Mosses from an Old Manse

by Nathaniel Hawthorne




Contents

 The Old Manse
 The Birthmark
 A Select Party
 Young Goodman Brown
 Rappaccini’s Daughter
 Mrs. Bullfrog
 Fire Worship
 Buds and Bird Voices
 Monsieur du Miroir
 The Hall of Fantasy
 The Celestial Railroad
 The Procession of Life
 Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
 The New Adam and Eve
 Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent
 The Christmas Banquet
 Drowne’s Wooden Image
 The Intelligence Office
 Roger Malvin’s Burial
 P.’s Correspondence
 Earth’s Holocaust
 Passages from a Relinquished Work
 Sketches from Memory
 The Old Apple Dealer
 The Artist of the Beautiful
 A Virtuoso’s Collection




THE OLD MANSE

The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.


Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself having
fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front
of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash
trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the
venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway
towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the
door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown
with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and
an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the
roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door
of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium,
seen through which the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to
the material world. Certainly it had little in common with those
ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the road that every
passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle.
From these quiet windows the figures of passing travellers looked too
remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its near retirement
and accessible seclusion, it was the very spot for the residence of a
clergyman,—a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped, in the
midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It
was worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England,
in which, through many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass
from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to
pervade the house and hover over it as with an atmosphere.

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A
priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect
how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant
alone—he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was left
vacant—had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the better,
if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips. How often,
no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue, attuning his
meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and solemn peals
of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees! In that variety of
natural utterances he could find something accordant with every passage
of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs
over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as well as with
rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been so long a
writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend
upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light
upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hoards
of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses.
Profound treatises of morality; a layman’s unprofessional, and
therefore unprejudiced, views of religion; histories (such as Bancroft
might have written had he taken up his abode here, as he once purposed)
bright with picture, gleaming over a depth of philosophic
thought,—these were the works that might fitly have flowed from such a
retirement. In the humblest event, I resolved at least to achieve a
novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and should possess physical
substance enough to stand alone.

In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful
little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a
scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an
inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and
Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill. When I
first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of
unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan
ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad
angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so
sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been
imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; a cheerful
coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the
overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of
the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael’s
Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The
only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and
a bronze one containing graceful ferns. My books (few, and by no means
choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as chance had thrown in my
way) stood in order about the room, seldom to be disturbed.

The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked,
or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the orchard,
with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing
northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot where its
hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was
at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the Manse stood
watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between two
nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on the farther
side of the river, and the glittering line of the British on the hither
bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of the musketry.
It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the battle-smoke
around this quiet house.

Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of
sight-showing,—perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the
memorable spot. We stand now on the river’s brink. It may well be
called the Concord,—the river of peace and quietness; for it is
certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered
imperceptibly towards its eternity,—the sea. Positively I had lived
three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which
way the current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day. From the
incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
wild, free mountain torrent. While all things else are compelled to
subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even
water-power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The
torpor of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so
much as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course.
It slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the roots
of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow along
its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad, flat leaves
on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally
selecting a position just so far from the river’s brink that it cannot
be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the
mud-turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances
which supply good and beautiful results—the fragrance of celestial
flowers—to the daily life of others.

The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calm and golden sunset
it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the quietude
that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest. Each tree and
rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The
minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign our river as gross and impure
while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven
that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
within its depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
everywhere, it must be true.

Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed by
the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of the
contest. On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a wide
circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some period
within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
battle-day. On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes,
we discern the stone abutment of the bridge. Looking down into the
river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers, all green
with half a century’s growth of water-moss; for during that length of
time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased along this
ancient highway. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty
strokes of a swimmer’s arm,—a space not too wide when the bullets were
whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts will point out, the
very spots on the western bank where our countrymen fell down and died;
and on this side of the river an obelisk of granite has grown up from
the soil that was fertilized with British blood. The monument, not more
than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a
village to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest rather
than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national history.
Still, by the fathers of the village this famous deed was done; and
their descendants might rightfully claim the privilege of building a
memorial.

A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the
granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates
the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the
grave,—marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and
another at the foot,—the grave of two British soldiers who were slain
in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah
Brown and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was their warfare ended; a
weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the
river, and then these many years of rest. In the long procession of
slain invaders who passed into eternity from the battle-fields of the
Revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.

Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. The story has
something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot altogether
be reconciled with probability. A youth in the service of the clergyman
happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back door of
the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the
bridge, he hastened across the intervening field to see what might be
going forward. It is rather strange, by the way, that this lad should
have been so diligently at work when the whole population of town and
country were startled out of their customary business by the advance of
the British troops. Be that as it might, the tradition, says that the
lad now left his task and hurried to the battle-field with the axe
still in his hand. The British had by this time retreated; the
Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was thus
deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground,—one was a
corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh, the other Briton
raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and gave a ghastly
stare into his face. The boy,—it must have been a nervous impulse,
without purpose, without thought, and betokening a sensitive and
impressible nature rather than a hardened one,—the boy uplifted his axe
and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.

I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This one circumstance has borne
more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.

Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
died there. There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
hundred yards in breadth—which extends between the battle-field and the
northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and orchard.
Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood an Indian
village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants must have
drawn so large a part of their substance. The site is identified by the
spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other implements of war, labor,
and the chase, which the plough turns up from the soil. You see a
splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a sod; it looks like nothing
worthy of note; but, if you have faith enough to pick it up, behold a
relic! Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians
have left behind them, first set me on the search; and I afterwards
enriched myself with some very perfect specimens, so rudely wrought
that it seemed almost as if chance had fashioned them. Their great
charm consists in this rudeness and in the individuality of each
article, so different from the productions of civilized machinery,
which shapes everything on one pattern. There is exquisite delight,
too, in picking up for one’s self an arrow-head that was dropped
centuries ago and has never been handled since, and which we thus
receive directly from the hand of the red hunter, who purposed to shoot
it at his game or at an enemy. Such an incident builds up again the
Indian village and its encircling forest, and recalls to life the
painted chiefs and warriors, the squaws at their household toil, and
the children sporting among the wigwams, while the little wind-rocked
pappose swings from the branch of a tree. It can hardly be told whether
it is a joy or a pain, after such a momentary vision, to gaze around in
the broad daylight of reality and see stone fences, white houses,
potato-fields, and men doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and
homespun pantaloons. But this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than
a thousand wigwams.

The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
through the orchard. This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed man
for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of gathering
fruit. Even had that been the case, there was only so much the better
motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of benefiting
his successors,—an end so seldom achieved by more ambitious efforts.
But the old minister, before reaching his patriarchal age of ninety,
ate the apples from this orchard during many years, and added silver
and gold to his annual stipend by disposing of the superfluity. It is
pleasant to think of him walking among the trees in the quiet
afternoons of early autumn and picking up here and there a windfall,
while he observes how heavily the branches are weighed down, and
computes the number of empty flour-barrels that will be filled by their
burden. He loved each tree, doubtless, as if it had been his own child.
An orchard has a relation to mankind, and readily connects itself with
matters of the heart. The trees possess a domestic character; they have
lost the wild nature of their forest kindred, and have grown humanized
by receiving the care of man as well as by contributing to his wants.
There, is so much individuality of character, too, among apple trees,
that it gives them all additional claim to be the objects of human
interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another gives
us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently
grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in
free-hearted benevolence. The variety of grotesque shapes into which
apple, trees contort themselves has its effect on those who get
acquainted with them: they stretch out their crooked branches, and take
such hold of the imagination, that we remember them as humorists and
odd fellows. And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that
linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is
now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar?
They offer their fruit to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet
with the moral of Time’s vicissitude.

I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman’s wealth of
fruits. Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and
then came Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them
continually from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along. In the
stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was
audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of
perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that flung down
bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach-trees, which, in a good
year, tormented me with peaches, neither to be eaten nor kept, nor,
without labor and perplexity, to be given away. The idea of an infinite
generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother Nature was
well worth obtaining through such cares as these. That feeling can be
enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer islands, where the
bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange grow spontaneously and
hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise almost as well by a man
long habituated to city life, who plunges into such a solitude as that
of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of trees that he did not
plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox taste, bear the closest
resemblance to those that grew in Eden. It has been an apothegm these
five thousand years, that toil sweetens the bread it earns. For my part
(speaking from hard experience, acquired while belaboring the rugged
furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best the free gifts of Providence.

Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate
a moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as is
never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they
would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,—be
it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless
weed,—should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy
to maturity altogether by their own care. If there be not too many of
them, each individual plant becomes an object of separate interest. My
garden, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the
right extent. An hour or two of morning labor was all that it required.
But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in
deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody
could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of
creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to
observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early
peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted by the blossoms of
a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a joy to me, those little
spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip airy food out of my
nectar-cups. Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the yellow
blossoms of the summer-squashes. This, too, was a deep satisfaction;
although, when they had laden themselves with sweets, they flew away to
some unknown hive, which would give back nothing in requital of what my
garden had contributed. But I was glad thus to fling a benefaction upon
the passing breeze with the certainty that somebody must profit by it
and that there would be a little more honey in the world to allay the
sourness and bitterness which mankind is always complaining of. Yes,
indeed; my life was the sweeter for that honey.

Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
varied forms. They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a
sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything
more graceful. A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my eyes
at least, of being rendered indestructible in marble. If ever
Providence (but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity of
gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most
delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer-squashes
gathered from vines which I will plant with my own hands. As dishes for
containing vegetables, they would be peculiarly appropriate.

But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
toil in the kitchen-garden. There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise, in
observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the first
little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until they lay
strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads beneath
the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to the
noontide sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something worth
living for had been done. A new substance was born into the world. They
were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of
and rejoice in. A cabbage, too,—especially the early Dutch cabbage,
which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its ambitious heart
often bursts asunder,—is a matter to be proud of when we can claim a
share with the earth and sky in producing it. But, after all, the
hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable children of ours are
smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them.

What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden, the
reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old Manse.
But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep him out
of doors. I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation till a long
spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof. There could not
be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as then seen from the
windows of my study. The great willow-tree had caught and retained
among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be shaken down at
intervals by the frequent gusts of wind. All day long, and for a week
together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash-splash-splashing
from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into the tubs beneath the
spouts. The old, unpainted shingles of the house and outbuildings were
black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient growth upon the walls
looked green and fresh, as if they were the newest things and
afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was
blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a
completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the impression that the
earth was wet through like a sponge; while the summit of a wooded hill,
about a mile distant, was enveloped in a dense mist, where the demon of
the tempest seemed to have his abiding-place and to be plotting still
direr inclemencies.

Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain. In the fiercest
beat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes the
wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot penetrate;
but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us shiver to
think of those deep, umbrageous recesses, those overshadowing banks,
where we found such enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not a twig
of foliage there but would dash a little shower into our faces. Looking
reproachfully towards the impenetrable sky,—if sky there be above that
dismal uniformity of cloud,—we are apt to murmur against the whole
system of the universe, since it involves the extinction of so many
summer days in so short a life by the hissing and spluttering rain. In
such spells of weather,—and it is to be supposed such weather
came,—Eve’s bower in paradise must have been but a cheerless and aguish
kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old parsonage, which had
resources of its own to beguile the week’s imprisonment. The idea of
sleeping on a couch of wet roses!

Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has
left behind it from a period before the Revolution. Our garret was an
arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was
but a twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns, of
deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too
reverent of their dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters, roughly hewn
and with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of the
chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, an aspect unlike
what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house. But on one
side there was a little whitewashed apartment, which bore the
traditionary title of the Saint’s Chamber, because holy men in their
youth had slept, and studied, and prayed there. With its elevated
retirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its closet
convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where a young man might
inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly dreams. The
occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and ejaculations
inscribed upon the walls. There, too, hung a tattered and shrivelled
roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the forcibly wrought
picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown, holding a Bible in his
hand. As I turned his face towards the light, he eyed me with an air of
authority such as men of his profession seldom assume in our days. The
original had been pastor of the parish more than a century ago, a
friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal in fervid eloquence. I bowed
before the effigy of the dignified divine, and felt as if I had now met
face to face with the ghost by whom, as there was reason to apprehend,
the Manse was haunted.

Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed with
spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used
to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor, and sometimes
rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper
entry,—where nevertheless he was invisible, in spite of the bright
moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of
manuscript discourses that stood in the garret. Once, while Hillard and
other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a
rustling noise as of a minister’s silk gown, sweeping through the very
midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs.
Still there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business was that of a
ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest
midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short, all
kinds of domestic labor,—although no traces of anything accomplished
could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her
servitude, some ill-starched ministerial band, disturbed the poor
damsel in her grave and kept her at work without any wages.

But to return from this digression. A part of my predecessor’s library
was stored in the garret,—no unfit receptacle indeed for such dreary
trash as comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books would
have been worth nothing at an auction. In this venerable garret,
however, they possessed an interest, quite apart from their literary
value, as heirlooms, many of which had been transmitted down through a
series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty Puritan
divines. Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded ink on
some of their fly-leaves; and there were marginal observations or
interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegible
shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom. The
world will never be the better for it. A few of the books were Latin
folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry, as
with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on the Book of
Job—which only Job himself could have had patience to read—filled at
least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or three
volumes to a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divinity,—too
corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the spiritual
element of religion. Volumes of this form dated back two hundred years
or more, and were generally bound in black leather, exhibiting
precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to books of
enchantment. Others equally antique were of a size proper to be carried
in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,—diminutive, but as black
as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with Greek and
Latin quotations. These little old volumes impressed me as if they had
been intended for very large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted
at an early stage of their growth.

The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
that the works of man’s intellect decay like those of his hands.
Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the spirits
of one generation affords no sustenance for the next. Books of
religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring and
vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so seldom
really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so
little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul can
attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in
holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most
part, stupendous impertinence.

Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last
clergyman’s lifetime. These threatened to be of even less interest than
the elder works a century hence to any curious inquirer who should then
rummage then as I was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal Preacher and
Christian Examiner, occasional sermons, controversial pamphlets,
tracts, and other productions of a like fugitive nature, took the place
of the thick and heavy volumes of past time. In a physical point of
view, there was much the same difference as between a feather and a
lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the specific gravity of old
and new was about upon a par. Both also were alike frigid. The elder
books nevertheless seemed to have been earnestly written, and might be
conceived to have possessed warmth at some former period; although,
with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled down even to the
freezing-point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other
hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little to do
with the writer’s qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of this whole
dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt
myself none the less a Christian for eschewing it. There appeared no
hope of either mounting to the better world on a Gothic staircase of
ancient folios or of flying thither on the wings of a modern tract.

Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea
of permanence. There were a few old newspapers, and still older
almanacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had
issued from the press with a distinctness that was altogether
unaccountable. It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass
among the books with the images of a vanished century in them. I turned
my eyes towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked of the
austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, after the
most painful rummaging and groping into their minds, had been able to
produce nothing half so real as these newspaper scribblers and
almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a moment. The
portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself. It is the age
itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible
truth for all times; whereas most other works—being written by men who,
in the very act, set themselves apart from their age—are likely to
possess little significance when new, and none at all when old. Genius,
indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent,
yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral
writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or
perchance of a hundred centuries.

Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me
a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. A bound volume
has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for
the good Mussulman. He imagines that those wind-wafted records are
perhaps hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book or
antique one may contain the “open sesame,”—the spell to disclose
treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth. Thus it was not
without sadness that I turned away from the library of the Old Manse.

Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of another
stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western horizon; while the
massive firmament of clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but
served only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant glow by
the strongly contrasted shadows. Heaven smiled at the earth, so long
unseen, from beneath its heavy eyelid. To-morrow for the hill-tops and
the woodpaths.

Or it might be that Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a
fishing excursion on the river. Strange and happy times were those when
we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and
delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any
less conventional race during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing
our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside
into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its
junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth, nowhere, indeed,
except to lave the interior regions of a poet’s imagination. It is
sheltered from the breeze by woods and a hillside; so that elsewhere
there might be a hurricane, and here scarcely a ripple across the
shaded water. The current lingers along so gently that the mere force
of the boatman’s will seems sufficient to propel his craft against it.
It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart
of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back
again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one
another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of
the sky and of the clustering foliage, amid which fall showers of
broken sunlight, imparting specks of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast
with the quiet depth of the prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the
slumbering river has a dream-picture in its bosom. Which, after all,
was the most real,—the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable
to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath?
Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul. But
both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had
it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river had
strayed forth out of the rich scenery of my companion’s inner world;
only the vegetation along its banks should then have had an Oriental
character.

Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods seem
hardly satisfied to allow it passage. The trees are rooted on the very
verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it. At one spot
there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which grow some hemlocks,
declining across the stream with outstretched arms, as if resolute to
take the plunge. In other places the banks are almost on a level with
the water; so that the quiet congregation of trees set their feet in
the flood, and are Fringed with foliage down to the surface.
Cardinal-flowers kindle their spiral flames and illuminate the dark
nooks among the shrubbery. The pond-lily grows abundantly along the
margin,—that delicious flower which, as Thoreau tells me, opens its
virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being through the
magic of that genial kiss. He has beheld beds of them unfolding in due
succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower to flower,—a
sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to
a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine
themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water
within reach of the boatman’s hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of
alien race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple
against their will and enriching them with a purple offspring of which
neither is the parent. One of these ambitious parasites has climbed
into the upper branches of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending
from bough to bough, unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree’s airy
summit with a wreath of its broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.

The winding course of the stream continually shut out the scene behind
us and revealed as calm and lovely a one before. We glided from depth
to depth, and breathed new seclusion at every turn. The shy kingfisher
flew from the withered branch close at hand to another at a distance,
uttering a shrill cry of anger or alarm. Ducks that had been floating
there since the preceding eve were startled at our approach and skimmed
along the glassy river, breaking its dark surface with a bright streak.
The pickerel leaped from among the lilypads. The turtle, sunning itself
upon a rock or at the root of a tree, slid suddenly into the water with
a plunge. The painted Indian who paddled his canoe along the Assabeth
three hundred years ago could hardly have seen a wilder gentleness
displayed upon its banks and reflected in its bosom than we did. Nor
could the same Indian have prepared his noontide meal with more
simplicity. We drew up our skiff at some point where the overarching
shade formed a natural bower, and there kindled a fire with the pine
cones and decayed branches that lay strewn plentifully around. Soon the
smoke ascended among the trees, impregnated with a savory incense, not
heavy, dull, and surfeiting, like the steam of cookery within doors,
but sprightly and piquant. The smell of our feast was akin to the
woodland odors with which it mingled: there was no sacrilege committed
by our intrusion there: the sacred solitude was hospitable, and granted
us free leave to cook and eat in the recess that was at once our
kitchen and banqueting-hall. It is strange what humble offices may be
performed in a beautiful scene without destroying its poetry. Our fire,
red gleaming among the trees, and we beside it, busied with culinary
rites and spreading out our meal on a mossgrown log, all seemed in
unison with the river gliding by and the foliage rustling over us. And,
what was strangest, neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety
of the solemn woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and
the will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places might have
come trooping to share our table-talk and have added their shrill
laughter to our merriment. It was the very spot in which to utter the
extremest nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product
of the mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in
correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.

So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain. The evanescent spray was
Ellery’s; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay glimmering
in the fountain’s bed and brightened both our faces by the reflection.
Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it with the
mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had the
profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the knowledge
that it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days, to him and
me, lay not in any definite idea, not in any angular or rounded truth,
which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical stuff, but in
the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and conventionalism
and fettering influences of man on man. We were so free to-day that it
was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow. When we crossed the
threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still
the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were whispering to
us, “Be free! be free!” Therefore along that shady river-bank there are
spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half-consumed brands, only less
sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of a household fire.

And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
sunset,—how sweet was it to return within the system of human society,
not as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice, whence we
could go forth at will into state—her simplicity! How gently, too, did
the sight of the Old Manse, best seen from the river, overshadowed with
its willow and all environed about with the foliage of its orchard and
avenue,—how gently did its gray, homely aspect rebuke the speculative
extravagances of the day! It had grown sacred in connection with the
artificial life against which we inveighed; it had been a home for many
years, in spite of all; it was my home too; and, with these thoughts,
it seemed to me that all the artifice and conventionalism of life was
but an impalpable thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below
was none the worse for it. Once, as we turned our boat to the bank,
there was a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic figure of a
hound, couched above the house, as if keeping guard over it. Gazing at
this symbol, I prayed that the upper influences might long protect the
institutions that had grown out of the heart of mankind.

If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities,
houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these
the perverted ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the
early autumn. Then Nature will love him better than at any other
season, and will take him to her bosom with a more motherly tenderness.
I could scarcely endure the roof of the old house above me in those
first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too, the prophecy of
autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others; sometimes even in
the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling like what is caused
by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception—if it be not rather a
foreboding—of the year’s decay, so blessedly sweet and sad in the same
breath.

Did I say that there was no feeling like it? Ah, but there is a
half-acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the
perfected vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his
flowers, and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to
steal them one by one away.

I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as early a
token of autumn’s approach as any other,—that song which may be called
an audible stillness; for though very loud and heard afar, yet the mind
does not take note of it as a sound, so completely is its individual
existence merged among the accompanying characteristics of the season.
Alas for the pleasant summertime! In August the grass is still verdant
on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense
as ever and as green; the flowers gleam forth in richer abundance along
the margin of the river and by the stone walls and deep among the
woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as they were a month ago; and
yet in every breath of wind and in every beam of sunshine we hear the
whispered farewell and behold the parting smile of a dear friend. There
is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness in the blazing noon. Not a
breeze can stir but it thrills us with the breath of autumn. A pensive
glory is seen in the far, golden gleams, among the shadows of the
trees. The flowers—even the brightest of them, and they are the most
gorgeous of the year—have this gentle sadness wedded to their pomp, and
typify the character of the delicious time each within itself. The
brilliant cardinal-flower has never seemed gay to me.

Still later in the season Nature’s tenderness waxes stronger. It is
impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so fond of us!
At other periods she does not make this impression on me, or only at
rare intervals; but in those genial days of autumn, when she has
perfected her harvests and accomplished every needful thing that was
given her to do, then she overflows with a blessed superfluity of love.
She has leisure to caress her children now. It is good to be alive and
at such times. Thank Heaven for breath—yes, for mere breath—when it is
made up of a heavenly breeze like this! It comes with a real kiss upon
our cheeks; it would linger fondly around us if it might; but, since it
must be gone, it embraces us with its whole kindly heart and passes
onward to embrace likewise the next thing that it meets. A blessing is
flung abroad and scattered far and wide over the earth, to be gathered
up by all who choose. I recline upon the still unwithered grass and
whisper to myself, “O perfect day! O beautiful world! O beneficent
God!” And it is the promise of a blessed eternity; for our Creator
would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep
hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were
meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It
beams through the gates of paradise and shows us glimpses far inward.

By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts on a drear
austerity. On some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the
grass and along the tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall
from the trees of our avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly
descending by their own weight. All summer long they have murmured like
the noise of waters; they have roared loudly while the branches were
wrestling with the thunder-gust; they have made music both glad and
solemn; they have attuned my thoughts by their quiet sound as I paced
to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling boughs. Now they can only
rustle under my feet. Henceforth the gray parsonage begins to assume a
larger importance, and draws to its fireside,—for the abomination of
the air-tight stove is reserved till wintry weather,—draws closer and
closer to its fireside the vagrant impulses that had gone wandering
about through the summer.

When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became as lonely as a
hermitage. Not that ever—in my time at least—it had been thronged with
company; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some friend out of the
dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with him the
transparent obscurity that was floating over us. In one respect our
precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim
travelled on his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all,
felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or
took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched among
the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs.
They could not have paid a more acceptable compliment to my abode nor
to my own qualities as a host. I held it as a proof that they left
their cares behind them as they passed between the stone gate-posts at
the entrance of our avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the
abundance of peace and quiet within and all around us. Others could
give them pleasure and amusement or instruction,—these could be picked
up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest,—rest in a life of
trouble. What better could be done for those weary and world-worn
spirits?—for him whose career of perpetual action was impeded and
harassed by the rarest of his powers and the richest of his
acquirements?—for another who had thrown his ardent heart from earliest
youth into the strife of politics, and now, perchance, began to suspect
that one lifetime is too brief for the accomplishment of any lofty
aim?—for her oil whose feminine nature had been imposed the heavy gift
of intellectual power, such as a strong man might have staggered under,
and with it the necessity to act upon the world?—in a word, not to
multiply instances, what better could be done for anybody who came
within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit
over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed
him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.

Were I to adopt a pet idea as so many people do, and fondle it in my
embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great
want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The
world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and
take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity,
and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by
visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect
and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound
repose. This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions and
avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, so that it might in due
time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of restoring to us the
simple perception of what is right and the single-hearted desire to
achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of this
weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now
afflict the universe. Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto
attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.

Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for,
though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is the result and
expression of what he knew, while he was writing, to be but a distorted
survey of the state and prospects of mankind. There were circumstances
around me which made it difficult to view the world precisely as it
exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to
go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger
moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a
circuit of a thousand miles.

These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted
upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism,
and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face.
Young visionaries—to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as
to make life all a labyrinth around them—came to seek the clew that
should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed
theorists—whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in
an iron framework—travelled painfully to his door, not to ask
deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom.
People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied
new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a
lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled,
earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the
difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen
before,—mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among the
chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the
whole host of night birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the
gazer’s eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather.
Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is
kindled.

For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep
beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused
about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be, so quiet,
so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if
expecting to receive more than he could impart. And, in truth, the
heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions which he
could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without
inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought,
which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness,—new
truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country
village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly
behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense
water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who
crowd so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered
breath and thus become imbued with a false originality. This triteness
of novelty is enough to make any man of common-sense blaspheme at all
ideas of less than a century’s standing, and pray that the world may be
petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral and
physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by
such schemes of such philosophers.

And now I begin to feel—and perhaps should have sooner felt—that we
have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be,
will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many
pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its
walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that
wrought upon him from all these sources. My conscience, however, does
not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to be
revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit. How
narrow-how shallow and scanty too—is the stream of thought that has
been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim emotions,
ideas, and associations which swell around me from that portion of my
existence! How little have I told! and of that little, how almost
nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it exclusively my
own! Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with me, through the
inner passages of my being? and have we groped together into all its
chambers and examined their treasures or their rubbish? Not so. We have
been standing on the greensward, but just within the cavern’s mouth,
where the common sunshine is free to penetrate, and where every
footstep is therefore free to come. I have appealed to no sentiment or
sensibilities save such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am a
man of really individual attributes I veil my face; nor am I, nor have
I ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up
their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for
their beloved public.

Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no measurement
of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life’s ocean,
three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy
sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a still valley.
Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the owner of the
old house was pining for his native air. Carpenters next, appeared,
making a tremendous racket among the outbuildings, strewing the green
grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing the
whole antiquity of the place with their discordant renovations. Soon,
moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of woodbine which had
crept over a large portion of its southern face. All the aged mosses
were cleared unsparingly away; and there were horrible whispers about
brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint,—a purpose as
little to my taste as might be that of rouging the venerable cheeks of
one’s grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more
sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our
household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little
breakfast-room,—delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one
of the many angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us,—and passed
forth between the tall stone gate-posts as uncertain as the wandering
Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the
hand, and—an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no
irreverence in smiling at—has led me, as the newspapers announce while
I am writing, from the Old Manse into a custom-house. As a
story-teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my
imaginary personages, but none like this.

The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our secluded
dwelling had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics, no
philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its
edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these, few
tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm
summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of
my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else.
With these idle weeds and withering blossoms I have intermixed some
that were produced long ago,—old, faded things, reminding me of flowers
pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such
as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so
little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of
purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often
but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing
satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such trifles,
I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation.
Nevertheless, the public—if my limited number of readers, whom I
venture to regard rather as a circle of friends, may be termed a
public—will receive them the more kindly, as the last offering, the
last collection of this nature which it is my purpose ever to put
forth. Unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind. For
myself the book will always retain one charm,—as reminding me of the
river, with its delightful solitudes, and of the avenue, the garden,
and the orchard, and especially the dear Old Manse, with the little
study on its western side, and the sunshine glimmering through the
willow branches while I wrote.

Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine himself my
guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy of notice within
and about the Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study.
There, after seating him in an antique elbow-chair, an heirloom of the
house, I take forth a roll of manuscript and entreat his attention to
the following tales,—an act of personal inhospitality, however, which I
never was guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst enemy.




THE BIRTHMARK


In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an
eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long
before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more
attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the
care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace
smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a
beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the
comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred
mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it
was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in
its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination,
the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment
in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would
ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the
philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and
perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer
possessed this degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over Nature.
He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies
ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his
young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by
intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength
of the latter to his own.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly
remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very
soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble
in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.

“Georgiana,” said he, “has it never occurred to you that the mark upon
your cheek might be removed?”

“No, indeed,” said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his
manner, she blushed deeply. “To tell you the truth it has been so often
called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.”

“Ah, upon another face perhaps it might,” replied her husband; “but
never on yours. No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from
the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we
hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the
visible mark of earthly imperfection.”

“Shocks you, my husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first
reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why
did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks
you!”

To explain this conversation it must be mentioned that in the centre of
Georgiana’s left cheek there was a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as
it were, with the texture and substance of her face. In the usual state
of her complexion—a healthy though delicate bloom—the mark wore a tint
of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the
surrounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more
indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that
bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting
motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson
stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful
distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand,
though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say
that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the
infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic
endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a
desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing
his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however,
that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied
exceedingly, according to the difference of temperament in the
beholders. Some fastidious persons—but they were exclusively of her own
sex—affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite
destroyed the effect of Georgiana’s beauty, and rendered her
countenance even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one
of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary
marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine
observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration,
contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess
one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a
flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of the
matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this was the case with himself.

Had she been less beautiful,—if Envy’s self could have found aught else
to sneer at,—he might have felt his affection heightened by the
prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now
stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of
emotion that throbbed within her heart; but seeing her otherwise so
perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with
every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity
which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her
productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or
that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson
hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the
highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with
the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible
frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of
his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer’s sombre
imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object,
causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty,
whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.

At all the seasons which should have been their happiest, he invariably
and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary,
reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first
appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable trains of thought and
modes of feeling that it became the central point of all. With the
morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and
recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at
the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and
beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand
that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana
soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the
peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her
cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was
brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.

Late one night when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray
the stain on the poor wife’s cheek, she herself, for the first time,
voluntarily took up the subject.

“Do you remember, my dear Aylmer,” said she, with a feeble attempt at a
smile, “have you any recollection of a dream last night about this
odious hand?”

“None! none whatever!” replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in
a dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real depth of
his emotion, “I might well dream of it; for before I fell asleep it had
taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy.”

“And you did dream of it?” continued Georgiana, hastily; for she
dreaded lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say. “A
terrible dream! I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to
forget this one expression?—‘It is in her heart now; we must have it
out!’ Reflect, my husband; for by all means I would have you recall
that dream.”

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot
confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers
them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that
perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He
had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation
for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the
deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have
caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was
inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.

When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in
his wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to
the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with
uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an
unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had
not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over
his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for
the sake of giving himself peace.

“Aylmer,” resumed Georgiana, solemnly, “I know not what may be the cost
to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal
may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as
life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any
terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid
upon me before I came into the world?”

“Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject,”
hastily interrupted Aylmer. “I am convinced of the perfect
practicability of its removal.”

“If there be the remotest possibility of it,” continued Georgiana, “let
the attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for
life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and
disgust,—life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either
remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep
science. All the world bears witness of it. You have achieved great
wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little mark, which I cover with
the tips of two small fingers? Is this beyond your power, for the sake
of your own peace, and to save your poor wife from madness?”

“Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife,” cried Aylmer, rapturously, “doubt
not my power. I have already given this matter the deepest
thought—thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a
being less perfect than yourself. Georgiana, you have led me deeper
than ever into the heart of science. I feel myself fully competent to
render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most
beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what
Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his
sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will
be.”

“It is resolved, then,” said Georgiana, faintly smiling. “And, Aylmer,
spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my
heart at last.”

Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek—her right cheek—not that which
bore the impress of the crimson hand.

The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan that he had formed
whereby he might have opportunity for the intense thought and constant
watchfulness which the proposed operation would require; while
Georgiana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect repose essential to its
success. They were to seclude themselves in the extensive apartments
occupied by Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toilsome
youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of Nature that
had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe.
Seated calmly in this laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated
the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the profoundest mines;
he had satisfied himself of the causes that kindled and kept alive the
fires of the volcano; and had explained the mystery of fountains, and
how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure, and others
with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth.
Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the
human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature
assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from
the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The
latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling
recognition of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later
stumble—that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with
apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to
keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us
nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to
mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now,
however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten investigations; not, of
course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them; but because
they involved much physiological truth and lay in the path of his
proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.

As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory, Georgiana was cold
and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with intent to
reassure her, but was so startled with the intense glow of the
birthmark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could not restrain a
strong convulsive shudder. His wife fainted.

“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature,
but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was
grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer’s
underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably
fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill
with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he
executed all the details of his master’s experiments. With his vast
strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable
earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man’s physical
nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face,
were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

“Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,” said Aylmer, “and burn
a pastil.”

“Yes, master,” answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form
of Georgiana; and then he muttered to himself, “If she were my wife,
I’d never part with that birthmark.”

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an
atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had
recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked
like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre
rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits,
into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded
abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains,
which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other
species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to
the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and
straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For
aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds. And
Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his
chemical processes, had supplied its place with perfumed lamps,
emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a soft, impurpled
radiance. He now knelt by his wife’s side, watching her earnestly, but
without alarm; for he was confident in his science, and felt that he
could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.

“Where am I? Ah, I remember,” said Georgiana, faintly; and she placed
her hand over her cheek to hide the terrible mark from her husband’s
eyes.

“Fear not, dearest!” exclaimed he. “Do not shrink from me! Believe me,
Georgiana, I even rejoice in this single imperfection, since it will be
such a rapture to remove it.”

“Oh, spare me!” sadly replied his wife. “Pray do not look at it again.
I never can forget that convulsive shudder.”

In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from
the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the
light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its
profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of
unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their
momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct
idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was
almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed
sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look
forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were
answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen.
The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented,
but with that bewitching, yet indescribable difference which always
makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the
original. When wearied of this, Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a
vessel containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest
at first; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant
shooting upward from the soil. Then came the slender stalk; the leaves
gradually unfolded themselves; and amid them was a perfect and lovely
flower.

“It is magical!” cried Georgiana. “I dare not touch it.”

“Nay, pluck it,” answered Aylmer,—“pluck it, and inhale its brief
perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and
leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be
perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself.”

But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant
suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of
fire.

“There was too powerful a stimulus,” said Aylmer, thoughtfully.

To make up for this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her
portrait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be
effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal.
Georgiana assented; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted to
find the features of the portrait blurred and indefinable; while the
minute figure of a hand appeared where the cheek should have been.
Aylmer snatched the metallic plate and threw it into a jar of corrosive
acid.

Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures. In the intervals of
study and chemical experiment he came to her flushed and exhausted, but
seemed invigorated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language of
the resources of his art. He gave a history of the long dynasty of the
alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by
which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and
base. Aylmer appeared to believe that, by the plainest scientific
logic, it was altogether within the limits of possibility to discover
this long-sought medium; “but,” he added, “a philosopher who should go
deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to
stoop to the exercise of it.” Not less singular were his opinions in
regard to the elixir vitae. He more than intimated that it was at his
option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps
interminably; but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all
the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find
cause to curse.

“Aylmer, are you in earnest?” asked Georgiana, looking at him with
amazement and fear. “It is terrible to possess such power, or even to
dream of possessing it.”

“Oh, do not tremble, my love,” said her husband. “I would not wrong
either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects upon our
lives; but I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is
the skill requisite to remove this little hand.”

At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as if a
redhot iron had touched her cheek.

Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in
the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh,
uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt
or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer
reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of
chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former
he showed her a small vial, in which, he remarked, was contained a
gentle yet most powerful fragrance, capable of impregnating all the
breezes that blow across a kingdom. They were of inestimable value, the
contents of that little vial; and, as he said so, he threw some of the
perfume into the air and filled the room with piercing and invigorating
delight.

“And what is this?” asked Georgiana, pointing to a small crystal globe
containing a gold-colored liquid. “It is so beautiful to the eye that I
could imagine it the elixir of life.”

“In one sense it is,” replied Aylmer; “or, rather, the elixir of
immortality. It is the most precious poison that ever was concocted in
this world. By its aid I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at
whom you might point your finger. The strength of the dose would
determine whether he were to linger out years, or drop dead in the
midst of a breath. No king on his guarded throne could keep his life if
I, in my private station, should deem that the welfare of millions
justified me in depriving him of it.”

“Why do you keep such a terrific drug?” inquired Georgiana in horror.

“Do not mistrust me, dearest,” said her husband, smiling; “its virtuous
potency is yet greater than its harmful one. But see! here is a
powerful cosmetic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water,
freckles may be washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed. A
stronger infusion would take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the
rosiest beauty a pale ghost.”

“Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my cheek?” asked
Georgiana, anxiously.

“Oh, no,” hastily replied her husband; “this is merely superficial.
Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper.”

In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute
inquiries as to her sensations and whether the confinement of the rooms
and the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions
had such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjecture that she
was already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed
in with the fragrant air or taken with her food. She fancied likewise,
but it might be altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up of her
system—a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins, and
tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart. Still,
whenever she dared to look into the mirror, there she beheld herself
pale as a white rose and with the crimson birthmark stamped upon her
cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary
to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana
turned over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old
tomes she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the
works of philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus,
Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the
prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance
of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and
therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves to have
acquired from the investigation of Nature a power above Nature, and
from physics a sway over the spiritual world. Hardly less curious and
imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal
Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural
possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods
whereby wonders might be wrought.

But to Georgiana the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her
husband’s own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his
scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its
development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances
to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both
the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet
practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there
were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed
himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the
infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul.
Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly
than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment than
heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that
his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if
compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were
the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with
the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume,
rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as
melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad
confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the
composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and
of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so
miserably thwarted by the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius in
whatever sphere might recognize the image of his own experience in
Aylmer’s journal.

So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that she laid her face
upon the open volume and burst into tears. In this situation she was
found by her husband.

“It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer’s books,” said he with a smile,
though his countenance was uneasy and displeased. “Georgiana, there are
pages in that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep my
senses. Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to you.”

“It has made me worship you more than ever,” said she.

“Ah, wait for this one success,” rejoined he, “then worship me if you
will. I shall deem myself hardly unworthy of it. But come, I have
sought you for the luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest.”

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of
his spirit. He then took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gayety,
assuring her that her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and
that the result was already certain. Scarcely had he departed when
Georgiana felt irresistibly impelled to follow him. She had forgotten
to inform Aylmer of a symptom which for two or three hours past had
begun to excite her attention. It was a sensation in the fatal
birthmark, not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her
system. Hastening after her husband, she intruded for the first time
into the laboratory.

The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and
feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the
quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for
ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the
room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of
chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use.
The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous
odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The
severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and
brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to
the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost
solely, drew her attention, was the aspect of Aylmer himself.

He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and hung over the furnace
as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which
it was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or
misery. How different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had
assumed for Georgiana’s encouragement!

“Carefully now, Aminadab; carefully, thou human machine; carefully,
thou man of clay!” muttered Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant.
“Now, if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all over.”

“Ho! ho!” mumbled Aminadab. “Look, master! look!”

Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first reddened, then grew paler
than ever, on beholding Georgiana. He rushed towards her and seized her
arm with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.

“Why do you come hither? Have you no trust in your husband?” cried he,
impetuously. “Would you throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over
my labors? It is not well done. Go, prying woman, go!”

“Nay, Aylmer,” said Georgiana with the firmness of which she possessed
no stinted endowment, “it is not you that have a right to complain. You
mistrust your wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch
the development of this experiment. Think not so unworthily of me, my
husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink;
for my share in it is far less than your own.”

“No, no, Georgiana!” said Aylmer, impatiently; “it must not be.”

“I submit,” replied she calmly. “And, Aylmer, I shall quaff whatever
draught you bring me; but it will be on the same principle that would
induce me to take a dose of poison if offered by your hand.”

“My noble wife,” said Aylmer, deeply moved, “I knew not the height and
depth of your nature until now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then,
that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp
into your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception.
I have already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except
to change your entire physical system. Only one thing remains to be
tried. If that fail us we are ruined.”

“Why did you hesitate to tell me this?” asked she.

“Because, Georgiana,” said Aylmer, in a low voice, “there is danger.”

“Danger? There is but one danger—that this horrible stigma shall be
left upon my cheek!” cried Georgiana. “Remove it, remove it, whatever
be the cost, or we shall both go mad!”

“Heaven knows your words are too true,” said Aylmer, sadly. “And now,
dearest, return to your boudoir. In a little while all will be tested.”

He conducted her back and took leave of her with a solemn tenderness
which spoke far more than his words how much was now at stake. After
his departure Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the
character of Aylmer, and did it completer justice than at any previous
moment. Her heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love—so
pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection nor
miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had
dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment than
that meaner kind which would have borne with the imperfection for her
sake, and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its
perfect idea to the level of the actual; and with her whole spirit she
prayed that, for a single moment, she might satisfy his highest and
deepest conception. Longer than one moment she well knew it could not
be; for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each
instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant
before.

The sound of her husband’s footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal
goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be
the draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the
consequence of a highly-wrought state of mind and tension of spirit
than of fear or doubt.

“The concoction of the draught has been perfect,” said he, in answer to
Georgiana’s look. “Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot
fail.”

“Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer,” observed his wife, “I might
wish to put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mortality
itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to
those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at
which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I
stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself,
methinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die.”

“You are fit for heaven without tasting death!” replied her husband
“But why do we speak of dying? The draught cannot fail. Behold its
effect upon this plant.”

On the window seat there stood a geranium diseased with yellow
blotches, which had overspread all its leaves. Aylmer poured a small
quantity of the liquid upon the soil in which it grew. In a little
time, when the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the
unsightly blotches began to be extinguished in a living verdure.

“There needed no proof,” said Georgiana, quietly. “Give me the goblet I
joyfully stake all upon your word.”

“Drink, then, thou lofty creature!” exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid
admiration. “There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy
sensible frame, too, shall soon be all perfect.”

She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand.

“It is grateful,” said she with a placid smile. “Methinks it is like
water from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of
unobtrusive fragrance and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst
that had parched me for many days. Now, dearest, let me sleep. My
earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the
heart of a rose at sunset.”

She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required
almost more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and
lingering syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere
she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect
with the emotions proper to a man the whole value of whose existence
was involved in the process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood,
however, was the philosophic investigation characteristic of the man of
science. Not the minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush of
the cheek, a slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a
hardly perceptible tremor through the frame,—such were the details
which, as the moments passed, he wrote down in his folio volume.
Intense thought had set its stamp upon every previous page of that
volume, but the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon the last.

While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand, and
not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse
he pressed it with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very
act, and Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep, moved uneasily
and murmured as if in remonstrance. Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor
was it without avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been
strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek, now
grew more faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but
the birthmark with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of
its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was
more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out the sky,
and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.

“By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!” said Aylmer to himself, in almost
irrepressible ecstasy. “I can scarcely trace it now. Success! success!
And now it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of blood
across her cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!”

He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the light of natural day
to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek. At the same time he
heard a gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his servant
Aminadab’s expression of delight.

“Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!” cried Aylmer, laughing in a sort of
frenzy, “you have served me well! Matter and spirit—earth and
heaven—have both done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses!
You have earned the right to laugh.”

These exclamations broke Georgiana’s sleep. She slowly unclosed her
eyes and gazed into the mirror which her husband had arranged for that
purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized how
barely perceptible was now that crimson hand which had once blazed
forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their
happiness. But then her eyes sought Aylmer’s face with a trouble and
anxiety that he could by no means account for.

“My poor Aylmer!” murmured she.

“Poor? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored!” exclaimed he. “My
peerless bride, it is successful! You are perfect!”

“My poor Aylmer,” she repeated, with a more than human tenderness, “you
have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so
high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could
offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!”

Alas! it was too true! The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of
life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union
with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark—that
sole token of human imperfection—faded from her cheek, the parting
breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her
soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight.
Then a hoarse, chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the
gross fatality of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the
immortal essence which, in this dim sphere of half development, demands
the completeness of a higher state. Yet, had Alymer reached a
profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which
would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the
celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed
to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in
eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.




A SELECT PARTY


The man of fancy made an entertainment at one of his castles in the
air, and invited a select number of distinguished personages to favor
him with their presence. The mansion, though less splendid than many
that have been situated in the same region, was nevertheless of a
magnificence such as is seldom witnessed by those acquainted only with
terrestrial architecture. Its strong foundations and massive walls were
quarried out of a ledge of heavy and sombre clouds which had hung
brooding over the earth, apparently as dense and ponderous as its own
granite, throughout a whole autumnal day. Perceiving that the general
effect was gloomy,—so that the airy castle looked like a feudal
fortress, or a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a state prison of our
own times, rather than the home of pleasure and repose which he
intended it to be,—the owner, regardless of expense, resolved to gild
the exterior from top to bottom. Fortunately, there was just then a
flood of evening sunshine in the air. This being gathered up and poured
abundantly upon the roof and walls, imbued them with a kind of solemn
cheerfulness; while the cupolas and pinnacles were made to glitter with
the purest gold, and all the hundred windows gleamed with a glad light,
as if the edifice itself were rejoicing in its heart.

And now, if the people of the lower world chanced to be looking upward
out of the turmoil of their petty perplexities, they probably mistook
the castle in the air for a heap of sunset clouds, to which the magic
of light and shade had imparted the aspect of a fantastically
constructed mansion. To such beholders it was unreal, because they
lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass within its
portal, they would have recognized the truth, that the dominions which
the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand
times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying,
“This is solid and substantial; this may be called a fact.”

At the appointed hour, the host stood in his great saloon to receive
the company. It was a vast and noble room, the vaulted ceiling of which
was supported by double rows of gigantic pillars that had been hewn
entire out of masses of variegated clouds. So brilliantly were they
polished, and so exquisitely wrought by the sculptor’s skill, as to
resemble the finest specimens of emerald, porphyry, opal, and
chrysolite, thus producing a delicate richness of effect which their
immense size rendered not incompatible with grandeur. To each of these
pillars a meteor was suspended. Thousands of these ethereal lustres are
continually wandering about the firmament, burning out to waste, yet
capable of imparting a useful radiance to any person who has the art of
converting them to domestic purposes. As managed in the saloon, they
are far more economical than ordinary lamplight. Such, however, was the
intensity of their blaze that it had been found expedient to cover each
meteor with a globe of evening mist, thereby muffling the too potent
glow and soothing it into a mild and comfortable splendor. It was like
the brilliancy of a powerful yet chastened imagination,—a light which
seemed to hide whatever was unworthy to be noticed and give effect to
every beautiful and noble attribute. The guests, therefore, as they
advanced up the centre of the saloon, appeared to better advantage than
ever before in their lives.

The first that entered, with old-fashioned punctuality, was a venerable
figure in the costume of bygone days, with his white hair flowing down
over his shoulders and a reverend beard upon his breast. He leaned upon
a staff, the tremulous stroke of which, as he set it carefully upon the
floor, re-echoed through the saloon at every footstep. Recognizing at
once this celebrated personage, whom it had cost him a vast deal of
trouble and research to discover, the host advanced nearly three
fourths of the distance down between the pillars to meet and welcome
him.

“Venerable sir,” said the Man of Fancy, bending to the floor, “the
honor of this visit would never be forgotten were my term of existence
to be as happily prolonged as your own.”

The old gentleman received the compliment with gracious condescension.
He then thrust up his spectacles over his forehead and appeared to take
a critical survey of the saloon.

“Never within my recollection,” observed he, “have I entered a more
spacious and noble hall. But are you sure that it is built of solid
materials and that the structure will be permanent?”

“O, never fear, my venerable friend,” replied the host. “In reference
to a lifetime like your own, it is true my castle may well be called a
temporary edifice. But it will endure long enough to answer all the
purposes for which it was erected.”

But we forget that the reader has not yet been made acquainted with the
guest. It was no other than that universally accredited character so
constantly referred to in all seasons of intense cold or heat; he that,
remembers the hot Sunday and the cold Friday; the witness of a past age
whose negative reminiscences find their way into every newspaper, yet
whose antiquated and dusky abode is so overshadowed by accumulated
years and crowded back by modern edifices that none but the Man of
Fancy could have discovered it; it was, in short, that twin brother of
Time, and great-grandsire of mankind, and hand-and-glove associate of
all forgotten men and things,—the Oldest Inhabitant. The host would
willingly have drawn him into conversation, but succeeded only in
eliciting a few remarks as to the oppressive atmosphere of this present
summer evening compared with one which the guest had experienced about
fourscore years ago. The old gentleman, in fact, was a good deal
overcome by his journey among the clouds, which, to a frame so
earth-incrusted by long continuance in a lower region, was unavoidably
more fatiguing than to younger spirits. He was therefore conducted to
an easy-chair, well cushioned and stuffed with vaporous softness, and
left to take a little repose.

The Man of Fancy now discerned another guest, who stood so quietly in
the shadow of one of the pillars that he might easily have been
overlooked.

“My dear sir,” exclaimed the host, grasping him warmly by the hand,
“allow me to greet you as the hero of the evening. Pray do not take it
as an empty compliment; for, if there were not another guest in my
castle, it would be entirely pervaded with your presence.”

“I thank you,” answered the unpretending stranger; “but, though you
happened to overlook me, I have not just arrived. I came very early;
and, with your permission, shall remain after the rest of the company
have retired.”

And who does the reader imagine was this unobtrusive guest? It was the
famous performer of acknowledged impossibilities,—a character of
superhuman capacity and virtue, and, if his enemies are to be credited,
of no less remarkable weaknesses and defects. With a generosity with
which he alone sets us an example, we will glance merely at his nobler
attributes. He it is, then, who prefers the interests of others to his
own and a humble station to an exalted one. Careless of fashion,
custom, the opinions of men, and the influence of the press, he
assimilates his life to the standard of ideal rectitude, and thus
proves himself the one independent citizen of our free country. In
point of ability, many people declare him to be the only mathematician
capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the
principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can
compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is
equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are
his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded
in jumping down his own throat. With all these talents, however, he is
so far from being considered a member of good society, that it is the
severest censure of any fashionable assemblage to affirm that this
remarkable individual was present. Public orators, lecturers, and
theatrical performers particularly eschew his company. For especial
reasons, we are not at liberty to disclose his name, and shall mention
only one other trait,—a most singular phenomenon in natural
philosophy,—that, when he happens to cast his eyes upon a
looking-glass, he beholds Nobody reflected there!

Several other guests now made their appearance; and among them,
chattering with immense volubility, a brisk little gentleman of
universal vogue in private society, and not unknown in the public
journals under the title of Monsieur On-Dit. The name would seem to
indicate a Frenchman; but, whatever be his country, he is thoroughly
versed in all the languages of the day, and can express himself quite
as much to the purpose in English as in any other tongue. No sooner
were the ceremonies of salutation over than this talkative little
person put his mouth to the host’s ear and whispered three secrets of
state, an important piece of commercial intelligence, and a rich item
of fashionable scandal. He then assured the Man of Fancy that he would
not fail to circulate in the society of the lower world a minute
description of this magnificent castle in the air and of the
festivities at which he had the honor to be a guest. So saying,
Monsieur On-Dit made his bow and hurried from one to another of the
company, with all of whom he seemed to be acquainted and to possess
some topic of interest or amusement for every individual. Coming at
last to the Oldest Inhabitant, who was slumbering comfortably in the
easy-chair, he applied his mouth to that venerable ear.

“What do you say?” cried the old gentleman, starting from his nap and
putting up his hand to serve the purpose of an ear-trumpet.

Monsieur On-Dit bent forward again and repeated his communication.

“Never within my memory,” exclaimed the Oldest Inhabitant, lifting his
hands in astonishment, “has so remarkable an incident been heard of.”

Now came in the Clerk of the Weather, who had been invited out of
deference to his official station, although the host was well aware
that his conversation was likely to contribute but little to the
general enjoyment. He soon, indeed, got into a corner with his
acquaintance of long ago, the Oldest Inhabitant, and began to compare
notes with him in reference to the great storms, gales of wind, and
other atmospherical facts that had occurred during a century past. It
rejoiced the Man of Fancy that his venerable and much-respected guest
had met with so congenial an associate. Entreating them both to make
themselves perfectly at home, he now turned to receive the Wandering
Jew. This personage, however, had latterly grown so common, by mingling
in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of every entertainer,
that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in a very exclusive
circle. Besides, being covered with dust from his continual wanderings
along the highways of the world, he really looked out of place in a
dress party; so that the host felt relieved of an incommodity when the
restless individual in question, after a brief stay, took his departure
on a ramble towards Oregon.

The portal was now thronged by a crowd of shadowy people with whom the
Man of Fancy had been acquainted in his visionary youth. He had invited
them hither for the sake of observing how they would compare, whether
advantageously or otherwise, with the real characters to whom his
maturer life had introduced him. They were beings of crude imagination,
such as glide before a young man’s eye and pretend to be actual
inhabitants of the earth; the wise and witty with whom he would
hereafter hold intercourse; the generous and heroic friends whose
devotion would be requited with his own; the beautiful dream-woman who
would become the helpmate of his human toils and sorrows and at once
the source and partaker of his happiness. Alas! it is not good for the
full-grown man to look too closely at these old acquaintances, but
rather to reverence them at a distance through the medium of years that
have gathered duskily between. There was something laughably untrue in
their pompous stride and exaggerated sentiment; they were neither human
nor tolerable likenesses of humanity, but fantastic maskers, rendering
heroism and nature alike ridiculous by the grave absurdity of their
pretensions to such attributes; and as for the peerless dream-lady,
behold! there advanced up the saloon, with a movement like a jointed
doll, a sort of wax-figure of an angel, a creature as cold as
moonshine, an artifice in petticoats, with an intellect of pretty
phrases and only the semblance of a heart, yet in all these particulars
the true type of a young man’s imaginary mistress. Hardly could the
host’s punctilious courtesy restrain a smile as he paid his respects to
this unreality and met the sentimental glance with which the Dream
sought to remind him of their former love passages.

“No, no, fair lady,” murmured he betwixt sighing and smiling; “my taste
is changed; I have learned to love what Nature makes better than my own
creations in the guise of womanhood.”

“Ah, false one,” shrieked the dream-lady, pretending to faint, but
dissolving into thin air, out of which came the deplorable murmur of
her voice, “your inconstancy has annihilated me.”

“So be it,” said the cruel Man of Fancy to himself; “and a good
riddance too.”

Together with these shadows, and from the same region, there came an
uninvited multitude of shapes which at any time during his life had
tormented the Man of Fancy in his moods of morbid melancholy or had
haunted him in the delirium of fever. The walls of his castle in the
air were not dense enough to keep them out, nor would the strongest of
earthly architecture have availed to their exclusion. Here were those
forms of dim terror which had beset him at the entrance of life, waging
warfare with his hopes; here were strange uglinesses of earlier date,
such as haunt children in the night-time. He was particularly startled
by the vision of a deformed old black woman whom he imagined as lurking
in the garret of his native home, and who, when he was an infant, had
once come to his bedside and grinned at him in the crisis of a scarlet
fever. This same black shadow, with others almost as hideous, now
glided among the pillars of the magnificent saloon, grinning
recognition, until the man shuddered anew at the forgotten terrors of
his childhood. It amused him, however, to observe the black woman, with
the mischievous caprice peculiar to such beings, steal up to the chair
of the Oldest Inhabitant and peep into his half-dreamy mind.

“Never within my memory,” muttered that venerable personage, aghast,
“did I see such a face.”

Almost immediately after the unrealities just described, arrived a
number of guests whom incredulous readers may be inclined to rank
equally among creatures of imagination. The most noteworthy were an
incorruptible Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without
worldly ambition; and a Beautiful Woman without pride or coquetry; a
Married Pair whose life had never been disturbed by incongruity of
feeling; a Reformer untrammelled by his theory; and a Poet who felt no
jealousy towards other votaries of the lyre. In truth, however, the
host was not one of the cynics who consider these patterns of
excellence, without the fatal flaw, such rarities in the world; and he
had invited them to his select party chiefly out of humble deference to
the judgment of society, which pronounces them almost impossible to be
met with.

“In my younger days,” observed the Oldest Inhabitant, “such characters
might be seen at the corner of every street.”

Be that as it might, these specimens of perfection proved to be not
half so entertaining companions as people with the ordinary allowance
of faults.

But now appeared a stranger, whom the host had no sooner recognized
than, with an abundance of courtesy unlavished on any other, he
hastened down the whole length of the saloon in order to pay him
emphatic honor. Yet he was a young man in poor attire, with no insignia
of rank or acknowledged eminence, nor anything to distinguish him among
the crowd except a high, white forehead, beneath which a pair of
deep-set eyes were glowing with warm light. It was such a light as
never illuminates the earth save when a great heart burns as the
household fire of a grand intellect. And who was he?—who but the Master
Genius for whom our country is looking anxiously into the mist of Time,
as destined to fulfil the great mission of creating an American
literature, hewing it, as it were, out of the unwrought granite of our
intellectual quarries? From him, whether moulded in the form of an epic
poem or assuming a guise altogether new as the spirit itself may
determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall
do all that remains to be achieved for our glory among the nations. How
this child of a mighty destiny had been discovered by the Man of Fancy
it is of little consequence to mention. Suffice it that he dwells as
yet unhonored among men, unrecognized by those who have known him from
his cradle; the noble countenance which should be distinguished by a
halo diffused around it passes daily amid the throng of people toiling
and troubling themselves about the trifles of a moment, and none pay
reverence to the worker of immortality. Nor does it matter much to him,
in his triumph over all the ages, though a generation or two of his own
times shall do themselves the wrong to disregard him.

By this time Monsieur On-Dit had caught up the stranger’s name and
destiny and was busily whispering the intelligence among the other
guests.

“Pshaw!” said one. “There can never be an American genius.”

“Pish!” cried another. “We have already as good poets as any in the
world. For my part, I desire to see no better.”

And the Oldest Inhabitant, when it was proposed to introduce him to the
Master Genius, begged to be excused, observing that a man who had been
honored with the acquaintance of Dwight, and Freneau, and Joel Barlow,
might be allowed a little austerity of taste.

The saloon was now fast filling up by the arrival of other remarkable
characters, among whom were noticed Davy Jones, the distinguished
nautical personage, and a rude, carelessly dressed, harum-scarum sort
of elderly fellow, known by the nickname of Old Harry. The latter,
however, after being shown to a dressing-room, reappeared with his gray
hair nicely combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky on his neck, and
altogether so changed in aspect as to merit the more respectful
appellation of Venerable Henry. Joel Doe and Richard Roe came arm in
arm, accompanied by a Man of Straw, a fictitious indorser, and several
persons who had no existence except as voters in closely contested
elections. The celebrated Seatsfield, who now entered, was at first
supposed to belong to the same brotherhood, until he made it apparent
that he was a real man of flesh and blood and had his earthly domicile
in Germany. Among the latest comers, as might reasonably be expected,
arrived a guest from the far future.

“Do you know him? do you know him?” whispered Monsieur On-Dit, who
seemed to be acquainted with everybody. “He is the representative of
Posterity,—the man of an age to come.”

“And how came he here?” asked a figure who was evidently the prototype
of the fashion-plate in a magazine, and might be taken to represent the
vanities of the passing moment. “The fellow infringes upon our rights
by coming before his time.”

“But you forget where we are,” answered the Man of Fancy, who overheard
the remark. “The lower earth, it is true, will be forbidden ground to
him for many long years hence; but a castle in the air is a sort of
no-man’s-land, where Posterity may make acquaintance with us on equal
terms.”

No sooner was his identity known than a throng of guests gathered about
Posterity, all expressing the most generous interest in his welfare,
and many boasting of the sacrifices which they had made, or were
willing to make, in his behalf. Some, with as much secrecy as possible,
desired his judgment upon certain copies of verses or great manuscript
rolls of prose; others accosted him with the familiarity of old
friends, taking it for granted that he was perfectly cognizant of their
names and characters. At length, finding himself thus beset, Posterity
was put quite beside his patience.

“Gentlemen, my good friends,” cried he, breaking loose from a misty
poet who strove to hold him by the button, “I pray you to attend to
your own business, and leave me to take care of mine! I expect to owe
you nothing, unless it be certain national debts, and other
encumbrances and impediments, physical and moral, which I shall find it
troublesome enough to remove from my path. As to your verses, pray read
them to your contemporaries. Your names are as strange to me as your
faces; and even were it otherwise,—let me whisper you a secret,—the
cold, icy memory which one generation may retain of another is but a
poor recompense to barter life for. Yet, if your heart is set on being
known to me, the surest, the only method is, to live truly and wisely
for your own age, whereby, if the native force be in you, you may
likewise live for posterity.”

“It is nonsense,” murmured the Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of the
past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from himself to
be lavished on the future, “sheer nonsense, to waste so much thought on
what only is to be.”

To divert the minds of his guests, who were considerably abashed by
this little incident, the Man of Fancy led them through several
apartments of the castle, receiving their compliments upon the taste
and varied magnificence that were displayed in each. One of these rooms
was filled with moonlight, which did not enter through the window, but
was the aggregate of all the moonshine that is scattered around the
earth on a summer night while no eyes are awake to enjoy its beauty.
Airy spirits had gathered it up, wherever they found it gleaming on the
broad bosom of a lake, or silvering the meanders of a stream, or
glimmering among the wind-stirred boughs of a wood, and had garnered it
in this one spacious hall. Along the walls, illuminated by the mild
intensity of the moonshine, stood a multitude of ideal statues, the
original conceptions of the great works of ancient or modern art, which
the sculptors did but imperfectly succeed in putting into marble; for
it is not to be supposed that the pure idea of an immortal creation
ceases to exist; it is only necessary to know where they are deposited
in order to obtain possession of them.—In the alcoves of another vast
apartment was arranged a splendid library, the volumes of which were
inestimable, because they consisted, not of actual performances, but of
the works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the
happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the
untold tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of
the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge’s Christabel; and the
whole of Dryden’s projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The
shelves were crowded; for it would not be too much to affirm that every
author has imagined and shaped out in his thought more and far better
works than those which actually proceeded from his pen. And here,
likewise, where the unrealized conceptions of youthful poets who died
of the very strength of their own genius before the world had caught
one inspired murmur from their lips.

When the peculiarities of the library and statue-gallery were explained
to the Oldest Inhabitant, he appeared infinitely perplexed, and
exclaimed, with more energy than usual, that he had never heard of such
a thing within his memory, and, moreover, did not at all understand how
it could be.

“But my brain, I think,” said the good old gentleman, “is getting not
so clear as it used to be. You young folks, I suppose, can see your way
through these strange matters. For my part, I give it up.”

“And so do I,” muttered the Old Harry. “It is enough to puzzle
the—Ahem!”

Making as little reply as possible to these observations, the Man of
Fancy preceded the company to another noble saloon, the pillars of
which were solid golden sunbeams taken out of the sky in the first hour
in the morning. Thus, as they retained all their living lustre, the
room was filled with the most cheerful radiance imaginable, yet not too
dazzling to be borne with comfort and delight. The windows were
beautifully adorned with curtains made of the many-colored clouds of
sunrise, all imbued with virgin light, and hanging in magnificent
festoons from the ceiling to the floor. Moreover, there were fragments
of rainbows scattered through the room; so that the guests, astonished
at one another, reciprocally saw their heads made glorious by the seven
primary hues; or, if they chose,—as who would not?—they could grasp a
rainbow in the air and convert it to their own apparel and adornment.
But the morning light and scattered rainbows were only a type and
symbol of the real wonders of the apartment. By an influence akin to
magic, yet perfectly natural, whatever means and opportunities of joy
are neglected in the lower world had been carefully gathered up and
deposited in the saloon of morning sunshine. As may well be conceived,
therefore, there was material enough to supply, not merely a joyous
evening, but also a happy lifetime, to more than as many people as that
spacious apartment could contain. The company seemed to renew their
youth; while that pattern and proverbial standard of innocence, the
Child Unborn, frolicked to and fro among them, communicating his own
unwrinkled gayety to all who had the good fortune to witness his
gambols.

“My honored friends,” said the Man of Fancy, after they had enjoyed
themselves awhile, “I am now to request your presence in the
banqueting-hall, where a slight collation is awaiting you.”

“Ah, well said!” ejaculated a cadaverous figure, who had been invited
for no other reason than that he was pretty constantly in the habit of
dining with Duke Humphrey. “I was beginning to wonder whether a castle
in the air were provided with a kitchen.”

It was curious, in truth, to see how instantaneously the guests were
diverted from the high moral enjoyments which they had been tasting
with so much apparent zest by a suggestion of the more solid as well as
liquid delights of the festive board. They thronged eagerly in the rear
of the host, who now ushered them into a lofty and extensive hall, from
end to end of which was arranged a table, glittering all over with
innumerable dishes and drinking-vessels of gold. It is an uncertain
point whether these rich articles of plate were made for the occasion
out of molten sunbeams, or recovered from the wrecks of Spanish
galleons that had lain for ages at the bottom of the sea. The upper end
of the table was overshadowed by a canopy, beneath which was placed a
chair of elaborate magnificence, which the host himself declined to
occupy, and besought his guests to assign it to the worthiest among
them. As a suitable homage to his incalculable antiquity and eminent
distinction, the post of honor was at first tendered to the Oldest
Inhabitant. He, however, eschewed it, and requested the favor of a bowl
of gruel at a side table, where he could refresh himself with a quiet
nap. There was some little hesitation as to the next candidate, until
Posterity took the Master Genius of our country by the hand and led him
to the chair of state beneath the princely canopy. When once they
beheld him in his true place, the company acknowledged the justice of
the selection by a long thunder-roll of vehement applause.

Then was served up a banquet, combining, if not all the delicacies of
the season, yet all the rarities which careful purveyors had met with
in the flesh, fish, and vegetable markets of the land of Nowhere. The
bill of fare being unfortunately lost, we can only mention a phoenix,
roasted in its own flames, cold potted birds of paradise, ice-creams
from the Milky-Way, and whip syllabubs and flummery from the Paradise
of Fools, whereof there was a very great consumption. As for
drinkables, the temperance people contented themselves with water as
usual; but it was the water of the Fountain of Youth; the ladies sipped
Nepenthe; the lovelorn, the careworn, and the sorrow-stricken were
supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe; and it was shrewdly
conjectured that a certain golden vase, from which only the more
distinguished guests were invited to partake, contained nectar that had
been mellowing ever since the days of classical mythology. The cloth
being removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent over their liquor
and delivered themselves of a succession of brilliant speeches,—the
task of reporting which we resign to the more adequate ability of
Counsellor Gill, whose indispensable co-operation the Man of Fancy had
taken the precaution to secure.

When the festivity of the banquet was at its most ethereal point, the
Clerk of the Weather was observed to steal from the table and thrust
his head between the purple and golden curtains of one of the windows.

“My fellow-guests,” he remarked aloud, after carefully noting the signs
of the night, “I advise such of you as live at a distance to be going
as soon as possible; for a thunder-storm is certainly at hand.”

“Mercy on me!” cried Mother Carey, who had left her brood of chickens
and come hither in gossamer drapery, with pink silk stockings. “How
shall I ever get home?”

All now was confusion and hasty departure, with but little superfluous
leave-taking. The Oldest Inhabitant, however, true to the rule of those
long past days in which his courtesy had been studied, paused on the
threshold of the meteor-lighted hall to express his vast satisfaction
at the entertainment.

“Never, within my memory,” observed the gracious old gentleman, “has it
been my good fortune to spend a pleasanter evening or in more select
society.”

The wind here took his breath away, whirled his three-cornered hat into
infinite space, and drowned what further compliments it had been his
purpose to bestow. Many of the company had bespoken will-o’-the-wisps
to convoy them home; and the host, in his general beneficence, had
engaged the Man in the Moon, with an immense horn-lantern, to be the
guide of such desolate spinsters as could do no better for themselves.
But a blast of the rising tempest blew out all their lights in the
twinkling of an eye. How, in the darkness that ensued, the guests
contrived to get back to earth, or whether the greater part of them
contrived to get back at all, or are still wandering among clouds,
mists, and puffs of tempestuous wind, bruised by the beams and rafters
of the overthrown castle in the air, and deluded by all sorts of
unrealities, are points that concern themselves much more than the
writer or the public. People should think of these matters before they
trust themselves on a pleasure-party into the realm of Nowhere.




YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN


Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem
village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to
exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was
aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the
wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman
Brown.

“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips
were close to his ear, “prithee put off your journey until sunrise and
sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such
dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeard of herself sometimes. Pray
tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.”

“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights in
the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as
thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ’twixt now
and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already,
and we but three months married?”

“Then God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons; “and may you
find all well when you come back.”

“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to
bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.”

So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to
turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head
of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air, in spite of her
pink ribbons.

“Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “What a
wretch am I to leave her on such an errand! She talks of dreams, too.
Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had
warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; ’twould kill
her to think it. Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this
one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.”

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself
justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had
taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest,
which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and
closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there
is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not
who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs
overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through
an unseen multitude.

“There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman Brown
to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if
the devil himself should be at my very elbow!”

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking
forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire,
seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown’s approach
and walked onward side by side with him.

“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South was
striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes
agone.”

“Faith kept me back a while,” replied the young man, with a tremor in
his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not
wholly unexpected.

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it
where these two were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the
second traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank
of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to
him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might
have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person
was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had
an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would not have
felt abashed at the governor’s dinner table or in King William’s court,
were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only
thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff,
which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought
that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living
serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted
by the uncertain light.

“Come, Goodman Brown,” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is a dull pace
for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon
weary.”

“Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop,
“having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to
return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st
of.”

“Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Let us
walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not
thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet.”

“Too far! too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his
walk. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his
father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good
Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of
the name of Brown that ever took this path and kept—”

“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person,
interpreting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well
acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and
that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when
he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and
it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own
hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. They
were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along
this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends
with you for their sake.”

“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never
spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least
rumor of the sort would have driven them from New England. We are a
people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such
wickedness.”

“Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff, “I have
a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a
church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers
towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General
Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—But
these are state secrets.”

“Can this be so?” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his
undisturbed companion. “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor
and council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a simple
husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet
the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his
voice would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day.”

Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now
burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently
that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.

“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he again and again; then composing himself,
“Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, prithee, don’t kill me with
laughing.”

“Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown,
considerably nettled, “there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear
little heart; and I’d rather break my own.”

“Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways,
Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women like the one hobbling
before us that Faith should come to any harm.”

As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in
whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had
taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and
spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.

“A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness
at nightfall,” said he. “But with your leave, friend, I shall take a
cut through the woods until we have left this Christian woman behind.
Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and
whither I was going.”

“Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods, and
let me keep the path.”

Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his
companion, who advanced softly along the road until he had come within
a staff’s length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making the best
of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some
indistinct words—a prayer, doubtless—as she went. The traveller put
forth his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the
serpent’s tail.

“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.

“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller,
confronting her and leaning on his writhing stick.

“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame.
“Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman
Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But—would your
worship believe it?—my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen,
as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I
was all anointed with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf’s
bane.”

“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the
shape of old Goodman Brown.

“Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cackling
aloud. “So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no
horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me there
is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your
good worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a
twinkling.”

“That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm,
Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you will.”

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed
life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the
Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take
cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down
again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his
fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had
happened.

“That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and there
was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his
companion to make good speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so
aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his
auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a
branch of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of
the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The
moment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered and
dried up as with a week’s sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good
free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman
Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree and refused to go any
farther.

“Friend,” said he, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not another step
will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to
go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any
reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?”

“You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance,
composedly. “Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like
moving again, there is my staff to help you along.”

Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as
speedily out of sight as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom.
The young man sat a few moments by the roadside, applauding himself
greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the
minister in his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old
Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his that very night, which
was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in
the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations,
Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it
advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the forest, conscious
of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so
happily turned from it.

On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old
voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled sounds
appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man’s
hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that
particular spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible.
Though their figures brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could
not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam
from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed.
Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside
the branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst without
discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could
have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices
of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were
wont to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council.
While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch.

“Of the two, reverend sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, “I had
rather miss an ordination dinner than to-night’s meeting. They tell me
that some of our community are to be here from Falmouth and beyond, and
others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian
powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the
best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into
communion.”

“Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tones of the
minister. “Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know,
until I get on the ground.”

The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the
empty air, passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been
gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these holy
men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman
Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on
the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his
heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a
heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars
brightening in it.

“With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the
devil!” cried Goodman Brown.

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had
lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried
across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still
visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was
sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of
the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the
listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people
of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had
met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern.
The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he
had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a
wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily
in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of
night There was one voice of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet
with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which,
perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude,
both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation;
and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if
bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness.

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the
unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream,
drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off
laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent
sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through
the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it,
and beheld a pink ribbon.

“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no
good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this
world given.”

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did
Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that
he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The
road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at
length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing
onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole
forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the
howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the
wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar
around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But
he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its
other horrors.

“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.

“Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with
your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil
himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he
fear you.”

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more
frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black
pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to
an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such
laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons
around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he
rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course,
until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as
when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on
fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of
midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him
onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly
from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it
was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse
died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices,
but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful
harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his
own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full
upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark
wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural
resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four
blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles
at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the
summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and
fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy
festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous
congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and
again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the
solitary woods at once.

“A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown.

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom
and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council
board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked
devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the
holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor
was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives
of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient
maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled
lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light
flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he
recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for
their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited
at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But,
irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people,
these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there
were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given
over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes.
It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor
were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their
pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often
scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any
known to English witchcraft.

“But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his
heart, he trembled.

Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as
the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature
can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to
mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and
still the chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of
a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there
came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling
beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were
mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the
prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and
obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths
above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock
shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now
appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no
slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
New England churches.

“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field
and rolled into the forest.

At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees
and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful
brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He
could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father
beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a
woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him
back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor
to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon
Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came
also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse,
that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had
received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was
she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.

“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your
race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My
children, look behind you!”

They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the
fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on
every visage.

“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from
youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own
sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful
aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping
assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret
deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton
words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager
for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him
sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste
to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet
ones—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole
guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for
sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber,
street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall
exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood
spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every
bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and
which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than
my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my
children, look upon each other.”

They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the
wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling
before that unhallowed altar.

“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and
solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once
angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon
one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a
dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must
be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of
your race.”

“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and
triumph.

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet
hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was
hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the
lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did
the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism
upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of
sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look
at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the
next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they
disclosed and what they saw!

“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the
wicked one.”

Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found
himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind
which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the
rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been
all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.

The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of
Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old
minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for
breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he
passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to
avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the
holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God
doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own
lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of
morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp
of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied
the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and
bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the
street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But
Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on
without a greeting.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild
dream of a witch-meeting?

Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young
Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if
not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.
On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he
could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear
and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the
pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open
Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives
and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then
did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down
upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at
midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or
eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered
to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he
had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by
Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly
procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse
upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.




RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER


A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the
more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University
of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his
pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice
which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble,
and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings
of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not
unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the
ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion,
had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his
Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the
tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of
his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around
the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.

“Holy Virgin, signor!” cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won by the
youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the
chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young
man’s heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of
Heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as
bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.”

Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not
quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that
of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden
beneath the window and expended its fostering influences on a variety
of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.

“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.

“Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs
than any that grow there now,” answered old Lisabetta. “No; that garden
is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous
doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is
said that he distils these plants into medicines that are as potent as
a charm. Oftentimes you may see the signor doctor at work, and
perchance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers
that grow in the garden.”

The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the
chamber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints,
took her departure.

Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the
garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one
of those botanic gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than
elsewhere in Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once
have been the pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the
ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but
so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original
design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however,
continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever.
A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man’s window, and made
him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song
unceasingly and without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one
century imbodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable
garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided
grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of
moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances,
flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set
in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of
purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem;
and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough
to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every
portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less
beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their
individual virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them.
Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in common
garden pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground or climbed on
high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One plant had
wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite
veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily
arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling behind a screen
of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden.
His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no
common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man,
dressed in a scholar’s garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of
life, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked
with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more
youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart.

Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener
examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was
looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to
their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape
and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among
themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep
intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between
himself and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he avoided
their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a caution
that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man’s demeanor was
that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts,
or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one
moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. It was
strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination to see this air of
insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and
innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of
the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of
the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what
his own hands caused to grow,—was he the Adam?

The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or
pruning the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, defended his hands with
a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his
walk through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its
purple gems beside the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over
his mouth and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a
deadlier malice; but, finding his task still too dangerous, he drew
back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm voice of a
person affected with inward disease, “Beatrice! Beatrice!”

“Here am I, my father. What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice
from the window of the opposite house—a voice as rich as a tropical
sunset, and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep
hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable. “Are you
in the garden?”

“Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.”

Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young
girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of
the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid
that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with
life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and
compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her
virgin zone. Yet Giovanni’s fancy must have grown morbid while he
looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger
made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of
those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the
richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be
approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, it
was observable that she handled and inhaled the odor of several of the
plants which her father had most sedulously avoided.

“Here, Beatrice,” said the latter, “see how many needful offices
require to be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered as I am, my
life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as
circumstances demand. Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be consigned
to your sole charge.”

“And gladly will I undertake it,” cried again the rich tones of the
young lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant and opened her
arms as if to embrace it. “Yes, my sister, my splendour, it shall be
Beatrice’s task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with
thy kisses and perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life.”

Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly
expressed in her words, she busied herself with such attentions as the
plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his
eyes and almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite
flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection to another.
The scene soon terminated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his
labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had caught the
stranger’s face, he now took his daughter’s arm and retired. Night was
already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the
plants and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing the
lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful
girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught
with some strange peril in either shape.

But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify
whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred
during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the
less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni’s first movement, on
starting from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into
the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was
surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an
affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded the
dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter
beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of
ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the
barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely
and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a
symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the
sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his
brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not
determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was
due to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy;
but he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.

In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro
Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of
eminent repute to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction.
The professor was an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature,
and habits that might almost be called jovial. He kept the young man to
dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness
of his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan
wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the same
city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an
opportunity to mention the name of Dr. Rappaccini. But the professor
did not respond with so much cordiality as he had anticipated.

“Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine,” said
Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, “to
withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently
skilled as Rappaccini; but, on the other hand, I should answer it but
scantily to my conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like
yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe
erroneous ideas respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold
your life and death in his hands. The truth is, our worshipful Dr.
Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty—with
perhaps one single exception—in Padua, or all Italy; but there are
certain grave objections to his professional character.”

“And what are they?” asked the young man.

“Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so
inquisitive about physicians?” said the professor, with a smile. “But
as for Rappaccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can
answer for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for
mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some
new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest,
or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as
a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated
knowledge.”

“Methinks he is an awful man indeed,” remarked Guasconti, mentally
recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. “And
yet, worshipful professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men
capable of so spiritual a love of science?”

“God forbid,” answered the professor, somewhat testily; “at least,
unless they take sounder views of the healing art than those adopted by
Rappaccini. It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised
within those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he
cultivates with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new
varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the
assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world
withal. That the signor doctor does less mischief than might be
expected with such dangerous substances is undeniable. Now and then, it
must be owned, he has effected, or seemed to effect, a marvellous cure;
but, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive
little credit for such instances of success,—they being probably the
work of chance,—but should be held strictly accountable for his
failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”

The youth might have taken Baglioni’s opinions with many grains of
allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long
continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter was
generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be
inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter
tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the
University of Padua.

“I know not, most learned professor,” returned Giovanni, after musing
on what had been said of Rappaccini’s exclusive zeal for science,—“I
know not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there
is one object more dear to him. He has a daughter.”

“Aha!” cried the professor, with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s
secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men
in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good
hap to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that
Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and
that, young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified
to fill a professor’s chair. Perchance her father destines her for
mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking about or
listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your glass of
lachryma.”

Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had
quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies in
reference to Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way,
happening to pass by a florist’s, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers.

Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within
the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, so that he could look down
into the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his
eye was a solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine,
and now and then nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment
of sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew
the magnificent shrub, with its purple gems clustering all over it;
they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again out of the depths of the
pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance from the rich
reflection that was steeped in it. At first, as we have said, the
garden was a solitude. Soon, however,—as Giovanni had half hoped, half
feared, would be the case,—a figure appeared beneath the antique
sculptured portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling
their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of old
classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice,
the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty
exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its
character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni
whispered to himself, positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals
of the garden path. Her face being now more revealed than on the former
occasion, he was struck by its expression of simplicity and
sweetness,—qualities that had not entered into his idea of her
character, and which made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might
be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between
the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gemlike flowers
over the fountain,—a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged
a fantastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement of her dress
and the selection of its hues.

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate
ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace—so intimate that
her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets
all intermingled with the flowers.

“Give me thy breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint
with common air. And give me this flower of thine, which I separate
with gentlest fingers from the stem and place it close beside my
heart.”

With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of
the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her
bosom. But now, unless Giovanni’s draughts of wine had bewildered his
senses, a singular incident occurred. A small orange-colored reptile,
of the lizard or chameleon species, chanced to be creeping along the
path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni,—but, at
the distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything
so minute,—it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of moisture
from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard’s head.
For an instant the reptile contorted itself violently, and then lay
motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this remarkable
phenomenon and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did
she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her bosom. There
it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious
stone, adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm which
nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out of the
shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured and
trembled.

“Am I awake? Have I my senses?” said he to himself. “What is this
being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?”

Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer
beneath Giovanni’s window, so that he was compelled to thrust his head
quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and
painful curiosity which she excited. At this moment there came a
beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered
through the city, and found no flowers or verdure among those antique
haunts of men until the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini’s shrubs had
lured it from afar. Without alighting on the flowers, this winged
brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in the air
and fluttered about her head. Now, here it could not be but that
Giovanni Guasconti’s eyes deceived him. Be that as it might, he fancied
that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it
grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was
dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere
of her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she
bent over the dead insect.

An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There
she beheld the beautiful head of the young man—rather a Grecian than an
Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold
among his ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in
mid air. Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet
which he had hitherto held in his hand.

“Signora,” said he, “there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them
for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti.”

“Thanks, signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that came
forth as it were like a gush of music, and with a mirthful expression
half childish and half woman-like. “I accept your gift, and would fain
recompense it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into
the air it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must even content
himself with my thanks.”

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly
ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to
a stranger’s greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But
few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the
point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful
bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle
thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower
from a fresh one at so great a distance.

For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that
looked into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, as if something ugly and monstrous
would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He
felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the
influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had
opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart
were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once;
the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the
familiar and daylight view of Beatrice—thus bringing her rigidly and
systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all,
while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this
extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of
intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild
vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.
Guasconti had not a deep heart—or, at all events, its depths were not
sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern
temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether
or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath,
the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were
indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a
fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her
rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her
spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to
pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and
horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered
like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know
what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his
breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to
renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or
bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the
illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid
walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates: his footsteps
kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to
accelerate itself to a race. One day he found himself arrested; his arm
was seized by a portly personage, who had turned back on recognizing
the young man and expended much breath in overtaking him.

“Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!” cried he. “Have you forgotten
me? That might well be the case if I were as much altered as yourself.”

It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first
meeting, from a doubt that the professor’s sagacity would look too
deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared
forth wildly from his inner world into the outer one and spoke like a
man in a dream.

“Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now
let me pass!”

“Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the professor,
smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth with an earnest
glance. “What! did I grow up side by side with your father? and shall
his son pass me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand
still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part.”

“Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speedily,” said Giovanni,
with feverish impatience. “Does not your worship see that I am in
haste?”

Now, while he was speaking there came a man in black along the street,
stooping and moving feebly like a person in inferior health. His face
was all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so
pervaded with an expression of piercing and active intellect that an
observer might easily have overlooked the merely physical attributes
and have seen only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person
exchanged a cold and distant salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his
eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to bring out whatever
was within him worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar
quietness in the look, as if taking merely a speculative, not a human
interest, in the young man.

“It is Dr. Rappaccini!” whispered the professor when the stranger had
passed. “Has he ever seen your face before?”

“Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name.

“He HAS seen you! he must have seen you!” said Baglioni, hastily. “For
some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I
know that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face
as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance
of some experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as
deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor
Giovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of
Rappaccini’s experiments!”

“Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately. “THAT,
signor professor, were an untoward experiment.”

“Patience! patience!” replied the imperturbable professor. “I tell
thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in
thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora
Beatrice,—what part does she act in this mystery?”

But Guasconti, finding Baglioni’s pertinacity intolerable, here broke
away, and was gone before the professor could again seize his arm. He
looked after the young man intently and shook his head.

“This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “The youth is the son of
my old friend, and shall not come to any harm from which the arcana of
medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an
impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands,
as I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This
daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned
Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream of it!”

Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found
himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was
met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently
desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition
of his feelings had momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity.
He turned his eyes full upon the withered face that was puckering
itself into a smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame,
therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.

“Signor! signor!” whispered she, still with a smile over the whole
breadth of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a grotesque carving
in wood, darkened by centuries. “Listen, signor! There is a private
entrance into the garden!”

“What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an
inanimate thing should start into feverish life. “A private entrance
into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden?”

“Hush! hush! not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over
his mouth. “Yes; into the worshipful doctor’s garden, where you may see
all his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be
admitted among those flowers.”

Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.

“Show me the way,” said he.

A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed
his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might perchance be
connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the
professor seemed to suppose that Dr. Rappaccini was involving him. But
such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to
restrain him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of
approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence
to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was
irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him
onward, in ever-lessening circles, towards a result which he did not
attempt to foreshadow; and yet, strange to say, there came across him a
sudden doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not
delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to
justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position;
whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man’s brain, only
slightly or not at all connected with his heart.

He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. His
withered guide led him along several obscure passages, and finally
undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and
sound of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among
them. Giovanni stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the
entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden
entrance, stood beneath his own window in the open area of Dr.
Rappaccini’s garden.

How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass
and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible
realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid
circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to
anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his
own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an
appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance.
So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day his pulses had throbbed with
feverish blood at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice,
and of standing with her, face to face, in this very garden, basking in
the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full gaze
the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now
there was a singular and untimely equanimity within his breast. He
threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father
were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical
observation of the plants.

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness
seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an
individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a
forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an
unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would
have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness
indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were,
adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no
longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved
fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably
the result of experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in
mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the
questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth
of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but two or three plants in
the collection, and those of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous.
While busy with these contemplations he heard the rustling of a silken
garment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from beneath the
sculptured portal.

Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his deportment;
whether he should apologize for his intrusion into the garden, or
assume that he was there with the privity at least, if not by the
desire, of Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter; but Beatrice’s manner placed
him at his ease, though leaving him still in doubt by what agency he
had gained admittance. She came lightly along the path and met him near
the broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by
a simple and kind expression of pleasure.

“You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor,” said Beatrice, with a
smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her from the window.
“It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father’s rare
collection has tempted you to take a nearer view. If he were here, he
could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and
habits of these shrubs; for he has spent a lifetime in such studies,
and this garden is his world.”

“And yourself, lady,” observed Giovanni, “if fame says true,—you
likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated by these rich
blossoms and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my
instructress, I should prove an apter scholar than if taught by Signor
Rappaccini himself.”

“Are there such idle rumors?” asked Beatrice, with the music of a
pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I am skilled in my father’s science
of plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these
flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and
sometimes methinks I would fain rid myself of even that small
knowledge. There are many flowers here, and those not the least
brilliant, that shock and offend me when they meet my eye. But pray,
signor, do not believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing
of me save what you see with your own eyes.”

“And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked
Giovanni, pointedly, while the recollection of former scenes made him
shrink. “No, signora; you demand too little of me. Bid me believe
nothing save what comes from your own lips.”

It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush
to her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni’s eyes, and responded
to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness.

“I do so bid you, signor,” she replied. “Forget whatever you may have
fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it may be
false in its essence; but the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are
true from the depths of the heart outward. Those you may believe.”

A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon Giovanni’s
consciousness like the light of truth itself; but while she spoke there
was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful,
though evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable
reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor
of the flowers. Could it be Beatrice’s breath which thus embalmed her
words with a strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A
faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he
seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent
soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.

The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice’s manner vanished; she
became gay, and appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion
with the youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have
felt conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her
experience of life had been confined within the limits of that garden.
She talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer
clouds, and now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni’s
distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters—questions
indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and
forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed
out before him like a fresh rill that was just catching its first
glimpse of the sunlight and wondering at the reflections of earth and
sky which were flung into its bosom. There came thoughts, too, from a
deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and
rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon
there gleamed across the young man’s mind a sense of wonder that he
should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon
his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom
he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful
attributes,—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother,
and should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections
were only momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to
make itself familiar at once.

In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, and now,
after many turns among its avenues, were come to the shattered
fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of
glowing blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it which Giovanni
recognized as identical with that which he had attributed to Beatrice’s
breath, but incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it,
Giovanni beheld her press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were
throbbing suddenly and painfully.

“For the first time in my life,” murmured she, addressing the shrub, “I
had forgotten thee.”

“I remember, signora,” said Giovanni, “that you once promised to reward
me with one of these living gems for the bouquet which I had the happy
boldness to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a memorial
of this interview.”

He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand; but Beatrice
darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through his heart like a
dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back with the whole force of
her slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his
fibres.

“Touch it not!” exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. “Not for thy life!
It is fatal!”

Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished beneath the
sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he beheld
the emaciated figure and pale intelligence of Dr. Rappaccini, who had
been watching the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the
entrance.

No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of Beatrice
came back to his passionate musings, invested with all the witchery
that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her,
and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She
was human; her nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine
qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely,
on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he
had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her
physical and moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle
sophistry of passion transmitted into a golden crown of enchantment,
rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so much as she was the more
unique. Whatever had looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of
such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those shapeless half
ideas which throng the dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect
consciousness. Thus did he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the
dawn had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Dr. Rappaccini’s
garden, whither Giovanni’s dreams doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in
his due season, and, flinging his beams upon the young man’s eyelids,
awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became
sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in his right
hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was on
the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. On the back of that
hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and
the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist.

Oh, how stubbornly does love,—or even that cunning semblance of love
which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into
the heart,—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes
when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a
handkerchief about his hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him,
and soon forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.

After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of
what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in
the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the
whole space in which he might be said to live; for the anticipation and
memory of that ecstatic hour made up the remainder. Nor was it
otherwise with the daughter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth’s
appearance, and flew to his side with confidence as unreserved as if
they had been playmates from early infancy—as if they were such
playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the
appointed moment, she stood beneath the window and sent up the rich
sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber and echo and
reverberate throughout his heart: “Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest
thou? Come down!” And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous
flowers.

But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in
Beatrice’s demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained that the idea
of infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all
appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love with eyes that
conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of
the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they
had even spoken love in those gushes of passion when their spirits
darted forth in articulated breath like tongues of long-hidden flame;
and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any
slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never touched
one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so marked was the
physical barrier between them—had never been waved against him by a
breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to
overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore
such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a
spoken word was requisite to repel him. At such times he was startled
at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns
of his heart and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint
as the morning mist, his doubts alone had substance. But, when
Beatrice’s face brightened again after the momentary shadow, she was
transformed at once from the mysterious, questionable being whom he had
watched with so much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and
unsophisticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty
beyond all other knowledge.

A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with
Baglioni. One morning, however, he was disagreeably surprised by a
visit from the professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole
weeks, and would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up as he
had long been to a pervading excitement, he could tolerate no
companions except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his
present state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from
Professor Baglioni.

The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of
the city and the university, and then took up another topic.

“I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met
with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember
it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present
to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as
the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich
perfume in her breath—richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander,
as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight
with this magnificent stranger; but a certain sage physician, happening
to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her.”

“And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to avoid
those of the professor.

“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been
nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature
was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest
poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich
perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have
been poison—her embrace death. Is not this a marvellous tale?”

“A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his
chair. “I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense
among your graver studies.”

“By the by,” said the professor, looking uneasily about him, “what
singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your
gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, by no means
agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It
is like the breath of a flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber.”

“Nor are there any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the
professor spoke; “nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your
worship’s imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the
sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The
recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken
for a present reality.”

“Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said
Baglioni; “and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, it would be that of
some vile apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be
imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures
his medicaments with odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless,
likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her
patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden’s breath; but woe to him
that sips them!”

Giovanni’s face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which the
professor alluded to the pure and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a
torture to his soul; and yet the intimation of a view of her character
opposite to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim
suspicions, which now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove
hard to quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s
perfect faith.

“Signor professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend; perchance,
too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards his son. I would
fain feel nothing towards you save respect and deference; but I pray
you to observe, signor, that there is one subject on which we must not
speak. You know not the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore,
estimate the wrong—the blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her
character by a light or injurious word.”

“Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!” answered the professor, with a calm
expression of pity, “I know this wretched girl far better than
yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner
Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, poisonous as she is
beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do violence to my gray hairs,
it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian woman has become
a truth by the deep and deadly science of Rappaccini and in the person
of the lovely Beatrice.”

Giovanni groaned and hid his face

“Her father,” continued Baglioni, “was not restrained by natural
affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the
victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he
is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an
alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected
as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be
death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls
the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing.”

“It is a dream,” muttered Giovanni to himself; “surely it is a dream.”

“But,” resumed the professor, “be of good cheer, son of my friend. It
is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may even succeed in
bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary
nature, from which her father’s madness has estranged her. Behold this
little silver vase! It was wrought by the hands of the renowned
Benvenuto Cellini, and is well worthy to be a love gift to the fairest
dame in Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little sip of this
antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias
innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of
Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within it, on your
Beatrice, and hopefully await the result.”

Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver vial on the table and
withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young
man’s mind.

“We will thwart Rappaccini yet,” thought he, chuckling to himself, as
he descended the stairs; “but, let us confess the truth of him, he is a
wonderful man—a wonderful man indeed; a vile empiric, however, in his
practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the
good old rules of the medical profession.”

Throughout Giovanni’s whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had
occasionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark surmises as to her
character; yet so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a
simple, natural, most affectionate, and guileless creature, that the
image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked as strange and
incredible as if it were not in accordance with his own original
conception. True, there were ugly recollections connected with his
first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the
bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid
the sunny air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of her
breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her
character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged
as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might
appear to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real than
what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better
evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather
by the necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and
generous faith on his part. But now his spirit was incapable of
sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of
passion had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts,
and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice’s image. Not that
he gave her up; he did but distrust. He resolved to institute some
decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all, whether there were
those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature which could not be
supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul. His
eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the
insect, and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a
few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower in
Beatrice’s hand, there would be room for no further question. With this
idea he hastened to the florist’s and purchased a bouquet that was
still gemmed with the morning dew-drops.

It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice.
Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his
figure in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man,
yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the
token of a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character.
He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never
before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his
cheeks so warm a hue of superabundant life.

“At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet insinuated itself into
my system. I am no flower to perish in her grasp.”

With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had never
once laid aside from his hand. A thrill of indefinable horror shot
through his frame on perceiving that those dewy flowers were already
beginning to droop; they wore the aspect of things that had been fresh
and lovely yesterday. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood
motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at
the likeness of something frightful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark
about the fragrance that seemed to pervade the chamber. It must have
been the poison in his breath! Then he shuddered—shuddered at himself.
Recovering from his stupor, he began to watch with curious eye a spider
that was busily at work hanging its web from the antique cornice of the
apartment, crossing and recrossing the artful system of interwoven
lines—as vigorous and active a spider as ever dangled from an old
ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted a deep, long
breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web vibrated with a
tremor originating in the body of the small artisan. Again Giovanni
sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a venomous feeling
out of his heart: he knew not whether he were wicked, or only
desperate. The spider made a convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung
dead across the window.

“Accursed! accursed!” muttered Giovanni, addressing himself. “Hast thou
grown so poisonous that this deadly insect perishes by thy breath?”

At that moment a rich, sweet voice came floating up from the garden.

“Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the hour! Why tarriest thou? Come
down!”

“Yes,” muttered Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath
may not slay! Would that it might!”

He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and
loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his wrath and despair had been so
fierce that he could have desired nothing so much as to wither her by a
glance; but with her actual presence there came influences which had
too real an existence to be at once shaken off: recollections of the
delicate and benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often
enveloped him in a religious calm; recollections of many a holy and
passionate outgush of her heart, when the pure fountain had been
unsealed from its depths and made visible in its transparency to his
mental eye; recollections which, had Giovanni known how to estimate
them, would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an
earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have
gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as
he was of such high faith, still her presence had not utterly lost its
magic. Giovanni’s rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen
insensibility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt
that there was a gulf of blackness between them which neither he nor
she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus
to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the
midst of which grew the shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni was
affrighted at the eager enjoyment—the appetite, as it were—with which
he found himself inhaling the fragrance of the flowers.

“Beatrice,” asked he, abruptly, “whence came this shrub?”

“My father created it,” answered she, with simplicity.

“Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What mean you, Beatrice?”

“He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature,” replied
Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang
from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I
was but his earthly child. Approach it not!” continued she, observing
with terror that Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. “It has
qualities that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni,—I grew up
and blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its breath. It was
my sister, and I loved it with a human affection; for, alas!—hast thou
not suspected it?—there was an awful doom.”

Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and
trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured her, and made her
blush that she had doubted for an instant.

“There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s
fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind.
Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely was thy poor
Beatrice!”

“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.

“Only of late have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly.
“Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet.”

Giovanni’s rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning
flash out of a dark cloud.

“Accursed one!” cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. “And, finding
thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the
warmth of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!”

“Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his
face. The force of his words had not found its way into her mind; she
was merely thunderstruck.

“Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion.
“Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins
with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and
deadly a creature as thyself—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity!
Now, if our breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others,
let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!”

“What has befallen me?” murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her
heart. “Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heart-broken child!”

“Thou,—dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish
scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the
atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip
our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us
will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will
be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!”

“Giovanni,” said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief was beyond passion,
“why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those terrible words? I, it
is true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou,—what hast thou
to do, save with one other shudder at my hideous misery to go forth out
of the garden and mingle with thy race, and forget there ever crawled
on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?”

“Dost thou pretend ignorance?” asked Giovanni, scowling upon her.
“Behold! this power have I gained from the pure daughter of
Rappaccini.”

There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search
of the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. They
circled round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him
by the same influence which had drawn them for an instant within the
sphere of several of the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and
smiled bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell
dead upon the ground.

“I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal
science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only
to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass
away, leaving but thine image in mine heart; for, Giovanni, believe it,
though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature,
and craves love as its daily food. But my father,—he has united us in
this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill me! Oh, what
is death after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a world
of bliss would I have done it.”

Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips.
There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not without
tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice
and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would
be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life.
Ought not, then, the desert of humanity around them to press this
insulated pair closer together? If they should be cruel to one another,
who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might
there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of
ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by the
hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an
earthly union and earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love
had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s
blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass
heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time—she must
bathe her hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the
light of immortality, and THERE be well.

But Giovanni did not know it.

“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as
always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest
Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! there is a
medicine, potent, as a wise physician has assured me, and almost divine
in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients the most opposite to
those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and
me. It is distilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together,
and thus be purified from evil?”

“Give it me!” said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little
silver vial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She added, with a
peculiar emphasis, “I will drink; but do thou await the result.”

She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the
figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards
the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to
gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as
might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a
group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused;
his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands
over them in the attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his
children; but those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the
stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously,
and pressed her hand upon her heart.

“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the
world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid
thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My
science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within
his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost,
daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then,
through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all
besides!”

“My father,” said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke she kept her
hand upon her heart,—“wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom
upon thy child?”

“Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost
thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which
no power nor strength could avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell
the mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as terrible as thou art
beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak
woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?”

“I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking
down upon the ground. “But now it matters not. I am going, father,
where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will
pass away like a dream-like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers,
which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden.
Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart;
but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the
first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”

To Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by
Rappaccini’s skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote
was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted
nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted
wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at
that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and
called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the
thunderstricken man of science, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is _this_
the upshot of your experiment!”




MRS. BULLFROG


It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people
act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a
most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits,
disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady
herself. An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of
perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered
that no tolerable woman will accept them. Now this is the very height
of absurdity. A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and
the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious
exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married
state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is fundamentally a
good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor objections,
should there be such, will vanish, if you let them alone. Only put
yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss, and
it is scarcely to be imagined what miracles, in the way of recognizing
smaller incongruities, connubial love will effect.

For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was
precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not
to be. My early habits had gifted me with a feminine sensibility and
too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished graduate of a dry
goods store, where, by dint of ministering to the whims of fine ladies,
and suiting silken hose to delicate limbs, and handling satins,
ribbons, chintzes calicoes, tapes, gauze, and cambric needles, I grew
up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is not assuming too much to
affirm that the ladies themselves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas
Bullfrog. So painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection, and
such varied excellence did I require in the woman whom I could love,
that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all, or of being
driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the looking-glass.
Besides the fundamental principle already hinted at, I demanded the
fresh bloom of youth, pearly teeth, glossy ringlets, and the whole list
of lovely items, with the utmost delicacy of habits and sentiments, a
silken texture of mind, and, above all, a virgin heart. In a word, if a
young angel just from paradise, yet dressed in earthly fashion, had
come and offered me her hand, it is by no means certain that I should
have taken it. There was every chance of my becoming a most miserable
old bachelor, when, by the best luck in the world, I made a journey
into another state, and was smitten by, and smote again, and wooed,
won, and married, the present Mrs. Bullfrog, all in the space of a
fortnight. Owing to these extempore measures, I not only gave my bride
credit for certain perfections which have not as yet come to light, but
also overlooked a few trifling defects, which, however, glimmered on my
perception long before the close of the honeymoon. Yet, as there was no
mistake about the fundamental principle aforesaid, I soon learned, as
will be seen, to estimate Mrs. Bullfrog’s deficiencies and
superfluities at exactly their proper value.

The same morning that Mrs. Bullfrog and I came together as a unit, we
took two seats in the stage-coach and began our journey towards my
place of business. There being no other passengers, we were as much
alone and as free to give vent to our raptures as if I had hired a hack
for the matrimonial jaunt. My bride looked charmingly in a green silk
calash and riding habit of pelisse cloth; and whenever her red lips
parted with a smile, each tooth appeared like an inestimable pearl.
Such was my passionate warmth that—we had rattled out of the village,
gentle reader, and were lonely as Adam and Eve in paradise—I plead
guilty to no less freedom than a kiss. The gentle eye of Mrs. Bullfrog
scarcely rebuked me for the profanation. Emboldened by her indulgence,
I threw back the calash from her polished brow, and suffered my
fingers, white and delicate as her own, to stray among those dark and
glossy curls which realized my daydreams of rich hair.

“My love,” said Mrs. Bullfrog tenderly, “you will disarrange my curls.”

“Oh, no, my sweet Laura!” replied I, still playing with the glossy
ringlet. “Even your fair hand could not manage a curl more delicately
than mine. I propose myself the pleasure of doing up your hair in
papers every evening at the same time with my own.”

“Mr. Bullfrog,” repeated she, “you must not disarrange my curls.”

This was spoken in a more decided tone than I had happened to hear,
until then, from my gentlest of all gentle brides. At the same time she
put up her hand and took mine prisoner; but merely drew it away from
the forbidden ringlet, and then immediately released it. Now, I am a
fidgety little man, and always love to have something in my fingers; so
that, being debarred from my wife’s curls, I looked about me for any
other plaything. On the front seat of the coach there was one of those
small baskets in which travelling ladies who are too delicate to appear
at a public table generally carry a supply of gingerbread, biscuits and
cheese, cold ham, and other light refreshments, merely to sustain
nature to the journey’s end. Such airy diet will sometimes keep them in
pretty good flesh for a week together. Laying hold of this same little
basket, I thrust my hand under the newspaper with which it was
carefully covered.

“What’s this, my dear?” cried I; for the black neck of a bottle had
popped out of the basket.

“A bottle of Kalydor, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, coolly taking the
basket from my hands and replacing it on the front seat.

There was no possibility of doubting my wife’s word; but I never knew
genuine Kalydor, such as I use for my own complexion, to smell so much
like cherry brandy. I was about to express my fears that the lotion
would injure her skin, when an accident occurred which threatened more
than a skin-deep injury. Our Jehu had carelessly driven over a heap of
gravel and fairly capsized the coach, with the wheels in the air and
our heels where our heads should have been. What became of my wits I
cannot imagine; they have always had a perverse trick of deserting me
just when they were most needed; but so it chanced, that in the
confusion of our overthrow I quite forgot that there was a Mrs.
Bullfrog in the world. Like many men’s wives, the good lady served her
husband as a steppingstone. I had scrambled out of the coach and was
instinctively settling my cravat, when somebody brushed roughly by me,
and I heard a smart thwack upon the coachman’s ear.

“Take that, you villain!” cried a strange, hoarse voice. “You have
ruined me, you blackguard! I shall never be the woman I have been!”

And then came a second thwack, aimed at the driver’s other ear; but
which missed it, and hit him on the nose, causing a terrible effusion
of blood. Now, who or what fearful apparition was inflicting this
punishment on the poor fellow remained an impenetrable mystery to me.
The blows were given by a person of grisly aspect, with a head almost
bald, and sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though
hardly to be classed in the gentler sex. There being no teeth to
modulate the voice, it had a mumbled fierceness, not passionate, but
stern, which absolutely made me quiver like calf’s-foot jelly. Who
could the phantom be? The most awful circumstance of the affair is yet
to be told: for this ogre, or whatever it was, had a riding habit like
Mrs. Bullfrog’s, and also a green silk calash dangling down her back by
the strings. In my terror and turmoil of mind I could imagine nothing
less than that the Old Nick, at the moment of our overturn, had
annihilated my wife and jumped into her petticoats. This idea seemed
the most probable, since I could nowhere perceive Mrs. Bullfrog alive,
nor, though I looked very sharply about the coach, could I detect any
traces of that beloved woman’s dead body. There would have been a
comfort in giving her Christian burial.

“Come, sir, bestir yourself! Help this rascal to set up the coach,”
said the hobgoblin to me; then, with a terrific screech at three
countrymen at a distance, “Here, you fellows, ain’t you ashamed to
stand off when a poor woman is in distress?”

The countrymen, instead of fleeing for their lives, came running at
full speed, and laid hold of the topsy-turvy coach. I, also, though a
small-sized man, went to work like a son of Anak. The coachman, too,
with the blood still streaming from his nose, tugged and toiled most
manfully, dreading, doubtless, that the next blow might break his head.
And yet, bemauled as the poor fellow had been, he seemed to glance at
me with an eye of pity, as if my case were more deplorable than his.
But I cherished a hope that all would turn out a dream, and seized the
opportunity, as we raised the coach, to jam two of my fingers under the
wheel, trusting that the pain would awaken me.

“Why, here we are, all to rights again!” exclaimed a sweet voice
behind. “Thank you for your assistance, gentlemen. My dear Mr.
Bullfrog, how you perspire! Do let me wipe your face. Don’t take this
little accident too much to heart, good driver. We ought to be thankful
that none of our necks are broken.”

“We might have spared one neck out of the three,” muttered the driver,
rubbing his ear and pulling his nose, to ascertain whether he had been
cuffed or not. “Why, the woman’s a witch!”

I fear that the reader will not believe, yet it is positively a fact,
that there stood Mrs. Bullfrog, with her glossy ringlets curling on her
brow, and two rows of orient pearls gleaming between her parted lips,
which wore a most angelic smile. She had regained her riding habit and
calash from the grisly phantom, and was, in all respects, the lovely
woman who had been sitting by my side at the instant of our overturn.
How she had happened to disappear, and who had supplied her place, and
whence she did now return, were problems too knotty for me to solve.
There stood my wife. That was the one thing certain among a heap of
mysteries. Nothing remained but to help her into the coach, and plod
on, through the journey of the day and the journey of life, as
comfortably as we could. As the driver closed the door upon us, I heard
him whisper to the three countrymen, “How do you suppose a fellow feels
shut up in the cage with a she tiger?”

Of course this query could have no reference to my situation. Yet,
unreasonable as it may appear, I confess that my feelings were not
altogether so ecstatic as when I first called Mrs. Bullfrog mine. True,
she was a sweet woman and an angel of a wife; but what if a Gorgon
should return, amid the transports of our connubial bliss, and take the
angel’s place. I recollected the tale of a fairy, who half the time was
a beautiful woman and half the time a hideous monster. Had I taken that
very fairy to be the wife of my bosom? While such whims and chimeras
were flitting across my fancy I began to look askance at Mrs. Bullfrog,
almost expecting that the transformation would be wrought before my
eyes.

To divert my mind, I took up the newspaper which had covered the little
basket of refreshments, and which now lay at the bottom of the coach,
blushing with a deep-red stain and emitting a potent spirituous fume
from the contents of the broken bottle of Kalydor. The paper was two or
three years old, but contained an article of several columns, in which
I soon grew wonderfully interested. It was the report of a trial for
breach of promise of marriage, giving the testimony in full, with
fervid extracts from both the gentleman’s and lady’s amatory
correspondence. The deserted damsel had personally appeared in court,
and had borne energetic evidence to her lover’s perfidy and the
strength of her blighted affections. On the defendant’s part there had
been an attempt, though insufficiently sustained, to blast the
plaintiff’s character, and a plea, in mitigation of damages, on account
of her unamiable temper. A horrible idea was suggested by the lady’s
name.

“Madam,” said I, holding the newspaper before Mrs. Bullfrog’s
eyes,—and, though a small, delicate, and thin-visaged man, I feel
assured that I looked very terrific,—“madam,” repeated I, through my
shut teeth, “were you the plaintiff in this cause?”

“Oh, my dear Mr. Bullfrog,” replied my wife, sweetly, “I thought all
the world knew that!”

“Horror! horror!” exclaimed I, sinking back on the seat.

Covering my face with both hands, I emitted a deep and deathlike groan,
as if my tormented soul were rending me asunder—I, the most exquisitely
fastidious of men, and whose wife was to have been the most delicate
and refined of women, with all the fresh dew-drops glittering on her
virgin rosebud of a heart!

I thought of the glossy ringlets and pearly teeth; I thought of the
Kalydor; I thought of the coachman’s bruised ear and bloody nose; I
thought of the tender love secrets which she had whispered to the judge
and jury and a thousand tittering auditors,—and gave another groan!

“Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife.

As I made no reply, she gently took my hands within her own, removed
them from my face, and fixed her eyes steadfastly on mine.

“Mr. Bullfrog,” said she, not unkindly, yet with all the decision of
her strong character, “let me advise you to overcome this foolish
weakness, and prove yourself, to the best of your ability, as good a
husband as I will be a wife. You have discovered, perhaps, some little
imperfections in your bride. Well, what did you expect? Women are not
angels. If they were, they would go to heaven for husbands; or, at
least, be more difficult in their choice on earth.”

“But why conceal those imperfections?” interposed I, tremulously.

“Now, my love, are not you a most unreasonable little man?” said Mrs.
Bullfrog, patting me on the cheek. “Ought a woman to disclose her
frailties earlier than the wedding day? Few husbands, I assure you,
make the discovery in such good season, and still fewer complain that
these trifles are concealed too long. Well, what a strange man you are!
Poh! you are joking.”

“But the suit for breach of promise!” groaned I.

“Ah, and is that the rub?” exclaimed my wife. “Is it possible that you
view that affair in an objectionable light? Mr. Bullfrog, I never could
have dreamed it! Is it an objection that I have triumphantly defended
myself against slander and vindicated my purity in a court of justice?
Or do you complain because your wife has shown the proper spirit of a
woman, and punished the villain who trifled with her affections?”

“But,” persisted I, shrinking into a corner of the coach, however,—for
I did not know precisely how much contradiction the proper spirit of a
woman would endure,—“but, my love, would it not have been more
dignified to treat the villain with the silent contempt he merited?”

“That is all very well, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, slyly; “but, in
that case, where would have been the five thousand dollars which are to
stock your dry goods store?”

“Mrs. Bullfrog, upon your honor,” demanded I, as if my life hung upon
her words, “is there no mistake about those five thousand dollars?”

“Upon my word and honor there is none,” replied she. “The jury gave me
every cent the rascal had; and I have kept it all for my dear
Bullfrog.”

“Then, thou dear woman,” cried I, with an overwhelming gush of
tenderness, “let me fold thee to my heart. The basis of matrimonial
bliss is secure, and all thy little defects and frailties are forgiven.
Nay, since the result has been so fortunate, I rejoice at the wrongs
which drove thee to this blessed lawsuit. Happy Bullfrog that I am!”




FIRE WORSHIP


It is a great revolution in social and domestic life, and no less so in
the life of a secluded student, this almost universal exchange of the
open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. On such a morning
as now lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the bright face of
my ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the hearth and play the
part of more familiar sunshine. It is sad to turn from the cloudy sky
and sombre landscape; from yonder hill, with its crown of rusty, black
pines, the foliage of which is so dismal in the absence of the sun;
that bleak pasture-land, and the broken surface of the potato-field,
with the brown clods partly concealed by the snowfall of last night;
the swollen and sluggish river, with ice-incrusted borders, dragging
its bluish-gray stream along the verge of our orchard like a snake half
torpid with the cold,—it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so
little comfort and find the same sullen influences brooding within the
precincts of my study. Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and
subtle spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize mankind
and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate,
whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient
consolation for summer’s lingering advance and early flight? Alas!
blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and
mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to
smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have been
too scanty for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make our fire
in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some half a dozen sticks of
wood between dawn and nightfall.

I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said that
the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there
and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the
picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life. The
domestic fire was a type of all these attributes, and seemed to bring
might and majesty, and wild nature and a spiritual essence, into our in
most home, and yet to dwell with us in such friendliness that its
mysteries and marvels excited no dismay. The same mild companion that
smiled so placidly in our faces was he that comes roaring out of Ætna
and rushes madly up the sky like a fiend breaking loose from torment
and fighting for a place among the upper angels. He it is, too, that
leaps from cloud to cloud amid the crashing thunder-storm. It was he
whom the Gheber worshipped with no unnatural idolatry; and it was he
who devoured London and Moscow and many another famous city, and who
loves to riot through our own dark forests and sweep across our
prairies, and to whose ravenous maw, it is said, the universe shall one
day be given as a final feast. Meanwhile he is the great artisan and
laborer by whose aid men are enabled to build a world within a world,
or, at least, to smooth down the rough creation which Nature flung to
it. He forges the mighty anchor and every lesser instrument; he drives
the steamboat and drags the rail-car; and it was he—this creature of
terrible might, and so many-sided utility and all-comprehensive
destructiveness—that used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our
wintry days, and whom we have made the prisoner of this iron cage.

How kindly he was! and, though the tremendous agent of change, yet
bearing himself with such gentleness, so rendering himself a part of
all life-long and age-coeval associations, that it seemed as if he were
the great conservative of nature. While a man was true to the fireside,
so long would he be true to country and law, to the God whom his
fathers worshipped, to the wife of his youth, and to all things else
which instinct or religion has taught us to consider sacred. With how
sweet humility did this elemental spirit perform all needful offices
for the household in which he was domesticated! He was equal to the
concoction of a grand dinner, yet scorned not to roast a potato or
toast a bit of cheese. How humanely did he cherish the school-boy’s icy
fingers, and thaw the old man’s joints with a genial warmth which
almost equalled the glow of youth! And how carefully did he dry the
cowhide boots that had trudged through mud and snow, and the shaggy
outside garment stiff with frozen sleet! taking heed, likewise, to the
comfort of the faithful dog who had followed his master through the
storm. When did he refuse a coal to light a pipe, or even a part of his
own substance to kindle a neighbor’s fire? And then, at twilight, when
laborer, or scholar, or mortal of whatever age, sex, or degree, drew a
chair beside him and looked into his glowing face, how acute, how
profound, how comprehensive was his sympathy with the mood of each and
all! He pictured forth their very thoughts. To the youthful he showed
the scenes of the adventurous life before them; to the aged the shadows
of departed love and hope; and, if all earthly things had grown
distasteful, he could gladden the fireside muser with golden glimpses
of a better world. And, amid this varied communion with the human soul,
how busily would the sympathizer, the deep moralist, the painter of
magic pictures, be causing the teakettle to boil!

Nor did it lessen the charm of his soft, familiar courtesy and
helpfulness that the mighty spirit, were opportunity offered him, would
run riot through the peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible
embrace, and leave nothing of them save their whitened bones. This
possibility of mad destruction only made his domestic kindness the more
beautiful and touching. It was so sweet of him, being endowed with such
power, to dwell day after day, and one long lonesome night after
another, on the dusky hearth, only now and then betraying his wild
nature by thrusting his red tongue out of the chimney-top! True, he had
done much mischief in the world, and was pretty certain to do more; but
his warm heart atoned for all. He was kindly to the race of man; and
they pardoned his characteristic imperfections.

The good old clergyman, my predecessor in this mansion, was well
acquainted with the comforts of the fireside. His yearly allowance of
wood, according to the terms of his settlement, was no less than sixty
cords. Almost an annual forest was converted from sound oak logs into
ashes, in the kitchen, the parlor, and this little study, where now an
unworthy successor, not in the pastoral office, but merely in his
earthly abode, sits scribbling beside an air-tight stove. I love to
fancy one of those fireside days while the good man, a contemporary of
the Revolution, was in his early prime, some five-and-sixty years ago.
Before sunrise, doubtless, the blaze hovered upon the gray skirts of
night and dissolved the frostwork that had gathered like a curtain over
the small window-panes. There is something peculiar in the aspect of
the morning fireside; a fresher, brisker glare; the absence of that
mellowness which can be produced only by half-consumed logs, and
shapeless brands with the white ashes on them, and mighty coals, the
remnant of tree-trunks that the hungry, elements have gnawed for hours.
The morning hearth, too, is newly swept, and the brazen andirons well
brightened, so that the cheerful fire may see its face in them. Surely
it was happiness, when the pastor, fortified with a substantial
breakfast, sat down in his arm-chair and slippers and opened the Whole
Body of Divinity, or the Commentary on Job, or whichever of his old
folios or quartos might fall within the range of his weekly sermons. It
must have been his own fault if the warmth and glow of this abundant
hearth did not permeate the discourse and keep his audience comfortable
in spite of the bitterest northern blast that ever wrestled with the
church-steeple. He reads while the heat warps the stiff covers of the
volume; he writes without numbness either in his heart or fingers; and,
with unstinted hand, he throws fresh sticks of wood upon the fire.

A parishioner comes in. With what warmth of benevolence—how should he
be otherwise than warm in any of his attributes?—does the minister bid
him welcome, and set a chair for him in so close proximity to the
hearth, that soon the guest finds it needful to rub his scorched shins
with his great red hands! The melted snow drips from his steaming boots
and bubbles upon the hearth. His puckered forehead unravels its
entanglement of crisscross wrinkles. We lose much of the enjoyment of
fireside heat without such an opportunity of marking its genial effect
upon those who have been looking the inclement weather in the face. In
the course of the day our clergyman himself strides forth, perchance to
pay a round of pastoral visits; or, it may he, to visit his mountain of
a wood-pile and cleave the monstrous logs into billets suitable for the
fire. He returns with fresher life to his beloved hearth. During the
short afternoon the western sunshine comes into the study and strives
to stare the ruddy blaze out of countenance but with only a brief
triumph, soon to be succeeded by brighter glories of its rival.
Beautiful it is to see the strengthening gleam, the deepening light
that gradually casts distinct shadows of the human figure, the table,
and the high-backed chairs upon the opposite wall, and at length, as
twilight comes on, replenishes the room with living radiance and makes
life all rose-color. Afar the wayfarer discerns the flickering flame as
it dances upon the windows, and hails it as a beacon-light of humanity,
reminding him, in his cold and lonely path, that the world is not all
snow, and solitude, and desolation. At eventide, probably, the study
was peopled with the clergyman’s wife and family, and children tumbled
themselves upon the hearth-rug, and grave puss sat with her back to the
fire, or gazed, with a semblance of human meditation, into its fervid
depths. Seasonably the plenteous ashes of the day were raked over the
mouldering brands, and from the heap came jets of flame, and an incense
of night-long smoke creeping quietly up the chimney.

Heaven forgive the old clergyman! In his later life, when for almost
ninety winters he had been gladdened by the firelight,—when it had
gleamed upon him from infancy to extreme age, and never without
brightening his spirits as well as his visage, and perhaps keeping him
alive so long,—he had the heart to brick up his chimney-place and bid
farewell to the face of his old friend forever, why did he not take an
eternal leave of the sunshine too? His sixty cords of wood had probably
dwindled to a far less ample supply in modern times; and it is certain
that the parsonage had grown crazy with time and tempest and pervious
to the cold; but still it was one of the saddest tokens of the decline
and fall of open fireplaces that, the gray patriarch should have
deigned to warm himself at an air-tight stove.

And I, likewise,—who have found a home in this ancient owl’s-nest since
its former occupant took his heavenward flight,—I, to my shame, have
put up stoves in kitchen and parlor and chamber. Wander where you will
about the house, not a glimpse of the earth-born, heaven-aspiring fiend
of Ætna,—him that sports in the thunder-storm, the idol of the Ghebers,
the devourer of cities, the forest-rioter and prairie-sweeper, the
future destroyer of our earth, the old chimney-corner companion who
mingled himself so sociably with household joys and sorrows,—not a
glimpse of this mighty and kindly one will greet your eyes. He is now
an invisible presence. There is his iron cage. Touch it, and he
scorches your fingers. He delights to singe a garment or perpetrate any
other little unworthy mischief; for his temper is ruined by the
ingratitude of mankind, for whom he cherished such warmth of feeling,
and to whom he taught all their arts, even that of making his own
prison-house. In his fits of rage he puffs volumes of smoke and noisome
gas through the crevices of the door, and shakes the iron walls of his
dungeon so as to overthrow the ornamental urn upon its summit. We
tremble lest he should break forth amongst us. Much of his time is
spent in sighs, burdened with unutterable grief, and long drawn through
the funnel. He amuses himself, too, with repeating all the whispers,
the moans, and the louder utterances or tempestuous howls of the wind;
so that the stove becomes a microcosm of the aerial world. Occasionally
there are strange combinations of sounds,—voices talking almost
articulately within the hollow chest of iron,—insomuch that fancy
beguiles me with the idea that my firewood must have grown in that
infernal forest of lamentable trees which breathed their complaints to
Dante. When the listener is half asleep he may readily take these
voices for the conversation of spirits and assign them an intelligible
meaning. Anon there is a pattering noise,—drip, drip, drip,—as if a
summer shower were falling within the narrow circumference of the
stove.

These barren and tedious eccentricities are all that the air-tight
stove can bestow in exchange for the invaluable moral influences which
we have lost by our desertion of the open fireplace. Alas! is this
world so very bright that we can afford to choke up such a domestic
fountain of gladsomeness, and sit down by its darkened source without
being conscious of a gloom?

It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it
has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and
vivifying an element as firelight. The effects will be more perceptible
on our children and the generations that shall succeed them than on
ourselves, the mechanism of whose life may remain unchanged, though its
spirit be far other than it was. The sacred trust of the household fire
has been transmitted in unbroken succession from the earliest ages, and
faithfully cherished in spite of every discouragement such as the
curfew law of the Norman conquerors, until in these evil days physical
science has nearly succeeded in extinguishing it. But we at least have
our youthful recollections tinged with the glow of the hearth, and our
life-long habits and associations arranged on the principle of a mutual
bond in the domestic fire. Therefore, though the sociable friend be
forever departed, yet in a degree he will be spiritually present with
us; and still more will the empty forms which were once full of his
rejoicing presence continue to rule our manners. We shall draw our
chairs together as we and our forefathers have been wont for thousands
of years back, and sit around some blank and empty corner of the room,
babbling with unreal cheerfulness of topics suitable to the homely
fireside. A warmth from the past—from the ashes of bygone years and the
raked-up embers of long ago—will sometimes thaw the ice about our
hearts; but it must be otherwise with our successors. On the most
favorable supposition, they will be acquainted with the fireside in no
better shape than that of the sullen stove; and more probably they will
have grown up amid furnace heat in houses which might be fancied to
have their foundation over the infernal pit, whence sulphurous steams
and unbreathable exhalations ascend through the apertures of the floor.
There will be nothing to attract these poor children to one centre.
They will never behold one another through that peculiar medium of
vision the ruddy gleam of blazing wood or bituminous coal—-which gives
the human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and melts all
humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may
still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never
gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious
Jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual
way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple
fireside word,—will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract
the air of debate, and all mortal intercourse be chilled with a fatal
frost.

In classic times, the exhortation to fight “pro axis et focis,” for the
altars and the hearths, was considered the strongest appeal that could
be made to patriotism. And it seemed an immortal utterance; for all
subsequent ages and people have acknowledged its force and responded to
it with the full portion of manhood that nature had assigned to each.
Wisely were the altar and the hearth conjoined in one mighty sentence;
for the hearth, too, had its kindred sanctity. Religion sat down beside
it, not in the priestly robes which decorated and perhaps disguised her
at the altar, but arrayed in a simple matron’s garb, and uttering her
lessons with the tenderness of a mother’s voice and heart. The holy
hearth! If any earthly and material thing, or rather a divine idea
embodied in brick and mortar, might be supposed to possess the
permanence of moral truth, it was this. All revered it. The man who did
not put off his shoes upon this holy ground would have deemed it
pastime to trample upon the altar. It has been our task to uproot the
hearth. What further reform is left for our children to achieve, unless
they overthrow the altar too? And by what appeal hereafter, when the
breath of hostile armies may mingle with the pure, cold breezes of our
country, shall we attempt to rouse up native valor? Fight for your
hearths? There will be none throughout the land. FIGHT FOR YOUR STOVES!
Not I, in faith. If in such a cause I strike a blow, it shall be on the
invader’s part; and Heaven grant that it may shatter the abomination
all to pieces!




BUDS AND BIRD VOICES


Balmy Spring—weeks later than we expected and months later than we
longed for her—comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls
of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window, inviting
me to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture
of her genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove.
As the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable
forms of thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement
of this little chamber during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather;
visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures of real life, tinted with
nature’s homely gray and russet; scenes in dreamland, bedizened with
rainbow hues which faded before they were well laid on,—all these may
vanish now, and leave me to mould a fresh existence out of sunshine,
Brooding Meditation may flap her dusky wings and take her owl-like
Right, blinking amid the cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions
befit the season of frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the
blast howls through the black-ash trees of our avenue and the drifting
snow-storm chokes up the wood-paths and fills the highway from stone
wall to stone wall. In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts
should follow the winter northward with the sombre and thoughtful
crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force; we live,
not to think or to labor, but for the simple end of being happy.
Nothing for the present hour is worthy of man’s infinite capacity save
to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and sympathize with the reviving
earth.

The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because Winter
lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can
hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a
fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river and beheld
the accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the stream. Except in
streaks here and there upon the hillsides, the whole visible universe
was then covered with deep snow, the nethermost layer of which had been
deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the
beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white
napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less
time than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate
the power of gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the
moral winter of man’s heart? There have been no tempestuous rains, even
no sultry days, but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a day
of kindly sunshine, and now a no less kindly mist or a soft descent of
showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped.
The snow has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in
the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain
in the landscape; and those I shall almost regret to miss when
to-morrow I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring
pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the
roadside the green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of
the snow-drifts. The pastures and mowing-fields have not vet assumed a
general aspect of verdure; but neither have they the cheerless-brown
tint which they wear in latter autumn when vegetation has entirely
ceased; there is now a faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into
the warm reality. Some tracts in a happy exposure,—as, for instance,
yonder southwestern slope of an orchard, in front of that old red
farm-house beyond the river,—such patches of land already wear a
beautiful and tender green, to which no future luxuriance can add a
charm. It looks unreal; a prophecy, a hope, a transitory effect of
sonic peculiar light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of
the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts, but
the dark and barren landscape all around them, is a shadow and a dream.
Each moment wins seine portion of the earth from death to life; a
sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope of a bank which
an instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an
apparition of green grass!

The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already
appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic
touch they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the
wind which now sighs through their naked branches might make sudden
music amid innumerable leaves. The mossgrown willow-tree which for
forty years past has overshadowed these western windows will be among
the first to put on its green attire. There are some objections to the
willow; it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder
with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly
agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a
firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost
the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in
its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow
yet scarcely withered leaves upon the ground. All through the winter,
too, its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a
cheering influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a
clouded sky it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would
lose a charm were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over
the snow-covered roof and its heap of summer verdure.

The lilac-shrubs under my study-windows are likewise almost in leaf: in
two or three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the topmost
bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost
the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart, or the judgment, or
the moral sense, or the taste is dissatisfied with their present
aspect. Old age is not venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs,
rose-bushes, or any other ornamental shrub; it seems as if such plants,
as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish always in immortal
youth, or, at least, to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of
beauty are trees of paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by
their original nature, though they have lost that precious birthright
by being transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous
unfitness in the idea of a time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush.
The analogy holds good in human life. Persons who can only be graceful
and ornamental—who can give the world nothing but flowers—should die
young, and never be seen with gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the
flower-shrubs with mossy bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs
under my window. Not that beauty is worthy of less than immortality;
no, the beautiful should live forever,—and thence, perhaps, the sense
of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on
the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as long as
they may, and contort themselves into whatever perversity of shape they
please, and deck their withered limbs with a springtime gaudiness of
pink blossoms; still they are respectable, even if they afford us only
an apple or two in a season. Those few apples—or, at all events, the
remembrance of apples in bygone years—are the atonement which
utilitarianism inexorably demands for the privilege of lengthened life.
Human flower-shrubs, if they will grow old on earth, should, besides
their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of fruit that will satisfy
earthly appetites, else neither man nor the decorum of nature will deem
it fit that the moss should gather on them.

One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet
of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden
beneath it. Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices. The
beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted
deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present hour.
Our avenue is strewn with the whole crop of autumn’s withered leaves.
There are quantities of decayed branches which one tempest after
another has flung down, black and rotten, and one or two with the ruin
of a bird’s-nest clinging to them. In the garden are the dried
bean-vines, the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old
cabbages which were frozen into the soil before their unthrifty
cultivator could find time to gather them. How invariably, throughout
all the forms of life, do we find these intermingled memorials of
death! On the soil of thought and in the garden of the heart, as well
as in the sensual world, he withered leaves,—the ideas and feelings
that we have done with. There is no wind strong enough to sweep them
away; infinite space will not garner then from our sight. What mean
they? Why may we not be permitted to live and enjoy, as if this were
the first life and our own the primal enjoyment, instead of treading
always on these dry hones and mouldering relics, from the aged
accumulation of which springs all that now appears so young and new?
Sweet must have been the springtime of Eden, when no earlier year had
strewn its decay upon the virgin turf and no former experience had
ripened into summer and faded into autumn in the hearts of its
inhabitants! That was a world worth living in. O then murmurer, it is
out of the very wantonness of such a life that then feignest these idle
lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is the first-created
inhabitant of its own Eden. We dwell in an old moss-covered mansion,
and tread in the worn footprints of the past, and have a gray
clergyman’s ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all these
outward circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing
power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power,—should the
withered leaves, and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house,
and the ghost of the gray past ever become its realities, and the
verdure and the freshness merely its faint dream,—then let it pray to
be released from earth. It will need the air of heaven to revive its
pristine energies.

What an unlooked-for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of
black-ash and balm of Gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have our
feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so
industriously as in this homely yard, along the base of the stone wall,
and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and especially around the
southern doorstep,—a locality which seems particularly favorable to its
growth, for it is already tall enough to bend over and wave in the
wind. I observe that several weeds—and most frequently a plant that
stains the fingers with its yellow juice—have survived and retained
their freshness and sap throughout the winter. One knows not how they
have deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race. They
are now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may preach mortality
to the present generation of flowers and weeds.

Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds?
Even the crows were welcome as the sable harbingers of a brighter and
livelier race. They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly
to have betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they
haunt all summer long. Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel
as if I had intruded among a company of silent worshippers, as they sit
in Sabbath stillness among the tree-tops. Their voices, when they
speak, are in admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a
summer afternoon; and resounding so far above the head, their loud
clamor increases the religious quiet of the scene instead of breaking
it. A crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of
his gravity of mien and black attire; he is certainly a thief, and
probably an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a moral
point of view. These denizens of seabeaten rocks and haunters of the
lonely beach come up our inland river at this season, and soar high
overhead, flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are
among the most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest
upon the air as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The
imagination has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not
flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds and greet these
lofty-flighted gulls, and repose confidently with them upon the
sustaining atmosphere. Duck’s have their haunts along the solitary
places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the broad bosom of the
overflowed meadows. Their flight is too rapid and determined for the
eye to catch enjoyment from it, although it never fails to stir up the
heart with the sportsman’s ineradicable instinct. They have now gone
farther northward, but will visit us again in autumn.

The smaller birds,—the little songsters of the woods, and those that
haunt man’s dwellings and claim human friendship by building their
nests under the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees,—these
require a touch more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them
justice. Their outburst of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry
chains. We need not deem it a too high and solemn word to call it a
hymn of praise to the Creator; since Nature, who pictures the reviving
year in so many sights of beauty, has expressed the sentiment of
renewed life in no other sound save the notes of these blessed birds.
Their music, however, just now, seems to be incidental, and not the
result of a set purpose. They are discussing the economy of life and
love and the site and architecture of their summer residences, and have
no time to sit on a twig and pour forth solemn hymns, or overtures,
operas, symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked; grave
subjects are settled in quick and animated debate; and only by
occasional accident, as from pure ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its
tiny waves of golden sound through the atmosphere. Their little bodies
are as busy as their voices; they are all a constant flutter and
restlessness. Even when two or three retreat to a tree-top to hold
council, they wag their tails and heads all the time with the
irrepressible activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their
brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal age of
sluggish man. The blackbirds, three species of which consort together,
are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great companies of
them—more than the famous “four-and-twenty” whom Mother Goose has
immortalized—congregate in contiguous treetops and vociferate with all
the clamor and confusion of a turbulent political meeting. Politics,
certainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous debates; but still,
unlike all other politicians, they instil melody into their individual
utterances and produce harmony as a general effect. Of all bird voices,
none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear than those of swallows, in
the dim, sunstreaked interior of a lofty barn; they address the heart
with even a closer sympathy than robin-redbreast. But, indeed, all
these winged people, that dwell in the vicinity of homesteads, seem to
partake of human nature, and possess the germ, if not the development,
of immortal souls. We hear them saying their melodious prayers at
morning’s blush and eventide. A little while ago, in the deep of night,
there came the lively thrill of a bird’s note from a neighboring
tree,—a real song, such as greets the purple dawn or mingles with the
yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by pouring it forth at
midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the midst of a dream in
which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but suddenly awoke
on a cold leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating through
his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination for reality.

Insects are among the earliest births of sprung. Multitudes of I know
not what species appeared long ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds
of them, almost too minute for sight, hover in a beam of sunshine, and
vanish, as if annihilated, when they pass into the shade. A mosquito
has already been heard to sound the small horror of his bugle-horn.
Wasps infest the sunny windows of the house. A bee entered one of the
chambers with a prophecy of flowers. Rare butterflies came before the
snow was off, flaunting in the chill breeze, and looking forlorn and
all astray, in spite of the magnificence of their dark velvet cloaks,
with golden borders.

The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the
wanderer. In a walk, the other day, I found no violets, nor anemones,
nor anything in the likeness of a flower. It was worth while, however,
to ascend our opposite hill for the sake of gaining a general idea of
the advance of spring, which I had hitherto been studying in its minute
developments. The river lay around me in a semicircle, overflowing all
the meadows which give it its Indian name, and offering a noble breadth
to sparkle in the sunbeams. Along the hither shore a row of trees stood
up to their knees in water; and afar off, on the surface of the stream,
tufts of bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The most
striking objects were great solitary trees here and there, with a
mile-wide waste of water all around them. The curtailment of the trunk,
by its immersion in the river, quite destroys the fair proportions of
the tree, and thus makes us sensible of a regularity and propriety in
the usual forms of nature. The flood of the present season—though it
never amounts to a freshet on our quiet stream—has encroached farther
upon the land than any previous one for at least a score of years. It
has overflowed stone fences, and even rendered a portion of the highway
navigable for boats.

The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands become
annexed to the mainland; and other islands emerge, like new creations,
from the watery waste. The scene supplies an admirable image of the
receding of the Nile, except that there is no deposit of black slime;
or of Noah’s flood, only that there is a freshness and novelty in these
recovered portions of the continent which give the impression of a
world just made rather than of one so polluted that a deluge had been
requisite to purify it. These upspringing islands are the greenest
spots in the landscape; the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover
them with verdure.

Thank Providence for spring! The earth—and man himself, by sympathy
with his birthplace would be far other than we find them if life toiled
wearily onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit.
Will the world ever be so decayed that spring may not renew its
greenness? Can man be so dismally age stricken that no faintest
sunshine of his youth may revisit him once a year? It is impossible.
The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; the good old
pastor who once dwelt here renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in
the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy
soul if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege of
springtime sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no
reformation of its evil, no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant
struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the
present, and thinks not of the future; autumn is a rich conservative;
winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the
remembrance of what has been; but spring, with its outgushing life, is
the true type of the movement.




MONSIEUR DU MIROIR


Than the gentleman above named, there is nobody, in the whole circle of
my acquaintance, whom I have more attentively studied, yet of whom I
have less real knowledge, beneath the surface which it pleases him to
present. Being anxious to discover who and what he really is, and how
connected with me, and what are to be the results to him and to myself
of the joint interest which, without any choice on my part, seems to be
permanently established between us, and incited, furthermore, by the
propensities of a student of human nature, though doubtful whether
Monsieur du Miroir have aught of humanity but the figure,—I have
determined to place a few of his remarkable points before the public,
hoping to be favored with some clew to the explanation of his
character. Nor let the reader condemn any part of the narrative as
frivolous, since a subject of such grave reflection diffuses its
importance through the minutest particulars; and there is no judging
beforehand what odd little circumstance may do the office of a blind
man’s dog among the perplexities of this dark investigation; and
however extraordinary, marvellous, preternatural, and utterly
incredible some of the meditated disclosures may appear, I pledge my
honor to maintain as sacred a regard to fact as if my testimony were
given on oath and involved the dearest interests of the personage in
question. Not that there is matter for a criminal accusation against
Monsieur du Miroir, nor am I the man to bring it forward if there were.
The chief that I complain of is his impenetrable mystery, which is no
better than nonsense if it conceal anything good, and much worse in the
contrary case.

But, if undue partialities could be supposed to influence me, Monsieur
du Miroir might hope to profit rather than to suffer by them, for in
the whole of our long intercourse we have seldom had the slightest
disagreement; and, moreover, there are reasons for supposing him a near
relative of mine, and consequently entitled to the best word that I can
give him. He bears indisputably a strong personal resemblance to
myself, and generally puts on mourning at the funerals of the family.
On the other hand, his name would indicate a French descent; in which
case, infinitely preferring that my blood should flow from a bold
British and pure Puritan source, I beg leave to disclaim all kindred
with Monsieur du Miroir. Some genealogists trace his origin to Spain,
and dub him a knight of the order of the CABALLEROS DE LOS ESPEJOZ, one
of whom was overthrown by Don Quixote. But what says Monsieur du Miroir
himself of his paternity and his fatherland? Not a word did he ever say
about the matter; and herein, perhaps, lies one of his most especial
reasons for maintaining such a vexatious mystery, that he lacks the
faculty of speech to expound it. His lips are sometimes seen to move;
his eyes and countenance are alive with shifting expression, as if
corresponding by visible hieroglyphics to his modulated breath; and
anon he will seem to pause with as satisfied an air as if he had been
talking excellent sense. Good sense or bad, Monsieur du Miroir is the
sole judge of his own conversational powers, never having whispered so
much as a syllable that reached the ears of any other auditor. Is he
really dumb? or is all the world deaf? or is it merely a piece of my
friend’s waggery, meant for nothing but to make fools of us? If so, he
has the joke all to himself.

This dumb devil which possesses Monsieur do Miroir is, I am persuaded,
the sole reason that he does not make me the most flattering
protestations of friendship. In many particulars—indeed, as to all his
cognizable and not preternatural points, except that, once in a great
while, I speak a word or two—there exists the greatest apparent
sympathy between us. Such is his confidence in my taste that he goes
astray from the general fashion and copies all his dresses after mine.
I never try on a new garment without expecting to meet, Monsieur du
Miroir in one of the same pattern. He has duplicates of all my
waistcoats and cravats, shirt-bosoms of precisely a similar plait, and
an old coat for private wear, manufactured, I suspect, by a Chinese
tailor, in exact imitation of a beloved old coat of mine, with a
facsimile, stitch by stitch, of a patch upon the elbow. In truth, the
singular and minute coincidences that occur, both in the accidents of
the passing day and the serious events of our lives, remind me of those
doubtful legends of lovers, or twin children, twins of fate, who have
lived, enjoyed, suffered, and died in unison, each faithfully repeating
the last tremor of the other’s breath, though separated by vast tracts
of sea and land. Strange to say, my incommodities belong equally to my
companion, though the burden is nowise alleviated by his participation.
The other morning, after a night of torment from the toothache, I met
Monsieur du Miroir with such a swollen anguish in his cheek that my own
pangs were redoubled, as were also his, if I might judge by a fresh
contortion of his visage. All the inequalities of my spirits are
communicated to him, causing the unfortunate Monsieur du Miroir to mope
and scowl through a whole summer’s day, or to laugh as long, for no
better reason than the gay or gloomy crotchets of my brain. Once we
were joint sufferers of a three months’ sickness, and met like mutual
ghosts in the first days of convalescence. Whenever I have been in
love, Monsieur du Miroir has looked passionate and tender; and never
did my mistress discard me, but this too susceptible gentleman grew
lackadaisical. His temper, also, rises to blood heat, fever heat, or
boiling-water beat, according to the measure of any wrong which might
seem to have fallen entirely on myself. I have sometimes been calmed
down by the sight of my own inordinate wrath depicted on his frowning
brow. Yet, however prompt in taking up my quarrels, I cannot call to
mind that he ever struck a downright blow in my behalf; nor, in fact,
do I perceive that any real and tangible good has resulted from his
constant interference in my affairs; so that, in my distrustful moods,
I am apt to suspect Monsieur du Miroir’s sympathy to be mere outward
show, not a whit better nor worse than other people’s sympathy.
Nevertheless, as mortal man must have something in the guise of
sympathy,—and whether the true metal, or merely copper-washed, is of
less moment,—I choose rather to content myself with Monsieur du
Miroir’s, such as it is, than to seek the sterling coin, and perhaps
miss even the counterfeit.

In my age of vanities I have often seen him in the ballroom, and might
again were I to seek him there. We have encountered each other at the
Tremont Theatre, where, however, he took his seat neither in the
dress-circle, pit, nor upper regions, nor threw a single glance at the
stage, though the brightest star, even Fanny Kemble herself, might be
culminating there. No; this whimsical friend of mine chose to linger in
the saloon, near one of the large looking-glasses which throw back
their pictures of the illuminated room. He is so full of these
unaccountable eccentricities that I never like to notice Monsieur du
Miroir, nor to acknowledge the slightest connection with him, in places
of public resort. He, however, has no scruple about claiming my
acquaintance, even when his common-sense, if he had any, might teach
him that I would as willingly exchange a nod with the Old Nick. It was
but the other day that he got into a large brass kettle at the entrance
of a hardware-store, and thrust his head, the moment afterwards, into a
bright, new warming-pan, whence he gave me a most merciless look of
recognition. He smiled, and so did I; but these childish tricks make
decent people rather shy of Monsieur du Miroir, and subject him to more
dead cuts than any other gentleman in town.

One of this singular person’s most remarkable peculiarities is his
fondness for water, wherein he excels any temperance man whatever. His
pleasure, it must be owned, is not so much to drink it (in which
respect a very moderate quantity will answer his occasions) as to souse
himself over head and ears wherever he may meet with it. Perhaps he is
a merman, or born of a mermaid’s marriage with a mortal, and thus
amphibious by hereditary right, like the children which the old river
deities, or nymphs of fountains, gave to earthly love. When no cleaner
bathing-place happened to be at hand, I have seen the foolish fellow in
a horse-pond. Some times he refreshes himself in the trough of a
town-pump, without caring what the people think about him. Often, while
carefully picking my way along the street after a heavy shower, I have
been scandalized to see Monsieur du Miroir, in full dress, paddling
from one mud-puddle to another, and plunging into the filthy depths of
each. Seldom have I peeped into a well without discerning this
ridiculous gentleman at the bottom, whence he gazes up, as through a
long telescopic tube, and probably makes discoveries among the stars by
daylight. Wandering along lonesome paths or in pathless forests, when I
have come to virgin fountains of which it would have been pleasant to
deem myself the first discoverer, I have started to find Monsieur du
Miroir there before me. The solitude seemed lonelier for his presence.
I have leaned from a precipice that frowns over Lake George, which the
French call nature’s font of sacramental water, and used it in their
log-churches here and their cathedrals beyond the sea, and seen him far
below in that pure element. At Niagara, too, where I would gladly have
forgotten both myself and him, I could not help observing my companion
in the smooth water on the very verge of the cataract just above the
Table Rock. Were I to reach the sources of the Nile, I should expect to
meet him there. Unless he be another Ladurlad, whose garments the depth
of ocean could not moisten, it is difficult to conceive how he keeps
himself in any decent pickle; though I am bound to confess that his
clothes seem always as dry and comfortable as my own. But, as a friend,
I could wish that he would not so often expose himself in liquor.

All that I have hitherto related may be classed among those little
personal oddities which agreeably diversify the surface of society,
and, though they may sometimes annoy us, yet keep our daily intercourse
fresher and livelier than if they were done away. By an occasional
hint, however, I have endeavored to pave the way for stranger things to
come, which, had they been disclosed at once, Monsieur du Miroir might
have been deemed a shadow, and myself a person of no veracity, and this
truthful history a fabulous legend. But, now that the reader knows me
worthy of his confidence, I will begin to make him stare.

To speak frankly, then, I could bring the most astounding proofs that
Monsieur du Miroir is at least a conjurer, if not one of that unearthly
tribe with whom conjurers deal. He has inscrutable methods of conveying
himself from place to place with the rapidity of the swiftest steamboat
or rail-car. Brick walls and oaken doors and iron bolts are no
impediment to his passage. Here in my chamber, for instance, as the
evening deepens into night, I sit alone,—the key turned and withdrawn
from the lock, the keyhole stuffed with paper to keep out a peevish
little blast of wind. Yet, lonely as I seem, were I to lift one of the
lamps and step five paces eastward, Monsieur du Miroir would be sure to
meet me with a lamp also in his hand; and were I to take the
stage-coach to-morrow, without giving him the least hint of my design,
and post onward till the week’s end, at whatever hotel I might find
myself I should expect to share my private apartment with this
inevitable Monsieur du Miroir. Or, out of a mere wayward fantasy, were
I to go, by moonlight, and stand beside the stone Pout of the Shaker
Spring at Canterbury, Monsieur du Miroir would set forth on the same
fool’s errand, and would not fail to meet me there. Shall I heighten
the reader’s wonder? While writing these latter sentences, I happened
to glance towards the large, round globe of one off the brass andirons,
and lo! a miniature apparition of Monsieur du Miroir, with his face
widened and grotesquely contorted, as if he were making fun of my
amazement! But he has played so many of these jokes that they begin to
lose their effect. Once, presumptuous that he was, he stole into the
heaven of a young lady’s eyes; so that, while I gazed and was dreaming
only of herself, I found him also in my dream. Years have so changed
him since that he need never hope to enter those heavenly orbs again.

From these veritable statements it will be readily concluded that, had
Monsieur du Miroir played such pranks in old witch times, matters might
have gone hard with him; at least if the constable and posse comitatus
could have executed a warrant, or the jailer had been cunning enough to
keep him. But it has often occurred to me as a very singular
circumstance, and as betokening either a temperament morbidly
suspicious or some weighty cause of apprehension, that he never trusts
himself within the grasp even of his most intimate friend. If you step
forward to meet him, he readily advances; if you offer him your hand,
he extends his own with an air of the utmost frankness; but, though you
calculate upon a hearty shake, you do not get hold of his little
finger. Ah, this Monsieur du Miroir is a slippery fellow!

These truly are matters of special admiration. After vainly
endeavoring, by the strenuous exertion of my own wits, to gain a
satisfactory insight into the character of Monsieur du Miroir, I had
recourse to certain wise men, and also to books of abstruse philosophy,
seeking who it was that haunted me, and why. I heard long lectures and
read huge volumes with little profit beyond the knowledge that many
former instances are recorded, in successive ages, of similar
connections between ordinary mortals and beings possessing the
attributes of Monsieur du Miroir. Some now alive, perhaps, besides
myself, have such attendants. Would that Monsieur du Miroir could be
persuaded to transfer his attachment to one of those, and allow some
other of his race to assume the situation that he now holds in regard
to me! If I must needs have so intrusive an intimate, who stares me in
the face in my closest privacy, and follows me even to my bedchamber, I
should prefer—scandal apart—the laughing bloom of a young girl to the
dark and bearded gravity of my present companion. But such desires are
never to be gratified. Though the members of Monsieur du Miroir’s
family have been accused, perhaps justly, of visiting their friends
often in splendid halls, and seldom in darksome dungeons, yet they
exhibit a rare constancy to the objects of their first attachment,
however unlovely in person or unamiable in disposition,—however
unfortunate, or even infamous, and deserted by all the world besides.
So will it be with my associate. Our fates appear inseparably blended.
It is my belief, as I find him mingling with my earliest recollections,
that we came into existence together, as my shadow follows me into the
sunshine, and that hereafter, as heretofore, the brightness or gloom of
my fortunes will shine upon, or darken, the face of Monsieur du Miroir.
As we have been young together, and as it is now near the summer noon
with both of us, so, if long life be granted, shall each count his own
wrinkles on the other’s brow and his white hairs on the other’s head.
And when the coffin-lid shall have closed over me and that face and
form, which, more truly than the lover swears it to his beloved, are
the sole light of his existence,—when they shall be laid in that dark
chamber, whither his swift and secret footsteps cannot bring him,—then
what is to become of poor Monsieur du Miroir? Will he have the
fortitude, with my other friends, to take a last look at my pale
countenance? Will he walk foremost in the funeral train? Will he come
often and haunt around my grave, and weed away the nettles, and plant
flowers amid the verdure, and scrape the moss out of the letters of my
burial-stone? Will he linger where I have lived, to remind the
neglectful world of one who staked much to win a name, but will not
then care whether he lost or won?

Not thus will he prove his deep fidelity. O, what terror, if this
friend of mine, after our last farewell, should step into the crowded
street, or roam along our old frequented path by the still waters, or
sit down in the domestic circle where our faces are most familiar and
beloved! No; but when the rays of heaven shall bless me no more, nor
the thoughtful lamplight gleam upon my studies, nor the cheerful
fireside gladden the meditative man, then, his task fulfilled, shall
this mysterious being vanish from the earth forever. He will pass to
the dark realm of nothingness, but will not find me there.

There is something fearful in bearing such a relation to a creature so
imperfectly known, and in the idea that, to a certain extent, all which
concerns myself will be reflected in its consequences upon him. When we
feel that another is to share the self-same fortune with ourselves we
judge more severely of our prospects, and withhold our confidence from
that delusive magic which appears to shed an infallibility of happiness
over our own pathway. Of late years, indeed, there has been much to
sadden my intercourse with Monsieur de Miroir. Had not our union been a
necessary condition of our life, we must have been estranged ere now.
In early youth, when my affections were warm and free, I loved him
well, and could always spend a pleasant hour in his society, chiefly
because it gave me an excellent opinion of myself. Speechless as he
was, Monsieur du Miroir had then a most agreeable way of calling me a
handsome fellow; and I, of course, returned the compliment; so that,
the more we kept each other’s company, the greater coxcombs we mutually
grew. But neither of us need apprehend any such misfortune now. When we
chance to meet,—for it is chance oftener than design,—each glances
sadly at the other’s forehead, dreading wrinkles there; and at our
temples, whence the hair is thinning away too early; and at the sunken
eyes, which no longer shed a gladsome light over the whole face. I
involuntarily peruse him as a record of my heavy youth, which has been
wasted in sluggishness for lack of hope and impulse, or equally thrown
away in toil that had no wise motive and has accomplished no good end.
I perceive that the tranquil gloom of a disappointed soul has darkened
through his countenance, where the blackness of the future seems to
mingle with the shadows of the past, giving him the aspect of a fated
man. Is it too wild a thought that my fate may have assumed this image
of myself, and therefore haunts me with such inevitable pertinacity,
originating every act which it appears to imitate, while it deludes me
by pretending to share the events of which it is merely the emblem and
the prophecy? I must banish this idea, or it will throw too deep an awe
round my companion. At our next meeting, especially if it be at
midnight or in solitude, I fear that I shall glance aside and shudder;
in which case, as Monsieur du Miroir is extremely sensitive to
ill-treatment, he also will avert his eyes and express horror or
disgust.

But no; this is unworthy of me. As of old I sought his society for the
bewitching dreams of woman’s love which he inspired, and because I
fancied a bright fortune in his aspect, so now will I hold daily and
long communion with hint for the sake of the stern lessons that he will
teach my manhood. With folded arms we will sit face to face, and
lengthen out our silent converse till a wiser cheerfulness shall have
been wrought from the very texture of despondency. He will say, perhaps
indignantly, that it befits only him to mourn for the decay of outward
grace, which, while he possessed it, was his all. But have not you, he
will ask, a treasure in reserve, to which every year may add far more
value than age or death itself can snatch from that miserable clay? He
will tell me that though the bloom of life has been nipped with a
frost, yet the soul must not sit shivering in its cell, but bestir
itself manfully, and kindle a genial warmth from its own exercise
against; the autumnal and the wintry atmosphere. And I, in return, will
bid him be of good cheer, nor take it amiss that I must blanch his
locks and wrinkle him up like a wilted apple, since it shall be my
endeavor so to beautify his face with intellect and mild benevolence
that he shall profit immensely by the change. But here a smile will
glimmer somewhat sadly over Monsieur du Miroir’s visage.

When this subject shall have been sufficiently discussed we may take up
others as important. Reflecting upon his power of following me to the
remotest regions and into the deepest privacy, I will compare the
attempt to escape him to the hopeless race that men sometimes run with
memory, or their own hearts, or their moral selves, which, though
burdened with cares enough to crush an elephant, will never be one step
behind. I will be self-contemplative, as nature bids me, and make him
the picture or visible type of what I muse upon, that my mind may not
wander so vaguely as heretofore, chasing its own shadow through a chaos
and catching only the monsters that abide there. Then will we turn our
thoughts to the spiritual world, of the reality of which my companions
shall furnish me an illustration, if not an argument; for, as we have
only the testimony of the eye to Monsieur du Miroir’s existence, while
all the other senses would fail to inform us that such a figure stands
within arm’s-length, wherefore should there not be beings innumerable
close beside us, and filling heaven and earth with their multitude, yet
of whom no corporeal perception can take cognizance? A blind man might
as reasonably deny that Monsieur du Miroir exists, as we, because the
Creator has hitherto withheld the spiritual perception, can therefore
contend that there are no spirits. O, there are! And, at this moment,
when the subject of which I write has grown strong within me and
surrounded itself with those solemn and awful associations which might
have seemed most alien to it, I could fancy that Monsieur du Miroir
himself is a wanderer from the spiritual world, with nothing human
except his delusive garment of visibility. Methinks I should tremble
now were his wizard power of gliding through all impediments in search
of me to place him suddenly before my eyes.

Ha! What is yonder? Shape of mystery, did the tremor of my heartstrings
vibrate to thine own, and call thee from thy home among the dancers of
the northern lights, and shadows flung from departed sunshine, and
giant spectres that appear on clouds at daybreak and affright the
climber of the Alps? In truth it startled me, as I threw a wary glance
eastward across the chamber, to discern an unbidden guest with his eyes
bent on mine. The identical MONSIEUR DU MIROIR! Still there he sits and
returns my gaze with as much of awe and curiosity as if he, too, had
spent a solitary evening in fantastic musings and made me his theme. So
inimitably does he counterfeit that I could almost doubt which of us is
the visionary form, or whether each be not the other’s mystery, and
both twin brethren of one fate, in mutually reflected spheres. O
friend, canst thou not hear and answer me? Break down the barrier
between us! Grasp my hand! Speak! Listen! A few words, perhaps, might
satisfy the feverish yearning of my soul for some master-thought that
should guide me through this labyrinth of life, teaching wherefore I
was born, and how to do my task on earth, and what is death. Alas! Even
that unreal image should forget to ape me and smile at these vain
questions. Thus do mortals deify, as it were, a mere shadow of
themselves, a spectre of human reason, and ask of that to unveil the
mysteries which Divine Intelligence has revealed so far as needful to
our guidance, and hid the rest.

Farewell, Monsieur du Miroir. Of you, perhaps, as of many men, it may
be doubted whether you are the wiser, though your whole business is
REFLECTION.




THE HALL OF FANTASY


It has happened to me, on various occasions, to find myself in a
certain edifice which would appear to have some of the characteristics
of a public exchange. Its interior is a spacious hall, with a pavement
of white marble. Overhead is a lofty dome, supported by long rows of
pillars of fantastic architecture, the idea of which was probably taken
from the Moorish ruins of the Alhambra, or perhaps from some enchanted
edifice in the Arabian tales. The windows of this hall have a breadth
and grandeur of design and an elaborateness of workmanship that have
nowhere been equalled, except in the Gothic cathedrals of the Old
World. Like their prototypes, too, they admit the light of heaven only
through stained and pictured glass, thus filling the hall with
many-colored radiance and painting its marble floor with beautiful or
grotesque designs; so that its inmates breathe, as it were, a visionary
atmosphere, and tread upon the fantasies of poetic minds. These
peculiarities, combining a wilder mixture of styles than even an
American architect usually recognizes as allowable,—Grecian, Gothic,
Oriental, and nondescript,—cause the whole edifice to give the
impression of a dream, which might be dissipated and shattered to
fragments by merely stamping the foot upon the pavement. Yet, with such
modifications and repairs as successive ages demand, the Hall of
Fantasy is likely to endure longer than the most substantial structure
that ever cumbered the earth.

It is not at all times that one can gain admittance into this edifice,
although most persons enter it at some period or other of their lives;
if not in their waking moments, then by the universal passport of a
dream. At my last visit I wandered thither unawares while my mind was
busy with an idle tale, and was startled by the throng of people who
seemed suddenly to rise up around me.

“Bless me! Where am I?” cried I, with but a dim recognition of the
place.

“You are in a spot,” said a friend who chanced to be near at hand,
“which occupies in the world of fancy the same position which the
Bourse, the Rialto, and the Exchange do in the commercial world. All
who have affairs in that mystic region, which lies above, below, or
beyond the actual, may here meet and talk over the business of their
dreams.”

“It is a noble hall,” observed I.

“Yes,” he replied. “Yet we see but a small portion of the edifice. In
its upper stories are said to be apartments where the inhabitants of
earth may hold converse with those of the moon; and beneath our feet
are gloomy cells, which communicate with the infernal regions, and
where monsters and chimeras are kept in confinement and fed with all
unwholesomeness.”

In niches and on pedestals around about the hall stood the statues or
busts of men who in every age have been rulers and demigods in the
realms of imagination and its kindred regions. The grand old
countenance of Homer; the shrunken and decrepit form but vivid face of
AEsop; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais’s smile
of deep-wrought mirth, the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the
all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric
structure; the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, moulded of
homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire,—were those that
chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott occupied
conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure and shadowy niche was deposited
the bust of our countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn.

“Besides these indestructible memorials of real genius,” remarked my
companion, “each century has erected statues of its own ephemeral
favorites in wood.”

“I observe a few crumbling relics of such,” said I. “But ever and anon,
I suppose, Oblivion comes with her huge broom and sweeps them all from
the marble floor. But such will never be the fate of this fine statue
of Goethe.”

“Nor of that next to it,—Emanuel Swedenborg,” said he. “Were ever two
men of transcendent imagination more unlike?”

In the centre of the hall springs an ornamental fountain, the water of
which continually throws itself into new shapes and snatches the most
diversified lines from the stained atmosphere around. It is impossible
to conceive what a strange vivacity is imparted to the scene by the
magic dance of this fountain, with its endless transformations, in
which the imaginative beholder may discern what form he will. The water
is supposed by some to flow from the same source as the Castalian
spring, and is extolled by others as uniting the virtues of the
Fountain of Youth with those of many other enchanted wells long
celebrated in tale and song. Having never tasted it, I can bear no
testimony to its quality.

“Did you ever drink this water?” I inquired of my friend.

“A few sips now and then,” answered he. “But there are men here who
make it their constant beverage,—or, at least, have the credit of doing
so. In some instances it is known to have intoxicating qualities.”

“Pray let us look at these water-drinkers,” said I.

So we passed among the fantastic pillars till we came to a spot where a
number of persons were clustered together in the light of one of the
great stained windows, which seemed to glorify the whole group as well
as the marble that they trod on. Most of them were men of broad
foreheads, meditative countenances, and thoughtful, inward eyes; yet it
required but a trifle to summon up mirth, peeping out from the very
midst of grave and lofty musings. Some strode about, or leaned against
the pillars of the hall, alone and in silence; their faces wore a rapt
expression, as if sweet music were in the air around them, or as if
their inmost souls were about to float away in song. One or two,
perhaps, stole a glance at the bystanders, to watch if their poetic
absorption were observed. Others stood talking in groups, with a
liveliness of expression, a ready smile, and a light, intellectual
laughter, which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to
and fro among them.

A few held higher converse, which caused their calm and melancholy
souls to beam moonlight from their eyes. As I lingered near them,—for I
felt an inward attraction towards these men, as if the sympathy of
feeling, if not of genius, had united me to their order,—my friend
mentioned several of their names. The world has likewise heard those
names; with some it has been familiar for years; and others are daily
making their way deeper into the universal heart.

“Thank Heaven,” observed I to my companion, as we passed to another
part of the hall, “we have done with this techy, wayward, shy, proud
unreasonable set of laurel-gatherers. I love them in their works, but
have little desire to meet them elsewhere.”

“You have adopted all old prejudice, I see,” replied my friend, who was
familiar with most of these worthies, being himself a student of
poetry, and not without the poetic flame. “But, so far as my experience
goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in
this age there appears to be a fellow-feeling among them which had not
heretofore been developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to be
on equal terms with their fellow-men; and as authors, they have thrown
aside their proverbial jealousy, and acknowledge a generous
brotherhood.”

“The world does not think so,” answered I. “An author is received in
general society pretty much as we honest citizens are in the Hall of
Fantasy. We gaze at him as if he had no business among us, and question
whether he is fit for any of our pursuits.”

“Then it is a very foolish question,” said he. “Now, here are a class
of men whom we may daily meet on ’Change. Yet what poet in the hall is
more a fool of fancy than the sagest of them?”

He pointed to a number of persons, who, manifest as the fact was, would
have deemed it an insult to be told that they stood in the Hall of
Fantasy. Their visages were traced into wrinkles and furrows, each of
which seemed the record of some actual experience in life. Their eyes
had the shrewd, calculating glance which detects so quickly and so
surely all that it concerns a man of business to know about the
characters and purposes of his fellow-men. Judging them as they stood,
they might be honored and trusted members of the Chamber of Commerce,
who had found the genuine secret of wealth and whose sagacity gave them
the command of fortune.

There was a character of detail and matter of fact in their talk which
concealed the extravagance of its purport, insomuch that the wildest
schemes had the aspect of everyday realities. Thus the listener was not
startled at the idea of cities to be built, as if by magic, in the
heart of pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out where now the
sea was tossing; and of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses in
order to turn the machinery of a cotton-mill. It was only by an effort,
and scarcely then, that the mind convinced itself that such
speculations were as much matter of fantasy as the old dream of
Eldorado, or as Mammon’s Cave, or any other vision of gold ever
conjured up by the imagination of needy poet or romantic adventurer.

“Upon my word,” said I, “it is dangerous to listen to such dreamers as
these. Their madness is contagious.”

“Yes,” said my friend, “because they mistake the Hall of Fantasy for
actual brick and mortar, and its purple atmosphere for unsophisticated
sunshine. But the poet knows his whereabout, and therefore is less
likely to make a fool of himself in real life.”

“Here again,” observed I, as we advanced a little farther, “we see
another order of dreamers, peculiarly characteristic, too, of the
genius of our country.”

These were the inventors of fantastic machines. Models of their
contrivances were placed against some of the pillars of the hall, and
afforded good emblems of the result generally to be anticipated from an
attempt to reduce day-dreams to practice. The analogy may hold in
morals as well as physics; for instance, here was the model of a
railroad through the air and a tunnel under the sea. Here was a
machine—stolen, I believe—for the distillation of heat from moonshine;
and another for the condensation of morning mist into square blocks of
granite, wherewith it was proposed to rebuild the entire Hall of
Fantasy. One man exhibited a sort of lens whereby he had succeeded in
making sunshine out of a lady’s smile; and it was his purpose wholly to
irradiate the earth by means of this wonderful invention.

“It is nothing new,” said I; “for most of our sunshine comes from
woman’s smile already.”

“True,” answered the inventor; “but my machine will secure a constant
supply for domestic use; whereas hitherto it has been very precarious.”

Another person had a scheme for fixing the reflections of objects in a
pool of water, and thus taking the most life-like portraits imaginable;
and the same gentleman demonstrated the practicability of giving a
permanent dye to ladies’ dresses, in the gorgeous clouds of sunset.
There were at least fifty kinds of perpetual motion, one of which was
applicable to the wits of newspaper editors and writers of every
description. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous storm in a
gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many more of these Utopian
inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative collection is to be
found in the Patent Office at Washington.

Turning from the inventors we took a more general survey of the inmates
of the hall. Many persons were present whose right of entrance appeared
to consist in some crotchet of the brain, which, so long as it might
operate, produced a change in their relation to the actual world. It is
singular how very few there are who do not occasionally gain admittance
on such a score, either in abstracted musings, or momentary thoughts,
or bright anticipations, or vivid remembrances; for even the actual
becomes ideal, whether in hope or memory, and beguiles the dreamer into
the Hall of Fantasy. Some unfortunates make their whole abode and
business here, and contract habits which unfit them for all the real
employments of life. Others—but these are few—possess the faculty, in
their occasional visits, of discovering a purer truth than the world
call impart among the lights and shadows of these pictured windows.

And with all its dangerous influences, we have reason to thank God that
there is such a place of refuge from the gloom and chillness of actual
life. Hither may come the prisoner, escaping from his dark and narrow
cell and cankerous chain, to breathe free air in this enchanted
atmosphere. The sick man leaves his weary pillow, and finds strength to
wander hither, though his wasted limbs might not support him even to
the threshold of his chamber. The exile passes through the Hall of
Fantasy to revisit his native soil. The burden of years rolls down from
the old man’s shoulders the moment that the door uncloses. Mourners
leave their heavy sorrows at the entrance, and here rejoin the lost
ones whose faces would else be seen no more, until thought shall have
become the only fact. It may be said, in truth, that there is but half
a life—the meaner and earthier half—for those who never find their way
into the hall. Nor must I fail to mention that in the observatory of
the edifice is kept that wonderful perspective-glass, through which the
shepherds of the Delectable Mountains showed Christian the far-off
gleam of the Celestial City. The eye of Faith still loves to gaze
through it.

“I observe some men here,” said I to my friend, “who might set up a
strong claim to be reckoned among the most real personages of the day.”

“Certainly,” he replied. “If a man be in advance of his age, he must be
content to make his abode in this hall until the lingering generations
of his fellow-men come up with him. He can find no other shelter in the
universe. But the fantasies of one day are the deepest realities of a
future one.”

“It is difficult to distinguish them apart amid the gorgeous and
bewildering light of this ball,” rejoined I. “The white sunshine of
actual life is necessary in order to test them. I am rather apt to
doubt both men and their reasonings till I meet them in that truthful
medium.”

“Perhaps your faith in the ideal is deeper than you are aware,” said my
friend. “You are at least a democrat; and methinks no scanty share of
such faith is essential to the adoption of that creed.”

Among the characters who had elicited these remarks were most of the
noted reformers of the day, whether in physics, politics, morals, or
religion. There is no surer method of arriving at the Hall of Fantasy
than to throw one’s-self into the current of a theory; for, whatever
landmarks of fact may be set up along the stream, there is a law of
nature that impels it thither. And let it be so; for here the wise head
and capacious heart may do their work; and what is good and true
becomes gradually hardened into fact, while error melts away and
vanishes among the shadows of the ball. Therefore may none who believe
and rejoice in the progress of mankind be angry with me because I
recognized their apostles and leaders amid the fantastic radiance of
those pictured windows. I love and honor such men as well as they.

It would be endless to describe the herd of real or self styled
reformers that peopled this place of refuge. They were the
representatives of an unquiet period, when mankind is seeking to cast
off the whole tissue of ancient custom like a tattered garment. Many of
then had got possession of some crystal fragment of truth, the
brightness of which so dazzled them that they could see nothing else in
the wide universe. Here were men whose faith had embodied itself in the
form of a potato; and others whose long beards had a deep spiritual
significance. Here was the abolitionist, brandishing his one idea like
an iron flail. In a word, there were a thousand shapes of good and
evil, faith and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense,—a most incongruous
throng.

Yet, withal, the heart of the stanchest conservative, unless he abjured
his fellowship with man, could hardly have helped throbbing in sympathy
with the spirit that pervaded these innumerable theorists. It was good
for the man of unquickened heart to listen even to their folly. Far
down beyond the fathom of the intellect the soul acknowledged that all
these varying and conflicting developments of humanity were united in
one sentiment. Be the individual theory as wild as fancy could make it,
still the wiser spirit would recognize the struggle of the race after a
better and purer life than had yet been realized on earth. My faith
revived even while I rejected all their schemes. It could not be that
the world should continue forever what it has been; a soil where
Happiness is so rare a flower and Virtue so often a blighted fruit; a
battle-field where the good principle, with its shield flung above its
head, can hardly save itself amid the rush of adverse influences. In
the enthusiasm of such thoughts I gazed through one of the pictured
windows, and, behold! the whole external world was tinged with the
dimly glorious aspect that is peculiar to the Hall of Fantasy, insomuch
that it seemed practicable at that very instant to realize some plan
for the perfection of mankind. But, alas! if reformers would understand
the sphere in which their lot is cast they must cease to look through
pictured windows. Yet they not only use this medium, but mistake it for
the whitest sunshine.

“Come,” said I to my friend, starting from a deep revery, “let us
hasten hence, or I shall be tempted to make a theory, after which there
is little hope of any man.”

“Come hither, then,” answered he. “Here is one theory that swallows up
and annihilates all others.”

He led me to a distant part of the hall where a crowd of deeply
attentive auditors were assembled round an elderly man of plain,
honest, trustworthy aspect. With an earnestness that betokened the
sincerest faith in his own doctrine, he announced that the destruction
of the world was close at hand.

“It is Father Miller himself!” exclaimed I.

“No less a man,” said my friend; “and observe how picturesque a
contrast between his dogma and those of the reformers whom we have just
glanced at. They look for the earthly perfection of mankind, and are
forming schemes which imply that the immortal spirit will be connected
with a physical nature for innumerable ages of futurity. On the other
hand, here comes good Father Miller, and with one puff of his
relentless theory scatters all their dreams like so many withered
leaves upon the blast.”

“It is, perhaps, the only method of getting mankind out of the various
perplexities into which they have fallen,” I replied. “Yet I could wish
that the world might be permitted to endure until some great moral
shall have been evolved. A riddle is propounded. Where is the solution?
The sphinx did not slay herself until her riddle had been guessed. Will
it not be so with the world? Now, if it should be burned to-morrow
morning, I am at a loss to know what purpose will have been
accomplished, or how the universe will be wiser or better for our
existence and destruction.”

“We cannot tell what mighty truths may have been embodied in act
through the existence of the globe and its inhabitants,” rejoined my
companion. “Perhaps it may be revealed to us after the fall of the
curtain over our catastrophe; or not impossibly, the whole drama, in
which we are involuntary actors, may have been performed for the
instruction of another set of spectators. I cannot perceive that our
own comprehension of it is at all essential to the matter. At any rate,
while our view is so ridiculously narrow and superficial it would be
absurd to argue the continuance of the world from the fact that it
seems to have existed hitherto in vain.”

“The poor old earth,” murmured I. “She has faults enough, in all
conscience, but I cannot hear to have her perish.”

“It is no great matter,” said my friend. “The happiest of us has been
weary of her many a time and oft.”

“I doubt it,” answered I, pertinaciously; “the root of human nature
strikes down deep into this earthly soil, and it is but reluctantly
that we submit to be transplanted, even for a higher cultivation in
heaven. I query whether the destruction of the earth would gratify any
one individual, except perhaps some embarrassed man of business whose
notes fall due a day after the day of doom.”

Then methought I heard the expostulating cry of a multitude against the
consummation prophesied by Father Miller. The lover wrestled with
Providence for his foreshadowed bliss. Parents entreated that the
earth’s span of endurance might be prolonged by some seventy years, so
that their new-born infant should not be defrauded of his lifetime. A
youthful poet murmured because there would be no posterity to recognize
the inspiration of his song. The reformers, one and all, demanded a few
thousand years to test their theories, after which the universe might
go to wreck. A mechanician, who was busied with an improvement of the
steam-engine, asked merely time to perfect his model. A miser insisted
that the world’s destruction would be a personal wrong to himself,
unless he should first be permitted to add a specified sum to his
enormous heap of gold. A little boy made dolorous inquiry whether the
last day would come before Christmas, and thus deprive him of his
anticipated dainties. In short, nobody seemed satisfied that this
mortal scene of things should have its close just now. Yet, it must be
confessed, the motives of the crowd for desiring its continuance were
mostly so absurd, that unless infinite Wisdom had been aware of much
better reasons, the solid earth must have melted away at once.

For my own part, not to speak of a few private and personal ends, I
really desired our old mother’s prolonged existence for her own dear
sake.

“The poor old earth!” I repeated. “What I should chiefly regret in her
destruction would be that very earthliness which no other sphere or
state of existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of flowers
and of new-mown hay; the genial warmth of sunshine, and the beauty of a
sunset among clouds; the comfort and cheerful glow of the fireside; the
deliciousness of fruits and of all good cheer; the magnificence of
mountains, and seas, and cataracts, and the softer charm of rural
scenery; even the fast-falling snow and the gray atmosphere through
which it descends,—all these and innumerable other enjoyable things of
earth must perish with her. Then the country frolics; the homely humor;
the broad, open-mouthed roar of laughter, in which body and soul
conjoin so heartily! I fear that no other world call show its anything
just like this. As for purely moral enjoyments, the good will find them
in every state of being. But where the material and the moral exist
together, what is to happen then? And then our mute four-footed friends
and the winged songsters of our woods! Might it not be lawful to regret
them, even in the hallowed groves of paradise?”

“You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued with a scent of
freshly turned soil,” exclaimed my friend.

“It is not that I so much object to giving up these enjoyments on my
own account,” continued I, “but I hate to think that they will have
been eternally annihilated from the list of joys.”

“Nor need they be,” he replied. “I see no real force in what you say.
Standing in this Hall of Fantasy, we perceive what even the
earth-clogged intellect of man can do in creating circumstances which,
though we call them shadowy and visionary, are scarcely more so than
those that surround us in actual life. Doubt not then that man’s
disembodied spirit may recreate time and the world for itself, with all
their peculiar enjoyments, should there still be human yearnings amid
life eternal and infinite. But I doubt whether we shall be inclined to
play such a poor scene over again.”

“O, you are ungrateful to our mother earth!” rejoined I. “Come what
may, I never will forget her! Neither will it satisfy me to have her
exist merely in idea. I want her great, round, solid self to endure
interminably, and still to be peopled with the kindly race of man, whom
I uphold to be much better than he thinks himself. Nevertheless, I
confide the whole matter to Providence, and shall endeavor so to live
that the world may come to an end at any moment without leaving me at a
loss to find foothold somewhere else.”

“It is an excellent resolve,” said my companion, looking at his watch.
“But come; it is the dinner-hour. Will you partake of my vegetable
diet?”

A thing so matter of fact as an invitation to dinner, even when the
fare was to be nothing more substantial than vegetables and fruit,
compelled us forthwith to remove from the Hall of Fantasy. As we passed
out of the portal we met the spirits of several persons who had been
sent thither in magnetic sleep. I looked back among the sculptured
pillars and at the transformations of the gleaming fountain, and almost
desired that the whole of life might be spent in that visionary scene
where the actual world, with its hard angles, should never rub against
me, and only be viewed through the medium of pictured windows. But for
those who waste all their days in the Hall of Fantasy, good Father
Miller’s prophecy is already accomplished, and the solid earth has come
to an untimely end. Let us be content, therefore, with merely an
occasional visit, for the sake of spiritualizing the grossness of this
actual life, and prefiguring to ourselves a state in which the Idea
shall be all in all.




THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD


Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited
that region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction.
It interested me much to learn that by the public spirit of some of the
inhabitants a railroad has recently been established between this
populous and flourishing town and the Celestial City. Having a little
time upon my hands, I resolved to gratify a liberal curiosity by making
a trip thither. Accordingly, one fine morning after paying my bill at
the hotel, and directing the porter to stow my luggage behind a coach,
I took my seat in the vehicle and set out for the station-house. It was
my good fortune to enjoy the company of a gentleman—one Mr.
Smooth-it-away—who, though he had never actually visited the Celestial
City, yet seemed as well acquainted with its laws, customs, policy, and
statistics, as with those of the City of Destruction, of which he was a
native townsman. Being, moreover, a director of the railroad
corporation and one of its largest stockholders, he had it in his power
to give me all desirable information respecting that praiseworthy
enterprise.

Our coach rattled out of the city, and at a short distance from its
outskirts passed over a bridge of elegant construction, but somewhat
too slight, as I imagined, to sustain any considerable weight. On both
sides lay an extensive quagmire, which could not have been more
disagreeable either to sight or smell, had all the kennels of the earth
emptied their pollution there.

“This,” remarked Mr. Smooth-it-away, “is the famous Slough of Despond—a
disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so
easily be converted into firm ground.”

“I have understood,” said I, “that efforts have been made for that
purpose from time immemorial. Bunyan mentions that above twenty
thousand cartloads of wholesome instructions had been thrown in here
without effect.”

“Very probably! And what effect could be anticipated from such
unsubstantial stuff?” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away. “You observe this
convenient bridge. We obtained a sufficient foundation for it by
throwing into the slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of
French philosophy and German rationalism; tracts, sermons, and essays
of modern clergymen; extracts from Plato, Confucius, and various Hindoo
sages together with a few ingenious commentaries upon texts of
Scripture,—all of which by some scientific process, have been converted
into a mass like granite. The whole bog might be filled up with similar
matter.”

It really seemed to me, however, that the bridge vibrated and heaved up
and down in a very formidable manner; and, in spite of Mr.
Smooth-it-away’s testimony to the solidity of its foundation, I should
be loath to cross it in a crowded omnibus, especially if each passenger
were encumbered with as heavy luggage as that gentleman and myself.
Nevertheless we got over without accident, and soon found ourselves at
the stationhouse. This very neat and spacious edifice is erected on the
site of the little wicket gate, which formerly, as all old pilgrims
will recollect, stood directly across the highway, and, by its
inconvenient narrowness, was a great obstruction to the traveller of
liberal mind and expansive stomach. The reader of John Bunyan will be
glad to know that Christian’s old friend Evangelist, who was accustomed
to supply each pilgrim with a mystic roll, now presides at the ticket
office. Some malicious persons it is true deny the identity of this
reputable character with the Evangelist of old times, and even pretend
to bring competent evidence of an imposture. Without involving myself
in a dispute I shall merely observe that, so far as my experience goes,
the square pieces of pasteboard now delivered to passengers are much
more convenient and useful along the road than the antique roll of
parchment. Whether they will be as readily received at the gate of the
Celestial City I decline giving an opinion.

A large number of passengers were already at the station-house awaiting
the departure of the cars. By the aspect and demeanor of these persons
it was easy to judge that the feelings of the community had undergone a
very favorable change in reference to the celestial pilgrimage. It
would have done Bunyan’s heart good to see it. Instead of a lonely and
ragged man with a huge burden on his back, plodding along sorrowfully
on foot while the whole city hooted after him, here were parties of the
first gentry and most respectable people in the neighborhood setting
forth towards the Celestial City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage
were merely a summer tour. Among the gentlemen were characters of
deserved eminence—magistrates, politicians, and men of wealth, by whose
example religion could not but be greatly recommended to their meaner
brethren. In the ladies’ apartment, too, I rejoiced to distinguish some
of those flowers of fashionable society who are so well fitted to adorn
the most elevated circles of the Celestial City. There was much
pleasant conversation about the news of the day, topics of business and
politics, or the lighter matters of amusement; while religion, though
indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the
background. Even an infidel would have heard little or nothing to shock
his sensibility.

One great convenience of the new method of going on pilgrimage I must
not forget to mention. Our enormous burdens, instead of being carried
on our shoulders as had been the custom of old, were all snugly
deposited in the baggage car, and, as I was assured, would be delivered
to their respective owners at the journey’s end. Another thing,
likewise, the benevolent reader will be delighted to understand. It may
be remembered that there was an ancient feud between Prince Beelzebub
and the keeper of the wicket gate, and that the adherents of the former
distinguished personage were accustomed to shoot deadly arrows at
honest pilgrims while knocking at the door. This dispute, much to the
credit as well of the illustrious potentate above mentioned as of the
worthy and enlightened directors of the railroad, has been pacifically
arranged on the principle of mutual compromise. The prince’s subjects
are now pretty numerously employed about the station-house, some in
taking care of the baggage, others in collecting fuel, feeding the
engines, and such congenial occupations; and I can conscientiously
affirm that persons more attentive to their business, more willing to
accommodate, or more generally agreeable to the passengers, are not to
be found on any railroad. Every good heart must surely exult at so
satisfactory an arrangement of an immemorial difficulty.

“Where is Mr. Greatheart?” inquired I. “Beyond a doubt the directors
have engaged that famous old champion to be chief conductor on the
railroad?”

“Why, no,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a dry cough. “He was offered
the situation of brakeman; but, to tell you the truth, our friend
Greatheart has grown preposterously stiff and narrow in his old age. He
has so often guided pilgrims over the road on foot that he considers it
a sin to travel in any other fashion. Besides, the old fellow had
entered so heartily into the ancient feud with Prince Beelzebub that he
would have been perpetually at blows or ill language with some of the
prince’s subjects, and thus have embroiled us anew. So, on the whole,
we were not sorry when honest Greatheart went off to the Celestial City
in a huff and left us at liberty to choose a more suitable and
accommodating man. Yonder comes the engineer of the train. You will
probably recognize him at once.”

The engine at this moment took its station in advance of the cars,
looking, I must confess, much more like a sort of mechanical demon that
would hurry us to the infernal regions than a laudable contrivance for
smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its top sat a personage
almost enveloped in smoke and flame, which, not to startle the reader,
appeared to gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as from the
engine’s brazen abdomen.

“Do my eyes deceive me?” cried I. “What on earth is this! A living
creature? If so, he is own brother to the engine he rides upon!”

“Poh, poh, you are obtuse!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a hearty
laugh. “Don’t you know Apollyon, Christian’s old enemy, with whom he
fought so fierce a battle in the Valley of Humiliation? He was the very
fellow to manage the engine; and so we have reconciled him to the
custom of going on pilgrimage, and engaged him as chief engineer.”

“Bravo, bravo!” exclaimed I, with irrepressible enthusiasm; “this shows
the liberality of the age; this proves, if anything can, that all musty
prejudices are in a fair way to be obliterated. And how will Christian
rejoice to hear of this happy transformation of his old antagonist! I
promise myself great pleasure in informing him of it when we reach the
Celestial City.”

The passengers being all comfortably seated, we now rattled away
merrily, accomplishing a greater distance in ten minutes than Christian
probably trudged over in a day. It was laughable, while we glanced
along, as it were, at the tail of a thunderbolt, to observe two dusty
foot travellers in the old pilgrim guise, with cockle shell and staff,
their mystic rolls of parchment in their hands and their intolerable
burdens on their backs. The preposterous obstinacy of these honest
people in persisting to groan and stumble along the difficult pathway
rather than take advantage of modern improvements, excited great mirth
among our wiser brotherhood. We greeted the two pilgrims with many
pleasant gibes and a roar of laughter; whereupon they gazed at us with
such woful and absurdly compassionate visages that our merriment grew
tenfold more obstreperous. Apollyon also entered heartily into the fun,
and contrived to flirt the smoke and flame of the engine, or of his own
breath, into their faces, and envelop them in an atmosphere of scalding
steam. These little practical jokes amused us mightily, and doubtless
afforded the pilgrims the gratification of considering themselves
martyrs.

At some distance from the railroad Mr. Smooth-it-away pointed to a
large, antique edifice, which, he observed, was a tavern of long
standing, and had formerly been a noted stopping-place for pilgrims. In
Bunyan’s road-book it is mentioned as the Interpreter’s House.

“I have long had a curiosity to visit that old mansion,” remarked I.

“It is not one of our stations, as you perceive,” said my companion
“The keeper was violently opposed to the railroad; and well he might
be, as the track left his house of entertainment on one side, and thus
was pretty certain to deprive him of all his reputable customers. But
the footpath still passes his door, and the old gentleman now and then
receives a call from some simple traveller, and entertains him with
fare as old-fashioned as himself.”

Before our talk on this subject came to a conclusion we were rushing by
the place where Christian’s burden fell from his shoulders at the sight
of the Cross. This served as a theme for Mr. Smooth-it-away, Mr.
Livefor-the-world, Mr. Hide-sin-in-the-heart, Mr. Scaly-conscience, and
a knot of gentlemen from the town of Shun-repentance, to descant upon
the inestimable advantages resulting from the safety of our baggage.
Myself, and all the passengers indeed, joined with great unanimity in
this view of the matter; for our burdens were rich in many things
esteemed precious throughout the world; and, especially, we each of us
possessed a great variety of favorite Habits, which we trusted would
not be out of fashion even in the polite circles of the Celestial City.
It would have been a sad spectacle to see such an assortment of
valuable articles tumbling into the sepulchre. Thus pleasantly
conversing on the favorable circumstances of our position as compared
with those of past pilgrims and of narrow-minded ones at the present
day, we soon found ourselves at the foot of the Hill Difficulty.
Through the very heart of this rocky mountain a tunnel has been
constructed of most admirable architecture, with a lofty arch and a
spacious double track; so that, unless the earth and rocks should
chance to crumble down, it will remain an eternal monument of the
builder’s skill and enterprise. It is a great though incidental
advantage that the materials from the heart of the Hill Difficulty have
been employed in filling up the Valley of Humiliation, thus obviating
the necessity of descending into that disagreeable and unwholesome
hollow.

“This is a wonderful improvement, indeed,” said I. “Yet I should have
been glad of an opportunity to visit the Palace Beautiful and be
introduced to the charming young ladies—Miss Prudence, Miss Piety, Miss
Charity, and the rest—who have the kindness to entertain pilgrims
there.”

“Young ladies!” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away, as soon as he could speak for
laughing. “And charming young ladies! Why, my dear fellow, they are old
maids, every soul of them—prim, starched, dry, and angular; and not one
of them, I will venture to say, has altered so much as the fashion of
her gown since the days of Christian’s pilgrimage.”

“Ah, well,” said I, much comforted, “then I can very readily dispense
with their acquaintance.”

The respectable Apollyon was now putting on the steam at a prodigious
rate, anxious, perhaps, to get rid of the unpleasant reminiscences
connected with the spot where he had so disastrously encountered
Christian. Consulting Mr. Bunyan’s road-book, I perceived that we must
now be within a few miles of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, into
which doleful region, at our present speed, we should plunge much
sooner than seemed at all desirable. In truth, I expected nothing
better than to find myself in the ditch on one side or the Quag on the
other; but on communicating my apprehensions to Mr. Smooth-it-away, he
assured me that the difficulties of this passage, even in its worst
condition, had been vastly exaggerated, and that, in its present state
of improvement, I might consider myself as safe as on any railroad in
Christendom.

Even while we were speaking the train shot into the entrance of this
dreaded Valley. Though I plead guilty to some foolish palpitations of
the heart during our headlong rush over the causeway here constructed,
yet it were unjust to withhold the highest encomiums on the boldness of
its original conception and the ingenuity of those who executed it. It
was gratifying, likewise, to observe how much care had been taken to
dispel the everlasting gloom and supply the defect of cheerful
sunshine, not a ray of which has ever penetrated among these awful
shadows. For this purpose, the inflammable gas which exudes plentifully
from the soil is collected by means of pipes, and thence communicated
to a quadruple row of lamps along the whole extent of the passage. Thus
a radiance has been created even out of the fiery and sulphurous curse
that rests forever upon the valley—a radiance hurtful, however, to the
eyes, and somewhat bewildering, as I discovered by the changes which it
wrought in the visages of my companions. In this respect, as compared
with natural daylight, there is the same difference as between truth
and falsehood, but if the reader have ever travelled through the dark
Valley, he will have learned to be thankful for any light that he could
get—if not from the sky above, then from the blasted soil beneath. Such
was the red brilliancy of these lamps that they appeared to build walls
of fire on both sides of the track, between which we held our course at
lightning speed, while a reverberating thunder filled the Valley with
its echoes. Had the engine run off the track,—a catastrophe, it is
whispered, by no means unprecedented,—the bottomless pit, if there be
any such place, would undoubtedly have received us. Just as some dismal
fooleries of this nature had made my heart quake there came a
tremendous shriek, careering along the valley as if a thousand devils
had burst their lungs to utter it, but which proved to be merely the
whistle of the engine on arriving at a stopping-place.

The spot where we had now paused is the same that our friend Bunyan—a
truthful man, but infected with many fantastic notions—has designated,
in terms plainer than I like to repeat, as the mouth of the infernal
region. This, however, must be a mistake, inasmuch as Mr.
Smooth-it-away, while we remained in the smoky and lurid cavern, took
occasion to prove that Tophet has not even a metaphorical existence.
The place, he assured us, is no other than the crater of a half-extinct
volcano, in which the directors had caused forges to be set up for the
manufacture of railroad iron. Hence, also, is obtained a plentiful
supply of fuel for the use of the engines. Whoever had gazed into the
dismal obscurity of the broad cavern mouth, whence ever and anon darted
huge tongues of dusky flame, and had seen the strange, half-shaped
monsters, and visions of faces horribly grotesque, into which the smoke
seemed to wreathe itself, and had heard the awful murmurs, and shrieks,
and deep, shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes forming
themselves into words almost articulate, would have seized upon Mr.
Smooth-it-away’s comfortable explanation as greedily as we did. The
inhabitants of the cavern, moreover, were unlovely personages, dark,
smoke-begrimed, generally deformed, with misshapen feet, and a glow of
dusky redness in their eyes as if their hearts had caught fire and were
blazing out of the upper windows. It struck me as a peculiarity that
the laborers at the forge and those who brought fuel to the engine,
when they began to draw short breath, positively emitted smoke from
their mouth and nostrils.

Among the idlers about the train, most of whom were puffing cigars
which they had lighted at the flame of the crater, I was perplexed to
notice several who, to my certain knowledge, had heretofore set forth
by railroad for the Celestial City. They looked dark, wild, and smoky,
with a singular resemblance, indeed, to the native inhabitants, like
whom, also, they had a disagreeable propensity to ill-natured gibes and
sneers, the habit of which had wrought a settled contortion of their
visages. Having been on speaking terms with one of these persons,—an
indolent, good-for-nothing fellow, who went by the name of
Take-it-easy,—I called him, and inquired what was his business there.

“Did you not start,” said I, “for the Celestial City?”

“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Take-it-easy, carelessly puffing some smoke
into my eyes. “But I heard such bad accounts that I never took pains to
climb the hill on which the city stands. No business doing, no fun
going on, nothing to drink, and no smoking allowed, and a thrumming of
church music from morning till night. I would not stay in such a place
if they offered me house room and living free.”

“But, my good Mr. Take-it-easy,” cried I, “why take up your residence
here, of all places in the world?”

“Oh,” said the loafer, with a grin, “it is very warm hereabouts, and I
meet with plenty of old acquaintances, and altogether the place suits
me. I hope to see you back again some day soon. A pleasant journey to
you.”

While he was speaking the bell of the engine rang, and we dashed away
after dropping a few passengers, but receiving no new ones. Rattling
onward through the Valley, we were dazzled with the fiercely gleaming
gas lamps, as before. But sometimes, in the dark of intense brightness,
grim faces, that bore the aspect and expression of individual sins, or
evil passions, seemed to thrust themselves through the veil of light,
glaring upon us, and stretching forth a great, dusky hand, as if to
impede our progress. I almost thought that they were my own sins that
appalled me there. These were freaks of imagination—nothing more,
certainly-mere delusions, which I ought to be heartily ashamed of; but
all through the Dark Valley I was tormented, and pestered, and
dolefully bewildered with the same kind of waking dreams. The mephitic
gases of that region intoxicate the brain. As the light of natural day,
however, began to struggle with the glow of the lanterns, these vain
imaginations lost their vividness, and finally vanished from the first
ray of sunshine that greeted our escape from the Valley of the Shadow
of Death. Ere we had gone a mile beyond it I could well-nigh have taken
my oath that this whole gloomy passage was a dream.

At the end of the valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where,
in his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strown the
ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims.
These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but into their deserted
cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his
business to seize upon honest travellers and fatten them for his table
with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and
sawdust. He is a German by birth, and is called Giant
Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and
his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge
miscreant that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever
been able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern’s mouth we
caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an
ill-proportioned figure, but considerably more like a heap of fog and
duskiness. He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we
knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.

It was late in the day when the train thundered into the ancient city
of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and
exhibits an epitome of whatever is brilliant, gay, and fascinating
beneath the sun. As I purposed to make a considerable stay here, it
gratified me to learn that there is no longer the want of harmony
between the town’s-people and pilgrims, which impelled the former to
such lamentably mistaken measures as the persecution of Christian and
the fiery martyrdom of Faithful. On the contrary, as the new railroad
brings with it great trade and a constant influx of strangers, the lord
of Vanity Fair is its chief patron, and the capitalists of the city are
among the largest stockholders. Many passengers stop to take their
pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead of going onward to
the Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place that
people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly
contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere
dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the Celestial City lay
but a bare mile beyond the gates of Vanity, they would not be fools
enough to go thither. Without subscribing to these perhaps exaggerated
encomiums, I can truly say that my abode in the city was mainly
agreeable, and my intercourse with the inhabitants productive of much
amusement and instruction.

Being naturally of a serious turn, my attention was directed to the
solid advantages derivable from a residence here, rather than to the
effervescent pleasures which are the grand object with too many
visitants. The Christian reader, if he have had no accounts of the city
later than Bunyan’s time, will be surprised to hear that almost every
street has its church, and that the reverend clergy are nowhere held in
higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve such
honorable estimation; for the maxims of wisdom and virtue which fall
from their lips come from as deep a spiritual source, and tend to as
lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of old. In
justification of this high praise I need only mention the names of the
Rev. Mr. Shallow-deep, the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth, that fine old
clerical character the Rev. Mr. This-today, who expects shortly to
resign his pulpit to the Rev. Mr. That-tomorrow; together with the Rev.
Mr. Bewilderment, the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-spirit, and, last and greatest,
the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are
aided by those of innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various
profundity, in all subjects of human or celestial science, that any man
may acquire an omnigenous erudition without the trouble of even
learning to read. Thus literature is etherealized by assuming for its
medium the human voice; and knowledge, depositing all its heavier
particles, except, doubtless, its gold becomes exhaled into a sound,
which forthwith steals into the ever-open ear of the community. These
ingenious methods constitute a sort of machinery, by which thought and
study are done to every person’s hand without his putting himself to
the slightest inconvenience in the matter. There is another species of
machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality. This
excellent result is effected by societies for all manner of virtuous
purposes, with which a man has merely to connect himself, throwing, as
it were, his quota of virtue into the common stock, and the president
and directors will take care that the aggregate amount be well applied.
All these, and other wonderful improvements in ethics, religion, and
literature, being made plain to my comprehension by the ingenious Mr.
Smooth-it-away, inspired me with a vast admiration of Vanity Fair.

It would fill a volume, in an age of pamphlets, were I to record all my
observations in this great capital of human business and pleasure.
There was an unlimited range of society—the powerful, the wise, the
witty, and the famous in every walk of life; princes, presidents,
poets, generals, artists, actors, and philanthropists,—all making their
own market at the fair, and deeming no price too exorbitant for such
commodities as hit their fancy. It was well worth one’s while, even if
he had no idea of buying or selling, to loiter through the bazaars and
observe the various sorts of traffic that were going forward.

Some of the purchasers, I thought, made very foolish bargains. For
instance, a young man having inherited a splendid fortune, laid out a
considerable portion of it in the purchase of diseases, and finally
spent all the rest for a heavy lot of repentance and a suit of rags. A
very pretty girl bartered a heart as clear as crystal, and which seemed
her most valuable possession, for another jewel of the same kind, but
so worn and defaced as to be utterly worthless. In one shop there were
a great many crowns of laurel and myrtle, which soldiers, authors,
statesmen, and various other people pressed eagerly to buy; some
purchased these paltry wreaths with their lives, others by a toilsome
servitude of years, and many sacrificed whatever was most valuable, yet
finally slunk away without the crown. There was a sort of stock or
scrip, called Conscience, which seemed to be in great demand, and would
purchase almost anything. Indeed, few rich commodities were to be
obtained without paying a heavy sum in this particular stock, and a
man’s business was seldom very lucrative unless he knew precisely when
and how to throw his hoard of conscience into the market. Yet as this
stock was the only thing of permanent value, whoever parted with it was
sure to find himself a loser in the long run. Several of the
speculations were of a questionable character. Occasionally a member of
Congress recruited his pocket by the sale of his constituents; and I
was assured that public officers have often sold their country at very
moderate prices. Thousands sold their happiness for a whim. Gilded
chains were in great demand, and purchased with almost any sacrifice.
In truth, those who desired, according to the old adage, to sell
anything valuable for a song, might find customers all over the Fair;
and there were innumerable messes of pottage, piping hot, for such as
chose to buy them with their birthrights. A few articles, however,
could not be found genuine at Vanity Fair. If a customer wished to
renew his stock of youth the dealers offered him a set of false teeth
and an auburn wig; if he demanded peace of mind, they recommended opium
or a brandy bottle.

Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the Celestial City, were
often exchanged, at very disadvantageous rates, for a few years’ lease
of small, dismal, inconvenient tenements in Vanity Fair. Prince
Beelzebub himself took great interest in this sort of traffic, and
sometimes condescended to meddle with smaller matters. I once had the
pleasure to see him bargaining with a miser for his soul, which, after
much ingenious skirmishing on both sides, his highness succeeded in
obtaining at about the value of sixpence. The prince remarked with a
smile, that he was a loser by the transaction.

Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and
deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants. The
place began to seem like home; the idea of pursuing my travels to the
Celestial City was almost obliterated from my mind. I was reminded of
it, however, by the sight of the same pair of simple pilgrims at whom
we had laughed so heartily when Apollyon puffed smoke and steam into
their faces at the commencement of our journey. There they stood amidst
the densest bustle of Vanity; the dealers offering them their purple
and fine linen and jewels, the men of wit and humor gibing at them, a
pair of buxom ladies ogling them askance, while the benevolent Mr.
Smooth-it-away whispered some of his wisdom at their elbows, and
pointed to a newly-erected temple; but there were these worthy
simpletons, making the scene look wild and monstrous, merely by their
sturdy repudiation of all part in its business or pleasures.

One of them—his name was Stick-to-the-right—perceived in my face, I
suppose, a species of sympathy and almost admiration, which, to my own
great surprise, I could not help feeling for this pragmatic couple. It
prompted him to address me.

“Sir,” inquired he, with a sad, yet mild and kindly voice, “do you call
yourself a pilgrim?”

“Yes,” I replied, “my right to that appellation is indubitable. I am
merely a sojourner here in Vanity Fair, being bound to the Celestial
City by the new railroad.”

“Alas, friend,” rejoined Mr. Stick-to-the-truth, “I do assure you, and
beseech you to receive the truth of my words, that that whole concern
is a bubble. You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live
thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair.
Yea, though you should deem yourself entering the gates of the blessed
city, it will be nothing but a miserable delusion.”

“The Lord of the Celestial City,” began the other pilgrim, whose name
was Mr. Foot-it-to-heaven, “has refused, and will ever refuse, to grant
an act of incorporation for this railroad; and unless that be obtained,
no passenger can ever hope to enter his dominions. Wherefore every man
who buys a ticket must lay his account with losing the purchase money,
which is the value of his own soul.”

“Poh, nonsense!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, taking my arm and leading me
off, “these fellows ought to be indicted for a libel. If the law stood
as it once did in Vanity Fair we should see them grinning through the
iron bars of the prison window.”

This incident made a considerable impression on my mind, and
contributed with other circumstances to indispose me to a permanent
residence in the city of Vanity; although, of course, I was not simple
enough to give up my original plan of gliding along easily and
commodiously by railroad. Still, I grew anxious to be gone. There was
one strange thing that troubled me. Amid the occupations or amusements
of the Fair, nothing was more common than for a person—whether at
feast, theatre, or church, or trafficking for wealth and honors, or
whatever he might be doing, to vanish like a soap bubble, and be never
more seen of his fellows; and so accustomed were the latter to such
little accidents that they went on with their business as quietly as if
nothing had happened. But it was otherwise with me.

Finally, after a pretty long residence at the Fair, I resumed my
journey towards the Celestial City, still with Mr. Smooth-it-away at my
side. At a short distance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we passed the
ancient silver mine, of which Demas was the first discoverer, and which
is now wrought to great advantage, supplying nearly all the coined
currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot’s
wife had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious
travellers have long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets
been punished as rigorously as this poor dame’s were, my yearning for
the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar
change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning to future
pilgrims.

The next remarkable object was a large edifice, constructed of
moss-grown stone, but in a modern and airy style of architecture. The
engine came to a pause in its vicinity, with the usual tremendous
shriek.

“This was formerly the castle of the redoubted giant Despair,” observed
Mr. Smooth-it-away; “but since his death Mr. Flimsy-faith has repaired
it, and keeps an excellent house of entertainment here. It is one of
our stopping-places.”

“It seems but slightly put together,” remarked I, looking at the frail
yet ponderous walls. “I do not envy Mr. Flimsy-faith his habitation.
Some day it will thunder down upon the heads of the occupants.”

“We shall escape at all events,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, “for Apollyon
is putting on the steam again.”

The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delectable Mountains, and
traversed the field where in former ages the blind men wandered and
stumbled among the tombs. One of these ancient tombstones had been
thrust across the track by some malicious person, and gave the train of
cars a terrible jolt. Far up the rugged side of a mountain I perceived
a rusty iron door, half overgrown with bushes and creeping plants, but
with smoke issuing from its crevices.

“Is that,” inquired I, “the very door in the hill-side which the
shepherds assured Christian was a by-way to hell?”

“That was a joke on the part of the shepherds,” said Mr. Smooth-itaway,
with a smile. “It is neither more nor less than the door of a cavern
which they use as a smoke-house for the preparation of mutton hams.”

My recollections of the journey are now, for a little space, dim and
confused, inasmuch as a singular drowsiness here overcame me, owing to
the fact that we were passing over the enchanted ground, the air of
which encourages a disposition to sleep. I awoke, however, as soon as
we crossed the borders of the pleasant land of Beulah. All the
passengers were rubbing their eyes, comparing watches, and
congratulating one another on the prospect of arriving so seasonably at
the journey’s end. The sweet breezes of this happy clime came
refreshingly to our nostrils; we beheld the glimmering gush of silver
fountains, overhung by trees of beautiful foliage and delicious fruit,
which were propagated by grafts from the celestial gardens. Once, as we
dashed onward like a hurricane, there was a flutter of wings and the
bright appearance of an angel in the air, speeding forth on some
heavenly mission. The engine now announced the close vicinity of the
final station-house by one last and horrible scream, in which there
seemed to be distinguishable every kind of wailing and woe, and bitter
fierceness of wrath, all mixed up with the wild laughter of a devil or
a madman. Throughout our journey, at every stopping-place, Apollyon had
exercised his ingenuity in screwing the most abominable sounds out of
the whistle of the steam-engine; but in this closing effort he outdid
himself and created an infernal uproar, which, besides disturbing the
peaceful inhabitants of Beulah, must have sent its discord even through
the celestial gates.

While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our ears we heard an
exulting strain, as if a thousand instruments of music, with height and
depth and sweetness in their tones, at once tender and triumphant, were
struck in unison, to greet the approach of some illustrious hero, who
had fought the good fight and won a glorious victory, and was come to
lay aside his battered arms forever. Looking to ascertain what might be
the occasion of this glad harmony, I perceived, on alighting from the
cars, that a multitude of shining ones had assembled on the other side
of the river, to welcome two poor pilgrims, who were just emerging from
its depths. They were the same whom Apollyon and ourselves had
persecuted with taunts, and gibes, and scalding steam, at the
commencement of our journey—the same whose unworldly aspect and
impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the wild revellers of
Vanity Fair.

“How amazingly well those men have got on,” cried I to Mr.
Smoothit—away. “I wish we were secure of as good a reception.”

“Never fear, never fear!” answered my friend. “Come, make haste; the
ferry boat will be off directly, and in three minutes you will be on
the other side of the river. No doubt you will find coaches to carry
you up to the city gates.”

A steam ferry boat, the last improvement on this important route, lay
at the river side, puffing, snorting, and emitting all those other
disagreeable utterances which betoken the departure to be immediate. I
hurried on board with the rest of the passengers, most of whom were in
great perturbation: some bawling out for their baggage; some tearing
their hair and exclaiming that the boat would explode or sink; some
already pale with the heaving of the stream; some gazing affrighted at
the ugly aspect of the steersman; and some still dizzy with the
slumberous influences of the Enchanted Ground. Looking back to the
shore, I was amazed to discern Mr. Smooth-it-away waving his hand in
token of farewell.

“Don’t you go over to the Celestial City?” exclaimed I.

“Oh, no!” answered he with a queer smile, and that same disagreeable
contortion of visage which I had remarked in the inhabitants of the
Dark Valley. “Oh, no! I have come thus far only for the sake of your
pleasant company. Good-by! We shall meet again.”

And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-away laugh outright, in
the midst of which cachinnation a smoke-wreath issued from his mouth
and nostrils, while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of either eye,
proving indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent
fiend! To deny the existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures
raging within his breast. I rushed to the side of the boat, intending
to fling myself on shore; but the wheels, as they began their
revolutions, threw a dash of spray over me so cold—so deadly cold, with
the chill that will never leave those waters until Death be drowned in
his own river—that with a shiver and a heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven
it was a Dream!




THE PROCESSION OF LIFE


Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. All of us
have our places, and are to move onward under the direction of the
Chief Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the invariably
mistaken principles on which the deputy marshals seek to arrange this
immense concourse of people, so much more numerous than those that
train their interminable length through streets and highways in times
of political excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory
of man or even the record of history, and has hitherto been very little
modified by the innate sense of something wrong, and the dim perception
of better methods, that have disquieted all the ages through which the
procession has taken its march. Its members are classified by the
merest external circumstances, and thus are more certain to be thrown
out of their true positions than if no principle of arrangement were
attempted. In one part of the procession we see men of landed estate or
moneyed capital gravely keeping each other company, for the
preposterous reason that they chance to have a similar standing in the
tax-gatherer’s book. Trades and professions march together with
scarcely a more real bond of union. In this manner, it cannot be
denied, people are disentangled from the mass and separated into
various classes according to certain apparent relations; all have some
artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn
to consider as a genuine characteristic. Fixing our attention on such
outside shows of similarity or difference, we lose sight of those
realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or Providence has constituted
for every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one great office of human
wisdom to classify him. When the mind has once accustomed itself to a
proper arrangement of the Procession of Life, or a true classification
of society, even though merely speculative, there is thenceforth a
satisfaction which pretty well suffices for itself without the aid of
any actual reformation in the order of march.

For instance, assuming to myself the power of marshalling the aforesaid
procession, I direct a trumpeter to send forth a blast loud enough to
be heard from hence to China; and a herald, with world-pervading voice,
to make proclamation for a certain class of mortals to take their
places. What shall be their principle of union? After all, an external
one, in comparison with many that might be found, yet far more real
than those which the world has selected for a similar purpose. Let all
who are afflicted with like physical diseases form themselves into
ranks.

Our first attempt at classification is not very successful. It may
gratify the pride of aristocracy to reflect that disease, more than any
other circumstance of human life, pays due observance to the
distinctions which rank and wealth, and poverty and lowliness, have
established among mankind. Some maladies are rich and precious, and
only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
Of this kind is the gout, which serves as a bond of brotherhood to the
purple-visaged gentry, who obey the herald’s voice, and painfully
hobble from all civilized regions of the globe to take their post in
the grand procession. In mercy to their toes, let us hope that the
march may not be long. The Dyspeptics, too, are people of good standing
in the world. For them the earliest salmon is caught in our eastern
rivers, and the shy woodcock stains the dry leaves with his blood in
his remotest haunts, and the turtle comes from the far Pacific Islands
to be gobbled up in soup. They can afford to flavor all their dishes
with indolence, which, in spite of the general opinion, is a sauce more
exquisitely piquant than appetite won by exercise. Apoplexy is another
highly respectable disease. We will rank together all who have the
symptom of dizziness in the brain, and as fast as any drop by the way
supply their places with new members of the board of aldermen.

On the other hand, here come whole tribes of people whose physical
lives are but a deteriorated variety of life, and themselves a meaner
species of mankind; so sad an effect has been wrought by the tainted
breath of cities, scanty and unwholesome food, destructive modes of
labor, and the lack of those moral supports that might partially have
counteracted such bad influences. Behold here a train of house
painters, all afflicted with a peculiar sort of colic. Next in place we
will marshal those workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal
disorder into their lungs with the impalpable dust of steel. Tailors
and shoemakers, being sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
part of the procession and march under similar banners of disease; but
among them we may observe here and there a sickly student, who has left
his health between the leaves of classic volumes; and clerks, likewise,
who have caught their deaths on high official stools; and men of genius
too, who have written sheet after sheet with pens dipped in their
heart’s blood. These are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But
what is this cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear
with the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are
seamstresses, who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the
service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now it is
almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud. Consumption
points their place in the procession. With their sad sisterhood are
intermingled many youthful maidens who have sickened in aristocratic
mansions, and for whose aid science has unavailingly searched its
volumes, and whom breathless love has watched. In our ranks the rich
maiden and the poor seamstress may walk arm in arm. We might find
innumerable other instances, where the bond of mutual disease—not to
speak of nation-sweeping pestilence—embraces high and low, and makes
the king a brother of the clown. But it is not hard to own that disease
is the natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the color of a
fever flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their own physical
infirmities, and display their symptoms as the badges of high station.
All things considered, these are as proper subjects of human pride as
any relations of human rank that men can fix upon.

Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and herald, with thy voice
of might, shout forth another summons that shall reach the old baronial
castles of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our western wilderness! What
class is next to take its place in the procession of mortal life? Let
it be those whom the gifts of intellect have united in a noble
brotherhood.

Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional distinctions of
society melt away like a vapor when we would grasp it with the hand.
Were Byron now alive, and Burns, the first would come from his
ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited
honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who
grew immortal while he stooped behind his plough. These are gone; but
the hall, the farmer’s fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace, the
counting-room, the workshop, the village, the city, life’s high places
and low ones, may all produce their poets, whom a common temperament
pervades like an electric sympathy. Peer or ploughman, we will muster
them pair by pair and shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in its most
artificial state, consents to this arrangement. These factory girls
from Lowell shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and
literary circles, the bluebells in fashion’s nosegay, the Sapphos, and
Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of intellect bring
together as strange companies. Silk-gowned professor of languages, give
your arm to this sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the
conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the anvil. All varieties
of human speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man.
Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank they
come, who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway a
people—Nature’s generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with them also
the deep philosophers who think the thought in one generation that is
to revolutionize society in the next. With the hereditary legislator in
whom eloquence is a far-descended attainment—a rich echo repeated by
powerful voices from Cicero downward—we will match some wondrous
backwoodsman, who has caught a wild power of language from the breeze
among his native forest boughs. But we may safely leave these brethren
and sisterhood to settle their own congenialities. Our ordinary
distinctions become so trifling, so impalpable, so ridiculously
visionary, in comparison with a classification founded on truth, that
all talk about the matter is immediately a common place.

Yet the longer I reflect the less am I satisfied with the idea of
forming a separate class of mankind on the basis of high intellectual
power. At best it is but a higher development of innate gifts common to
all. Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius appears deepest and truest
excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws
out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is
profoundly, though unutterably, conscious. Therefore, though we suffer
the brotherhood of intellect to march onward together, it may be
doubted whether their peculiar relation will not begin to vanish as
soon as the procession shall have passed beyond the circle of this
present world. But we do not classify for eternity.

And next, let the trumpet pour forth a funereal wail, and the herald’s
voice give breath in one vast cry to all the groans and grievous
utterances that are audible throughout the earth. We appeal now to the
sacred bond of sorrow, and summon the great multitude who labor under
similar afflictions to take their places in the march.

How many a heart that would have been insensible to any other call has
responded to the doleful accents of that voice! It has gone far and
wide, and high and low, and left scarcely a mortal roof unvisited.
Indeed, the principle is only too universal for our purpose, and,
unless we limit it, will quite break up our classification of mankind,
and convert the whole procession into a funeral train. We will
therefore be at some pains to discriminate. Here comes a lonely rich
man: he has built a noble fabric for his dwelling-house, with a front
of stately architecture and marble floors and doors of precious woods;
the whole structure is as beautiful as a dream and as substantial as
the native rock. But the visionary shapes of a long posterity, for
whose home this mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness since
the death of the founder’s only son. The rich man gives a glance at his
sable garb in one of the splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and
descending a flight of lofty steps instinctively offers his arm to
yonder poverty stricken widow in the rusty black bonnet, and with a
check apron over her patched gown. The sailor boy, who was her sole
earthly stay, was washed overboard in a late tempest. This couple from
the palace and the almshouse are but the types of thousands more who
represent the dark tragedy of life and seldom quarrel for the upper
parts. Grief is such a leveller, with its own dignity and its own
humility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and the monarch,
will waive their pretensions to external rank without the officiousness
of interference on our part. If pride—the influence of the world’s
false distinctions—remain in the heart, then sorrow lacks the
earnestness which makes it holy and reverend. It loses its reality and
becomes a miserable shadow. On this ground we have an opportunity to
assign over multitudes who would willingly claim places here to other
parts of the procession. If the mourner have anything dearer than his
grief he must seek his true position elsewhere. There are so many
unsubstantial sorrows which the necessity of our mortal state begets on
idleness, that an observer, casting aside sentiment, is sometimes led
to question whether there be any real woe, except absolute physical
suffering and the loss of closest friends. A crowd who exhibit what
they deem to be broken hearts—and among them many lovelorn maids and
bachelors, and men of disappointed ambition in arts or politics, and
the poor who were once rich, or who have sought to be rich in vain—the
great majority of these may ask admittance into some other fraternity.
There is no room here. Perhaps we may institute a separate class where
such unfortunates will naturally fall into the procession. Meanwhile
let them stand aside and patiently await their time.

If our trumpeter can borrow a note from the doomsday trumpet blast, let
him sound it now. The dread alarum should make the earth quake to its
centre, for the herald is about to address mankind with a summons to
which even the purest mortal may be sensible of some faint responding
echo in his breast. In many bosoms it will awaken a still small voice
more terrible than its own reverberating uproar.

The hideous appeal has swept around the globe. Come, all ye guilty
ones, and rank yourselves in accordance with the brotherhood of crime.
This, indeed, is an awful summons. I almost tremble to look at the
strange partnerships that begin to be formed, reluctantly, but by the
invincible necessity of like to like in this part of the procession. A
forger from the state prison seizes the arm of a distinguished
financier. How indignantly does the latter plead his fair reputation
upon ’Change, and insist that his operations, by their magnificence of
scope, were removed into quite another sphere of morality than those of
his pitiful companion! But let him cut the connection if he can. Here
comes a murderer with his clanking chains, and pairs himself—horrible
to tell—with as pure and upright a man, in all observable respects, as
ever partook of the consecrated bread and wine. He is one of those,
perchance the most hopeless of all sinners, who practise such an
exemplary system of outward duties, that even a deadly crime may be
hidden from their own sight and remembrance, under this unreal
frostwork. Yet he now finds his place. Why do that pair of flaunting
girls, with the pert, affected laugh and the sly leer at the
by-standers, intrude themselves into the same rank with yonder decorous
matron, and that somewhat prudish maiden? Surely these poor creatures,
born to vice as their sole and natural inheritance, can be no fit
associates for women who have been guarded round about by all the
proprieties of domestic life, and who could not err unless they first
created the opportunity. Oh no; it must be merely the impertinence of
those unblushing hussies; and we can only wonder how such respectable
ladies should have responded to a summons that was not meant for them.

We shall make short work of this miserable class, each member of which
is entitled to grasp any other member’s hand, by that vile degradation
wherein guilty error has buried all alike. The foul fiend to whom it
properly belongs must relieve us of our loathsome task. Let the bond
servants of sin pass on. But neither man nor woman, in whom good
predominates, will smile or sneer, nor bid the Rogues’ March be played,
in derision of their array. Feeling within their breasts a shuddering
sympathy, which at least gives token of the sin that might have been,
they will thank God for any place in the grand procession of human
existence, save among those most wretched ones. Many, however, will be
astonished at the fatal impulse that drags them thitherward. Nothing is
more remarkable than the various deceptions by which guilt conceals
itself from the perpetrator’s conscience, and oftenest, perhaps, by the
splendor of its garments. Statesmen, rulers, generals, and all men who
act over an extensive sphere, are most liable to be deluded in this
way; they commit wrong, devastation, and murder, on so grand a scale,
that it impresses them as speculative rather than actual; but in our
procession we find them linked in detestable conjunction with the
meanest criminals whose deeds have the vulgarity of petty details. Here
the effect of circumstance and accident is done away, and a man finds
his rank according to the spirit of his crime, in whatever shape it may
have been developed.

We have called the Evil; now let us call the Good. The trumpet’s brazen
throat should pour heavenly music over the earth, and the herald’s
voice go forth with the sweetness of an angel’s accents, as if to
summon each upright man to his reward. But how is this? Does none
answer to the call? Not one: for the just, the pure, the true, and all
who might most worthily obey it, shrink sadly back, as most conscious
of error and imperfection. Then let the summons be to those whose
pervading principle is Love. This classification will embrace all the
truly good, and none in whose souls there exists not something that may
expand itself into a heaven, both of well-doing and felicity.

The first that presents himself is a man of wealth, who has bequeathed
the bulk of his property to a hospital; his ghost, methinks, would have
a better right here than his living body. But here they come, the
genuine benefactors of their race. Some have wandered about the earth
with pictures of bliss in their imagination, and with hearts that
shrank sensitively from the idea of pain and woe, yet have studied all
varieties of misery that human nature can endure. The prison, the
insane asylum, the squalid chamber of the almshouse, the manufactory
where the demon of machinery annihilates the human soul, and the cotton
field where God’s image becomes a beast of burden; to these and every
other scene where man wrongs or neglects his brother, the apostles of
humanity have penetrated. This missionary, black with India’s burning
sunshine, shall give his arm to a pale-faced brother who has made
himself familiar with the infected alleys and loathsome haunts of vice
in one of our own cities. The generous founder of a college shall be
the partner of a maiden lady of narrow substance, one of whose good
deeds it has been to gather a little school of orphan children. If the
mighty merchant whose benefactions are reckoned by thousands of dollars
deem himself worthy, let him join the procession with her whose love
has proved itself by watchings at the sick-bed, and all those lowly
offices which bring her into actual contact with disease and
wretchedness. And with those whose impulses have guided them to
benevolent actions, we will rank others to whom Providence has assigned
a different tendency and different powers. Men who have spent their
lives in generous and holy contemplation for the human race; those who,
by a certain heavenliness of spirit, have purified the atmosphere
around them, and thus supplied a medium in which good and high things
may be projected and performed—give to these a lofty place among the
benefactors of mankind, although no deed, such as the world calls
deeds, may be recorded of them. There are some individuals of whom we
cannot conceive it proper that they should apply their hands to any
earthly instrument, or work out any definite act; and others, perhaps
not less high, to whom it is an essential attribute to labor in body as
well as spirit for the welfare of their brethren. Thus, if we find a
spiritual sage whose unseen, inestimable influence has exalted the
moral standard of mankind, we will choose for his companion some poor
laborer who has wrought for love in the potato field of a neighbor
poorer than himself.

We have summoned this various multitude—and, to the credit of our
nature, it is a large one—on the principle of Love. It is singular,
nevertheless, to remark the shyness that exists among many members of
the present class, all of whom we might expect to recognize one another
by the freemasonry of mutual goodness, and to embrace like brethren,
giving God thanks for such various specimens of human excellence. But
it is far otherwise. Each sect surrounds its own righteousness with a
hedge of thorns. It is difficult for the good Christian to acknowledge
the good Pagan; almost impossible for the good Orthodox to grasp the
hand of the good Unitarian, leaving to their Creator to settle the
matters in dispute, and giving their mutual efforts strongly and
trustingly to whatever right thing is too evident to be mistaken. Then
again, though the heart be large, yet the mind is often of such
moderate dimensions as to be exclusively filled up with one idea. When
a good man has long devoted himself to a particular kind of
beneficence—to one species of reform—he is apt to become narrowed into
the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to fancy that there is no
other good to be done on earth but that self-same good to which he has
put his hand, and in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions.
All else is worthless. His scheme must be wrought out by the united
strength of the whole world’s stock of love, or the world is no longer
worthy of a position in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being
the rich grape juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an
intoxicating quality, when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect,
and often, as it were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups. For
such reasons, strange to say, it is harder to contrive a friendly
arrangement of these brethren of love and righteousness, in the
procession of life, than to unite even the wicked, who, indeed, are
chained together by their crimes. The fact is too preposterous for
tears, too lugubrious for laughter.

But, let good men push and elbow one another as they may during their
earthly march, all will be peace among them when the honorable array of
their procession shall tread on heavenly ground. There they will
doubtless find that they have been working each for the other’s cause,
and that every well-delivered stroke, which, with an honest purpose any
mortal struck, even for a narrow object, was indeed stricken for the
universal cause of good. Their own view may be bounded by country,
creed, profession, the diversities of individual character—but above
them all is the breadth of Providence. How many who have deemed
themselves antagonists will smile hereafter, when they look back upon
the world’s wide harvest field, and perceive that, in unconscious
brotherhood, they were helping to bind the selfsame sheaf!

But, come! The sun is hastening westward, while the march of human
life, that never paused before, is delayed by our attempt to rearrange
its order. It is desirable to find some comprehensive principle, that
shall render our task easier by bringing thousands into the ranks where
hitherto we have brought one. Therefore let the trumpet, if possible,
split its brazen throat with a louder note than ever, and the herald
summon all mortals, who, from whatever cause, have lost, or never
found, their proper places in the wold.

Obedient to this call, a great multitude come together, most of them
with a listless gait, betokening weariness of soul, yet with a gleam of
satisfaction in their faces, at a prospect of at length reaching those
positions which, hitherto, they have vainly sought. But here will be
another disappointment; for we can attempt no more than merely to
associate in one fraternity all who are afflicted with the same vague
trouble. Some great mistake in life is the chief condition of
admittance into this class. Here are members of the learned
professions, whom Providence endowed with special gifts for the plough,
the forge, and the wheelbarrow, or for the routine of unintellectual
business. We will assign to them, as partners in the march, those lowly
laborers and handicraftsmen, who have pined, as with a dying thirst,
after the unattainable fountains of knowledge. The latter have lost
less than their companions; yet more, because they deem it infinite.
Perchance the two species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here
are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and men of war who
should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be ranked here whom some
freak of Nature, making game of her poor children, had imbued with the
confidence of genius and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no
corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied
with the faculty of expression, or any of that earthly machinery by
which ethereal endowments must be manifested to mankind. All these,
therefore, are melancholy laughing-stocks. Next, here are honest and
well intentioned persons, who by a want of tact—by inaccurate
perceptions—by a distorting imagination—have been kept continually at
cross purposes with the world and bewildered upon the path of life. Let
us see if they can confine themselves within the line of our
procession. In this class, likewise, we must assign places to those who
have encountered that worst of ill success, a higher fortune than their
abilities could vindicate; writers, actors, painters, the pets of a
day, but whose laurels wither unrenewed amid their hoary hair;
politicians, whom some malicious contingency of affairs has thrust into
conspicuous station, where, while the world stands gazing at them, the
dreary consciousness of imbecility makes them curse their birth hour.
To such men, we give for a companion him whose rare talents, which
perhaps require a Revolution for their exercise, are buried in the tomb
of sluggish circumstances.

Not far from these, we must find room for one whose success has been of
the wrong kind; the man who should have lingered in the cloisters of a
university, digging new treasures out of the Herculaneum of antique
lore, diffusing depth and accuracy of literature throughout his
country, and thus making for himself a great and quiet fame. But the
outward tendencies around him have proved too powerful for his inward
nature, and have drawn him into the arena of political tumult, there to
contend at disadvantage, whether front to front, or side by side, with
the brawny giants of actual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for
brawling parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the Union; a
governor of his native state; an ambassador to the courts of kings or
queens; and the world may deem him a man of happy stars. But not so the
wise; and not so himself, when he looks through his experience, and
sighs to miss that fitness, the one invaluable touch which makes all
things true and real. So much achieved, yet how abortive is his life!
Whom shall we choose for his companion? Some weak framed blacksmith,
perhaps, whose delicacy of muscle might have suited a tailor’s
shopboard better than the anvil.

Shall we bid the trumpet sound again? It is hardly worth the while.
There remain a few idle men of fortune, tavern and grog-shop loungers,
lazzaroni, old bachelors, decaying maidens, and people of crooked
intellect or temper, all of whom may find their like, or some tolerable
approach to it, in the plentiful diversity of our latter class. There
too, as his ultimate destiny, must we rank the dreamer, who, all his
life long, has cherished the idea that he was peculiarly apt for
something, but never could determine what it was; and there the most
unfortunate of men, whose purpose it has been to enjoy life’s
pleasures, but to avoid a manful struggle with its toil and sorrow. The
remainder, if any, may connect themselves with whatever rank of the
procession they shall find best adapted to their tastes and
consciences. The worst possible fate would be to remain behind,
shivering in the solitude of time, while all the world is on the move
towards eternity. Our attempt to classify society is now complete. The
result may be anything but perfect; yet better—to give it the very
lowest praise—than the antique rule of the herald’s office, or the
modern one of the tax-gatherer, whereby the accidents and superficial
attributes with which the real nature of individuals has least to do,
are acted upon as the deepest characteristics of mankind. Our task is
done! Now let the grand procession move!

Yet pause a while! We had forgotten the Chief Marshal.

Hark! That world-wide swell of solemn music, with the clang of a mighty
bell breaking forth through its regulated uproar, announces his
approach. He comes; a severe, sedate, immovable, dark rider, waving his
truncheon of universal sway, as he passes along the lengthened line, on
the pale horse of the Revelation. It is Death! Who else could assume
the guidance of a procession that comprehends all humanity? And if
some, among these many millions, should deem themselves classed amiss,
yet let them take to their hearts the comfortable truth that Death
levels us all into one great brotherhood, and that another state of
being will surely rectify the wrong of this. Then breathe thy wail upon
the earth’s wailing wind, thou band of melancholy music, made up of
every sigh that the human heart, unsatisfied, has uttered! There is yet
triumph in thy tones. And now we move! Beggars in their rags, and Kings
trailing the regal purple in the dust; the Warrior’s gleaming helmet;
the Priest in his sable robe; the hoary Grandsire, who has run life’s
circle and come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy with his golden
curls, frisking along the march; the Artisan’s stuff jacket; the
Noble’s star-decorated coat;—the whole presenting a motley spectacle,
yet with a dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward, onward, into that
dimness where the lights of Time which have blazed along the
procession, are flickering in their sockets! And whither! We know not;
and Death, hitherto our leader, deserts us by the wayside, as the tramp
of our innumerable footsteps echoes beyond his sphere. He knows not,
more than we, our destined goal. But God, who made us, knows, and will
not leave us on our toilsome and doubtful march, either to wander in
infinite uncertainty, or perish by the way!




FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND


“Dickon,” cried Mother Rigby, “a coal for my pipe!”

The pipe was in the old dame’s mouth when she said these words. She had
thrust it there after filling it with tobacco, but without stooping to
light it at the hearth, where indeed there was no appearance of a fire
having been kindled that morning. Forthwith, however, as soon as the
order was given, there was an intense red glow out of the bowl of the
pipe, and a whiff of smoke came from Mother Rigby’s lips. Whence the
coal came, and how brought thither by an invisible hand, I have never
been able to discover.

“Good!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a nod of her head. “Thank ye, Dickon!
And now for making this scarecrow. Be within call, Dickon, in case I
need you again.”

The good woman had risen thus early (for as yet it was scarcely
sunrise) in order to set about making a scarecrow, which she intended
to put in the middle of her corn-patch. It was now the latter week of
May, and the crows and blackbirds had already discovered the little,
green, rolledup leaf of the Indian corn just peeping out of the soil.
She was determined, therefore, to contrive as lifelike a scarecrow as
ever was seen, and to finish it immediately, from top to toe, so that
it should begin its sentinel’s duty that very morning. Now Mother Rigby
(as everybody must have heard) was one of the most cunning and potent
witches in New England, and might, with very little trouble, have made
a scarecrow ugly enough to frighten the minister himself. But on this
occasion, as she had awakened in an uncommonly pleasant humor, and was
further dulcified by her pipe tobacco, she resolved to produce
something fine, beautiful, and splendid, rather than hideous and
horrible.

“I don’t want to set up a hobgoblin in my own corn-patch, and almost at
my own doorstep,” said Mother Rigby to herself, puffing out a whiff of
smoke; “I could do it if I pleased, but I’m tired of doing marvellous
things, and so I’ll keep within the bounds of every-day business just
for variety’s sake. Besides, there is no use in scaring the little
children for a mile roundabout, though ’tis true I’m a witch.”

It was settled, therefore, in her own mind, that the scarecrow should
represent a fine gentleman of the period, so far as the materials at
hand would allow. Perhaps it may be as well to enumerate the chief of
the articles that went to the composition of this figure.

The most important item of all, probably, although it made so little
show, was a certain broomstick, on which Mother Rigby had taken many an
airy gallop at midnight, and which now served the scarecrow by way of a
spinal column, or, as the unlearned phrase it, a backbone. One of its
arms was a disabled flail which used to be wielded by Goodman Rigby,
before his spouse worried him out of this troublesome world; the other,
if I mistake not, was composed of the pudding stick and a broken rung
of a chair, tied loosely together at the elbow. As for its legs, the
right was a hoe handle, and the left an undistinguished and
miscellaneous stick from the woodpile. Its lungs, stomach, and other
affairs of that kind were nothing better than a meal bag stuffed with
straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton and entire corporosity of the
scarecrow, with the exception of its head; and this was admirably
supplied by a somewhat withered and shrivelled pumpkin, in which Mother
Rigby cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth, leaving a
bluish-colored knob in the middle to pass for a nose. It was really
quite a respectable face.

“I’ve seen worse ones on human shoulders, at any rate,” said Mother
Rigby. “And many a fine gentleman has a pumpkin head, as well as my
scarecrow.”

But the clothes, in this case, were to be the making of the man. So the
good old woman took down from a peg an ancient plum-colored coat of
London make, and with relics of embroidery on its seams, cuffs,
pocket-flaps, and button-holes, but lamentably worn and faded, patched
at the elbows, tattered at the skirts, and threadbare all over. On the
left breast was a round hole, whence either a star of nobility had been
rent away, or else the hot heart of some former wearer had scorched it
through and through. The neighbors said that this rich garment belonged
to the Black Man’s wardrobe, and that he kept it at Mother Rigby’s
cottage for the convenience of slipping it on whenever he wished to
make a grand appearance at the governor’s table. To match the coat
there was a velvet waistcoat of very ample size, and formerly
embroidered with foliage that had been as brightly golden as the maple
leaves in October, but which had now quite vanished out of the
substance of the velvet. Next came a pair of scarlet breeches, once
worn by the French governor of Louisbourg, and the knees of which had
touched the lower step of the throne of Louis le Grand. The Frenchman
had given these small-clothes to an Indian powwow, who parted with them
to the old witch for a gill of strong waters, at one of their dances in
the forest. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings
and put them on the figure’s legs, where they showed as unsubstantial
as a dream, with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself
miserably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead
husband’s wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin, and surmounted the
whole with a dusty three-cornered hat, in which was stuck the longest
tail feather of a rooster.

Then the old dame stood the figure up in a corner of her cottage and
chuckled to behold its yellow semblance of a visage, with its nobby
little nose thrust into the air. It had a strangely self-satisfied
aspect, and seemed to say, “Come look at me!”

“And you are well worth looking at, that’s a fact!” quoth Mother Rigby,
in admiration at her own handiwork. “I’ve made many a puppet since I’ve
been a witch, but methinks this is the finest of them all. ’Tis almost
too good for a scarecrow. And, by the by, I’ll just fill a fresh pipe
of tobacco and then take him out to the corn-patch.”

While filling her pipe the old woman continued to gaze with almost
motherly affection at the figure in the corner. To say the truth,
whether it were chance, or skill, or downright witchcraft, there was
something wonderfully human in this ridiculous shape, bedizened with
its tattered finery; and as for the countenance, it appeared to shrivel
its yellow surface into a grin—a funny kind of expression betwixt scorn
and merriment, as if it understood itself to be a jest at mankind. The
more Mother Rigby looked the better she was pleased.

“Dickon,” cried she sharply, “another coal for my pipe!”

Hardly had she spoken, than, just as before, there was a red-glowing
coal on the top of the tobacco. She drew in a long whiff and puffed it
forth again into the bar of morning sunshine which struggled through
the one dusty pane of her cottage window. Mother Rigby always liked to
flavor her pipe with a coal of fire from the particular chimney corner
whence this had been brought. But where that chimney corner might be,
or who brought the coal from it,—further than that the invisible
messenger seemed to respond to the name of Dickon,—I cannot tell.

“That puppet yonder,” thought Mother Rigby, still with her eyes fixed
on the scarecrow, “is too good a piece of work to stand all summer in a
corn-patch, frightening away the crows and blackbirds. He’s capable of
better things. Why, I’ve danced with a worse one, when partners
happened to be scarce, at our witch meetings in the forest! What if I
should let him take his chance among the other men of straw and empty
fellows who go bustling about the world?”

The old witch took three or four more whiffs of her pipe and smiled.

“He’ll meet plenty of his brethren at every street corner!” continued
she. “Well; I didn’t mean to dabble in witchcraft to-day, further than
the lighting of my pipe, but a witch I am, and a witch I’m likely to
be, and there’s no use trying to shirk it. I’ll make a man of my
scarecrow, were it only for the joke’s sake!”

While muttering these words, Mother Rigby took the pipe from her own
mouth and thrust it into the crevice which represented the same feature
in the pumpkin visage of the scarecrow.

“Puff, darling, puff!” said she. “Puff away, my fine fellow! your life
depends on it!”

This was a strange exhortation, undoubtedly, to be addressed to a mere
thing of sticks, straw, and old clothes, with nothing better than a
shrivelled pumpkin for a head,—as we know to have been the scarecrow’s
case. Nevertheless, as we must carefully hold in remembrance, Mother
Rigby was a witch of singular power and dexterity; and, keeping this
fact duly before our minds, we shall see nothing beyond credibility in
the remarkable incidents of our story. Indeed, the great difficulty
will be at once got over, if we can only bring ourselves to believe
that, as soon as the old dame bade him puff, there came a whiff of
smoke from the scarecrow’s mouth. It was the very feeblest of whiffs,
to be sure; but it was followed by another and another, each more
decided than the preceding one.

“Puff away, my pet! puff away, my pretty one!” Mother Rigby kept
repeating, with her pleasantest smile. “It is the breath of life to ye;
and that you may take my word for.”

Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched. There must have been a
spell either in the tobacco or in the fiercely-glowing coal that so
mysteriously burned on top of it, or in the pungently-aromatic smoke
which exhaled from the kindled weed. The figure, after a few doubtful
attempts at length blew forth a volley of smoke extending all the way
from the obscure corner into the bar of sunshine. There it eddied and
melted away among the motes of dust. It seemed a convulsive effort; for
the two or three next whiffs were fainter, although the coal still
glowed and threw a gleam over the scarecrow’s visage. The old witch
clapped her skinny hands together, and smiled encouragingly upon her
handiwork. She saw that the charm worked well. The shrivelled, yellow
face, which heretofore had been no face at all, had already a thin,
fantastic haze, as it were of human likeness, shifting to and fro
across it; sometimes vanishing entirely, but growing more perceptible
than ever with the next whiff from the pipe. The whole figure, in like
manner, assumed a show of life, such as we impart to ill-defined shapes
among the clouds, and half deceive ourselves with the pastime of our
own fancy.

If we must needs pry closely into the matter, it may be doubted whether
there was any real change, after all, in the sordid, wornout worthless,
and ill-jointed substance of the scarecrow; but merely a spectral
illusion, and a cunning effect of light and shade so colored and
contrived as to delude the eyes of most men. The miracles of witchcraft
seem always to have had a very shallow subtlety; and, at least, if the
above explanation do not hit the truth of the process, I can suggest no
better.

“Well puffed, my pretty lad!” still cried old Mother Rigby. “Come,
another good stout whiff, and let it be with might and main. Puff for
thy life, I tell thee! Puff out of the very bottom of thy heart, if any
heart thou hast, or any bottom to it! Well done, again! Thou didst suck
in that mouthful as if for the pure love of it.”

And then the witch beckoned to the scarecrow, throwing so much magnetic
potency into her gesture that it seemed as if it must inevitably be
obeyed, like the mystic call of the loadstone when it summons the iron.

“Why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one?” said she. “Step forth! Thou
hast the world before thee!”

Upon my word, if the legend were not one which I heard on my
grandmother’s knee, and which had established its place among things
credible before my childish judgment could analyze its probability, I
question whether I should have the face to tell it now.

In obedience to Mother Rigby’s word, and extending its arm as if to
reach her outstretched hand, the figure made a step forward—a kind of
hitch and jerk, however, rather than a step—then tottered and almost
lost its balance. What could the witch expect? It was nothing, after
all, but a scarecrow stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed old
beldam scowled, and beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so
forcibly at this poor combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and
ragged garments, that it was compelled to show itself a man, in spite
of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There
it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the
thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was
evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered,
good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap
upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall
I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the
scarecrow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abortive characters,
composed of heterogeneous materials, used for the thousandth time, and
never worth using, with which romance writers (and myself, no doubt,
among the rest) have so overpeopled the world of fiction.

But the fierce old hag began to get angry and show a glimpse of her
diabolic nature (like a snake’s head, peeping with a hiss out of her
bosom), at this pusillanimous behavior of the thing which she had taken
the trouble to put together.

“Puff away, wretch!” cried she, wrathfully. “Puff, puff, puff, thou
thing of straw and emptiness! thou rag or two! thou meal bag! thou
pumpkin head! thou nothing! Where shall I find a name vile enough to
call thee by? Puff, I say, and suck in thy fantastic life with the
smoke! else I snatch the pipe from thy mouth and hurl thee where that
red coal came from.”

Thus threatened, the unhappy scarecrow had nothing for it but to puff
away for dear life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself lustily
to the pipe, and sent forth such abundant volleys of tobacco smoke that
the small cottage kitchen became all vaporous. The one sunbeam
struggled mistily through, and could but imperfectly define the image
of the cracked and dusty window pane on the opposite wall. Mother
Rigby, meanwhile, with one brown arm akimbo and the other stretched
towards the figure, loomed grimly amid the obscurity with such port and
expression as when she was wont to heave a ponderous nightmare on her
victims and stand at the bedside to enjoy their agony. In fear and
trembling did this poor scarecrow puff. But its efforts, it must be
acknowledged, served an excellent purpose; for, with each successive
whiff, the figure lost more and more of its dizzy and perplexing
tenuity and seemed to take denser substance. Its very garments,
moreover, partook of the magical change, and shone with the gloss of
novelty and glistened with the skilfully embroidered gold that had long
ago been rent away. And, half revealed among the smoke, a yellow visage
bent its lustreless eyes on Mother Rigby.

At last the old witch clinched her fist and shook it at the figure. Not
that she was positively angry, but merely acting on the
principle—perhaps untrue, or not the only truth, though as high a one
as Mother Rigby could be expected to attain—that feeble and torpid
natures, being incapable of better inspiration, must be stirred up by
fear. But here was the crisis. Should she fail in what she now sought
to effect, it was her ruthless purpose to scatter the miserable
simulacre into its original elements.

“Thou hast a man’s aspect,” said she, sternly. “Have also the echo and
mockery of a voice! I bid thee speak!”

The scarecrow gasped, struggled, and at length emitted a murmur, which
was so incorporated with its smoky breath that you could scarcely tell
whether it were indeed a voice or only a whiff of tobacco. Some
narrators of this legend hold the opinion that Mother Rigby’s
conjurations and the fierceness of her will had compelled a familiar
spirit into the figure, and that the voice was his.

“Mother,” mumbled the poor stifled voice, “be not so awful with me! I
would fain speak; but being without wits, what can I say?”

“Thou canst speak, darling, canst thou?” cried Mother Rigby, relaxing
her grim countenance into a smile. “And what shalt thou say, quoth-a!
Say, indeed! Art thou of the brotherhood of the empty skull, and
demandest of me what thou shalt say? Thou shalt say a thousand things,
and saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said
nothing! Be not afraid, I tell thee! When thou comest into the world
(whither I purpose sending thee forthwith) thou shalt not lack the
wherewithal to talk. Talk! Why, thou shall babble like a mill-stream,
if thou wilt. Thou hast brains enough for that, I trow!”

“At your service, mother,” responded the figure.

“And that was well said, my pretty one,” answered Mother Rigby. “Then
thou speakest like thyself, and meant nothing. Thou shalt have a
hundred such set phrases, and five hundred to the boot of them. And
now, darling, I have taken so much pains with thee and thou art so
beautiful, that, by my troth, I love thee better than any witch’s
puppet in the world; and I’ve made them of all sorts—clay, wax, straw,
sticks, night fog, morning mist, sea foam, and chimney smoke. But thou
art the very best. So give heed to what I say.”

“Yes, kind mother,” said the figure, “with all my heart!”

“With all thy heart!” cried the old witch, setting her hands to her
sides and laughing loudly. “Thou hast such a pretty way of speaking.
With all thy heart! And thou didst put thy hand to the left side of thy
waistcoat as if thou really hadst one!”

So now, in high good humor with this fantastic contrivance of hers,
Mother Rigby told the scarecrow that it must go and play its part in
the great world, where not one man in a hundred, she affirmed, was
gifted with more real substance than itself. And, that he might hold up
his head with the best of them, she endowed him, on the spot, with an
unreckonable amount of wealth. It consisted partly of a gold mine in
Eldorado, and of ten thousand shares in a broken bubble, and of half a
million acres of vineyard at the North Pole, and of a castle in the
air, and a chateau in Spain, together with all the rents and income
therefrom accruing. She further made over to him the cargo of a certain
ship, laden with salt of Cadiz, which she herself, by her necromantic
arts, had caused to founder, ten years before, in the deepest part of
mid-ocean. If the salt were not dissolved, and could be brought to
market, it would fetch a pretty penny among the fishermen. That he
might not lack ready money, she gave him a copper farthing of
Birmingham manufacture, being all the coin she had about her, and
likewise a great deal of brass, which she applied to his forehead, thus
making it yellower than ever.

“With that brass alone,” quoth Mother Rigby, “thou canst pay thy way
all over the earth. Kiss me, pretty darling! I have done my best for
thee.”

Furthermore, that the adventurer might lack no possible advantage
towards a fair start in life, this excellent old dame gave him a token
by which he was to introduce himself to a certain magistrate, member of
the council, merchant, and elder of the church (the four capacities
constituting but one man), who stood at the head of society in the
neighboring metropolis. The token was neither more nor less than a
single word, which Mother Rigby whispered to the scarecrow, and which
the scarecrow was to whisper to the merchant.

“Gouty as the old fellow is, he’ll run thy errands for thee, when once
thou hast given him that word in his ear,” said the old witch. “Mother
Rigby knows the worshipful Justice Gookin, and the worshipful Justice
knows Mother Rigby!”

Here the witch thrust her wrinkled face close to the puppet’s,
chuckling irrepressibly, and fidgeting all through her system, with
delight at the idea which she meant to communicate.

“The worshipful Master Gookin,” whispered she, “hath a comely maiden to
his daughter. And hark ye, my pet! Thou hast a fair outside, and a
pretty wit enough of thine own. Yea, a pretty wit enough! Thou wilt
think better of it when thou hast seen more of other people’s wits.
Now, with thy outside and thy inside, thou art the very man to win a
young girl’s heart. Never doubt it! I tell thee it shall be so. Put but
a bold face on the matter, sigh, smile, flourish thy hat, thrust forth
thy leg like a dancing-master, put thy right hand to the left side of
thy waistcoat, and pretty Polly Gookin is thine own!”

All this while the new creature had been sucking in and exhaling the
vapory fragrance of his pipe, and seemed now to continue this
occupation as much for the enjoyment it afforded as because it was an
essential condition of his existence. It was wonderful to see how
exceedingly like a human being it behaved. Its eyes (for it appeared to
possess a pair) were bent on Mother Rigby, and at suitable junctures it
nodded or shook its head. Neither did it lack words proper for the
occasion: “Really! Indeed! Pray tell me! Is it possible! Upon my word!
By no means! Oh! Ah! Hem!” and other such weighty utterances as imply
attention, inquiry, acquiescence, or dissent on the part of the
auditor. Even had you stood by and seen the scarecrow made, you could
scarcely have resisted the conviction that it perfectly understood the
cunning counsels which the old witch poured into its counterfeit of an
ear. The more earnestly it applied its lips to the pipe, the more
distinctly was its human likeness stamped among visible realities, the
more sagacious grew its expression, the more lifelike its gestures and
movements, and the more intelligibly audible its voice. Its garments,
too, glistened so much the brighter with an illusory magnificence. The
very pipe, in which burned the spell of all this wonderwork, ceased to
appear as a smoke-blackened earthen stump, and became a meerschaum,
with painted bowl and amber mouthpiece.

It might be apprehended, however, that as the life of the illusion
seemed identical with the vapor of the pipe, it would terminate
simultaneously with the reduction of the tobacco to ashes. But the
beldam foresaw the difficulty.

“Hold thou the pipe, my precious one,” said she, “while I fill it for
thee again.”

It was sorrowful to behold how the fine gentleman began to fade back
into a scarecrow while Mother Rigby shook the ashes out of the pipe and
proceeded to replenish it from her tobacco-box.

“Dickon,” cried she, in her high, sharp tone, “another coal for this
pipe!”

No sooner said than the intensely red speck of fire was glowing within
the pipe-bowl; and the scarecrow, without waiting for the witch’s
bidding, applied the tube to his lips and drew in a few short,
convulsive whiffs, which soon, however, became regular and equable.

“Now, mine own heart’s darling,” quoth Mother Rigby, “whatever may
happen to thee, thou must stick to thy pipe. Thy life is in it; and
that, at least, thou knowest well, if thou knowest nought besides.
Stick to thy pipe, I say! Smoke, puff, blow thy cloud; and tell the
people, if any question be made, that it is for thy health, and that so
the physician orders thee to do. And, sweet one, when thou shalt find
thy pipe getting low, go apart into some corner, and (first filling
thyself with smoke) cry sharply, ‘Dickon, a fresh pipe of tobacco!’
and, ‘Dickon, another coal for my pipe!’ and have it into thy pretty
mouth as speedily as may be. Else, instead of a gallant gentleman in a
gold-laced coat, thou wilt be but a jumble of sticks and tattered
clothes, and a bag of straw, and a withered pumpkin! Now depart, my
treasure, and good luck go with thee!”

“Never fear, mother!” said the figure, in a stout voice, and sending
forth a courageous whiff of smoke, “I will thrive, if an honest man and
a gentleman may!”

“Oh, thou wilt be the death of me!” cried the old witch, convulsed with
laughter. “That was well said. If an honest man and a gentleman may!
Thou playest thy part to perfection. Get along with thee for a smart
fellow; and I will wager on thy head, as a man of pith and substance,
with a brain and what they call a heart, and all else that a man should
have, against any other thing on two legs. I hold myself a better witch
than yesterday, for thy sake. Did not I make thee? And I defy any witch
in New England to make such another! Here; take my staff along with
thee!”

The staff, though it was but a plain oaken stick, immediately took the
aspect of a gold-headed cane.

“That gold head has as much sense in it as thine own,” said Mother
Rigby, “and it will guide thee straight to worshipful Master Gookin’s
door. Get thee gone, my pretty pet, my darling, my precious one, my
treasure; and if any ask thy name, it is Feathertop. For thou hast a
feather in thy hat, and I have thrust a handful of feathers into the
hollow of thy head, and thy wig, too, is of the fashion they call
Feathertop,—so be Feathertop thy name!”

And, issuing from the cottage, Feathertop strode manfully towards town.
Mother Rigby stood at the threshold, well pleased to see how the
sunbeams glistened on him, as if all his magnificence were real, and
how diligently and lovingly he smoked his pipe, and how handsomely he
walked, in spite of a little stiffness of his legs. She watched him
until out of sight, and threw a witch benediction after her darling,
when a turn of the road snatched him from her view.

Betimes in the forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring
town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very
distinguished figure was seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his
garments betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a
richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, a waistcoat of costly velvet,
magnificently adorned with golden foliage, a pair of splendid scarlet
breeches, and the finest and glossiest of white silk stockings. His
head was covered with a peruke, so daintily powdered and adjusted that
it would have been sacrilege to disorder it with a hat; which,
therefore (and it was a gold-laced hat, set off with a snowy feather),
he carried beneath his arm. On the breast of his coat glistened a star.
He managed his gold-headed cane with an airy grace, peculiar to the
fine gentlemen of the period; and, to give the highest possible finish
to his equipment, he had lace ruffles at his wrist, of a most ethereal
delicacy, sufficiently avouching how idle and aristocratic must be the
hands which they half concealed.

It was a remarkable point in the accoutrement of this brilliant
personage that he held in his left hand a fantastic kind of a pipe,
with an exquisitely painted bowl and an amber mouthpiece. This he
applied to his lips as often as every five or six paces, and inhaled a
deep whiff of smoke, which, after being retained a moment in his lungs,
might be seen to eddy gracefully from his mouth and nostrils.

As may well be supposed, the street was all astir to find out the
stranger’s name.

“It is some great nobleman, beyond question,” said one of the
townspeople. “Do you see the star at his breast?”

“Nay; it is too bright to be seen,” said another. “Yes; he must needs
be a nobleman, as you say. But by what conveyance, think you, can his
lordship have voyaged or travelled hither? There has been no vessel
from the old country for a month past; and if he have arrived overland
from the southward, pray where are his attendants and equipage?”

“He needs no equipage to set off his rank,” remarked a third. “If he
came among us in rags, nobility would shine through a hole in his
elbow. I never saw such dignity of aspect. He has the old Norman blood
in his veins, I warrant him.”

“I rather take him to be a Dutchman, or one of your high Germans,” said
another citizen. “The men of those countries have always the pipe at
their mouths.”

“And so has a Turk,” answered his companion. “But, in my judgment, this
stranger hath been bred at the French court, and hath there learned
politeness and grace of manner, which none understand so well as the
nobility of France. That gait, now! A vulgar spectator might deem it
stiff—he might call it a hitch and jerk—but, to my eye, it hath an
unspeakable majesty, and must have been acquired by constant
observation of the deportment of the Grand Monarque. The stranger’s
character and office are evident enough. He is a French ambassador,
come to treat with our rulers about the cession of Canada.”

“More probably a Spaniard,” said another, “and hence his yellow
complexion; or, most likely, he is from the Havana, or from some port
on the Spanish main, and comes to make investigation about the piracies
which our government is thought to connive at. Those settlers in Peru
and Mexico have skins as yellow as the gold which they dig out of their
mines.”

“Yellow or not,” cried a lady, “he is a beautiful man!—so tall, so
slender! such a fine, noble face, with so well-shaped a nose, and all
that delicacy of expression about the mouth! And, bless me, how bright
his star is! It positively shoots out flames!”

“So do your eyes, fair lady,” said the stranger, with a bow and a
flourish of his pipe; for he was just passing at the instant. “Upon my
honor, they have quite dazzled me.”

“Was ever so original and exquisite a compliment?” murmured the lady,
in an ecstasy of delight.

Amid the general admiration excited by the stranger’s appearance, there
were only two dissenting voices. One was that of an impertinent cur,
which, after snuffing at the heels of the glistening figure, put its
tail between its legs and skulked into its master’s back yard,
vociferating an execrable howl. The other dissentient was a young
child, who squalled at the fullest stretch of his lungs, and babbled
some unintelligible nonsense about a pumpkin.

Feathertop meanwhile pursued his way along the street. Except for the
few complimentary words to the lady, and now and then a slight
inclination of the head in requital of the profound reverences of the
bystanders, he seemed wholly absorbed in his pipe. There needed no
other proof of his rank and consequence than the perfect equanimity
with which he comported himself, while the curiosity and admiration of
the town swelled almost into clamor around him. With a crowd gathering
behind his footsteps, he finally reached the mansion-house of the
worshipful Justice Gookin, entered the gate, ascended the steps of the
front door, and knocked. In the interim, before his summons was
answered, the stranger was observed to shake the ashes out of his pipe.

“What did he say in that sharp voice?” inquired one of the spectators.

“Nay, I know not,” answered his friend. “But the sun dazzles my eyes
strangely. How dim and faded his lordship looks all of a sudden! Bless
my wits, what is the matter with me?”

“The wonder is,” said the other, “that his pipe, which was out only an
instant ago, should be all alight again, and with the reddest coal I
ever saw. There is something mysterious about this stranger. What a
whiff of smoke was that! Dim and faded did you call him? Why, as he
turns about the star on his breast is all ablaze.”

“It is, indeed,” said his companion; “and it will go near to dazzle
pretty Polly Gookin, whom I see peeping at it out of the chamber
window.”

The door being now opened, Feathertop turned to the crowd, made a
stately bend of his body like a great man acknowledging the reverence
of the meaner sort, and vanished into the house. There was a mysterious
kind of a smile, if it might not better be called a grin or grimace,
upon his visage; but, of all the throng that beheld him, not an
individual appears to have possessed insight enough to detect the
illusive character of the stranger except a little child and a cur dog.

Our legend here loses somewhat of its continuity, and, passing over the
preliminary explanation between Feathertop and the merchant, goes in
quest of the pretty Polly Gookin. She was a damsel of a soft, round
figure, with light hair and blue eyes, and a fair, rosy face, which
seemed neither very shrewd nor very simple. This young lady had caught
a glimpse of the glistening stranger while standing on the threshold,
and had forthwith put on a laced cap, a string of beads, her finest
kerchief, and her stiffest damask petticoat in preparation for the
interview. Hurrying from her chamber to the parlor, she had ever since
been viewing herself in the large looking-glass and practising pretty
airs-now a smile, now a ceremonious dignity of aspect, and now a softer
smile than the former, kissing her hand likewise, tossing her head, and
managing her fan; while within the mirror an unsubstantial little maid
repeated every gesture and did all the foolish things that Polly did,
but without making her ashamed of them. In short, it was the fault of
pretty Polly’s ability rather than her will if she failed to be as
complete an artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself; and, when
she thus tampered with her own simplicity, the witch’s phantom might
well hope to win her.

No sooner did Polly hear her father’s gouty footsteps approaching the
parlor door, accompanied with the stiff clatter of Feathertop’s
high-heeled shoes, than she seated herself bolt upright and innocently
began warbling a song.

“Polly! daughter Polly!” cried the old merchant. “Come hither, child.”

Master Gookin’s aspect, as he opened the door, was doubtful and
troubled.

“This gentleman,” continued he, presenting the stranger, “is the
Chevalier Feathertop,—nay, I beg his pardon, my Lord Feathertop,—who
hath brought me a token of remembrance from an ancient friend of mine.
Pay your duty to his lordship, child, and honor him as his quality
deserves.”

After these few words of introduction, the worshipful magistrate
immediately quitted the room. But, even in that brief moment, had the
fair Polly glanced aside at her father instead of devoting herself
wholly to the brilliant guest, she might have taken warning of some
mischief nigh at hand. The old man was nervous, fidgety, and very pale.
Purposing a smile of courtesy, he had deformed his face with a sort of
galvanic grin, which, when Feathertop’s back was turned, he exchanged
for a scowl, at the same time shaking his fist and stamping his gouty
foot—an incivility which brought its retribution along with it. The
truth appears to have been that Mother Rigby’s word of introduction,
whatever it might be, had operated far more on the rich merchant’s
fears than on his good will. Moreover, being a man of wonderfully acute
observation, he had noticed that these painted figures on the bowl of
Feathertop’s pipe were in motion. Looking more closely he became
convinced that these figures were a party of little demons, each duly
provided with horns and a tail, and dancing hand in hand, with gestures
of diabolical merriment, round the circumference of the pipe bowl. As
if to confirm his suspicions, while Master Gookin ushered his guest
along a dusky passage from his private room to the parlor, the star on
Feathertop’s breast had scintillated actual flames, and threw a
flickering gleam upon the wall, the ceiling, and the floor.

With such sinister prognostics manifesting themselves on all hands, it
is not to be marvelled at that the merchant should have felt that he
was committing his daughter to a very questionable acquaintance. He
cursed, in his secret soul, the insinuating elegance of Feathertop’s
manners, as this brilliant personage bowed, smiled, put his hand on his
heart, inhaled a long whiff from his pipe, and enriched the atmosphere
with the smoky vapor of a fragrant and visible sigh. Gladly would poor
Master Gookin have thrust his dangerous guest into the street; but
there was a constraint and terror within him. This respectable old
gentleman, we fear, at an earlier period of life, had given some pledge
or other to the evil principle, and perhaps was now to redeem it by the
sacrifice of his daughter.

It so happened that the parlor door was partly of glass, shaded by a
silken curtain, the folds of which hung a little awry. So strong was
the merchant’s interest in witnessing what was to ensue between the
fair Polly and the gallant Feathertop that, after quitting the room, he
could by no means refrain from peeping through the crevice of the
curtain.

But there was nothing very miraculous to be seen; nothing—except the
trifles previously noticed—to confirm the idea of a supernatural peril
environing the pretty Polly. The stranger it is true was evidently a
thorough and practised man of the world, systematic and self-possessed,
and therefore the sort of a person to whom a parent ought not to
confide a simple, young girl without due watchfulness for the result.
The worthy magistrate who had been conversant with all degrees and
qualities of mankind, could not but perceive every motion and gesture
of the distinguished Feathertop came in its proper place; nothing had
been left rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had
incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him
into a work of art. Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him
with a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of anything
completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person
impresses us as an unreality and as having hardly pith enough to cast a
shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all this resulted in a
wild, extravagant, and fantastical impression, as if his life and being
were akin to the smoke that curled upward from his pipe.

But pretty Polly Gookin felt not thus. The pair were now promenading
the room: Feathertop with his dainty stride and no less dainty grimace,
the girl with a native maidenly grace, just touched, not spoiled, by a
slightly affected manner, which seemed caught from the perfect artifice
of her companion. The longer the interview continued, the more charmed
was pretty Polly, until, within the first quarter of an hour (as the
old magistrate noted by his watch), she was evidently beginning to be
in love. Nor need it have been witchcraft that subdued her in such a
hurry; the poor child’s heart, it may be, was so very fervent that it
melted her with its own warmth as reflected from the hollow semblance
of a lover. No matter what Feathertop said, his words found depth and
reverberation in her ear; no matter what he did, his action was heroic
to her eye. And by this time it is to be supposed there was a blush on
Polly’s cheek, a tender smile about her mouth and a liquid softness in
her glance; while the star kept coruscating on Feathertop’s breast, and
the little demons careered with more frantic merriment than ever about
the circumference of his pipe bowl. O pretty Polly Gookin, why should
these imps rejoice so madly that a silly maiden’s heart was about to be
given to a shadow! Is it so unusual a misfortune, so rare a triumph?

By and by Feathertop paused, and throwing himself into an imposing
attitude, seemed to summon the fair girl to survey his figure and
resist him longer if she could. His star, his embroidery, his buckles
glowed at that instant with unutterable splendor; the picturesque hues
of his attire took a richer depth of coloring; there was a gleam and
polish over his whole presence betokening the perfect witchery of
well-ordered manners. The maiden raised her eyes and suffered them to
linger upon her companion with a bashful and admiring gaze. Then, as if
desirous of judging what value her own simple comeliness might have
side by side with so much brilliancy, she cast a glance towards the
full-length looking-glass in front of which they happened to be
standing. It was one of the truest plates in the world and incapable of
flattery. No sooner did the images therein reflected meet Polly’s eye
than she shrieked, shrank from the stranger’s side, gazed at him for a
moment in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor.
Feathertop likewise had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld,
not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the
sordid patchwork of his real composition stripped of all witchcraft.

The wretched simulacrum! We almost pity him. He threw up his arms with
an expression of despair that went further than any of his previous
manifestations towards vindicating his claims to be reckoned human, for
perchance the only time since this so often empty and deceptive life of
mortals began its course, an illusion had seen and fully recognized
itself.

Mother Rigby was seated by her kitchen hearth in the twilight of this
eventful day, and had just shaken the ashes out of a new pipe, when she
heard a hurried tramp along the road. Yet it did not seem so much the
tramp of human footsteps as the clatter of sticks or the rattling of
dry bones.

“Ha!” thought the old witch, “what step is that? Whose skeleton is out
of its grave now, I wonder?”

A figure burst headlong into the cottage door. It was Feathertop! His
pipe was still alight; the star still flamed upon his breast; the
embroidery still glowed upon his garments; nor had he lost, in any
degree or manner that could be estimated, the aspect that assimilated
him with our mortal brotherhood. But yet, in some indescribable way (as
is the case with all that has deluded us when once found out), the poor
reality was felt beneath the cunning artifice.

“What has gone wrong?” demanded the witch. “Did yonder sniffling
hypocrite thrust my darling from his door? The villain! I’ll set twenty
fiends to torment him till he offer thee his daughter on his bended
knees!”

“No, mother,” said Feathertop despondingly; “it was not that.”

“Did the girl scorn my precious one?” asked Mother Rigby, her fierce
eyes glowing like two coals of Tophet. “I’ll cover her face with
pimples! Her nose shall be as red as the coal in thy pipe! Her front
teeth shall drop out! In a week hence she shall not be worth thy
having!”

“Let her alone, mother,” answered poor Feathertop; “the girl was half
won; and methinks a kiss from her sweet lips might have made me
altogether human. But,” he added, after a brief pause and then a howl
of self-contempt, “I’ve seen myself, mother! I’ve seen myself for the
wretched, ragged, empty thing I am! I’ll exist no longer!”

Snatching the pipe from his mouth, he flung it with all his might
against the chimney, and at the same instant sank upon the floor, a
medley of straw and tattered garments, with some sticks protruding from
the heap, and a shrivelled pumpkin in the midst. The eyeholes were now
lustreless; but the rudely-carved gap, that just before had been a
mouth still seemed to twist itself into a despairing grin, and was so
far human.

“Poor fellow!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a rueful glance at the relics
of her ill-fated contrivance. “My poor, dear, pretty Feathertop! There
are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world,
made up of just such a jumble of wornout, forgotten, and
good-for-nothing trash as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and
never see themselves for what they are. And why should my poor puppet
be the only one to know himself and perish for it?”

While thus muttering, the witch had filled a fresh pipe of tobacco, and
held the stem between her fingers, as doubtful whether to thrust it
into her own mouth or Feathertop’s.

“Poor Feathertop!” she continued. “I could easily give him another
chance and send him forth again tomorrow. But no; his feelings are too
tender, his sensibilities too deep. He seems to have too much heart to
bustle for his own advantage in such an empty and heartless world.
Well! well! I’ll make a scarecrow of him after all. ’Tis an innocent
and useful vocation, and will suit my darling well; and, if each of his
human brethren had as fit a one, ’twould be the better for mankind; and
as for this pipe of tobacco, I need it more than he.”

So saying Mother Rigby put the stem between her lips. “Dickon!” cried
she, in her high, sharp tone, “another coal for my pipe!”




THE NEW ADAM AND EVE


We who are born into the world’s artificial system can never adequately
know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and
how much is merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of
man. Art has become a second and stronger nature; she is a step-mother,
whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despise the bountiful and
wholesome ministrations of our true parent. It is only through the
medium of the imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters, which
we call truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible
what prisoners we are. For instance, let us conceive good Father
Miller’s interpretation of the prophecies to have proved true. The Day
of Doom has burst upon the globe and swept away the whole race of men.
From cities and fields, sea-shore and midland mountain region, vast
continents, and even the remotest islands of the ocean, each living
thing is gone. No breath of a created being disturbs this earthly
atmosphere. But the abodes of man, and all that he has accomplished,
the footprints of his wanderings and the results of his toil, the
visible symbols of his intellectual cultivation and moral progress,—in
short, everything physical that can give evidence of his present
position,—shall remain untouched by the hand of destiny. Then, to
inherit and repeople this waste and deserted earth, we will suppose a
new Adam and a new Eve to have been created, in the full development of
mind and heart, but with no knowledge of their predecessors nor of the
diseased circumstances that had become incrusted around them. Such a
pair would at once distinguish between art and nature. Their instincts
and intuitions would immediately recognize the wisdom and simplicity of
the latter; while the former, with its elaborate perversities, would
offer them a continual succession of puzzles.

Let us attempt, in a mood half sportive and half thoughtful, to track
these imaginary heirs of our mortality, through their first day’s
experience. No longer ago than yesterday the flame of human life was
extinguished; there has been a breathless night; and now another morn
approaches, expecting to find the earth no less desolate than at
eventide.

It is dawn. The east puts on its immemorial blush, although no human
eye is gazing at it; for all the phenomena of the natural world renew
themselves, in spite of the solitude that now broods around the globe.
There is still beauty of earth, sea, and sky, for beauty’s sake. But
soon there are to be spectators. Just when the earliest sunshine gilds
earth’s mountain-tops, two beings have come into life, not in such an
Eden as bloomed to welcome our first parents, but in the heart of a
modern city. They find themselves in existence, and gazing into one
another’s eyes. Their emotion is not astonishment; nor do they perplex
themselves with efforts to discover what, and whence, and why they are.
Each is satisfied to be, because the other exists likewise; and their
first consciousness is of calm and mutual enjoyment, which seems not to
have been the birth of that very moment, but prolonged from a past
eternity. Thus content with an inner sphere which they inhabit
together, it is not immediately that the outward world can obtrude
itself upon their notice.

Soon, however, they feel the invincible necessity of this earthly life,
and begin to make acquaintance with the objects and circumstances that
surround them. Perhaps no other stride so vast remains to be taken as
when they first turn from the reality of their mutual glance to the
dreams and shadows that perplex them everywhere else.

“Sweetest Eve, where are we?” exclaims the new Adam; for speech, or
some equivalent mode of expression, is born with them, and comes just
as natural as breath. “Methinks I do not recognize this place.”

“Nor I, dear Man,” replies the new Eve. “And what a strange place, too!
Let me come closer to thy side and behold thee only; for all other
sights trouble and perplex my spirit.”

“Nay, Eve,” replies Adam, who appears to have the stronger tendency
towards the material world; “it were well that we gain some insight
into these matters. We are in an odd situation here. Let us look about
us.”

Assuredly there are sights enough to throw the new inheritors of earth
into a state of hopeless perplexity. The long lines of edifices, their
windows glittering in the yellow sunrise, and the narrow street
between, with its barren pavement tracked and battered by wheels that
have now rattled into an irrevocable past! The signs, with their
unintelligible hieroglyphics! The squareness and ugliness, and regular
or irregular deformity of everything that meets the eye! The marks of
wear and tear, and unrenewed decay, which distinguish the works of man
from the growth of nature! What is there in all this, capable of the
slightest significance to minds that know nothing of the artificial
system which is implied in every lamp-post and each brick of the
houses? Moreover, the utter loneliness and silence, in a scene that
originally grew out of noise and bustle, must needs impress a feeling
of desolation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as they are of the
recent extinction of human existence. In a forest, solitude would be
life; in a city, it is death.

The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt and distrust, such as
a city dame, the daughter of numberless generations of citizens, might
experience if suddenly transported to the garden of Eden. At length her
downcast eye discovers a small tuft of grass, just beginning to sprout
among the stones of the pavement; she eagerly grasps it, and is
sensible that this little herb awakens some response within her heart.
Nature finds nothing else to offer her. Adam, after staring up and down
the street without detecting a single object that his comprehension can
lay hold of, finally turns his forehead to the sky. There, indeed, is
something which the soul within him recognizes.

“Look up yonder, mine own Eve,” he cries; “surely we ought to dwell
among those gold-tinged clouds or in the blue depths beyond them. I
know not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our
home; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us.”

“Can we not ascend thither?” inquires Eve.

“Why not?” answers Adam, hopefully. “But no; something drags us down in
spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter.”

In the energy of new life it appears no such impracticable feat to
climb into the sky. But they have already received a woful lesson,
which may finally go far towards reducing them to the level of the
departed race, when they acknowledge the necessity of keeping the
beaten track of earth. They now set forth on a ramble through the city,
in the hope of making their escape from this uncongenial sphere.
Already in the fresh elasticity of their spirits they have found the
idea of weariness. We will watch them as they enter some of the shops
and public or private edifices; for every door, whether of alderman or
beggar, church or hall of state, has been flung wide open by the same
agency that swept away the inmates.

It so happens,—and not unluckily for an Adam and Eve who are still in
the costume that might better have befitted Eden,—it so happens that
their first visit is to a fashionable dry-goods store. No courteous and
importunate attendants hasten to receive their orders; no throng of
ladies are tossing over the rich Parisian fabrics. All is deserted;
trade is at a stand-still; and not even an echo of the national
watchword, “Go ahead!” disturbs the quiet of the new customers. But
specimens of the latest earthly fashions, silks of every shade, and
whatever is most delicate or splendid for the decoration of the human
form, he scattered around, profusely as bright autumnal leaves in a
forest. Adam looks at a few of the articles, but throws them carelessly
aside with whatever exclamation may correspond to “Pish!” or “Pshaw!”
in the new vocabulary of nature. Eve, however,—be it said without
offence to her native modesty,—examines these treasures of her sex with
somewhat livelier interest. A pair of corsets chance to be upon the
counter; she inspects them curiously, but knows not what to make of
them. Then she handles a fashionable silk with dim yearnings, thoughts
that wander hither and thither, instincts groping in the dark.

“On the whole, I do not like it,” she observes, laying the glossy
fabric upon the counter. “But, Adam, it is very strange. What can these
things mean? Surely I ought to know; yet they put me in a perfect
maze.”

“Poh! my dear Eve, why trouble thy little head about such nonsense?”
cries Adam, in a fit of impatience. “Let us go somewhere else. But
stay; how very beautiful! My loveliest Eve, what a charm you have
imparted to that robe by merely throwing it over your shoulders!”

For Eve, with the taste that nature moulded into her composition, has
taken a remnant of exquisite silver gauze and drawn it around her
forms, with an effect that gives Adam his first idea of the witchery of
dress. He beholds his spouse in a new light and with renewed
admiration; yet is hardly reconciled to any other attire than her own
golden locks. However, emulating Eve’s example, he makes free with a
mantle of blue velvet, and puts it on so picturesquely that it might
seem to have fallen from heaven upon his stately figure. Thus garbed
they go in search of new discoveries.

They next wander into a Church, not to make a display of their fine
clothes, but attracted by its spire pointing upwards to the sky,
whither they have already yearned to climb. As they enter the portal, a
clock, which it was the last earthly act of the sexton to wind up,
repeats the hour in deep reverberating tones; for Time has survived his
former progeny, and, with the iron tongue that man gave him, is now
speaking to his two grandchildren. They listen, but understand him not.
Nature would measure time by the succession of thoughts and acts which
constitute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the
church-aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve
become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the vastness and
sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have recognized the purpose
for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like the dim awfulness of
an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to
prayer. Within the snug walls of a metropolitan church there can be no
such influence.

Yet some odor of religion is still lingering here, the bequest of pious
souls, who had grace to enjoy a foretaste of immortal life. Perchance
they breathe a prophecy of a better world to their successors, who have
become obnoxious to all their own cares and calamities in the present
one.

“Eve, something impels me to look upward,” says Adam; “but it troubles
me to see this roof between us and the sky. Let us go forth, and
perhaps we shall discern a Great Face looking down upon us.”

“Yes; a Great Face, with a beam of love brightening over it, like
sunshine,” responds Eve. “Surely we have seen such a countenance
somewhere.”

They go out of the church, and kneeling at its threshold give way to
the spirit’s natural instinct of adoration towards a beneficent Father.
But, in truth, their life thus far has been a continual prayer. Purity
and simplicity hold converse at every moment with their Creator.

We now observe them entering a Court of Justice. But what remotest
conception can they attain of the purposes of such an edifice? How
should the idea occur to them that human brethren, of like nature with
themselves, and originally included in the same law of love which is
their only rule of life, should ever need an outward enforcement of the
true voice within their souls? And what, save a woful experience, the
dark result of many centuries, could teach them the sad mysteries of
crime? O Judgment Seat, not by the pure in heart vast thou established,
nor in the simplicity of nature; but by hard and wrinkled men, and upon
the accumulated heap of earthly wrong. Thou art the very symbol of
man’s perverted state.

On as fruitless an errand our wanderers next visit a Hall of
Legislature, where Adam places Eve in the Speaker’s chair, unconscious
of the moral which he thus exemplifies. Man’s intellect, moderated by
Woman’s tenderness and moral sense! Were such the legislation of the
world there would be no need of State Houses, Capitols, Halls of
Parliament, nor even of those little assemblages of patriarchs beneath
the shadowy trees, by whom freedom was first interpreted to mankind on
our native shores.

Whither go they next? A perverse destiny seems to perplex them with one
after another of the riddles which mankind put forth to the wandering
universe, and left unsolved in their own destruction. They enter an
edifice of stern gray stone standing insulated in the midst of others,
and gloomy even in the sunshine, which it barely suffers to penetrate
through its iron grated windows. It is a prison. The jailer has left
his post at the summons of a stronger authority than the sheriff’s. But
the prisoners? Did the messenger of fate, when he shook open all the
doors, respect the magistrate’s warrant and the judge’s sentence, and
leave the inmates of the dungeons to be delivered by due course of
earthly law? No; a new trial has been granted in a higher court, which
may set judge, jury, and prisoner at its bar all in a row, and perhaps
find one no less guilty than another. The jail, like the whole earth,
is now a solitude, and has thereby lost something of its dismal gloom.
But here are the narrow cells, like tombs, only drearier and deadlier,
because in these the immortal spirit was buried with the body.
Inscriptions appear on the walls, scribbled with a pencil or scratched
with a rusty nail; brief words of agony, perhaps, or guilt’s desperate
defiance to the world, or merely a record of a date by which the writer
strove to keep up with the march of life. There is not a living eye
that could now decipher these memorials.

Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator’s hand that the new
denizens of earth—no, nor their descendants for a thousand years—could
discover that this edifice was a hospital for the direst disease which
could afflict their predecessors. Its patients bore the outward marks
of that leprosy with which all were more or less infected. They were
sick-and so were the purest of their brethren—with the plague of sin. A
deadly sickness, indeed! Feeling its symptoms within the breast, men
concealed it with fear and shame, and were only the more cruel to those
unfortunates whose pestiferous sores were flagrant to the common eye.
Nothing save a rich garment could ever hide the plague-spot. In the
course of the world’s lifetime, every remedy was tried for its cure and
extirpation, except the single one, the flower that grew in Heaven and
was sovereign for all the miseries of earth. Man never had attempted to
cure sin by LOVE! Had he but once made the effort, it might well have
happened that there would have been no more need of the dark
lazar-house into which Adam and Eve have wandered. Hasten forth with
your native innocence, lest the damps of these still conscious walls
infect you likewise, and thus another fallen race be propagated!

Passing from the interior of the prison into the space within its
outward wall, Adam pauses beneath a structure of the simplest
contrivance, yet altogether unaccountable to him. It consists merely of
two upright posts, supporting a transverse beam, from which dangles a
cord.

“Eve, Eve!” cries Adam, shuddering with a nameless horror. “What can
this thing be?”

“I know not,” answers Eve; “but, Adam, my heart is sick! There seems to
be no more sky,—no more sunshine!”

Well might Adam shudder and poor Eve be sick at heart; for this
mysterious object was the type of mankind’s whole system in regard to
the great difficulties which God had given to be solved,—a system of
fear and vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the last. Here,
on the morning when the final summons came, a criminal—one criminal,
where none were guiltless—had died upon the gallows. Had the world
heard the footfall of its own approaching doom, it would have been no
inappropriate act thus to close the record of its deeds by one so
characteristic.

The two pilgrims now hurry from the prison. Had they known how the
former inhabitants of earth were shut up in artificial error and
cramped and chained by their perversions, they might have compared the
whole moral world to a prison-house, and have deemed the removal of the
race a general jail-delivery.

They next enter, unannounced, but they might have rung at the door in
vain, a private mansion, one of the stateliest in Beacon Street. A wild
and plaintive strain of music is quivering through the house, now
rising like a solemn organ-peal, and now dying into the faintest
murmur, as if some spirit that had felt an interest in the departed
family were bemoaning itself in the solitude of hall and chamber.
Perhaps a virgin, the purest of mortal race, has been left behind to
perform a requiem for the whole kindred of humanity. Not so. These are
the tones of an Eolian harp, through which Nature pours the harmony
that lies concealed in her every breath, whether of summer breeze or
tempest. Adam and Eve are lost in rapture, unmingled with surprise. The
passing wind, that stirred the harp-strings, has been hushed, before
they can think of examining the splendid furniture, the gorgeous
carpets, and the architecture of the rooms. These things amuse their
unpractised eyes, but appeal to nothing within their hearts. Even the
pictures upon the walls scarcely excite a deeper interest; for there is
something radically artificial and deceptive in painting with which
minds in the primal simplicity cannot sympathize. The unbidden guests
examine a row of family portraits, but are too dull to recognize them
as men and women, beneath the disguise of a preposterous garb, and with
features and expression debased, because inherited through ages of
moral and physical decay.

Chance, however, presents them with pictures of human beauty, fresh
from the hand of Nature. As they enter a magnificent apartment they are
astonished, but not affrighted, to perceive two figures advancing to
meet them. Is it not awful to imagine that any life, save their own,
should remain in the wide world?

“How is this?” exclaims Adam. “My beautiful Eve, are you in two places
at once?”

“And you, Adam!” answers Eve, doubtful, yet delighted. “Surely that
noble and lovely form is yours. Yet here you are by my side. I am
content with one,—methinks there should not be two.”

This miracle is wrought by a tall looking-glass, the mystery of which
they soon fathom, because Nature creates a mirror for the human face in
every pool of water, and for her own great features in waveless lakes.
Pleased and satisfied with gazing at themselves, they now discover the
marble statue of a child in a corner of the room so exquisitely
idealized that it is almost worthy to be the prophetic likeness of
their first-born. Sculpture, in its highest excellence, is more genuine
than painting, and might seem to be evolved from a natural germ, by the
same law as a leaf or flower. The statue of the child impresses the
solitary pair as if it were a companion; it likewise hints at secrets
both of the past and future.

“My husband!” whispers Eve.

“What would you say, dearest Eve?” inquires Adam.

“I wonder if we are alone in the world,” she continues, “with a sense
of something like fear at the thought of other inhabitants. This lovely
little form! Did it ever breathe? Or is it only the shadow of something
real, like our pictures in the mirror?”

“It is strange!” replies Adam, pressing his hand to his brow. “There
are mysteries all around us. An idea flits continually before me,—would
that I could seize it! Eve, Eve, are we treading in the footsteps of
beings that bore a likeness to ourselves? If so, whither are they
gone?—and why is their world so unfit for our dwelling-place?”

“Our great Father only knows,” answers Eve. “But something tells me
that we shall not always be alone. And how sweet if other beings were
to visit us in the shape of this fair image!”

Then they wander through the house, and everywhere find tokens of human
life, which now, with the idea recently suggested, excite a deeper
curiosity in their bosoms. Woman has here left traces of her delicacy
and refinement, and of her gentle labors. Eve ransacks a work-basket
and instinctively thrusts the rosy tip of her finger into a thimble.
She takes up a piece of embroidery, glowing with mimic flowers, in one
of which a fair damsel of the departed race has left her needle. Pity
that the Day of Doom should have anticipated the completion of such a
useful task! Eve feels almost conscious of the skill to finish it. A
pianoforte has been left open. She flings her hand carelessly over the
keys, and strikes out a sudden melody, no less natural than the strains
of the AEolian harp, but joyous with the dance of her yet unburdened
life. Passing through a dark entry they find a broom behind the door;
and Eve, who comprises the whole nature of womanhood, has a dim idea
that it is an instrument proper for her hand. In another apartment they
behold a canopied bed, and all the appliances of luxurious repose. A
heap of forest-leaves would be more to the purpose. They enter the
nursery, and are perplexed with the sight of little gowns and caps,
tiny slices, and a cradle, amid the drapery of which is still to be
seen the impress of a baby’s form. Adam slightly notices these trifles;
but Eve becomes involved in a fit of mute reflection from which it is
hardly possible to rouse her.

By a most unlucky arrangement there was to have been a grand
dinner-party in this mansion on the very day when the whole human
family, including the invited guests, were summoned to the unknown
regions of illimitable space. At the moment of fate, the table was
actually spread, and the company on the point of sitting down. Adam and
Eve come unbidden to the banquet; it has now been some time cold, but
otherwise furnishes them with highly favorable specimens of the
gastronomy of their predecessors. But it is difficult to imagine the
perplexity of the unperverted couple, in endeavoring to find proper
food for their first meal, at a table where the cultivated appetites of
a fashionable party were to have been gratified. Will Nature teach them
the mystery of a plate of turtle-soup? Will she embolden them to attack
a haunch of venison? Will she initiate them into the merits of a
Parisian pasty, imported by the last steamer that ever crossed the
Atlantic? Will she not, rather, bid them turn with disgust from fish,
fowl, and flesh, which, to their pure nostrils, steam with a loathsome
odor of death and corruption?—Food? The bill of fare contains nothing
which they recognize as such.

Fortunately, however, the dessert is ready upon a neighboring table.
Adam, whose appetite and animal instincts are quicker than those of
Eve, discovers this fitting banquet.

“Here, dearest Eve,” he exclaims,—“here is food.”

“Well,” answered she, with the germ of a housewife stirring within her,
“we have been so busy to-day, that a picked-up dinner must serve.”

So Eve comes to the table and receives a red-cheeked apple from her
husband’s hand in requital of her predecessor’s fatal gift to our
common grandfather. She eats it without sin, and, let us hope, with no
disastrous consequences to her future progeny. They make a plentiful,
yet temperate, meal of fruit, which, though not gathered in paradise,
is legitimately derived from the seeds that were planted there. Their
primal appetite is satisfied.

“What shall we drink, Eve?” inquires Adam.

Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which, as they contain
fluids, she naturally conceives must be proper to quench thirst. But
never before did claret, hock, and madeira, of rich and rare perfume,
excite such disgust as now.

“Pah!” she exclaims, after smelling at various wines. “What stuff is
here? The beings who have gone before us could not have possessed the
same nature that we do; for neither their hunger nor thirst were like
our own.”

“Pray hand me yonder bottle,” says Adam. “If it be drinkable by any
manner of mortal, I must moisten my throat with it.”

After some remonstrances, she takes up a champagne bottle, but is
frightened by the sudden explosion of the cork, and drops it upon the
floor. There the untasted liquor effervesces. Had they quaffed it they
would have experienced that brief delirium whereby, whether excited by
moral or physical causes, man sought to recompense himself for the
calm, life-long joys which he had lost by his revolt from nature. At
length, in a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure,
cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among the hills. Both
drink; and such refreshment does it bestow, that they question one
another if this precious liquid be not identical with the stream of
life within them.

“And now,” observes Adam, “we must again try to discover what sort of a
world this is, and why we have been sent hither.”

“Why? to love one another,” cries Eve. “Is not that employment enough?”

“Truly is it,” answers Adam, kissing her; “but still—I know
not—something tells us there is labor to be done. Perhaps our allotted
task is no other than to climb into the sky, which is so much more
beautiful than earth.”

“Then would we were there now,” murmurs Eve, “that no task or duty
might come between us!”

They leave the hospitable mansion, and we next see them passing down
State Street. The clock on the old State House points to high noon,
when the Exchange should be in its glory and present the liveliest
emblem of what was the sole business of life, as regarded a multitude
of the foregone worldlings. It is over now. The Sabbath of eternity has
shed its stillness along the street. Not even a newsboy assails the two
solitary passers-by with an extra penny-paper from the office of the
Times or Mail, containing a full account of yesterday’s terrible
catastrophe. Of all the dull times that merchants and speculators have
known, this is the very worst; for, so far as they were concerned,
creation itself has taken the benefit of the Bankrupt Act. After all,
it is a pity. Those mighty capitalists who had just attained the
wished-for wealth! Those shrewd men of traffic who had devoted so many
years to the most intricate and artificial of sciences, and had barely
mastered it when the universal bankruptcy was announced by peal of
trumpet! Can they have been so incautious as to provide no currency of
the country whither they have gone, nor any bills of exchange, or
letters of credit from the needy on earth to the cash-keepers of
heaven?

Adam and Eve enter a Bank. Start not, ye whose funds are treasured
there! You will never need them now. Call not for the police. The
stones of the street and the coin of the vaults are of equal value to
this simple pair. Strange sight! They take up the bright gold in
handfuls and throw it sportively into the air for the sake of seeing
the glittering worthlessness descend again in a shower. They know not
that each of those small yellow circles was once a magic spell, potent
to sway men’s hearts and mystify their moral sense. Here let them pause
in the investigation of the past. They have discovered the mainspring,
the life, the very essence of the system that had wrought itself into
the vitals of mankind, and choked their original nature in its deadly
gripe. Yet how powerless over these young inheritors of earth’s hoarded
wealth! And here, too, are huge, packages of back-notes, those
talismanic slips of paper which once had the efficacy to build up
enchanted palaces like exhalations, and work all kinds of perilous
wonders, yet were themselves but the ghosts of money, the shadows of a
shade. How like is this vault to a magician’s cave when the
all-powerful wand is broken, and the visionary splendor vanished, and
the floor strewn with fragments of shattered spells, and lifeless
shapes, once animated by demons!

“Everywhere, my dear Eve,” observes Adam, “we find heaps of rubbish of
one kind or another. Somebody, I am convinced, has taken pains to
collect them, but for what purpose? Perhaps, hereafter, we shall be
moved to do the like. Can that be our business in the world?”

“O no, no, Adam!” answers Eve. “It would be better to sit down quietly
and look upward to tine sky.”

They leave the Bank, and in good time; for had they tarried later they
would probably have encountered some gouty old goblin of a capitalist,
whose soul could not long be anywhere save in the vault with his
treasure.

Next they drop into a jeweller’s shop. They are pleased with the glow
of gems; and Adam twines a string of beautiful pearls around the head
of Eve, and fastens his own mantle with a magnificent diamond brooch.
Eve thanks him, and views herself with delight, in the nearest
looking-glass. Shortly afterward, observing a bouquet of roses and
other brilliant flowers in a vase of water, she flings away the
inestimable pearls, and adorns herself with these lovelier gems of
nature. They charm her with sentiment as well as beauty.

“Surely they are living beings,” she remarks to Adam.

“I think so,” replies Adam, “and they seem to be as little at home in
the world as ourselves.”

We must not attempt to follow every footstep of these investigators
whom their Creator has commissioned to pass unconscious judgment upon
the works and ways of the vanished race. By this time, being endowed
with quick and accurate perceptions, they begin to understand the
purpose of the many things around them. They conjecture, for instance,
that the edifices of the city were erected, not by the immediate hand
that made the world, but by beings somewhat similar to themselves, for
shelter and convenience. But how will they explain the magnificence of
one habitation as compared with the squalid misery of another? Through
what medium can the idea of servitude enter their minds? When will they
comprehend the great and miserable fact—the evidences of which appeal
to their senses everywhere—that one portion of earth’s lost inhabitants
was rolling in luxury while the multitude was toiling for scanty food?
A wretched change, indeed, must be wrought in their own hearts ere they
can conceive the primal decree of Love to have been so completely
abrogated, that a brother should ever want what his brother had. When
their intelligence shah have reached so far, Earth’s new progeny will
have little reason to exult over her old rejected one.

Their wanderings have now brought them into the suburbs of the city,
They stand on a grassy brow of a hill at the foot of a granite obelisk
which points its great finger upwards, as if the human family had
agreed, by a visible symbol of age-long endurance, to offer some high
sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplication. The solemn height of the
monument, its deep simplicity, and the absence of any vulgar and
practical use, all strengthen its effect upon Adam and Eve, and leave
them to interpret it by a purer sentiment than the builders thought of
expressing.

“Eve, it is a visible prayer,” observed Adam.

“And we will pray too,” she replies.

Let us pardon these poor children of neither father nor mother for so
absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial which man founded and
woman finished on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not native
to their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the brave defenders of
liberty, since oppression is one of their unconjectured mysteries.
Could they guess that the green sward on which they stand so peacefully
was once strewn with human corpses and purple with their blood, it
would equally amaze them that one generation of men should perpetrate
such carnage, and that a subsequent generation should triumphantly
commemorate it.

With a sense of delight they now stroll across green fields and along
the margin of a quiet river. Not to track them too closely, we next
find the wanderers entering a Gothic edifice of gray stone, where the
bygone world has left whatever it deemed worthy of record, in the rich
library of Harvard University.

No student ever yet enjoyed such solitude and silence as now broods
within its deep alcoves. Little do the present visitors understand what
opportunities are thrown away upon them. Yet Adam looks anxiously at
the long rows of volumes, those storied heights of human lore,
ascending one above another from floor to ceiling. He takes up a bulky
folio. It opens in his hands as if spontaneously to impart the spirit
of its author to the yet unworn and untainted intellect of the
fresh-created mortal. He stands poring over the regular columns of
mystic characters, seemingly in studious mood; for the unintelligible
thought upon the page has a mysterious relation to his mind, and makes
itself felt as if it were a burden flung upon him. He is even painfully
perplexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what. O Adam, it is too
soon, too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on spectacles
and bury yourself in the alcoves of a library!

“What can this be?” he murmurs at last. “Eve, methinks nothing is so
desirable as to find out the mystery of this big and heavy object with
its thousand thin divisions. See! it stares me in the face as if it
were about to speak!”

Eve, by a feminine instinct, is dipping into a volume of fashionable
poetry, the production certainly the most fortunate of earthly bards,
since his lay continues in vogue when all the great masters of the lyre
have passed into oblivion. But let not, his ghost be too exultant! The
world’s one lady tosses the book upon the floor and laughs merrily at
her husband’s abstracted mien.

“My dear Adam,” cries she, “you look pensive and dismal. Do fling down
that stupid thing; for even if it should speak it would not be worth
attending to. Let us talk with one another, and with the sky, and the
green earth, and its trees and flowers. They will teach us better
knowledge than we can find here.”

“Well, Eve, perhaps you are right,” replies Adam, with a sort of sigh.
“Still I cannot help thinking that the interpretation of the riddles
amid which we have been wandering all day long might here be
discovered.”

“It may be better not to seek the interpretation,” persists Eve. “For
my part, the air of this place does not suit me. If you love me, come
away!”

She prevails, and rescues him from the mysterious perils of the
library. Happy influence of woman! Had he lingered there long enough to
obtain a clew to its treasures,—as was not impossible, his intellect
being of human structure, indeed, but with an untransmitted vigor and
acuteness,—had he then and there become a student, the annalist of our
poor world would soon have recorded the downfall of a second Adam. The
fatal apple of another Tree of knowledge would have been eaten. All the
perversions, and sophistries, and false wisdom so aptly mimicking the
true,—all the narrow truth, so partial that it becomes more deceptive
than falsehood,—all the wrong principles and worse practice, the
pernicious examples and mistaken rules of life,—all the specious
theories which turn earth into cloudland and men into shadows,—all the
sad experience which it took mankind so many ages to accumulate, and
from which they never drew a moral for their future guidance, the whole
heap of this disastrous lore would have tumbled at once upon Adam’s
head. There would have been nothing left for him but to take up the
already abortive experiment of life where he had dropped it, and toil
onward with it a little farther.

But, blessed in his ignorance, he may still enjoy a new world in our
worn-out one. Should he fall short of good, even as far as we did, he
has at least the freedom—no worthless one—to make errors for himself.
And his literature, when the progress of centuries shall create it,
will be no interminably repeated echo of our own poetry and
reproduction of the images that were moulded by our great fathers of
song and fiction, but a melody never yet heard on earth, and
intellectual forms unbreathed upon by our conceptions. Therefore let
the dust of ages gather upon the volumes of the library, and in due
season the roof of the edifice crumble down upon the whole. When the
second Adam’s descendants shall have collected as much rubbish of their
own, it will be time enough to dig into our ruins and compare the
literary advancement of two independent races.

But we are looking forward too far. It seems to be the vice of those
who have a long past behind them. We will return to the new Adam and
Eve, who, having no reminiscences save dim and fleeting visions of a
pre-existence, are content to live and be happy in the present.

The day is near its close when these pilgrims, who derive their being
from no dead progenitors, reach the cemetery of Mount Auburn. With
light hearts—for earth and sky now gladden each other with beauty—they
tread along the winding paths, among marble pillars, mimic temples,
urns, obelisks, and sarcophagi, sometimes pausing to contemplate these
fantasies of human growth, and sometimes to admire the flowers
wherewith nature converts decay to loveliness. Can Death, in the midst
of his old triumphs, make them sensible that they have taken up the
heavy burden of mortality which a whole species had thrown down? Dust
kindred to their own has never lain in the grave. Will they then
recognize, and so soon, that Time and the elements have an indefeasible
claim upon their bodies? Not improbably they may. There must have been
shadows enough, even amid the primal sunshine of their existence, to
suggest the thought of the soul’s incongruity with its circumstances.
They have already learned that something is to be thrown aside. The
idea of Death is in them, or not far off. But, were they to choose a
symbol for him, it would be the butterfly soaring upward, or the bright
angel beckoning them aloft, or the child asleep, with soft dreams
visible through her transparent purity.

Such a Child, in whitest marble, they have found among the monuments of
Mount Auburn.

“Sweetest Eve,” observes Adam, while hand in hand they contemplate this
beautiful object, “yonder sun has left us, and the whole world is
fading from our sight. Let us sleep as this lovely little figure is
sleeping. Our Father only knows whether what outward things we have
possessed to-day are to be snatched from us forever. But should our
earthly life be leaving us with the departing light, we need not doubt
that another morn will find us somewhere beneath the smile of God. I
feel that he has imparted the boon of existence never to be resumed.”

“And no matter where we exist,” replies Eve, “for we shall always be
together.”




EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT


“Here he comes!” shouted the boys along the street. “Here comes the man
with a snake in his bosom!”

This outcry, saluting Herkimer’s ears as he was about to enter the iron
gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was not without a
shudder that he found himself on the point of meeting his former
acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom now
after an interval of five years, he was to find the victim either of a
diseased fancy or a horrible physical misfortune.

“A snake in his bosom!” repeated the young sculptor to himself. “It
must be he. No second man on earth has such a bosom friend. And now, my
poor Rosina, Heaven grant me wisdom to discharge my errand aright!
Woman’s faith must be strong indeed since thine has not yet failed.”

Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of the gate and waited
until the personage so singularly announced should make his appearance.
After an instant or two he beheld the figure of a lean man, of
unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and long black hair, who seemed
to imitate the motion of a snake; for, instead of walking straight
forward with open front, he undulated along the pavement in a curved
line. It may be too fanciful to say that something, either in his moral
or material aspect, suggested the idea that a miracle had been wrought
by transforming a serpent into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky
nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere outward
guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his complexion had a greenish
tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a species of marble out
of which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with her snaky locks.

The wretched being approached the gate, but, instead of entering,
stopped short and fixed the glitter of his eye full upon the
compassionate yet steady countenance of the sculptor.

“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” he exclaimed.

And then there was an audible hiss, but whether it came from the
apparent lunatic’s own lips, or was the real hiss of a serpent, might
admit of a discussion. At all events, it made Herkimer shudder to his
heart’s core.

“Do you know me, George Herkimer?” asked the snake-possessed.

Herkimer did know him; but it demanded all the intimate and practical
acquaintance with the human face, acquired by modelling actual
likenesses in clay, to recognize the features of Roderick Elliston in
the visage that now met the sculptor’s gaze. Yet it was he. It added
nothing to the wonder to reflect that the once brilliant young man had
undergone this odious and fearful change during the no more than five
brief years of Herkimer’s abode at Florence. The possibility of such a
transformation being granted, it was as easy to conceive it effected in
a moment as in an age. Inexpressibly shocked and startled, it was still
the keenest pang when Herkimer remembered that the fate of his cousin
Rosina, the ideal of gentle womanhood, was indissolubly interwoven with
that of a being whom Providence seemed to have unhumanized.

“Elliston! Roderick!” cried he, “I had heard of this; but my conception
came far short of the truth. What has befallen you? Why do I find you
thus?”

“Oh, ’tis a mere nothing! A snake! A snake! The commonest thing in the
world. A snake in the bosom—that’s all,” answered Roderick Elliston.
“But how is your own breast?” continued he, looking the sculptor in the
eye with the most acute and penetrating glance that it had ever been
his fortune to encounter. “All pure and wholesome? No reptile there? By
my faith and conscience, and by the devil within me, here is a wonder!
A man without a serpent in his bosom!”

“Be calm, Elliston,” whispered George Herkimer, laying his hand upon
the shoulder of the snake-possessed. “I have crossed the ocean to meet
you. Listen! Let us be private. I bring a message from Rosina—from your
wife!”

“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” muttered Roderick.

With this exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the unfortunate
man clutched both hands upon his breast as if an intolerable sting or
torture impelled him to rend it open and let out the living mischief,
even should it be intertwined with his own life. He then freed himself
from Herkimer’s grasp by a subtle motion, and, gliding through the
gate, took refuge in his antiquated family residence. The sculptor did
not pursue him. He saw that no available intercourse could be expected
at such a moment, and was desirous, before another meeting, to inquire
closely into the nature of Roderick’s disease and the circumstances
that had reduced him to so lamentable a condition. He succeeded in
obtaining the necessary information from an eminent medical gentleman.

Shortly after Elliston’s separation from his wife—now nearly four years
ago—his associates had observed a singular gloom spreading over his
daily life, like those chill, gray mists that sometimes steal away the
sunshine from a summer’s morning. The symptoms caused them endless
perplexity. They knew not whether ill health were robbing his spirits
of elasticity, or whether a canker of the mind was gradually eating, as
such cankers do, from his moral system into the physical frame, which
is but the shadow of the former. They looked for the root of this
trouble in his shattered schemes of domestic bliss,—wilfully shattered
by himself,—but could not be satisfied of its existence there. Some
thought that their once brilliant friend was in an incipient stage of
insanity, of which his passionate impulses had perhaps been the
forerunners; others prognosticated a general blight and gradual
decline. From Roderick’s own lips they could learn nothing. More than
once, it is true, he had been heard to say, clutching his hands
convulsively upon his breast,—“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”—but, by
different auditors, a great diversity of explanation was assigned to
this ominous expression. What could it be that gnawed the breast of
Roderick Elliston? Was it sorrow? Was it merely the tooth of physical
disease? Or, in his reckless course, often verging upon profligacy, if
not plunging into its depths, had he been guilty of some deed which
made his bosom a prey to the deadlier fangs of remorse? There was
plausible ground for each of these conjectures; but it must not be
concealed that more than one elderly gentleman, the victim of good
cheer and slothful habits, magisterially pronounced the secret of the
whole matter to be Dyspepsia!

Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally he had become the
subject of curiosity and conjecture, and, with a morbid repugnance to
such notice, or to any notice whatsoever, estranged himself from all
companionship. Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him; not
merely the light of a friend’s countenance; but even the blessed
sunshine, likewise, which in its universal beneficence typifies the
radiance of the Creator’s face, expressing his love for all the
creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was now too transparent for
Roderick Elliston; the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to steal
abroad; and if ever he were seen, it was when the watchman’s lantern
gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street, with his hands
clutched upon his bosom, still muttering, “It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”
What could it be that gnawed him?

After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of
resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom money
would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of these
persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed far
and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets on dingy paper,
that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been
relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here was the monstrous secret,
ejected from its lurking place into public view, in all its horrible
deformity. The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it
were anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The
empiric’s cure had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of some
stupefying drug which more nearly caused the death of the patient than
of the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston
regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune the town
talk—the more than nine days’ wonder and horror—while, at his bosom, he
felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the gnawing of that
restless fang which seemed to gratify at once a physical appetite and a
fiendish spite.

He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his father’s
house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his cradle.

“Scipio!” he began; and then paused, with his arms folded over his
heart. “What do people say of me, Scipio.”

“Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom,” answered
the servant with hesitation.

“And what else?” asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man.

“Nothing else, dear master,” replied Scipio, “only that the doctor gave
you a powder, and that the snake leaped out upon the floor.”

“No, no!” muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and
pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast, “I feel
him still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”

From this time the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world, but
rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of acquaintances
and strangers. It was partly the result of desperation on finding that
the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep and dark enough to hide
the secret, even while it was so secure a fortress for the loathsome
fiend that had crept into it. But still more, this craving for
notoriety was a symptom of the intense morbidness which now pervaded
his nature. All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the
disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely
the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the
cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a
self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be
so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the
face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure—perhaps the
greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible—in displaying the wasted
or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the
crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it
from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is
that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective
individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before, had held
himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full
allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the
symbol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was referred, and
which he pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive
sacrifice of devil worship.

He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of
insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and gloried
himself on being marked out from the ordinary experience of mankind, by
the possession of a double nature, and a life within a life. He
appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity,—not celestial, it is
true, but darkly infernal,—and that he thence derived an eminence and a
sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than whatever ambition
aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a regal mantle, and
looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly
monster. Oftener, however, his human nature asserted its empire over
him in the shape of a yearning for fellowship. It grew to be his custom
to spend the whole day in wandering about the streets, aimlessly,
unless it might be called an aim to establish a species of brotherhood
between himself and the world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out
his own disease in every breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so
keen a perception of frailty, error, and vice, that many persons gave
him credit for being possessed not merely with a serpent, but with an
actual fiend, who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever
was ugliest in man’s heart.

For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had
cherished a hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the throng
of the street, laid his hand on this man’s chest, and looking full into
his forbidding face, “How is the snake to-day?” he inquired, with a
mock expression of sympathy.

“The snake!” exclaimed the brother hater—“what do you mean?”

“The snake! The snake! Does it gnaw you?” persisted Roderick. “Did you
take counsel with him this morning when you should have been saying
your prayers? Did he sting, when you thought of your brother’s health,
wealth, and good repute? Did he caper for joy, when you remembered the
profligacy of his only son? And whether he stung, or whether he
frolicked, did you feel his poison throughout your body and soul,
converting everything to sourness and bitterness? That is the way of
such serpents. I have learned the whole nature of them from my own!”

“Where is the police?” roared the object of Roderick’s persecution, at
the same time giving an instinctive clutch to his breast. “Why is this
lunatic allowed to go at large?”

“Ha, ha!” chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp of the man.— “His
bosom serpent has stung him then!”

Often it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter
satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like virulence.
One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired
after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick
affirmed, this gentleman’s serpent must needs be, since its appetite
was enormous enough to devour the whole country and constitution. At
another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth,
but who skulked about the city in the guise of a scarecrow, with a
patched blue surtout, brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence
together, and picking up rusty nails. Pretending to look earnestly at
this respectable person’s stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake
was a copper-head and had been generated by the immense quantities of
that base metal with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he
assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom
serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the
vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention
was a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in
a theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than
divine inspiration.

“You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramental wine,” quoth he.

“Profane wretch!” exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand
stole to his breast.

He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early
disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately
over the irrevocable past. This man’s very heart, if Roderick might be
believed, had been changed into a serpent, which would finally torment
both him and itself to death. Observing a married couple, whose
domestic troubles were matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on
having mutually taken a house adder to their bosoms. To an envious
author, who depreciated works which he could never equal, he said that
his snake was the slimiest and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but
was fortunately without a sting. A man of impure life, and a brazen
face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told
him that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don
Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and gazing
sadly into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the
deadliest kind within her gentle breast; and the world found the truth
of those ominous words, when, a few months afterwards, the poor girl
died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life who
tormented one another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite,
were given to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of
diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief as one great one.

But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a
person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous
green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting
of any snake save one.

“And what one is that?” asked a by-stander, overhearing him.

It was a dark-browed man who put the question; he had an evasive eye,
which in the course of a dozen years had looked no mortal directly in
the face. There was an ambiguity about this person’s character,—a stain
upon his reputation,—yet none could tell precisely of what nature,
although the city gossips, male and female, whispered the most
atrocious surmises. Until a recent period he had followed the sea, and
was, in fact, the very shipmaster whom George Herkimer had encountered,
under such singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.

“What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting?” repeated this man; but he
put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he
was uttering it.

“Why need you ask?” replied Roderick, with a look of dark intelligence.
“Look into your own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He
acknowledges the presence of a master fiend!”

And then, as the by-standers afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound was
heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston’s breast. It was said, too, that
an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake
were actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its
brother reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might have
been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of
Roderick.

Thus making his own actual serpent—if a serpent there actually was in
his bosom—the type of each man’s fatal error, or hoarded sin, or
unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into the
sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the pest of the
city. Nobody could elude him—none could withstand him. He grappled with
the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his
adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human life where it is
the instinctive effort of one and all to hide those sad realities, and
leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics which
constitute the materials of intercourse between man and man! It was not
to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break through the tacit
compact by which the world has done its best to secure repose without
relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious remarks, it is true,
had brothers enough to keep them in countenance; for, by Roderick’s
theory, every mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small serpents or
one overgrown monster that had devoured all the rest. Still the city
could not bear this new apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and
particularly by the most respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should
no longer be permitted to violate the received rules of decorum by
obtruding his own bosom serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those
of decent people from their lurking places.

Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed him in a private
asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was observed
that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances and
covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.

His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the
peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In
solitude his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
days—indeed, it was his sole occupation—in communing with the serpent.
A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden
monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners, and
inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had
now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however,
with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant
emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and
poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love—horrible antipathy—embracing
one another in his bosom, and both concentrating themselves upon a
being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there, and
which was nourished with his food, and lived upon his life, and was as
intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all
created things! But not the less was it the true type of a morbid
nature.

Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake
and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at the
expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation; but, while
the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster seemed to
feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his
sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active
poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the
devil that possessed him, or both together. Another mistake; for if
Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart nor the
snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive
sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest appeared to operate as an antidote
against all other poisons. The physicians tried to suffocate the fiend
with tobacco smoke. He breathed it as freely as if it were his native
atmosphere. Again, they drugged their patient with opium and drenched
him with intoxicating liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be
reduced to stupor and perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They
succeeded in rendering Roderick insensible; but, placing their hands
upon his breast, they were inexpressibly horror stricken to feel the
monster wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro within his narrow
limits, evidently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to
unusual feats of activity. Thenceforth they gave up all attempts at
cure or palliation. The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate, resumed
his former loathsome affection for the bosom fiend, and spent whole
miserable days before a looking-glass, with his mouth wide open,
watching, in hope and horror, to catch a glimpse of the snake’s head
far down within his throat. It is supposed that he succeeded; for the
attendants once heard a frenzied shout, and, rushing into the room,
found Roderick lifeless upon the floor.

He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute
investigation, the medical directors of the asylum decided that his
mental disease did not amount to insanity, nor would warrant his
confinement, especially as its influence upon his spirits was
unfavorable, and might produce the evil which it was meant to remedy.
His eccentricities were doubtless great; he had habitually violated
many of the customs and prejudices of society; but the world was not,
without surer ground, entitled to treat him as a madman. On this
decision of such competent authority Roderick was released, and had
returned to his native city the very day before his encounter with
George Herkimer.

As soon as possible after learning these particulars the sculptor,
together with a sad and tremulous companion, sought Elliston at his own
house. It was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters and a
balcony, and was divided from one of the principal streets by a terrace
of three elevations, which was ascended by successive flights of stone
steps. Some immense old elms almost concealed the front of the mansion.
This spacious and once magnificent family residence was built by a
grandee of the race early in the past century, at which epoch, land
being of small comparative value, the garden and other grounds had
formed quite an extensive domain. Although a portion of the ancestral
heritage had been alienated, there was still a shadowy enclosure in the
rear of the mansion where a student, or a dreamer, or a man of stricken
heart might lie all day upon the grass, amid the solitude of murmuring
boughs, and forget that a city had grown up around him.

Into this retirement the sculptor and his companion were ushered by
Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage grew almost sunny
with intelligence and joy as he paid his humble greetings to one of the
two visitors.

“Remain in the arbor,” whispered the sculptor to the figure that leaned
upon his arm. “You will know whether, and when, to make your
appearance.”

“God will teach me,” was the reply. “May He support me too!”

Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain which gushed into
the fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle and the same voice
of airy quietude as when trees of primeval growth flung their shadows
cross its bosom. How strange is the life of a fountain!—born at every
moment, yet of an age coeval with the rocks, and far surpassing the
venerable antiquity of a forest.

“You are come! I have expected you,” said Elliston, when he became
aware of the sculptor’s presence.

His manner was very different from that of the preceding day—quiet,
courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over his guest and
himself. This unnatural restraint was almost the only trait that
betokened anything amiss. He had just thrown a book upon the grass,
where it lay half opened, thus disclosing itself to be a natural
history of the serpent tribe, illustrated by lifelike plates. Near it
lay that bulky volume, the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor, full of
cases of conscience, and in which most men, possessed of a conscience,
may find something applicable to their purpose.

“You see,” observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents, while a
smile gleamed upon his lips, “I am making an effort to become better
acquainted with my bosom friend; but I find nothing satisfactory in
this volume. If I mistake not, he will prove to be sui generis, and
akin to no other reptile in creation.”

“Whence came this strange calamity?” inquired the sculptor.

“My sable friend Scipio has a story,” replied Roderick, “of a snake
that had lurked in this fountain—pure and innocent as it looks—ever
since it was known to the first settlers. This insinuating personage
once crept into the vitals of my great grandfather and dwelt there many
years, tormenting the old gentleman beyond mortal endurance. In short
it is a family peculiarity. But, to tell you the truth, I have no faith
in this idea of the snake’s being an heirloom. He is my own snake, and
no man’s else.”

“But what was his origin?” demanded Herkimer.

“Oh, there is poisonous stuff in any man’s heart sufficient to generate
a brood of serpents,” said Elliston with a hollow laugh. “You should
have heard my homilies to the good town’s-people. Positively, I deem
myself fortunate in having bred but a single serpent. You, however,
have none in your bosom, and therefore cannot sympathize with the rest
of the world. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”

With this exclamation Roderick lost his self-control and threw himself
upon the grass, testifying his agony by intricate writhings, in which
Herkimer could not but fancy a resemblance to the motions of a snake.
Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss, which often ran through
the sufferer’s speech, and crept between the words and syllables
without interrupting their succession.

“This is awful indeed!” exclaimed the sculptor—“an awful infliction,
whether it be actual or imaginary. Tell me, Roderick Elliston, is there
any remedy for this loathsome evil?”

“Yes, but an impossible one,” muttered Roderick, as he lay wallowing
with his face in the grass. “Could I for one moment forget myself, the
serpent might not abide within me. It is my diseased self-contemplation
that has engendered and nourished him.”

“Then forget yourself, my husband,” said a gentle voice above him;
“forget yourself in the idea of another!”

Rosina had emerged from the arbor, and was bending over him with the
shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance, yet so mingled with
hope and unselfish love that all anguish seemed but an earthly shadow
and a dream. She touched Roderick with her hand. A tremor shivered
through his frame. At that moment, if report be trustworthy, the
sculptor beheld a waving motion through the grass, and heard a tinkling
sound, as if something had plunged into the fountain. Be the truth as
it might, it is certain that Roderick Elliston sat up like a man
renewed, restored to his right mind, and rescued from the fiend which
had so miserably overcome him in the battle-field of his own breast.

“Rosina!” cried he, in broken and passionate tones, but with nothing of
the wild wail that had haunted his voice so long, “forgive! forgive!”

Her happy tears bedewed his face.

“The punishment has been severe,” observed the sculptor. “Even Justice
might now forgive; how much more a woman’s tenderness! Roderick
Elliston, whether the serpent was a physical reptile, or whether the
morbidness of your nature suggested that symbol to your fancy, the
moral of the story is not the less true and strong. A tremendous
Egotism, manifesting itself in your case in the form of jealousy, is as
fearful a fiend as ever stole into the human heart. Can a breast, where
it has dwelt so long, be purified?”

“Oh yes,” said Rosina with a heavenly smile. “The serpent was but a
dark fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The past,
dismal as it seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To give it
its due importance we must think of it but as an anecdote in our
Eternity.”




THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET

FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART.”


“I have here attempted,” said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the
summer-house,—“I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides
past me, occasionally, in my walk through life. My former sad
experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight into
the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have wandered
like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast flickering to
extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a hopeless puzzle.”

“Well, but propound him,” said the sculptor. “Let us have an idea of
hint, to begin with.”

“Why, indeed,” replied Roderick, “he is such a being as I could
conceive you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized perfection
of human science to endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect; but
still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a divine Creator. He
looks like a man; and, perchance, like a better specimen of man than
you ordinarily meet. You might esteem him wise; he is capable of
cultivation and refinement, and has at least an external conscience;
but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those to
which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find
him chill and unsubstantial,—a mere vapor.”

“I believe,” said Rosina, “I have a glimmering idea of what you mean.”

“Then be thankful,” answered her husband, smiling; “but do not
anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I
have here imagined such a man to be—what, probably, he never
is—conscious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks
the result would be a sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go
shivering through the world, longing to exchange his load of ice for
any burden of real grief that fate could fling upon a human being.”

Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.


In a certain old gentleman’s last will and testament there appeared a
bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in
keeping with a long life of melancholy eccentricity. He devised a
considerable sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was to
be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christmas Banquet for ten
of the most miserable persons that could be found. It seemed not to be
the testator’s purpose to make these half a score of sad hearts merry,
but to provide that the stern or fierce expression of human discontent
should not be drowned, even for that one holy and joyful day, amid the
acclamations of festal gratitude which all Christendom sends up. And he
desired, likewise, to perpetuate his own remonstrance against the
earthly course of Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those
systems of religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the
world or draw it down from heaven.

The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might
advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was
confided to the two trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentlemen,
like their deceased friend, were sombre humorists, who made it their
principal occupation to number the sable threads in the web of human
life, and drop all the golden ones out of the reckoning. They performed
their present office with integrity and judgment. The aspect of the
assembled company, on the day of the first festival, might not, it is
true, have satisfied every beholder that these were especially the
individuals, chosen forth from all the world, whose griefs were worthy
to stand as indicators of the mass of human suffering. Yet, after due
consideration, it could not be disputed that here was a variety of
hopeless discomfort, which, if it sometimes arose from causes
apparently inadequate, was thereby only the shrewder imputation against
the nature and mechanism of life.

The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably intended
to signify that death in life which had been the testator’s definition
of existence. The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with
curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress
and wreaths of artificial flowers, imitative of such as used to be
strewn over the dead. A sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The
main reservoir of wine, was a sepulchral urn of silver, whence the
liquor was distributed around the table in small vases, accurately
copied from those that held the tears of ancient mourners. Neither had
the stewards—if it were their taste that arranged these
details—forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a
skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with
the imperturbable grin of a death’s-head. Such a fearful guest,
shrouded in a black mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It was
whispered, I know not with what truth, that the testator himself had
once walked the visible world with the machinery of that sane skeleton,
and that it was one of the stipulations of his will, that he should
thus be permitted to sit, from year to year, at the banquet which he
had instituted. If so, it was perhaps covertly implied that he had
cherished no hopes of bliss beyond the grave to compensate for the
evils which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their bewildered
conjectures as to the purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters
should throw aside the veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this
figure of death, as seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable,
the only reply would be a stare of the vacant eye-caverns and a grin of
the skeleton jaws. Such was the response that the dead man had fancied
himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his
life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his dismal
hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same question.

“What means that wreath?” asked several of the company, while viewing
the decorations of the table.

They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a
skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle.

“It is a crown,” said one of the stewards, “not for the worthiest, but
for the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it.”

The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and gentle
character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy despondency
to which his temperament rendered him liable; and therefore with
nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he had spent a life of
quiet misery that made his blood torpid, and weighed upon his breath,
and sat like a ponderous night-fiend upon every throb of his
unresisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as deep as his original
nature, if not identical with it. It was the misfortune of a second
guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased heart, which had become so
wretchedly sore that the continual and unavoidable rubs of the world,
the blow of an enemy, the careless jostle of a stranger, and even the
faithful and loving touch of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is
the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in
exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give themselves the
pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose
imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world, and
caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in
the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and
something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature.
His neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted
mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting
with many disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several
years back this misanthrope bad employed himself in accumulating
motives for hating and despising his race,—such as murder, lust,
treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive
vices of children, impurity of women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like
aspect,—and, in short, all manner of black realities that sought to
decorate themselves with outward grace or glory. But at every atrocious
fact that was added to his catalogue, at every increase of the sad
knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native impulses of
the poor man’s loving and confiding heart made him groan with anguish.
Next, with his heavy brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a
man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial
infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high message to the world;
but, essaying to deliver it, had found either no voice or form of
speech, or else no ears to listen. Therefore his whole life was a
bitter questioning of himself: “Why have not men acknowledged my
mission? Am I not a self-deluding fool? What business have I on earth?
Where is my grave?” Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent
draughts from the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the
celestial fire that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his
race.

Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay
gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow,
and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head. Endowed with
sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but
had reached at last that dreary point in life where Folly quits us of
her own accord, leaving us to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus,
cold and desolate, he had come to seek Wisdom at the banquet, and
wondered if the skeleton were she. To eke out the company, the stewards
had invited a distressed poet from his home in the almshouse, and a
melancholy idiot from the street-corner. The latter had just the
glimmering of sense that was sufficient to make him conscious of a
vacancy, which the poor fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought
to fill up with intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and
groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffectual. The only lady
in the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye.
But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal of her
soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in solitude, and
veiled her countenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat
shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at the other.

One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth
brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior
developed him, he might much more suitably have found a place at some
merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among the blighted,
fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs
arose among the guests as they noted, the glance of general scrutiny
which the intruder threw over his companions. What had he to do among
them? Why did not the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast unbend
its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwelcome stranger from the
board?

“Shameful!” said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
heart. “He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends
I—he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the
stage!”

“O, never mind him!” said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly. “He shall
feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a fricassee of
scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the
dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if he like our
Christmas fare, let him return again next year!”

“Trouble him not,” murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness. “What
matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few years sooner
or later? If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with us
for the sake of the wretchedness to come.”

The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused people
to say that he was always in search of his missing wits. After no
little examination he touched the stranger’s hand, but immediately drew
back his own, shaking his head and shivering.

“Cold, cold, cold!” muttered the idiot.

The young man shivered too, and smiled.

“Gentlemen, and you, madam,” said one of the stewards of the festival,
“do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment, as to
imagine that we have admitted this young stranger—Gervayse Hastings by
name—without a full investigation and thoughtful balance of his claims.
Trust me, not a guest at the table is better entitled to his seat.”

The steward’s guaranty was perforce satisfactory. The company,
therefore, took their places, and addressed themselves to the serious
business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac,
who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of stewed toads and
vipers was set before him, and that there was green ditchwater in his
cup of wine. This mistake being amended, he quietly resumed his seat.
The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn, seemed to come
imbued with all gloomy inspirations; so that its influence was not to
cheer, but either to sink the revellers into a deeper melancholy, or
elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. The
conversation was various. They told sad stories about people who might
have been Worthy guests at such a festival as the present. They talked
of grisly incidents in human history; of strange crimes, which, if
truly considered, were but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had
been altogether wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general
semblance of happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by
misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of
death-bed scenes, and what dark intimations might be gathered from the
words of dying men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were
by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
charcoal. The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their own
woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most excellent in
anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and
wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a gleam of discolored
light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. Many a miserable
thought, such as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he now
rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestimable gem, a diamond, a
treasure far preferable to those bright, spiritual revelations of a
better world, which are like precious stones from heaven’s pavement.
And then, amid his lore of wretchedness he hid his face and wept.

It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have been
a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have tasted
deepest of the bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that every son
or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune, might, at one
sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a stricken heart,
to sit down at this table. But, throughout the feast, it was remarked
that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings, was unsuccessful in his
attempts to catch its pervading spirit. At any deep, strong thought
that found utterance, and which was torn out, as it were, from the
saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked mystified and
bewildered; even more than the poor idiot, who seemed to grasp at such
things with his earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend
them. The young man’s conversation was of a colder and lighter kind,
often brilliant, but lacking the powerful characteristics of a nature
that had been developed by suffering.

“Sir,” said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation by
Gervayse Hastings, “pray do not address me again. We have no right to
talk together. Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim you
appear at this banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a man who could
say what you have just now said, my companions and myself must seem no
more than shadows flickering on the wall. And precisely such a shadow
are you to us.”

The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his chair,
he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-ball were
growing chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon the
youth, and murmured, “Cold! cold! cold!”

The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed. Scarcely
had they stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the scene that
had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an
exhalation from a stagnant heart. Now and then, however, during the
year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses of one
another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they walked the
earth with the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair of them
came face to face, while stealing through the evening twilight,
enveloped in their sable cloaks. Sometimes they casually met in
churchyards. Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters
mutually started at recognizing each other in the noonday sunshine of a
crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray. Doubtless they
wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at noonday too.

But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these Christmas
guests into the bustling world, they were sure to encounter the young
man who had so unaccountably been admitted to the festival. They saw
him among the gay and fortunate; they caught the sunny sparkle of his
eye; they heard the light and careless tones of his voice, and muttered
to themselves with such indignation as only the aristocracy of
wretchedness could kindle, “The traitor! The vile impostor! Providence,
in its own good time, may give him a right to feast among us!” But the
young man’s unabashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they
passed him, seeming to say, perchance with somewhat of a sneer, “First,
know my secret then, measure your claims with mine!”

The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas round
again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and sports, games,
festivals, and everywhere the bright face of Joy beside the household
fire. Again likewise the hall, with its curtains of dusky purple, was
illuminated by the death-torches gleaming on the sepulchral decorations
of the banquet. The veiled, skeleton sat in state, lifting the
cypress-wreath above its head, as the guerdon of some guest illustrious
in the qualifications which there claimed precedence. As the stewards
deemed the world inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of
recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble
the company of the former year. New faces now threw their gloom across
the table.

There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
heart—the death of a fellow-creature—which, for his more exquisite
torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he
could not absolutely determine whether his will had entered into the
deed or not. Therefore, his whole life was spent in the agony of an
inward trial for murder, with a continual sifting of the details of his
terrible calamity, until his mind had no longer any thought, nor his
soul any emotion, disconnected with it, There was a mother, too,—a
mother once, but a desolation now,—who, many years before, had gone out
on a pleasure-party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in its
little bed. And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that
her buried baby lay smothering in its coffin. Then there was an aged
lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
quivering through her-frame. It was terrible to discern her dark shadow
tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous; and the
expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was trembling
too. Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made almost a chaos
of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what dire misfortune
had thus shaken her nature to its depths; so that the stewards had
admitted her to the table, not from any acquaintance with her history,
but on the safe testimony of her miserable aspect. Some surprise was
expressed at the presence of a bluff, red-faced gentleman, a certain
Mr. Smith, who had evidently the fat of many a rich feast within him,
and the habitual twinkle of whose eye betrayed a disposition to break
forth into uproarious laughter for little cause or none. It turned out,
however, that, with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend
was afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened
instant death on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that
titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry thoughts. In this
dilemma he had sought admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible plea
of his irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the hope of
imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.

A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it
being well understood that they rendered each other unutterably
miserable whenever they chanced to meet, and therefore must necessarily
be fit associates at the festival. In contrast with these was another
couple still unmarried, who had interchanged their hearts in early
life, but had been divided by circumstances as impalpable as morning
mist, and kept apart so long that their spirits now found it impossible
to meet, Therefore, yearning for communion, yet shrinking from one
another and choosing none beside, they felt themselves companionless in
life, and looked upon eternity as a boundless desert. Next to the
skeleton sat a mere son of earth,—a hunter of the Exchange,—a gatherer
of shining dust,—a man whose life’s record was in his ledger, and whose
soul’s prison-house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits.
This person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming
himself one of the most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards
persisted in demanding his presence, assuring him that he had no
conception how miserable he was.

And now appeared a figure which we must acknowledge as our acquaintance
of the former festival. It was Gervayse Hastings, whose presence had
then caused so much question and criticism, and who now took his place
with the composure of one whose claims were satisfactory to himself and
must needs be allowed by others. Yet his easy and unruffled face
betrayed no sorrow.

The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook their
heads, to miss the unuttered sympathy—the countersign never to be
falsified—of those whose hearts are cavern-mouths through which they
descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize other wanderers
there.

“Who is this youth?” asked the man with a bloodstain on his conscience.
“Surely he has never gone down into the depths! I know all the aspects
of those who have passed through the dark valley. By what right is he
among us?”

“Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow,” murmured
the aged lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which
pervaded her whole being “Depart, young man! Your soul has never been
shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the more to look at you.”

“His soul shaken! No; I’ll answer for it,” said bluff Mr. Smith,
pressing his hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as he
could, for fear of a fatal explosion of laughter. “I know the lad well;
he has as fair prospects as any young man about town, and has no more
right among us miserable creatures than the child unborn. He never was
miserable and probably never will be!”

“Our honored guests,” interposed the stewards, “pray have patience with
us, and believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the sacredness
of this solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of it. Receive
this young man to your table. It may not be too much to say, that no
guest here would exchange his own heart for the one that beats within
that youthful bosom!”

“I’d call it a bargain, and gladly, too,” muttered Mr. Smith, with a
perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit. “A plague upon
their nonsense! My own heart is the only really miserable one in the
company; it will certainly be the death of me at last!”

Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the stewards
being without appeal, the company sat down. The obnoxious guest made no
more attempt to obtrude his conversation on those about him, but
appeared to listen to the table-talk with peculiar assiduity, as if
some inestimable secret, otherwise beyond his reach, might be conveyed
in a casual word. And in truth, to those who could understand and value
it, there was rich matter in the upgushings and outpourings of these
initiated souls to whom sorrow had been a talisman, admitting them into
spiritual depths which no other spell can open. Sometimes out of the
midst of densest gloom there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as
crystal, bright as the flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon
the mysteries of life, that the guests were ready to exclaim, “Surely
the riddle is on the point of being solved!” At such illuminated
intervals the saddest mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal
griefs are but shadowy and external; no more than the sable robes
voluminously shrouding a certain divine reality, and thus indicating
what might otherwise be altogether invisible to mortal eye.

“Just now,” remarked the trembling old woman, “I seemed to see beyond
the outside. And then my everlasting tremor passed away!”

“Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of light!”
said the man of stricken conscience. “Then the blood-stain in my heart
would be washed clean away.”

This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to good
Mr. Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter which his
physicians had warned him against, as likely to prove instantaneously
fatal. In effect, he fell back in his chair a corpse, with a broad grin
upon his face, while his ghost, perchance, remained beside it
bewildered at its unpremeditated exit. This catastrophe of course broke
up the festival.

“How is this? You do not tremble!” observed the tremulous old woman to
Gervayse Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular
intentness. “Is it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of the
midst of life,—this man of flesh and blood, whose earthly nature was so
warm and strong? There is a never-ending tremor in my soul, but it
trembles afresh at, this! And you are calm!”

“Would that he could teach me somewhat!” said Gervayse Hastings,
drawing a long breath. “Men pass before me like shadows on the wall;
their actions, passions, feelings, are flickerings of the light, and
then they vanish! Neither the corpse, nor yonder skeleton, nor this old
woman’s everlasting tremor, can give me what I seek.”

And then the company departed.

We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of
these singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder’s will,
continued to be kept with the regularity of an established institution.
In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of inviting, from
far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes were prominent above
other men’s, and whose mental and moral development might, therefore,
be supposed to possess a corresponding interest. The exiled noble of
the French Revolution, and the broken soldier of the Empire, were alike
represented at the table. Fallen monarchs, wandering about the earth,
have found places at that forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman,
when his party flung him off, might, if he chose it, be once more a
great man for the space of a single banquet. Aaron Burr’s name appears
on the record at a period when his ruin—the profoundest and most
striking, with more of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any
other man—was complete in his lonely age. Stephen Guard, when his
wealth weighed upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his
own accord. It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson
to teach in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally
well have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious
unfortunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are
more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the
better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity.

It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive
festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from
the smooth beauty of his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of manhood,
and thence to the bald, impressive dignity of age. He was the only
individual invariably present. Yet on every occasion there were
murmurs, both from those who knew his character and position, and from
them whose hearts shrank back as denying his companionship in their
mystic fraternity.

“Who is this impassive man?” had been asked a hundred times. “Has he
suffered? Has he sinned? There are no traces of either. Then wherefore
is he here?”

“You must inquire of the stewards or of himself,” was the constant
reply. “We seem to know him well here in our city, and know nothing of
him but what is creditable and fortunate. Yet hither he comes, year
after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among the guests like a
marble statue. Ask yonder skeleton, perhaps that may solve the riddle!”

It was in truth a wonder. The life of Gervayse Hastings was not merely
a prosperous, but a brilliant one. Everything had gone well with him.
He was wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was required by habits
of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and cultivation, a love of
travel, a scholar’s instinct to collect a splendid library, and,
moreover, what seemed a magnificent liberality to the distressed. He
had sought happiness, and not vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and
children of fair promise, could insure it. He had, besides, ascended
above the limit which separates the obscure from the distinguished, and
had won a stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public
importance. Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the
mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of success.
To the public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute of those rich
lines of personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar faculty of
stamping his own heart’s impression on a multitude of hearts, by which
the people recognize their favorites. And it must be owned that, after
his most intimate associates had done their best to know him
thoroughly, and love him warmly, they were startled to find how little
hold he had upon their affections. They approved, they admired, but
still in those moments when the human spirit most craves reality, they
shrank back from Gervayse Hastings, as powerless to give them what they
sought. It was the feeling of distrustful regret with which we should
draw back the hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to
grasp the hand of a shadow upon the wall.

As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect of
Gervayse Hastings’s character grew more perceptible. His children, when
he extended his arms, came coldly to his knees, but never climbed them
of their own accord. His wife wept secretly, and almost adjudged
herself a criminal because she shivered in the chill of his bosom. He,
too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of the chillness of his
moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so, to warm himself at a
kindly fire. But age stole onward and benumbed him snore and more. As
the hoar-frost began to gather on him his wife went to her grave, and
was doubtless warmer there; his children either died or were scattered
to different homes of their own; and old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed
by grief,—alone, but needing no companionship,—continued his steady
walk through life, and still one very Christmas day attended at the
dismal banquet. His privilege as a guest had become prescriptive now.
Had he claimed the head of the table, even the skeleton would have been
ejected from its seat.

Finally, at the merry Christmas-tide, when he had numbered fourscore
years complete, this pale, highbrowed, marble-featured old man once
more entered the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive aspect
that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark at his first
attendance. Time, except in matters merely external, had done nothing
for him, either of good or evil. As he took his place he threw a calm,
inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain whether any guest
had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful banquets, who might impart
to him the mystery—the deep, warm secret—the life within the
life—which, whether manifested in joy or sorrow, is what gives
substance to a world of shadows.

“My friends,” said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his
long conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, “you are
welcome! I drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine.”

The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved them
unable to receive the old man as a member of their sad fraternity. It
may be well to give the reader an idea of the present company at the
banquet.

One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and
apparently of the genuine dynasty of those old Puritan divines whose
faith in their calling, and stern exercise of it, had placed them among
the mighty of the earth. But yielding to the speculative tendency of
the age, he had gone astray from the firm foundation of an ancient
faith, and wandered into a cloud-region, where everything was misty and
deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of reality, but still
dissolving when he flung himself upon it for support and rest. His
instinct and early training demanded something steadfast; but, looking
forward, he beheld vapors piled on vapors, and behind him an impassable
gulf between the man of yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which
he paced to and fro, sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often
making his own woe a theme of scornful merriment. This surely was a
miserable man. Next, there was a theorist,—one of a numerous tribe,
although he deemed himself unique since the creation,—a theorist, who
had conceived a plan by which all the wretchedness of earth, moral and
physical, might be done away, and the bliss of the millennium at once
accomplished. But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him from
action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass of woe
which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded into his own
bosom. A plain old man in black attracted much of the company’s notice,
on the supposition that he was no other than Father Miller, who, it
seemed, had given himself up to despair at the tedious delay of the
final conflagration. Then there was a man distinguished for native
pride and obstinacy, who, a little while before, had possessed immense
wealth, and held the control of a vast moneyed interest which he had
wielded in the same spirit as a despotic monarch would wield the power
of his empire, carrying on a tremendous moral warfare, the roar and
tremor of which was felt at every fireside in the land. At length came
a crushing ruin,—a total overthrow of fortune, power, and
character,—the effect of which on his imperious and, in many respects,
noble and lofty nature might have entitled him to a place, not merely
at our festival, but among the peers of Pandemonium.

There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of
the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures, and
of the impracticableness of any general measures for their relief, that
he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately within his
power, but contented himself with being miserable for sympathy. Near
him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of
which the present epoch probably affords numerous examples. Ever since
he was of capacity to read a newspaper, this person had prided himself
on his consistent adherence to one political party, but, in the
confusion of these latter days, had got bewildered and knew not
whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition, so morally desolate
and disheartening to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his
individuality in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by
such as have experienced it. His next companion was a popular orator
who had lost his voice, and—as it was pretty much all that he had to
lose—had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy. The table was
likewise graced by two of the gentler sex,—one, a half-starved,
consumptive seamstress, the representative of thousands just as
wretched; the other, a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself in
the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing even
to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of madness
by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion from a
proper field of action. The roll of guests being thus complete, a
side-table had been set for three or four disappointed office-seekers,
with hearts as sick as death, whom the stewards had admitted partly
because their calamities really entitled them to entrance here, and
partly that they were in especial need of a good dinner. There was
likewise a homeless dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the
crumbs and gnawing the fragments of the feast,—such a melancholy cur as
one sometimes sees about the streets without a master, and willing to
follow the first that will accept his service.

In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had
assembled at the festival. There they sat, with the veiled skeleton of
the founder holding aloft the cypress-wreath, at one end of the table,
and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure of Gervayse
Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, impressing the company with awe, yet
so little interesting their sympathy that he might have vanished into
thin air without their once exclaiming, “Whither is he gone?”

“Sir,” said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, “you have been
so long a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been conversant
with so many varieties of human affliction, that, not improbably, you
have thence derived some great and important lessons. How blessed were
your lot could you reveal a secret by which all this mass of woe might
be removed!”

“I know of but one misfortune,” answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly,
“and that is my own.”

“Your own!” rejoined the philanthropist. “And looking back on your
serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole
unfortunate of the human race?”

“You will not understand it,” replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and
with a singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting
one word for another. “None have understood it, not even those who
experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a
feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting
perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men
have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy
nor griefs. All things, all persons,—as was truly said to me at this
table long and long ago,—have been like shadows flickering on the wall.
It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends:
it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I
myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.”

“And how is it with your views of a future life?” inquired the
speculative clergyman.

“Worse than with you,” said the old man, in a hollow and feeble tone;
“for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear.
Mine,—mine is the wretchedness! This cold heart,—this unreal life! Ah!
it grows colder still.”

It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the
skeleton gave way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus
causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The
attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant from
Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards him, that
the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on
the wall.


“Well, Rosina, what is your criticism?” asked Roderick, as he rolled up
the manuscript.

“Frankly, your success is by no means complete,” replied she. “It is
true, I have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe; but it
is rather by dint of my own thought than your expression.”

“That is unavoidable,” observed the sculptor, “because the
characteristics are all negative. If Gervayse Hastings could have
imbibed one human grief at the gloomy banquet, the task of describing
him would have been infinitely easier. Of such persons—and we do meet
with these moral monsters now and then—it is difficult to conceive how
they came to exist here, or what there is in them capable of existence
hereafter. They seem to be on the outside of everything; and nothing
wearies the soul more than an attempt to comprehend them within its
grasp.”




DROWNE’S WOODEN IMAGE


One sunshiny morning, in the good old times of the town of Boston, a
young carver in wood, well known by the name of Drowne, stood
contemplating a large oaken log, which it was his purpose to convert
into the figure-head of a vessel. And while he discussed within his own
mind what sort of shape or similitude it were well to bestow upon this
excellent piece of timber, there came into Drowne’s workshop a certain
Captain Hunnewell, owner and commander of the good brig called the
Cynosure, which had just returned from her first voyage to Fayal.

“Ah! that will do, Drowne, that will do!” cried the jolly captain,
tapping the log with his rattan. “I bespeak this very piece of oak for
the figure-head of the Cynosure. She has shown herself the sweetest
craft that ever floated, and I mean to decorate her prow with the
handsomest image that the skill of man can cut out of timber. And,
Drowne, you are the fellow to execute it.”

“You give me more credit than I deserve, Captain Hunnewell,” said the
carver, modestly, yet as one conscious of eminence in his art. “But,
for the sake of the good brig, I stand ready to do my best. And which
of these designs do you prefer? Here,”—pointing to a staring,
half-length figure, in a white wig and scarlet coat,—“here is an
excellent model, the likeness of our gracious king. Here is the valiant
Admiral Vernon. Or, if you prefer a female figure, what say you to
Britannia with the trident?”

“All very fine, Drowne; all very fine,” answered the mariner. “But as
nothing like the brig ever swam the ocean, so I am determined she shall
have such a figure-head as old Neptune never saw in his life. And what
is more, as there is a secret in the matter, you must pledge your
credit not to betray it.”

“Certainly,” said Drowne, marvelling, however, what possible mystery
there could be in reference to an affair so open, of necessity, to the
inspection of all the world as the figure-head of a vessel. “You may
depend, captain, on my being as secret as the nature of the case will
permit.”

Captain Hunnewell then took Drowne by the button, and communicated his
wishes in so low a tone that it would be unmannerly to repeat what was
evidently intended for the carver’s private ear. We shall, therefore,
take the opportunity to give the reader a few desirable particulars
about Drowne himself.

He was the first American who is known to have attempted—in a very
humble line, it is true—that art in which we can now reckon so many
names already distinguished, or rising to distinction. From his
earliest boyhood he had exhibited a knack—for it would be too proud a
word to call it genius—a knack, therefore, for the imitation of the
human figure in whatever material came most readily to hand. The snows
of a New England winter had often supplied him with a species of marble
as dazzingly white, at least, as the Parian or the Carrara, and if less
durable, yet sufficiently so to correspond with any claims to permanent
existence possessed by the boy’s frozen statues. Yet they won
admiration from maturer judges than his school-fellows, and were
indeed, remarkably clever, though destitute of the native warmth that
might have made the snow melt beneath his hand. As he advanced in life,
the young man adopted pine and oak as eligible materials for the
display of his skill, which now began to bring him a return of solid
silver as well as the empty praise that had been an apt reward enough
for his productions of evanescent snow. He became noted for carving
ornamental pump heads, and wooden urns for gate posts, and decorations,
more grotesque than fanciful, for mantelpieces. No apothecary would
have deemed himself in the way of obtaining custom without setting up a
gilded mortar, if not a head of Galen or Hippocrates, from the skilful
hand of Drowne.

But the great scope of his business lay in the manufacture of
figure-heads for vessels. Whether it were the monarch himself, or some
famous British admiral or general, or the governor of the province, or
perchance the favorite daughter of the ship-owner, there the image
stood above the prow, decked out in gorgeous colors, magnificently
gilded, and staring the whole world out of countenance, as if from an
innate consciousness of its own superiority. These specimens of native
sculpture had crossed the sea in all directions, and been not ignobly
noticed among the crowded shipping of the Thames and wherever else the
hardy mariners of New England had pushed their adventures. It must be
confessed that a family likeness pervaded these respectable progeny of
Drowne’s skill; that the benign countenance of the king resembled those
of his subjects, and that Miss Peggy Hobart, the merchant’s daughter,
bore a remarkable similitude to Britannia, Victory, and other ladies of
the allegoric sisterhood; and, finally, that they all had a kind of
wooden aspect which proved an intimate relationship with the unshaped
blocks of timber in the carver’s workshop. But at least there was no
inconsiderable skill of hand, nor a deficiency of any attribute to
render them really works of art, except that deep quality, be it of
soul or intellect, which bestows life upon the lifeless and warmth upon
the cold, and which, had it been present, would have made Drowne’s
wooden image instinct with spirit.

The captain of the Cynosure had now finished his instructions.

“And Drowne,” said he, impressively, “you must lay aside all other
business and set about this forthwith. And as to the price, only do the
job in first-rate style, and you shall settle that point yourself.”

“Very well, captain,” answered the carver, who looked grave and
somewhat perplexed, yet had a sort of smile upon his visage; “depend
upon it, I’ll do my utmost to satisfy you.”

From that moment the men of taste about Long Wharf and the Town Dock
who were wont to show their love for the arts by frequent visits to
Drowne’s workshop, and admiration of his wooden images, began to be
sensible of a mystery in the carver’s conduct. Often he was absent in
the daytime. Sometimes, as might be judged by gleams of light from the
shop windows, he was at work until a late hour of the evening; although
neither knock nor voice, on such occasions, could gain admittance for a
visitor, or elicit any word of response. Nothing remarkable, however,
was observed in the shop at those late hours when it was thrown open. A
fine piece of timber, indeed, which Drowne was known to have reserved
for some work of especial dignity, was seen to be gradually assuming
shape. What shape it was destined ultimately to take was a problem to
his friends and a point on which the carver himself preserved a rigid
silence. But day after day, though Drowne was seldom noticed in the act
of working upon it, this rude form began to be developed until it
became evident to all observers that a female figure was growing into
mimic life. At each new visit they beheld a larger pile of wooden chips
and a nearer approximation to something beautiful. It seemed as if the
hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world
within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to
remove the strange shapelessness that had incrusted her, and reveal the
grace and loveliness of a divinity. Imperfect as the design, the
attitude, the costume, and especially the face of the image still
remained, there was already an effect that drew the eye from the wooden
cleverness of Drowne’s earlier productions and fixed it upon the
tantalizing mystery of this new project.

Copley, the celebrated painter, then a young man and a resident of
Boston, came one day to visit Drowne; for he had recognized so much of
moderate ability in the carver as to induce him, in the dearth of
professional sympathy, to cultivate his acquaintance. On entering the
shop, the artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander,
dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have
been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man
had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the
intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation.
But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing
the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and
how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the
utmost degree of the former!

“My friend Drowne;” said Copley, smiling to himself, but alluding to
the mechanical and wooden cleverness that so invariably distinguished
the images, “you are really a remarkable person! I have seldom met with
a man in your line of business that could do so much; for one other
touch might make this figure of General Wolfe, for instance, a
breathing and intelligent human creature.”

“You would have me think that you are praising me highly, Mr. Copley,”
answered Drowne, turning his back upon Wolfe’s image in apparent
disgust. “But there has come a light into my mind. I know what you know
as well, that the one touch which you speak of as deficient is the only
one that would be truly valuable, and that without it these works of
mine are no better than worthless abortions. There is the same
difference between them and the works of an inspired artist as between
a sign-post daub and one of your best pictures.”

“This is strange,” cried Copley, looking him in the face, which now, as
the painter fancied, had a singular depth of intelligence, though
hitherto it had not given him greatly the advantage over his own family
of wooden images. “What has come over you? How is it that, possessing
the idea which you have now uttered, you should produce only such works
as these?”

The carver smiled, but made no reply. Copley turned again to the
images, conceiving that the sense of deficiency which Drowne had just
expressed, and which is so rare in a merely mechanical character, must
surely imply a genius, the tokens of which had heretofore been
overlooked. But no; there was not a trace of it. He was about to
withdraw when his eyes chanced to fall upon a half-developed figure
which lay in a corner of the workshop, surrounded by scattered chips of
oak. It arrested him at once.

“What is here? Who has done this?” he broke out, after contemplating it
in speechless astonishment for an instant. “Here is the divine, the
lifegiving touch. What inspired hand is beckoning this wood to arise
and live? Whose work is this?”

“No man’s work,” replied Drowne. “The figure lies within that block of
oak, and it is my business to find it.”

“Drowne,” said the true artist, grasping the carver fervently by the
hand, “you are a man of genius!”

As Copley departed, happening to glance backward from the threshold, he
beheld Drowne bending over the half-created shape, and stretching forth
his arms as if he would have embraced and drawn it to his heart; while,
had such a miracle been possible, his countenance expressed passion
enough to communicate warmth and sensibility to the lifeless oak.

“Strange enough!” said the artist to himself. “Who would have looked
for a modern Pygmalion in the person of a Yankee mechanic!”

As yet, the image was but vague in its outward presentment; so that, as
in the cloud shapes around the western sun, the observer rather felt,
or was led to imagine, than really saw what was intended by it. Day by
day, however, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its
irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The
general design was now obvious to the common eye. It was a female
figure, in what appeared to be a foreign dress; the gown being laced
over the bosom, and opening in front so as to disclose a skirt or
petticoat, the folds and inequalities of which were admirably
represented in the oaken substance. She wore a hat of singular
gracefulness, and abundantly laden with flowers, such as never grew in
the rude soil of New England, but which, with all their fanciful
luxuriance, had a natural truth that it seemed impossible for the most
fertile imagination to have attained without copying from real
prototypes. There were several little appendages to this dress, such as
a fan, a pair of earrings, a chain about the neck, a watch in the
bosom, and a ring upon the finger, all of which would have been deemed
beneath the dignity of sculpture. They were put on, however, with as
much taste as a lovely woman might have shown in her attire, and could
therefore have shocked none but a judgment spoiled by artistic rules.

The face was still imperfect; but gradually, by a magic touch,
intelligence and sensibility brightened through the features, with all
the effect of light gleaming forth from within the solid oak. The face
became alive. It was a beautiful, though not precisely regular and
somewhat haughty aspect, but with a certain piquancy about the eyes and
mouth, which, of all expressions, would have seemed the most impossible
to throw over a wooden countenance. And now, so far as carving went,
this wonderful production was complete.

“Drowne,” said Copley, who had hardly missed a single day in his visits
to the carver’s workshop, “if this work were in marble it would make
you famous at once; nay, I would almost affirm that it would make an
era in the art. It is as ideal as an antique statue, and yet as real as
any lovely woman whom one meets at a fireside or in the street. But I
trust you do not mean to desecrate this exquisite creature with paint,
like those staring kings and admirals yonder?”

“Not paint her!” exclaimed Captain Hunnewell, who stood by; “not paint
the figure-head of the Cynosure! And what sort of a figure should I cut
in a foreign port with such an unpainted oaken stick as this over my
prow! She must, and she shall, be painted to the life, from the topmost
flower in her hat down to the silver spangles on her slippers.”

“Mr. Copley,” said Drowne, quietly, “I know nothing of marble statuary,
and nothing of the sculptor’s rules of art; but of this wooden image,
this work of my hands, this creature of my heart,”—and here his voice
faltered and choked in a very singular manner,—“of this—of her—I may
say that I know something. A well-spring of inward wisdom gushed within
me as I wrought upon the oak with my whole strength, and soul, and
faith. Let others do what they may with marble, and adopt what rules
they choose. If I can produce my desired effect by painted wood, those
rules are not for me, and I have a right to disregard them.”

“The very spirit of genius,” muttered Copley to himself. “How otherwise
should this carver feel himself entitled to transcend all rules, and
make me ashamed of quoting them?”

He looked earnestly at Drowne, and again saw that expression of human
love which, in a spiritual sense, as the artist could not help
imagining, was the secret of the life that had been breathed into this
block of wood.

The carver, still in the same secrecy that marked all his operations
upon this mysterious image, proceeded to paint the habiliments in their
proper colors, and the countenance with Nature’s red and white. When
all was finished he threw open his workshop, and admitted the towns
people to behold what he had done. Most persons, at their first
entrance, felt impelled to remove their hats, and pay such reverence as
was due to the richly-dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to
stand in a corner of the room, with oaken chips and shavings scattered
at her feet. Then came a sensation of fear; as if, not being actually
human, yet so like humanity, she must therefore be something
preternatural. There was, in truth, an indefinable air and expression
that might reasonably induce the query, Who and from what sphere this
daughter of the oak should be? The strange, rich flowers of Eden on her
head; the complexion, so much deeper and more brilliant than those of
our native beauties; the foreign, as it seemed, and fantastic garb, yet
not too fantastic to be worn decorously in the street; the
delicately-wrought embroidery of the skirt; the broad gold chain about
her neck; the curious ring upon her finger; the fan, so exquisitely
sculptured in open work, and painted to resemble pearl and ebony;—where
could Drowne, in his sober walk of life, have beheld the vision here so
matchlessly embodied! And then her face! In the dark eyes, and around
the voluptuous mouth, there played a look made up of pride, coquetry,
and a gleam of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea that
the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing admiration of himself
and other beholders.

“And will you,” said he to the carver, “permit this masterpiece to
become the figure-head of a vessel? Give the honest captain yonder
figure of Britannia—it will answer his purpose far better—and send this
fairy queen to England, where, for aught I know, it may bring you a
thousand pounds.”

“I have not wrought it for money,” said Drowne.

“What sort of a fellow is this!” thought Copley. “A Yankee, and throw
away the chance of making his fortune! He has gone mad; and thence has
come this gleam of genius.”

There was still further proof of Drowne’s lunacy, if credit were due to
the rumor that he had been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady,
and gazing with a lover’s passionate ardor into the face that his own
hands had created. The bigots of the day hinted that it would be no
matter of surprise if an evil spirit were allowed to enter this
beautiful form, and seduce the carver to destruction.

The fame of the image spread far and wide. The inhabitants visited it
so universally, that after a few days of exhibition there was hardly an
old man or a child who had not become minutely familiar with its
aspect. Even had the story of Drowne’s wooden image ended here, its
celebrity might have been prolonged for many years by the reminiscences
of those who looked upon it in their childhood, and saw nothing else so
beautiful in after life. But the town was now astounded by an event,
the narrative of which has formed itself into one of the most singular
legends that are yet to be met with in the traditionary chimney corners
of the New England metropolis, where old men and women sit dreaming of
the past, and wag their heads at the dreamers of the present and the
future.

One fine morning, just before the departure of the Cynosure on her
second voyage to Fayal, the commander of that gallant vessel was seen
to issue from his residence in Hanover Street. He was stylishly dressed
in a blue broadcloth coat, with gold lace at the seams and
button-holes, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, a triangular hat, with
a loop and broad binding of gold, and wore a silver-hilted hanger at
his side. But the good captain might have been arrayed in the robes of
a prince or the rags of a beggar, without in either case attracting
notice, while obscured by such a companion as now leaned on his arm.
The people in the street started, rubbed their eyes, and either leaped
aside from their path, or stood as if transfixed to wood or marble in
astonishment.

“Do you see it?—do you see it?” cried one, with tremulous eagerness.
“It is the very same!”

“The same?” answered another, who had arrived in town only the night
before. “Who do you mean? I see only a sea-captain in his shoregoing
clothes, and a young lady in a foreign habit, with a bunch of beautiful
flowers in her hat. On my word, she is as fair and bright a damsel as
my eyes have looked on this many a day!”

“Yes; the same!—the very same!” repeated the other. “Drowne’s wooden
image has come to life!”

Here was a miracle indeed! Yet, illuminated by the sunshine, or
darkened by the alternate shade of the houses, and with its garments
fluttering lightly in the morning breeze, there passed the image along
the street. It was exactly and minutely the shape, the garb, and the
face which the towns-people had so recently thronged to see and admire.
Not a rich flower upon her head, not a single leaf, but had had its
prototype in Drowne’s wooden workmanship, although now their fragile
grace had become flexible, and was shaken by every footstep that the
wearer made. The broad gold chain upon the neck was identical with the
one represented on the image, and glistened with the motion imparted by
the rise and fall of the bosom which it decorated. A real diamond
sparkled on her finger. In her right hand she bore a pearl and ebony
fan, which she flourished with a fantastic and bewitching coquetry,
that was likewise expressed in all her movements as well as in the
style of her beauty and the attire that so well harmonized with it. The
face with its brilliant depth of complexion had the same piquancy of
mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the countenance of the image, but
which was here varied and continually shifting, yet always essentially
the same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain. On the whole,
there was something so airy and yet so real in the figure, and withal
so perfectly did it represent Drowne’s image, that people knew not
whether to suppose the magic wood etherealized into a spirit or warmed
and softened into an actual woman.

“One thing is certain,” muttered a Puritan of the old stamp, “Drowne
has sold himself to the devil; and doubtless this gay Captain Hunnewell
is a party to the bargain.”

“And I,” said a young man who overheard him, “would almost consent to
be the third victim, for the liberty of saluting those lovely lips.”

“And so would I,” said Copley, the painter, “for the privilege of
taking her picture.”

The image, or the apparition, whichever it might be, still escorted by
the bold captain, proceeded from Hanover Street through some of the
cross lanes that make this portion of the town so intricate, to Ann
Street, thence into Dock Square, and so downward to Drowne’s shop,
which stood just on the water’s edge. The crowd still followed,
gathering volume as it rolled along. Never had a modern miracle
occurred in such broad daylight, nor in the presence of such a
multitude of witnesses. The airy image, as if conscious that she was
the object of the murmurs and disturbance that swelled behind her,
appeared slightly vexed and flustered, yet still in a manner consistent
with the light vivacity and sportive mischief that were written in her
countenance. She was observed to flutter her fan with such vehement
rapidity that the elaborate delicacy of its workmanship gave way, and
it remained broken in her hand.

Arriving at Drowne’s door, while the captain threw it open, the
marvellous apparition paused an instant on the threshold, assuming the
very attitude of the image, and casting over the crowd that glance of
sunny coquetry which all remembered on the face of the oaken lady. She
and her cavalier then disappeared.

“Ah!” murmured the crowd, drawing a deep breath, as with one vast pair
of lungs.

“The world looks darker now that she has vanished,” said some of the
young men.

But the aged, whose recollections dated as far back as witch times,
shook their heads, and hinted that our forefathers would have thought
it a pious deed to burn the daughter of the oak with fire.

“If she be other than a bubble of the elements,” exclaimed Copley, “I
must look upon her face again.”

He accordingly entered the shop; and there, in her usual corner, stood
the image, gazing at him, as it might seem, with the very same
expression of mirthful mischief that had been the farewell look of the
apparition when, but a moment before, she turned her face towards the
crowd. The carver stood beside his creation mending the beautiful fan,
which by some accident was broken in her hand. But there was no longer
any motion in the lifelike image, nor any real woman in the workshop,
nor even the witchcraft of a sunny shadow, that might have deluded
people’s eyes as it flitted along the street. Captain Hunnewell, too,
had vanished. His hoarse sea-breezy tones, however, were audible on the
other side of a door that opened upon the water.

“Sit down in the stern sheets, my lady,” said the gallant captain.
“Come, bear a hand, you lubbers, and set us on board in the turning of
a minute-glass.”

And then was heard the stroke of oars.

“Drowne,” said Copley with a smile of intelligence, “you have been a
truly fortunate man. What painter or statuary ever had such a subject!
No wonder that she inspired a genius into you, and first created the
artist who afterwards created her image.”

Drowne looked at him with a visage that bore the traces of tears, but
from which the light of imagination and sensibility, so recently
illuminating it, had departed. He was again the mechanical carver that
he had been known to be all his lifetime.

“I hardly understand what you mean, Mr. Copley,” said he, putting his
hand to his brow. “This image! Can it have been my work? Well, I have
wrought it in a kind of dream; and now that I am broad awake I must set
about finishing yonder figure of Admiral Vernon.”

And forthwith he employed himself on the stolid countenance of one of
his wooden progeny, and completed it in his own mechanical style, from
which he was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed his
business industriously for many years, acquired a competence, and in
the latter part of his life attained to a dignified station in the
church, being remembered in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne,
the carver. One of his productions, an Indian chief, gilded all over,
stood during the better part of a century on the cupola of the Province
House, bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of
the sun. Another work of the good deacon’s hand—a reduced likeness of
his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quadrant—may be
seen to this day, at the corner of Broad and State streets, serving in
the useful capacity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker.
We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old
figure, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady,
unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is
imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to
circumstances, may either be developed in this world, or shrouded in a
mask of dulness until another state of being. To our friend Drowne
there came a brief season of excitement, kindled by love. It rendered
him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment,
left him again the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of
appreciating the work that his own hands had wrought. Yet who can doubt
that the very highest state to which a human spirit can attain, in its
loftiest aspirations, is its truest and most natural state, and that
Drowne was more consistent with himself when he wrought the admirable
figure of the mysterious lady, than when he perpetrated a whole progeny
of blockheads?

There was a rumor in Boston, about this period, that a young Portuguese
lady of rank, on some occasion of political or domestic disquietude,
had fled from her home in Fayal and put herself under the protection of
Captain Hunnewell, on board of whose vessel, and at whose residence,
she was sheltered until a change of affairs. This fair stranger must
have been the original of Drowne’s Wooden Image.




THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE


Grave figure, with a pair of mysterious spectacles on his nose and a
pen behind his ear, was seated at a desk in the corner of a
metropolitan office. The apartment was fitted up with a counter, and
furnished with an oaken cabinet and a Chair or two, in simple and
business-like style. Around the walls were stuck advertisements of
articles lost, or articles wanted, or articles to be disposed of; in
one or another of which classes were comprehended nearly all the
Conveniences, or otherwise, that the imagination of man has contrived.
The interior of the room was thrown into shadow, partly by the tall
edifices that rose on the opposite side of the street, and partly by
the immense show-bills of blue and crimson paper that were expanded
over each of the three windows. Undisturbed by the tramp of feet, the
rattle of wheels, the hump of voices, the shout of the city crier, the
scream of the newsboys, and other tokens of the multitudinous life that
surged along in front of the office, the figure at the desk pored
diligently over a folio volume, of ledger-like size and aspect, He
looked like the spirit of a record—the soul of his own great volume
made visible in mortal shape.

But scarcely an instant elapsed without the appearance at the door of
some individual from the busy population whose vicinity was manifested
by so much buzz, and clatter, and outcry. Now, it was a thriving
mechanic in quest of a tenement that should come within his moderate
means of rent; now, a ruddy Irish girl from the banks of Killarney,
wandering from kitchen to kitchen of our land, while her heart still
hung in the peat-smoke of her native cottage; now, a single gentleman
looking out for economical board; and now—for this establishment
offered an epitome of worldly pursuits—it was a faded beauty inquiring
for her lost bloom; or Peter Schlemihl, for his lost shadow; or an
author of ten years’ standing, for his vanished reputation; or a moody
man, for yesterday’s sunshine.

At the next lifting of the latch there entered a person with his hat
awry upon his head, his clothes perversely ill-suited to his form, his
eyes staring in directions opposite to their intelligence, and a
certain odd unsuitableness pervading his whole figure. Wherever he
might chance to be, whether in palace or cottage, church or market, on
land or sea, or even at his own fireside, he must have worn the
characteristic expression of a man out of his right place.

“This,” inquired he, putting his question in the form of an
assertion,—“this is the Central Intelligence Office?”

“Even so,” answered the figure at the desk, turning another leaf of his
volume; he then looked the applicant in the face and said briefly,
“Your business?”

“I want,” said the latter, with tremulous earnestness, “a place!”

“A place! and of what nature?” asked the Intelligencer. “There are many
vacant, or soon to be so, some of which will probably suit, since they
range from that of a footman up to a seat at the council-board, or in
the cabinet, or a throne, or a presidential chair.”

The stranger stood pondering before the desk with an unquiet,
dissatisfied air,—a dull, vague pain of heart, expressed by a slight
contortion of the brow,—an earnestness of glance, that asked and
expected, yet continually wavered, as if distrusting. In short, he
evidently wanted, not in a physical or intellectual sense, but with an
urgent moral necessity that is the hardest of all things to satisfy,
since it knows not its own object.

“Ah, you mistake me!” said he at length, with a gesture of nervous
impatience. “Either of the places you mention, indeed, might answer my
purpose; or, more probably, none of them. I want my place! my own
place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do,
which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry,
and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime! Whether it be a
footman’s duty or a king’s is of little consequence, so it be naturally
mine. Can you help me here?”

“I will enter your application,” answered the Intelligencer, at the
same time writing a few lines in his volume. “But to undertake such a
business, I tell you frankly, is quite apart from the ground covered by
my official duties. Ask for something specific, and it may doubtless be
negotiated for you, on your compliance with the conditions. But were I
to go further, I should have the whole population of the city upon my
shoulders; since far the greater proportion of them are, more or less,
in your predicament.”

The applicant sank into a fit of despondency, and passed out of the
door without again lifting his eyes; and, if he died of the
disappointment, he was probably buried in the wrong tomb, inasmuch as
the fatality of such people never deserts them, and, whether alive or
dead, they are invariably out of place.

Almost immediately another foot was heard on the threshold. A youth
entered hastily, and threw a glance around the office to ascertain
whether the man of intelligence was alone. He then approached close to
the desk, blushed like a maiden, and seemed at a loss how to broach his
business.

“You come upon an affair of the heart,” said the official personage,
looking into him through his mysterious spectacles. “State it in as few
words as may be.”

“You are right,” replied the youth. “I have a heart to dispose of.”

“You seek an exchange?” said the Intelligencer. “Foolish youth, why not
be contented with your own?”

“Because,” exclaimed the young man, losing his embarrassment in a
passionate glow,—“because my heart burns me with an intolerable fire;
it tortures me all day long with yearnings for I know not what, and
feverish throbbings, and the pangs of a vague sorrow; and it awakens me
in the night-time with a quake, when there is nothing to be feared. I
cannot endure it any longer. It were wiser to throw away such a heart,
even if it brings me nothing in return.”

“O, very well,” said the man of office, making an entry in his volume.
“Your affair will be easily transacted. This species of brokerage makes
no inconsiderable part of my business; and there is always a large
assortment of the article to select from. Here, if I mistake not, comes
a pretty fair sample.”

Even as he spoke the door was gently and slowly thrust ajar, affording
a glimpse of the slender figure of a young girl, who, as she timidly
entered, seemed to bring the light and cheerfulness of the outer
atmosphere into the somewhat gloomy apartment. We know not her errand
there, nor can we reveal whether the young man gave up his heart into
her custody. If so, the arrangement was neither better nor worse than
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where the parallel sensibilities
of a similar age, importunate affections, and the easy satisfaction of
characters not deeply conscious of themselves, supply the place of any
profounder sympathy.

Not always, however, was the agency of the passions and affections an
office of so little trouble. It happened, rarely, indeed, in proportion
to the cases that came under an ordinary rule, but still it did happen,
that a heart was occasionally brought hither of such exquisite
material, so delicately attempered, and so curiously wrought, that no
other heart could be found to match it. It might almost be considered a
misfortune, in a worldly point of view, to be the possessor of such a
diamond of the purest water; since in any reasonable probability it
could only be exchanged for an ordinary pebble, or a bit of cunningly
manufactured glass, or, at least, for a jewel of native richness, but
ill-set, or with some fatal flaw, or an earthy vein running through its
central lustre. To choose another figure, it is sad that hearts which
have their wellspring in the infinite, and contain inexhaustible
sympathies, should ever be doomed to pour themselves into shallow
vessels, and thus lavish their rich affections on the ground. Strange
that the finer and deeper nature, whether in man or woman, while
possessed of every other delicate instinct, should so often lack that
most invaluable one of preserving itself front contamination with what
is of a baser kind! Sometimes, it is true, the spiritual fountain is
kept pure by a wisdom within itself, and sparkles into the light of
heaven without a stain from the earthy strata through which it had
gushed upward. And sometimes, even here on earth, the pure mingles with
the pure, and the inexhaustible is recompensed with the infinite. But
these miracles, though he should claim the credit of them, are far
beyond the scope of such a superficial agent in human affairs as the
figure in the mysterious spectacles.

Again the door was opened, admitting the bustle of the city with a
fresher reverberation into the Intelligence Office. Now entered a man
of woe-begone and downcast look; it was such an aspect as if he had
lost the very soul out of his body, and had traversed all the world
over, searching in the dust of the highways, and along the shady
footpaths, and beneath the leaves of the forest, and among the sands of
the sea-shore, in hopes to recover it again. He had bent an anxious
glance along the pavement of the street as he came hitherward; he
looked also in the angle of the doorstep, and upon the floor of the
room; and, finally, coming up to the Man of Intelligence, he gazed
through the inscrutable spectacles which the latter wore, as if the
lost treasure might be hidden within his eyes.

“I have lost—” he began; and then he paused.

“Yes,” said the Intelligencer, “I see that you have lost,—but what?”

“I have lost a precious jewel!” replied the unfortunate person, “the
like of which is not to be found among any prince’s treasures. While I
possessed it, the contemplation of it was my sole and sufficient
happiness. No price should have purchased it of me; but it has fallen
from my bosom where I wore it in my careless wanderings about the
city.”

After causing the stranger to describe the marks of his lost jewel, the
Intelligencer opened a drawer of the oaken cabinet which has been
mentioned as forming a part of the furniture of the room. Here were
deposited whatever articles had been picked up in the streets, until
the right owners should claim them. It was a strange and heterogeneous
collection. Not the least remarkable part of it was a great number of
wedding-rings, each one of which had been riveted upon the finger with
holy vows, and all the mystic potency that the most solemn rites could
attain, but had, nevertheless, proved too slippery for the wearer’s
vigilance. The gold of some was worn thin, betokening the attrition of
years of wedlock; others, glittering from the jeweller’s shop, must
have been lost within the honeymoon. There were ivory tablets, the
leaves scribbled over with sentiments that had been the deepest truths
of the writer’s earlier years, but which were now quite obliterated
from his memory. So scrupulously were articles preserved in this
depository, that not even withered flowers were rejected; white roses,
and blush-roses, and moss-roses, fit emblems of virgin purity and
shamefacedness, which bad been lost or flung away, and trampled into
the pollution of the streets; locks of hair,—the golden and the glossy
dark,—the long tresses of woman and the crisp curls of man, signified
that lovers were now and then so heedless of the faith intrusted to
them as to drop its symbol from the treasure-place of the bosom. Many
of these things were imbued with perfumes, and perhaps a sweet scent
had departed from the lives of their former possessors ever since they
had so wilfully or negligently lost them. Here were gold pencil-cases,
little ruby hearts with golden arrows through them, bosom-pins, pieces
of coin, and small articles of every description, comprising nearly all
that have been lost since a long time ago. Most of them, doubtless, had
a history and a meaning, if there were time to search it out and room
to tell it. Whoever has missed anything valuable, whether out of his
heart, mind, or pocket, would do well to make inquiry at the Central
Intelligence Office.

And in the corner of one of the drawers of the oaken cabinet, after
considerable research, was found a great pearl, looking like the soul
of celestial purity, congealed and polished.

“There is my jewel! my very pearl!” cried the stranger, almost beside
himself with rapture. “It is mine! Give it me this moment! or I shall
perish!”

“I perceive,” said the Man of Intelligence, examining it more closely,
“that this is the Pearl of Great Price!”

“The very same,” answered the stranger. “Judge, then, of my misery at
losing it out of my bosom! Restore it to me! I must not live without it
an instant to longer.”

“Pardon me,” rejoined the Intelligencer, calmly, “you ask what is
beyond my duty. This pearl, as you well know, is held upon a peculiar
tenure; and having once let it escape from your keeping, you have no
greater claim to it—nay, not so great—as any other person. I cannot
give it back.”

Nor could the entreaties of the miserable man—who saw before his eyes
the jewel of his life without the power to reclaim it—soften the heart
of this stern being, impassive to human sympathy, though exercising
such an apparent influence over human fortunes. Finally the loser of
the inestimable pearl clutched his hands among his hair, and ran madly
forth into the world, which was affrighted at his desperate looks.
There passed him on the doorstep a fashionable young gentleman, whose
business was to inquire for a damask rosebud, the gift of his
lady-love, which he had lost out of his buttonhole within a hour after
receiving it. So various were the errands of those who visited this
Central Office, where all human wishes seemed to be made known, and, so
far as destiny would allow, negotiated to their fulfilment.

The next that entered was a man beyond the middle age, bearing the look
of one who knew the world and his own course in it. He had just
alighted from a handsome private carriage, which had orders to wait in
the street while its owner transacted his business. This person came up
to the desk with a quick, determined step, and looked the Intelligencer
in the face with a resolute eye; though, at the same time, some secret
trouble gleamed from it in red and dusky light.

“I have an estate to dispose of,” said he, with a brevity that seemed
characteristic.

“Describe it,” said the Intelligencer.

The applicant proceeded to give the boundaries of his property, its
nature, comprising tillage, pasture, woodland, and pleasure-grounds, in
ample circuit; together with a mansion-house, in the construction of
which it had been his object to realize a castle in the air, hardening
its shadowy walls into granite, and rendering its visionary splendor
perceptible to the awakened eye. Judging from his description, it was
beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to
endure for centuries. He spoke, too, of the gorgeous furniture, the
refinements of upholstery, and all the luxurious artifices that
combined to render this a residence where life might flow onward in a
stream of golden days, undisturbed by the ruggedness which fate loves
to fling into it.

“I am a man of strong will,” said he, in conclusion; “and at my first
setting out in life, as a poor, unfriended youth, I resolved to make
myself the possessor of such a mansion and estate as this, together
with the abundant revenue necessary to uphold it. I have succeeded to
the extent of my utmost wish. And this is the estate which I have now
concluded to dispose of.”

“And your terms?” asked the Intelligencer, after taking down the
particulars with which the stranger had supplied him.

“Easy, abundantly easy!” answered the successful man, smiling, but with
a stern and almost frightful contraction of the brow, as if to quell an
inward pang. “I have been engaged in various sorts of business,—a
distiller, a trader to Africa, an East India merchant, a speculator in
the stocks,—and, in the course of these affairs, have contracted an
encumbrance of a certain nature. The purchaser of the estate shall
merely be required to assume this burden to himself.”

“I understand you,” said the Man of Intelligence, putting his pen
behind his ear. “I fear that no bargain can be negotiated on these
conditions. Very probably the next possessor may acquire the estate
with a similar encumbrance, but it will be of his own contracting, and
will not lighten your burden in the least.”

“And am I to live on,” fiercely exclaimed the stranger, “with the dirt
of these accursed acres and the granite of this infernal mansion
crushing down my soul? How, if I should turn the edifice into an
almshouse or a hospital, or tear it down and build a church?”

“You can at least make the experiment,” said the Intelligencer; “but
the whole matter is one which you must settle for yourself.”

The man of deplorable success withdrew, and got into his coach, which
rattled off lightly over the wooden pavements, though laden with the
weight of much land, a stately house, and ponderous heaps of gold, all
compressed into an evil conscience.

There now appeared many applicants for places; among the most
noteworthy of whom was a small, smoke-dried figure, who gave himself
out to be one of the bad spirits that had waited upon Dr. Faustus in
his laboratory. He pretended to show a certificate of character, which,
he averred, had been given him by that famous necromancer, and
countersigned by several masters whom he had subsequently served.

“I am afraid, my good friend,” observed the Intelligencer, “that your
chance of getting a service is but poor. Nowadays, men act the evil
spirit for themselves and their neighbors, and play the part more
effectually than ninety-nine out of a hundred of your fraternity.”

But, just as the poor fiend was assuming a vaporous consistency, being
about to vanish through the floor in sad disappointment and chagrin,
the editor of a political newspaper chanced to enter the office in
quest of a scribbler of party paragraphs. The former servant of Dr.
Faustus, with some misgivings as to his sufficiency of venom, was
allowed to try his hand in this capacity. Next appeared, likewise
seeking a service, the mysterious man in Red, who had aided Bonaparte
in his ascent to imperial power. He was examined as to his
qualifications by an aspiring politician, but finally rejected, as
lacking familiarity with the cunning tactics of the present day.

People continued to succeed each other with as much briskness as if
everybody turned aside, out of the roar and tumult of the city, to
record here some want, or superfluity, or desire. Some had goods or
possessions, of which they wished to negotiate the sale. A China
merchant had lost his health by a long residence in that wasting
climate. He very liberally offered his disease, and his wealth along
with it, to any physician who would rid him of both together. A soldier
offered his wreath of laurels for as good a leg as that which it had
cost him on the battle-field. One poor weary wretch desired nothing but
to be accommodated with any creditable method of laying down his life;
for misfortune and pecuniary troubles had so subdued his spirits that
he could no longer conceive the possibility of happiness, nor had the
heart to try for it. Nevertheless, happening to, overhear some
conversation in the Intelligence Office respecting wealth to be rapidly
accumulated by a certain mode of speculation, he resolved to live out
this one other experiment of better fortune. Many persons desired to
exchange their youthful vices for others better suited to the gravity
of advancing age; a few, we are glad to say, made earnest, efforts to
exchange vice for virtue, and, hard as the bargain was, succeeded in
effecting it. But it was remarkable that what all were the least
willing to give up, even on the most advantageous terms, were the
habits, the oddities, the characteristic traits, the little ridiculous
indulgences, somewhere between faults and follies, of which nobody but
themselves could understand the fascination.

The great folio, in which the Man of Intelligence recorded all these
freaks of idle hearts, and aspirations of deep hearts, and desperate
longings of miserable hearts, and evil prayers of perverted hearts,
would be curious reading were it possible to obtain it for publication.
Human character in its individual developments-human nature in the
mass—may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them
all. There was an endless diversity of mode and circumstance, yet
withal such a similarity in the real groundwork, that any one page of
the volume-whether written in the days before the Flood, or the
yesterday that is just gone by, or to be written on the morrow that is
close at hand, or a thousand ages hence—might serve as a specimen of
the whole. Not but that there were wild sallies of fantasy that could
scarcely occur to more than one man’s brain, whether reasonable or
lunatic. The strangest wishes—yet most incident to men who had gone
deep into scientific pursuits, and attained a high intellectual stage,
though not the loftiest—were, to contend with Nature, and wrest from
her some secret, or some power, which she had seen fit to withhold from
mortal grasp. She loves to delude her aspiring students, and mock them
with mysteries that seem but just beyond their utmost reach. To concoct
new minerals, to produce new forms of vegetable life, to create an
insect, if nothing higher in the living scale, is a sort of wish that
has often revelled in the breast of a man of science. An astronomer,
who lived far more among the distant worlds of space than in this lower
sphere, recorded a wish to behold the opposite side of the moon, which,
unless the system of the firmament be reversed, she can never turn
towards the earth. On the same page of the volume was written the wish
of a little child to have the stars for playthings.

The most ordinary wish, that was written down with wearisome
recurrence, was, of course, for wealth, wealth, wealth, in sums from a
few shillings up to unreckonable thousands. But in reality this
often-repeated expression covered as many different desires. Wealth is
the golden essence of the outward world, embodying almost everything
that exists beyond the limits of the soul; and therefore it is the
natural yearning for the life in the midst of which we find ourselves,
and of which gold is the condition of enjoyment, that men abridge into
this general wish. Here and there, it is true, the volume testified to
some heart so perverted as to desire gold for its own sake. Many wished
for power; a strange desire indeed, since it is but another form of
slavery. Old people wished for the delights of youth; a fop for a
fashionable coat; an idle reader, for a new novel; a versifier, for a
rhyme to some stubborn word; a painter, for Titian’s secret of
coloring; a prince, for a cottage; a republican, for a kingdom and a
palace; a libertine, for his neighbor’s wife; a man of palate, for
green peas; and a poor man, for a crust of bread. The ambitious desires
of public men, elsewhere so craftily concealed, were here expressed
openly and boldly, side by side with the unselfish wishes of the
philanthropist for the welfare of the race, so beautiful, so
comforting, in contrast with the egotism that continually weighed self
against the world. Into the darker secrets of the Book of Wishes we
will not penetrate.

It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind,
perusing this volume carefully and comparing its records with men’s
perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to
ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most
cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous
wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart towards heaven, often
lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul,
selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart,
often passes into the spiritual atmosphere without being concreted into
an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation
of the human heart, than is the living drama of action as it evolves
around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming
points of the bad and more errors of the virtuous; higher upsoarings,
and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing
amalgamation of vice and virtue than we witness in the outward world.
Decency and external conscience often produce a far fairer outside than
is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, oil the other hand,
that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he
realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or
other, have arisen from the depths of his nature and witnessed for him
in this volume. Yet there is enough on every leaf to make the good man
shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner,
whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

But again the door is opened, and we hear the tumultuous stir of the
world,—a deep and awful sound, expressing in another form some portion
of what is written in the volume that lies before the Man of
Intelligence. A grandfatherly personage tottered hastily into the
office, with such an earnestness in his infirm alacrity that his white
hair floated backward as he hurried up to the desk, while his dim eyes
caught a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable
figure explained that he was in search of To-morrow.

“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” added the sage old
gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other
in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make
haste; for, unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it
will finally escape me.”

“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of
Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father
into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will
doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you
expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”

Obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, the
grandsire hastened forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the
floor; and, as he disappeared, a little boy scampered through the door
in chase of a butterfly which had got astray amid the barren sunshine
of the city. Had the old gentleman been shrewder, he might have
detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect. The golden
butterfly glistened through the shadowy apartment, and brushed its
wings against the Book of Wishes, and fluttered forth again with the
child still in pursuit.

A man now entered, in neglected attire, with the aspect of a thinker,
but somewhat too rough-hewn and brawny for a scholar. His face was full
of sturdy vigor, with some finer and keener attribute beneath. Though
harsh at first, it was tempered with the glow of a large, warm heart,
which had force enough to heat his powerful intellect through and
through. He advanced to the Intelligencer and looked at him with a
glance of such stern sincerity that perhaps few secrets were beyond its
scope.

“I seek for Truth,” said he.

“It is precisely the most rare pursuit that has ever come under my
cognizance,” replied the Intelligencer, as he made the new inscription
in his volume. “Most men seek to impose some cunning falsehood upon
themselves for truth. But I can lend no help to your researches. You
must achieve the miracle for yourself. At some fortunate moment you may
find Truth at your side, or perhaps she may be mistily discerned far in
advance, or possibly behind you.”

“Not behind me,” said the seeker; “for I have left nothing on my track
without a thorough investigation. She flits before me, passing now
through a naked solitude, and now mingling with the throng of a popular
assembly, and now writing with the pen of a French philosopher, and now
standing at the altar of an old cathedral, in the guise of a Catholic
priest, performing the high mass. O weary search! But I must not
falter; and surely my heart-deep quest of Truth shall avail at last.”

He paused and fixed his eyes upon the Intelligencer with a depth of
investigation that seemed to hold commerce with the inner nature of
this being, wholly regardless of his external development.

“And what are you?” said he. “It will not satisfy me to point to this
fantastic show of an Intelligence Office and this mockery of business.
Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life and your
influence upon mankind.”

“Yours is a mind,” answered the Man of Intelligence, “before which the
forms and fantasies that conceal the inner idea from the multitude
vanish at once and leave the naked reality beneath. Know, then, the
secret. My agency in worldly action, my connection with the press, and
tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs, is merely
delusive. The desire of man’s heart does for him whatever I seem to do.
I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit.”

What further secrets were then spoken remains a mystery, inasmuch as
the roar of the city, the bustle of human business, the outcry of the
jostling masses, the rush and tumult of man’s life, in its noisy and
brief career, arose so high that it drowned the words of these two
talkers; and whether they stood talking in the moon, or in Vanity Fair,
or in a city of this actual world, is more than I can say.




ROGER MALVIN’S BURIAL


One of the few incidents of Indian warfare naturally susceptible of the
moonlight of romance was that expedition undertaken for the defence of
the frontiers in the year 1725, which resulted in the well-remembered
“Lovell’s Fight.” Imagination, by casting certain circumstances
judicially into the shade, may see much to admire in the heroism of a
little band who gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the
enemy’s country. The open bravery displayed by both parties was in
accordance with civilized ideas of valor; and chivalry itself might not
blush to record the deeds of one or two individuals. The battle, though
so fatal to those who fought, was not unfortunate in its consequences
to the country; for it broke the strength of a tribe and conduced to
the peace which subsisted during several ensuing years. History and
tradition are unusually minute in their memorials of their affair; and
the captain of a scouting party of frontier men has acquired as actual
a military renown as many a victorious leader of thousands. Some of the
incidents contained in the following pages will be recognized,
notwithstanding the substitution of fictitious names, by such as have
heard, from old men’s lips, the fate of the few combatants who were in
a condition to retreat after “Lovell’s Fight.”


The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree-tops, beneath which
two weary and wounded men had stretched their limbs the night before.
Their bed of withered oak leaves was strewn upon the small level space,
at the foot of a rock, situated near the summit of one of the gentle
swells by which the face of the country is there diversified. The mass
of granite, rearing its smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet
above their heads, was not unlike a gigantic gravestone, upon which the
veins seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters. On a tract
of several acres around this rock, oaks and other hard-wood trees had
supplied the place of the pines, which were the usual growth of the
land; and a young and vigorous sapling stood close beside the
travellers.

The severe wound of the elder man had probably deprived him of sleep;
for, so soon as the first ray of sunshine rested on the top of the
highest tree, he reared himself painfully from his recumbent posture
and sat erect. The deep lines of his countenance and the scattered gray
of his hair marked him as past the middle age; but his muscular frame
would, but for the effect of his wound, have been as capable of
sustaining fatigue as in the early vigor of life. Languor and
exhaustion now sat upon his haggard features; and the despairing glance
which he sent forward through the depths of the forest proved his own
conviction that his pilgrimage was at an end. He next turned his eyes
to the companion who reclined by his side. The youth—for he had
scarcely attained the years of manhood—lay, with his head upon his arm,
in the embrace of an unquiet sleep, which a thrill of pain from his
wounds seemed each moment on the point of breaking. His right hand
grasped a musket; and, to judge from the violent action of his
features, his slumbers were bringing back a vision of the conflict of
which he was one of the few survivors. A shout deep and loud in his
dreaming fancy—found its way in an imperfect murmur to his lips; and,
starting even at the slight sound of his own voice, he suddenly awoke.
The first act of reviving recollection was to make anxious inquiries
respecting the condition of his wounded fellow-traveller. The latter
shook his head.

“Reuben, my boy,” said he, “this rock beneath which we sit will serve
for an old hunter’s gravestone. There is many and many a long mile of
howling wilderness before us yet; nor would it avail me anything if the
smoke of my own chimney were but on the other side of that swell of
land. The Indian bullet was deadlier than I thought.”

“You are weary with our three days’ travel,” replied the youth, “and a
little longer rest will recruit you. Sit you here while I search the
woods for the herbs and roots that must be our sustenance; and, having
eaten, you shall lean on me, and we will turn our faces homeward. I
doubt not that, with my help, you can attain to some one of the
frontier garrisons.”

“There is not two days’ life in me, Reuben,” said the other, calmly,
“and I will no longer burden you with my useless body, when you can
scarcely support your own. Your wounds are deep and your strength is
failing fast; yet, if you hasten onward alone, you may be preserved.
For me there is no hope, and I will await death here.”

“If it must be so, I will remain and watch by you,” said Reuben,
resolutely.

“No, my son, no,” rejoined his companion. “Let the wish of a dying man
have weight with you; give me one grasp of your hand, and get you
hence. Think you that my last moments will be eased by the thought that
I leave you to die a more lingering death? I have loved you like a
father, Reuben; and at a time like this I should have something of a
father’s authority. I charge you to be gone that I may die in peace.”

“And because you have been a father to me, should I therefore leave you
to perish and to lie unburied in the wilderness?” exclaimed the youth.
“No; if your end be in truth approaching, I will watch by you and
receive your parting words. I will dig a grave here by the rock, in
which, if my weakness overcome me, we will rest together; or, if Heaven
gives me strength, I will seek my way home.”

“In the cities and wherever men dwell,” replied the other, “they bury
their dead in the earth; they hide them from the sight of the living;
but here, where no step may pass perhaps for a hundred years, wherefore
should I not rest beneath the open sky, covered only by the oak leaves
when the autumn winds shall strew them? And for a monument, here is
this gray rock, on which my dying hand shall carve the name of Roger
Malvin, and the traveller in days to come will know that here sleeps a
hunter and a warrior. Tarry not, then, for a folly like this, but
hasten away, if not for your own sake, for hers who will else be
desolate.”

Malvin spoke the last few words in a faltering voice, and their effect
upon his companion was strongly visible. They reminded him that there
were other and less questionable duties than that of sharing the fate
of a man whom his death could not benefit. Nor can it be affirmed that
no selfish feeling strove to enter Reuben’s heart, though the
consciousness made him more earnestly resist his companion’s
entreaties.

“How terrible to wait the slow approach of death in this solitude!”
exclaimed he. “A brave man does not shrink in the battle; and, when
friends stand round the bed, even women may die composedly; but here—”

“I shall not shrink even here, Reuben Bourne,” interrupted Malvin. “I
am a man of no weak heart, and, if I were, there is a surer support
than that of earthly friends. You are young, and life is dear to you.
Your last moments will need comfort far more than mine; and when you
have laid me in the earth, and are alone, and night is settling on the
forest, you will feel all the bitterness of the death that may now be
escaped. But I will urge no selfish motive to your generous nature.
Leave me for my sake, that, having said a prayer for your safety, I may
have space to settle my account undisturbed by worldly sorrows.”

“And your daughter,—how shall I dare to meet her eye?” exclaimed
Reuben. “She will ask the fate of her father, whose life I vowed to
defend with my own. Must I tell her that he travelled three days’ march
with me from the field of battle and that then I left him to perish in
the wilderness? Were it not better to lie down and die by your side
than to return safe and say this to Dorcas?”

“Tell my daughter,” said Roger Malvin, “that, though yourself sore
wounded, and weak, and weary, you led my tottering footsteps many a
mile, and left me only at my earnest entreaty, because I would not have
your blood upon my soul. Tell her that through pain and danger you were
faithful, and that, if your lifeblood could have saved me, it would
have flowed to its last drop; and tell her that you will be something
dearer than a father, and that my blessing is with you both, and that
my dying eyes can see a long and pleasant path in which you will
journey together.”

As Malvin spoke he almost raised himself from the ground, and the
energy of his concluding words seemed to fill the wild and lonely
forest with a vision of happiness; but, when he sank exhausted upon his
bed of oak leaves, the light which had kindled in Reuben’s eye was
quenched. He felt as if it were both sin and folly to think of
happiness at such a moment. His companion watched his changing
countenance, and sought with generous art to wile him to his own good.

“Perhaps I deceive myself in regard to the time I have to live,” he
resumed. “It may be that, with speedy assistance, I might recover of my
wound. The foremost fugitives must, ere this, have carried tidings of
our fatal battle to the frontiers, and parties will be out to succor
those in like condition with ourselves. Should you meet one of these
and guide them hither, who can tell but that I may sit by my own
fireside again?”

A mournful smile strayed across the features of the dying man as he
insinuated that unfounded hope,—which, however, was not without its
effect on Reuben. No merely selfish motive, nor even the desolate
condition of Dorcas, could have induced him to desert his companion at
such a moment—but his wishes seized on the thought that Malvin’s life
might be preserved, and his sanguine nature heightened almost to
certainty the remote possibility of procuring human aid.

“Surely there is reason, weighty reason, to hope that friends are not
far distant,” he said, half aloud. “There fled one coward, unwounded,
in the beginning of the fight, and most probably he made good speed.
Every true man on the frontier would shoulder his musket at the news;
and, though no party may range so far into the woods as this, I shall
perhaps encounter them in one day’s march. Counsel me faithfully,” he
added, turning to Malvin, in distrust of his own motives. “Were your
situation mine, would you desert me while life remained?”

“It is now twenty years,” replied Roger Malvin,—sighing, however, as he
secretly acknowledged the wide dissimilarity between the two cases,—“it
is now twenty years since I escaped with one dear friend from Indian
captivity near Montreal. We journeyed many days through the woods, till
at length overcome with hunger and weariness, my friend lay down and
besought me to leave him; for he knew that, if I remained, we both must
perish; and, with but little hope of obtaining succor, I heaped a
pillow of dry leaves beneath his head and hastened on.”

“And did you return in time to save him?” asked Reuben, hanging on
Malvin’s words as if they were to be prophetic of his own success.

“I did,” answered the other. “I came upon the camp of a hunting party
before sunset of the same day. I guided them to the spot where my
comrade was expecting death; and he is now a hale and hearty man upon
his own farm, far within the frontiers, while I lie wounded here in the
depths of the wilderness.”

This example, powerful in affecting Reuben’s decision, was aided,
unconsciously to himself, by the hidden strength of many another
motive. Roger Malvin perceived that the victory was nearly won.

“Now, go, my son, and Heaven prosper you!” he said. “Turn not back with
your friends when you meet them, lest your wounds and weariness
overcome you; but send hitherward two or three, that may be spared, to
search for me; and believe me, Reuben, my heart will be lighter with
every step you take towards home.” Yet there was, perhaps, a change
both in his countenance and voice as he spoke thus; for, after all, it
was a ghastly fate to be left expiring in the wilderness.

Reuben Bourne, but half convinced that he was acting rightly, at length
raised himself from the ground and prepared himself for his departure.
And first, though contrary to Malvin’s wishes, he collected a stock of
roots and herbs, which had been their only food during the last two
days. This useless supply he placed within reach of the dying man, for
whom, also, he swept together a bed of dry oak leaves. Then climbing to
the summit of the rock, which on one side was rough and broken, he bent
the oak sapling downward, and bound his handkerchief to the topmost
branch. This precaution was not unnecessary to direct any who might
come in search of Malvin; for every part of the rock, except its broad,
smooth front, was concealed at a little distance by the dense
undergrowth of the forest. The handkerchief had been the bandage of a
wound upon Reuben’s arm; and, as he bound it to the tree, he vowed by
the blood that stained it that he would return, either to save his
companion’s life or to lay his body in the grave. He then descended,
and stood, with downcast eyes, to receive Roger Malvin’s parting words.

The experience of the latter suggested much and minute advice
respecting the youth’s journey through the trackless forest. Upon this
subject he spoke with calm earnestness, as if he were sending Reuben to
the battle or the chase while he himself remained secure at home, and
not as if the human countenance that was about to leave him were the
last he would ever behold. But his firmness was shaken before he
concluded.

“Carry my blessing to Dorcas, and say that my last prayer shall be for
her and you. Bid her to have no hard thoughts because you left me
here,”—Reuben’s heart smote him,—“for that your life would not have
weighed with you if its sacrifice could have done me good. She will
marry you after she has mourned a little while for her father; and
Heaven grant you long and happy days, and may your children’s children
stand round your death bed! And, Reuben,” added he, as the weakness of
mortality made its way at last, “return, when your wounds are healed
and your weariness refreshed,—return to this wild rock, and lay my
bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them.”

An almost superstitious regard, arising perhaps from the customs of the
Indians, whose war was with the dead as well as the living, was paid by
the frontier inhabitants to the rites of sepulture; and there are many
instances of the sacrifice of life in the attempt to bury those who had
fallen by the “sword of the wilderness.” Reuben, therefore, felt the
full importance of the promise which he most solemnly made to return
and perform Roger Malvin’s obsequies. It was remarkable that the
latter, speaking his whole heart in his parting words, no longer
endeavored to persuade the youth that even the speediest succor might
avail to the preservation of his life. Reuben was internally convinced
that he should see Malvin’s living face no more. His generous nature
would fain have delayed him, at whatever risk, till the dying scene
were past; but the desire of existence and the hope of happiness had
strengthened in his heart, and he was unable to resist them.

“It is enough,” said Roger Malvin, having listened to Reuben’s promise.
“Go, and God speed you!”

The youth pressed his hand in silence, turned, and was departing. His
slow and faltering steps, however, had borne him but a little way
before Malvin’s voice recalled him.

“Reuben, Reuben,” said he, faintly; and Reuben returned and knelt down
by the dying man.

“Raise me, and let me lean against the rock,” was his last request. “My
face will be turned towards home, and I shall see you a moment longer
as you pass among the trees.”

Reuben, having made the desired alteration in his companion’s posture,
again began his solitary pilgrimage. He walked more hastily at first
than was consistent with his strength; for a sort of guilty feeling,
which sometimes torments men in their most justifiable acts, caused him
to seek concealment from Malvin’s eyes; but after he had trodden far
upon the rustling forest leaves he crept back, impelled by a wild and
painful curiosity, and, sheltered by the earthy roots of an uptorn
tree, gazed earnestly at the desolate man. The morning sun was
unclouded, and the trees and shrubs imbibed the sweet air of the month
of May; yet there seemed a gloom on Nature’s face, as if she
sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow. Roger Malvin’s hands were
uplifted in a fervent prayer, some of the words of which stole through
the stillness of the woods and entered Reuben’s heart, torturing it
with an unutterable pang. They were the broken accents of a petition
for his own happiness and that of Dorcas; and, as the youth listened,
conscience, or something in its similitude, pleaded strongly with him
to return and lie down again by the rock. He felt how hard was the doom
of the kind and generous being whom he had deserted in his extremity.
Death would come like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually
towards him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless
features from behind a nearer and yet a nearer tree. But such must have
been Reuben’s own fate had he tarried another sunset; and who shall
impute blame to him if he shrink from so useless a sacrifice? As he
gave a parting look, a breeze waved the little banner upon the sapling
oak and reminded Reuben of his vow.


Many circumstances combined to retard the wounded traveller in his way
to the frontiers. On the second day the clouds, gathering densely over
the sky, precluded the possibility of regulating his course by the
position of the sun; and he knew not but that every effort of his
almost exhausted strength was removing him farther from the home he
sought. His scanty sustenance was supplied by the berries and other
spontaneous products of the forest. Herds of deer, it is true,
sometimes bounded past him, and partridges frequently whirred up before
his footsteps; but his ammunition had been expended in the fight, and
he had no means of slaying them. His wounds, irritated by the constant
exertion in which lay the only hope of life, wore away his strength and
at intervals confused his reason. But, even in the wanderings of
intellect, Reuben’s young heart clung strongly to existence; and it was
only through absolute incapacity of motion that he at last sank down
beneath a tree, compelled there to await death.

In this situation he was discovered by a party who, upon the first
intelligence of the fight, had been despatched to the relief of the
survivors. They conveyed him to the nearest settlement, which chanced
to be that of his own residence.

Dorcas, in the simplicity of the olden time, watched by the bedside of
her wounded lover, and administered all those comforts that are in the
sole gift of woman’s heart and hand. During several days Reuben’s
recollection strayed drowsily among the perils and hardships through
which he had passed, and he was incapable of returning definite answers
to the inquiries with which many were eager to harass him. No authentic
particulars of the battle had yet been circulated; nor could mothers,
wives, and children tell whether their loved ones were detained by
captivity or by the stronger chain of death. Dorcas nourished her
apprehensions in silence till one afternoon when Reuben awoke from an
unquiet sleep, and seemed to recognize her more perfectly than at any
previous time. She saw that his intellect had become composed, and she
could no longer restrain her filial anxiety.

“My father, Reuben?” she began; but the change in her lover’s
countenance made her pause.

The youth shrank as if with a bitter pain, and the blood gushed vividly
into his wan and hollow cheeks. His first impulse was to cover his
face; but, apparently with a desperate effort, he half raised himself
and spoke vehemently, defending himself against an imaginary
accusation.

“Your father was sore wounded in the battle, Dorcas; and he bade me not
burden myself with him, but only to lead him to the lakeside, that he
might quench his thirst and die. But I would not desert the old man in
his extremity, and, though bleeding myself, I supported him; I gave him
half my strength, and led him away with me. For three days we journeyed
on together, and your father was sustained beyond my hopes, but,
awaking at sunrise on the fourth day, I found him faint and exhausted;
he was unable to proceed; his life had ebbed away fast; and—”

“He died!” exclaimed Dorcas, faintly.

Reuben felt it impossible to acknowledge that his selfish love of life
had hurried him away before her father’s fate was decided. He spoke
not; he only bowed his head; and, between shame and exhaustion, sank
back and hid his face in the pillow. Dorcas wept when her fears were
thus confirmed; but the shock, as it had been long anticipated, was on
that account the less violent.

“You dug a grave for my poor father in the wilderness, Reuben?” was the
question by which her filial piety manifested itself.

“My hands were weak; but I did what I could,” replied the youth in a
smothered tone. “There stands a noble tombstone above his head; and I
would to Heaven I slept as soundly as he!”

Dorcas, perceiving the wildness of his latter words, inquired no
further at the time; but her heart found ease in the thought that Roger
Malvin had not lacked such funeral rites as it was possible to bestow.
The tale of Reuben’s courage and fidelity lost nothing when she
communicated it to her friends; and the poor youth, tottering from his
sick chamber to breathe the sunny air, experienced from every tongue
the miserable and humiliating torture of unmerited praise. All
acknowledged that he might worthily demand the hand of the fair maiden
to whose father he had been “faithful unto death;” and, as my tale is
not of love, it shall suffice to say that in the space of a few months
Reuben became the husband of Dorcas Malvin. During the marriage
ceremony the bride was covered with blushes, but the bridegroom’s face
was pale.

There was now in the breast of Reuben Bourne an incommunicable
thought—something which he was to conceal most heedfully from her whom
he most loved and trusted. He regretted, deeply and bitterly, the moral
cowardice that had restrained his words when he was about to disclose
the truth to Dorcas; but pride, the fear of losing her affection, the
dread of universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood. He
felt that for leaving Roger Malvin he deserved no censure. His
presence, the gratuitous sacrifice of his own life, would have added
only another and a needless agony to the last moments of the dying man;
but concealment had imparted to a justifiable act much of the secret
effect of guilt; and Reuben, while reason told him that he had done
right, experienced in no small degree the mental horrors which punish
the perpetrator of undiscovered crime. By a certain association of
ideas, he at times almost imagined himself a murderer. For years, also,
a thought would occasionally recur, which, though he perceived all its
folly and extravagance, he had not power to banish from his mind. It
was a haunting and torturing fancy that his father-in-law was yet
sitting at the foot of the rock, on the withered forest leaves, alive,
and awaiting his pledged assistance. These mental deceptions, however,
came and went, nor did he ever mistake them for realities: but in the
calmest and clearest moods of his mind he was conscious that he had a
deep vow unredeemed, and that an unburied corpse was calling to him out
of the wilderness. Yet such was the consequence of his prevarication
that he could not obey the call. It was now too late to require the
assistance of Roger Malvin’s friends in performing his long-deferred
sepulture; and superstitious fears, of which none were more susceptible
than the people of the outward settlements, forbade Reuben to go alone.
Neither did he know where in the pathless and illimitable forest to
seek that smooth and lettered rock at the base of which the body lay:
his remembrance of every portion of his travel thence was indistinct,
and the latter part had left no impression upon his mind. There was,
however, a continual impulse, a voice audible only to himself,
commanding him to go forth and redeem his vow; and he had a strange
impression that, were he to make the trial, he would be led straight to
Malvin’s bones. But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was
disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his
spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart; and he was
transformed into a sad and downcast yet irritable man.

In the course of a few years after their marriage changes began to be
visible in the external prosperity of Reuben and Dorcas. The only
riches of the former had been his stout heart and strong arm; but the
latter, her father’s sole heiress, had made her husband master of a
farm, under older cultivation, larger, and better stocked than most of
the frontier establishments. Reuben Bourne, however, was a neglectful
husbandman; and, while the lands of the other settlers became annually
more fruitful, his deteriorated in the same proportion. The
discouragements to agriculture were greatly lessened by the cessation
of Indian war, during which men held the plough in one hand and the
musket in the other, and were fortunate if the products of their
dangerous labor were not destroyed, either in the field or in the barn,
by the savage enemy. But Reuben did not profit by the altered condition
of the country; nor can it be denied that his intervals of industrious
attention to his affairs were but scantily rewarded with success. The
irritability by which he had recently become distinguished was another
cause of his declining prosperity, as it occasioned frequent quarrels
in his unavoidable intercourse with the neighboring settlers. The
results of these were innumerable lawsuits; for the people of New
England, in the earliest stages and wildest circumstances of the
country, adopted, whenever attainable, the legal mode of deciding their
differences. To be brief, the world did not go well with Reuben Bourne;
and, though not till many years after his marriage, he was finally a
ruined man, with but one remaining expedient against the evil fate that
had pursued him. He was to throw sunlight into some deep recess of the
forest, and seek subsistence from the virgin bosom of the wilderness.

The only child of Reuben and Dorcas was a son, now arrived at the age
of fifteen years, beautiful in youth, and giving promise of a glorious
manhood. He was peculiarly qualified for, and already began to excel
in, the wild accomplishments of frontier life. His foot was fleet, his
aim true, his apprehension quick, his heart glad and high; and all who
anticipated the return of Indian war spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future
leader in the land. The boy was loved by his father with a deep and
silent strength, as if whatever was good and happy in his own nature
had been transferred to his child, carrying his affections with it.
Even Dorcas, though loving and beloved, was far less dear to him; for
Reuben’s secret thoughts and insulated emotions had gradually made him
a selfish man, and he could no longer love deeply except where he saw
or imagined some reflection or likeness of his own mind. In Cyrus he
recognized what he had himself been in other days; and at intervals he
seemed to partake of the boy’s spirit, and to be revived with a fresh
and happy life. Reuben was accompanied by his son in the expedition,
for the purpose of selecting a tract of land and felling and burning
the timber, which necessarily preceded the removal of the household
gods. Two months of autumn were thus occupied, after which Reuben
Bourne and his young hunter returned to spend their last winter in the
settlements.


It was early in the month of May that the little family snapped asunder
whatever tendrils of affections had clung to inanimate objects, and
bade farewell to the few who, in the blight of fortune, called
themselves their friends. The sadness of the parting moment had, to
each of the pilgrims, its peculiar alleviations. Reuben, a moody man,
and misanthropic because unhappy, strode onward with his usual stern
brow and downcast eye, feeling few regrets and disdaining to
acknowledge any. Dorcas, while she wept abundantly over the broken ties
by which her simple and affectionate nature had bound itself to
everything, felt that the inhabitants of her inmost heart moved on with
her, and that all else would be supplied wherever she might go. And the
boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous
pleasures of the untrodden forest.

Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream, has not wished that he were a
wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle
being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth his free and exulting step
would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topped
mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home where Nature had strewn a
double wealth in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary
age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him
there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a
people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. When death, like the
sweet sleep which we welcome after a day of happiness, came over him,
his far descendants would mourn over the venerated dust. Enveloped by
tradition in mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would
call him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly
glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries.

The tangled and gloomy forest through which the personages of my tale
were wandering differed widely from the dreamer’s land of fantasy; yet
there was something in their way of life that Nature asserted as her
own, and the gnawing cares which went with them from the world were all
that now obstructed their happiness. One stout and shaggy steed, the
bearer of all their wealth, did not shrink from the added weight of
Dorcas; although her hardy breeding sustained her, during the latter
part of each day’s journey, by her husband’s side. Reuben and his son,
their muskets on their shoulders and their axes slung behind them, kept
an unwearied pace, each watching with a hunter’s eye for the game that
supplied their food. When hunger bade, they halted and prepared their
meal on the bank of some unpolluted forest brook, which, as they knelt
down with thirsty lips to drink, murmured a sweet unwillingness, like a
maiden at love’s first kiss. They slept beneath a hut of branches, and
awoke at peep of light refreshed for the toils of another day. Dorcas
and the boy went on joyously, and even Reuben’s spirit shone at
intervals with an outward gladness; but inwardly there was a cold cold
sorrow, which he compared to the snowdrifts lying deep in the glens and
hollows of the rivulets while the leaves were brightly green above.

Cyrus Bourne was sufficiently skilled in the travel of the woods to
observe that his father did not adhere to the course they had pursued
in their expedition of the preceding autumn. They were now keeping
farther to the north, striking out more directly from the settlements,
and into a region of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet the
sole possessors. The boy sometimes hinted his opinions upon the
subject, and Reuben listened attentively, and once or twice altered the
direction of their march in accordance with his son’s counsel; but,
having so done, he seemed ill at ease. His quick and wandering glances
were sent forward apparently in search of enemies lurking behind the
tree trunks, and, seeing nothing there, he would cast his eyes
backwards as if in fear of some pursuer. Cyrus, perceiving that his
father gradually resumed the old direction, forbore to interfere; nor,
though something began to weigh upon his heart, did his adventurous
nature permit him to regret the increased length and the mystery of
their way.

On the afternoon of the fifth day they halted, and made their simple
encampment nearly an hour before sunset. The face of the country, for
the last few miles, had been diversified by swells of land resembling
huge waves of a petrified sea; and in one of the corresponding hollows,
a wild and romantic spot, had the family reared their hut and kindled
their fire. There is something chilling, and yet heart-warming, in the
thought of these three, united by strong bands of love and insulated
from all that breathe beside. The dark and gloomy pines looked down
upon them, and, as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying sound
was heard in the forest; or did those old trees groan in fear that men
were come to lay the axe to their roots at last? Reuben and his son,
while Dorcas made ready their meal, proposed to wander out in search of
game, of which that day’s march had afforded no supply. The boy,
promising not to quit the vicinity of the encampment, bounded off with
a step as light and elastic as that of the deer he hoped to slay; while
his father, feeling a transient happiness as he gazed after him, was
about to pursue an opposite direction. Dorcas in the meanwhile, had
seated herself near their fire of fallen branches upon the mossgrown
and mouldering trunk of a tree uprooted years before. Her employment,
diversified by an occasional glance at the pot, now beginning to simmer
over the blaze, was the perusal of the current year’s Massachusetts
Almanac, which, with the exception of an old black-letter Bible,
comprised all the literary wealth of the family. None pay a greater
regard to arbitrary divisions of time than those who are excluded from
society; and Dorcas mentioned, as if the information were of
importance, that it was now the twelfth of May. Her husband started.

“The twelfth of May! I should remember it well,” muttered he, while
many thoughts occasioned a momentary confusion in his mind. “Where am
I? Whither am I wandering? Where did I leave him?”

Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband’s wayward moods to note any
peculiarity of demeanor, now laid aside the almanac and addressed him
in that mournful tone which the tender hearted appropriate to griefs
long cold and dead.

“It was near this time of the month, eighteen years ago, that my poor
father left this world for a better. He had a kind arm to hold his head
and a kind voice to cheer him, Reuben, in his last moments; and the
thought of the faithful care you took of him has comforted me many a
time since. Oh, death would have been awful to a solitary man in a wild
place like this!”

“Pray Heaven, Dorcas,” said Reuben, in a broken voice,—“pray Heaven
that neither of us three dies solitary and lies unburied in this
howling wilderness!” And he hastened away, leaving her to watch the
fire beneath the gloomy pines.

Reuben Bourne’s rapid pace gradually slackened as the pang,
unintentionally inflicted by the words of Dorcas, became less acute.
Many strange reflections, however, thronged upon him; and, straying
onward rather like a sleep walker than a hunter, it was attributable to
no care of his own that his devious course kept him in the vicinity of
the encampment. His steps were imperceptibly led almost in a circle;
nor did he observe that he was on the verge of a tract of land heavily
timbered, but not with pine-trees. The place of the latter was here
supplied by oaks and other of the harder woods; and around their roots
clustered a dense and bushy under-growth, leaving, however, barren
spaces between the trees, thick strewn with withered leaves. Whenever
the rustling of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made a
sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber, Reuben instinctively
raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp
glance on every side; but, convinced by a partial observation that no
animal was near, he would again give himself up to his thoughts. He was
musing on the strange influence that had led him away from his
premeditated course, and so far into the depths of the wilderness.
Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives
lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him
onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat. He
trusted that it was Heaven’s intent to afford him an opportunity of
expiating his sin; he hoped that he might find the bones so long
unburied; and that, having laid the earth over them, peace would throw
its sunlight into the sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he
was aroused by a rustling in the forest at some distance from the spot
to which he had wandered. Perceiving the motion of some object behind a
thick veil of undergrowth, he fired, with the instinct of a hunter and
the aim of a practised marksman. A low moan, which told his success,
and by which even animals cars express their dying agony, was unheeded
by Reuben Bourne. What were the recollections now breaking upon him?

The thicket into which Reuben had fired was near the summit of a swell
of land, and was clustered around the base of a rock, which, in the
shape and smoothness of one of its surfaces, was not unlike a gigantic
gravestone. As if reflected in a mirror, its likeness was in Reuben’s
memory. He even recognized the veins which seemed to form an
inscription in forgotten characters: everything remained the same,
except that a thick covert of bushes shrouded the lowerpart of the
rock, and would have hidden Roger Malvin had he still been sitting
there. Yet in the next moment Reuben’s eye was caught by another change
that time had effected since he last stood where he was now standing
again behind the earthy roots of the uptorn tree. The sapling to which
he had bound the bloodstained symbol of his vow had increased and
strengthened into an oak, far indeed from its maturity, but with no
mean spread of shadowy branches. There was one singularity observable
in this tree which made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches
were in luxuriant life, and an excess of vegetation had fringed the
trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently stricken the
upper part of the oak, and the very topmost bough was withered,
sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered how the little banner had
fluttered on that topmost bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen
years before. Whose guilt had blasted it?


Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, continued her
preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the
moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of
which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of
the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements.
It had a strange aspect that one little spot of homely comfort in the
desolate heart of Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the higher
branches of the trees that grew on rising ground; but the shadows of
evening had deepened into the hollow where the encampment was made, and
the firelight began to redden as it gleamed up the tall trunks of the
pines or hovered on the dense and obscure mass of foliage that circled
round the spot. The heart of Dorcas was not sad; for she felt that it
was better to journey in the wilderness with two whom she loved than to
be a lonely woman in a crowd that cared not for her. As she busied
herself in arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves, for
Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the gloomy forest in the
measure of a song that she had learned in youth. The rude melody, the
production of a bard who won no name, was descriptive of a winter
evening in a frontier cottage, when, secured from savage inroad by the
high-piled snow-drifts, the family rejoiced by their own fireside. The
whole song possessed the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought,
but four continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the
blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them, working
magic with a few simple words, the poet had instilled the very essence
of domestic love and household happiness, and they were poetry and
picture joined in one. As Dorcas sang, the walls of her forsaken home
seemed to encircle her; she no longer saw the gloomy pines, nor heard
the wind which still, as she began each verse, sent a heavy breath
through the branches, and died away in a hollow moan from the burden of
the song. She was aroused by the report of a gun in the vicinity of the
encampment; and either the sudden sound, or her loneliness by the
glowing fire, caused her to tremble violently. The next moment she
laughed in the pride of a mother’s heart.

“My beautiful young hunter! My boy has slain a deer!” she exclaimed,
recollecting that in the direction whence the shot proceeded Cyrus had
gone to the chase.

She waited a reasonable time to hear her son’s light step bounding over
the rustling leaves to tell of his success. But he did not immediately
appear; and she sent her cheerful voice among the trees in search of
him.

“Cyrus! Cyrus!”

His coming was still delayed; and she determined, as the report had
apparently been very near, to seek for him in person. Her assistance,
also, might be necessary in bringing home the venison which she
flattered herself he had obtained. She therefore set forward, directing
her steps by the long-past sound, and singing as she went, in order
that the boy might be aware of her approach and run to meet her. From
behind the trunk of every tree, and from every hiding-place in the
thick foliage of the undergrowth, she hoped to discover the countenance
of her son, laughing with the sportive mischief that is born of
affection. The sun was now beneath the horizon, and the light that came
down among the leaves was sufficiently dim to create many illusions in
her expecting fancy. Several times she seemed indistinctly to see his
face gazing out from among the leaves; and once she imagined that he
stood beckoning to her at the base of a craggy rock. Keeping her eyes
on this object, however, it proved to be no more than the trunk of an
oak fringed to the very ground with little branches, one of which,
thrust out farther than the rest, was shaken by the breeze. Making her
way round the foot of the rock, she suddenly found herself close to her
husband, who had approached in another direction. Leaning upon the butt
of his gun, the muzzle of which rested upon the withered leaves, he was
apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some object at his feet.

“How is this, Reuben? Have you slain the deer and fallen asleep over
him?” exclaimed Dorcas, laughing cheerfully, on her first slight
observation of his posture and appearance.

He stirred not, neither did he turn his eyes towards her; and a cold,
shuddering fear, indefinite in its source and object, began to creep
into her blood. She now perceived that her husband’s face was ghastly
pale, and his features were rigid, as if incapable of assuming any
other expression than the strong despair which had hardened upon them.
He gave not the slightest evidence that he was aware of her approach.

“For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me!” cried Dorcas; and the
strange sound of her own voice affrighted her even more than the dead
silence.

Her husband started, stared into her face, drew her to the front of the
rock, and pointed with his finger.

Oh, there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon the fallen forest
leaves! His cheek rested upon his arm—his curled locks were thrown back
from his brow—his limbs were slightly relaxed. Had a sudden weariness
overcome the youthful hunter? Would his mother’s voice arouse him? She
knew that it was death.

“This broad rock is the gravestone of your near kindred, Dorcas,” said
her husband. “Your tears will fall at once over your father and your
son.”

She heard him not. With one wild shriek, that seemed to force its way
from the sufferer’s inmost soul, she sank insensible by the side of her
dead boy. At that moment the withered topmost bough of the oak loosened
itself in the stilly air, and fell in soft, light fragments upon the
rock, upon the leaves, upon Reuben, upon his wife and child, and upon
Roger Malvin’s bones. Then Reuben’s heart was stricken, and the tears
gushed out like water from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth had
made the blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was expiated,—the
curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood dearer
to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven
from the lips of Reuben Bourne.




P.’S CORRESPONDENCE


My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first
paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible
to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a
delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the
imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that
he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less
distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of
illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based
upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not
a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of
correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend
from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after
literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to
achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object
while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have
stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.

LONDON, February 29, 1845.


MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind’s
strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me
whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all
the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in my
hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of
Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’s
metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,
whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,—with all this
positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you
think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,—would you believe it?—that
all this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little
chamber,—that whitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its
one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste
or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars,—that same
little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought
you to visit me! Will no length of time or breadth of space enfranchise
me from that unlovely abode? I travel; but it seems to be like the
snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose,
on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble
impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile
myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me
hop about a little with her chain around my leg.

My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me
to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until
now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse
as the wits of Queen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the
Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself was the letter to
Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had
anticipated, although, considering his former irregularities of life
and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not older than a man
on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual
immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat,—so fat as to give the
impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without
sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of
corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the
mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be
Byron, you murmur within yourself, “For Heaven’s sake, where is he?”
Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly
matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and
carnal vices which unspiritualize man’s nature and clog up his avenues
of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
and, besides, Lord Byron’s morals have been improving while his outward
man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he
were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet
it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.

On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on
the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up
its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed
in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot
was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether
Byron’s right or left foot was the deformed one.

The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
aware, of ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any
symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at
least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple, descending the
slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support which will
enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is
pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful
errors in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to
add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a
religious point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of
Methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being
perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble
consort, while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque
illumination demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is
bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and
this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul
fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the
metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords
or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous
and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit
similar sins in other people with the sincerest vengeance which his
somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on
the most intimate terms. You are aware that, some little time before
the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man
to be evicted from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart
that, it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness
which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in
a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and
expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of
paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may
have found it so.

I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words,
whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one
worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that
they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that
there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with
myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own
heart to the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have
resounded throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly
out. Byron,—I have the information from his own lips, so that you need
not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,—Byron is preparing a new
edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and
amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals,
politics, and religion. It so happened that the very passages of
highest inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions
having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has
deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote,
but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively
he no longer understands his own poetry.

This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious,
whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever
morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails
settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever
could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a
republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its
place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his lordship’s later style.
You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The
result is not so good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very
sad affair indeed; for, though the torches kindled in Tophet have been
extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by
no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that
this attempt on Lord Byron’s part to atone for his youthful errors will
at length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in
the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece,
were denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.

What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about
burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in
a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat
man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very
extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to the
immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted
into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty
years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of
shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to
attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of
it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more
substantial.

Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I
mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year—happens to be making a visit to
London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by
the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet
cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither
now by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival.
It will be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the
little spirit of life within the aged bard’s bosom may not be
extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already had the honor
of an introduction to him at the British Museum, where he was examining
a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with songs,
which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.

Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been
embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?

The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor
the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair
floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows
of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that
have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent
preservation, considering his time of life. He has that crickety sort
of liveliness,—I mean the cricket’s humor of chirping for any cause or
none,—which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme
old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we
perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was
surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and
brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving
only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing
upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos.
At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses,
so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the
scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of it did
partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes and
his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary in
Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to
meet her there.

Burns then began to repeat Tan O’Shanter; but was so tickled with its
wit and humor—of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary
sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded
by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a
close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a
satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant
poet’s life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having
been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as
attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now
considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I
suppose, is worth having lived so long for.

I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard
to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say,
remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless
paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of
which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day
and from year to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which
grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer’s
tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether
in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing,
although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in
his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating
tales to an amanuensis,—to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not
deemed worth any one’s trouble now to take down what flows from that
once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,—a striking
combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as
no other man alive could have bit off,—a glimmer from that ruined mind,
as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom
of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses
itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy
ground.

For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It
was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should
first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a
one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same
position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest
purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was
qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation
even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations from a young
man,—one Dickens,—who published a few magazine articles, very rich in
humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow
died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I
think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more than
it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.

Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day? You would not hit
it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all
that is now left of him,—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal
substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small
sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended
only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the
old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him except to
see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of
thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so much as turned
to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive
to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike
spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought
upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic
influence of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in
the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,—buried
beneath his own mortality,—and lacking even the qualities of sense that
enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of
the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long
endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,—for he is now
above seventy,—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has acted
shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena to England. They should
now restore him to Paris, and there let him once again review the
relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his nether lip hung
down upon his chin. While I was observing him there chanced to be a
little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
Hannibal,—the great captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke
and tracked it round with bloody footsteps,—was seized with a nervous
trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.

Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my
inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear
friend, pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those
two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea
of that odious wretch—you remember him well—who was pleased to take
such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I quitted New
England. Forthwith up rose before my mind’s eye that same little
whitewashed room, with the iron-grated window,—strange that it should
have been iron-grated!—where, in too easy compliance with the absurd
wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life.
Positively it seemed to me that I was still sitting there, and that the
keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of
intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just peeped in at the door. The
rascal! I owe him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.
Fie! fie! The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even
now that hateful chamber—the iron-grated window, which blasted the
blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it poison
to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my comfortable
apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that which I know to be
such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably
prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.

You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known
to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past
been reconciled to the Church of England. In his more recent works he
has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Christian faith,
with an especial view to that particular development. Latterly, as you
may not have heard, he has taken orders, and been inducted to a small
country living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily
for me, he has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of
a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of
Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first
introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the manner of
combining what I had to say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt
of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might
be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing
where he now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a
higher point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a
regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand upon any one of
the earlier poems and say, “This is my work,” with precisely the same
complacency of conscience wherewithal he contemplates the volume of
discourses above mentioned. They are like the successive steps of a
staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting upon
the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what
would have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his
staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the celestial
brightness.

How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly care,
so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a lower
region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their religious merits,
I consider the productions of his maturity superior, as poems, to those
of his youth. They are warmer with human love, which has served as an
interpreter between his mind and the multitude. The author has learned
to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby avoided the
faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont
to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete
arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they
were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley
can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate than his
friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when
he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,—sheer nonsense!
What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his
being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio,
and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and
frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of
marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet’s heart, and that
his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman
earth. If all this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I
have met the drowned and burned and buried man here in London only
yesterday?

Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on
terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in
contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream is the life of man!

Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be
issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop,
to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from his
lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation of
ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a week or
two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed
_The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his
_Laodamia_. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets
whom it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with
his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of
age, and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
intellect the Devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a
man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away our
speculative license of kicking him.

Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers
other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender
figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore,
or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old
cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the
verge of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the
dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere, in
short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted out by the
porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him
fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell
whether he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my
mind and clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile
me. At one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so
fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the
effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on
his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him
to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have
been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.

Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the world,
is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic
poem. Some passages of it have been communicated to the inner circle of
his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest strains that have been
audible on earth since Milton’s days. If I can obtain copies of these
specimens, I will ask you to present them to James Russell Lowell, who
seems to be one of the poet’s most fervent and worthiest worshippers.
The information took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats’s
poetic incense, without being embodied in human language, floated up to
heaven and mingled with the songs of the immortal choristers, who
perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought
their melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively
written a poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another
sense than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In
compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of
the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the eve of
its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection; Woman,
redeemed from the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts so powerful
and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for
herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children’s
happier state, has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty
as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over
dewy Eden. Nor then indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then
but a golden promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
mankind another peril,—a last encounter with the evil principle. Should
the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of
ages. If we triumph—But it demands a poet’s eye to contemplate the
splendor of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.

To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a
spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of
a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme.
Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends;
for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in
question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea
that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it
worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet.
The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best
child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is
because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
foreign to the purpose.

I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time
blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order
of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few
words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or
rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men whom
I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long
grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who
made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter,
clatter, when the sexton’s spade disturbs them. Were it only possible
to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely
to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me
in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men,
and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.
For instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
before me, in the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the bodily presence of the
elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or
other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His
powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the
ghost of the Danish king.

In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into my
brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she
took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother,
John Kemble, sat behind,—a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly
majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, Nature enables
him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his
genius. Charles Matthews was likewise there; but a paralytic affection
has distorted his once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable
one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into proper form
than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as
if, for the joke’s sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
contrive, and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so
hideous, an avenging Providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it
is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him to change
countenance, for his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and
night-time. Some other players of the past generation were present, but
none that greatly interested me. It behooves actors, more than all
other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best
but painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
anther’s thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to
fade and the voice to croak with age.

What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of
poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know
that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to
exhibit any of the characteristics of the author’s mind as displayed in
his prose works; although some of the poems have a richness that is not
merely of the surface, but glows still the brighter the deeper and more
faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
native manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from Africa. I
doubt whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to
the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly
our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to
untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned
my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else
he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last
sleep, with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured
marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer verses
in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis
as a man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker
youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and
who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I
remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who
scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of
Gottingen. Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly, in
1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going to give us sketches
of the world’s sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one or all
of them, have grown to be famous men.

And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I
was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit,
where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when
fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest
mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world’s hopes to scorn,
it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall never
make a truer one.

What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,—for there is no
need of generalizing the remark,—what an odd brain is mine! Would you
believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my
intellectual ear—some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat
as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such
verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable
destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit,
perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their
posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they
have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to
attend to; and besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in
some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of
pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be
glad of such a job.

Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still
scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and
proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever?
It is too bad. Let every man manufacture his own nonsense, say I.
Expect me home soon, and—to whisper you a secret—in company with the
poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and enjoy the shadow of
the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls
himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale,
and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through his
densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and
forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.

Your true friend, P.


P. S.—Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.

It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic
reputation on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century. And
does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas with
machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine, as being the
nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can boast? How can he expect
ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists
in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?




EARTH’S HOLOCAUST


Once upon a time—but whether in the time past or time to come is a
matter of little or no moment—this wide world had become so
overburdened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, that the
inhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire.
The site fixed upon at the representation of the insurance companies,
and as being as central a spot as any other on the globe, was one of
the broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation would be
endangered by the flames, and where a vast assemblage of spectators
might commodiously admire the show. Having a taste for sights of this
kind, and imagining, likewise, that the illumination of the bonfire
might reveal some profundity of moral truth heretofore hidden in mist
or darkness, I made it convenient to journey thither and be present. At
my arrival, although the heap of condemned rubbish was as yet
comparatively small, the torch had already been applied. Amid that
boundless plain, in the dusk of the evening, like a far off star alone
in the firmament, there was merely visible one tremulous gleam, whence
none could have anticipated so fierce a blaze as was destined to ensue.
With every moment, however, there came foot-travellers, women holding
up their aprons, men on horseback, wheelbarrows, lumbering
baggage-wagons, and other vehicles, great and small, and from far and
near, laden with articles that were judged fit for nothing but to be
burned.

“What materials have been used to kindle the flame?” inquired I of a
bystander; for I was desirous of knowing the whole process of the
affair from beginning to end.

The person whom I addressed was a grave man, fifty years old or
thereabout, who had evidently come thither as a looker-on. He struck me
immediately as having weighed for himself the true value of life and
its circumstances, and therefore as feeling little personal interest in
whatever judgment the world might form of them. Before answering my
question, he looked me in the face by the kindling light of the fire.

“O, some very dry combustibles,” replied he, “and extremely suitable to
the purpose,—no other, in fact, than yesterday’s newspapers, last
month’s magazines, and last year’s withered leaves. Here now comes some
antiquated trash that will take fire like a handful of shavings.”

As he spoke, some rough-looking men advanced to the verge of the
bonfire, and threw in, as it appeared, all the rubbish of the herald’s
office,—the blazonry of coat armor, the crests and devices of
illustrious families, pedigrees that extended back, like lines of
light, into the mist of the dark ages, together with stars, garters,
and embroidered collars, each of which, as paltry a bawble as it might
appear to the uninstructed eye, had once possessed vast significance,
and was still, in truth, reckoned among the most precious of moral or
material facts by the worshippers of the gorgeous past. Mingled with
this confused heap, which was tossed into the flames by armfuls at
once, were innumerable badges of knighthood, comprising those of all
the European sovereignties, and Napoleon’s decoration of the Legion of
Honor, the ribbons of which were entangled with those of the ancient
order of St. Louis. There, too, were the medals of our own Society of
Cincinnati, by means of which, as history tells us, an order of
hereditary knights came near being constituted out of the king quellers
of the Revolution. And besides, there were the patents of nobility of
German counts and barons, Spanish grandees, and English peers, from the
worm-eaten instruments signed by William the Conqueror down to the
bran-new parchment of the latest lord who has received his honors from
the fair hand of Victoria.

At sight of the dense volumes of smoke, mingled with vivid jets of
flame, that gushed and eddied forth from this immense pile of earthly
distinctions, the multitude of plebeian spectators set up a joyous
shout, and clapped their hands with an emphasis that made the welkin
echo. That was their moment of triumph, achieved, after long ages, over
creatures of the same clay and the same spiritual infirmities, who had
dared to assume the privileges due only to Heaven’s better workmanship.
But now there rushed towards the blazing heap a gray-haired man, of
stately presence, wearing a coat, from the breast of which a star, or
other badge of rank, seemed to have been forcibly wrenched away. He had
not the tokens of intellectual power in his face; but still there was
the demeanor, the habitual and almost native dignity, of one who had
been born to the idea of his own social superiority, and had never felt
it questioned till that moment.

“People,” cried he, gazing at the ruin of what was dearest to his eyes
with grief and wonder, but nevertheless with a degree of
stateliness,—“people, what have you done? This fire is consuming all
that marked your advance from barbarism, or that could have prevented
your relapse thither. We, the men of the privileged orders, were those
who kept alive from age to age the old chivalrous spirit; the gentle
and generous thought; the higher, the purer, the more refined and
delicate life. With the nobles, too, you cast off the poet, the
painter, the sculptor,—all the beautiful arts; for we were their
patrons, and created the atmosphere in which they flourish. In
abolishing the majestic distinctions of rank, society loses not only
its grace, but its steadfastness—”

More he would doubtless have spoken; but here there arose an outcry,
sportive, contemptuous, and indignant, that altogether drowned the
appeal of the fallen nobleman, insomuch that, casting one look of
despair at his own half-burned pedigree, he shrunk back into the crowd,
glad to shelter himself under his new-found insignificance.

“Let him thank his stars that we have not flung him into the same
fire!” shouted a rude figure, spurning the embers with his foot. “And
henceforth let no man dare to show a piece of musty parchment as his
warrant for lording it over his fellows. If he have strength of arm,
well and good; it is one species of superiority. If he have wit,
wisdom, courage, force of character, let these attributes do for him
what they may; but from this day forward no mortal must hope for place
and consideration by reckoning up the mouldy bones of his ancestors.
That nonsense is done away.”

“And in good time,” remarked the grave observer by my side, in a low
voice, however, “if no worse nonsense comes in its place; but, at all
events, this species of nonsense has fairly lived out its life.”

There was little space to muse or moralize over the embers of this
time-honored rubbish; for, before it was half burned out, there came
another multitude from beyond the sea, bearing the purple robes of
royalty, and the crowns, globes, and sceptres of emperors and kings.
All these had been condemned as useless bawbles, playthings at best,
fit only for the infancy of the world or rods to govern and chastise it
in its nonage, but with which universal manhood at its full-grown
stature could no longer brook to be insulted. Into such contempt had
these regal insignia now fallen that the gilded crown and tinselled
robes of the player king from Drury Lane Theatre had been thrown in
among the rest, doubtless as a mockery of his brother monarchs on the
great stage of the world. It was a strange sight to discern the crown
jewels of England glowing and flashing in the midst of the fire. Some
of them had been delivered down from the time of the Saxon princes;
others were purchased with vast revenues, or perchance ravished from
the dead brows of the native potentates of Hindustan; and the whole now
blazed with a dazzling lustre, as if a star had fallen in that spot and
been shattered into fragments. The splendor of the ruined monarchy had
no reflection save in those inestimable precious stones. But enough on
this subject. It were but tedious to describe how the Emperor of
Austria’s mantle was converted to tinder, and how the posts and pillars
of the French throne became a heap of coals, which it was impossible to
distinguish from those of any other wood. Let me add, however, that I
noticed one of the exiled Poles stirring up the bonfire with the Czar
of Russia’s sceptre, which he afterwards flung into the flames.

“The smell of singed garments is quite intolerable here,” observed my
new acquaintance, as the breeze enveloped us in the smoke of a royal
wardrobe. “Let us get to windward and see what they are doing on the
other side of the bonfire.”

We accordingly passed around, and were just in time to witness the
arrival of a vast procession of Washingtonians,—as the votaries of
temperance call themselves nowadays,—accompanied by thousands of the
Irish disciples of Father Mathew, with that great apostle at their
head. They brought a rich contribution to the bonfire, being nothing
less than all the hogsheads and barrels of liquor in the world, which
they rolled before them across the prairie.

“Now, my children,” cried Father Mathew, when they reached the verge of
the fire, “one shove more, and the work is done. And now let us stand
off and see Satan deal with his own liquor.”

Accordingly, having placed their wooden vessels within reach of the
flames, the procession stood off at a safe distance, and soon beheld
them burst into a blaze that reached the clouds and threatened to set
the sky itself on fire. And well it might; for here was the whole
world’s stock of spirituous liquors, which, instead of kindling a
frenzied light in the eyes of individual topers as of yore, soared
upwards with a bewildering gleam that startled all mankind. It was the
aggregate of that fierce fire which would otherwise have scorched the
hearts of millions. Meantime numberless bottles of precious wine were
flung into the blaze, which lapped up the contents as if it loved them,
and grew, like other drunkards, the merrier and fiercer for what it
quaffed. Never again will the insatiable thirst of the fire-fiend be so
pampered. Here were the treasures of famous bon vivants,—liquors that
had been tossed on ocean, and mellowed in the sun, and hoarded long in
the recesses of the earth,—the pale, the gold, the ruddy juice of
whatever vineyards were most delicate,—the entire vintage of Tokay,—all
mingling in one stream with the vile fluids of the common pot house,
and contributing to heighten the self-same blaze. And while it rose in
a gigantic spire that seemed to wave against the arch of the firmament
and combine itself with the light of stars, the multitude gave a shout
as if the broad earth were exulting in its deliverance from the curse
of ages.

But the joy was not universal. Many deemed that human life would be
gloomier than ever when that brief illumination should sink down. While
the reformers were at work I overheard muttered expostulations from
several respectable gentlemen with red noses and wearing gouty shoes;
and a ragged worthy, whose face looked like a hearth where the fire is
burned out, now expressed his discontent more openly and boldly.

“What is this world good for,” said the last toper, “now that we can
never be jolly any more? What is to comfort the poor man in sorrow and
perplexity? How is he to keep his heart warm against the cold winds of
this cheerless earth? And what do you propose to give him in exchange
for the solace that you take away? How are old friends to sit together
by the fireside without a cheerful glass between them? A plague upon
your reformation! It is a sad world, a cold world, a selfish world, a
low world, not worth an honest fellow’s living in, now that good
fellowship is gone forever!”

This harangue excited great mirth among the bystanders; but,
preposterous as was the sentiment, I could not help commiserating the
forlorn condition of the last toper, whose boon companions had dwindled
away from his side, leaving the poor fellow without a soul to
countenance him in sipping his liquor, nor indeed any liquor to sip.
Not that this was quite the true state of the case; for I had observed
him at a critical moment filch a bottle of fourth-proof brandy that
fell beside the bonfire and hide it in his pocket.

The spirituous and fermented liquors being thus disposed of, the zeal
of the reformers next induced them to replenish the fire with all the
boxes of tea and bags of coffee in the world. And now came the planters
of Virginia, bringing their crops of tobacco. These, being cast upon
the heap of inutility, aggregated it to the size of a mountain, and
incensed the atmosphere with such potent fragrance that methought we
should never draw pure breath again. The present sacrifice seemed to
startle the lovers of the weed more than any that they had hitherto
witnessed.

“Well, they’ve put my pipe out,” said an old gentleman, flinging it
into the flames in a pet. “What is this world coming to? Everything
rich and racy—all the spice of life—is to be condemned as useless. Now
that they have kindled the bonfire, if these nonsensical reformers
would fling themselves into it, all would be well enough!”

“Be patient,” responded a stanch conservative; “it will come to that in
the end. They will first fling us in, and finally themselves.”

From the general and systematic measures of reform I now turn to
consider the individual contributions to this memorable bonfire. In
many instances these were of a very amusing character. One poor fellow
threw in his empty purse, and another a bundle of counterfeit or
insolvable bank-notes. Fashionable ladies threw in their last season’s
bonnets, together with heaps of ribbons, yellow lace, and much other
half-worn milliner’s ware, all of which proved even more evanescent in
the fire than it had been in the fashion. A multitude of lovers of both
sexes—discarded maids or bachelors and couples mutually weary of one
another—tossed in bundles of perfumed letters and enamored sonnets. A
hack politician, being deprived of bread by the loss of office, threw
in his teeth, which happened to be false ones. The Rev. Sydney
Smith—having voyaged across the Atlantic for that sole purpose—came up
to the bonfire with a bitter grin and threw in certain repudiated
bonds, fortified though they were with the broad seal of a sovereign
state. A little boy of five years old, in the premature manliness of
the present epoch, threw in his playthings; a college graduate, his
diploma; an apothecary, ruined by the spread of homeopathy, his whole
stock of drugs and medicines; a physician, his library; a parson, his
old sermons; and a fine gentleman of the old school, his code of
manners, which he had formerly written down for the benefit of the next
generation. A widow, resolving on a second marriage, slyly threw in her
dead husband’s miniature. A young man, jilted by his mistress, would
willingly have flung his own desperate heart into the flames, but could
find no means to wrench it out of his bosom. An American author, whose
works were neglected by the public, threw his pen and paper into the
bonfire and betook himself to some less discouraging occupation. It
somewhat startled me to overhear a number of ladies, highly respectable
in appearance, proposing to fling their gowns and petticoats into the
flames, and assume the garb, together with the manners, duties,
offices, and responsibilities, of the opposite sex.

What favor was accorded to this scheme I am unable to say, my attention
being suddenly drawn to a poor, deceived, and half-delirious girl, who,
exclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead,
attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all that wrecked and
broken trumpery of the world. A good man, however, ran to her rescue.

“Patience, my poor girl!” said he, as he drew her back from the fierce
embrace of the destroying angel. “Be patient, and abide Heaven’s will.
So long as you possess a living soul, all may be restored to its first
freshness. These things of matter and creations of human fantasy are
fit for nothing but to be burned when once they have had their day; but
your day is eternity!”

“Yes,” said the wretched girl, whose frenzy seemed now to have sunk
down into deep despondency, “yes, and the sunshine is blotted out of
it!”

It was now rumored among the spectators that all the weapons and
munitions of war were to be thrown into the bonfire with the exception
of the world’s stock of gunpowder, which, as the safest mode of
disposing of it, had already been drowned in the sea. This intelligence
seemed to awaken great diversity of opinion. The hopeful philanthropist
esteemed it a token that the millennium was already come; while persons
of another stamp, in whose view mankind was a breed of bulldogs,
prophesied that all the old stoutness, fervor, nobleness, generosity,
and magnanimity of the race would disappear,—these qualities, as they
affirmed, requiring blood for their nourishment. They comforted
themselves, however, in the belief that the proposed abolition of war
was impracticable for any length of time together.

Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose thunder had long been
the voice of battle,—the artillery of the Armada, the battering trains
of Marlborough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon and Wellington,—were
trundled into the midst of the fire. By the continual addition of dry
combustibles, it had now waxed so intense that neither brass nor iron
could withstand it. It was wonderful to behold how these terrible
instruments of slaughter melted away like playthings of wax. Then the
armies of the earth wheeled around the mighty furnace, with their
military music playing triumphant marches,—and flung in their muskets
and swords. The standard-bearers, likewise, cast one look upward at
their banners, all tattered with shot-holes and inscribed with the
names of victorious fields; and, giving them a last flourish on the
breeze, they lowered them into the flame, which snatched them upward in
its rush towards the clouds. This ceremony being over, the world was
left without a single weapon in its hands, except possibly a few old
king’s arms and rusty swords and other trophies of the Revolution in
some of our State armories. And now the drums were beaten and the
trumpets brayed all together, as a prelude to the proclamation of
universal and eternal peace and the announcement that glory was no
longer to be won by blood, but that it would henceforth be the
contention of the human race to work out the greatest mutual good, and
that beneficence, in the future annals of the earth, would claim the
praise of valor. The blessed tidings were accordingly promulgated, and
caused infinite rejoicings among those who had stood aghast at the
horror and absurdity of war.

But I saw a grim smile pass over the seared visage of a stately old
commander,—by his war-worn figure and rich military dress, he might
have been one of Napoleon’s famous marshals,—who, with the rest of the
world’s soldiery, had just flung away the sword that had been familiar
to his right hand for half a century.

“Ay! ay!” grumbled he. “Let them proclaim what they please; but, in the
end, we shall find that all this foolery has only made more work for
the armorers and cannon-founders.”

“Why, sir,” exclaimed I, in astonishment, “do you imagine that the
human race will ever so far return on the steps of its past madness as
to weld another sword or cast another cannon?”

“There will be no need,” observed, with a sneer, one who neither felt
benevolence nor had faith in it. “When Cain wished to slay his brother,
he was at no loss for a weapon.”

“We shall see,” replied the veteran commander. “If I am mistaken, so
much the better; but in my opinion, without pretending to philosophize
about the matter, the necessity of war lies far deeper than these
honest gentlemen suppose. What! is there a field for all the petty
disputes of individuals? and shall there be no great law court for the
settlement of national difficulties? The battle-field is the only court
where such suits can be tried.”

“You forget, general,” rejoined I, “that, in this advanced stage of
civilization, Reason and Philanthropy combined will constitute just
such a tribunal as is requisite.”

“Ah, I had forgotten that, indeed!” said the old warrior, as he limped
away.

The fire was now to be replenished with materials that had hitherto
been considered of even greater importance to the well-being of society
than the warlike munitions which we had already seen consumed. A body
of reformers had travelled all over the earth in quest of the machinery
by which the different nations were accustomed to inflict the
punishment of death. A shudder passed through the multitude as these
ghastly emblems were dragged forward. Even the flames seemed at first
to shrink away, displaying the shape and murderous contrivance of each
in a full blaze of light, which of itself was sufficient to convince
mankind of the long and deadly error of human law. Those old implements
of cruelty; those horrible monsters of mechanism; those inventions
which it seemed to demand something worse than man’s natural heart to
contrive, and which had lurked in the dusky nooks of ancient prisons,
the subject of terror-stricken legend,—were now brought forth to view.
Headsmen’s axes, with the rust of noble and royal blood upon them, and
a vast collection of halters that had choked the breath of plebeian
victims, were thrown in together. A shout greeted the arrival of the
guillotine, which was thrust forward on the same wheels that had borne
it from one to another of the bloodstained streets of Paris. But the
loudest roar of applause went up, telling the distant sky of the
triumph of the earth’s redemption, when the gallows made its
appearance. An ill-looking fellow, however, rushed forward, and,
putting himself in the path of the reformers, bellowed hoarsely, and
fought with brute fury to stay their progress.

It was little matter of surprise, perhaps, that the executioner should
thus do his best to vindicate and uphold the machinery by which he
himself had his livelihood and worthier individuals their death; but it
deserved special note that men of a far different sphere—even of that
consecrated class in whose guardianship the world is apt to trust its
benevolence—were found to take the hangman’s view of the question.

“Stay, my brethren!” cried one of them. “You are misled by a false
philanthropy; you know not what you do. The gallows is a
Heaven-ordained instrument. Bear it back, then, reverently, and set it
up in its old place, else the world will fall to speedy ruin and
desolation!”

“Onward! onward!” shouted a leader in the reform. “Into the flames with
the accursed instrument of man’s bloody policy! How can human law
inculcate benevolence and love while it persists in setting up the
gallows as its chief symbol? One heave more, good friends, and the
world will be redeemed from its greatest error.”

A thousand hands, that nevertheless loathed the touch, now lent their
assistance, and thrust the ominous burden far, far into the centre of
the raging furnace. There its fatal and abhorred image was beheld,
first black, then a red coal, then ashes.

“That was well done!” exclaimed I.

“Yes, it was well done,” replied, but with less enthusiasm than I
expected, the thoughtful observer, who was still at my side,—“well
done, if the world be good enough for the measure. Death, however, is
an idea that cannot easily be dispensed with in any condition between
the primal innocence and that other purity and perfection which
perchance we are destined to attain after travelling round the full
circle; but, at all events, it is well that the experiment should now
be tried.”

“Too cold! too cold!” impatiently exclaimed the young and ardent leader
in this triumph. “Let the heart have its voice here as well as the
intellect. And as for ripeness, and as for progress, let mankind always
do the highest, kindest, noblest thing that, at any given period, it
has attained the perception of; and surely that thing cannot be wrong
nor wrongly timed.”

I know not whether it were the excitement of the scene, or whether the
good people around the bonfire were really growing more enlightened
every instant; but they now proceeded to measures in the full length of
which I was hardly prepared to keep them company. For instance, some
threw their marriage certificates into the flames, and declared
themselves candidates for a higher, holier, and more comprehensive
union than that which had subsisted from the birth of time under the
form of the connubial tie. Others hastened to the vaults of banks and
to the coffers of the rich—all of which were opened to the first comer
on this fated occasion—and brought entire bales of paper-money to
enliven the blaze, and tons of coin to be melted down by its intensity.
Henceforth, they said, universal benevolence, uncoined and exhaustless,
was to be the golden currency of the world. At this intelligence the
bankers and speculators in the stocks grew pale, and a pickpocket, who
had reaped a rich harvest among the crowd, fell down in a deadly
fainting fit. A few men of business burned their day-books and ledgers,
the notes and obligations of their creditors, and all other evidences
of debts due to themselves; while perhaps a somewhat larger number
satisfied their zeal for reform with the sacrifice of any uncomfortable
recollection of their own indebtment. There was then a cry that the
period was arrived when the title-deeds of landed property should be
given to the flames, and the whole soil of the earth revert to the
public, from whom it had been wrongfully abstracted and most unequally
distributed among individuals. Another party demanded that all written
constitutions, set forms of government, legislative acts,
statute-books, and everything else on which human invention had
endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws, should at once be destroyed,
leaving the consummated world as free as the man first created.

Whether any ultimate action was taken with regard to these propositions
is beyond my knowledge; for, just then, some matters were in progress
that concerned my sympathies more nearly.

“See! see! What heaps of books and pamphlets!” cried a fellow, who did
not seem to be a lover of literature. “Now we shall have a glorious
blaze!”

“That’s just the thing!” said a modern philosopher. “Now we shall get
rid of the weight of dead men’s thought, which has hitherto pressed so
heavily on the living intellect that it has been incompetent to any
effectual self-exertion. Well done, my lads! Into the fire with them!
Now you are enlightening the world indeed!”

“But what is to become of the trade?” cried a frantic bookseller.

“O, by all means, let them accompany their merchandise,” coolly
observed an author. “It will be a noble funeral-pile!”

The truth was, that the human race had now reached a stage of progress
so far beyond what the wisest and wittiest men of former ages had ever
dreamed of, that it would have been a manifest absurdity to allow the
earth to be any longer encumbered with their poor achievements in the
literary line. Accordingly a thorough and searching investigation had
swept the booksellers’ shops, hawkers’ stands, public and private
libraries, and even the little book-shelf by the country fireside, and
had brought the world’s entire mass of printed paper, bound or in
sheets, to swell the already mountain bulk of our illustrious bonfire.
Thick, heavy folios, containing the labors of lexicographers,
commentators, and encyclopedists, were flung in, and, falling among the
embers with a leaden thump, smouldered away to ashes like rotten wood.
The small, richly gilt French tomes of the last age, with the hundred
volumes of Voltaire among them, went off in a brilliant shower of
sparkles and little jets of flame; while the current literature of the
same nation burned red and blue, and threw an infernal light over the
visages of the spectators, converting them all to the aspect of
party-colored fiends. A collection of German stories emitted a scent of
brimstone. The English standard authors made excellent fuel, generally
exhibiting the properties of sound oak logs. Milton’s works, in
particular, sent up a powerful blaze, gradually reddening into a coal,
which promised to endure longer than almost any other material of the
pile. From Shakespeare there gushed a flame of such marvellous splendor
that men shaded their eyes as against the sun’s meridian glory; nor
even when the works of his own elucidators were flung upon him did he
cease to flash forth a dazzling radiance from beneath the ponderous
heap. It is my belief that he is still blazing as fervidly as ever.

“Could a poet but light a lamp at that glorious flame,” remarked I, “he
might then consume the midnight oil to some good purpose.”

“That is the very thing which modern poets have been too apt to do, or
at least to attempt,” answered a critic. “The chief benefit to be
expected from this conflagration of past literature undoubtedly is,
that writers will henceforth be compelled to light their lamps at the
sun or stars.”

“If they can reach so high,” said I; “but that task requires a giant,
who may afterwards distribute the light among inferior men. It is not
every one that can steal the fire from heaven like Prometheus; but,
when once he had done the deed, a thousand hearths were kindled by it.”

It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was the proportion between
the physical mass of any given author and the property of brilliant and
long-continued combustion. For instance, there was not a quarto volume
of the last century—nor, indeed, of the present—that could compete in
that particular with a child’s little gilt-covered book, containing
_Mother Goose’s Melodies_. _The Life and Death of Tom Thumb_ outlasted
the biography of Marlborough. An epic, indeed a dozen of them, was
converted to white ashes before the single sheet of an old ballad was
half consumed. In more than one case, too, when volumes of applauded
verse proved incapable of anything better than a stifling smoke, an
unregarded ditty of some nameless bard—perchance in the corner of a
newspaper—soared up among the stars with a flame as brilliant as their
own. Speaking of the properties of flame, methought Shelley’s poetry
emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day,
contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of
black vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron. As
for Tom Moore, some of his songs diffused an odor like a burning
pastil.

I felt particular interest in watching the combustion of American
authors, and scrupulously noted by my watch the precise number of
moments that changed most of them from shabbily printed books to
indistinguishable ashes. It would be invidious, however, if not
perilous, to betray these awful secrets; so that I shall content myself
with observing that it was not invariably the writer most frequent in
the public mouth that made the most splendid appearance in the bonfire.
I especially remember that a great deal of excellent inflammability was
exhibited in a thin volume of poems by Ellery Channing; although, to
speak the truth, there were certain portions that hissed and spluttered
in a very disagreeable fashion. A curious phenomenon occurred in
reference to several writers, native as well as foreign. Their books,
though of highly respectable figure, instead of bursting into a blaze
or even smouldering out their substance in smoke, suddenly melted away
in a manner that proved them to be ice.

If it be no lack of modesty to mention my own works, it must here be
confessed that I looked for them with fatherly interest, but in vain.
Too probably they were changed to vapor by the first action of the
heat; at best, I can only hope that, in their quiet way, they
contributed a glimmering spark or two to the splendor of the evening.

“Alas! and woe is me!” thus bemoaned himself a heavy-looking gentleman
in green spectacles. “The world is utterly ruined, and there is nothing
to live for any longer. The business of my life is snatched from me.
Not a volume to be had for love or money!”

“This,” remarked the sedate observer beside me, “is a bookworm,—one of
those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are
covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas;
and, in good earnest, now that the old stock is abolished, I do not see
what is to become of the poor fellow. Have you no word of comfort for
him?”

“My dear sir,” said I to the desperate bookworm, “is not nature better
than a book? Is not the human heart deeper than any system of
philosophy? Is not life replete with more instruction than past
observers have found it possible to write down in maxims? Be of good
cheer. The great book of Time is still spread wide open before us; and,
if we read it aright, it will be to us a volume of eternal truth.”

“O, my books, my books, my precious printed books!” reiterated the
forlorn bookworm. “My only reality was a bound volume; and now they
will not leave me even a shadowy pamphlet!”

In fact, the last remnant of the literature of all the ages was now
descending upon the blazing heap in the shape of a cloud of pamphlets
from the press of the New World. These likewise were consumed in the
twinkling of an eye, leaving the earth, for the first time since the
days of Cadmus, free from the plague of letters,—an enviable field for
the authors of the next generation.

“Well, and does anything remain to be done?” inquired I, somewhat
anxiously. “Unless we set fire to the earth itself, and then leap
boldly off into infinite space, I know not that we can carry reform to
any farther point.”

“You are vastly mistaken, my good friend,” said the observer. “Believe
me, the fire will not be allowed to settle down without the addition of
fuel that will startle many persons who have lent a willing hand thus
far.”

Nevertheless there appeared to be a relaxation of effort for a little
time, during which, probably, the leaders of the movement were
considering what should be done next. In the interval, a philosopher
threw his theory into the flames,—a sacrifice which, by those who knew
how to estimate it, was pronounced the most remarkable that had yet
been made. The combustion, however, was by no means brilliant. Some
indefatigable people, scorning to take a moment’s ease, now employed
themselves in collecting all the withered leaves and fallen boughs of
the forest, and thereby recruited the bonfire to a greater height than
ever. But this was mere by-play.

“Here comes the fresh fuel that I spoke of,” said my companion.

To my astonishment the persons who now advanced into the vacant space
around the mountain fire bore surplices and other priestly garments,
mitres, crosiers, and a confusion of Popish and Protestant emblems with
which it seemed their purpose to consummate the great act of faith.
Crosses from the spires of old cathedrals were cast upon the heap with
as little remorse as if the reverence of centuries passing in long
array beneath the lofty towers had not looked up to them as the holiest
of symbols. The font in which infants were consecrated to God, the
sacramental vessels whence piety received the hallowed draught, were
given to the same destruction. Perhaps it most nearly touched my heart
to see among these devoted relics fragments of the humble
communion-tables and undecorated pulpits which I recognized as having
been torn from the meeting-houses of New England. Those simple edifices
might have been permitted to retain all of sacred embellishment that
their Puritan founders had bestowed, even though the mighty structure
of St. Peter’s had sent its spoils to the fire of this terrible
sacrifice. Yet I felt that these were but the externals of religion,
and might most safely be relinquished by spirits that best knew their
deep significance.

“All is well,” said I, cheerfully. “The wood-paths shall be the aisles
of our cathedral, the firmament itself shall be its ceiling. What needs
an earthly roof between the Deity and his worshippers? Our faith can
well afford to lose all the drapery that even the holiest men have
thrown around it, and be only the more sublime in its simplicity.”

“True,” said my companion; “but will they pause here?”

The doubt implied in his question was well founded. In the general
destruction of books already described, a holy volume, that stood apart
from the catalogue of human literature, and yet, in one sense, was at
its head, had been spared. But the Titan of innovation,—angel or fiend,
double in his nature, and capable of deeds befitting both
characters,—at first shaking down only the old and rotten shapes of
things, had now, as it appeared, laid his terrible hand upon the main
pillars which supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual
state. The inhabitants of the earth had grown too enlightened to define
their faith within a form of words, or to limit the spiritual by any
analogy to our material existence. Truths which the heavens trembled at
were now but a fable of the world’s infancy. Therefore, as the final
sacrifice of human error, what else remained to be thrown upon the
embers of that awful pile, except the book which, though a celestial
revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere as
regarded the present race of man? It was done! Upon the blazing heap of
falsehood and worn-out truth—things that the earth had never needed, or
had ceased to need, or had grown childishly weary of—fell the ponderous
church Bible, the great old volume that had lain so long on the cushion
of the pulpit, and whence the pastor’s solemn voice had given holy
utterance on so many a Sabbath day. There, likewise, fell the family
Bible, which the long-buried patriarch had read to his children,—in
prosperity or sorrow, by the fireside and in the summer shade of
trees,—and had bequeathed downward as the heirloom of generations.
There fell the bosom Bible, the little volume that had been the soul’s
friend of some sorely tried child of dust, who thence took courage,
whether his trial were for life or death, steadfastly confronting both
in the strong assurance of immortality.

All these were flung into the fierce and riotous blaze; and then a
mighty wind came roaring across the plain with a desolate howl, as if
it were the angry lamentation of the earth for the loss of heaven’s
sunshine; and it shook the gigantic pyramid of flame and scattered the
cinders of half-consumed abominations around upon the spectators.

“This is terrible!” said I, feeling that my check grew pale, and seeing
a like change in the visages about me.

“Be of good courage yet,” answered the man with whom I had so often
spoken. He continued to gaze steadily at the spectacle with a singular
calmness, as if it concerned him merely as an observer. “Be of good
courage, nor yet exult too much; for there is far less both of good and
evil in the effect of this bonfire than the world might be willing to
believe.”

“How can that be?” exclaimed I, impatiently. “Has it not consumed
everything? Has it not swallowed up or melted down every human or
divine appendage of our mortal state that had substance enough to be
acted on by fire? Will there be anything left us to-morrow morning
better or worse than a heap of embers and ashes?”

“Assuredly there will,” said my grave friend. “Come hither to-morrow
morning, or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite
burned out, and you will find among the ashes everything really
valuable that you have seen cast into the flames. Trust me, the world
of to-morrow will again enrich itself with the gold and diamonds which
have been cast off by the world of today. Not a truth is destroyed nor
buried so deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last.”

This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined to credit it, the
more especially as I beheld among the wallowing flames a copy of the
Holy Scriptures, the pages of which, instead of being blackened into
tinder, only assumed a more dazzling whiteness as the fingermarks of
human imperfection were purified away. Certain marginal notes and
commentaries, it is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test,
but without detriment to the smallest syllable that had flamed from the
pen of inspiration.

“Yes; there is the proof of what you say,” answered I, turning to the
observer; “but if only what is evil can feel the action of the fire,
then, surely, the conflagration has been of inestimable utility. Yet,
if I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether the world’s
expectation of benefit would be realized by it.”

“Listen to the talk of these worthies,” said he, pointing to a group in
front of the blazing pile; “possibly they may teach you something
useful, without intending it.”

The persons whom he indicated consisted of that brutal and most earthy
figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of the gallows,—the
hangman, in short,—together with the last thief and the last murderer,
all three of whom were clustered about the last toper. The latter was
liberally passing the brandy bottle, which he had rescued from the
general destruction of wines and spirits. This little convivial party
seemed at the lowest pitch of despondency, as considering that the
purified world must needs be utterly unlike the sphere that they had
hitherto known, and therefore but a strange and desolate abode for
gentlemen of their kidney.

“The best counsel for all of us is,” remarked the hangman, “that, as
soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor, I help you, my three
friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang
myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer.”

“Poh, poh, my good fellows!” said a dark-complexioned personage, who
now joined the group,—his complexion was indeed fearfully dark, and his
eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; “be not so
cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There is one
thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and
without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all;
yes, though they had burned the earth itself to a cinder.”

“And what may that be?” eagerly demanded the last murderer.

“What but the human heart itself?” said the dark-visaged stranger, with
a portentous grin. “And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying
that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong
and misery—the same old shapes or worse ones—which they have taken such
a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this
livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. O, take
my word for it, it will be the old world yet!”

This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened
thought. How sad a truth, if true it were, that man’s age-long endeavor
for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of the evil
principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of
the matter! The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless
sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery
of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and
the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem
almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of
their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and
strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what
is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial
that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully
described, were what we choose to call a real event and a flame that
would scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a parable of
my own brain.




PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK


AT HOME

From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made
me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes,
using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between
myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been
very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men
and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father’s
pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a
wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of
them, have run the course which this volume will describe. Yet there is
room for doubt whether I should have been any better contented with
such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,—at least, till
after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
trial.

My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones,
would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such
pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the
whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in
imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and
belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable
adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering his
sermons could have supported the good parson’s health under the mental
toil which they cost him in composition.

Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a
warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose,
to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a good and
wise man after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself,
it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any
mode of education with which it was possible for him to be acquainted
have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier fortune
than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it
was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for
parents have an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
children, and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and
affection of his parents which he cannot transfer to any delegate of
their duties, however conscientious. An orphan’s fate is hard, be he
rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old
gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding
out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!

I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in contact with the
stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen;
they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what
they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man
who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be
satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent in
its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that
violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as
if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,—with the
drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence
of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.

I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which
I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been
suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant
than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering
orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one
illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere,—of Goldsmith, who
planned and performed his travels through France and Italy on a less
promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various
qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking.
Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up
an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I
must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives
were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than
seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit
upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I
had written romances instead of reciting them.

The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had
collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed,
the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence
was its own reward, though the hope of praise also became a powerful
incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought as I
did then, let me beseech the reader to believe that my tales were not
always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be
given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus
my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames perhaps more valuable than
the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the
villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book
for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by,
though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller.

A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.

I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise. The day
promised to be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay along
the earth and settled in minute globules on the folds of my clothes, so
that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost. The sky was
quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible till they grew out
of the fog as I came close upon them. There is a hill towards the west
whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level course through the
village and ascending an eminence on the other side, behind which it
disappears. The whole view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I
paused; and, while gazing through the misty veil, it partially rose and
swept away with so sudden an effect that a gray cloud seemed to have
taken the aspect of a small white town. A thin vapor being still
diffused through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog,
whether hung in air or based on earth, appeared not less substantial
than the edifices, and gave their own indistinctness to the whole. It
was singular that such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.

Half of the parson’s dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of it
was a cloud; but Squire Moody’s mansion, the grandest in the village,
was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony under the
front window; while in another place only two red chimneys were seen
above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence, then
tenanted by strangers. I could not remember those with whom I had dwelt
there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank was in the
clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of buildings
had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods store of Mr.
Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike’s tobacco
manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian
chief in front. The white spire of the meeting-house ascended out of
the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy base were its only
support: or, to give a truer interpretation, the steeple was the emblem
of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet pointing to a cloudless
atmosphere, and catching the brightness of the east on its gilded vane.

As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy intervals
and a border of trees between the wheeltrack and the sidewalks, all so
indistinct, and not to be traced without an effort, the whole seemed
more like memory than reality. I would have imagined that years had
already passed, and I was far away, contemplating that dim picture of
my native place, which I should retain in my mind through the mist of
time. No tears fell from my eyes among the dewdrops of the morning; nor
does it occur to me that I heaved a sigh. In truth, I had never felt
such a delicious excitement nor known what freedom was till that moment
when I gave up my home and took the whole world in exchange, fluttering
the wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to
another through the universe. I waved my hand towards the dusky
village, bade it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path
but that which might lead me back. Never was Childe Harold’s sentiment
adopted in a spirit more unlike his own.

Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote. Recollecting how the knight
and Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road to Toboso,
I began, between jest and earnest, to feel a similar anxiety. It was
gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon than the braying of the
dappled ass or the neigh of Rosinante. The sun, then just above the
horizon, shone faintly through the fog, and formed a species of rainbow
in the west, bestriding my intended road like a gigantic portal. I had
never known before that a bow could be generated between the sunshine
and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but
was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar
rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to
which all omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway
of futurity.

I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred miles
of home, and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The first
precaution was reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson Thumpcushion
might have put an untimely catastrophe to my story; but as nobody would
be much affected by my disgrace, and all was to be suffered in my own
person, I know not why I cared about a name. For a week or two I
travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any guidance except the
whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or the green bough that
beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed its withered finger
onward. All my care was to be farther from home each night than the
preceding morning.

A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.

One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether of
tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree. The first which offered itself
was a wood,—not a forest, but a trim plantation of young oaks, growing
just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out, while they admitted
a few straggling beams, and thus produced the most cheerful gloom
imaginable. A brook, so small and clear, and apparently so cool, that I
wanted to drink it up, ran under the road through a little arch of
stone without once meeting the sun in its passage from the shade on one
side to the shade on the other. As there was a stepping-place over the
stone wall and a path along the rivulet, I followed it and discovered
its source,—a spring gushing out of an old barrel.

In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch of a
tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on the
grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me. He was a slender
figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the finest nor
very fashionably cut. On hearing my footsteps he started up rather
nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young man about my
own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been reading till my
intrusion. His book was evidently a pocket Bible. Though I piqued
myself at that period on my great penetration into people’s characters
and pursuits, I could not decide whether this young man in black were
an unfledged divine from Andover, a college student, or preparing for
college at some academy. In either case I would quite as willingly have
found a merrier companion; such, for instance, as the comedian with
whom Gil Blas shared his dinner beside a fountain in Spain.

After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves,
filled and emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit the
stranger’s classical associations, that this beautiful fountain ought
to flow from an urn instead of an old barrel. He did not show that he
understood the allusion, and replied very briefly, with a shyness that
was quite out of place between persons who met in such circumstances.
Had he treated my next observation in the same way, we should have
parted without another word.

“It is very singular,” said I,—“though doubtless there are good reasons
for it,—that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and lavish it
everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat. Why should
not we find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a barrel of good
liquor at the foot of it?”

“There is a loaf of bread on the tree,” replied the stranger, without
even smiling—at a coincidence which made me laugh. “I have something to
eat in my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with me, you shall be
welcome.”

“I accept your offer with pleasure,” said I. “A pilgrim such as I am
must not refuse a providential meal.”

The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the tree,
but now turned round and regarded me with great earnestness, coloring
deeply at the same time. However, he said nothing, and produced part of
a loaf of bread and some cheese, the former being evidently home baked,
though some days out of the oven. The fare was good enough, with a real
welcome, such as his appeared to be. After spreading these articles on
the stump of a tree, he proceeded to ask a blessing on our food, an
unexpected ceremony, and quite an impressive one at our woodland table,
with the fountain gushing beside us and the bright sky glimmering
through the boughs; nor did his brief petition affect me less because
his embarrassment made his voice tremble. At the end of the meal he
returned thanks with the same tremulous fervor.

He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my necessities,
and showed it by becoming less reserved. On my part, I professed never
to have relished a dinner better; and, in requital of the stranger’s
hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company to supper.

“Where? At your home?” asked he.

“Yes,” said I, smiling.

“Perhaps our roads are not the same,” observed he.

“O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way,” answered I.
“This morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home to-night; and
a moment ago I dined at home. To be sure, there was a certain place
which I called home; but I have resolved not to see it again till I
have been quite round the globe and enter the street on the east as I
left it on the west. In the mean time, I have a home everywhere, or
nowhere, just as you please to take it.”

“Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home,” said the
young man, with solemnity. “We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but it
is strange that we two should meet.”

I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no satisfactory
reply. But we had eaten salt together, and it was right that we should
form acquaintance after that ceremony as the Arabs of the desert do,
especially as he had learned something about myself, and the courtesy
of the country entitled me to as much information in return. I asked
whither he was travelling.

“I do not know,” said he; “but God knows.”

“That is strange!” exclaimed I; “not that God should know it, but that
you should not. And how is your road to be pointed out?”

“Perhaps by an inward conviction,” he replied, looking sideways at me
to discover whether I smiled; “perhaps by an outward sign.”

“Then, believe me,” said I, “the outward sign is already granted you,
and the inward conviction ought to follow. We are told of pious men in
old times who committed themselves to the care of Providence, and saw
the manifestation of its will in the slightest circumstances, as in the
shooting of a star, the flight of a bird, or the course taken by some
brute animal. Sometimes even a stupid ass was their guide. May I not be
as good a one?”

“I do not know,” said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.

We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I
partly apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit of
a stray patient. Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my sanity
as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since I was fully
aware of my own extravagances, while he acted as wildly, and deemed it
heavenly wisdom. We were a singular couple, strikingly contrasted, yet
curiously assimilated, each of us remarkable enough by himself, and
doubly so in the other’s company. Without any formal compact, we kept
together day after day till our union appeared permanent. Even had I
seen nothing to love and admire in him, I could never have thought of
deserting one who needed me continually; for I never knew a person; not
even a woman, so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was,—so
painfully shy, so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so often
depressed by a weight within himself.

I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before the
public. A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of relinquishing
the immunities of a private character, and giving every man, and for
money too, the right which no man yet possessed, of treating me with
open scorn. But about a week after contracting the above alliance I
made my bow to an audience of nine persons, seven of whom hissed me in
a very disagreeable manner, and not without good cause. Indeed, the
failure was so signal that it would have been mere swindling to retain
the money, which had been paid on my implied contract to give its value
of amusement. So I called in the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole
receipts, a mighty sum and was gratified with a round of applause by
way of offset to the hisses. This event would have looked most horrible
in anticipation,—a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or
hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning blush;
but the reality was not so very hard to bear. It is a fact that I was
more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to
my companion on the same evening. In my own behalf I was angry and
excited, not depressed; my blood ran quick, my spirits rose buoyantly,
and I had never felt such a confidence of future success and
determination to achieve it as at that trying moment. I resolved to
persevere, if it were only to wring the reluctant praise from my
enemies.

Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle trade;
now I recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole powers
cultivated to the utmost, and exerted with the same prodigality as if I
were speaking for a great party or for the nation at large on the floor
of the Capitol. No talent or attainment could come amiss; everything,
indeed, was requisite,—wide observation, varied knowledge, deep
thoughts, and sparkling ones; pathos and levity, and a mixture of both,
like sunshine in a raindrop; lofty imagination, veiling itself in the
garb of common life; and the practised art which alone could render
these gifts, and more than these, available. Not that I ever hoped to
be thus qualified. But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,
I did my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of every defect;
and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next
attempt. It is one of my few sources of pride, that, ridiculous as the
object was, I followed it up with the firmness and energy of a man.

I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and
kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of
the moment; though I cannot remember ever to have told a tale which did
not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and acquire a novelty
of aspect as often as I repeated it. Oddly enough, my success was
generally in proportion to the difference between the conception and
accomplishment. I provided two or more commencements and catastrophes
to many of the tales,—a happy expedient, suggested by the double sets
of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the suits in Sir Piercy
Shafton’s wardrobe. But my best efforts had a unity, a wholeness, and a
separate character that did not admit of this sort of mechanism.

THE VILLAGE THEATRE

About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived at
a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return from a
summer’s campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a series of
dramatic exhibitions. A moderately sized hall of the tavern had been
converted into a theatre. The performances that evening were, The Heir
at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the recitation of Alexander’s
Feast between the play and farce. The house was thin and dull. But the
next day there appeared to be brighter prospects, the playbills
announcing at every corner, on the town-pump, and—awful sacrilege!—on
the very door of the meeting-house, an Unprecedented Attraction! After
setting forth the ordinary entertainments of a theatre, the public were
informed, in the hugest type that the printing-office could supply,
that the manager had been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement
with the celebrated Story-Teller. He would make his first appearance
that evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s
Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
audiences in all the principal cities. This outrageous flourish of
trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the tale, it could hardly
have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an unfilled
plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether Mr.
Higginbotham should live or die.

In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice, in
tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.

In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion. My
spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had already
learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success. Passing a
small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning dimly and a
few people were entering the door, I went in with them, and saw my
friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected about fifteen hearers,
mostly females. Just as I entered he was beginning to pray in accents
so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of his
efforts both with God and man. There was room for distrust in regard to
the latter. At the conclusion of the prayer several of the little
audience went out, leaving him to begin his discourse under such
discouraging circumstances, added to his natural and agonizing
diffidence. Knowing that my presence on these occasions increased his
embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a dusky place near the door,
and now stole softly out.

On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
much the better chance for the Story-Teller. The bar was thronged with
customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in the
hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of
impatient thunder,—all symptoms of all overflowing house and an eager
audience. I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood at the side
scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex. If a gentleman,
how could he have performed the singing girl the night before in No
Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why did she enact Young Norval, and now
wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little
Pickle? In either case the dress was pretty and the wearer bewitching;
so that, at the proper moment, I stepped forward with a gay heart and a
hold one; while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded at many
a country ball, and the curtain, as it rose, discovered something like
a country bar-room. Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a
tale.

The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there, it
might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted
me. The good people of the town, knowing that the world contained
innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them, took it for
granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome was but a feeble
echo of those which had thundered around me in lofty theatres. Such an
enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each person seemed a Briarcus
clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping his feet and several cudgels
in play with stamping and thumping on the floor; while the ladies
flourished their white cambric handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow
and red bandanna, like the flags of different nations. After such a
salutation, the celebrated Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce
so humble an affair as Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.

This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to my
shame, did I spare. I never knew the “magic of a name” till I used that
of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated it, there were louder bursts
of merriment than those which responded to what, in my opinion, were
more legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the piece was
incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which Little
Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had fastened
to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the queerest
gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The audience,
supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this long tail
behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a tumult of
approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches broke beneath
them and left one whole row of my admirers on the floor. Even in that
predicament they continued their applause. In after times, when I had
grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example how much of
fame is humbug; how much the meed of what our better nature blushes at;
how much an accident; how much bestowed on mistaken principles; and how
small and poor the remnant. From pit and boxes there was now a
universal call for the Story-Teller.

That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I left
the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given me a
letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to my
assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no other
than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it, affected me
most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian
standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the
players,—the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy
girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than modest,—pointing to these with
solemn ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type
of the austere duty, and they of the vanities of life.

I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
theatre. Another train of thought came over me. The stern old man
appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
authority with love as a father might, and even bending his venerable
head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his own mistaken
discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then held the letter in
the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in
my mind, and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a style of
paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation which I could not have
resisted had I but risked the trial. The thought still haunts me that
then I made my irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.

Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed me
to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in spite of
a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the liberal
offers of the manager. As we walked onward, following the same road, on
two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with
tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my life.




SKETCHES FROM MEMORY


THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

It was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise from
Bartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extends
between mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often as
level as a church-aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we had
been loitering towards the heart of the White Mountains,—those old
crystal hills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our distant
wanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after height had
risen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang below
the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, those
avalanches of earth, stones, and trees, which descend into the hollows,
leaving vestiges of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation
of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side, and a
group of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco,
right towards the centre of that group, as if to climb above the clouds
in its passage to the farther region.

In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
Northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart
through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrous
path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was
travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he
passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across
his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it
asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of
hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain’s
inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side.
This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted
to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of
those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not
to the conception, of Omnipotence.


We had now reached a narrow passage, which showed almost the appearance
of having been cut by human strength and artifice in the solid rock.
There was a wall of granite on each side, high and precipitous,
especially on our right, and so smooth that a few evergreens could
hardly find foothold enough to grow there. This is the entrance, or, in
the direction we were going, the extremity, of the romantic defile of
the Notch. Before emerging from it, the rattling of wheels approached
behind us, and a stage-coach rumbled out of the mountain, with seats on
top and trunks behind, and a smart driver, in a drab great-coat,
touching the wheel-horses with the whip-stock and reigning in the
leaders. To my mind there was a sort of poetry in such an incident,
hardly inferior to what would have accompanied the painted array of an
Indian war-party gliding forth from the same wild chasm. All the
passengers, except a very fat lady on the back seat, had alighted. One
was a mineralogist, a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black,
bearing a heavy hammer, with which he did great damage to the
precipices, and put the fragments in his pocket. Another was a
well-dressed young man, who carried an operaglass set in gold, and
seemed to be making a quotation from some of Byron’s rhapsodies on
mountain scenery. There was also a trader, returning from Portland to
the upper part of Vermont; and a fair young girl, with a very faint
bloom like one of those pale and delicate flowers which sometimes occur
among alpine cliffs.

They disappeared, and we followed them, passing through a deep pine
forest, which for some miles allowed us to see nothing but its own
dismal shade. Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,
surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out the sunshine
long before it left the external world. It was here that we obtained
our first view, except at a distance, of the principal group of
mountains. They are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a
proper mood, yet, by their breadth of base and the long ridges which
support them, give the idea of immense bulk rather than of towering
height. Mount Washington, indeed, looked near to Heaven: he was white
with snow a mile downward, and had caught the only cloud that was
sailing through the atmosphere to veil his head. Let us forget the
other names of American statesmen that have been stamped upon these
hills, but still call the loftiest WASHINGTON. Mountains are Earth’s
undecaying monuments. They must stand while she endures, and never
should be consecrated to the mere great men of their own age and
country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is universal, and
whom all time will render illustrious.

The air, not often sultry in this elevated region, nearly two thousand
feet above the sea, was now sharp and cold, like that of a clear
November evening in the lowlands. By morning, probably, there would be
a frost, if not a snowfall, on the grass and rye, and an icy surface
over the standing water. I was glad to perceive a prospect of
comfortable quarters in a house which we were approaching, and of
pleasant company in the guests who were assembled at the door.

OUR EVENING PARTY AMONG THE MOUNTAINS

WE stood in front of a good substantial farm-house, of old date in that
wild country. A sign over the door denoted it to be the White Mountain
Post-Office,—an establishment which distributes letters and newspapers
to perhaps a score of persons, comprising the population of two or
three townships among the hills. The broad and weighty antlers of a
deer, “a stag of ten,” were fastened at the corner of the house; a
fox’s bushy tail was nailed beneath them; and a huge black paw lay on
the ground, newly severed and still bleeding, the trophy of a
bear-hunt. Among several persons collected about the doorsteps, the
most remarkable was a sturdy mountaineer, of six feet two, and
corresponding bulk, with a heavy set of features, such as might be
moulded on his own blacksmith’s anvil, but yet indicative of mother wit
and rough humor. As we appeared, he uplifted a tin trumpet, four or
five feet long, and blew a tremendous blast, either in honor of our
arrival or to awaken an echo from the opposite hill.

Ethan Crawford’s guests were of such a motley description as to form
quite a picturesque group, seldom seen together except at some place
like this, at once the pleasure-house of fashionable tourists and the
homely inn of country travellers. Among the company at the door were
the mineralogist and the owner of the gold operaglass whom we had
encountered in the Notch; two Georgian gentlemen, who had chilled their
Southern blood that morning on the top of Mount Washington; a physician
and his wife from Conway; a trader of Burlington and an old squire of
the Green Mountains; and two young married couples, all the way from
Massachusetts, on the matrimonial jaunt. Besides these strangers, the
rugged county of Coos, in which we were, was represented by half a
dozen wood-cutters, who had slain a bear in the forest and smitten off
his paw.

I had joined the party, and had a moment’s leisure to examine them
before the echo of Ethan’s blast returned from the hill. Not one, but
many echoes had caught up the harsh and tuneless sound, untwisted its
complicated threads, and found a thousand aerial harmonies in one stern
trumpet-tone. It was a distinct yet distant and dream-like symphony of
melodious instruments, as if an airy band had been hidden on the
hillside and made faint music at the summons. No subsequent trial
produced so clear, delicate, and spiritual a concert as the first. A
field-piece was then discharged from the top of a neighboring hill, and
gave birth to one long reverberation, which ran round the circle of
mountains in an unbroken chain of sound and rolled away without a
separate echo. After these experiments, the cold atmosphere drove us
all into the house, with the keenest appetites for supper.

It did one’s heart good to see the great fires that were kindled in the
parlor and bar-room, especially the latter, where the fireplace was
built of rough stone, and might have contained the trunk of an old tree
for a backlog.

A man keeps a comfortable hearth when his own forest is at his very
door. In the parlor, when the evening was fairly set in, we held our
hands before our eyes to shield them from the ruddy glow, and began a
pleasant variety of conversation. The mineralogist and the physician
talked about the invigorating qualities of the mountain air, and its
excellent effect on Ethan Crawford’s father, an old man of
seventy-five, with the unbroken frame of middle life. The two brides
and the doctor’s wife held a whispered discussion, which, by their
frequent titterings and a blush or two, seemed to have reference to the
trials or enjoyments of the matrimonial state. The bridegrooms sat
together in a corner, rigidly silent, like Quakers whom the spirit
moveth not, being still in the odd predicament of bashfulness towards
their own young wives. The Green Mountain squire chose me for his
companion, and described the difficulties he had met with half a
century ago in travelling from the Connecticut River through the Notch
to Conway, now a single day’s journey, though it had cost him eighteen.
The Georgians held the album between them, and favored us with the few
specimens of its contents, which they considered ridiculous enough to
be worth hearing. One extract met with deserved applause. It was a
“Sonnet to the Snow on Mount Washington,” and had been contributed that
very afternoon, bearing a signature of great distinction in magazines
and annuals. The lines were elegant and full of fancy, but too remote
from familiar sentiment, and cold as their subject, resembling those
curious specimens of crystallized vapor which I observed next day on
the mountain-top. The poet was understood to be the young gentleman of
the gold opera-glass, who heard our laudatory remarks with the
composure of a veteran.

Such was our party, and such their ways of amusement. But on a winter
evening another set of guests assembled at the hearth where these
summer travellers were now sitting. I once had it in contemplation to
spend a month hereabouts, in sleighing-time, for the sake of studying
the yeomen of New England, who then elbow each other through the Notch
by hundreds, on their way to Portland. There could be no better school
for such a purpose than Ethan Crawford’s inn. Let the student go
thither in December, sit down with the teamsters at their meals, share
their evening merriment, and repose with them at night when every bed
has its three occupants, and parlor, bar-room, and kitchen are strewn
with slumberers around the fire. Then let him rise before daylight,
button his great-coat, muffle up his ears, and stride with the
departing caravan a mile or two, to see how sturdily they make head
against the blast. A treasure of characteristic traits will repay all
inconveniences, even should a frozen nose be of the number.

The conversation of our party soon became more animated and sincere,
and we recounted some traditions of the Indians, who believed that the
father and mother of their race were saved from a deluge by ascending
the peak of Mount Washington. The children of that pair have been
overwhelmed, and found no such refuge. In the mythology of the savage,
these mountains were afterwards considered sacred and inaccessible,
full of unearthly wonders, illuminated at lofty heights by the blaze of
precious stones, and inhabited by deities, who sometimes shrouded
themselves in the snow-storm and came down on the lower world. There
are few legends more poetical than that of the “Great Carbuncle” of the
White Mountains. The belief was communicated to the English settlers,
and is hardly yet extinct, that a gem, of such immense size as to be
seen shining miles away, hangs from a rock over a clear, deep lake,
high up among the hills. They who had once beheld its splendor were
enthralled with an unutterable yearning to possess it. But a spirit
guarded that inestimable jewel, and bewildered the adventurer with a
dark mist from the enchanted lake. Thus life was worn away in the vain
search for an unearthly treasure, till at length the deluded one went
up the mountain, still sanguine as in youth, but returned no more. On
this theme methinks I could frame a tale with a deep moral.

The hearts of the palefaces would not thrill to these superstitions of
the red men, though we spoke of them in the centre of their haunted
region. The habits and sentiments of that departed people were too
distinct from those of their successors to find much real sympathy. It
has often been a matter of regret to me that I was shut out from the
most peculiar field of American fiction by an inability to see any
romance, or poetry, or grandeur, or beauty in the Indian character, at
least till such traits were pointed out by others. I do abhor an Indian
story. Yet no writer can be more secure of a permanent place in our
literature than the biographer of the Indian chiefs. His subject, as
referring to tribes which have mostly vanished from the earth, gives
him a right to be placed on a classic shelf, apart from the merits
which will sustain him there.

I made inquiries whether, in his researches about these parts, our
mineralogist had found the three “Silver Hills” which an Indian sachem
sold to an Englishman nearly two hundred years ago, and the treasure of
which the posterity of the purchaser have been looking for ever since.
But the man of science had ransacked every hill along the Saco, and
knew nothing of these prodigious piles of wealth. By this time, as
usual with men on the eve of great adventure, we had prolonged our
session deep into the night, considering how early we were to set out
on our six miles’ ride to the foot of Mount Washington. There was now a
general breaking up. I scrutinized the faces of the two bridegrooms,
and saw but little probability of their leaving the bosom of earthly
bliss, in the first week of the honeymoon and at the frosty hour of
three, to climb above the clouds; nor, when I felt how sharp the wind
was as it rushed through a broken pane and eddied between the chinks of
my unplastered chamber, did I anticipate much alacrity on my own part,
though we were to seek for the “Great Carbuncle.”

THE CANAL-BOAT

I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal. In my imagination
De Witt Clinton was an enchanter, who had waved his magic wand from the
Hudson to Lake Erie and united them by a watery highway, crowded with
the commerce of two worlds, till then inaccessible to each other. This
simple and mighty conception had conferred inestimable value on spots
which Nature seemed to have thrown carelessly into the great body of
the earth, without foreseeing that they could ever attain importance. I
pictured the surprise of the sleepy Dutchmen when the new river first
glittered by their doors, bringing them hard cash or foreign
commodities in exchange for their hitherto unmarketable produce. Surely
the water of this canal must be the most fertilizing of all fluids; for
it causes towns, with their masses of brick and stone, their churches
and theatres, their business and hubbub, their luxury and refinement,
their gay dames and polished citizens, to spring up, till in time the
wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings,
through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany. I embarked about
thirty miles below Utica, determining to voyage along the whole extent
of the canal at least twice in the course of the summer.

Behold us, then, fairly afloat, with three horses harnessed to our
vessel, like the steeds of Neptune to a huge scallop-shell in
mythological pictures. Bound to a distant port, we had neither chart
nor compass, nor cared about the wind, nor felt the heaving of a
billow, nor dreaded shipwreck, however fierce the tempest, in our
adventurous navigation of an interminable mudpuddle; for a mudpuddle it
seemed, and as dark and turbid as if every kennel in the land paid
contribution to it. With an imperceptible current, it holds its drowsy
way through all the dismal swamps and unimpressive scenery that could
be found between the great lakes and the sea-coast. Yet there is
variety enough, both on the surface of the canal and along its banks,
to amuse the traveller, if an overpowering tedium did not deaden his
perceptions.

Sometimes we met a black and rusty-looking vessel, laden with lumber,
salt from Syracuse, or Genesee flour, and shaped at both ends like a
square-toed boot, as if it had two sterns, and were fated always to
advance backward. On its deck would be a square hut, and a woman seen
through the window at her household work, with a little tribe of
children who perhaps had been born in this strange dwelling and knew no
other home. Thus, while the husband smoked his pipe at the helm and the
eldest son rode one of the horses, on went the family, travelling
hundreds of miles in their own house and carrying their fireside with
them. The most frequent species of craft were the “line-boats,” which
had a cabin at each end, and a great bulk of barrels, bales, and boxes
in the midst, or light packets like our own decked all over with a row
of curtained windows from stem to stern, and a drowsy face at every
one. Once we encountered a boat of rude construction, painted all in
gloomy black, and manned by three Indians, who gazed at us in silence
and with a singular fixedness of eye. Perhaps these three alone, among
the ancient possessors of the land, had attempted to derive benefit
from the white mail’s mighty projects and float along the current of
his enterprise. Not long after, in the midst of a swamp and beneath a
clouded sky, we overtook a vessel that seemed full of mirth and
sunshine. It contained a little colony of Swiss on their way to
Michigan, clad in garments of strange fashion and gay colors, scarlet,
yellow, and bright blue, singing, laughing, and making merry in odd
tones and a babble of outlandish words. One pretty damsel, with a
beautiful pair of naked white arms, addressed a mirthful remark to me.
She spoke in her native tongue, and I retorted in good English, both of
us laughing heartily at each other’s unintelligible wit. I cannot
describe how pleasantly this incident affected me. These honest Swiss
were all itinerant community of jest and fun journeying through a
gloomy land and among a dull race of money-getting drudges, meeting
none to understand their mirth, and only one to sympathize with it, yet
still retaining the happy lightness of their own spirit.

Had I been on my feet at the time instead of sailing slowly along in a
dirty canal-boat, I should often have paused to contemplate the
diversified panorama along the banks of the canal. Sometimes the scene
was a forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away occasionally
and receding from a lonely tract, covered with dismal black stumps,
where, on the verge of the canal, might be seen a log-cottage and a
sallow-faced woman at the window. Lean and aguish, she looked like
poverty personified, half clothed, half fed, and dwelling in a desert,
while a tide of wealth was sweeping by her door. Two or three miles
farther would bring us to a lock, where the slight impediment to
navigation had created a little mart of trade. Here would be found
commodities of all sorts, enumerated in yellow letters on the
window-shutters of a small grocery-store, the owner of which had set
his soul to the gathering of coppers and small change, buying and
selling through the week, and counting his gains on the blessed
Sabbath. The next scene might be the dwelling-houses and stores of a
thriving village, built of wood or small gray stones, a church-spire
rising in the midst, and generally two taverns, bearing over their
piazzas the pompous titles of “hotel,” “exchange,” “tontine,” or
“coffee-house.” Passing on, we glide now into the unquiet heart of an
inland city,—of Utica, for instance,—and find ourselves amid piles of
brick, crowded docks and quays, rich warehouses, and a busy population.
We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the place, like a stream and
eddy whirling us along with it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes
the canal, flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched bridges
of hewn stone. Onward, also, go we, till the hum and bustle of
struggling enterprise die away behind us and we are threading an avenue
of the ancient woods again.

This sounds not amiss in description, but was so tiresome in reality
that we were driven to the most childish expedients for amusement. An
English traveller paraded the deck, with a rifle in his walking-stick,
and waged war on squirrels and woodpeckers, sometimes sending an
unsuccessful bullet among flocks of tame ducks and geese which abound
in the dirty water of the canal. I, also, pelted these foolish birds
with apples, and smiled at the ridiculous earnestness of their
scrambles for the prize while the apple bobbed about like a thing of
life. Several little accidents afforded us good-natured diversion. At
the moment of changing horses the tow-rope caught a Massachusetts
farmer by the leg and threw him down in a very indescribable posture,
leaving a purple mark around his sturdy limb. A new passenger fell flat
on his back in attempting to step on deck as the boat emerged from
under a bridge. Another, in his Sunday clothes, as good luck would have
it, being told to leap aboard from the bank, forthwith plunged up to
his third waistcoat-button in the canal, and was fished out in a very
pitiable plight, not at all amended by our three rounds of applause.
Anon a Virginia schoolmaster, too intent on a pocket Virgil to heed the
helmsman’s warning, “Bridge! bridge!” was saluted by the said bridge on
his knowledge-box. I had prostrated myself like a pagan before his
idol, but heard the dull, leaden sound of the contact, and fully
expected to see the treasures of the poor man’s cranium scattered about
the deck. However, as there was no harm done, except a large bump on
the head, and probably a corresponding dent in the bridge, the rest of
us exchanged glances and laughed quietly. O, bow pitiless are idle
people!


The table being now lengthened through the cabin and spread for supper,
the next twenty minutes were the pleasantest I had spent on the canal,
the same space at dinner excepted. At the close of the meal it had
become dusky enough for lamplight. The rain pattered unceasingly on the
deck, and sometimes came with a sullen rush against the windows, driven
by the wind as it stirred through an opening of the forest. The
intolerable dulness of the scene engendered an evil spirit in me.
Perceiving that the Englishman was taking notes in a memorandum-book,
with occasional glances round the cabin, I presumed that we were all to
figure in a future volume of travels, and amused my ill-humor by
falling into the probable vein of his remarks. He would hold up an
imaginary mirror, wherein our reflected faces would appear ugly and
ridiculous, yet still retain all undeniable likeness to the originals.
Then, with more sweeping malice, he would make these caricatures the
representatives of great classes of my countrymen.

He glanced at the Virginia schoolmaster, a Yankee by birth, who, to
recreate himself, was examining a freshman from Schenectady College in
the conjugation of a Greek verb. Him the Englishman would portray as
the scholar of America, and compare his erudition to a school-boy’s
Latin theme made up of scraps ill-selected and worse put together. Next
the tourist looked at the Massachusetts farmer, who was delivering a
dogmatic harangue on the iniquity of Sunday mails. Here was the
far-famed yeoman of New England; his religion, writes the Englishman,
is gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and
illiberality at all times; his boasted information is merely an
abstract and compound of newspaper paragraphs, Congress debates, caucus
harangues, and the argument and judge’s charge in his own lawsuits. The
book-monger cast his eye at a Detroit merchant, and began scribbling
faster than ever. In this sharp-eyed man, this lean man, of wrinkled
brow, we see daring enterprise and close-fisted avarice combined. Here
is the worshipper of Mammon at noonday; here is the three times
bankrupt, richer after every ruin; here, in one word, (O wicked
Englishman to say it!) here is the American. He lifted his eyeglass to
inspect a Western lady, who at once became aware of the glance,
reddened, and retired deeper into the female part of the cabin. Here
was the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of
America,—shrinking when no evil is intended, and sensitive like
diseased flesh, that thrills if you but point at it; and strangely
modest, without confidence in the modesty of other people; and
admirably pure, with such a quick apprehension of all impurity.

In this manner I went all through the cabin, hitting everybody as hard
a lash as I could, and laying the whole blame on the infernal
Englishman. At length I caught the eyes of my own image in the
looking-glass, where a number of the party were likewise reflected, and
among them the Englishman, who at that moment was intently observing
myself.


The crimson curtain being let down between the ladies and gentlemen,
the cabin became a bedchamber for twenty persons, who were laid on
shelves one above another. For a long time our various incommodities
kept us all awake except five or six, who were accustomed to sleep
nightly amid the uproar of their own snoring, and had little to dread
from any other species of disturbance. It is a curious fact that these
snorers had been the most quiet people in the boat while awake, and
became peace-breakers only when others cease to be so, breathing tumult
out of their repose. Would it were possible to affix a wind-instrument
to the nose, and thus make melody of a snore, so that a sleeping lover
might serenade his mistress or a congregation snore a psalm-tune!
Other, though fainter, sounds than these contributed to my
restlessness. My head was close to the crimson curtain,—the sexual
division of the boat,—behind which I continually heard whispers and
stealthy footsteps; the noise of a comb laid on the table or a slipper
dropped on the floor; the twang, like a broken harp-string, caused by
loosening a tight belt; the rustling of a gown in its descent; and the
unlacing of a pair of stays. My ear seemed to have the properties of an
eye; a visible image pestered my fancy in the darkness; the curtain was
withdrawn between me and the Western lady, who yet disrobed herself
without a blush.

Finally all was hushed in that quarter. Still I was more broad awake
than through the whole preceding day, and felt a feverish impulse to
toss my limbs miles apart and appease the unquietness of mind by that
of matter. Forgetting that my berth was hardly so wide as a coffin, I
turned suddenly over and fell like an avalanche on the floor, to the
disturbance of the whole community of sleepers. As there were no bones
broken, I blessed the accident and went on deck. A lantern was burning
at each end of the boat, and one of the crew was stationed at the bows,
keeping watch, as mariners do on the ocean. Though the rain had ceased,
the sky was all one cloud, and the darkness so intense that there
seemed to be no world except the little space on which our lanterns
glimmered. Yet it was an impressive scene.

We were traversing the “long level,” a dead flat between Utica and
Syracuse, where the canal has not rise or fall enough to require a lock
for nearly seventy miles. There can hardly be a more dismal tract of
country. The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white-cedar,
black-ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now
decayed and death-struck by the partial draining of the swamp into the
great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected
from pools of stagnant water which stretched far in among the trunks of
the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage. But generally the tall
stems and intermingled branches were naked, and brought into strong
relief amid the surrounding gloom by the whiteness of their decay.
Often we beheld the prostrate form of some old sylvan giant which had
fallen and crushed down smaller trees under its immense ruin. In spots
where destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a
hundred trunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground,
resting on their shattered limbs or tossing them desperately into the
darkness, but all of one ashy white, all naked together, in desolate
confusion. Thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing
as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it,
the scene was ghostlike,—the very land of unsubstantial things, whither
dreams might betake themselves when they quit the slumberer’s brain.

My fancy found another emblem. The wild nature of America had been
driven to this desert-place by the encroachments of civilized man. And
even here, where the savage queen was throned on the ruins of her
empire, did we penetrate, a vulgar and worldly throng, intruding on her
latest solitude. In other lands decay sits among fallen palaces; but
here her home is in the forests.

Looking ahead, I discerned a distant light, announcing the approach of
another boat, which soon passed us, and proved to be a rusty old
scow,—just such a craft as the “Flying Dutchman” would navigate on the
canal. Perhaps it was that celebrated personage himself whom I
imperfectly distinguished at the helm in a glazed cap and rough
great-coat, with a pipe in his mouth, leaving the fumes of tobacco a
hundred yards behind. Shortly after our boatman blew a horn, sending a
long and melancholy note through the forest avenue, as a signal for
some watcher in the wilderness to be ready with a change of horses. We
had proceeded a mile or two with our fresh team when the tow-rope got
entangled in a fallen branch on the edge of the canal, and caused a
momentary delay, during which I went to examine the phosphoric light of
an old tree a little within the forest. It was not the first delusive
radiance that I had followed.

The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly converted into a mass of
diseased splendor, which threw a ghastliness around. Being full of
conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light,
illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the
dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its brilliancy
to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike torches were
just fit to light up this dead forest or to blaze coldly in tombs,
when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I
recollected myself, and discovered the lanterns glimmering far away.

“Boat ahoy!” shouted I, making a trumpet of my closed fists.

Though the cry must have rung for miles along that hollow passage of
the woods, it produced no effect. These packet-boats make up for their
snail-like pace by never loitering day nor night, especially for those
who have paid their fare. Indeed, the captain had an interest in
getting rid of me; for I was his creditor for a breakfast.

“They are gone, Heaven be praised!” ejaculated I; “for I cannot
possibly overtake them. Here am I, on the ‘long level,’ at midnight,
with the comfortable prospect of a walk to Syracuse, where my baggage
will be left. And now to find a house or shed wherein to pass the
night.” So thinking aloud, I took a flambeau from the old tree,
burning, but consuming not, to light my steps withal, and, like a
jack-o’-the-lantern, set out on my midnight tour.




THE OLD APPLE DEALER


The lover of the moral picturesque may sometimes find what he, seeks in
a character which is nevertheless of too negative a description to be
seized upon and represented to the imaginative vision by word-painting.
As an instance, I remember an old man who carries on a little trade of
gingerbread and apples at the depot of one of our railroads. While
awaiting the departure of the cars, my observation, flitting to and fro
among the livelier characteristics of the scene, has often settled
insensibly upon this almost hueless object. Thus, unconsciously to
myself and unsuspected by him, I have studied the old apple-dealer
until he has become a naturalized citizen of my inner world. How little
would he imagine—poor, neglected, friendless, unappreciated, and with
little that demands appreciation—that the mental eye of an utter
stranger has so often reverted to his figure! Many a noble form, many a
beautiful face, has flitted before me and vanished like a shadow. It is
a strange witchcraft whereby this faded and featureless old
apple-dealer has gained a settlement in my memory.

He is a small man, with gray hair and gray stubble beard, and is
invariably clad in a shabby surtout of snuff-color, closely buttoned,
and half concealing a pair of gray pantaloons; the whole dress, though
clean and entire, being evidently flimsy with much wear. His face,
thin, withered, furrowed, and with features which even age has failed
to render impressive, has a frost-bitten aspect. It is a moral frost
which no physical warmth or comfortableness could counteract. The
summer sunshine may fling its white heat upon him or the good fire of
the depot room may slake him the focus of its blaze on a winter’s day;
but all in vain; for still the old roan looks as if he were in a frosty
atmosphere, with scarcely warmth enough to keep life in the region
about his heart. It is a patient, long-suffering, quiet, hopeless,
shivering aspect. He is not desperate,—that, though its etymology
implies no more, would be too positive an expression,—but merely devoid
of hope. As all his past life, probably, offers no spots of brightness
to his memory, so he takes his present poverty and discomfort as
entirely a matter of course! he thinks it the definition of existence,
so far as himself is concerned, to be poor, cold, and uncomfortable. It
may be added, that time has not thrown dignity as a mantle over the old
man’s figure: there is nothing venerable about him: you pity him
without a scruple.

He sits on a bench in the depot room; and before him, on the floor, are
deposited two baskets of a capacity to contain his whole stock in
trade. Across from one basket to the other extends a board, on which is
displayed a plate of cakes and gingerbread, some russet and red-cheeked
apples, and a box containing variegated sticks of candy, together with
that delectable condiment known by children as Gibraltar rock, neatly
done up in white paper. There is likewise a half-peck measure of
cracked walnuts and two or three tin half-pints or gills filled with
the nut-kernels, ready for purchasers.

Such are the small commodities with which our old friend comes daily
before the world, ministering to its petty needs and little freaks of
appetite, and seeking thence the solid subsistence—so far as he may
subsist of his life.

A slight observer would speak of the old man’s quietude; but, on closer
scrutiny, you discover that there is a continual unrest within him,
which somewhat resembles the fluttering action of the nerves in a
corpse from which life has recently departed. Though he never exhibits
any violent action, and, indeed, might appear to be sitting quite
still, yet you perceive, when his minuter peculiarities begin to be
detected, that he is always making some little movement or other. He
looks anxiously at his plate of cakes or pyramid of apples and slightly
alters their arrangement, with an evident idea that a great deal
depends on their being disposed exactly thus and so. Then for a moment
he gazes out of the window; then he shivers quietly and folds his arms
across his breast, as if to draw himself closer within himself, and
thus keep a flicker of warmth in his lonesome heart. Now he turns again
to his merchandise of cakes, apples, and candy, and discovers that this
cake or that apple, or yonder stick of red and white candy, has somehow
got out of its proper position. And is there not a walnut-kernel too
many or too few in one of those small tin measures? Again the whole
arrangement appears to be settled to his mind; but, in the course of a
minute or two, there will assuredly be something to set right. At
times, by an indescribable shadow upon his features, too quiet,
however, to be noticed until you are familiar with his ordinary aspect,
the expression of frostbitten, patient despondency becomes very
touching. It seems as if just at that instant the suspicion occurred to
him that, in his chill decline of life, earning scanty bread by selling
cakes, apples, and candy, he is a very miserable old fellow.

But, if he thinks so, it is a mistake. He can never suffer the extreme
of misery, because the tone of his whole being is too much subdued for
him to feel anything acutely.

Occasionally one of the passengers, to while away a tedious interval,
approaches the old man, inspects the articles upon his board, and even
peeps curiously into the two baskets. Another, striding to and fro
along the room, throws a look at the apples and gingerbread at every
turn. A third, it may be of a more sensitive and delicate texture of
being, glances shyly thitherward, cautious not to excite expectations
of a purchaser while yet undetermined whether to buy. But there appears
to be no need of such a scrupulous regard to our old friend’s feelings.
True, he is conscious of the remote possibility to sell a cake or an
apple; but innumerable disappointments have rendered him so far a
philosopher, that, even if the purchased article should be returned, he
will consider it altogether in the ordinary train of events. He speaks
to none, and makes no sign of offering his wares to the public: not
that he is deterred by pride, but by the certain conviction that such
demonstrations would not increase his custom. Besides, this activity in
business would require an energy that never could have been a
characteristic of his almost passive disposition even in youth.
Whenever an actual customer customer appears the old man looks up with
a patient eye: if the price and the article are approved, he is ready
to make change; otherwise his eyelids droop again sadly enough, but
with no heavier despondency than before. He shivers, perhaps folds his
lean arms around his lean body, and resumes the life-long, frozen
patience in which consists his strength.

Once in a while a school-boy comes hastily up, places cent or two upon
the board, and takes up a cake, or stick of candy, or a measure of
walnuts, or an apple as red-checked as himself. There are no words as
to price, that being as well known to the buyer as to the seller. The
old apple-dealer never speaks an unnecessary word not that he is sullen
and morose; but there is none of the cheeriness and briskness in him
that stirs up people to talk.

Not seldom he is greeted by some old neighbor, a man well to do in the
world, who makes a civil, patronizing observation about the weather;
and then, by way of performing a charitable deed, begins to chaffer for
an apple. Our friend presumes not on any past acquaintance; he makes
the briefest possible response to all general remarks, and shrinks
quietly into himself again. After every diminution of his stock he
takes care to produce from the basket another cake, another stick of
candy, another apple, or another measure of walnuts, to supply the
place of the article sold. Two or three attempts—or, perchance, half a
dozen—are requisite before the board can be rearranged to his
satisfaction. If he have received a silver coin, he waits till the
purchaser is out of sight, then examines it closely, and tries to bend
it with his finger and thumb: finally he puts it into his
waistcoat-pocket with seemingly a gentle sigh. This sigh, so faint as
to be hardly perceptible, and not expressive of any definite emotion,
is the accompaniment and conclusion of all his actions. It is the
symbol of the chillness and torpid melancholy of his old age, which
only make themselves felt sensibly when his repose is slightly
disturbed.

Our man of gingerbread and apples is not a specimen of the “needy man
who has seen better days.” Doubtless there have been better and
brighter days in the far-off time of his youth; but none with so much
sunshine of prosperity in them that the chill, the depression, the
narrowness of means, in his declining years, can have come upon him by
surprise. His life has all been of a piece. His subdued and nerveless
boyhood prefigured his abortive prime, which likewise contained within
itself the prophecy and image of his lean and torpid age. He was
perhaps a mechanic, who never came to be a master in his craft, or a
petty tradesman, rubbing onward between passably to do and poverty.
Possibly he may look back to some brilliant epoch of his career when
there were a hundred or two of dollars to his credit in the Savings
Bank. Such must have been the extent of his better fortune,—his little
measure of this world’s triumphs,—all that he has known of success. A
meek, downcast, humble, uncomplaining creature, he probably has never
felt himself entitled to more than so much of the gifts of Providence.
Is it not still something that he has never held out his hand for
charity, nor has yet been driven to that sad home and household of
Earth’s forlorn and broken-spirited children, the almshouse? He
cherishes no quarrel, therefore, with his destiny, nor with the Author
of it. All is as it should be.

If, indeed, he have been bereaved of a son, a bold, energetic, vigorous
young man, on whom the father’s feeble nature leaned as on a staff of
strength, in that case he may have felt a bitterness that could not
otherwise have been generated in his heart. But methinks the joy of
possessing such a son and the agony of losing him would have developed
the old man’s moral and intellectual nature to a much greater degree
than we now find it. Intense grief appears to be as much out of keeping
with his life as fervid happiness.

To confess the truth, it is not the easiest matter in the world to
define and individualize a character like this which we are now
handling. The portrait must be so generally negative that the most
delicate pencil is likely to spoil it by introducing some too positive
tint. Every touch must be kept down, or else you destroy the subdued
tone which is absolutely essential to the whole effect. Perhaps more
may be done by contrast than by direct description. For this purpose I
make use of another cake and candy merchant, who, likewise infests the
railroad depot. This latter worthy is a very smart and well-dressed boy
of ten years old or thereabouts, who skips briskly hither and thither,
addressing the passengers in a pert voice, yet with somewhat of good
breeding in his tone and pronunciation. Now he has caught my eye, and
skips across the room with a pretty pertness, which I should like to
correct with a box on the ear. “Any cake, sir? any candy?”

No, none for me, my lad. I did but glance at your brisk figure in order
to catch a reflected light and throw it upon your old rival yonder.

Again, in order to invest my conception of the old man with a more
decided sense of reality, I look at him in the very moment of intensest
bustle, on the arrival of the cars. The shriek of the engine as it
rushes into the car-house is the utterance of the steam fiend, whom man
has subdued by magic spells and compels to serve as a beast of burden.
He has skimmed rivers in his headlong rush, dashed through forests,
plunged into the hearts of mountains, and glanced from the city to the
desert-place, and again to a far-off city, with a meteoric progress,
seen and out of sight, while his reverberating roar still fills the
ear. The travellers swarm forth from the cars. All are full of the
momentum which they have caught from their mode of conveyance. It seems
as if the whole world, both morally and physically, were detached from
its old standfasts and set in rapid motion. And, in the midst of this
terrible activity, there sits the old man of gingerbread, so subdued,
so hopeless, so without a stake in life, and yet not positively
miserable,—there he sits, the forlorn old creature, one chill and
sombre day after another, gathering scanty coppers for his cakes,
apples, and candy,—there sits the old apple-dealer, in his threadbare
suit of snuff-color and gray and his grizzly stubble heard. See! he
folds his lean arms around his lean figure with that quiet sigh and
that scarcely perceptible shiver which are the tokens of his inward
state. I have him now. He and the steam fiend are each other’s
antipodes; the latter is the type of all that go ahead, and the old man
the representative of that melancholy class who by some sad witchcraft
are doomed never to share in the world’s exulting progress. Thus the
contrast between mankind and this desolate brother becomes picturesque,
and even sublime.

And now farewell, old friend! Little do you suspect that a student of
human life has made your character the theme of more than one solitary
and thoughtful hour. Many would say that you have hardly individuality
enough to be the object of your own self-love. How, then, can a
stranger’s eye detect anything in your mind and heart to study and to
wonder at? Yet, could I read but a tithe of what is written there, it
would be a volume of deeper and more comprehensive import than all that
the wisest mortals have given to the world; for the soundless depths of
the human soul and of eternity have an opening through your breast. God
be praised, were it only for your sake, that the present shapes of
human existence are not cast in iron nor hewn in everlasting adamant,
but moulded of the vapors that vanish away while the essence flits
upward to the infinite. There is a spiritual essence in this gray and
lean old shape that shall flit upward too. Yes; doubtless there is a
region where the life-long shiver will pass away from his being, and
that quiet sigh, which it has taken him so many years to breathe, will
be brought to a close for good and all.




THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL


An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along
the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the
light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It
was a projecting window; and on the inside were suspended a variety of
watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their
faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform
the wayfarers what o’clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to
the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece
of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade
lamp, appeared a young man.

“What can Owen Warland be about?” muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself
a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man
whose occupation he was now wondering at. “What can the fellow be
about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without
seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond
his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion; and yet I know
enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy
with is no part of the machinery of a watch.”

“Perhaps, father,” said Annie, without showing much interest in the
question, “Owen is inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has
ingenuity enough.”

“Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better
than a Dutch toy,” answered her father, who had formerly been put to
much vexation by Owen Warland’s irregular genius. “A plague on such
ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the
accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun
out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said
before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child’s toy!”

“Hush, father! He hears you!” whispered Annie, pressing the old man’s
arm. “His ears are as delicate as his feelings; and you know how easily
disturbed they are. Do let us move on.”

So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further
conversation, until in a by-street of the town they found themselves
passing the open door of a blacksmith’s shop. Within was seen the
forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof, and now
confining its lustre to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor,
according as the breath of the bellows was puffed forth or again
inhaled into its vast leathern lungs. In the intervals of brightness it
was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the shop and the
horseshoes that hung upon the wall; in the momentary gloom the fire
seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space.
Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the
blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of
light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night,
as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon
he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil,
uplifted his arm of might, and was soon enveloped in the myriads of
sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding
gloom.

“Now, that is a pleasant sight,” said the old watchmaker. “I know what
it is to work in gold; but give me the worker in iron after all is said
and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you, daughter
Annie?”

“Pray don’t speak so loud, father,” whispered Annie, “Robert Danforth
will hear you.”

“And what if he should hear me?” said Peter Hovenden. “I say again, it
is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and
reality, and to earn one’s bread with the bare and brawny arm of a
blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a
wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my
case, and finds himself at middle age, or a little after, past labor at
his own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his
ease. So I say once again, give me main strength for my money. And
then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a
blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?”

“Well said, uncle Hovenden!” shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in
a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. “And what says
Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler
business to tinker up a lady’s watch than to forge a horseshoe or make
a gridiron.”

Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.

But we must return to Owen Warland’s shop, and spend more meditation
upon his history and character than either Peter Hovenden, or probably
his daughter Annie, or Owen’s old school-fellow, Robert Danforth, would
have thought due to so slight a subject. From the time that his little
fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate
ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally
figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden
mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of grace, and
never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the crowd of
school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn
or watermills across the neighboring brook. Those who discovered such
peculiarity in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe him
closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to
imitate the beautiful movements of Nature as exemplified in the flight
of birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new
development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a
poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined
from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the
fine arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular
processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a
steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of
mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick,
as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him. This
horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron
laborer; for the character of Owen’s mind was microscopic, and tended
naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame and
the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that
his sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness.
The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly
developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation
as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow.
But, at all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and
accomplishments made the world even more incapable than it might
otherwise have been of appreciating Owen Warland’s genius. The boy’s
relatives saw nothing better to be done—as perhaps there was not—than
to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange
ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes.

Peter Hovenden’s opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed.
He could make nothing of the lad. Owen’s apprehension of the
professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick; but he
altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker’s
business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had
been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his
old master’s care, Owen’s lack of sturdiness made it possible, by
strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative
eccentricity within bounds; but when his apprenticeship was served out,
and he had taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden’s failing
eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how
unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along his
daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a
musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the
harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting
moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. If a
family clock was intrusted to him for repair,—one of those tall,
ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature by
measuring out the lifetime of many generations,—he would take upon
himself to arrange a dance or funeral procession of figures across its
venerable face, representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours.
Several freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young watchmaker’s
credit with that steady and matter-of-fact class of people who hold the
opinion that time is not to be trifled with, whether considered as the
medium of advancement and prosperity in this world or preparation for
the next. His custom rapidly diminished—a misfortune, however, that was
probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen Warland, who was
becoming more and more absorbed in a secret occupation which drew all
his science and manual dexterity into itself, and likewise gave full
employment to the characteristic tendencies of his genius. This pursuit
had already consumed many months.

After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed at him out
of the obscurity of the street, Owen Warland was seized with a
fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand tremble too violently to
proceed with such delicate labor as he was now engaged upon.

“It was Annie herself!” murmured he. “I should have known it, by this
throbbing of my heart, before I heard her father’s voice. Ah, how it
throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work again on this exquisite
mechanism to-night. Annie! dearest Annie! thou shouldst give firmness
to my heart and hand, and not shake them thus; for if I strive to put
the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy
sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted,
there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will leave me
spiritless to-morrow.”

As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, the shop
door opened and gave admittance to no other than the stalwart figure
which Peter Hovenden had paused to admire, as seen amid the light and
shadow of the blacksmith’s shop. Robert Danforth had brought a little
anvil of his own manufacture, and peculiarly constructed, which the
young artist had recently bespoken. Owen examined the article and
pronounced it fashioned according to his wish.

“Why, yes,” said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the shop as
with the sound of a bass viol, “I consider myself equal to anything in
the way of my own trade; though I should have made but a poor figure at
yours with such a fist as this,” added he, laughing, as he laid his
vast hand beside the delicate one of Owen. “But what then? I put more
main strength into one blow of my sledge hammer than all that you have
expended since you were a ’prentice. Is not that the truth?”

“Very probably,” answered the low and slender voice of Owen. “Strength
is an earthly monster. I make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever
there may be of it, is altogether spiritual.”

“Well, but, Owen, what are you about?” asked his old school-fellow,
still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist shrink,
especially as the question related to a subject so sacred as the
absorbing dream of his imagination. “Folks do say that you are trying
to discover the perpetual motion.”

“The perpetual motion? Nonsense!” replied Owen Warland, with a movement
of disgust; for he was full of little petulances. “It can never be
discovered. It is a dream that may delude men whose brains are
mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery were
possible, it would not be worth my while to make it only to have the
secret turned to such purposes as are now effected by steam and water
power. I am not ambitious to be honored with the paternity of a new
kind of cotton machine.”

“That would be droll enough!” cried the blacksmith, breaking out into
such an uproar of laughter that Owen himself and the bell glasses on
his work-board quivered in unison. “No, no, Owen! No child of yours
will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I won’t hinder you any more.
Good night, Owen, and success, and if you need any assistance, so far
as a downright blow of hammer upon anvil will answer the purpose, I’m
your man.”

And with another laugh the man of main strength left the shop.

“How strange it is,” whispered Owen Warland to himself, leaning his
head upon his hand, “that all my musings, my purposes, my passion for
the beautiful, my consciousness of power to create it,—a finer, more
ethereal power, of which this earthly giant can have no
conception,—all, all, look so vain and idle whenever my path is crossed
by Robert Danforth! He would drive me mad were I to meet him often. His
hard, brute force darkens and confuses the spiritual element within me;
but I, too, will be strong in my own way. I will not yield to him.”

He took from beneath a glass a piece of minute machinery, which he set
in the condensed light of his lamp, and, looking intently at it through
a magnifying glass, proceeded to operate with a delicate instrument of
steel. In an instant, however, he fell back in his chair and clasped
his hands, with a look of horror on his face that made its small
features as impressive as those of a giant would have been.

“Heaven! What have I done?” exclaimed he. “The vapor, the influence of
that brute force,—it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I
have made the very stroke—the fatal stroke—that I have dreaded from the
first. It is all over—the toil of months, the object of my life. I am
ruined!”

And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the
socket and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.

Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear
so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are
exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.
It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character
that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith
in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter
disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole
disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is
directed.

For a time Owen Warland succumbed to this severe but inevitable test.
He spent a few sluggish weeks with his head so continually resting in
his hands that the towns-people had scarcely an opportunity to see his
countenance. When at last it was again uplifted to the light of day, a
cold, dull, nameless change was perceptible upon it. In the opinion of
Peter Hovenden, however, and that order of sagacious understandings who
think that life should be regulated, like clockwork, with leaden
weights, the alteration was entirely for the better. Owen now, indeed,
applied himself to business with dogged industry. It was marvellous to
witness the obtuse gravity with which he would inspect the wheels of a
great old silver watch thereby delighting the owner, in whose fob it
had been worn till he deemed it a portion of his own life, and was
accordingly jealous of its treatment. In consequence of the good report
thus acquired, Owen Warland was invited by the proper authorities to
regulate the clock in the church steeple. He succeeded so admirably in
this matter of public interest that the merchants gruffly acknowledged
his merits on ’Change; the nurse whispered his praises as she gave the
potion in the sick-chamber; the lover blessed him at the hour of
appointed interview; and the town in general thanked Owen for the
punctuality of dinner time. In a word, the heavy weight upon his
spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his own system, but
wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible. It was a
circumstance, though minute, yet characteristic of his present state,
that, when employed to engrave names or initials on silver spoons, he
now wrote the requisite letters in the plainest possible style,
omitting a variety of fanciful flourishes that had heretofore
distinguished his work in this kind.

One day, during the era of this happy transformation, old Peter
Hovenden came to visit his former apprentice.

“Well, Owen,” said he, “I am glad to hear such good accounts of you
from all quarters, and especially from the town clock yonder, which
speaks in your commendation every hour of the twenty-four. Only get rid
altogether of your nonsensical trash about the beautiful, which I nor
nobody else, nor yourself to boot, could ever understand,—only free
yourself of that, and your success in life is as sure as daylight. Why,
if you go on in this way, I should even venture to let you doctor this
precious old watch of mine; though, except my daughter Annie, I have
nothing else so valuable in the world.”

“I should hardly dare touch it, sir,” replied Owen, in a depressed
tone; for he was weighed down by his old master’s presence.

“In time,” said the latter,—“In time, you will be capable of it.”

The old watchmaker, with the freedom naturally consequent on his former
authority, went on inspecting the work which Owen had in hand at the
moment, together with other matters that were in progress. The artist,
meanwhile, could scarcely lift his head. There was nothing so antipodal
to his nature as this man’s cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact
with which everything was converted into a dream except the densest
matter of the physical world. Owen groaned in spirit and prayed
fervently to be delivered from him.

“But what is this?” cried Peter Hovenden abruptly, taking up a dusty
bell glass, beneath which appeared a mechanical something, as delicate
and minute as the system of a butterfly’s anatomy. “What have we here?
Owen! Owen! there is witchcraft in these little chains, and wheels, and
paddles. See! with one pinch of my finger and thumb I am going to
deliver you from all future peril.”

“For Heaven’s sake,” screamed Owen Warland, springing up with wonderful
energy, “as you would not drive me mad, do not touch it! The slightest
pressure of your finger would ruin me forever.”

“Aha, young man! And is it so?” said the old watchmaker, looking at him
with just enough penetration to torture Owen’s soul with the bitterness
of worldly criticism. “Well, take your own course; but I warn you again
that in this small piece of mechanism lives your evil spirit. Shall I
exorcise him?”

“You are my evil spirit,” answered Owen, much excited,—“you and the
hard, coarse world! The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you
fling upon me are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the
task that I was created for.”

Peter Hovenden shook his head, with the mixture of contempt and
indignation which mankind, of whom he was partly a representative, deem
themselves entitled to feel towards all simpletons who seek other
prizes than the dusty one along the highway. He then took his leave,
with an uplifted finger and a sneer upon his face that haunted the
artist’s dreams for many a night afterwards. At the time of his old
master’s visit, Owen was probably on the point of taking up the
relinquished task; but, by this sinister event, he was thrown back into
the state whence he had been slowly emerging.

But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating fresh
vigor during its apparent sluggishness. As the summer advanced he
almost totally relinquished his business, and permitted Father Time, so
far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks and watches
under his control, to stray at random through human life, making
infinite confusion among the train of bewildered hours. He wasted the
sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods and fields and
along the banks of streams. There, like a child, he found amusement in
chasing butterflies or watching the motions of water insects. There was
something truly mysterious in the intentness with which he contemplated
these living playthings as they sported on the breeze or examined the
structure of an imperial insect whom he had imprisoned. The chase of
butterflies was an apt emblem of the ideal pursuit in which he had
spent so many golden hours; but would the beautiful idea ever be
yielded to his hand like the butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet,
doubtless, were these days, and congenial to the artist’s soul. They
were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through his intellectual
world as the butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and
were real to him, for the instant, without the toil, and perplexity,
and many disappointments of attempting to make them visible to the
sensual eye. Alas that the artist, whether in poetry, or whatever other
material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the
beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge of his
ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a
material grasp. Owen Warland felt the impulse to give external reality
to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have
arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied
from the richness of their visions.

The night was now his time for the slow progress of re-creating the one
idea to which all his intellectual activity referred itself. Always at
the approach of dusk he stole into the town, locked himself within his
shop, and wrought with patient delicacy of touch for many hours.
Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the watchman, who, when all the
world should be asleep, had caught the gleam of lamplight through the
crevices of Owen Warland’s shutters. Daylight, to the morbid
sensibility of his mind, seemed to have an intrusiveness that
interfered with his pursuits. On cloudy and inclement days, therefore,
he sat with his head upon his hands, muffling, as it were, his
sensitive brain in a mist of indefinite musings, for it was a relief to
escape from the sharp distinctness with which he was compelled to shape
out his thoughts during his nightly toil.

From one of these fits of torpor he was aroused by the entrance of
Annie Hovenden, who came into the shop with the freedom of a customer,
and also with something of the familiarity of a childish friend. She
had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted Owen to repair
it.

“But I don’t know whether you will condescend to such a task,” said
she, laughing, “now that you are so taken up with the notion of putting
spirit into machinery.”

“Where did you get that idea, Annie?” said Owen, starting in surprise.

“Oh, out of my own head,” answered she, “and from something that I
heard you say, long ago, when you were but a boy and I a little child.
But come, will you mend this poor thimble of mine?”

“Anything for your sake, Annie,” said Owen Warland,—“anything, even
were it to work at Robert Danforth’s forge.”

“And that would be a pretty sight!” retorted Annie, glancing with
imperceptible slightness at the artist’s small and slender frame.
“Well; here is the thimble.”

“But that is a strange idea of yours,” said Owen, “about the
spiritualization of matter.”

And then the thought stole into his mind that this young girl possessed
the gift to comprehend him better than all the world besides. And what
a help and strength would it be to him in his lonely toil if he could
gain the sympathy of the only being whom he loved! To persons whose
pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either
in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of
moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen
solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer,
the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from
the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.

“Annie,” cried he, growing pale as death at the thought, “how gladly
would I tell you the secret of my pursuit! You, methinks, would
estimate it rightly. You, I know, would hear it with a reverence that I
must not expect from the harsh, material world.”

“Would I not? to be sure I would!” replied Annie Hovenden, lightly
laughing. “Come; explain to me quickly what is the meaning of this
little whirligig, so delicately wrought that it might be a plaything
for Queen Mab. See! I will put it in motion.”

“Hold!” exclaimed Owen, “hold!”

Annie had but given the slightest possible touch, with the point of a
needle, to the same minute portion of complicated machinery which has
been more than once mentioned, when the artist seized her by the wrist
with a force that made her scream aloud. She was affrighted at the
convulsion of intense rage and anguish that writhed across his
features. The next instant he let his head sink upon his hands.

“Go, Annie,” murmured he; “I have deceived myself, and must suffer for
it. I yearned for sympathy, and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that
you might give it me; but you lack the talisman, Annie, that should
admit you into my secrets. That touch has undone the toil of months and
the thought of a lifetime! It was not your fault, Annie; but you have
ruined me!”

Poor Owen Warland! He had indeed erred, yet pardonably; for if any
human spirit could have sufficiently reverenced the processes so sacred
in his eyes, it must have been a woman’s. Even Annie Hovenden, possibly
might not have disappointed him had she been enlightened by the deep
intelligence of love.

The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any persons
who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him that he was, in
truth, irrevocably doomed to unutility as regarded the world, and to an
evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a relative had put him in
possession of a small inheritance. Thus freed from the necessity of
toil, and having lost the steadfast influence of a great
purpose,—great, at least, to him,—he abandoned himself to habits from
which it might have been supposed the mere delicacy of his organization
would have availed to secure him. But when the ethereal portion of a
man of genius is obscured the earthly part assumes an influence the
more uncontrollable, because the character is now thrown off the
balance to which Providence had so nicely adjusted it, and which, in
coarser natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen Warland made
proof of whatever show of bliss may be found in riot. He looked at the
world through the golden medium of wine, and contemplated the visions
that bubble up so gayly around the brim of the glass, and that people
the air with shapes of pleasant madness, which so soon grow ghostly and
forlorn. Even when this dismal and inevitable change had taken place,
the young man might still have continued to quaff the cup of
enchantments, though its vapor did but shroud life in gloom and fill
the gloom with spectres that mocked at him. There was a certain
irksomeness of spirit, which, being real, and the deepest sensation of
which the artist was now conscious, was more intolerable than any
fantastic miseries and horrors that the abuse of wine could summon up.
In the latter case he could remember, even out of the midst of his
trouble, that all was but a delusion; in the former, the heavy anguish
was his actual life.

From this perilous state he was redeemed by an incident which more than
one person witnessed, but of which the shrewdest could not explain or
conjecture the operation on Owen Warland’s mind. It was very simple. On
a warm afternoon of spring, as the artist sat among his riotous
companions with a glass of wine before him, a splendid butterfly flew
in at the open window and fluttered about his head.

“Ah,” exclaimed Owen, who had drank freely, “are you alive again, child
of the sun and playmate of the summer breeze, after your dismal
winter’s nap? Then it is time for me to be at work!”

And, leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed and was
never known to sip another drop of wine.

And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and fields. It
might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had come so
spirit-like into the window as Owen sat with the rude revellers, was
indeed a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal life that
had so etheralized him among men. It might be fancied that he went
forth to seek this spirit in its sunny haunts; for still, as in the
summer time gone by, he was seen to steal gently up wherever a
butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in contemplation of it. When
it took flight his eyes followed the winged vision, as if its airy
track would show the path to heaven. But what could be the purpose of
the unseasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watchman knew by
the lines of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland’s shutters?
The towns-people had one comprehensive explanation of all these
singularities. Owen Warland had gone mad! How universally
efficacious—how satisfactory, too, and soothing to the injured
sensibility of narrowness and dulness—is this easy method of accounting
for whatever lies beyond the world’s most ordinary scope! From St.
Paul’s days down to our poor little Artist of the Beautiful, the same
talisman had been applied to the elucidation of all mysteries in the
words or deeds of men who spoke or acted too wisely or too well. In
Owen Warland’s case the judgment of his towns-people may have been
correct. Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy—that contrast between
himself and his neighbors which took away the restraint of example—was
enough to make him so. Or possibly he had caught just so much of
ethereal radiance as served to bewilder him, in an earthly sense, by
its intermixture with the common daylight.

One evening, when the artist had returned from a customary ramble and
had just thrown the lustre of his lamp on the delicate piece of work so
often interrupted, but still taken up again, as if his fate were
embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the entrance of old
Peter Hovenden. Owen never met this man without a shrinking of the
heart. Of all the world he was most terrible, by reason of a keen
understanding which saw so distinctly what it did see, and disbelieved
so uncompromisingly in what it could not see. On this occasion the old
watchmaker had merely a gracious word or two to say.

“Owen, my lad,” said he, “we must see you at my house to-morrow night.”

The artist began to mutter some excuse.

“Oh, but it must be so,” quoth Peter Hovenden, “for the sake of the
days when you were one of the household. What, my boy! don’t you know
that my daughter Annie is engaged to Robert Danforth? We are making an
entertainment, in our humble way, to celebrate the event.”

That little monosyllable was all he uttered; its tone seemed cold and
unconcerned to an ear like Peter Hovenden’s; and yet there was in it
the stifled outcry of the poor artist’s heart, which he compressed
within him like a man holding down an evil spirit. One slight outbreak,
however, imperceptible to the old watchmaker, he allowed himself.
Raising the instrument with which he was about to begin his work, he
let it fall upon the little system of machinery that had, anew, cost
him months of thought and toil. It was shattered by the stroke!

Owen Warland’s story would have been no tolerable representation of the
troubled life of those who strive to create the beautiful, if, amid all
other thwarting influences, love had not interposed to steal the
cunning from his hand. Outwardly he had been no ardent or enterprising
lover; the career of his passion had confined its tumults and
vicissitudes so entirely within the artist’s imagination that Annie
herself had scarcely more than a woman’s intuitive perception of it;
but, in Owen’s view, it covered the whole field of his life. Forgetful
of the time when she had shown herself incapable of any deep response,
he had persisted in connecting all his dreams of artistical success
with Annie’s image; she was the visible shape in which the spiritual
power that he worshipped, and on whose altar he hoped to lay a not
unworthy offering, was made manifest to him. Of course he had deceived
himself; there were no such attributes in Annie Hovenden as his
imagination had endowed her with. She, in the aspect which she wore to
his inward vision, was as much a creature of his own as the mysterious
piece of mechanism would be were it ever realized. Had he become
convinced of his mistake through the medium of successful love,—had he
won Annie to his bosom, and there beheld her fade from angel into
ordinary woman,—the disappointment might have driven him back, with
concentrated energy, upon his sole remaining object. On the other hand,
had he found Annie what he fancied, his lot would have been so rich in
beauty that out of its mere redundancy he might have wrought the
beautiful into many a worthier type than he had toiled for; but the
guise in which his sorrow came to him, the sense that the angel of his
life had been snatched away and given to a rude man of earth and iron,
who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations,—this was the
very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd
and contradictory to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear.
There was nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a man that
had been stunned.

He went through a fit of illness. After his recovery his small and
slender frame assumed an obtuser garniture of flesh than it had ever
before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his delicate little hand, so
spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than the
hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might
have induced a stranger to pat him on the head—pausing, however, in the
act, to wonder what manner of child was here. It was as if the spirit
had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a sort of
vegetable existence. Not that Owen Warland was idiotic. He could talk,
and not irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin
to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of
marvels of mechanism that he had read about in books, but which he had
learned to consider as absolutely fabulous. Among them he enumerated
the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head
of Friar Bacon; and, coming down to later times, the automata of a
little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured
for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about
the ear like a living fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute
steel springs. There was a story, too, of a duck that waddled, and
quacked, and ate; though, had any honest citizen purchased it for
dinner, he would have found himself cheated with the mere mechanical
apparition of a duck.

“But all these accounts,” said Owen Warland, “I am now satisfied are
mere impositions.”

Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he once thought
differently. In his idle and dreamy days he had considered it possible,
in a certain sense, to spiritualize machinery, and to combine with the
new species of life and motion thus produced a beauty that should
attain to the ideal which Nature has proposed to herself in all her
creatures, but has never taken pains to realize. He seemed, however, to
retain no very distinct perception either of the process of achieving
this object or of the design itself.

“I have thrown it all aside now,” he would say. “It was a dream such as
young men are always mystifying themselves with. Now that I have
acquired a little common sense, it makes me laugh to think of it.”

Poor, poor and fallen Owen Warland! These were the symptoms that he had
ceased to be an inhabitant of the better sphere that lies unseen around
us. He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as
such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that
even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his
hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies
out of them and leaves the grosser understanding to assimilate them
more and more to the things of which alone it can take cognizance; but
in Owen Warland the spirit was not dead nor passed away; it only slept.

How it awoke again is not recorded. Perhaps the torpid slumber was
broken by a convulsive pain. Perhaps, as in a former instance, the
butterfly came and hovered about his head and reinspired him,—as indeed
this creature of the sunshine had always a mysterious mission for the
artist,—reinspired him with the former purpose of his life. Whether it
were pain or happiness that thrilled through his veins, his first
impulse was to thank Heaven for rendering him again the being of
thought, imagination, and keenest sensibility that he had long ceased
to be.

“Now for my task,” said he. “Never did I feel such strength for it as
now.”

Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil the more
diligently by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the midst of
his labors. This anxiety, perhaps, is common to all men who set their
hearts upon anything so high, in their own view of it, that life
becomes of importance only as conditional to its accomplishment. So
long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we
desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty
of its texture. But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there
is a vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while
engaged in any task that seems assigned by Providence as our proper
thing to do, and which the world would have cause to mourn for should
we leave it unaccomplished. Can the philosopher, big with the
inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to
be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is
mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so,
the weary ages may pass away—the world’s, whose life sand may fall,
drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth
that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example
where the most precious spirit, at any particular epoch manifested in
human shape, has gone hence untimely, without space allowed him, so far
as mortal judgment could discern, to perform his mission on the earth.
The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives
on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the
scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The painter—as Allston
did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its
imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no
irreverence to say so, in the hues of heaven. But rather such
incomplete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere. This so
frequent abortion of man’s dearest projects must be taken as a proof
that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are
without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit. In
heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton’s
song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left
unfinished here?

But to return to Owen Warland. It was his fortune, good or ill, to
achieve the purpose of his life. Pass we over a long space of intense
thought, yearning effort, minute toil, and wasting anxiety, succeeded
by an instant of solitary triumph: let all this be imagined; and then
behold the artist, on a winter evening, seeking admittance to Robert
Danforth’s fireside circle. There he found the man of iron, with his
massive substance thoroughly warmed and attempered by domestic
influences. And there was Annie, too, now transformed into a matron,
with much of her husband’s plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen
Warland still believed, with a finer grace, that might enable her to be
the interpreter between strength and beauty. It happened, likewise,
that old Peter Hovenden was a guest this evening at his daughter’s
fireside, and it was his well-remembered expression of keen, cold
criticism that first encountered the artist’s glance.

“My old friend Owen!” cried Robert Danforth, starting up, and
compressing the artist’s delicate fingers within a hand that was
accustomed to gripe bars of iron. “This is kind and neighborly to come
to us at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had bewitched you out
of the remembrance of old times.”

“We are glad to see you,” said Annie, while a blush reddened her
matronly cheek. “It was not like a friend to stay from us so long.”

“Well, Owen,” inquired the old watchmaker, as his first greeting, “how
comes on the beautiful? Have you created it at last?”

The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the apparition
of a young child of strength that was tumbling about on the carpet,—a
little personage who had come mysteriously out of the infinite, but
with something so sturdy and real in his composition that he seemed
moulded out of the densest substance which earth could supply. This
hopeful infant crawled towards the new-comer, and setting himself on
end, as Robert Danforth expressed the posture, stared at Owen with a
look of such sagacious observation that the mother could not help
exchanging a proud glance with her husband. But the artist was
disturbed by the child’s look, as imagining a resemblance between it
and Peter Hovenden’s habitual expression. He could have fancied that
the old watchmaker was compressed into this baby shape, and looking out
of those baby eyes, and repeating, as he now did, the malicious
question: “The beautiful, Owen! How comes on the beautiful? Have you
succeeded in creating the beautiful?”

“I have succeeded,” replied the artist, with a momentary light of
triumph in his eyes and a smile of sunshine, yet steeped in such depth
of thought that it was almost sadness. “Yes, my friends, it is the
truth. I have succeeded.”

“Indeed!” cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping out of her
face again. “And is it lawful, now, to inquire what the secret is?”

“Surely; it is to disclose it that I have come,” answered Owen Warland.
“You shall know, and see, and touch, and possess the secret! For,
Annie,—if by that name I may still address the friend of my boyish
years,—Annie, it is for your bridal gift that I have wrought this
spiritualized mechanism, this harmony of motion, this mystery of
beauty. It comes late, indeed; but it is as we go onward in life, when
objects begin to lose their freshness of hue and our souls their
delicacy of perception, that the spirit of beauty is most needed.
If,—forgive me, Annie,—if you know how—to value this gift, it can never
come too late.”

He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel box. It was carved richly
out of ebony by his own hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of
pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, elsewhere,
had become a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward; while the boy,
or youth, had found such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended
from earth to cloud, and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the
beautiful. This case of ebony the artist opened, and bade Annie place
her fingers on its edge. She did so, but almost screamed as a butterfly
fluttered forth, and, alighting on her finger’s tip, sat waving the
ample magnificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in
prelude to a flight. It is impossible to express by words the glory,
the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which were softened into the
beauty of this object. Nature’s ideal butterfly was here realized in
all its perfection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit
among earthly flowers, but of those which hover across the meads of
paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed infants to
disport themselves with. The rich down was visible upon its wings; the
lustre of its eyes seemed instinct with spirit. The firelight glimmered
around this wonder—the candles gleamed upon it; but it glistened
apparently by its own radiance, and illuminated the finger and
outstretched hand on which it rested with a white gleam like that of
precious stones. In its perfect beauty, the consideration of size was
entirely lost. Had its wings overreached the firmament, the mind could
not have been more filled or satisfied.

“Beautiful! beautiful!” exclaimed Annie. “Is it alive? Is it alive?”

“Alive? To be sure it is,” answered her husband. “Do you suppose any
mortal has skill enough to make a butterfly, or would put himself to
the trouble of making one, when any child may catch a score of them in
a summer’s afternoon? Alive? Certainly! But this pretty box is
undoubtedly of our friend Owen’s manufacture; and really it does him
credit.”

At this moment the butterfly waved its wings anew, with a motion so
absolutely lifelike that Annie was startled, and even awestricken; for,
in spite of her husband’s opinion, she could not satisfy herself
whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of wondrous
mechanism.

“Is it alive?” she repeated, more earnestly than before.

“Judge for yourself,” said Owen Warland, who stood gazing in her face
with fixed attention.

The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round Annie’s
head, and soared into a distant region of the parlor, still making
itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of
its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course
with his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it
returned in a spiral curve and settled again on Annie’s finger.

“But is it alive?” exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the
gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was
forced to balance himself with his wings. “Tell me if it be alive, or
whether you created it.”

“Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?” replied Owen
Warland. “Alive? Yes, Annie; it may well be said to possess life, for
it has absorbed my own being into itself; and in the secret of that
butterfly, and in its beauty,—which is not merely outward, but deep as
its whole system,—is represented the intellect, the imagination, the
sensibility, the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful! Yes; I created it.
But”—and here his countenance somewhat changed—“this butterfly is not
now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in the daydreams of my
youth.”

“Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything,” said the blacksmith,
grinning with childlike delight. “I wonder whether it would condescend
to alight on such a great clumsy finger as mine? Hold it hither,
Annie.”

By the artist’s direction, Annie touched her finger’s tip to that of
her husband; and, after a momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from
one to the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar, yet not
precisely the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment; then,
ascending from the blacksmith’s stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually
enlarging curve to the ceiling, made one wide sweep around the room,
and returned with an undulating movement to the point whence it had
started.

“Well, that does beat all nature!” cried Robert Danforth, bestowing the
heartiest praise that he could find expression for; and, indeed, had he
paused there, a man of finer words and nicer perception could not
easily have said more. “That goes beyond me, I confess. But what then?
There is more real use in one downright blow of my sledge hammer than
in the whole five years’ labor that our friend Owen has wasted on this
butterfly.”

Here the child clapped his hands and made a great babble of indistinct
utterance, apparently demanding that the butterfly should be given him
for a plaything.

Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at Annie, to discover whether
she sympathized in her husband’s estimate of the comparative value of
the beautiful and the practical. There was, amid all her kindness
towards himself, amid all the wonder and admiration with which she
contemplated the marvellous work of his hands and incarnation of his
idea, a secret scorn—too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness,
and perceptible only to such intuitive discernment as that of the
artist. But Owen, in the latter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of
the region in which such a discovery might have been torture. He knew
that the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, whatever
praise might be bestowed, could never say the fitting word nor feel the
fitting sentiment which should be the perfect recompense of an artist
who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material trifle,—converting what
was earthly to spiritual gold,—had won the beautiful into his
handiwork. Not at this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of
all high performance must be sought within itself, or sought in vain.
There was, however, a view of the matter which Annie and her husband,
and even Peter Hovenden, might fully have understood, and which would
have satisfied them that the toil of years had here been worthily
bestowed. Owen Warland might have told them that this butterfly, this
plaything, this bridal gift of a poor watchmaker to a blacksmith’s
wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch would have purchased
with honors and abundant wealth, and have treasured it among the jewels
of his kingdom as the most unique and wondrous of them all. But the
artist smiled and kept the secret to himself.

“Father,” said Annie, thinking that a word of praise from the old
watchmaker might gratify his former apprentice, “do come and admire
this pretty butterfly.”

“Let us see,” said Peter Hovenden, rising from his chair, with a sneer
upon his face that always made people doubt, as he himself did, in
everything but a material existence. “Here is my finger for it to
alight upon. I shall understand it better when once I have touched it.”

But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when the tip of her
father’s finger was pressed against that of her husband, on which the
butterfly still rested, the insect drooped its wings and seemed on the
point of falling to the floor. Even the bright spots of gold upon its
wings and body, unless her eyes deceived her, grew dim, and the glowing
purple took a dusky hue, and the starry lustre that gleamed around the
blacksmith’s hand became faint and vanished.

“It is dying! it is dying!” cried Annie, in alarm.

“It has been delicately wrought,” said the artist, calmly. “As I told
you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence—call it magnetism, or what you
will. In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite
susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who instilled
his own life into it. It has already lost its beauty; in a few moments
more its mechanism would be irreparably injured.”

“Take away your hand, father!” entreated Annie, turning pale. “Here is
my child; let it rest on his innocent hand. There, perhaps, its life
will revive and its colors grow brighter than ever.”

Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his finger. The butterfly
then appeared to recover the power of voluntary motion, while its hues
assumed much of their original lustre, and the gleam of starlight,
which was its most ethereal attribute, again formed a halo round about
it. At first, when transferred from Robert Danforth’s hand to the small
finger of the child, this radiance grew so powerful that it positively
threw the little fellow’s shadow back against the wall. He, meanwhile,
extended his plump hand as he had seen his father and mother do, and
watched the waving of the insect’s wings with infantine delight.
Nevertheless, there was a certain odd expression of sagacity that made
Owen Warland feel as if here were old Pete Hovenden, partially, and but
partially, redeemed from his hard scepticism into childish faith.

“How wise the little monkey looks!” whispered Robert Danforth to his
wife.

“I never saw such a look on a child’s face,” answered Annie, admiring
her own infant, and with good reason, far more than the artistic
butterfly. “The darling knows more of the mystery than we do.”

As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not
entirely congenial in the child’s nature, it alternately sparkled and
grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an
airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the
ethereal instincts with which its master’s spirit had endowed it
impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there
been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown
immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite
texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle
or two, as of stardust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the
carpet. Then the butterfly came fluttering down, and, instead of
returning to the infant, was apparently attracted towards the artist’s
hand.

“Not so! not so!” murmured Owen Warland, as if his handiwork could have
understood him. “Thou has gone forth out of thy master’s heart. There
is no return for thee.”

With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremulous radiance, the
butterfly struggled, as it were, towards the infant, and was about to
alight upon his finger; but while it still hovered in the air, the
little child of strength, with his grandsire’s sharp and shrewd
expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvellous insect and
compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed. Old Peter Hovenden burst
into a cold and scornful laugh. The blacksmith, by main force, unclosed
the infant’s hand, and found within the palm a small heap of glittering
fragments, whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. And as for
Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life’s
labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly
than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful,
the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of
little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the
enjoyment of the reality.




A VIRTUOSO’S COLLECTION


The other day, having a leisure hour at my disposal, I stepped into a
new museum, to which my notice was casually drawn by a small and
unobtrusive sign: “TO BE SEEN HERE, A VIRTUOSO’S COLLECTION.” Such was
the simple yet not altogether unpromising announcement that turned my
steps aside for a little while from the sunny sidewalk of our principal
thoroughfare. Mounting a sombre staircase, I pushed open a door at its
summit, and found myself in the presence of a person, who mentioned the
moderate sum that would entitle me to admittance.

“Three shillings, Massachusetts tenor,” said he. “No, I mean half a
dollar, as you reckon in these days.”

While searching my pocket for the coin I glanced at the doorkeeper, the
marked character and individuality of whose aspect encouraged me to
expect something not quite in the ordinary way. He wore an
old-fashioned great-coat, much faded, within which his meagre person
was so completely enveloped that the rest of his attire was
undistinguishable. But his visage was remarkably wind-flushed,
sunburnt, and weather-worn, and had a most, unquiet, nervous, and
apprehensive expression. It seemed as if this man had some
all-important object in view, some point of deepest interest to be
decided, some momentous question to ask, might he but hope for a reply.
As it was evident, however, that I could have nothing to do with his
private affairs, I passed through an open doorway, which admitted me
into the extensive hall of the museum.

Directly in front of the portal was the bronze statue of a youth with
winged feet. He was represented in the act of flitting away from earth,
yet wore such a look of earnest invitation that it impressed me like a
summons to enter the hall.

“It is the original statue of Opportunity, by the ancient sculptor
Lysippus,” said a gentleman who now approached me. “I place it at the
entrance of my museum, because it is not at all times that one can gain
admittance to such a collection.”

The speaker was a middle-aged person, of whom it was not easy to
determine whether he had spent his life as a scholar or as a man of
action; in truth, all outward and obvious peculiarities had been worn
away by an extensive and promiscuous intercourse with the world. There
was no mark about him of profession, individual habits, or scarcely of
country; although his dark complexion and high features made me
conjecture that he was a native of some southern clime of Europe. At
all events, he was evidently the virtuoso in person.

“With your permission,” said he, “as we have no descriptive catalogue,
I will accompany you through the museum and point out whatever may be
most worthy of attention. In the first place, here is a choice
collection of stuffed animals.”

Nearest the door stood the outward semblance of a wolf, exquisitely
prepared, it is true, and showing a very wolfish fierceness in the
large glass eyes which were inserted into its wild and crafty head.
Still it was merely the skin of a wolf, with nothing to distinguish it
from other individuals of that unlovely breed.

“How does this animal deserve a place in your collection?” inquired I.

“It is the wolf that devoured Little Red Riding Hood,” answered the
virtuoso; “and by his side—with a milder and more matronly look, as you
perceive—stands the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus.”

“Ah, indeed!” exclaimed I. “And what lovely lamb is this with the
snow-white fleece, which seems to be of as delicate a texture as
innocence itself?”

“Methinks you have but carelessly read Spenser,” replied my guide, “or
you would at once recognize the ‘milk-white lamb’ which Una led. But I
set no great value upon the lamb. The next specimen is better worth our
notice.”

“What!” cried I, “this strange animal, with the black head of an ox
upon the body of a white horse? Were it possible to suppose it, I
should say that this was Alexander’s steed Bucephalus.”

“The same,” said the virtuoso. “And can you likewise give a name to the
famous charger that stands beside him?”

Next to the renowned Bucephalus stood the mere skeleton of a horse,
with the white bones peeping through his ill-conditioned hide; but, if
my heart had not warmed towards that pitiful anatomy, I might as well
have quitted the museum at once. Its rarities had not been collected
with pain and toil from the four quarters of the earth, and from the
depths of the sea, and from the palaces and sepulchres of ages, for
those who could mistake this illustrious steed.

“It, is Rosinante!” exclaimed I, with enthusiasm.

And so it proved. My admiration for the noble and gallant horse caused
me to glance with less interest at the other animals, although many of
them might have deserved the notice of Cuvier himself. There was the
donkey which Peter Bell cudgelled so soundly, and a brother of the same
species who had suffered a similar infliction from the ancient prophet
Balaam. Some doubts were entertained, however, as to the authenticity
of the latter beast. My guide pointed out the venerable Argus, that
faithful dog of Ulysses, and also another dog (for so the skin bespoke
it), which, though imperfectly preserved, seemed once to have had three
heads. It was Cerberus. I was considerably amused at detecting in an
obscure corner the fox that became so famous by the loss of his tail.
There were several stuffed cats, which, as a dear lover of that
comfortable beast, attracted my affectionate regards. One was Dr.
Johnson’s cat Hodge; and in the same row stood the favorite cats of
Mahomet, Gray, and Walter Scott, together with Puss in Boots, and a cat
of very noble aspect—who had once been a deity of ancient Egypt.
Byron’s tame bear came next. I must not forget to mention the
Eryruanthean boar, the skin of St. George’s dragon, and that of the
serpent Python; and another skin with beautifully variegated hues,
supposed to have been the garment of the “spirited sly snake,” which
tempted Eve. Against the walls were suspended the horns of the stag
that Shakespeare shot; and on the floor lay the ponderous shell of the
tortoise which fell upon the head of Aeschylus. In one row, as natural
as life, stood the sacred bull Apis, the “cow with the crumpled horn,”
and a very wild-looking young heifer, which I guessed to be the cow
that jumped over the moon. She was probably killed by the rapidity of
her descent. As I turned away, my eyes fell upon an indescribable
monster, which proved to be a griffin.

“I look in vain,” observed I, “for the skin of an animal which might
well deserve the closest study of a naturalist,—the winged horse,
Pegasus.”

“He is not yet dead,” replied the virtuoso; “but he is so hard ridden
by many young gentlemen of the day that I hope soon to add his skin and
skeleton to my collection.”

We now passed to the next alcove of the hall, in which was a multitude
of stuffed birds. They were very prettily arranged, some upon the
branches of trees, others brooding upon nests, and others suspended by
wires so artificially that they seemed in the very act of flight. Among
them was a white dove, with a withered branch of olive-leaves in her
mouth.

“Can this be the very dove,” inquired I, “that brought the message of
peace and hope to the tempest-beaten passengers of the ark?”

“Even so,” said my companion.

“And this raven, I suppose,” continued I, “is the same that fed Elijah
in the wilderness.”

“The raven? No,” said the virtuoso; “it is a bird of modern date. He
belonged to one Barnaby Rudge, and many people fancied that the Devil
himself was disguised under his sable plumage. But poor Grip has drawn
his last cork, and has been forced to ‘say die’ at last. This other
raven, hardly less curious, is that in which the soul of King George I.
revisited his lady-love, the Duchess of Kendall.”

My guide next pointed out Minerva’s owl and the vulture that preyed
upon the liver of Prometheus. There was likewise the sacred ibis of
Egypt, and one of the Stymphalides which Hercules shot in his sixth
labor. Shelley’s skylark, Bryant’s water-fowl, and a pigeon from the
belfry of the Old South Church, preserved by N. P. Willis, were placed
on the same perch. I could not but shudder on beholding Coleridge’s
albatross, transfixed with the Ancient Mariner’s crossbow shaft. Beside
this bird of awful poesy stood a gray goose of very ordinary aspect.

“Stuffed goose is no such rarity,” observed I. “Why do you preserve
such a specimen in your museum?”

“It is one of the flock whose cackling saved the Roman Capitol,”
answered the virtuoso. “Many geese have cackled and hissed both before
and since; but none, like those, have clamored themselves into
immortality.”

There seemed to be little else that demanded notice in this department
of the museum, unless we except Robinson Crusoe’s parrot, a live
phoenix, a footless bird of paradise, and a splendid peacock, supposed
to be the same that once contained the soul of Pythagoras. I therefore
passed to the next alcove, the shelves of which were covered with a
miscellaneous collection of curiosities such as are usually found in
similar establishments. One of the first things that took my eye was a
strange-looking cap, woven of some substance that appeared to be
neither woollen, cotton, nor linen.

“Is this a magician’s cap?” I asked.

“No,” replied the virtuoso; “it is merely Dr. Franklin’s cap of
asbestos. But here is one which, perhaps, may suit you better. It is
the wishing-cap of Fortunatus. Will you try it on?”

“By no means,” answered I, putting it aside with my hand. “The day of
wild wishes is past with me. I desire nothing that may not come in the
ordinary course of Providence.”

“Then probably,” returned the virtuoso, “you will not be tempted to rub
this lamp?”

While speaking, he took from the shelf an antique brass lamp, curiously
wrought with embossed figures, but so covered with verdigris that the
sculpture was almost eaten away.

“It is a thousand years,” said he, “since the genius of this lamp
constructed Aladdin’s palace in a single night. But he still retains
his power; and the man who rubs Aladdin’s lamp has but to desire either
a palace or a cottage.”

“I might desire a cottage,” replied I; “but I would have it founded on
sure and stable truth, not on dreams and fantasies. I have learned to
look for the real and the true.”

My guide next showed me Prospero’s magic wand, broken into three
fragments by the hand of its mighty master. On the same shelf lay the
gold ring of ancient Gyges, which enabled the wearer to walk invisible.
On the other side of the alcove was a tall looking-glass in a frame of
ebony, but veiled with a curtain of purple silk, through the rents of
which the gleam of the mirror was perceptible.

“This is Cornelius Agrippa’s magic glass,” observed the virtuoso. “Draw
aside the curtain, and picture any human form within your mind, and it
will be reflected in the mirror.”

“It is enough if I can picture it within my mind,” answered I. “Why
should I wish it to be repeated in the mirror? But, indeed, these works
of magic have grown wearisome to me. There are so many greater wonders
in the world, to those who keep their eyes open and their sight
undimmed by custom, that all the delusions of the old sorcerers seem
flat and stale. Unless you can show me something really curious, I care
not to look further into your museum.”

“Ah, well, then,” said the virtuoso, composedly, “perhaps you may deem
some of my antiquarian rarities deserving of a glance.”

He pointed out the iron mask, now corroded with rust; and my heart grew
sick at the sight of this dreadful relic, which had shut out a human
being from sympathy with his race. There was nothing half so terrible
in the axe that beheaded King Charles, nor in the dagger that slew
Henry of Navarre, nor in the arrow that pierced the heart of William
Rufus,—all of which were shown to me. Many of the articles derived
their interest, such as it was, from having been formerly in the
possession of royalty. For instance, here was Charlemagne’s sheepskin
cloak, the flowing wig of Louis Quatorze, the spinning-wheel of
Sardanapalus, and King Stephen’s famous breeches which cost him but a
crown. The heart of the Bloody Mary, with the word “Calais” worn into
its diseased substance, was preserved in a bottle of spirits; and near
it lay the golden case in which the queen of Gustavus Adolphus
treasured up that hero’s heart. Among these relics and heirlooms of
kings I must not forget the long, hairy ears of Midas, and a piece of
bread which had been changed to gold by the touch of that unlucky
monarch. And as Grecian Helen was a queen, it may here be mentioned
that I was permitted to take into my hand a lock of her golden hair and
the bowl which a sculptor modelled from the curve of her perfect
breast. Here, likewise, was the robe that smothered Agamemnon, Nero’s
fiddle, the Czar Peter’s brandy-bottle, the crown of Semiramis, and
Canute’s sceptre which he extended over the sea. That my own land may
not deem itself neglected, let me add that I was favored with a sight
of the skull of King Philip, the famous Indian chief, whose head the
Puritans smote off and exhibited upon a pole.

“Show me something else,” said I to the virtuoso. “Kings are in such an
artificial position that people in the ordinary walks of life cannot
feel an interest in their relics. If you could show me the straw hat of
sweet little Nell, I would far rather see it than a king’s golden
crown.”

“There it is,” said my guide, pointing carelessly with his staff to the
straw hat in question. “But, indeed, you are hard to please. Here are
the seven-league boots. Will you try them on?”

“Our modern railroads have superseded their use,” answered I; “and as
to these cowhide boots, I could show you quite as curious a pair at the
Transcendental community in Roxbury.”

We next examined a collection of swords and other weapons, belonging to
different epochs, but thrown together without much attempt at
arrangement. Here Was Arthur’s sword Excalibar, and that of the Cid
Campeader, and the sword of Brutus rusted with Caesar’s blood and his
own, and the sword of Joan of Arc, and that of Horatius, and that with
which Virginius slew his daughter, and the one which Dionysius
suspended over the head of Damocles. Here also was Arria’s sword, which
she plunged into her own breast, in order to taste of death before her
husband. The crooked blade of Saladin’s cimeter next attracted my
notice. I know not by what chance, but so it happened, that the sword
of one of our own militia generals was suspended between Don Quixote’s
lance and the brown blade of Hudibras. My heart throbbed high at the
sight of the helmet of Miltiades and the spear that was broken in the
breast of Epaminondas. I recognized the shield of Achilles by its
resemblance to the admirable cast in the possession of Professor
Felton. Nothing in this apartment interested me more than Major
Pitcairn’s pistol, the discharge of which, at Lexington, began the war
of the Revolution, and was reverberated in thunder around the land for
seven long years. The bow of Ulysses, though unstrung for ages, was
placed against the wall, together with a sheaf of Robin Hood’s arrows
and the rifle of Daniel Boone.

“Enough of weapons,” said I, at length; “although I would gladly have
seen the sacred shield which fell from heaven in the time of Numa. And
surely you should obtain the sword which Washington unsheathed at
Cambridge. But the collection does you much credit. Let us pass on.”

In the next alcove we saw the golden thigh of Pythagoras, which had so
divine a meaning; and, by one of the queer analogies to which the
virtuoso seemed to be addicted, this ancient emblem lay on the same
shelf with Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg, that was fabled to be of
silver. Here was a remnant of the Golden Fleece, and a sprig of yellow
leaves that resembled the foliage of a frost-bitten elm, but was duly
authenticated as a portion of the golden branch by which AEneas gained
admittance to the realm of Pluto. Atalanta’s golden apple and one of
the apples of discord were wrapped in the napkin of gold which
Rampsinitus brought from Hades; and the whole were deposited in the
golden vase of Bias, with its inscription: “TO THE WISEST.”

“And how did you obtain this vase?” said I to the virtuoso.

“It was given me long ago,” replied he, with a scornful expression in
his eye, “because I had learned to despise all things.”

It had not escaped me that, though the virtuoso was evidently a man of
high cultivation, yet he seemed to lack sympathy with the spiritual,
the sublime, and the tender. Apart from the whim that had led him to
devote so much time, pains, and expense to the collection of this
museum, he impressed me as one of the hardest and coldest men of the
world whom I had ever met.

“To despise all things!” repeated I. “This, at best, is the wisdom of
the understanding. It is the creed of a man whose soul, whose better
and diviner part, has never been awakened, or has died out of him.”

“I did not think that you were still so young,” said the virtuoso.
“Should you live to my years, you will acknowledge that the vase of
Bias was not ill bestowed.”

Without further discussion of the point, he directed my attention to
other curiosities. I examined Cinderella’s little glass slipper, and
compared it with one of Diana’s sandals, and with Fanny Elssler’s shoe,
which bore testimony to the muscular character of her illustrious foot.
On the same shelf were Thomas the Rhymer’s green velvet shoes, and the
brazen shoe of Empedocles which was thrown out of Mount AEtna.
Anacreon’s drinking-cup was placed in apt juxtaposition with one of Tom
Moore’s wine-glasses and Circe’s magic bowl. These were symbols of
luxury and riot; but near them stood the cup whence Socrates drank his
hemlock, and that which Sir Philip Sidney put from his death-parched
lips to bestow the draught upon a dying soldier. Next appeared a
cluster of tobacco-pipes, consisting of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, the
earliest on record, Dr. Parr’s, Charles Lamb’s, and the first calumet
of peace which was ever smoked between a European and an Indian. Among
other musical instruments, I noticed the lyre of Orpheus and those of
Homer and Sappho, Dr. Franklin’s famous whistle, the trumpet of Anthony
Van Corlear, and the flute which Goldsmith played upon in his rambles
through the French provinces. The staff of Peter the Hermit stood in a
corner with that of good old Bishop Jewel, and one of ivory, which had
belonged to Papirius, the Roman senator. The ponderous club of Hercules
was close at hand. The virtuoso showed me the chisel of Phidias,
Claude’s palette, and the brush of Apelles, observing that he intended
to bestow the former either on Greenough, Crawford, or Powers, and the
two latter upon Washington Allston. There was a small vase of oracular
gas from Delphos, which I trust will be submitted to the scientific
analysis of Professor Silliman. I was deeply moved on beholding a vial
of the tears into which Niobe was dissolved; nor less so on learning
that a shapeless fragment of salt was a relic of that victim of
despondency and sinful regrets,—Lot’s wife. My companion appeared to
set great value upon some Egyptian darkness in a blacking-jug. Several
of the shelves were covered by a collection of coins, among which,
however, I remember none but the Splendid Shilling, celebrated by
Phillips, and a dollar’s worth of the iron money of Lycurgus, weighing
about fifty pounds.

Walking carelessly onward, I had nearly fallen over a huge bundle, like
a peddler’s pack, done up in sackcloth, and very securely strapped and
corded.

“It is Christian’s burden of sin,” said the virtuoso.

“O, pray let us open it!” cried I. “For many a year I have longed to
know its contents.”

“Look into your own consciousness and memory,” replied the virtuoso.
“You will there find a list of whatever it contains.”

As this was all undeniable truth, I threw a melancholy look at the
burden and passed on. A collection of old garments, banging on pegs,
was worthy of some attention, especially the shirt of Nessus, Caesar’s
mantle, Joseph’s coat of many colors, the Vicar of Bray’s cassock,
Goldsmith’s peach-bloom suit, a pair of President Jefferson’s scarlet
breeches, John Randolph’s red baize hunting-shirt, the drab
small-clothes of the Stout Gentleman, and the rags of the “man all
tattered and torn.” George Fox’s hat impressed me with deep reverence
as a relic of perhaps the truest apostle that has appeared on earth for
these eighteen hundred years. My eye was next attracted by an old pair
of shears, which I should have taken for a memorial of some famous
tailor, only that the virtuoso pledged his veracity that they were the
identical scissors of Atropos. He also showed me a broken hourglass
which had been thrown aside by Father Time, together with the old
gentleman’s gray forelock, tastefully braided into a brooch. In the
hour-glass was the handful of sand, the grains of which had numbered
the years of the Cumeean sibyl. I think it was in this alcove that I
saw the inkstand which Luther threw at the Devil, and the ring which
Essex, while under sentence of death, sent to Queen Elizabeth. And here
was the blood-incrusted pen of steel with which Faust signed away his
salvation.

The virtuoso now opened the door of a closet and showed me a lamp
burning, while three others stood unlighted by its side. One of the
three was the lamp of Diogenes, another that of Guy Fawkes, and the
third that which Hero set forth to the midnight breeze in the high
tower of Ahydos.

“See!” said the virtuoso, blowing with all his force at the lighted
lamp.

The flame quivered and shrank away from his breath, but clung to the
wick, and resumed its brilliancy as soon as the blast was exhausted.

“It is an undying lamp from the tomb of Charlemagne,” observed my
guide. “That flame was kindled a thousand years ago.”

“How ridiculous to kindle an unnatural light in tombs!” exclaimed I.
“We should seek to behold the dead in the light of heaven. But what is
the meaning of this chafing-dish of glowing coals?”

“That,” answered the virtuoso, “is the original fire which Prometheus
stole from heaven. Look steadfastly into it, and you will discern
another curiosity.”

I gazed into that fire,—which, symbolically, was the origin of all that
was bright and glorious in the soul of man,—and in the midst of it,
behold a little reptile, sporting with evident enjoyment of the fervid
heat! It was a salamander.

“What a sacrilege!” cried I, with inexpressible disgust. “Can you find
no better use for this ethereal fire than to cherish a loathsome
reptile in it? Yet there are men who abuse the sacred fire of their own
souls to as foul and guilty a purpose.”

The virtuoso made no answer except by a dry laugh and an assurance that
the salamander was the very same which Benvenuto Cellini had seen in
his father’s household fire. He then proceeded to show me other
rarities; for this closet appeared to be the receptacle of what he
considered most valuable in his collection.

“There,” said he, “is the Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains.”

I gazed with no little interest at this mighty gem, which it had been
one of the wild projects of my youth to discover. Possibly it might
have looked brighter to me in those days than now; at all events, it
had not such brilliancy as to detain me long from the other articles of
the museum. The virtuoso pointed out to me a crystalline stone which
hung by a gold chain against the wall.

“That is the philosopher’s stone,” said he.

“And have you the elixir vita which generally accompanies it?” inquired
I.

“Even so; this urn is filled with it,” he replied. “A draught would
refresh you. Here is Hebe’s cup; will you quaff a health from it?”

My heart thrilled within me at the idea of such a reviving draught; for
methought I had great need of it after travelling so far on the dusty
road of life. But I know not whether it were a peculiar glance in the
virtuoso’s eye, or the circumstance that this most precious liquid was
contained in an antique sepulchral urn, that made me pause. Then came
many a thought with which, in the calmer and better hours of life, I
had strengthened myself to feel that Death is the very friend whom, in
his due season, even the happiest mortal should be willing to embrace.

“No; I desire not an earthly immortality,” said I.

“Were man to live longer on the earth, the spiritual would die out of
him. The spark of ethereal fire would be choked by the material, the
sensual. There is a celestial something within us that requires, after
a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it from decay and
ruin. I will have none of this liquid. You do well to keep it in a
sepulchral urn; for it would produce death while bestowing the shadow
of life.”

“All this is unintelligible to me,” responded my guide, with
indifference. “Life—earthly life—is the only good. But you refuse the
draught? Well, it is not likely to be offered twice within one man’s
experience. Probably you have griefs which you seek to forget in death.
I can enable you to forget them in life. Will you take a draught of
Lethe?”

As he spoke, the virtuoso took from the shelf a crystal vase containing
a sable liquor, which caught no reflected image from the objects
around.

“Not for the world!” exclaimed I, shrinking back. “I can spare none of
my recollections, not even those of error or sorrow. They are all alike
the food of my spirit. As well never to have lived as to lose them
now.”

Without further parley we passed to the next alcove, the shelves of
which were burdened with ancient volumes and with those rolls of
papyrus in which was treasured up the eldest wisdom of the earth.
Perhaps the most valuable work in the collection, to a bibliomaniac,
was the Book of Hermes. For my part, however, I would have given a
higher price for those six of the Sibyl’s books which Tarquin refused
to purchase, and which the virtuoso informed me he had himself found in
the cave of Trophonius. Doubtless these old volumes contain prophecies
of the fate of Rome, both as respects the decline and fall of her
temporal empire and the rise of her spiritual one. Not without value,
likewise, was the work of Anaxagoras on Nature, hitherto supposed to be
irrecoverably lost, and the missing treatises of Longinus, by which
modern criticism might profit, and those books of Livy for which the
classic student has so long sorrowed without hope. Among these precious
tomes I observed the original manuscript of the Koran, and also that of
the Mormon Bible in Joe Smith’s authentic autograph. Alexander’s copy
of the Iliad was also there, enclosed in the jewelled casket of Darius,
still fragrant of the perfumes which the Persian kept in it.

Opening an iron-clasped volume, bound in black leather, I discovered it
to be Cornelius Agrippa’s book of magic; and it was rendered still more
interesting by the fact that many flowers, ancient and modern, were
pressed between its leaves. Here was a rose from Eve’s bridal bower,
and all those red and white roses which were plucked in the garden of
the Temple by the partisans of York and Lancaster. Here was Halleck’s
Wild Rose of Alloway. Cowper had contributed a Sensitive Plant, and
Wordsworth an Eglantine, and Burns a Mountain Daisy, and Kirke White a
Star of Bethlehem, and Longfellow a Sprig of Fennel, with its yellow
flowers. James Russell Lowell had given a Pressed Flower, but fragrant
still, which had been shadowed in the Rhine. There was also a sprig
from Southey’s Holly Tree. One of the most beautiful specimens was a
Fringed Gentian, which had been plucked and preserved for immortality
by Bryant. From Jones Very, a poet whose voice is scarcely heard among
us by reason of its depth, there was a Wind Flower and a Columbine.

As I closed Cornelius Agrippa’s magic volume, an old, mildewed letter
fell upon the floor. It proved to be an autograph from the Flying
Dutchman to his wife. I could linger no longer among books; for the
afternoon was waning, and there was yet much to see. The bare mention
of a few more curiosities must suffice. The immense skull of Polyphemus
was recognizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the forehead
where once had blazed the giant’s single eye. The tub of Diogenes,
Medea’s caldron, and Psyche’s vase of beauty were placed one within
another. Pandora’s box, without the lid, stood next, containing nothing
but the girdle of Venus, which had been carelessly flung into it. A
bundle of birch-rods which had been used by Shenstone’s schoolmistress
were tied up with the Countess of Salisbury’s garter. I know not which
to value most, a roc’s egg as big as an ordinary hogshead, or the shell
of the egg which Columbus set upon its end. Perhaps the most delicate
article in the whole museum was Queen Mab’s chariot, which, to guard it
from the touch of meddlesome fingers, was placed under a glass tumbler.

Several of the shelves were occupied by specimens of entomology.
Feeling but little interest in the science, I noticed only Anacreon’s
grasshopper, and a bumblebee which had been presented to the virtuoso
by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the part of the hall which we had now reached I observed a curtain,
that descended from the ceiling to the floor in voluminous folds, of a
depth, richness, and magnificence which I had never seen equalled. It
was not to be doubted that this splendid though dark and solemn veil
concealed a portion of the museum even richer in wonders than that
through which I had already passed; but, on my attempting to grasp the
edge of the curtain and draw it aside, it proved to be an illusive
picture.

“You need not blush,” remarked the virtuoso; “for that same curtain
deceived Zeuxis. It is the celebrated painting of Parrhasius.”

In a range with the curtain there were a number of other choice
pictures by artists of ancient days. Here was the famous cluster of
grapes by Zeuxis, so admirably depicted that it seemed as if the ripe
juice were bursting forth. As to the picture of the old woman by the
same illustrious painter, and which was so ludicrous that he himself
died with laughing at it, I cannot say that it particularly moved my
risibility. Ancient humor seems to have little power over modern
muscles. Here, also, was the horse painted by Apelles which living
horses neighed at; his first portrait of Alexander the Great, and his
last unfinished picture of Venus asleep. Each of these works of art,
together with others by Parrhasius, Timanthes, Polygnotus, Apollodorus,
Pausias, and Pamplulus, required more time and study than I could
bestow for the adequate perception of their merits. I shall therefore
leave them undescribed and uncriticised, nor attempt to settle the
question of superiority between ancient and modern art.

For the same reason I shall pass lightly over the specimens of antique
sculpture which this indefatigable and fortunate virtuoso had dug out
of the dust of fallen empires. Here was AEtion’s cedar statue of
AEsculapius, much decayed, and Alcon’s iron statue of Hercules,
lamentably rusted. Here was the statue of Victory, six feet high, which
the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias had held in his hand. Here was a
forefinger of the Colossus of Rhodes, seven feet in length. Here was
the Venus Urania of Phidias, and other images of male and female beauty
or grandeur, wrought by sculptors who appeared never to have debased
their souls by the sight of any meaner forms than those of gods or
godlike mortals. But the deep simplicity of these great works was not
to be comprehended by a mind excited and disturbed, as mine was, by the
various objects that had recently been presented to it. I therefore
turned away with merely a passing glance, resolving on some future
occasion to brood over each individual statue and picture until my
inmost spirit should feel their excellence. In this department, again,
I noticed the tendency to whimsical combinations and ludicrous
analogies which seemed to influence many of the arrangements of the
museum. The wooden statue so well known as the Palladium of Troy was
placed in close apposition with the wooden head of General Jackson,
which was stolen a few years since from the bows of the frigate
Constitution.

We had now completed the circuit of the spacious hall, and found
ourselves again near the door. Feeling somewhat wearied with the survey
of so many novelties and antiquities, I sat down upon Cowper’s sofa,
while the virtuoso threw himself carelessly into Rabelais’s easychair.
Casting my eyes upon the opposite wall, I was surprised to perceive the
shadow of a man flickering unsteadily across the wainscot, and looking
as if it were stirred by some breath of air that found its way through
the door or windows. No substantial figure was visible from which this
shadow might be thrown; nor, had there been such, was there any
sunshine that would have caused it to darken upon the wall.

“It is Peter Schlemihl’s shadow,” observed the virtuoso, “and one of
the most valuable articles in my collection.”

“Methinks a shadow would have made a fitting doorkeeper to such a
museum,” said I; “although, indeed, yonder figure has something strange
and fantastic about him, which suits well enough with many of the
impressions which I have received here. Pray, who is he?”

While speaking, I gazed more scrutinizingly than before at the
antiquated presence of the person who had admitted me, and who still
sat on his bench with the same restless aspect, and dim, confused,
questioning anxiety that I had noticed on my first entrance. At this
moment he looked eagerly towards us, and, half starting from his seat,
addressed me.

“I beseech you, kind sir,” said he, in a cracked, melancholy tone,
“have pity on the most unfortunate man in the world. For Heaven’s sake,
answer me a single question! Is this the town of Boston?”

“You have recognized him now,” said the virtuoso. “It is Peter Rugg,
the missing man. I chanced to meet him the other day still in search of
Boston, and conducted him hither; and, as he could not succeed in
finding his friends, I have taken him into my service as doorkeeper. He
is somewhat too apt to ramble, but otherwise a man of trust and
integrity.”

“And might I venture to ask,” continued I, “to whom am I indebted for
this afternoon’s gratification?”

The virtuoso, before replying, laid his hand upon an antique dart, or
javelin, the rusty steel head of winch seemed to have been blunted, as
if it had encountered the resistance of a tempered shield, or
breastplate.

“My name has not been without its distinction in the world for a longer
period than that of any other man alive,” answered he. “Yet many doubt
of my existence; perhaps you will do so to-morrow. This dart which I
hold in my hand was once grim Death’s own weapon. It served him well
for the space of four thousand years; but it fell blunted, as you see,
when he directed it against my breast.”

These words were spoken with the calm and cold courtesy of manner that
had characterized this singular personage throughout our interview. I
fancied, it is true, that there was a bitterness indefinably mingled
with his tone, as of one cut off from natural sympathies and blasted
with a doom that had been inflicted on no other human being, and by the
results of which he had ceased to be human. Yet, withal, it seemed one
of the most terrible consequences of that doom that the victim no
longer regarded it as a calamity, but had finally accepted it as the
greatest good that could have befallen him.

“You are the Wandering Jew!” exclaimed I.

The virtuoso bowed without emotion of any kind; for, by centuries of
custom, he had almost lost the sense of strangeness in his fate, and
was but imperfectly conscious of the astonishment and awe with which it
affected such as are capable of death.

“Your doom is indeed a fearful one!” said I, with irrepressible feeling
and a frankness that afterwards startled me; “yet perhaps the ethereal
spirit is not entirely extinct under all this corrupted or frozen mass
of earthly life. Perhaps the immortal spark may yet be rekindled by a
breath of heaven. Perhaps you may yet be permitted to die before it is
too late to live eternally. You have my prayers for such a
consummation. Farewell.”

“Your prayers will be in vain,” replied he, with a smile of cold
triumph. “My destiny is linked with the realities of earth. You are
welcome to your visions and shadows of a future state; but give me what
I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask no more.”

“It is indeed too late,” thought I. “The soul is dead within him.”

Struggling between pity and horror, I extended my hand, to which the
virtuoso gave his own, still with the habitual courtesy of a man of the
world, but without a single heart-throb of human brotherhood. The touch
seemed like ice, yet I know not whether morally or physically. As I
departed, he bade me observe that the inner door of the hall was
constructed with the ivory leaves of the gateway through which Aeneas
and the Sibyl had been dismissed from Hades.