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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80,
+June, 1864, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: November 16, 2006 [EBook #19827]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+VOL. XIII.--JUNE, 1864.--NO. LXXX.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR
+AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected. Footnotes have been
+moved to the end of the article.
+
+
+
+
+A TALK ABOUT GUIDES.
+
+
+Talk about guides! Let Independence, Self-Conceit, and Go-ahead
+undervalue them, if they will; but I, Sola Foemina, (for that is the
+name I go by,) of Ignorance, (the place I hail from,) casting up my
+unbalanced accounts, (with a view to settling,) find a large credit due
+to this class of individuals, which (though I have not the means to
+meet) I have no intention to repudiate.
+
+Now and then, to be sure, I, S. F., have been reminded in my journeyings
+of poor dear E., whose lively spirit was so chafed by the exactions made
+upon his purse and his temper at the hands of this imperturbable race,
+that at last he turned, like a stag at bay, and vented all his wrath in
+the face of a startled old woman by the abrupt and emphatic query,
+"What'll you take to clear out?"
+
+Still, dogmatic and prosing as they sometimes proved, my experience on
+the whole was favorable; and from the motherly old portress of the
+English church at Honeybourne, who fed me with bread and butter under
+her cottage-roof, and sent me away laden with garden-flowers and a
+blessing, to faithful Michel, who held me over the blue fissures of the
+glaciers that I might get a glimpse of their secret waterfalls, who
+gathered violets for me on the margin of the icy sea, and, when I had
+carelessly dropped them by the way, treasured up the faded things to
+restore them to me at nightfall,--from the aged woman, with her "Good
+bye till we meet in heaven," to the rough mountaineer, with his hearty
+hand-pressure and God-speed at parting, I would not willingly lose one
+link out of the chain of such fast friends which stretched along my way.
+
+There is Warwick Castle,--a written history, no doubt, to scholars, a
+mine of wealth to antiquaries and architects; but how incomplete would
+my associations be with the spot, were you banished from the picture, my
+sturdy friend, fit type of the female retainers of the household of the
+King-Maker, who, stationed within the ivied approach to the castle,
+presided at the brazen porridge-pot, once holding food enough to satisfy
+ten score of men, now empty, save for the volume of sound which stuns
+the ear when you strike it with your ponderous iron bar! Can I ever
+forget the scene of laughter and riot, when you installed me within the
+capacious vessel, dubbed me "Countess Guy, of the Porridge-Pot," and,
+the rest of my party having been induced to accept the hospitalities of
+the place, and mount my triumphal car, declared your intention to light
+a fire beneath and have the finest stew in all England? The castle is a
+stern place, perhaps; but how can I ever think it grim, with such a
+jolly old flatterer as you stationed at its portal?
+
+And here, in my blundering way, I have stumbled on the secret spring of
+my whole subject; so I may as well make a merit of confession, and
+acknowledge frankly that the trap in which these wary guides entangled
+my affections was generally neither more nor less than a net of silken
+flattery. Your good guide, your dear guide, your pet guide, whom
+Neighbor So-and-so, going abroad, must look up immediately on his
+arrival, this invaluable creature, depend upon it, is an arrant
+flatterer. He does not go out of his way for you; he does not tell it
+you to your face; but, somehow or other, (if he knows his vocation,) he
+makes you believe, that, of all the travellers he ever escorted, (and he
+has been a travellers' escort from his infancy,) you are the first, the
+only one, in whose behalf duty became a privilege.
+
+Do you suppose I put faith in Michel, when, on my second Alpine
+excursion, this companion of the previous day's peril placed himself in
+close proximity to my mule, took the bridle with an air of satisfaction,
+and whispered with an insinuating smile, "I go with _you_ to-day; see,
+there is another guide for Mademoiselle"? He was mistaken. It was my
+young friend whom he was, on this occasion, destined to escort over the
+mountain. He was as devoted to her as if she had been the apple of his
+eye. Whether I followed next in the file, brought up the rear, or was
+dashed over the precipice, I doubt if he looked behind him to discover.
+Was I fool enough, then, to trust his professions? I acknowledge the
+weakness. I was but a novice, he a practised courtier in the guise of a
+mountaineer. To make a clean breast of it, I even suspect that his
+self-gratulatory whisper is still ringing in my ear, for I find that
+Mademoiselle and I are rivals in our devotion to Michel.
+
+And Ann Harris, of Honeybourne, widow, portress of the ancient
+village-church, surrounded by villagers' graves, approached by four
+foot-paths over four stiles, perfect model of all the churches in all
+the novels of English literature,--was it partiality for me, ancient
+matron, or an eye to a silver sixpence, which made you, and makes you
+still, the heroine of my day of romance? At any rate, I shall never
+cease to invoke a blessing on that immaculate railway-company which
+decoyed me from London into the heart of England, and, with a coolness
+unexampled in the new districts of Iowa, dropped me at the sweetest nook
+under the sun, there to wait three hours for the train which should have
+taken me at once to Stratford,--three golden hours, in which I might
+bask like a bee in a Honeybourne beyond my hopes.
+
+Not that my Honeybourne was precisely the spot where the railway-train
+left me standing deserted and alone,--alone save for a Stratford
+furniture-dealer, who, unceremoniously set down in the midst of his new
+stock of tables and chairs, and with nothing else in sight but a
+platform, a shed, and me, looked at the last-mentioned object for
+sympathy, while he cursed the departing train and swore the usual oath
+of vengeance, namely, that he would never travel that road again.
+
+_He_ got red with passion and cursed the road; _I_ stared round me and
+kept cool. Was I more philosophical than he? No, but there was this
+difference: he was bent on business, I on pleasure; he was in a hurry, I
+could afford to wait.
+
+Three hours,--and only a platform, a shed, and an infuriated
+furniture-dealer to keep me company! This was the Honeybourne station,
+but not Honeybourne. I found a railway-official hard by, had my baggage
+stowed in the shed, crossed the platform, looked at my watch to make
+sure of the time, then struck out into the open country. Through shady
+lanes, over stiles, across the fields, on I went, in the direction
+pointed out to me by two laborers whom I met at starting. The sweet
+white may smiled at me from the hedges; the great sober eyes of the
+cattle at pasture reflected my sense of contentment; the nonchalant
+English sheep showed no signs of disturbance at my approach (unlike the
+American species, which invariably take to their heels); the children
+set to watch them lifted their heads from the long grass and looked
+lazily after me, never doubting my right to tread the well-worn
+foot-path with which every green field beguiled me on. I came out in the
+vegetable-garden of a rustic cottage, one of some dozen thatched-roofed
+dwellings, which, with the church and simple parsonage, constituted
+sweet Honeybourne. "Oh that it were the bourne from which no traveller
+returns!" was the thought of my heart, as, with a dreamy sense of
+longings fulfilled, I wandered through the miniature village, across it,
+around it, beyond it, and back to it again, as a bee saturated with
+sweets floats round the hive.
+
+And now to my queen-bee, Ann Harris, aforesaid!
+
+"All the way from Lunnon! Alone, and such a distance! Bless my heart!"
+cried the primitive Ann, with hands and eyes uplifted. "Come in and rest
+you, and have something to eat! I have bread and butter, sweet and good,
+and will boil the kettle and make you a cup of tea, if you say so."
+
+I had already made the circuit of the church, strolled among the ancient
+gravestones, crossed the moss-covered bridge, threaded the paths beneath
+the hawthorn, had a vision of boundless beauty, drunk in the silence,
+and dreamed out my dream of solitude, independence, and the joy of being
+no one but myself knew where. Could I do better than accept this
+invitation to enter the humble cottage, with the prospect of an
+admittance also to an old woman's heart? Did I win the latter? or did I
+only fancy it? Did the motherly creature believe me lost? or was her
+astonishment only feigned? Was she really, despite her poverty, ready to
+share her last crust with a stranger? or was the benignant glance which
+gave me in my loneliness the sense of adoption merely an eye to
+self-interest?
+
+Dear old soul! One of us, at least, was simple-hearted and true,--either
+she in her innocent professions, or I in my silly credulity. I have
+faith that it was she. At all events, I do so cherish the memory of her
+kindness, that, so far from treasuring the notion of the silver
+sixpence, I hereby pledge myself, that, if ever the reminiscence I am
+penning should be worth half as much to me in gold as it is in memory, I
+will send Ann Harris at least one shining guinea, as a token how
+willingly I would go shares with her in something.
+
+And the guinea would not come amiss, for Ann was poor; her clay-floored
+cottage boasted only its exquisite neatness, her furniture was of the
+humblest, her dress the cheapest. She was too old for hard work; her
+duties at the little church were light,--the profits, I fear, were
+lighter; for that visitors to the remote sanctuary were rare her
+reception of me was sufficient proof. As she guided me through the
+church, I asked her if it was well attended. She shook her head sadly,
+and, pointing in the direction of a neighboring village, answered,--
+
+"Most of 'em go to chapel, yonder,--the more's the pity."
+
+She told me that she had no provision for the coming winter, and feared
+she must go to the Union. (It was not our own, then prosperous and
+unbroken, Union, to which she dreaded emigrating.) She merely meant the
+work-house; and as she spoke, her face wore a shadow that still clouds
+my recollections of Honeybourne. I do not know if her fears were
+realized,--if her cottage is forsaken,--if she dwells among paupers, or
+sleeps in the village church-yard; but I cannot think of her as lonely
+or poor or dead. Her saintly face told of blessed communion; I know that
+she was rich in faith and hope; and were I assured that her spirit had
+left the flesh, I should only picture her to myself standing erect at
+heaven's doorway, welcoming strangers with the same serenity with which
+she said to me at parting,--"I shall meet you _there_."
+
+She offered me a farewell gift of flowers from her garden. It was a
+beautiful cottage-garden, and many of the flowers were brilliant and
+even rare, giving proof of careful, if not scientific culture. Still I
+hesitated. My hands were full of sweet may, red campion, and other
+native field-blossoms, which had introduced themselves to me
+anonymously. They were the children of the green sod which I had been
+treading so lightly on my way to the village; and, in the quiet of my
+ramble, they had seemed to me like whispers from Him who made them, and
+with whom I had never felt so utterly alone. I could not bear to see
+them displaced by Ann's garden-belles, tempting as the latter would have
+been at any other moment. She saw my indifference to her offer. I knew
+she saw it working in my face. I attempted to apologize for my
+preference, but she did not understand me; so I blurted out my thought,
+awkwardly enough, saying,--
+
+"Yours are beautiful; but God made these, you know,--and--and--I like
+them best."
+
+She looked down upon me gravely, pityingly, smiling, too, with a
+tenderness which was neither grave nor pitying. I have seen
+long-visioned people look with just that expression at the eyes of the
+short-sighted, on the latter's confessing their inability to detect an
+object at no great distance.
+
+"_He made them all_," she said; and her words were an ascription of
+praise.
+
+They come to me often now. They bid me look farther and see more. They
+tell me how _mine_ and _thine_ have no place in this world of _His_.
+False distinctions shrink away from the light of the old woman's clearer
+faith; I see how the ablest workers are but instruments in higher
+hands,--how science, culture, inspiration itself, are but gifts to be
+laid on His altar.
+
+I need scarcely say that I at once found room for Ann's flowers in my
+hand, as for her lesson in my heart. Some of the former are pressed and
+laid away as a sacred memento, and something of the latter is treasured
+up among good seed sown by the way-side.
+
+I would gladly have lingered longer in this little nook, into which I
+seemed to have been drifted by chance; but my time was up,--I had a mile
+or two to walk over the fields in the direction of the railway,--my
+friends were to meet me at Stratford. Should I miss the train this time,
+my philosophy might fail me as signally as that of the above-mentioned
+furniture-dealer failed him.
+
+A few hours after I bade my old friend farewell, I was at my
+destination. Millions have shared my experiences at the tomb of the
+great poet. Everybody is familiar with William Shakspeare and
+Stratford-on-Avon, but I hug the thought that nobody but I knows
+anything about Ann Harris and Honeybourne.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have dwelt upon an occasion in which the humble office of a guide
+resulted in companionship, friendship, instruction. A brief sojourn in
+Alpine regions has furnished me with a similar reminiscence.
+
+We were setting forth for a day's ride across the Tête-Noire. Our party
+consisted of five, and we had two guides. Our baggage, which was for the
+most part light, was strapped on the backs of the mules behind the
+riders. One article, however, a square box of considerable proportions,
+proved refractory, and, veering from side to side, refused to maintain
+the even balance which, owing to the rough nature of the bridle-path,
+was essential to the safety of both mule and rider. We were obliged to
+halt again and again, that the box might be restrapped, always with
+doubtful success. Each time that we drew up in line for this purpose we
+were overtaken by a Swiss youth, who had perceived our dilemma, and who
+hoped, by following us up closely, to make a job out of it. There was
+but a limited knowledge of French among us, (the language in which the
+youth spoke,) still, by aid of his vehement gestures, he made us
+understand that he was ready, for a consideration, to accompany us on
+our toilsome journey, and carry the box on his back.
+
+"Eight francs, Monsieur,--I will do it for eight francs!" But the box
+was righted, his services seemed superfluous, and we moved on,
+regardless of his beseeching looks.
+
+A fresh delay soon ensued, the boy came panting up, and this time it was
+"Seven francs,"--nay, as we rode away from him, he frantically shouted,
+"Six!" His prospects seemed hopeless, but destiny and perseverance were
+on his side,--the box gave another alarming lurch,--the heated and
+almost discouraged youth made one last appeal,--
+
+"Four francs, Monsieur! I will do it for four francs!" and the day was
+his.
+
+He was not a regular guide, appointed by Government and furnished with a
+certificate, as is the law of the Alpine district for all who serve in
+this responsible capacity. We had engaged him simply as a porter. Still,
+the docile youth had no sooner strapped the box on his back than, seeing
+that I was the only lady unprovided with an attendant, he drew my mule's
+bridle through his arm, and quietly took me in charge.
+
+No matter how charming a travelling-party you belong to, the moment they
+are all mounted and climbing a mountain, single file, you feel yourself
+a unit in creation. Everybody has turned his back upon you, and you have
+turned your back upon everybody. You are a solitary traveller. Are you
+aghast at your own situation on the steep slope of a mule's back, with a
+precipice above your head and your feet dangling over a gulf below?
+There is no help for it. Imagine yourself a sack of meal, if you can,
+and expect as little sympathy as would be accorded to that article. Are
+you moved to a keen sense of the ridiculous, as a curve in the road
+discloses the figures of your elongated party, unused to riding, and
+rendered the more grotesque by their mountain-equipment? A laugh
+unshared is no laugh at all, so you may as well smother it at once. Does
+the scenery through which you are passing awaken emotions of sublimity?
+It would be sacrilege to shout out your sentiments to the occupant of
+the next mule in such tones as a watchman would employ to cry, "Fire!"
+No,--if you are essentially a social creature, there is nothing for it
+but to bottle up your sensibilities and await the opportunity for an
+explosion when you reach your inn.
+
+Something like this result occurred, I remember, on the evening of that
+very day, when Mademoiselle, who, under the charge of Michel, led the
+van, met me at the hotel at Martigny, at which place she had of course
+arrived a little in advance. We were not usually more demonstrative in
+our manners than is customary among New-England women, but the moment I
+could alight we rushed into each other's embrace, regardless of a crowd
+of astonished porters and guides, mutually insisting, by way of apology,
+that it seemed as if we had not met for a year.
+
+Having dwelt upon this peculiar isolation experienced by the Alpine
+traveller, it may be conjectured, that, when the boy, Auguste, drew my
+bridle through his arm, I felt very much as Robinson Crusoe did when he
+was joined by his man Friday. Auguste and I soon became friends. He was
+a large, round-faced, mild-eyed youth, who, the instant the excitement
+of securing his employment was past, subsided into a soft, even pace
+like that of a dog. Now and then, too, he looked up at the mule and me,
+precisely as a dog, accompanying his master, looks up to see if all is
+right.
+
+I did not talk to him at first. His mere presence was satisfaction
+enough. After a while we grew more sociable. He spoke a French _patois_.
+So did I. His was peculiar to the province,--mine wholly original,--but
+both answered the purpose of communication, and so were satisfactory.
+He had the essential characteristic of his profession,--he was one of
+the oily-tongued tribe, simple as he seemed, and I the willing victim;
+for I am confident that I straightened in my saddle, and talked more
+glibly than ever in the language peculiar to myself, on the strength of
+his _naïve_ surprise at learning the place of my nativity, and his
+polite exclamation, "_De l'Amèrique! O! j'avais cru que vous étiez de
+Paris_!"
+
+The conversation you hold with your guide has this advantage,--you can
+suspend it at will. There are miles of travel, in crossing the
+Tête-Noire, when, if your most sympathizing friend walked beside you,
+the thought of both hearts would be, "Let all the earth keep silence!"
+and in the absence of such unspoken sympathy, the next best thing is the
+innocent gravity of an attendant hired for so many francs a day, and not
+presuming to speak unless spoken to.
+
+But when these sublimer passages are passed, when the path skirts the
+edge of the valley, when the giant mountains have retired a little and
+you slacken the tense cord of emotion which for a while has held you
+spell-bound, it is a relief to loosen the tongue also, and reassure
+yourself with the sound of the human voice. Thus Auguste and I had
+frequent dialogues. He told me something of his past life, which I do
+not remember very well. I think its chief incident was his having been
+drafted for the army, and having served his term. Of his future,
+however, he spoke with an earnestness which has left its impression on
+my mind. He said that the next winter he meant to go to Paris and seek a
+service; and his perseverance in wringing employment out of us inclines
+me to think that he fulfilled his intention. Savoy, to which province he
+belonged, had just been annexed to France. A party of guides from
+Chamouni had the day before succeeded, with difficulty, in planting the
+imperial flag on the summit of Mont Blanc. Was it this which had
+awakened the ambition of the young Savoyard to share the spoils of the
+empire of which he had so suddenly become a member? Perhaps (I never
+thought of it before, but perhaps) he was already seeking means for his
+journey to the capital. Perhaps the price of his hard-won service was to
+be the nucleus of his savings. Have I, then, aided your purpose,
+Auguste? helped to transform you from a simple mountain-lad to a mere
+link in a chain of street-sweepers, an artful official of a third-rate
+billiard-saloon, or a roystering cab-driver with his perpetual entreaty
+for an extra fee in the form of "_Quelque chose à boire_"? My mind
+shrinks from the possibility, for I cannot bear to think of him as other
+than he then seemed,--a child of Nature and of the truth.
+
+In the course of our day's journey we drew near a little village. I had
+been chatting with Auguste and felt in a loquacious mood, but paused as
+I found myself passing through the village,--in other words, sneaking
+round the corner of one shabby hut, and straight through the farm-yard
+of the next, and close by the windows of a third,--the three, and a few
+other stray buildings, constituting the hamlet. As it seemed an
+impertinence to follow such an intrusive, inquisitive little road at
+all, we could, of course, do no less than maintain a dumb propriety in
+the presence of the children and kitchen-utensils, but, as we left them
+behind and struck across an open field, my eye fell on one of those
+way-side shrines common in all Roman-Catholic districts. It was a
+miniature arch of plastered or whitewashed stone, and contained, as
+nearly as I could judge from the glimpse I had in passing, two coarse
+dolls, intended to represent the Virgin and Child.
+
+"What is that, Auguste?" I asked, with feigned ignorance.
+
+"A place of worship," he answered; "the people come there to pray."
+
+"But what do they come _there_ for?" I continued.
+
+"_God is there_," he answered, with emphasis, pointing at the same time
+to the gayly dressed puppets.
+
+"No, He is not," I replied.
+
+He turned round and looked at me defiantly. His mild face became that
+of a fanatic, and I actually quailed beneath his angry eye, as he
+retorted,--
+
+"He _is_ there."
+
+My mistake flashed upon me, too, at the instant, and I hastened to
+explain myself in the simplest manner my poor French would allow,
+saying,--
+
+_"Oui, Auguste, Il est là, c'est vrai; mais Il est là aussi!"_--and I
+pointed to the snow-capped mountains on my right,--_"et là!"_--and I
+waved my hand towards the deeply shadowed heights on the opposite side
+of the valley.
+
+He caught my meaning as by an inspiration. His fierce frown melted
+instantly into an intelligent smile.
+
+_"Il est partout!"_ exclaimed the youth, with enthusiasm, his childlike,
+eager eyes seeking a response in mine.
+
+I nodded in affirmation of the truth. It was enough. Catholic and
+Protestant had met on common ground,--we understood each other,--we were
+reconciled.
+
+Has he carried his large faith with him into the great metropolis? and
+have I kept mine unshaken in spite of the storm that is raging in my
+native land? Armed in his simplicity only, he has gone to meet the gusts
+of temptation; and I have lived to see the Republic, which I believed
+inviolable as Mother Earth herself, tremble and totter, as one after
+another of her rotten pillars has fallen away. God grant that we may
+both, in this day of our peril, be able, as then, to realize that "_Il
+est partout_"!
+
+During my short Alpine journey I held the office of paymaster for our
+party, my election being due not so much to proficiency in the queer
+dialect above alluded to as to courage in the use of it. It is always a
+pleasant office to disburse the funds, but was never more so than when,
+late at night, Michel and Auguste came to the hotel at Martigny to
+receive the reward of their day's toil. Michel had his full dues in
+money, and plenty of praise to boot; Auguste, evidently much to his
+surprise, a trifle more than his minimum price. Each of them then
+grasped my hand in his horny palm,--an unexpected salutation, but not a
+harsh one, for each hand had a heart in it, or I believed it had, which
+was all the same to me. They made the customary promise not to forget
+me, but credulity must stop somewhere, and at this point I must confess
+my easy faith gave out, and left me skeptical.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have given the preference in order of narrative, as well as in memory,
+to guides who proved competent, willing, and true, who, if they seasoned
+the intercourse between us with a little encouragement to my
+self-esteem, had nothing in them obsequious or timeserving, and who set
+me a wholesome example of clear convictions and firmness in the
+maintenance of right. But not only are the virtues of the race whom I
+have chosen for a theme subjects of congratulation; even the
+uncertainties and misfits of these frequently rusty keys to the past
+excite a mirth that lightens the toil with which one rummages through
+the corridors of time. It would be treason to tell the name of that
+antique university-chapel where a certain wooden-headed verger was
+betrayed into the absurdest error; it would be personal to give the name
+of the waggish friend who made him his innocent butt; but the facts and
+the joke claim no disguise.
+
+The solemn British beadle had been rehearsing the history of numerous
+sarcophagi and monuments, dwelling with mingled pathos and indignation
+upon the injuries which the chapel, its railings, and its statues had
+sustained at the hands of that arch-destroyer and his soldiery who, in
+their zeal for the new Commonwealth, trampled brutally upon the records
+of past grandeur and royalty.
+
+"He stabled his 'osses 'ere! yes, 'ere,--in this wery chapel! ugh!" was
+the wrathful exclamation of our guide; and as he pointed towards the
+tablets without corners and the effigies lacking noses or feet, there
+was a low muttering in his throat and a look at us intended to excite
+sympathetic ire on our part.
+
+One only of our party responded to the look.
+
+"Let me see,--Cromwell was a terrible Catholic, wasn't he?" gravely
+inquired our fellow-traveller, as if in this way, and this way only,
+could the sacrilege be accounted for,--one blue eye, as he spoke, full
+of sage earnestness, the other twinkling with fun.
+
+The stolid face of our guide now became a study. He had no instructions
+for such an emergency as this. The question had made war with his poor
+wits. For a moment they staggered, felt themselves defeated, and were
+about to surrender. But, resolute Briton that he was, the old man soon
+rallied his forces. True servant both of Church and State, he saw that
+there was no consistent course for him but to consign the enemy of
+royalty and the contemner of sacred monuments to the abominable Scarlet
+Lady. He gave one appealing look at his interrogator, but the side of
+the face turned towards him was immovable. It gave no positive
+discouragement to an affirmative reply; it even feigned ignorance.
+Seeking enlightenment, and taking heart of faith, the verger assented in
+the words, "Y-e-e-e-s,--I be-e-e-lieve so!" Then, his courage rising as
+he felt himself committed to the fact, he continued, with emphasis and a
+dictatorial nodding of the head, "Yes,--yes, he _was_."
+
+Many and laughable are the instances of such perplexity and mistake
+among the aged pieces of mechanism who have for years been sounding the
+same tune to generations of unquestioning ears, and who, not having an
+extra note in their gamut, can by no means bear to be played upon by
+strange hands. Age has its exemptions and immunities, however; might
+makes right, and one who has long been a dictator comes to be deemed an
+infallible authority. So they whine on, and are oftener believed than
+otherwise. As they constitute a class, and those whom I have to do with
+are chiefly the exceptions, I will forbear to dwell on stereotyped
+specimens, and turn to one so unlike the generality of her tribe, so
+utterly lawless, so completely at variance with all her surroundings,
+that I must beg leave to introduce her precisely as she introduced
+herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is an old place in England (there may be many such, but I know
+there is one) which is consecrated to imagination, romance, and memory.
+Abandoned by its owners as a residence, it is nevertheless maintained in
+sufficient repair to prevent its walls from crumbling or its beauty of
+outline from being marred, and stands forth a living epic, written in
+stone and oak, and meriting a place among the classics of the land.
+
+The favorite of tourists, artists, and antiquaries, it can well dispense
+with anything like an accurate description from a traveller who went
+thither, not to study, but to muse; so, putting in a plea, beforehand,
+for possible failures in observation and memory, I propose to myself
+nothing more than a re-indulgence of the reverie which took possession
+of me on my visit to Haddon Hall.
+
+We had spent the middle hours of the day at Chatsworth, that palace and
+museum of modern art, and, with senses bewildered and eyes dazzled by
+the magnificence of a ducal residence unparalleled, perhaps, in the
+world for its wealth and culture, we had set off, in the latter part of
+the afternoon, to view its antipodes. The circumstances and the hour
+were not inappropriate. Sated with the most perfect display of luxury
+and taste which the present age can boast, and somewhat weary with the
+toil of sight-seeing, a six-mile drive, the gradual decline of the
+summer day, the shadows gathering over the landscape, all acted as a
+gentle narcotic, and were a fit preparative for our approach to that
+old, deserted homestead, the first glimpse of which set my fancy
+roaming, and carried me away into a world of dreams.
+
+Hitherto I had been the contented occupant of an old yellow coach, and
+had been satisfied with the pace of two jaded post-horses. But, as I
+crossed the drawbridge and climbed the steep hill which led to the
+principal gateway, I found myself mounted on rapid wings, and whirling
+through the centuries. Not that I was rushing on in advance of the age.
+No,--the wings flapped backwards, they careered disdainfully over and
+beyond the region of reality; as we flew, the present became merged in
+the past, the actual gave place to the ideal.
+
+I am approaching a feudal fortress. The deep moat, the turreted walls,
+the old gray towers, the lattice of my lady's bower, the sentry pacing
+the battlements, the warder stationed at the gate, the severe exterior
+of the grim pile, the smoking hospitality that reigns within,--I
+recognize them all. Much that I have taken on faith from my childhood
+has already been realized since I touched English shores,--why not this?
+I climb the steep slope leading to the principal entrance, and knock at
+the gate. Hark! is not that the sound of an answering horn? Is not that
+distant rattling the clash of armor on the stones? Do I not hear the
+voice of the stout baron mustering his retainers to bid me welcome? If
+so, they are a long time about it,--for I have knocked once, twice,
+three times, and there is no admittance. It is a severe process, too;
+for, though the original gate, which may have been an iron portcullis
+for aught I know, has given place to rough boards, the latter are not
+particularly tender of my knuckles, and, though romance is romance, pain
+is a fact. So I fold my airy wings for the present, and look about me
+for a big stone to pound with. It is of no use. The old castle is deaf
+and dumb. It neither hears nor answers. I creep along the edge of a
+steep bank, pry round a corner of the building, gaze up at the high
+Gothic windows, but see nothing like a practicable approach, and turn
+back, discouraged. We take counsel together, I and my party, and at
+length condescend to the belief that our best hope of obtaining an
+entrance lies in a modern farm-house, at the foot of the eminence on
+which the fortress stands. The farm-house is beyond the hail of our
+voices, but our coachman, who is stationed there with his post-chaise, a
+witness of our embarrassment, makes an encouraging sign. That the
+farm-house bears some relation to the manor-house is suggested also by
+the fact that its garden boasts a yew-tree cut into the form of a
+peacock, and the book of heraldry says that the crest of the noble Earls
+of Rutland, who occupied the hall for centuries, includes, among its
+other belongings, "a peacock, in pride, proper."
+
+At last, just as our impatience had reached the verge of indignation, a
+little figure emerged from the shadow of the farm-house, and sauntered
+towards us. She was a pretty child, a true daughter of the Saxon race,
+fair-haired, blue-eyed, and sunny-complexioned. She was the pink of
+neatness, too, and it was evident that the time we had spent in waiting
+had been passed by her at her toilet, for the folds were still fresh in
+her snowy apron, and her golden hair glistened smoothly within the bars
+of a net,--that unfailing net, sure emblem of British female
+nationality. Her dainty little hat was trimmed with white ribbons, which
+streamed behind her in the breeze, and, altogether, she was as complete
+a picture as one would wish to see of youth, health, and
+self-complacency.
+
+The nonchalance with which she approached us was a thing I have never
+seen equalled. The independence of American children is proverbial; but
+democratic institutions never produced anything more saucily
+self-reliant than this little Briton. Without looking at us, or deigning
+any apology for the great gate,--which, it seems, is a mere barricade,
+not made to be opened,--she unlocked a side-postern, a rude door,
+consisting of two or three rough boards, and made a motion for us to
+enter. As we trod the time-worn pavement of the outer court, and gained
+an open quadrangle round which various apartments were grouped,
+imagination once more took possession of me, and I found myself peopling
+the place with its original inmates.
+
+"Oh, how old and story-like!" I exclaimed to my companions. "Can you not
+imagine knights on horseback prancing over these stones, and alighting
+at the great hall-door beyond?"
+
+"Horses never came up here!" was the interruption which my suggestion
+met from our practical little guide. "Horses couldn't climb those
+stairs," she added, somewhat scornfully; and I then observed that I had
+unconsciously ascended a rough, angular stairway, passable only to
+foot-passengers.
+
+Knights on foot, then, my fancy at once substituted; and as the child,
+now commencing her duties as show-woman, pointed out the servants'
+offices, it was no difficult matter to picture the baron's retainers
+lazily grouped around the stone walls of the low cells, for such the
+apartments were, polishing their master's armor, or bousing over jugs of
+ale, while handsome pages loitered about the court-yard, waiting the
+summons of their lord, or the sound of their lady's silver whistle.
+Fancy was an indispensable attendant in making the circuit of the
+apartments, which surrounded at least three sides of this outer
+quadrangle. Without her aid, they were simply remarkable for their
+similarity, their vacancy, their unfitness for any modern purpose save
+that of sheep-pens or lumber-rooms. Destitute of windows, so that the
+sun and air found admittance only through the doorway, without
+fireplaces, boarded floors, or plastered walls, they presented simply so
+many square feet of space walled in by stone and mortar. But Fancy had
+the power to enliven, furnish, people them. She suggested that their
+very number was an indication of sociability, excitement, noise, and
+mirth. Here, as in all feudal dwellings, the vast disproportion between
+the space allotted to the dependents and that reserved for the lord of
+the manor pointed to the time when each castle was a walled city, each
+baronial hall the home of a crowd of petty retainers. In that long-ago,
+what multitudes of voices had stirred the silence of the court-yard! The
+bare walls of the apartments then were hung with breast-plate, spear,
+and cross-bow,--trophies of war and the chase furnished decorations
+suited to the taste of the occupants, and the hides of slaughtered
+beasts carpeted the cold floor. Stirring tales of love and warfare
+gathered little knots of listeners; wandering minstrels sought
+hospitality, and repaid it in songs and rhymes; the beef and the bowl
+went round; my lord's jester made his privileged way into every circle
+in turn, and cracked his jokes at everybody's expense; and pretty Bess,
+my lady's maid, peeped in at the open door, just in time to join in the
+laugh against her lover.
+
+But Fancy only whispered, and another little attendant, whose name was
+Fact, spoke out, and interrupted her.
+
+"Would you like to see the family-plate?" asked our guide, with the air
+of one who felt she had really nothing worth showing, but was bound to
+fulfil her task; and, entering one of the stone-walled apartments, she
+pointed out a few enormous pewter platters, much dimmed by time and
+neglect, leaning against the wall.
+
+What visions of Christmas feasts and wassails these relics might have
+awakened in me, had I been left to gaze on them undisturbed, it is
+impossible to say; but my mind was not permitted to follow its own bent.
+
+"There's nicer ones down at the house, all brightened up," said the
+child, with simplicity, and looking disdain at the heirlooms she was
+displaying.
+
+The estimate put by the little girl upon the comparative value of old
+pewter dishes was suggestive. Whether the farm-house had robbed the
+castle, or the castle the farm-house, became at once an open question,
+and romance died in doubt.
+
+There could be no doubt, however, as to the genuineness of the rude old
+dining-hall to which we were conducted next. The clumsy oaken table
+still occupied the raised end of the apartment, where the baron feasted
+his principal guests. The carved and panelled gallery whence his
+minstrels cheered the banquet still stood firm on its massive pillars,
+and the great stags'-antlers which surmounted it told of his skill as a
+sportsman. What giant logs might once have burned in the wide
+fireplaces, what sounds of revelry have gone up to the bare rafters! Our
+guide's tongue went glibly as she pointed out these familiar objects,
+and in the kitchen, buttery, and wine-vault, which were situated
+conveniently near to the dining-hall, she seemed equally at home. It was
+easy to recognize in the great stone chimneys, with their heavy hooks
+and cross-bars, symptoms of banquets for which bullocks were roasted
+whole and sheep and calves slain by the dozen; but we needed her
+practised lips to suggest the uses of the huge stone chopping-blocks,
+the deeply sunk troughs, the narrow gutters that crossed the stone
+pavement, all illustrative of the primitive days when butcher and cook
+wrought simultaneously, and this contracted cellar served at once for
+slaughter-house and kitchen. Her little airy figure was in strange
+contrast with these gloomy passages, these stones that had reeked with
+blood and smoke. She glided before us into the mysterious depths of the
+storehouse and ale-vault, as the new moon glides among damp, black
+clouds; as she directed our attention to the oaken cupboards for bread
+and cheese, the stone benches that once supported long rows of casks,
+the little wicket in the doorway, through which the butler doled out
+provisions to a waiting crowd of poor, she might well have been likened
+to a freshly trimmed lamp, lighting up the dark, mysterious past.
+
+Freshly trimmed she unquestionably was, and by careful hands, but not a
+voluntary light; for, the moment her explanations were finished, or our
+curiosity satisfied, she sank into an indifference of speech and
+attitude which proved her distaste to a place and a task utterly foreign
+to her nature. Evidently, the hall which we had come so far to see, and
+were so eager to explore, was at once the most familiar object of her
+life and her most utter aversion. She had been drilled into a mechanical
+knowledge of its history, but the place itself was to her what an old
+grammar or spelling-book is to the unwilling pupil,--a thing to be
+learned by rote, to be abused, contemned, escaped from. As we finished
+our exploration of the lower floor, she probably breathed a sigh of
+relief, feeling that the first chapter of her task was concluded.
+
+But a second and more difficult was yet to follow,--for we now ascended
+a staircase of uncemented blocks of stone, crossed a passage, and found
+ourselves in a long gallery or hall, the finest and best-preserved room
+in the castle, the state-apartment and ball-room of the lords of the
+manor. Our admiration at once broke forth in words of surprise and
+delight. The architecture of this room was of much more recent date than
+that portion of the building which we had already visited. It was
+Elizabethan in its style, and one of the finest specimens of the period.
+It was floored and wainscoted with oak; its frieze richly carved and
+adorned with boars' heads, thistles, and roses; its ceiling, also of
+oak, beautifully panelled and ornamented. There was a great square
+recess in the middle of the gallery, and along one side of it a row of
+bow-windows, through whose diamond panes a fine view was afforded of the
+quaint old garden and balconies below. Here, doubtless, knights and
+dames of the olden time had danced, coquetted, quarrelled, and been
+reconciled. Within those deep embrasures courtiers in ruffs and plumes
+had sued for ladies' favors, and plotted deep intrigues of state. What
+stories these walls could tell, had they but tongues to speak! What
+dreams did their very silence conjure up!
+
+Led by a more erratic spirit than that even of our child-guide, I am
+afraid I lent an inattentive ear to her accurate statement of the
+length, breadth, and height of the gallery in which we stood, the
+precise date of its erection, the noble owners of the various
+coats-of-arms carved above the doorway; for I remember only that she
+seemed confident and well-informed, and recited her lesson faithfully
+so long as she was suffered to follow the beaten track. How impossible
+it was to extract anything beyond that from her we soon had proof.
+
+She ushered us next into my lord's parlor, which nearly adjoined the
+gallery. This room was hung with arras, retained a few articles of
+ancient furniture, had one or two pictures hanging on its walls, and
+presented, altogether, a more habitable look than any other portion of
+the castle. Our little maid had got on well with her description of this
+room, had pointed out the portrait of Prince Arthur, once a resident at
+the hall, had introduced that of Will Somers, my lord's jester, as
+glibly as if Will were a playmate of her own, had deciphered for us the
+excellent moral precept carved in old English beneath the royal arms,
+"Drede God and honour the King," and was proceeding rapidly with an
+array of measurements and dates, when I unluckily interrupted her,--I
+think it was to ask some question about the tapestry. She looked at me
+reproachfully, indignantly,--just as a child reciting the
+multiplication-table before the School-Committee would look, if tripped
+up between the numbers, or as a boy, taken advantage of in play, might
+cry, "No fair!" She did not condescend to answer me, perhaps she could
+not, but paused a moment, reflected, went deliberately back in her
+recital, repeated the last few dates and phrases by way of gaining an
+impetus, and then went on without faltering to the end of her prescribed
+narration.
+
+Poor child! She had my sympathy, and has still. What a grudge she must
+owe us tourists, even the tamest and most submissive of us, for whom she
+is thus compelled to tax her unwilling memory!
+
+But if her spirits were damped, her good-humor threatened, it was for a
+minute only. Upon completing our rapid survey of my lord's parlor, and
+looking round for the guide who should conduct us farther, she had
+become invisible. So we moved on without her, and commenced exploring a
+narrow passage with a certain sense of bewilderment at its loneliness,
+and the doubt whither it might lead, when, suddenly, we were startled by
+a merry laugh, which seemed to ring through the air directly above our
+heads. Was it a mocking spirit that haunted the place? or one of the old
+figures on the tapestry, started into life? We looked up, and there, on
+a rough platform of pine boards, projecting from the wall, stood our
+Fenella. She was leaning over the shoulder of an artist-boy, who, seated
+at his easel, was copying one of the Gorgon-heads that stood out on the
+faded tapestry. She had dismissed us wholly from her thoughts, and,
+giving play to her native fun and coquetry, was taunting the youth with
+the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she
+last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the
+boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive
+which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some
+elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her
+future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer
+felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall,
+and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring out in
+fresh colors the staring eyes and mummied cheeks which would otherwise
+soon be lost to memory. She certainly made the most of her opportunity
+to taunt and tease him, for there was time for a laugh and a word of
+raillery only, to which he seemed too shamefaced to respond, before she
+was at our side again, gravely announcing, "My lady's chamber!"--and as
+we looked around the apartment, whose furniture and decorations imparted
+to it a superior air of neatness and refinement to that observable
+elsewhere, she pointed out to us a private doorway, conducting to a
+flight of steps, and affording an exit by which "my lady" had easy
+access to the court-yard, and thence to the chapel where she performed
+her devotions.
+
+"And what are the rooms opposite?" we asked, pointing to a long row of
+windows on the second floor, on the opposite side of the quadrangle to
+that of which we had now completed the inspection.
+
+"Those rooms are never shown," was the mysterious answer.
+
+"But you will show them to _us_" (spoken coaxingly).
+
+She shook her head, and sealed her lips, with an expression of
+determination.
+
+"What is in them?"
+
+"Oh, nothing in particular."
+
+"Then we might see them."
+
+No encouragement, but, on the contrary, a resolute negative.
+
+A bribe was held out,--for, by this time, the child's air of mystery and
+reserve had suggested a closet like that of Bluebeard, a chamber of
+torture, or, at least, the proofs of some family-secret.
+
+We might as well have offered a two-shilling bribe to the Iron Duke
+himself. The miniature castle-keeper was so firm and so non-committal
+that she disarmed us of all our ingenuity, defeated all our tactics, and
+we gave up the point. I have since learned that this quarter of the
+mansion consists of a labyrinth of rooms, shut up because devoid of
+interest, and containing only some old lumber. To have conducted us
+through them would have been to disobey orders, and, worse still,
+establish a precedent, from which the child might well shrink. It would
+have doubled her arduous round of duty. It was policy, no less than
+loyalty, which had inspired her.
+
+So, too, when we came to inspect the chapel. She mounted an old oak
+chest in the rear of the little sanctuary, just beneath the solitary
+window, whose quaint patterns in stained glass pointed to centuries long
+past. Seated comfortably on this elevation, she rehearsed the history
+and described the architecture of the most primitive place of worship I
+ever saw,--or, if she left her post to point out some minuter detail,
+she returned to it as jealously as a watch-dog to some spot which he is
+specially appointed to guard. When our curiosity was otherwise
+satisfied,--when we had even ascended to the rude confessional, which
+was a mere excavation in the soft stone of the wall,--when we had put
+our hands in the hollow, not unlike a swallow's nest in a mud-bank, once
+the receptacle for holy water,--when we had descended the stony pathway,
+for it was so worn as scarcely to merit the name of staircase,--when,
+standing once more on the chapel-pavement, with minds excited by the
+thought of those monkish days when priestcraft ruled the land,--our eyes
+naturally fell on the old oak chest. What further revelation might not
+this disclose! What sacred relics, what curious church-plate, what
+vellum manuscript, might not be hidden beneath this heavy lid! Would she
+rise and let us see?
+
+No,--she maintained her seat and her reserve with as much rigidity as on
+the former occasion. Unconvinced by this experience, our imaginations
+still ran riot. They shadowed forth every possible beauty and horror
+which such a giant chest might contain. The story even of "The Bride of
+the Mistletoe-Bough" might be verified, if we could but get a peep. At
+last we prevailed. The child was persuaded to dismount, we lifted the
+cover, and the chest was empty,--literally empty.
+
+Once more the plain fact of the present had swept away the cobwebs of
+the past, the real had banished the ideal. While the child of to-day
+sought only a comfortable rest from weariness, we had been seeking
+myths. She looked on as indignant as a dethroned queen. We turned away a
+little mortified, and a good deal disappointed.
+
+But the Fenella of the castle was not so very tired, after all. True,
+she was tired of the old manor-house, tired of us, tired of her own dull
+routine of duty; but there was a well-spring of freshness in her yet.
+She moved languidly, to be sure, as she now led the way to the tower,
+the only portion of the castle yet unvisited. Following her, we
+ascended, first, to a bare upper room, a sort of anteroom, from which
+the ascent to the tower commenced. It presented a solid inclosure of
+stone, except on the western side, where it was dimly lighted through
+one or two slits in the masonry. Turning my eyes in this direction, I
+saw our little guide leaning against the stone framework of one of these
+chinks in the wall. The beams of western sunlight came slanting in at
+precisely the angle of her figure as she leaned back in infantile
+repose; her white ribbons, her snowy apron, her golden hair caught and
+held the sunshine, and the ray of light which relieved the gloom of the
+gray old vault seemed to emanate from the child.
+
+One of our party addressed some question to her regarding the probable
+design of the empty room in which we stood; but there was no
+answer,--not even a responsive glance. Her eyes were fixed upon the
+stone roof. She looked spell-bound. Before we could follow the direction
+of her steady gaze, we were startled by the flapping of wings overhead,
+and, still more, by the sudden rushing forward of the child with a loud
+cry of "Shoo! shoo!" and with her hands stretched eagerly into the air.
+Our presence had disturbed a swallow, which had found its way in through
+one of the slits, and, perhaps, built a nest in some crevice of the
+wall. The girl's languor was instantaneously dispelled by the discovery
+and the excitement of pursuit. Here, now, was congenial sport. Hopeless
+as was the attempt to catch the bird, the joy of frightening it was
+sure; and our guide sprang wildly from side to side of the building,
+uttering exciting exclamations, and making vain passes at the little
+creature, which flew round high above her head, now and then settling in
+some secure "coigne of vantage." In these intervals we endeavored to
+catch the attention of the mischievous fowler, but her task had ended
+with this tower-room, she had done with us, she had found an unexpected
+source of sport, and was not to be deterred from an enjoyment which she
+probably thought well-earned. With one eye following the least motion of
+the bird, she informed us, at last, in reply to repeated inquiries, that
+there was nothing to be told about the room we were in,--that it merely
+led to the tower,--we could go up into the tower, if we wished.
+
+She must go with us and show us the way.
+
+"No," was the cool reply. She never went into the tower; she never went
+any farther than this.
+
+Glancing at the dilapidated state of the stairs leading to the
+successive stones of the tower, we were almost tempted to believe that
+her instinct of self-preservation had reached its climax here,--that we
+might break our necks, if we liked,--she preferred not to run the risk.
+Resolved to satisfy our suspicions, we pressed the point, and, after
+many inquiries and waiting a considerable time upon the motions of the
+child and her new plaything, we got the brief and somewhat scornful
+explanation,--
+
+"What if some other party should come while I was away?"
+
+"We part here, then?"
+
+She nodded in assent, received the fee for her services without
+acknowledgment, and saw us depart on our breakneck expedition with an
+indifference equalled only by the nonchalance with which she had
+admitted us on our arrival. The moment our backs were turned, she
+resumed her play.
+
+After exploring the successive stories of the tower in safety, we
+descended by way of the anteroom, but the bird and its pursuer had both
+of them flown. We passed through a door she had previously pointed out,
+and gained the garden as surreptitiously as did Dorothy Vernon, of old,
+when, according to the tradition, she escaped through this same doorway
+on the night of her sister's nuptials, and eloped with her lover, Mr.
+(afterwards Sir John) Manners, who had long been haunting the
+neighboring forest as an outlaw. We strolled through the ancient garden,
+all ivied and moss-grown, admired the stone balustrade, which,
+time-stained and mouldy, is still the student's favorite bit of
+architecture, and at last made our way back to the farm-house,--I am
+sure I do not remember how, for we were as deficient in a guide as on
+our first attempt at entrance. Whether another party arrived while we
+were in the tower, and were engrossing her attention,--whether she was
+engaged in the more agreeable office of coquetting with the young
+artist, or was still chasing the swallow from room to room of the
+manor-house, I do not know. We saw her no more. She had barely
+condescended to let us in, and now left us to find our way out as we
+could.
+
+She cared nothing at all for us. All the interest we had manifested in
+her (and it was considerable) had failed to awaken any emotion. We were
+a stereotyped feature of the old hall; and the old hall, though she had
+sprung from its root, and her life had been nourished by its strength,
+was no part of herself,--was her antipathy. Still I never think of the
+mansion, with all the romantic associations which cluster around it, but
+the image of this child comes to break my reverie, as she did on the day
+when it was first indulged.
+
+So we go to visit some royal oak, and bring away, as a memento, the
+daisy which blooms at its foot; so we stand, as the reward of toil and
+fatigue, upon an Alpine glacier, and the trophy and pledge of our visit
+are the forget-me-not that grew on its margin. Thus youth and beauty
+ever press on the footsteps of old age, and youth and beauty bear away
+the palm.
+
+My faith in legendary lore is confirmed, when I call to mind the Gothic
+fortress, with its strong defences against the enemy, its rude
+suggestions of centuries of hospitality, its tower-lattices, whence
+generation after generation of high-born maids waved signals to knightly
+lovers, its stairways, worn slippery with the tread of heavy-mailed
+warriors, its chapel-vault, where chivalrous lord and noble dame have
+turned to dust. But there is a faith more precious than the faith in old
+song and legend; and the golden-haired child, who flourishes so fresh
+and fair amidst all this ruin and decay, stands forth to my mind as an
+emblem of that power which renovates earth and defies time. Had she been
+a pattern child, had her instructors (whoever they were) succeeded in
+moulding her into a mere machine, she might not so vividly have roused
+my interest; but there was something in her saucy independence, her
+wayward freaks, her coquettish airs, her fiery chase after the swallow,
+which--breaking in, as they did, upon the docility with which she
+otherwise went through her round of duty--revivified the desolation of
+the old hall with a sudden outburst of humanity. Everywhere else the
+fountain of life seemed to have died out, but here it gushed forth a
+living stream.
+
+We gaze down the centuries and see in them ignorance, error, warning,
+and ruin at last. What hope for the race, then, if this were all? But it
+is not all. The child's foot treading lightly over the graves is the
+type of the _time-is_ triumphing over the _time-was_. Full of faults and
+imperfections, she is still the daughter of Hope and Opportunity. She
+has the past for her teacher, and the door of knowledge, repentance, and
+faith stands open before her. Thus childhood is the rainbow of God's
+providence, and the brightest feature of His covenant with men.
+
+Silence, desolation, and decay have set their seal upon old Haddon Hall,
+but chance has set a child over them all, and the lesson her simple
+presence teaches is worth more to me than all the Idyls of the King.
+
+And thus it is that I treasure up the memory of her among my catalogue
+of guides; and so she did more for me than she promised, when she
+undertook to lend me her light through the old Hall.
+
+If there are any who can live without thus borrowing, then let them
+disparage guides. For the rest, the best guide is Humility. We have all
+so many dark paths to tread from the cradle to the grave, that we need
+to lay hold on all the helps we can. Groping blindly down the avenues
+of Time, who is there that does not long to grasp some friendly hand, or
+follow in the track of some traveller familiar with the way?
+
+For me, Experience is a staff on which I am glad to lean, Simplicity is
+an unfailing leader where Learning might go astray. Trust is a lamp that
+burns through the darkest night; and sometimes, when strong men are weak
+and wise men foolish, strength and wisdom are given unto babes, and he
+whom the counsels of the elders cannot save may walk the narrowest path
+in safety with his hand in the hand of a little child.
+
+God grant me guides, then, to my journey's end! God guide us all,
+whether we will or no! guide the nations, and make for them a way
+through the dust, the turmoil, and the strife which Time has heaped in
+their path, to the freshness and promise of the new birth! guide each
+poor yearning soul through the darkness and doubt that overshadow it, as
+it journeys on to the clear light of immortal day!
+
+
+
+
+THE KALIF OF BALDACCA.
+
+
+    Into the city of Kambalu,
+    By the road that leadeth to Ispahan,
+    At the head of his dusty caravan,
+    Laden with treasure from realms afar,
+    Baldacca and Kelat and Kandahar,
+    Rode the great captain Alaù.
+
+    The Khan from his palace-window gazed:
+    He saw in the thronging street beneath,
+    In the light of the setting sun, that blazed
+    Through the clouds of dust by the caravan raised,
+    The flash of harness and jewelled sheath,
+    And the shining scimitars of the guard,
+    And the weary camels that bared their teeth,
+    As they passed and passed through the gates unbarred
+    Into the shade of the palace-yard.
+
+    Thus into the city of Kambalu
+    Rode the great captain Alaù;
+    And he stood before the Khan, and said,--
+    "The enemies of my lord are dead;
+    All the Kalifs of all the West
+    Bow and obey his least behest;
+    The plains are dark with the mulberry-trees,
+    The weavers are busy in Samarcand,
+    The miners are sifting the golden sand,
+    The divers are plunging for pearls in the seas,
+    And peace and plenty are in the land.
+
+    "Only Baldacca's Kalif alone
+    Rose in rebellion against thy throne:
+    His treasures are at thy palace-door,
+    With the swords and the shawls and the jewels he wore;
+    His body is dust o'er the Desert blown.
+
+    "A mile outside of Baldacca's gate
+    I left my forces to lie in wait,
+    Concealed by forests and hillocks of sand,
+    And forward dashed with a handful of men
+    To lure the old tiger from his den
+    Into the ambush I had planned.
+    Ere we reached the town the alarm was spread,
+    For we heard the sound of gongs from within;
+    With clash of cymbals and warlike din
+    The gates swung wide; we turned and fled,
+    And the garrison sallied forth and pursued,
+    With the gray old Kalif at their head,
+    And above them the banner of Mahomed:
+    Thus we snared them all, and the town was subdued.
+
+    "As in at the gate we rode, behold,
+    A tower that was called the Tower of Gold!
+    For there the Kalif had hidden his wealth,
+    Heaped and hoarded and piled on high,
+    Like sacks of wheat in a granary;
+    And there the old miser crept by stealth
+    To feel of the gold that gave him health,
+    To gaze and gloat with his hungry eye
+    On jewels that gleamed like a glow-worm's spark,
+    Or the eyes of a panther in the dark.
+
+    "I said to the Kalif,--'Thou art old,
+    Thou hast no need of so much gold.
+    Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here,
+    Till the breath of battle was hot and near,
+    But have sown through the land these useless hoards
+    To spring into shining blades of swords,
+    And keep thine honor sweet and clear.
+    These grains of gold are not grains of wheat;
+    These bars of silver thou canst not eat;
+    These jewels and pearls and precious stones
+    Cannot cure the aches in thy bones,
+    Nor keep the feet of Death one hour
+    From climbing the stairways of thy tower!'
+
+    "Then into this dungeon I locked the drone,
+    And left him to feed there all alone
+    In the honey-cells of his golden hive:
+    Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan
+    Was heard from those massive walls of stone,
+    Nor again was the Kalif seen alive!
+
+    "When at last we unlocked the door,
+    We found him dead upon the floor;
+    The rings had dropped from his withered hands,
+    His teeth were like bones in the Desert sands;
+    Still clutching his treasures he had died;
+    And as he lay there, he appeared
+    A statue of gold with a silver beard,
+    His arms outstretched as if crucified."
+
+    This is the story, strange and true,
+    That the great captain Alaù
+    Told to his brother the Tartar Khan,
+    When he rode that day into Kambalu
+    By the road that leadeth to Ispahan.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE ON THE SEA ISLANDS.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+A few days before Christmas, we were delighted at receiving a beautiful
+Christmas Hymn from Whittier, written by request, especially for our
+children. They learned it very easily, and enjoyed singing it. We showed
+them the writer's picture, and told them he was a very good friend of
+theirs, who felt the deepest interest in them, and had written this hymn
+expressly for them to sing,--which made them very proud and happy. Early
+Christmas morning, we were wakened by the people knocking at the doors
+and windows, and shouting, "Merry Christmas!" After distributing some
+little presents among them, we went to the church, which had been
+decorated with holly, pine, cassena, mistletoe, and the hanging moss,
+and had a very Christmas-like look. The children of our school assembled
+there, and we gave them the nice, comfortable clothing, and the
+picture-books, which had been kindly sent by some Philadelphia ladies.
+There were at least a hundred and fifty children present. It was very
+pleasant to see their happy, expectant little faces. To them, it was a
+wonderful Christmas-Day,--such as they had never dreamed of before.
+There was cheerful sunshine without, lighting up the beautiful
+moss-drapery of the oaks, and looking in joyously through the open
+windows; and there were bright faces and glad hearts within. The long,
+dark night of the Past, with all its sorrows and its fears, was
+forgotten; and for the Future,--the eyes of these freed children see no
+clouds in it. It is full of sunlight, they think, and they trust in it,
+perfectly.
+
+After the distribution of the gifts, the children were addressed by some
+of the gentlemen present. They then sang Whittier's Hymn, the "John
+Brown" song, and several of their own hymns, among them a very singular
+one, commencing,--
+
+    "I wonder where my mudder gone;
+      Sing, O graveyard!
+    Graveyard ought to know me;
+      Ring, Jerusalem!
+    Grass grow in de graveyard;
+      Sing, O graveyard!
+    Graveyard ought to know me;
+      Ring, Jerusalem!"
+
+They improvise many more words as they sing. It is one of the strangest,
+most mournful things I ever heard. It is impossible to give any idea of
+the deep pathos of the refrain,--
+
+    "Sing, O graveyard!"
+
+In this, and many other hymns, the words seem to have but little
+meaning; but the tones,--a whole lifetime of despairing sadness is
+concentrated in them. They sing, also, "Jehovyah, Hallelujah," which we
+like particularly:--
+
+      "De foxes hab holes,
+      An' de birdies hab nes',
+      But de Son ob Man he hab not where
+      To lay de weary head.
+
+            CHORUS.
+
+    "Jehovyah, Hallelujah! De Lord He will purvide!
+    Jehovyah, Hallelujah! De Lord He will purvide!"
+
+They repeat the words many times. "De foxes hab holes," and the
+succeeding lines, are sung in the most touching, mournful tones; and
+then the chorus--"Jehovyah, Hallelujah"--swells forth triumphantly, in
+glad contrast.
+
+Christmas night, the children came in and had several grand shouts. They
+were too happy to keep still.
+
+"Oh, Miss, all I want to do is to sing and shout!" said our little pet,
+Amaretta. And sing and shout she did, to her heart's content.
+
+She read nicely, and was very fond of books. The tiniest children are
+delighted to get a book in their hands. Many of them already know their
+letters. The parents are eager to have them learn. They sometimes said
+to me,--
+
+"Do, Miss, let de chil'en learn eberyting dey can. _We_ nebber hab no
+chance to learn nuttin', but we wants de chil'en to learn."
+
+They are willing to make many sacrifices that their children may attend
+school. One old woman, who had a large family of children and
+grandchildren, came regularly to school in the winter, and took her seat
+among the little ones. She was at least sixty years old. Another
+woman--who had one of the best faces I ever saw--came daily, and brought
+her baby in her arms. It happened to be one of the best babies in the
+world, a perfect little "model of deportment," and allowed its mother to
+pursue her studies without interruption.
+
+While taking charge of the store, one day, one of the men who came in
+told me a story which interested me much. He was a carpenter, living on
+this island, and just before the capture of Port Royal had been taken by
+his master to the mainland,--"the Main," as the people call it,--to
+assist in building some houses which were to shelter the families of the
+Rebels in case the "Yankees" should come. The master afterward sent him
+back to the island, providing him with a pass, to bring away a boat and
+some of the people. On his arrival he found that the Union troops were
+in possession, and determined to remain here with his family instead of
+returning to his master. Some of his fellow-servants, who had been left
+on "the Main," hearing that the Federal troops had come, resolved to
+make their escape to the islands. They found a boat of their master's,
+out of which a piece six feet square had been cut. In the night they
+went to the boat, which had been sunk in a creek near the house,
+measured the hole, and, after several nights' work in the woods, made a
+piece large enough to fit in. They then mended and sank it again, as
+they had found it. The next night five of them embarked. They had a
+perilous journey, often passing quite near the enemy's boats. They
+travelled at night, and in the day ran close up to the shore out of
+sight. Sometimes they could hear the hounds, which had been sent in
+pursuit of them, baying in the woods. Their provisions gave out, and
+they were nearly exhausted. At last they succeeded in passing all the
+enemy's boats, and reached one of our gun-boats in safety. They were
+taken on board and kindly cared for, and then sent to this island, where
+their families, who had no hope of ever seeing them again, welcomed them
+with great rejoicing.
+
+We were also told the story of two girls, one about ten, the other
+fifteen, who, having been taken by their master up into the country, on
+the mainland, at the time of the capture of the islands, determined to
+try to escape to their parents, who had been left on this island. They
+stole away at night, and travelled through woods and swamps for two
+days, without eating. Sometimes their strength gave out, and they would
+sink down, thinking they could go no farther; but they had brave little
+hearts, and got up again and struggled on, till at last they reached
+Port-Royal Ferry, in a state of utter exhaustion. They were seen there
+by a boat-load of people who were also making their escape. The boat was
+too full to take them in; but the people, on reaching this island, told
+the children's father of their whereabouts, and he immediately took a
+boat, and hastened to the ferry. The poor little creatures were almost
+wild with joy when they saw him. When they were brought to their mother,
+she fell down "jes' as if she was dead,"--so our informant expressed
+it,--overpowered with joy on beholding the "lost who were found."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+New-Year's-Day--Emancipation-Day--was a glorious one to us. The morning
+was quite cold, the coldest we had experienced; but we were determined
+to go to the celebration at Camp Saxton,--the camp of the First Regiment
+South-Carolina Volunteers,--whither the General and Colonel Higginson
+had bidden us, on this, "the greatest day in the nation's history." We
+enjoyed perfectly the exciting scene on board the Flora. There was an
+eager, wondering crowd of the freed people in their holiday-attire, with
+the gayest of head-handkerchiefs, the whitest of aprons, and the
+happiest of faces. The band was playing, the flags streaming, everybody
+talking merrily and feeling strangely happy. The sun shone brightly, the
+very waves seemed to partake of the universal gayety, and danced and
+sparkled more joyously than ever before. Long before we reached Camp
+Saxton we could see the beautiful grove, and the ruins of the old
+Huguenot fort near it. Some companies of the First Regiment were drawn
+up in line under the trees, near the landing, to receive us. A fine,
+soldierly-looking set of men; their brilliant dress against the trees
+(they were then wearing red pantaloons) invested them with a
+semi-barbaric splendor. It was my good fortune to find among the
+officers an old friend,--and what it was to meet a friend from the
+North, in our isolated Southern life, no one can imagine who has not
+experienced the pleasure. Letters were an unspeakable luxury,--we
+hungered for them, we could never get enough; but to meet old
+friends,--that was "too much, too much," as the people here say, when
+they are very much in earnest. Our friend took us over the camp, and
+showed us all the arrangements. Everything looked clean and comfortable,
+much neater, we were told, than in most of the white camps. An officer
+told us that he had never seen a regiment in which the men were so
+honest. "In many other camps," said he, "the colonel and the rest of us
+would find it necessary to place a guard before our tents. We never do
+it here. They are left entirely unguarded. Yet nothing has ever been
+touched." We were glad to know that. It is a remarkable fact, when we
+consider that these men have all their lives been _slaves_; and we know
+what the teachings of Slavery are.
+
+The celebration took place in the beautiful grove of live-oaks adjoining
+the camp. It was the largest grove we had seen. I wish it were possible
+to describe fitly the scene which met our eyes as we sat upon the stand,
+and looked down on the crowd before us. There were the black soldiers in
+their blue coats and scarlet pantaloons, the officers of this and other
+regiments in their handsome uniforms, and crowds of lookers-on,--men,
+women, and children, of every complexion, grouped in various attitudes
+under the moss-hung trees. The faces of all wore a happy, interested
+look. The exercises commenced with a prayer by the chaplain of the
+regiment. An ode, written for the occasion by Professor Zachos, was read
+by him, and then sung. Colonel Higginson then introduced Dr. Brisbane,
+who read the President's Proclamation, which was enthusiastically
+cheered. Rev. Mr. French presented to the Colonel two very elegant
+flags, a gift to the regiment from the Church of the Puritans,
+accompanying them by an appropriate and enthusiastic speech. At its
+conclusion, before Colonel Higginson could reply, and while he still
+stood holding the flags in his hand, some of the colored people, of
+their own accord, commenced singing, "My Country, 'tis of thee." It was
+a touching and beautiful incident, and sent a thrill through all our
+hearts. The Colonel was deeply moved by it. He said that that reply was
+far more effective than any speech he could make. But he did make one of
+those stirring speeches which are "half battles." All hearts swelled
+with emotion as we listened to his glorious words,--"stirring the soul
+like the sound of a trumpet."
+
+His soldiers are warmly attached to him, and he evidently feels towards
+them all as if they were his children. The people speak of him as "the
+officer who never leaves his regiment for pleasure," but devotes
+himself, with all his rich gifts of mind and heart, to their interests.
+It is not strange that his judicious kindness, ready sympathy, and rare
+fascination of manner should attach them to him strongly. He is one's
+ideal of an officer. There is in him much of the grand, knightly spirit
+of the olden time,--scorn of all that is mean and ignoble, pity for the
+weak, chivalrous devotion to the cause of the oppressed.
+
+General Saxton spoke also, and was received with great enthusiasm.
+Throughout the morning, repeated cheers were given for him by the
+regiment, and joined in heartily by all the people. They know him to be
+one of the best and noblest men in the world. His Proclamation for
+Emancipation-Day we thought, if possible, even more beautiful than the
+Thanksgiving Proclamation.
+
+At the close of Colonel Higginson's speech he presented the flags to the
+color-bearers, Sergeant Rivers and Sergeant Sutton, with an earnest
+charge, to which they made appropriate replies. We were particularly
+pleased with Robert Sutton, who is a man of great natural intelligence,
+and whose remarks were simple, eloquent, and forcible.
+
+Mrs. Gage also uttered some earnest words; and then the regiment sang
+"John Brown" with much spirit. After the meeting we saw the
+dress-parade, a brilliant and beautiful sight. An officer told us that
+the men went through the drill remarkably well,--that the ease and
+rapidity with which they learned the movements were wonderful. To us it
+seemed strange as a miracle,--this black regiment, the first mustered
+into the service of the United States, doing itself honor in the sight
+of the officers of other regiments, many of whom, doubtless, "came to
+scoff." The men afterwards had a great feast, ten oxen having been
+roasted whole for their especial benefit.
+
+We went to the landing, intending to take the next boat for Beaufort;
+but finding it very much crowded, waited for another. It was the
+softest, loveliest moonlight; we seated ourselves on the ruined wall of
+the old fort; and when the boat had got a short distance from the shore
+the band in it commenced playing "Sweet Home." The moonlight on the
+water, the perfect stillness around, the wildness and solitude of the
+ruins, all seemed to give new pathos to that ever dear and beautiful old
+song. It came very near to all of us,--strangers in that strange
+Southern land. After a while we retired to one of the tents,--for the
+night-air, as usual, grew dangerously damp,--and, sitting around the
+bright wood-fire, enjoyed the brilliant and entertaining conversation.
+Very unwilling were we to go home; for, besides the attractive society,
+we knew that the soldiers were to have grand shouts and a general
+jubilee that night. But the Flora was coming, and we were obliged to say
+a reluctant farewell to Camp Saxton and the hospitable dwellers therein,
+and hasten to the landing. We promenaded the deck of the steamer, sang
+patriotic songs, and agreed that moonlight and water had never looked so
+beautiful as on that night. At Beaufort we took the row-boat for St.
+Helena; and the boatmen, as they rowed, sang some of their sweetest,
+wildest hymns. It was a fitting close to such a day. Our hearts were
+filled with an exceeding great gladness; for, although the Government
+had left much undone, we knew that Freedom was surely born in our land
+that day. It seemed too glorious a good to realize,--this beginning of
+the great work we had so longed and prayed for.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+L. and I had one day an interesting visit to a plantation about six
+miles from ours. The house is beautifully situated in the midst of noble
+pine-trees, on the banks of a large creek. The place was owned by a very
+wealthy Rebel family, and is one of the pleasantest and healthiest on
+the island. The vicinity of the pines makes it quite healthy. There were
+a hundred and fifty people on it,--one hundred of whom had come from
+Edisto Island at the time of its evacuation by our troops. There were
+not houses enough to accommodate them, and they had to take shelter in
+barns, out-houses, or any other place they could find. They afterwards
+built rude dwellings for themselves, which did not, however, afford them
+much protection in bad weather. The superintendent told us that they
+were well-behaved and industrious. One old woman interested us greatly.
+Her name was Daphne; she was probably more than a hundred years old; had
+had fifty grandchildren, sixty-five great-grandchildren, and three
+great-great-grandchildren. Entirely blind, she yet seemed very cheerful
+and happy. She told us that she was brought with her parents from Africa
+at the time of the Revolution. A bright, happy old face was hers, and
+she retained her faculties remarkably well. Fifteen of the people had
+escaped from the mainland in the previous spring. They were pursued, and
+one of them was overtaken by his master in the swamps. A fierce grapple
+ensued,--the master on horseback, the man on foot. The former drew a
+pistol and shot his slave through the arm, shattering it dreadfully.
+Still, the heroic man fought desperately, and at last succeeded in
+unhorsing his master, and beating him until he was senseless. He then
+made his escape, and joined the rest of the party.
+
+One of the most interesting sights we saw was a baptism among the
+people. On one Sunday there were a hundred and fifty baptized in the
+creek near the church. They looked very picturesque in their white
+aprons and bright frocks and handkerchiefs. As they marched in
+procession down to the river's edge, and during the ceremony, the
+spectators, with whom the banks were crowded, sang glad, triumphant
+songs. The freed people on this island are all Baptists.
+
+We were much disappointed in the Southern climate. We found it much
+colder than we had expected,--quite cold enough for as thick winter
+clothing as one would wear at the North. The houses, heated only by open
+fires, were never comfortably warm. In the floor of our sitting-room
+there was a large crack through which we could see the ground beneath;
+and through this and the crevices of the numerous doors and windows the
+wind came chillingly. The church in which we taught school was
+particularly damp and cold. There was no chimney, and we could have no
+fire at all. Near the close of the winter a stove came for us, but it
+could not be made to draw; we were nearly suffocated with smoke, and
+gave it up in despair. We got so thoroughly chilled and benumbed within,
+that for several days we had school out-of-doors, where it was much
+warmer. Our school-room was a pleasant one,--for ceiling the blue sky
+above, for walls the grand old oaks with their beautiful
+moss-drapery,--but the dampness of the ground made it unsafe for us to
+continue the experiment.
+
+At a later period, during a few days' visit to some friends living on
+the Milne Plantation, then the head-quarters of the First
+South-Carolina, which was on picket-duty at Port-Royal Ferry, we had an
+opportunity of seeing something of Port-Royal Island. We had pleasant
+rides through the pine barrens. Indeed, riding on horseback was our
+chief recreation at the South, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. The
+"Secesh" horses, though small, poor, and mean-looking, when compared
+with ours, are generally excellent for the saddle, well-trained and very
+easy. I remember particularly one ride that we had while on Port-Royal
+Island. We visited the Barnwell Plantation, one of the finest places on
+the island. It is situated on Broad River. The grounds are extensive,
+and are filled with magnificent live-oaks, magnolias, and other trees.
+We saw one noble old oak, said to be the largest on these islands. Some
+of the branches have been cut off, but the remaining ones cover an area
+of more than a hundred feet in circumference. We rode to a point whence
+the Rebels on the opposite side of the river are sometimes to be seen.
+But they were not visible that day; and we were disappointed in our
+long-cherished hope of seeing a "real live Rebel." On leaving the
+plantation, we rode through a long avenue of oaks,--the moss-hung
+branches forming a perfect arch over our heads,--and then for miles
+through the pine barrens. There was an Italian softness in the April
+air. Only a low, faint murmur--hardly "the slow song of the sea"--could
+be heard among the pines. The ground was thickly carpeted with ferns of
+a vivid green. We found large violets, purple and white, and azaleas of
+a deeper pink and heavier fragrance than ours. It was leaving Paradise,
+to emerge from the beautiful woods upon the public road,--the shell-road
+which runs from Beaufort to the Ferry. Then we entered a by-way leading
+to the plantation, where we found the Cherokee rose in all its glory.
+The hedges were white with it; it canopied the trees, and hung from
+their branches its long sprays of snowy blossoms and dark, shining
+leaves, forming perfect arches, and bowers which seemed fitting places
+for fairies to dwell in. How it gladdened our eyes and hearts! It was as
+if all the dark shadows that have so long hung over this Southern land
+had flitted away, and, in this garment of purest white, it shone forth
+transfigured, beautified, forevermore.
+
+On returning to the house, we were met by the exciting news that the
+Rebels were bringing up pontoon-bridges, and were expected to attempt
+crossing over near the Ferry, which was only two or three miles from us.
+Couriers came in every few moments with various reports. A
+superintendent whose plantation was very near the Ferry had been
+watching through his glass the movements on the opposite side, and
+reported that the Rebels were gathering in large force, and evidently
+preparing for some kind of demonstration. A messenger was despatched to
+Beaufort for reinforcements, and for some time we were in a state of
+expectancy, not entirely without excitement, but entirely without fear.
+The officers evidently enjoyed the prospect of a fight. One of them
+assured me that I should have the pleasure of seeing a Rebel shell
+during the afternoon. It was proposed that the women should be sent into
+Beaufort in an ambulance; against which ignoble treatment we indignantly
+protested, and declared our intention of remaining at our post, if the
+Colonel would consent; and finally, to our great joy, the best of
+colonels did consent that we should remain, as he considered it quite
+safe for us to do so. Soon a light battery arrived, and during the
+evening a brisk firing was kept up. We could hear the explosion of the
+shells. It was quite like being in the war; and as the firing was
+principally on our side, and the enemy was getting the worst of it, we
+rather enjoyed it. For a little while the Colonel read to us, in his
+spirited way, some of the stirring "Lays of the Old Cavaliers." It was
+just the time to appreciate them thoroughly, and he was of all men the
+fittest person to read them. But soon came a courier, "in hot haste," to
+make report of the doings without, and the reading was at an end. In the
+midst of the firing, Mrs. D. and I went to bed, and slept soundly until
+morning. We learned afterward that the Rebels had not intended to cross
+over, but were attempting to take the guns off one of our boats, which
+they had sunk a few days previous. The timely arrival of the battery
+from Beaufort prevented them from accomplishing their purpose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In April we left Oaklands, which had always been considered a
+particularly unhealthy place during the summer, and came to "Seaside," a
+plantation on another and healthier part of the island. The place
+contains nearly a hundred people. The house is large and comparatively
+comfortable. Notwithstanding the name, we have not even a distant
+glimpse of the sea, although we can sometimes hear its roar. At low tide
+there is not a drop of water to be seen,--only dreary stretches of
+marsh-land, reminding us of the sad outlook of Mariana in the Moated
+Grange,--
+
+    "The level waste and rounding gray."
+
+But at night we have generally a good sea-breeze, and during the hottest
+weather the air is purer and more invigorating than in many parts of the
+island.
+
+On this, as on several other large plantations, there is a
+"Praise-House," which is the special property of the people. Even in the
+old days of Slavery, they were allowed to hold meetings here; and they
+still keep up the custom. They assemble on several nights of the week,
+and on Sunday afternoons. First, they hold what is called the
+"Praise-Meeting," which consists of singing, praying, and preaching. We
+have heard some of the old negro preachers make prayers that were really
+beautiful and touching. In these meetings they sing only the
+church-hymns which the Northern ministers have taught them, and which
+are far less suited to their voices than their own. At the close of the
+Praise-Meeting they all shake hands with each other in the most solemn
+manner. Afterward, as a kind of appendix, they have a grand "shout,"
+during which they sing their own hymns. Maurice, an old blind man, leads
+the singing. He has a remarkable voice, and sings with the greatest
+enthusiasm. The first shout that we witnessed in the Praise-House
+impressed us very much. The large, gloomy room, with its blackened
+walls,--the wild, whirling dance of the shouters,--the crowd of dark,
+eager faces gathered around,--the figure of the old blind man, whose
+excitement could hardly be controlled, and whose attitude and gestures
+while singing were very fine,--and over all, the red glare of the
+burning pine-knot, which shed a circle of light around it, but only
+seemed to deepen and darken the shadows in the other parts of the
+room,--these all formed a wild, strange, and deeply impressive picture,
+not soon to be forgotten.
+
+Maurice's especial favorite is one of the grandest hymns that we have
+yet heard:--
+
+      "De tallest tree in Paradise
+      De Christian calls de Tree ob Life,
+      An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+      To my New Jerusalem.
+
+                   CHORUS.
+
+    "Blow, Gabriel! trumpet, blow louder, louder!
+    An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+    To my New Jerusalem!
+
+      "Paul and Silas jail-bound
+      Sing God's praise both night and day,
+      An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+      To my New Jerusalem.
+
+                   CHORUS.
+
+    "Blow, Gabriel! trumpet, blow louder, louder!
+    An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+    To my New Jerusalem!"
+
+The chorus has a glad, triumphal sound, and in singing it the voice of
+old Maurice rings out in wonderfully clear, trumpet-like tones. His
+blindness was caused by a blow on the head from a loaded whip. He was
+struck by his master in a fit of anger. "I feel great distress when I
+become blind," said Maurice; "but den I went to seek de Lord; and eber
+since I know I see in de next world, I always hab great satisfaction."
+We are told that the master was not a "hard man" except when in a
+passion, and then he seems to have been very cruel.
+
+One of the women on the place, Old Bess, bears on her limbs many marks
+of the whip. Some of the scars are three and four inches long. She was
+used principally as a house-servant. She says, "Ebery time I lay de
+table I put cow-skin on one end, an' I git beatin' and thumpin' all de
+time. Hab all kinds o' work to do, and sich a gang [of children] to look
+after! One person couldn't git along wid so much work, so it go wrong,
+and den I git beatin'."
+
+But the cruelty of Bess's master sinks into insignificance, when
+compared with the far-famed wickedness of another slave-holder, known
+all over the island as "Old Joe Eddings." There seem to have been no
+bounds to his cruelty and licentiousness; and the people tell tales of
+him which make one shudder. We were once asking some questions about him
+of an old, half-witted woman, a former slave of his. The look of horror
+and loathing which overspread her face was perfectly indescribable, as,
+with upraised hands, she exclaimed, "What! Old Joe Eddings? Lord,
+Missus, he second to none in de world but de Debil!" She had, indeed,
+good cause to detest him; for, some years before, her daughter, a young
+black girl, maddened by his persecutions, had thrown herself into the
+creek and been drowned, after having been severely beaten for refusing
+to degrade herself. Outraged, despised, and black, she yet preferred
+death to dishonor. But these are things too heart-sickening to dwell
+upon. God alone knows how many hundreds of plantations, all over the
+South, might furnish a similar record.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in June, before the summer heat had become unendurable, we made a
+pleasant excursion to Edisto Island. We left St. Helena village in the
+morning, dined on one of the gun-boats stationed near our island, and in
+the afternoon proceeded to Edisto in two row-boats. There were six of
+us, besides an officer and the boats' crews, who were armed with guns
+and cutlasses. There was no actual danger; but as we were going into the
+enemy's country, we thought it wisest to guard against surprises. After
+a delightful row, we reached the island near sunset, landing at a place
+called Eddingsville, which was a favorite summer resort with the
+aristocracy of Edisto. It has a fine beach several miles in length.
+Along the beach there is a row of houses, which must once have been very
+desirable dwellings, but have now a desolate, dismantled look. The
+sailors explored the beach for some distance, and returned, reporting
+"all quiet, and nobody to be seen"; so we walked on, feeling quite safe,
+stopping here and there to gather the beautiful tiny shells which were
+buried deep in the sands.
+
+We took supper in a room of one of the deserted houses, using for seats
+some old bureau-drawers turned edgewise. Afterward we sat on the piazza,
+watching the lightning playing from a low, black cloud over a sky
+flushed with sunset, and listening to the merry songs of the sailors who
+occupied the next house. They had built a large fire, the cheerful glow
+of which shone through the windows, and we could see them dancing,
+evidently in great glee. Later, we had another walk on the beach, in the
+lovely moonlight. It was very quiet then. The deep stillness was broken
+only by the low, musical murmur of the waves. The moon shone bright and
+clear over the deserted houses and gardens, and gave them a still wilder
+and more desolate look.
+
+We went within-doors for the night very unwillingly. Having, of course,
+no beds, we made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the floor, with
+boat-cushions, blankets, and shawls. No fear of Rebels disturbed us.
+There was but one road by which they could get to us, and on that a
+watch was kept, and in case of their approach, we knew we should have
+ample time to get to the boats and make our escape. So, despite the
+mosquitoes, we had a sound night's sleep.
+
+The next morning we took the boats again, and followed the course of the
+most winding of little creeks. In and out, in and out, the boats went.
+Sometimes it seemed as if we were going into the very heart of the
+woods; and through the deep silence we half expected to hear the sound
+of a Rebel rifle. The banks were overhung with a thick tangle of shrubs
+and bushes, which threatened to catch our boats, as we passed close
+beneath their branches. In some places the stream was so narrow that we
+ran aground, and then the men had to get out, and drag and pull with all
+their might before we could be got clear again. After a row full of
+excitement and pleasure, we reached our place of destination,--the
+Eddings Plantation, whither some of the freedmen had preceded us in
+their search for corn. It must once have been a beautiful place. The
+grounds were laid out with great taste, and filled with fine trees,
+among which we noticed particularly the oleander, laden with deep
+rose-hued and deliciously fragrant flowers, and the magnolia, with its
+wonderful, large blossoms, which shone dazzlingly white among the dark
+leaves. We explored the house,--after it had first been examined by our
+guard, to see that no foes lurked there,--but found nothing but heaps of
+rubbish, an old bedstead, and a bathing-tub, of which we afterward made
+good use. When we returned to the shore, we found that the tide had gone
+out, and between us and the boats lay a tract of marsh-land, which it
+would have been impossible to cross without a wetting. The gentlemen
+determined on wading. But what were we to do? In this dilemma somebody
+suggested the bathing-tub, a suggestion which was eagerly seized upon.
+We were placed in it, one at a time, borne aloft in triumph on the
+shoulders of four stout sailors, and safely deposited in the boat. But,
+through a mistake, the tub was not sent back for two of the ladies, and
+they were brought over on the crossed hands of two of the sailors, in
+the "carry-a-lady-to-London" style. Again we rowed through the windings
+of the creek, then out into the open sea, among the white, exhilarating
+breakers,--reached the gun-boat, dined again with its hospitable
+officers, and then returned to our island, which we reached after
+nightfall, feeling thoroughly tired, but well pleased with our
+excursion.
+
+From what we saw of Edisto, however, we did not like it better than our
+own island,--except, of course, the beach; but we are told that farther
+in the interior it is much more beautiful. The freed people, who left it
+at the time of its evacuation, think it the loveliest place in the
+world, and long to return. When we were going, Miss T.--the much-loved
+and untiring friend and physician of the people--asked some whom we met
+if we should give their love to Edisto. "Oh, yes, yes, Miss!" they said.
+"Ah, Edisto a beautiful city!" And when we came back, they inquired,
+eagerly,--"How you like Edisto? How Edisto stan'?" Only the fear of
+again falling into the hands of the "Secesh" prevents them from
+returning to their much-loved home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the summer advanced, the heat became intense. We found it almost
+overpowering, driving to school near the middle of the day, as we were
+obliged to do. I gave up riding, and mounted a sulky, such as a single
+gentleman drives in at the North. It was exceedingly high, and I found
+it no small task to mount up into it. Its already very comical
+appearance was enhanced by the addition of a cover of black India-rubber
+cloth, with which a friend kindly provided me. Thus adorned, it looked
+like the skeleton of some strange creature surmounted by a huge bonnet,
+and afforded endless amusement to the soldiers we chanced to meet, who
+hailed its appearance with shouts of laughter, and cries of "Here comes
+the Calithumpian!" This unique vehicle, with several others on our
+island, kindred, but not quite equal to it, would create a decided
+sensation in the streets of a Northern city.
+
+No description of life on these islands would be complete without a word
+concerning the fleas. They appeared at the opening of spring, and kept
+constantly "risin'," as the people said, until they reached a height the
+possibility of which we had never conceived. We had heard and read of
+fleas. We had never _realized_ them before. Words utterly fail to
+describe the tortures we endured for months from these horrible little
+tyrants. Remembering our sufferings "through weary day and weary
+_night_," we warn everybody not gifted with extraordinary powers of
+endurance to beware of a summer on the Sea Islands.
+
+Notwithstanding the heat, we determined to celebrate the Fourth of July
+as worthily as we could. The freed people and the children of the
+different schools assembled in the grove near the Baptist Church. The
+flag was hung across the road, between two magnificent live-oaks, and
+the children, being grouped under it, sang "The Star-Spangled Banner"
+with much spirit. Our good General could not come, but addresses were
+made by Mr. P.,--the noble-hearted founder of the movement for the
+benefit of the people here, and from first to last their stanch and
+much-loved friend,--by Mr. L., a young colored minister, and others.
+Then the people sang some of their own hymns; and the woods resounded
+with the grand notes of "Roll, Jordan, roll." They all afterward partook
+of refreshments, consisting of molasses and water,--a very great luxury
+to them,--and hardtack.
+
+Among the visitors present was the noble young Colonel Shaw, whose
+regiment was then stationed on the island. We had met him a few nights
+before, when he came to our house to witness one of the people's shouts.
+We looked upon him with the deepest interest. There was something in his
+face finer, more exquisite, than one often sees in a man's face, yet it
+was full of courage and decision. The rare and singular charm of his
+manner drew all hearts to him. He was deeply interested in the singing
+and appearance of the people. A few days afterwards we saw his regiment
+on dress-parade, and admired its remarkably fine and manly appearance.
+After taking supper with the Colonel we sat outside the tent, while some
+of his men entertained us with excellent singing. Every moment we became
+more and more charmed with him. How full of life and hope and lofty
+aspirations he was that night! How eagerly he expressed his wish that
+they might soon be ordered to Charleston! "I do hope they will give _us_
+a chance," he said. It was the desire of his soul that his men should do
+themselves honor,--that they should prove themselves to an unbelieving
+world as brave soldiers as though their skins were white. And for
+himself, he was like the Chevalier of old, "without reproach or fear."
+After we had mounted our horses and rode away, we seemed still to feel
+the kind clasp of his hand,--to hear the pleasant, genial tones of his
+voice, as he bade us good-bye, and hoped that we might meet again. We
+never saw him afterward. In two short weeks came the terrible massacre
+at Fort Wagner, and the beautiful head of the young hero and martyr was
+laid low in the dust. Never shall we forget the heart-sickness with
+which we heard of his death. We could not realize it at first,--we, who
+had seen him so lately in all the strength and glory of his young
+manhood. For days we clung to a vain hope; then it fell away from us,
+and we knew that he was gone. We knew that he died gloriously, but still
+it seemed very hard. Our hearts bled for the mother whom he so
+loved,--for the young wife, left desolate. And then we said, as we say
+now,--"God comfort them! He only can." During a few of the sad days
+which followed the attack on Fort Wagner, I was in one of the hospitals
+of Beaufort, occupied with the wounded soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth
+Massachusetts. The first morning was spent in mending the bullet-holes
+and rents in their clothing. What a story they told! Some of the jackets
+of the poor fellows were literally cut in pieces. It was pleasant to see
+the brave, cheerful spirit among them. Some of them were severely
+wounded, but they uttered no complaint; and in the letters which they
+dictated to their absent friends there was no word of regret, but the
+same cheerful tone throughout. They expressed an eager desire to get
+well, that they might "go at it again." Their attachment to their young
+colonel was beautiful to see. They felt his death deeply. One and all
+united in the warmest and most enthusiastic praise of him. He was,
+indeed, exactly the person to inspire the most loyal devotion in the
+hearts of his men. And with everything to live for, he had given up his
+life for them. Heaven's best gifts had been showered upon him, but for
+them he had laid them all down. I think they truly appreciated the
+greatness of the sacrifice. May they ever prove worthy of such a leader!
+Already, they, and the regiments of freedmen here, as well, have shown
+that true manhood has no limitations of color.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daily the long-oppressed people of these islands are demonstrating their
+capacity for improvement in learning and labor. What they have
+accomplished in one short year exceeds our utmost expectations. Still
+the sky is dark; but through the darkness we can discern a brighter
+future. We cannot but feel that the day of final and entire deliverance,
+so long and often so hopelessly prayed for, has at length begun to dawn
+upon this much-enduring race. An old freedman said to me one day, "De
+Lord make me suffer long time, Miss. 'Peared like we nebber was gwine to
+git troo. But now we's free. He bring us all out right at las'." In
+their darkest hours they have clung to Him, and we know He will not
+forsake them.
+
+    "The poor among men shall rejoice,
+    For the terrible one is brought to nought."
+
+While writing these pages I am once more nearing Port Royal. The
+Fortunate Isles of Freedom are before me. I shall again tread the
+flower-skirted wood-paths of St. Helena, and the sombre pines and
+bearded oaks shall whisper in the sea-wind their grave welcome. I shall
+dwell again among "mine own people." I shall gather my scholars about
+me, and see smiles of greeting break over their dusk faces. My heart
+sings a song of thanksgiving, at the thought that even I am permitted to
+do something for a long-abused race, and aid in promoting a higher,
+holier, and happier life on the Sea Islands.
+
+
+
+
+A FAST-DAY AT FOXDEN.
+
+
+I.
+
+Colonel Elijah Prowley, like all good and true genealogists, held the
+mother-country in tender reverence. For, if there be any truth in the
+well-known _mot_ which calls Paris the Paradise of virtuous Yankees, it
+is limited to a few city-bucks of mongrel caste. England must be the
+Promised Land for the genuine representative of the Puritan. Whatever we
+may have felt about her lately,--and I confess there have been times
+when the declaration of the Fee-Faw-Fum giant of nursery-romance seemed
+to be of a moral and praiseworthy character,--there is no doubt, that,
+in the year of grace of which I write, and in the regards of many
+ratherish-scholarly gentlemen of our country-towns, the British Islands
+were the nearest terrestrial correspondences to the Islands of the
+Blest. About the massive Past Colonel Prowley never ceased to thrust his
+epistolary tendrils. Was not Great Britain a genealogical hunting-ground
+where game of rarest plumage might be started? Was not a
+family-connection with Sir Walter Raleigh (whose name should be written
+_Praleigh_, a common corruption of "Prowley" in the sixteenth century)
+susceptible of the clearest proof? There were, in fact, few
+distinguished Englishmen of the present day, who, if a provoking
+ancestor or two could be unearthed, might not be shown to have the
+Prowley fluid in their veins. To many of these eminent personages the
+head of the American branch of the family had written, and with several
+he had succeeded in establishing a correspondence. Old sermons, moral
+obituaries of public characters, celebrations of centennial
+anniversaries, and heavy reading of like description, constantly left
+the Foxden Post-Office addressed to the British Museum. The printed
+formulas of acknowledgment which arrived in return were preserved as the
+rarest treasures.
+
+And in fulness of time all this corresponding and presenting produced a
+glorious result. Elijah Prowley, of Foxden, was chosen an Honorary
+Member of the Royal Society of British Sextons,--an association than
+which there is none more mouldy in the whole world. Certainly, this was
+glory enough for any Western genealogist,--yet Fortune had a higher
+gratification to bestow. For, in His Worship, the Most Primordial, the
+High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of all Sextons, Colonel
+Prowley soon discovered a relative of his own. Sir Joseph Barley, a
+rubicund old knight, and the Most Primordial in question, after an
+elaborate investigation and counter-investigation, a jockeying of the
+wits of very old women, and a raid into divers registers, scrolls,
+schedules, archives, and the like,--Sir Joseph Barley, I say, turned out
+to be _a long-lost cousin_. "Barley," it appeared, had anciently been
+written "Parley," and "Praley," and even "Proley." Having arrived at
+this point, Sir Joseph conjectured that his ancestor Proley might have
+dropped a _w_ out of his name, and the Colonel conjectured that his
+progenitor, the Puritan, might have put one into his. Now it did not
+matter which was right, for, as was convincingly underscored in one of
+my letters from Foxden, "_upon either hypothesis_, the relationship of
+the Barleys of Old England to the Prowleys of New England was positively
+established."
+
+And so Sir Joseph Barley was dead!
+
+Although shocked, when the fact of his demise was abruptly announced in
+the familiar chirography of my old friend, I was unable to prevent a
+certain sense of the grotesque from mingling with the idea. A portrait
+in pastel, which hung over the chimney-piece in the Colonel's study, had
+given me a thorough acquaintance with the outward Sir Joseph. That
+brief, but bulky figure, clad in official robes as High Senior
+Governour, that weighty seal of the Sextons which dangled from the fob,
+those impressive spectacles with the glasses cut in parallelograms,
+above all, that full-blown face blandly contemplating our American
+rudeness like a smiling Phoebus from British skies,--how could all
+these things, which had so individualized the natural body of Sir Joseph
+Barley, be dispensed with in its spiritual counterpart? No answer to
+such question,--only the grim facts, that one brother more had "gone
+over to the majority," and that the living minority got on very
+comfortably without him. Comfortably? Ay, truly; for in the very letter
+that brought the news I was begged to spend the approaching Fast-Day in
+Foxden, just as if nothing had happened. The season, so I was assured,
+was unusually advanced, and already the flavor of spring was perceptible
+in the air; moreover, the different congregations in town were to unite
+in services at the Orthodox Church, and, by extraordinary favor, one of
+the Colonel's Boston correspondents, no less a man than the
+distinguished Dr. Burge, was to preach the sermon.
+
+A noble specimen of our New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held
+the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their
+faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last
+transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from aërial
+or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His
+parishioners supplied him with a wood-fire, a saddle-horse, and, it was
+maliciously said, a boxing-master; and he, on his part,--so ran the idle
+rumor of the street,--covenanted never to call upon them for cod-liver
+oil, Bourbon whiskey, or a tour to Europe. In his majestic presence
+there was a total impression sanative to body and soul. The full powers
+of manner and tone, of pause and emphasis, were at his command. He would
+rise in a shingled meeting-house as effective as choir, organ, and
+sacerdotal vestments in full cathedral-service. I was glad to learn that
+this stalwart servant of the Word would be at Foxden. He had formerly
+been well acquainted with the Reverend Charles Clifton, late pastor of a
+church in that place. He might deal wisely with the evil intelligence,
+or, possibly, the infatuated egotism, which controlled that unfortunate
+man. Dr. Burge would possess his soul in calmness in presence of the
+singular epidemic which was then running through Foxden, as it had
+previously run through, and run out of, other river-towns.
+
+And now it has come in my way to speak of that strange murmuring of
+phantoms and their attendant seers, psychometers, and dactylomancers,
+which in these latter days has revived among us. And what I may have to
+say about what is called Spiritualism will reflect actual observations.
+I do not forget that to the advocacy of the "New Dispensation" are
+devoted many men of earnestness and a few of ability. It is possible
+that the facts they build upon may render mine exceptional and
+unimportant. What is here set down is but a trifling contribution to
+that mass of human testimony and human opinion from which the truth must
+be finally elicited.
+
+Mr. Stellato had been celestially commissioned to Barnum the spirits in
+their Foxden exhibitions. Two years previously this gentleman was to be
+seen at the head of a fanatical and tumultuary offshoot from a cause the
+most humane and noble. He had done whatever his slender abilities
+permitted to bring into discredit large-hearted and devoted men and
+women whom history will honorably remember as New-England Reformers. But
+to lead anything on a large scale, without a continual winding-up by his
+companion, the fibrous Mrs. Romulus, was beyond the crassitude of
+Stellato's pursy nature. Now it had come to pass that this acidulated
+lady, essaying fresh flurries of progression, discovering higher
+passional affinities and new duties of demolition, proving that in
+Church and State every brick was loose and every timber rotten,
+testifying ever to the existence of a certain harmonial mortar by which
+the rubbish of a demolished civilization could be rebuilt into
+unexceptionable forms,--it happened that this woman, having towered for
+one proud moment at the very apex of her mission, slipped suddenly into
+the Romish communion, and was no more seen of men. Stellato, perceiving
+that the peculiar machinery be had been taught to manage was now out of
+repair and impracticable, looked about for some new invention whereby to
+gain a livelihood from the credulity of his neighbors. "The spirits,"
+then at the height of their profit and renown, were adapted to his
+purpose. A blank and vacant mind was freely offered to any power of
+earth or air which would condescend to enter and possess it. And so Mr.
+Stellato, with his three parts knavery and two parts delusion, became a
+popular and successful ghost-monger.
+
+The parsonage had been closed since Charles Clifton terminated his
+connection with the parish two years before. The newest lights of the
+Liberal persuasion, fledglings from divinity-schools, youths of every
+possible variety of creed and no creed, had by turns occupied the vacant
+pulpit. The Gospel vibrated at all points between the interpretations of
+Calvin and Strauss. The congregation grew more and more critical, and
+could agree upon no candidate for settlement. They demanded the
+respectability of belief with the showy talents of skepticism,--an
+impossible combination, at least for a parish which offered only eight
+hundred dollars and a decrepit house. At length Colonel Prowley took a
+pew in the Orthodox Church;--it was a temporary arrangement, he said, to
+be terminated whenever a settled minister should be provided for the
+First Parish.
+
+The Reverend Charles Clifton seldom left the rooms which he had taken in
+a farmer's family on the outskirts of the town. We have seen how this
+man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional
+and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a
+mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton
+possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was
+full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other
+men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them.
+The deep passion for metaphysical knowledge, which in his youth had been
+kindled, was stilled, but never overcome. Wifeless, childless, he was
+put under no bonds to struggle with the world. He knew the coldness of
+the church in which he had been ordained to minister,--the hard and
+dreary lives of those whom he had undertaken to illumine. But he made
+the fatal mistake--inexcusable, it would seem, in a man of his liberal
+nurture--of supposing that this world's evil was owing to the absence of
+right opinion, and not of right feeling. It is to be feared that it was
+not principle, but only a paroxysm of cowardice, which caused Clifton to
+bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister
+found himself unable to dismiss a certain thin and impalpable fantasy
+which lingered behind that ponderous speculation of an all-embracing
+philosophy. For the past two years he had fitfully sought, or rather
+persuaded himself that he sought, some clue through the sad labyrinth of
+his fate. He had indulged in the most morbid conditions of his physical
+organism; there was neither steadiness in his purpose nor firmness in
+his action. He yearned for that proximity to hidden things, which, if
+not forbidden to all men, yet is dangerous to most men. At length he
+succeeded in freeing his soul from the weight of conscious intellectual
+life which had become too heavy for it to bear. And while the Foxden
+people were wondering about the occupation of a late pastor in one of
+their churches, and inquiring of each other whether he would again speak
+before them, their gossiping solicitude was suddenly set at rest.
+Printed show-bills were posted about the streets: "Grand Festival of
+Spiritualists at the Town Hall." "The Reverend Charles Clifton will
+speak"--a line of largest type gloated upon the scandal--"IN A
+TRANCE-STATE."
+
+"I really ought to apologize," said Colonel Prowley, upon opening the
+hall-door for my admittance, on the afternoon of the second Wednesday in
+April, and this after repeated summons had been sounded by the brazen
+knocker,--"I ought to apologize for keeping you here so long; but there
+has been so much knocking about the house of late, and our cook and
+housemaid having turned out to be such excellent mediums, taking just as
+much interest in their circle down-stairs as we do in ours in the
+parlor, and then Mrs. Colfodder being so positive that it was either Sir
+Joseph Barley or Roger Williams,--though I am sure neither of them ever
+knocked half so satisfactorily before, and besides"----
+
+"My dear Sir," interrupted I, "no excuse is necessary. I have
+seen enough of 'the spirits' to know how they put aside all
+conventionalities. I should have accompanied Dr. Burge to the hotel, had
+I anticipated disturbing the circle which, I infer, is at present in
+session."
+
+"You would have grieved me very much by doing so," rejoined the kind old
+gentleman. "Dr. Burge dines with me to-morrow, and I confess--not yet
+calling myself a convert to these miracles which are now vouchsafed in
+Foxden--it would not be amiss to rid my premises of the amiable
+magicians congregated in my parlor before a minister were invited to
+enter. But a layman, as I take it, might witness these thaumaturgical
+matters without scandal,--nay, perchance you may help me to that
+wholesome credence in their reality which my celestial visitants so
+unceasingly demand."
+
+Colonel Prowley was in the state of mind not unusual to many
+well-meaning, unoccupied people, when this modern necromancy was thrust
+upon them by those pecuniarily or socially interested in its advocacy.
+The upheaval to the air of that dark inward nature which is ever working
+in us,--the startling proof of that loudly proclaimed, faintly realized
+truth, that this mind, so pervading every fibre of the body, is yet
+separate in its essence,--the novel gratification of the petty vanities
+and petty questionings which beset undecided men,--what wonder that
+persons not accustomed to sound analysis of evidence should be beguiled
+by these subtilest adaptations to their conditions, and hold dalliance
+with the feeble shades that imposture or enthusiasm vended about the
+towns? Historical personages--a nerveless mimicry of the conventional
+stage-representation of them--stalked the Colonel's parlor. Departed
+friends, Indians _à discrétion_, local celebrities, Deacon Golly, who in
+the year '90 took the ten first shares in the Wrexford Turnpike, the
+very Pelatiah Brimble from whom "Brimble's Corner" had taken its name,
+the identical Timson forever immortal in "Timson's Common,"--these
+defunct worthies were audibly, visibly, or tangibly present, pecking at
+great subjects in ghostly feebleness, swimming in Tupperic dilutions of
+cheapest wisdom, and finally inducing in their patrons strange
+derangements of mind and body.
+
+The circle, which was very select, consisted of three highly susceptible
+ladies and Stellato as medium-in-chief. Miss Turligood, a sort of
+Oroveso to the Druidical chorus, was a muscular spinster, fierce and
+forty, sporting steel spectacles, a frizette of the most scrupulous
+honesty, and a towering comb which formed what the landscape-gardeners
+call "an object" in the distance. Next this commanding lady, with fat
+hands sprawled upon the table, sat Mrs. Colfodder, widow, according to
+the flesh, of a respectable Foxden grocer. By later spiritual
+communications, however, it appeared that matters stood very
+differently; for no sooner had the departed Colfodder looked about him a
+little in the world to come than he proceeded to contract marriage with
+Queen Elizabeth of England, thereby leaving his mortal relict quite free
+to receive the addresses of the late Lord Byron, whose proposals were of
+the most honorable as well as amatory character. Miss Branly, by far the
+most pleasing of the lady-patronesses, was a fragile, stove-dried
+mantua-maker,--and, truly, it seemed something like poetic justice to
+recompense her depressed existence with the satisfactions of a material
+heaven full of marryings and givings in marriage.
+
+"Will Sir Joseph tip for us again?" inquired Miss Turligood, with her
+eyes fixed upon a crack in the mahogany table. "Will he? Will he not?
+Will he?"
+
+Sir Joseph vouchsafed no answer.
+
+"Hark! wasn't that a rap?" cried Stellato, in a husky whisper.
+
+Here every one pricked an ear towards the table.
+
+"Doctor Franklin, is that you?"
+
+"The Doctor promised to be present to give a scientific and
+philosophical view of these communications," parenthesized the
+interrogator.
+
+"Doctor Franklin, is that _you_?"
+
+A faint creaking is audible.
+
+"Byron's sign, as I'm a living woman!" ejaculated the Widow Colfodder.
+
+"Her spiritual partner and guardian-angel," explained Miss
+Turligood,--and this for my satisfaction as the last-comer.
+
+Direct examination by the widow:--
+
+"Have you brought your patent lyre here to-night?"
+
+For the enlightenment of the company:--
+
+"He played the lyre so beautiful on earth, that when he got to the
+spheres a committee gave him a golden one, with all the modern
+improvements."
+
+Question concerning the lyre repeated. A mysterious rubbing interpreted
+as an affirmative reply.
+
+"Have you brought Pocahontas with you? (she 'most always comes with
+him)--and if so, can she kiss me to-night?"
+
+The table is exceedingly doubtful.
+
+"Could she kiss Colonel Prowley, or even pull his hair a little?"
+
+No certainty of either.
+
+"Can she kiss Miss Turligood?"
+
+The table is satisfied that it couldn't be done.
+
+"Let me try her," urged Stellato, with the confidence of an expert; then
+in seductive tones,--
+
+"Couldn't Pocahontas kiss Miss Branly, if all the lights were put out?"
+
+Pocahontas thought it highly probable that she could.
+
+Here some interesting badgering. Miss Branly declined being kissed in
+the dark. Miss Turligood thought it would be very satisfactory, if she
+would, and couldn't see why any one should object to it. She (Miss
+Turligood) would willingly be kissed in the dark, or in the light, in
+furtherance of scientific investigation.
+
+Stellato suggested a compromise.
+
+"Might not the kissing be done through a medium?"
+
+At first the table thought it couldn't, but afterwards relented, and
+thought it might.
+
+"Would Pocahontas appoint that medium?"
+
+She would.
+
+"Should the alphabet be called?"
+
+It should not.
+
+"Would the table tip towards the medium indicated?"
+
+It could not be done.
+
+"Should somebody call over the names of all mediums present, and would
+the table tip at the right one?"
+
+Ah, that was it!
+
+"I suppose you and I have no share in this Gift Enterprise," whispered
+Colonel Prowley.
+
+"Order! order!" shouted Miss Turligood, glancing in our direction with
+great severity. "This general conversation cannot be permitted. We are
+about to have a most interesting manifestation.--Pocahontas, do you wish
+me to call over the names?"
+
+Pocahontas did not object.
+
+"Very well, then, you will tip when I come to the name of the medium
+through whom you consent to kiss Miss Sarah Branly?"
+
+Pocahontas certainly would.
+
+"Is it Mrs. Colfodder?"
+
+No reply.
+
+"Is it I, Eugenia Turligood?"
+
+No, it certainly was not.
+
+"Well, then, I suppose it must be Mr. Stellato!"
+
+Here the table was violently convulsed, as if somebody were pulling it
+very hard upon Mr. Stellato's side, and somebody else holding it with
+rigid firmness upon the other.
+
+"_Is_ it Mr. Stellato?"
+
+Convulsion repeated.
+
+"I don't think you stopped long enough at Mrs. Colfodder's name,"
+interposed Miss Branly. "I am sure the table was going to move, if you
+had given it time."
+
+"Nothing easier than to try again," responded Miss Turligood. "Is it
+Mrs. Colfodder?"
+
+This time the table fairly sprang into the lap of the lady indicated.
+
+And so that worthy widow arose and saluted--or rather Pocahontas,
+through her mediumship, arose and saluted--Miss Sarah Branly. And the
+skeptic will please take notice that this extraordinary manifestation is
+neither enlarged nor magnified, but that it actually happened precisely
+as is here set down.
+
+After this, Mr. Stellato, being put under inspiration, delivered a
+discursive homily upon the "New Dispensation" which was at present
+vouchsafed to the citizens of Foxden. He testified to the great relief
+of getting clear of the "Old Theology,"--meaning thereby such
+interpretations of Scripture as are held by the mass of our New-England
+churches. Moreover, he would announce his personal satisfaction in
+having, under spiritual guidance, eradicated every vestige of belief in
+hell,--a circumstance upon which, it is needless to say, that a
+gentleman of his profession might be honestly congratulated. With a
+view, as I could not help thinking, to my peculiar necessities, Stellato
+finally enlarged upon what he termed "the principle of the thing," or,
+as he otherwise phrased it, "a scientific explanation of the way the
+spirits worked mediums,"--"_sperrets_" and "_meejums_" according to
+celestial pronunciation, but I am loath to disturb the carnal
+orthography. This philosophical exposition, drawled forth in
+interminable sentences, was a dark doctrine to the uninitiated. There
+was a good deal about "Essences," which, at times, seemed to relate to
+the perfumery vended in the fancy-department of apothecaries' shops, and
+then again to some obscure matters of "Zones," "Interiors," "Magnetic
+Relations," and the like. The central revelation, if I remember rightly,
+had to do with a sort of putty, by which, according to the Stellato
+cosmogony, Chaos had been stuck together into a Universe. This adhesive
+composition was known as "Detached Vitalized Electricity." And having
+got upon this sounding title, which conveyed no meaning whatever to the
+"undeveloped" understanding, Stellato was profuse in windy talk. This
+Detached Vitalized Electricity, spread out over space, connected the
+parts of all systems; it appeared at that very instant in the form of
+"power" about Miss Turligood's head; in short, it diluted all stray bits
+of modern rhetoric, all exploded feats of ancient magic, into the
+thinnest of spiritual gruel, which was to supersede the strong meat upon
+which the Puritan walked before his Maker.
+
+Somebody summoned the eminent Twynintuft. Like every spirit that was
+ever called for, this ex-elocutionist happened to be within a few
+seconds' flight of the circle, and had nothing in the world to do but to
+swoop down and tip as long as the company could possibly endure him.
+
+The following information was elicited by affirmative or negative
+replies to the interrogatories of those present:--
+
+The spirit communicating was Twynintuft, grandfather to Mrs. Widesworth.
+Was unable to give his Christian name. Thought Mrs. Colfodder's lungs in
+a healthy condition. Could not undertake to move the table when no hands
+were upon it. If the room were made totally dark, would attempt that
+curious experiment. Was unable to give the maiden name of his earthly
+wife. Thought Mr. Stellato was a healing-medium of great power. Had been
+something of a Root-Doctor when in the body, and would gladly prescribe
+through that gentleman for the cure of all diseases. Considered mineral
+medicines destructive to the vital principle. Doctor Dastick, being a
+drug-doctor, would not be recognized by any medical association in the
+spheres. Would give any information about the fixed stars. The
+inhabitants of the Milky Way telegraphed to each other by means of the
+Detached Vitalized Electricity. Also, they bottled up the same to cure
+humors. Would privately impart their recipe to Mr. Stellato. It could
+not be afforded upon this earth at less than three dollars a bottle.
+Would, however, authorize an exception in favor of clergymen, when they
+gave certificates of cures. _The spirits did not recognize
+Fast-Day_,--it was a remnant of the Old Mythological Religion. Demanded
+further investigation, and promised greater marvels in future.
+
+Here Miss Turligood became violently convulsed, and, having slapped the
+table some forty times or more, seized a pencil and began to write:--
+
+     "DEAR PROWLEY,--Surrounded by a bank of
+     silver-tunicked attendants, I hover near you. The atmosphere is
+     redolent of costly herbs, which, with the well-known rotary
+     motion of the earth, impart density and spacefulness to our
+     spheral persons: this is the philosophy of our presence. Many
+     shining friends, supported upon fluted pillars, are with you
+     this evening. These grieve at your lack of faith, and flap
+     gold-bespattered wings in unison. Spherically yours,
+
+     "SIR JOSEPH BARLEY."
+
+"Why does he sign himself _Sir_?" inquired Colonel Prowley, rather taken
+aback at the sudden termination of this exquisite composition.
+
+It was evidently an oversight, for the medium's hand erased the
+offending title.
+
+"When did Sir Joseph die?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"That I cannot tell you," replied his late correspondent. "I have heard
+nothing from him for several months. When he last wrote, he was
+suffering under a severe influenza which must have terminated fatally.
+But why not ask _him_ the question?"
+
+"That is just my purpose.--Sir Joseph Barley, can you give me the date
+of your death?"
+
+"It is hard for spirits to give numbers," said Mr. Stellato.
+
+"It is sometimes done by tips," quoth Miss Turligood.
+
+I pressed the demand, and, after much cajoling and counting, a certain
+day of March was fixed upon.
+
+"Can you give me the place?"
+
+I was instructed to call over the names of such foreign cities as I
+might remember, and assured that Sir Joseph would tip at the right one.
+
+It turned out to be "London."
+
+"And now, Sir Joseph, could you oblige me with the name of the physician
+who attended your last sickness?"
+
+But no sooner had I propounded this final query than Mr. Stellato
+declared his consciousness of a skeptical influence in the company which
+would go far to impede other manifestations. Where people were not
+harmonial, he explained, the Detached Vitalized Electricity being unable
+to unite with the Imponderable Magnetic Fluid given off by mediums,
+satisfactory results could not be obtained.
+
+"But we have at least obtained this satisfaction," said I, addressing
+Colonel Prowley: "Sir Joseph has committed himself about the day and
+place of his decease. You must soon hear from some member of his family.
+If these particulars have been correctly given, there will be, at least,
+the beginning of evidence upon which to establish his identity."
+
+Mrs. Colfodder was so shocked with the perversity of unbelief which she
+detected in this harmless remark, that, nudging Miss Branly, she
+solemnly arose and moved to break up the circle for the night. And as it
+was already past nine o'clock, no violent objection was made to the
+proposition.
+
+"The circle will meet in this place to-morrow morning at eight o'clock,
+for the pursuance of further investigations," proclaimed Miss Turligood,
+in sonorous accents.
+
+"Fast-Day, Madam," mildly suggested Colonel Prowley.
+
+"The spirits do not recognize Fast-Day. Tomorrow at eight o'clock. In
+this place. Let every medium be punctual. It is to be _hoped_ that the
+_conditions_ will _then_ be _favorable_!"
+
+This latter aspiration, with its feminine redundancy of emphasis, was
+cast in my direction, as Miss Turligood swept haughtily from the room.
+
+Her final exit, however, was neither curt nor in any way effective. For
+it was no easy matter to gather up the bags, parcels, shawls, and other
+devices which the good lady had brought with her and scattered about the
+entry. One India-rubber shoe in particular eluded our search, till I was
+ready to admit the supposition that the spirits had carried it off, as
+entirely reasonable and satisfactory. A good-natured Irishman, servant
+to Miss Turligood, who had come with a lantern to see her home, at
+length discovered this missing bit of apparel upon Miss Branly's
+foot,--that medium, as it appeared, having in a fit of abstraction
+appropriated three. Finally the lantern glimmered down the gravel-walk,
+and Mr. Stellato, with a lady upon each arm, was persuaded to follow it.
+It was waking from a nightmare to get rid of them.
+
+"Over at last!" exclaimed Miss Prowley, when we returned to the
+drawing-room. She had been sitting in silence in an obscure corner, and
+I had scarcely realized her presence. "Over at last! and of all
+fatiguing and unprofitable employments that the folly of man ever
+devised, this trifling with spirits is certainly the chief."
+
+"Nay, my dear," urged the brother, in his placid way, "these good people
+who have fastened themselves upon us seem so anxious to continue the
+investigation that I cannot find it in my heart to refuse them. I _did_
+wish, to be sure, that we might have our Fast-Day in quiet; but Miss
+Turligood, who knows much more about the matter than we do, thinks the
+spirits would not like it, if we did, and so--although we will absent
+ourselves from the sitting long enough to go to church--we must really
+make the best of it, and receive the circle."
+
+"You speak like a believer, Colonel Prowley," I said.
+
+"No, not quite that," replied the old gentleman,--"yet, truly, I
+sometimes hardly know why I am not. The knockings alone are quite
+inexplicable; and when it comes to a fiery hand ringing the dinner-bell,
+which Stellato can show in the dark----Besides, there are the
+communications from distinguished characters, many of them so very
+important and interesting. To be sure, my poor cousin Barley did not do
+himself justice this evening, though some of his ideas were very
+poetical; but, really, the other night, when he told us how much the
+Royal Sextons were thought of in the spheres, and repeated that very
+high compliment which Thomas Herne paid to my family-history, it all
+seemed so marvellous, and yet so natural, that I could not help
+subscribing pretty handsomely to the cause."
+
+"And one of the privileges that your subscription has gone to purchase I
+am yet to enjoy. Dr. Burge wished me to visit, in his company, your
+former pastor, Mr. Clifton,--and we must look for him, as I see, at the
+Spiritualists' Festival in the Town Hall."
+
+"Sad! sad!" cried Colonel Prowley, thoughtfully chewing upon my remark.
+"It is an abiding shame for a minister of the gospel to meddle with
+these things, except, possibly, in the way of exorcism. Truly, a deep
+humiliation has fallen upon the town."
+
+And the chagrin of this respected gentleman was wholly sincere. The
+Puritanical distinction between clergy and laity had scarcely faded in
+his mind. The pastor of the First Church had belonged to a cherished
+class,--a class whose moral and intellectual consequence must be
+maintained by avoidance of all dangerous inquiries, common interests,
+and secular amusements. A minister attending a Jenny-Lind
+Charity-Concert in a play-house, or leading armed men in the most sacred
+cause for which human blood might be shed,--what offences would these
+have been to this titular Colonel of Foxden, who had won his honors by a
+six-months' finery and dining as aide-de-camp to some forgotten
+Governor!
+
+"I fear I shall not be back before you wish to close the house."
+
+"Never mind, you remember the old arrangement: door-key under the
+scraper,--light burning in the drawing-room."
+
+With hearty thanks I went forth to keep my appointment with Dr. Burge.
+
+
+II.
+
+The narrative here takes us to a portion of the shadowy perturbation
+which any who have turned these pages as a fictitious rendering of the
+grotesque in experience will do well to omit. Only a mortifying, though
+perchance salutary, sense of human infirmity comes from beholding one
+set over the people as intercessor and counsellor struggling in the
+meshes of that snare which the Enemy had spread for the undisciplined
+and wandering multitude. No, not even struggling now. That Clifton had
+fought through solitary days against the wretched enervation which
+invited him, I had reason to know. But he had dared to tamper with the
+normal functions of mind and body, to try fantastic tricks with that
+mysterious agent through which the healthy will commands the organism.
+And when the mental disorder, mocked at and preached against in happier
+years, at length ran through Foxden, the morbid condition of his system
+was powerless to resist the contagion.
+
+And let us not overlook the fact that in these manifestations there was
+to be found a palpable reality, a positive marvel, well calculated to
+lay hold of a skeptic like Clifton. His early associations with the
+Transcendentalists had undermined his faith in all popular presentations
+of Christianity. But his peculiarly emotional nature could never dwell
+in that haziness of opinion upon august subjects in which sounder men
+among the brethren made out to live cheerfully and to work vigorously.
+While Clifton madly sought a position of intelligence and satisfaction
+beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and
+stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For
+with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less
+than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess.
+And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every
+graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity
+had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete
+heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, which
+the best minds of Pagan civilization found no difficulty in pronouncing
+a delusion and a lie.
+
+I knew Dr. Burge for one of those most useful instructors who will
+patiently examine with the intellect what the instinct teaches them to
+condemn. He seldom helped the doctrine he assailed by denying it such
+facts as were true and such attractions as were real. He had cheerfully
+accepted whatever reproach came to him from frequenting circles in the
+attempt to see the mystery from the believers' point of view. I was not
+surprised at finding him upon one of the back benches in the Town Hall.
+
+"Nothing noteworthy," he said, as I joined him. "Only women have
+spoken,--the excited nervous system careering without restraint,--no
+spirits yet."
+
+"They pretend inspiration, I suppose."
+
+"Oh, yes; and it is not surprising that semi-educated people, ignorant
+of analogous phenomena, should take the _omne ignotum pro magnifico_."
+
+"Yet you are said to be a believer in the possession which the mediums
+claim?"
+
+"Certainly," replied Dr. Burge, "and to just this extent:--I do not
+doubt the possibility of intercourse between man and the lower grades of
+immaterial life, and I am willing to adopt this hypothesis to explain
+any occurrence where the facts demand it. That, in rare cases, such may
+be the most simple and natural supposition, I readily admit. The
+ordinary performances, however, may be accounted for without calling in
+god or demon to untie the knot."
+
+I remarked that Mr. Clifton was not to be seen upon the platform.
+
+"He is kept out of the way until the last,--in the Selectmen's Room, as
+I am told, and alone."
+
+"I fear all appeal would now be in vain; yet, Sir, I would not have you
+spare an effort to awaken him to the peril of his course."
+
+"Let us go to him, then," assented Dr. Burge.
+
+Upon common occasions, the Selectmen's Room failed to suggest any
+exceptional character in its occupants. It was a narrow, ill-lighted,
+unventilated apartment, bitter with the after-taste of taxes,
+prophetically flavorous of taxes yet to be. Stove-accommodation beyond
+the criticism of the most fastidious salamander, a liberal sprinkling of
+sand with a view to the ruminant necessities of the town-patricians, two
+or three stiff armchairs with straws protruding from their well-worn
+cushions, intolerant benches for unofficial occupancy,--altogether a
+gloomy aggregate result of the diverse ideals of social well-being to be
+found among the inhabitants of Foxden. But now I recognized a new
+element in this familiar chamber; a strange contagion hung about the
+walls; a something which imparted delicate edge to the nervous system
+was perceptible in the dry heat of the air. Near an oracular table,
+which bore evidence of recent manipulation, stood the Reverend Charles
+Clifton: others had evidently been with him before our entrance; he was
+now alone. An oil-lamp sputtered feebly in the corner. The stove-devil
+glared at us through his one glazed eye, and puffed out his mephitic
+welcome as I shut the door.
+
+"Clifton, my old friend!" exclaimed Dr. Burge.
+
+The person addressed raised his head, half closed his eyes, as one who
+endeavors to fix objects which are flitting before him. It seemed
+necessary to withdraw his inward gaze from some delicious dazzlement of
+dream-land. At last he spoke slowly and with effort.
+
+"Burge, you here?--and one of us?"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" cried my companion. "I but look upon these things for
+my own warning, and in the way of my duty as teacher to those who might
+be disposed to tamper with unknown powers, within or without."
+
+"Say, rather, to melt the iron links which gyve soul to body," said
+Clifton, in constrained articulation, through which a moaning undertone
+seemed ever trying to be heard. "Say, rather, to produce a finer
+exaltation than wine, opium, or hashish,--for it is most sweet to
+subject the animal organism to the control of spirit-wills."
+
+"A grateful doctrine to those who dare to substitute a morbid
+receptivity for an active endeavor!"
+
+"It is to soothe the sense-powers, so that others may use them to give
+us intimations far beyond their common capacity."
+
+"'_I_ keep under my body and bring it into subjection,'" quoted Dr.
+Burge, emphasizing the personal pronoun. "The Apostle declares that his
+own immortal individuality alone controls his members,--and why? 'lest,
+when I have preached unto others, I myself should become a castaway.'"
+
+The Doctor delivered the last sentence with rich cathedral-emphasis, and
+with the full unction of priestly authority.
+
+Clifton, or whatever vague and dusky power controlled him, cowered at
+the rebuke. The nervous energy with which he had experimented, or which
+he had left passive for the experiments of others, seemed withdrawn from
+his frame.
+
+Dr. Burge perceived his advantage, and continued:--
+
+"I speak to you, my fallen brother, as I cannot speak to the foolish
+people who grope in this miasma of delusion. Silly women, yielding to
+the natural vanity of their sex, may mistake hysterics for inspiration.
+Vacillating and vacant men may seek a new sensation by encouraging a
+revival of the demoniacal epidemics of heathendom. But you, who have
+been a preacher of the gospel, though, as I must now more than ever
+believe, after a devitalized and perverted method,--you, to leave the
+honest work of a dweller upon earth, to chatter of immensity, to weaken
+the brain that it may no longer separate the true from the
+false!--believe me, Clifton, you have been bought by the shallowest
+promises which the King of Evil ever exchanged for a sacred and
+inviolable soul."
+
+"You have spoken according to your business," replied Mr. Clifton,
+impatiently. "You, who begin by assuming the impossibility of
+spirit-intercourse since Bible times, with what candor can you examine
+the facts we build upon?"
+
+"I make no such assumption," was the rejoinder. "Has it not been
+foretold that 'in the latter times some shall depart from the faith,
+giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils'? Have we not
+aforetime been vexed with them in this very New England? For I almost
+justify Mather's words, when he stigmatizes the necromancy of his day as
+'a terrible Plague of Evil Angels,' or, in still plainer speech, as 'a
+prodigious descent of devils upon divers places near the centre of this
+Province.' And how better can we characterize this confused and
+distracting babblement which gives no good gift to man?"
+
+"It has given him this," exclaimed Clifton, advancing towards Dr. Burge,
+and seeming for a few moments to resume his old personality,--"it has
+given him the knowledge of a life to come! You think it, preach it,
+believe it,--but you do not _know_ it. A susceptibility to impressions
+from the inmost characters of men has been mine through life. It has
+been given me to perceive what facts and feelings most deeply adhered in
+the mental consciousness. And I tell you, Burge, ministers both of your
+communion and of mine repeat the old words of sublimest assurance, sway
+congregations with descriptions bright or lurid of future worlds, yet
+behind all this glowing speech and blatant confidence there has
+lurked,--oh, will you deny it?--there has lurked a grovelling doubt of
+man's immortality."
+
+"I will not deny it," said Dr. Burge, with slow solemnity. "Sinners that
+we are, how can we ask that faith be at no moment confused by the
+thousand cries of infidelity which our profession requires us to answer?
+Let my soul be chilled by transient shades of skepticism, rather than
+dote in a blind and puerile credulity! If I am not at all times equally
+penetrated by the great fact of man's conscious immortality, it is
+because of my undesert. A way to _know_ of the doctrine has been
+revealed: it is by doing the will of the Father: who of us has fulfilled
+the condition? But I can meet you on lower ground, and declare, that,
+according to our human observation, it is not well for man to _know_ the
+destiny of his being in all its details until the trials and victories
+of life have taught him to turn such knowledge to elevating use. It is
+the deplorable sinfulness of our nature which seeks to obtain without
+deserving, to possess the end and despise the appointed means."
+
+Some reply would doubtless have been made to these pertinent
+considerations, had not the confused tramp of a committee been heard at
+the door. The professors of the "New Dispensation" had come to conduct
+the Reverend Charles Clifton to their platform. The distinguished
+convert shuddered, as if affected by some incorporeal presence, and
+suffered himself to be led away.
+
+"I can do nothing more," murmured Dr. Burge; "and why should I stay to
+hear diluted rhetoric, or inflated commonplace, from lips which, however
+unworthily, once proclaimed the simplicity of the gospel?"
+
+"Because it is not well to prejudge what may offer some possible variety
+in this credence," I ventured to suggest.
+
+"You are right; we will stay."
+
+A murmur of applause followed the appearance of Clifton upon the
+platform,--yet it was only a murmur; for the flock, long pastured upon
+delicate delusions, received as matter of course whatever shepherding
+chance offered. Did not the face of the medium wear an expression of
+earthly disappointment at this slender recognition? Could it be that
+there was needed the hot-house heat of a carnal "success" to favor this
+exquisite flowering of the spirit? Can we suppose that this whole matter
+was no other than some Yankee patent to avoid the awful solitude in
+which each human soul must enter into relations with the unseen?
+
+Slowly and in dreamy heaviness the discourse began. The inspirational
+claims seemed to lie in the manifest improbability of a man of Clifton's
+cultivation being so dull and diffuse in a natural condition. Yet, as
+the message wore on, it cannot be denied that a strange influence was at
+work. The words followed each other with greater fluency and in richer
+abundance. The meaning, to be sure, was still vague enough; and whenever
+some commonplace truth or plausibility protruded from the general
+washiness, it was seized upon and beaten and stretched to the last
+degree of tenuity. Phrases upon phrases of gorgeous dreaminess. A
+soothing delight,--yet such delight as only the bodily senses demanded.
+A joyful deliverance from the bondage of intellectual life. Hints that
+our human consciousness of sin was a vain delusion from which the
+"developed" man was happily delivered. "Come up here," said the
+preacher, in substance, "and escape from this moral accountability which
+sits so heavily upon you. Here is a sensuous paradise, sweet and
+debilitating, offering varied delights to the eclecticism of personal
+taste. All angular and harsh things may be dissolved in copious floods
+of words, and washed into a ravishing, enervating Universe."
+
+An hour--two hours--passed. The air was thick and poisonous. Attention
+had been strained to the utmost. Other things were to be noted by those
+accustomed to regard mental disorder from a physiological point of view.
+
+And now, by some abnormal mode of cerebral activity, the trance-speaker
+won strange sympathies from his auditors. Certain faculties in Clifton
+had reached an expansion not permitted to the healthy man. A plastic
+power came from him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences
+groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time
+it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium or
+his audience might be stimulated into specious blossom. Phenomena were
+exhibited which transcended the conscious powers of the human
+soul,--nay, which testified of its latent ability to work without
+organic conditions. Our unemployed brain-organs, as Hamilton and others
+have clearly proved, are always employing themselves. And from this
+self-employment--or was it demon-employment?--there swept through the
+consciousness a vague delirium of excitement. In all that assembly a
+single pulse beat feverish measures. The climax was reached. Without was
+the soft spring night veiling the scarcely touched range of knowledge
+and beauty offered to the healthy energies of man; within were dazed
+wanderers in a region of morbid emotion, seeking to intensify the colors
+of Nature, willing to waste precious vitality in conjurations of the
+dead.
+
+The wretched thraldom was over,--and what had it left?
+
+An exquisite sensitiveness of the nerves of sense, imagination exalted,
+memory goaded, reason and judgment overthrown.
+
+
+III.
+
+In his Fast-Day sermon Dr. Burge delivered himself of much weighty
+testimony against those thaumaturgical incantations of heathenism which
+had been revived among us. With his splendor of clerical pause and
+emphasis he read the denunciations against a sinful nation to which the
+prophet Isaiah has affixed the awful words,--"Saith the Lord, the Lord
+of Hosts."
+
+"And they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one
+against his neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom."
+
+Here the preacher's dark eyes left the sacred volume, and seemed to gaze
+upon some coming struggle in which the sins of the people would meet a
+bloody retribution. Then, referring to the page, he pronounced with
+bitterness of holy indignation the prophetic curse which was that day
+fulfilled in our cherished New England.
+
+"And they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that
+have familiar spirits, and to the wizards."
+
+The sermon made no more visible impression upon the sinful portion of
+the congregation than homilies against novel and pleasant indulgences
+are wont to do.
+
+"The Apostle was right, after all," said Colonel Prowley, quoting the
+text upon the meeting-house steps; "we _should_ 'try the spirits.'"
+
+"No objection to that," said the post-master; "but here's Dr. Burge
+tells us to keep out of their way, and call them all humbugs, without
+trying them at all."
+
+The gentleman referred to joined our party upon the meeting-house
+green, and accompanied us home.
+
+As we entered the house, our ears were saluted by a sort of scuffling
+noise, with an accompaniment of broken English. Miss Turligood, highly
+charged with the Detached Vitalized Electricity, or some stimulant of
+equal potency, ran to meet us in the entry, to enjoin silence and a
+passive state of mind before entering the parlor. The manifestations
+during service had been most wonderful. Twynintuft had lifted the table
+to the ceiling, with Mr. Stellato clinging to the legs. Mrs. Colfodder
+had had her back-hair taken down, and the housemaid was certain that
+somebody tried to kiss her.
+
+We made for the parlor with all convenient speed. Notwithstanding the
+solemn adjurations of Dr. Burge, we entertained guilty hopes of seeing
+some of the marvels which had become such positive drugs in our absence.
+But to _see_ anything was, for a long time, out of the question; for the
+spirits had insisted upon having the shutters closed, and shawls pinned
+up before the cracks in the same, ere they would favor mortals with an
+exhibition. Finally, dim outlines revealed themselves through the
+obscurity. We made out a female figure (it was the cook, so Miss Prowley
+whispered) who was haranguing the assembly at the rate of a word every
+thirty seconds, or thereabouts.
+
+_Cook as Twynintuft:_--"I am Mister Twynintuft. I set lots by you all. I
+left my bright spirit-home to come here to-day. The squashes was musty
+afore they was brought into the house. No blame to the cook. Them
+pickled termarterses couldn't keep into spring, and so I tell you now.
+The spheres is a dry place, and everythin' is most a-beautiful here."
+
+_Betty, the housemaid, loquitur._--(She appears in the character of
+Red-Jacket, a popular personation upon these occasions,--it being very
+easy to talk _Indian_ by the simple recipe of transposing the nominative
+and objective cases of the personal pronoun.) "Me don't like what you
+say, old Twyney! I's name's Red-Jacket. Pale-face give fire-water to I.
+The squashes was good enough till cook left 'em out in the rain. Me have
+hunting-ground in fifth sphere. When me puts up tomatoes in the
+spirit-world, me rosins 'em when they bile. Great influence comes from I
+to-day; also, much development."
+
+"Dr. Burge," whispered I, "you claim to have devoted some time to the
+examination of these delusions; but I will venture to say you have never
+witnessed anything so humiliating as this!"
+
+"My dear Sir," murmured the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to
+be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel
+than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but
+upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal teachings
+ever blessed mankind."
+
+"Do you think these people voluntary impostors?"
+
+"No; it would be nearer the truth to say that they are voluntary victims
+of a mental epidemic like that which developed itself in the St. Vitus's
+dance of the Middle Ages. The subjects of that disease went through the
+same spasms, convulsions, and painful racking of the limbs which
+accompany such cases of this personation as are not designed deceptions.
+Even those accidentally present, when the effects of the ancient
+contagion were exhibited, became infected and were irresistibly impelled
+to join in the extravagance. Look at Miss Turligood and Mr. Stellato,
+and see if the parallel is not supported."
+
+The individuals named were seen to be twisting themselves up and making
+an awkward sort of obeisance to the housemaid, who (still as Red-Jacket)
+thus delivered herself:--
+
+"Me goin' to dancey war-dance. Great Spirit sends lots more Indians come
+dancey too."
+
+A cry of acquiescence,--perchance intended for a ghostly war-whoop,--and
+the beloved of my Lord Byron broke into a savage polka.
+
+Stellato seized a paper-knife, and proceeded to scalp a chair with
+merciless ferocity.
+
+Those unfortunate ladies, Miss Branly and Miss Turligood, were unable to
+resist the infection, and so sprang among the party, whirled about, and
+exhibited absurdities painful and unnecessary to relate.
+
+"By the Muse of my ancestor the Poet!" exclaimed Colonel Prowley,
+indignantly, "I will no longer endure this clumsy travesty of that
+choric saltation with which Apollo was said to inspire his Pythian
+virgins. Dr. Burge, you will oblige me by pulling down that shawl!
+Sister, you will please to open the shutters of the south window!"
+
+The requests were instantly complied with. The wholesome sunlight burst
+into the room, and checked, as if by magic, the unseemly mumming of
+these deluded convulsionaries. Mrs. Colfodder sank down exhausted upon
+the sofa. Betty ceased to be Red-Jacket. Mr. Stellato gave up his
+scalping-knife, flopped feebly upon a chair, and again became a
+transparent jelly-fish of philosophy and water. It was harder to bring
+Miss Turligood to herself, by reason of the singular intractability of
+the squaw who had taken possession of the premises, and was only to be
+dislodged by much tediousness of argument and adjuration. At length,
+however, even this was accomplished. The Indians sulked off into space,
+and their terrestrial mediums once more prepared to collect about the
+table.
+
+"Why, bless me! past one, I declare!" said Miss Turligood, consulting
+her watch. "How spirits do make the time pass! A brief adjournment for
+dinner will now take place. The circle will meet for renewed
+investigation this afternoon at three o'clock. Every member will be
+punctual. Remember, in this place, at three o'clock."
+
+"Stay," said Miss Prowley, in a gentle, but at the same time decided
+tone; "it will not be convenient to us to receive this party again. The
+presence of friends from the city, who are in Foxden only for the day,
+renders a meeting this afternoon out of the question. And having once
+broken up our regular sittings, it will not be worth while to resume
+them,--at least, here."
+
+"But, Madam, Madam, you forget that the spirits have positively
+commanded us to hold sittings in your parlor three times a day till
+further notice!" gasped Miss Turligood, in extreme astonishment.
+
+"I do not recognize the authority of the spirits. They have no right to
+dictate the uses of my parlor."
+
+Here was a confession indeed on the part of Miss Prowley. _Not recognize
+the authority of the spirits!_ Miss Turligood fairly staggered, when she
+heard the impious announcement. The smooth sciolist Stellato rallied his
+weak wits and uttered a cry of wonder at such flagitious heresy. The
+future Lady Byron, taking as a deliberate insult any doubts of the
+identity and authority of her posthumous spouse, threw up her arms in
+horror, and trotted out of the house.
+
+Finally, we got rid of them all,--_how_, I don't exactly remember, and
+if I did, it would not concern the reader to know. We delivered Miss
+Turligood over to her Irishman, (who had brought a carryall with him
+this time,) and charged him never to drive her back; Betty and the cook
+were restored to the kitchen; Stellato and Miss Branly disappeared, no
+one could say where.
+
+"And now," exclaimed Colonel Prowley, with a sigh of relief, "let us
+forget this nonsense, and go to dinner,--for the spirits have given me
+an appetite, if nothing else."
+
+"Then you intend to follow what I understand to be the teaching of your
+invisible visitors," remarked Dr. Burge, pleasantly.
+
+"How so?"
+
+"You do not recognize Fast-Day."
+
+"Ha! ha!" laughed the Colonel; "I doubt if the ghosts were quite
+unreasonable about that."
+
+"Nay, brother, you should tell our good minister that we have but a cold
+collation, and that prepared on the previous day, as is our custom on
+the Sabbath," urged Miss Prowley, with the dignity of an exact and
+consistent housekeeper.
+
+"It is as well we have," was the reply; "for those precious Indians,
+although wise in medicine, knew little enough about cookery. They would
+have made sorry work, had it been necessary to give a culinary direction
+to the inspirations of our damsels below-stairs."
+
+"And yet, after all," resumed our host, meditatively, and after a
+moment's pause, "it seems scarcely right to make a jest of this matter;
+for, although the manifestations of to-day have been ridiculous
+enough,--yet--really--when I think of some of those instructive
+observations of poor Sir Joseph Barley"----
+
+The remark was never concluded, for a sudden rattling and whoaing and
+bumping of baggage was heard. The interruption came from before the
+front-door. The "Railroad-Omnibus" had driven up to the house.
+
+"It is, doubtless, my good friend Professor Owlsdarck," said Colonel
+Prowley,--courteously rebuking an exclamation of astonishment from his
+sister, who had gone to the window;--"to be sure, we did not expect him
+to-day, but he is ever a most welcome guest."
+
+"But it is _not_ Professor Owlsdarck!" cried the sister, in shrillest
+tones of feminine amazement. "That portly figure to which the pencil of
+the artist has done such feeble justice! the spectacles with the square
+glasses! the enormous seal of the Sextons!--it can be but one man!"
+
+"What! you don't mean"----
+
+"Yes, but I _do_ mean! Come and see for yourself!"
+
+"A ghost in an omnibus! Why, sister, sister, the
+Detached--what-you-may-call-it has got into your head,--or, heavens! can
+it be that our unbelief is punished with this frightful manifestation?"
+
+"It is Sir Joseph Barley himself!" ejaculated Miss Prowley.
+
+"Surrounded by his bank of silver-tunicked attendants?" gasped the
+Colonel, in desperate interrogation.
+
+"No, no, nothing of the kind," said Dr. Burge, assuringly; "he has not
+brought even a footman."
+
+And it _was_ Sir Joseph Barley,--in the flesh,--and in a good deal of
+it, too;--Sir Joseph Barley, full to overflowing with talk and
+compliments. He had long planned a journey to America, and a surprise to
+his Fellow-Sexton in Foxden. The trip had been necessarily postponed
+from week to week, and then from month to month. Always expecting to
+leave by the next steamer, he had never thought it worth while to write.
+Had been on shore exactly nine hours, was delighted with the country,
+and had already written the first chapter of a book about it. Was,
+nevertheless, surprised to see none of the native Red Men upon the wharf
+when the Canada arrived. Should have thought the spectacle would have
+been both novel and imposing to them. After dinner, would, with
+permission, go into the forests about Foxden, and visit this singular
+people in their national wigwams.
+
+How picture the delight of hospitable Colonel Prowley, when, volubly
+delivering these and other sentiments, the High Priest and Potentate
+over all Sextondom entered the parlor and made himself comfortable in a
+rocking-chair?
+
+There is no need to dwell upon the matronly bustle of Miss Prowley, who,
+utterly ignoring the proper ordinances of the day, proceeded to send to
+the hotel for a beefsteak and a bottle of British Stout which could be
+warranted of genuine importation.
+
+"And stop, stop, sister!" whispered the Colonel, pursuing her to the
+door; "the idea seems absurd, to be sure, but still don't you think it
+barely possible, that, if Betty ran down to the river and caught a few
+of those snapping-turtles sunning themselves upon the old log, we might
+boil them into something which would faintly remind Sir Joseph of the
+Lord Mayor's soup?"
+
+This proposition being dismissed as impracticable,--first, by reason of
+the notorious unwillingness of the turtles to be caught, and, waiving
+that objection, because of the length of time it would take to achieve
+any passable imitation of the aldermanic dainty,--I was moved to an
+_aside_-declaration to the effect that my slight observation of the
+tastes of British tourists in the Federal States led to the suggestion
+of _oysters_ as delicacies not wholly unlikely to find favor with their
+eminent guest.
+
+An explosion of impulsive gratitude responded to the hint. There was a
+new "saloon" just opened in Main Street,--Betty should stop there and
+leave a generous order.
+
+Well! it was some time before we were summoned to our amended dinner;
+but, when we did get it, it was a dinner worth waiting for.
+
+Sir Joseph Barley--Heaven bless him!--knew nothing of that smattering of
+Cosmos into which we hungry New-Englanders are wont to thrust our wits.
+He bluntly declared that he had never heard of Detached Vitalized
+Electricity, Woman's Rights, or Harmonial Development; also, he was
+delightfully confident that--he, Sir Joseph Barley, British subject,
+_not_ having heard of them--they could not, by any possibility, be worth
+hearing about. Moreover, he had not read a word of Carlyle, and
+positively did not know of the existence of any English poet called
+Browning. Dr. Burge, he thoughtfully suggested, had probably mistaken
+the name; it was Byron, or possibly Bulwer, about whom he wished to
+inquire. The former of these personages was a British Peer, and a writer
+of some celebrity; he was, however, no longer living, having never
+recovered from a fever he took at a place called Missolonghi, in
+Greece;--the latter had written a book entitled "Pelham," once popular,
+but now thought inferior to a series of romances known in Great Britain
+as the "Waverley Novels"; these were the work of one Scott, a native of
+Edinburgh, whom George IV. honored with a baronetcy,--a splendid
+recompense for his great literary industry.
+
+This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the
+New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was
+good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and
+satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather
+narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant
+that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease
+of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of
+infinite space,--were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had
+never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American
+citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It
+is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth
+class--ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of
+life--who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of
+an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments--why not confess it? for is
+not man body as well as soul?--when it is a relief to get away from our
+mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a
+brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of
+his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past. Yet let
+this estate be temporary; for it is well to return to our thin diet,
+and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring
+phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life
+of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you,
+would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend,
+if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are
+seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers
+sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon
+hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise
+and grasp. And why this digression? I think its suggestion lay in the
+fact that Sir Joseph, being the type of the ordinary Englishman, held
+and imparted a fine sunniness of temper, and a perfectly balanced
+serenity,--good gifts, which, so far as my experience goes, are
+possessed in full measure by only one or two exceptional Americans, and
+these men of high and acknowledged genius.
+
+"I don't understand it, upon my honor," cried our visitor, after we had
+endeavored to explain to him his own spiritual intrusion on the previous
+evening. "I have heard of Doctor Pordage and the Dragon, and of the
+Drummer of Tedworth; but when you tell a sane British subject that his
+apparition comes before him, and takes, as it were, the froth off his
+welcome"----
+
+"No, no, my dear friend," interrupted Colonel Prowley, "you must know
+that nothing could do that! As to the obituary I had written, it may do
+for some other time,--for, indeed, my felicity in such compositions has
+been highly commended, and this by mundane authorities of no common
+weight."
+
+"Let us change the subject," said Sir Joseph, dryly; "I have no wish to
+test your powers in that direction; and so long as I don't give up the
+ghost, I suppose you must."
+
+"I would only say this," observed the Colonel,--"that in your book upon
+America I hope you will not fail to declare, that, in folly, deception,
+and unmitigated humbug, our Foxden spirits exceed all others ever seen
+or heard."
+
+"Sir Joseph Barley would be a foolish chronicler to commit himself to
+any such statement," said Dr. Burge, who seemed to feel it his duty to
+speak the moral _tag_ to our little Fast-Day interlude. "I cannot allow
+that these Foxden manifestations are one whit more silly or equivocal
+than many I have seen elsewhere. This shamming the ghost of somebody
+still alive is no uncommon deception: several cases of the sort have
+come under my recent observation. And it is well that they sometimes
+occur; for they must cause reflection in all who are not victims of a
+mental disorder which seems to confound the reasoning powers of
+man,--causing its subjects to accept as teachers phantoms of their
+morbid imaginations, or deceiving intelligences from without. To all, I
+say, but such as these, an imposition of the sort here noticed must send
+reflections of our total inability to identify any pretended spirit
+merely because he flatters our vanity, or talks what may seem _to us_
+good morality or sound sense."
+
+Dr. Burge had laid aside his knife and fork, and had launched bravely
+forth upon his theme. Sir Joseph moved uneasily. Things were getting
+serious. Our host happily interposed,--
+
+"Very true, Doctor, all very true;--yet there is one piece of wisdom
+regulating the spiritual practice which now seems worth considering."
+
+"And what is that, pray?"
+
+"They do not recognize Fast-Day."
+
+"Well, well," said Dr. Burge, taking the hint with the utmost
+good-humor, "perhaps they were not altogether wrong there; and so I will
+trouble Miss Prowley for a bit more of the steak, and----No, thank you,
+no beer for me; I am a water-drinker of twenty years' standing."
+
+"The toast I am about to propose," observed Colonel Prowley, "may, with
+exceeding propriety, be drunk in water,--that is, whenever
+milk-and-water is not to be had:--
+
+_"Our spiritual demagogues, much weaker than our political ones, may
+they not be as much worse!"_
+
+"And there is one other sentiment," said good Dr. Burge, brimming over
+with an honest hilarity,--"a toast which I should be willing to drink in
+pretty strong--coffee."
+
+"I have not forgotten that," exclaimed our host, proffering a hearty
+shake of the hand to the High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch
+of All Sextons,--
+
+_"Health and a long life to Sir Joseph Barley!"_
+
+
+
+
+PROSPICE.
+
+
+    Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
+      The mist in my face,
+    When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
+      I am nearing the place,
+    The power of the night, the press of the storm,
+      The post of the foe;
+    Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
+      Yet the strong man must go:
+    For the journey is done and the summit attained,
+      And the barriers fall,
+    Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
+      The reward of it all.
+    I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
+      The best and the last!
+    I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
+      And bade me creep past.
+    No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
+      The heroes of old,
+    Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
+      Of pain, darkness, and cold.
+    For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
+      The black minute's at end,
+    And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
+      Shall dwindle, shall blend,
+    Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
+      Then a light, then thy breast,
+    O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
+      And with God be the rest!
+
+
+
+
+WASHINGTON IRVING.
+
+
+We have, at last, a full story of the life of Mr. Irving. It is from the
+hand of a near relative, who has brought to the task an almost filial
+reverence, with a modest reserve of language, and a delicacy of
+treatment, which, while they disarm criticism, would of themselves
+suffice to attest the kinship of the writer with the distinguished
+subject of his biography. It is a quiet and tranquil picture that he has
+given us, of a serene and tranquil life. As we have turned it over
+delightedly, chapter after chapter, and volume upon volume, we have
+wished at times that the coy biographer had been endowed with a spice of
+garrulity or of egotism; for, say what we will, these qualities
+contribute largely to the interest with which we follow the story of a
+life about whose incidents and development the public has greed of
+knowledge.
+
+If Boswell had invariably governed his biographic record by the
+instincts of a gentleman, we should have possessed far less wealth of
+gossip by which to judge of the manhood and the familiar surroundings
+of the great lexicographer. And we can readily imagine that a
+conscientious man, in setting about the task of writing the life of a
+favorite author, would ask himself, over and over, how much should be
+yielded to the eager curiosity of the public, and how much a refined
+courtesy of feeling should keep in reserve. There are men, indeed, whose
+history, by whomsoever recorded, would suggest no such questioning,--men
+who have elbowed their way through life, bent upon some single aim, with
+a grand and coarse disregard of all the heart-burnings they may have
+caused, and all the idols they may have brushed down. Washington Irving
+was by no means such a man; he was kind-hearted to the last degree; and
+yet, remembering as we do that sly look of humor which lurked always in
+the corner of his eye, we cannot believe but that in his freer moments
+he has pricked through many a bag of bombast, and made dashing onslaught
+upon noisy literary pretension. Of all this, however, we find nothing in
+the volumes before us,--nothing in his own books. Always, in his contact
+with the world, he is genial; the face of every friend is beautiful to
+him; every acquaintance is at the least comely; in rollicking Tom Moore
+he sees (what all of us cannot see) a big heart,--in Espartero a bold,
+frank, honest soldier,--in every fair young girl a charmer,--and in
+almost every woman a fair young girl.
+
+In all these respects the biography of Mr. Pierre Irving is in fitting
+accord with what we had known and believed of his eminent kinsman. And
+we are delighted at being confirmed in the belief. We yield all measure
+of respect for the grace, the purity, the dignity, which Washington
+Irving has added to our literature; and yet we honor still more that
+true American heart which beams through all his writings, and throughout
+this record of his life. The rare kindliness of the man so hallows and
+sublimes his memory that we half forget his artistic power, his purity
+of touch, his keenness of observation, his delightful and abounding
+humor.
+
+There are no storms in this life of his: it is, as we have said, a quiet
+picture of a career that is full of honor indeed, full of triumphs, but
+full of serenity. Here is no Don Quixote searching for enemies with whom
+to do battle,--no John Knox thwacking terribly upon all heretical pates,
+and sweating with his obstinacy, as much as with the vigor of his blows;
+but the kindly gentleman, giving tone and beauty to the common sentiment
+of us all, piquing our wonder by his adroitness, kindling our smiles by
+his arch sallies, winning our admiration by his thousand graces, and our
+respect by his honesty and truth.
+
+In 1797, Washington Irving, a roguish lad of fifteen, living in William
+Street, in New York, and not a little rebellious against the severe
+orthodoxy of his father,--who was a deacon of the Presbyterian
+Church,--sometimes slipped out from his chamber, after evening prayers,
+for an hour or two at the theatre; he attended school, where he stole
+the reading of such books as "Robinson Crusoe," and "Sinbad the Sailor";
+and he wrote compositions for such of his fellows as would make good his
+tasks in mathematics. This was a study which he never loved, and to the
+last he abjured all stringency of method. The writer of this paper
+remembers on one occasion asking him what system he pursued in massing
+his notes for the "Life of Washington." "Don't ask me for system," said
+he; "I never had any. If you want to know what a man can do by
+arrangement, talk with B----; his whole mind is pigeon-holed."
+
+At sixteen we find him in a lawyer's office; he does not, like some of
+his brothers, enjoy the advantages (if there be any) of a collegiate
+education. But he loves law as little as he loves mathematics. Feeble
+health gives occasion for frequent absences and journeyings; and it is
+plain to see that he loves a voyage up the Hudson, and adventurous
+travel through the wilds of Northern New York, better than he loves
+Judge Livingston, or the books of his law-patron, Mr. Hoffman. He has a
+scribbling mood upon him at this early day, too, and contributes to the
+New-York "Morning Chronicle" certain letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, which
+are remarked for their pleasant humor. At the age of twenty-one (1804)
+continued ill-health suggests a sea-voyage. He leaves law and his jolly
+companions,--Brevoort, Kemble, Paulding, and the rest,--and sails for
+Bordeaux. He wanders through Southern Europe delightedly,--meets
+Washington Allston at Rome, and is half tempted to turn painter,--sees
+Humboldt, De Staël, Cooke, Siddons; and while all England is jubilant
+over Nelson's victory, and all England mourning over Nelson's death, he
+sails, in 1806, for home.
+
+Arrived in New York a sound man, he goes through a process of cramming
+for admission to the bar, and is presently instated--attorney-at-law.
+But at the very time of his examination he is concocting with James
+Paulding the project of "Salmagundi," which presently enlivens and
+perplexes people with the vagaries of Launcelot Langstaff. A little
+after, he plans and commences the Knickerbocker History.
+
+But meantime an interesting episode of his life is developing, which by
+its unfortunate issue is to give a certain color to all after-expression
+of his sentiment. While in the family of Mr. Hoffman, as law-student, he
+has conceived a strong attachment for his daughter; in certain
+memoranda, marked "private," which come under the eyes of the biographer
+only after Mr. Irving's death, he says,--"I idolized her. I felt at
+times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity, and as if I was a
+coarse, unworthy being in comparison.... I saw her fade rapidly away,
+beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelical to the very last.... I
+was by her when she died.... I was the last one she looked upon." The
+memorandum from which this extract is taken had been originally written,
+it appeared, for the eye of an intimate lady-friend abroad, to whom we
+shall have occasion to refer.
+
+In 1809, at the age of twenty-six, is published his "History of New
+York." There were a few punctilious Dutch families who were offended at
+its sallies; but cultivated people generally welcomed its fun, its
+spirit, its quiet satire, with heartiness and applause.
+
+Shortly after he entered into a commercial partnership with his
+brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, of whom one was established in England,
+the other in New York. In the War of 1812 we find him acting as military
+aid to Governor Tompkins; and in 1815 he embarks again for Europe. He
+passes many years in England, in the course of which time the commercial
+firm, of which he is a member goes into bankruptcy. Upon this, he is of
+course thrown adrift. But through the influence of his friends at home
+he is offered the position of Chief Clerk of the Navy Department, with a
+salary of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. This, however, after some
+misgivings, he declines. He does not like the idea of being cramped by
+official routine of duty. He will try what he can do with his pen. And
+for months after making this decision (we have heard it with unction
+from his own lips) he can do nothing. His friend Allston is going back
+to America; Leslie is making a reputation; and he, a bankrupt, and
+having wantonly thrown up the chance for a lucrative position at home,
+is suddenly bereft of all capacity for literary work; he makes trial;
+but it is in vain. The "Sketch-Book" is floating in his thought; but he
+cannot commit its graces to paper.
+
+The months roll on; something must be done; the secretaryship at home is
+abandoned; he must try again; he does try; he sends off "Sketch-Book No.
+I." to America. We know what came of it: success, delight. Number upon
+number followed. There was an early republication, under the author's
+auspices, in London. He was fêted: it was so odd that an American should
+write with such control of language, with such a play of fancy, with
+such pathetic grace. There was a kind of social _furor_ to meet and to
+see the man who, notwithstanding his Transatlantic birth, had conquered
+all the witchery of British speech, who knew its possible delicacies of
+expression, and who graced it with a humor that reminded of Goldsmith.
+
+No American author had ever dreamed of such ovation before: an ovation
+not due to any incisive thought, not due to any novelty of his
+subject-matter,--but due to the fact that a man born overseas had
+suddenly appeared among British writers, who could lay hold upon their
+own resources of sentiment, and inwrap it in language which charmed them
+by its grace and provoked them by its purity.
+
+Mr. Murray entered upon the publication of the "Sketch-Book" in 1820,
+Mr. Irving being at that time thirty-seven years of age. Of his pleasant
+intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, of his junketings in Paris, of his
+meeting with Tom Moore, of his unfortunate enlistment in a
+steamboat-enterprise upon the Seine, there is full and most lively
+account in the "Life and Letters" before us. "Bracebridge Hall,"
+despatched from Paris in 1822, is received with the same favor which had
+attended the publication of the "Sketch-Book"; and the pecuniary returns
+are so liberal that he can lie upon his oars for a while, and (what
+pleases him more) can effectually aid his brother Peter, who was a party
+to the unfortunate steamboat-scheme.
+
+After this comes a merry whirl through Europe. The Rhine, Heidelberg,
+Munich, Vienna, we visit again in his sparkling letters, dated forty odd
+years ago. His reputation, and the good offices of French and English
+friends, open an easy path for him; everywhere he finds hospitality and
+acquaintances, and everywhere, by that frank, genial manner of his, he
+transmutes even chance acquaintances into confidential friends. The
+winter of 1822-3 is passed in the delightful city of Dresden. He meets
+with a warm welcome at the little Saxon court; he has the _entrée_ of a
+pleasant English household, where he becomes fairly domesticated. Mrs.
+Foster, its accomplished mistress, is a lady of fortune, who has two
+"lovely daughters." Mr. Irving, in concert with two or three
+gentlemen-friends, organizes certain home-theatricals, in which the
+Misses Foster engage with ready zeal and a charming grace. There are
+Italian readings, and country-excursions, to all of which Mr. Irving is
+a delighted party. He hardly knows how to tear himself away from scenes
+so enchanting. To Miss Foster he writes, on the occasion of a little
+foray into Bohemia,--"I am almost wishing myself back already. I ought
+to be off like your bird, but I feel I shall not be able to keep clear
+of the cage." Mrs. Foster, with a womanly curiosity, is eager to know
+how a man so susceptible as Mr. Irving, and so domestically inclined,
+should have reached the mature age of forty as a bachelor. Mr. Irving
+amiably gratifies her curiosity by detailing to her the story of his
+early and unfortunate attachment, in the shape of the memorandum to
+which we have already alluded. He closes this confidential disclosure by
+saying,--"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was
+not long since.... My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims
+upon my thoughts, and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
+I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for."
+
+We have dwelt upon this little episode, not because it has any essential
+importance in itself, but because it has been the subject of a most
+unseemly interpolation in the British reprint of the biography. Mr.
+Bentley, "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty," was, it appears, the
+purchaser, at a small sum, of the advance-sheets of the book; but, in
+order to secure English copyright, he conceived the idea of introducing
+extraneous matter of British origin. In prosecution of this design, he
+found as _collaborateurs_ the two Misses Foster above alluded to, who
+are now wives of clergymen of the Church of England. Mrs. Fuller, the
+elder of the sisters, and the special favorite of the author, gives upon
+the whole a modest and pleasant account of their association with Mr.
+Irving, and closes with a few lines which, she says, he wrote in her
+scrap-book in 1832. "He declared it was impossible for him to be less in
+a writing-mood." And thereupon follow the well-known lines entitled
+"Echo and Silence." They certainly do not prove very much for the
+writing-mood of Mr. Irving,--whatever they may prove for Sir Egerton
+Brydges. The contribution of the younger sister, Mrs. Flora Dawson, is
+in a somewhat exaggerated and melodramatic vein, in the course of which
+she takes occasion to expend a great deal of pity upon "poor Irving,"
+who is made to appear in the character of a rejected suitor for the hand
+of her sister. It is true that the testimony of Mr. Irving's biographer,
+and of his private papers, is largely against this absurdly romantic
+construction; but, although it had been perfectly authentic, it is
+almost incredible that a lady of delicacy should make such blazon of the
+affair, for the sake of securing a copyright to "Her Majesty's Publisher
+in Ordinary." We are sorry that Mrs. Dawson has not made a better
+_début_ in literature. As for Mr. Bentley, we can characterize his
+conduct in the matter only by the word--disgraceful. In the whole
+history of griping literary piracies (of which Americans must bear their
+share) we can recall no one which shows so bad a taste, and so bad a
+faith, as this of Mr. Bentley, the "Publisher in Ordinary to Her
+Majesty."
+
+In the year 1824 we find Mr. Irving at work in Paris chambers upon the
+"Tales of a Traveller"; then follow three or four joyous and workful
+years in Spain, between Madrid, Seville, and the Alhambra. We have all
+tasted the fruit of that pleasant sojourn; "Columbus" is on every
+library-shelf; and we remember a certain dog's-eared copy of the
+"Conquest of Granada" which once upon a time set all the boys of a
+certain school agog with a martial furor. How we shook our javelins at
+some bewildered cow blundering into the play-ground! What piratical
+forays we made upon the neighbors' orchards, after the manner of the
+brave old Muley Aben Hassan! And as for the Alhambra, the tinkle of the
+water in the marble basins of its court is lingering on our ears even
+yet.
+
+In Spain, as elsewhere, Mr. Irving makes a circle of friends about him
+whom it is hard to leave; but it must be. Accusing comrades at home say
+he has deserted his country; he turns his face Westward at last, and,
+full of honors, sails for New York once more, in the year 1832, at the
+ripe age of forty-nine. There never was a warmer welcome given to a
+returning citizen. A feast is made for him, at which all the magnates of
+the city of Manhattan assist; and the author's sensibility is so touched
+that he can make only stammering acknowledgments,--at which the cheers
+and the plaudits are heartier than ever.
+
+After this comes the opening of that idyllic life at Sunnyside,--the
+building of the gables, the gilding of the weather-cocks, the planting
+of the ivies. "Astoria" and "Bonneville" and the "Tour on the Prairies"
+keep his hand active and his brain in play. Near and dear relatives
+relieve his bachelor home of all loneliness. Nine years or more have
+passed after his return, when he is surprised--and not a little
+shocked--by his appointment, at the instance of Mr. Webster, as Minister
+to Madrid.
+
+He cannot resist the memories of the Alhambra, of Seville, of the
+Guadalquivir. Many pleasant associations are revived in England, in
+France, and not a few in the now revolutionary Spain. But it is plain to
+see that the official visit is not so enjoyable as the old untrammelled
+life in the Peninsula. No matter how light the duties, routine is a
+harness that galls him. We can almost hear his cheer of thanksgiving as
+he breaks away from it, and comes once more to his cherished home of
+Sunnyside. He is not an old man yet, though he counts well into the
+sixties. He contrives new additions to his cottage; he dashes off the
+charming "Life of Goldsmith" at a heat. His older books come pouring
+from the press, and are met with the cordial welcome of new ones.
+
+His brothers, to whom he had been so fondly knit, are all gone save one;
+Brevoort is gone; Kemble is just above him, at his forge, under the lee
+of the Highlands. The river by quiet Tarrytown is strung up and down
+with new "gentlemen's places."
+
+He puts himself resolutely at work upon the "Life of Washington."
+Frequently recurring illness, and a little shakiness in his step, warn
+him that his time is nearly up. He knows it. There is only one more task
+to make good. We hear of him at Mount Vernon, at Arlington, at Saratoga.
+Volume by volume the work comes forward. The public welcome it,--for
+they love the author, and they love the subject. Three volumes,--four
+volumes; and there are rumors that the old gentleman is failing. But
+whoever finds admission to that delightful home of Sunnyside meets the
+old smile, the old cheer. Seventy years have shaken the frame, but have
+not shaken the heartiness of the man. The jest leaps from his eye before
+his lip can clothe it, as it did twenty years before. There is a
+friendly pat for his little terrier, and a friendly word for his
+gardener, as in the old days.
+
+The fifth volume is in progress; but there is a cough that distresses
+him sorely. He pushes on, however, through his task. The step is growing
+feebler and the cough more annoying. It is the year 1859, and the
+seventy-seventh of his age, when, upon a certain November evening, with
+one little sharp cry of pain, he falls upon his chamber-floor--dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are men whose works we admire, but for whose lives we care
+nothing. Mr. Irving was not one of them. There is such a manly
+heartiness in him that we crave close contact: we cannot know him too
+well. Surely, this sympathy of readers, spontaneous, inevitable, will
+keep his name always green. There may come greater purists,--though they
+must con the language well; writers of more dramatic power we have now,
+possibly a quainter humor,--but one more tender, that puts us in such
+immediate sympathy with the author, hardly in our day, or in any day,
+shall we see again.
+
+It is plain enough that Mr. Irving depended largely on his
+friendships,--that, unconsciously, his courage for meeting and
+conquering whatever of difficulty lay in his path was fed very much by
+the encouraging words of those he loved and respected. His were no
+brawny shoulders to push their way, no matter what points were galled by
+contact,--no self-asserting, irresistible press of purpose, which is
+careless of opinion. Throughout, we see in his kindly nature a longing
+for sympathy: if from those intellectually strong, so much the better;
+if from dear friends, better yet; if from casual acquaintances, still it
+is good and serviceable to him, and helps him to keep his poise.
+
+He is a man, too, who clearly shuns controversy, who does not like to
+take blows or to give blows, and whose intellectual life and development
+find shape and color from this dread of the combative. Not that he is
+without a quiet power and exercise of satire,--not that follies which
+strike his attention do not get a thrust from his fine rapier; but they
+are such follies, for the most part, as everybody condemns. By reason of
+this quality in him, he avoids strongly controverted points in history;
+or, if his course lies over them, he gives a fairly adjusted average of
+opinion; he is not in mood for trenchant assertions of this or that
+belief. This same quality, again, makes him shun political life. He has
+a horror of its wordy wars, its flood of objurgation. Not that he is
+without opinions, calmly formed, and firmly held; but the entertainment
+of kindred belief he does not make the measure of his friendships. His
+character counted on the side of all charity, of forbearance, against
+harsh judgments; it was largely and Christianly catholic, as well in
+things political as literary. He never made haste to condemn.
+
+There is a rashness in criminating this retirement from every-day
+political conflicts which is, to say the least, very short-sighted.
+Extreme radicalism spurns the comparative inactivity, and says, "Lo, a
+sluggard!" Extreme conservatism spurns it, and says, "Lo, a coward!" It
+is only too true that cowards and sluggards both may take shelter under
+a shield of indifference; but it is equally true that any reasonably
+acute mind, if only charitably disposed, can readily distinguish between
+an inactivity which springs from craven or sluggish propensity, and that
+other which belongs to constitutional temperament, and which, while
+passing calm and dispassionate judgment upon excesses of opinion of
+either party, contributes insensibly to moderate the violence of both.
+
+But whatever may have been Mr. Irving's reluctance to ally himself
+intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special
+measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken
+utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country.
+There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he
+had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge
+he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so
+grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the
+sneers he flings at the country of others. It was not in Mr. Irving's
+nature to sneer at even an enemy; it was not his way of making conquest.
+He recognized fully the advantages of a foreign life (at his date) in
+following up that career of belles-lettres study which he had marked out
+for himself. The free _entrée_ of European libraries and galleries, and
+familiar association with a class of cultivated men of leisure, (in
+countries where such a class exists,) offered opportunity for refining
+his taste, for enlarging his stock of available material, and for
+stimulating his mental activity, of which he was not slow to perceive
+the value, and of which he has given ample account.
+
+There is much that is interesting in the Life before us in regard to Mr.
+Irving's habit of work. He was, like most men of extreme sensitiveness,
+moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions,
+with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his
+labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon
+these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale
+manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted;
+he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless
+blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months
+during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then it passes
+suddenly, like a cloud, and the air (as at Seville) wooes him to his
+charmingest fancies.
+
+We do not propose a critical estimate of the books of Mr. Irving. We
+have neither space nor present temper for this. The world has indorsed
+his great popularity with the heart, as much as with the brain. There
+are those who have objected that the last subject of his labor--the
+"Life of Washington"--was little suited to his imaginative tone of mind,
+and should have been worked up with a larger and more philosophic grasp
+of thought. It may well be that at some future time we shall have a more
+profound estimate of the relations which our great Leader held to his
+cause and to his time; but, however profound and just such a work may
+be, we feel quite safe in predicting that it will never supplant the
+graceful labor of Mr. Irving in the hearts of the American people.
+Precisely what was wanted Mr. Irving has given: such charming, faithful,
+truthful picture of the great hero of our Revolution as should carry
+knowledge of him, of the battles he fought, of his large, self-denying,
+unswerving patriotism, of the purity of his life, into every household.
+No man could have done this work better; nor do we think any other will
+ever do it as well.
+
+And there is his "Sketch-Book,"--in blue and gold, in green and gold, in
+red and gold;--in what colors, and in what language, does it not appear?
+Yet the themes are of the simplest: a broken heart; a rural funeral; a
+Christmas among the hollies; an hour in the Abbey of Westminster: what
+is there new, or to care greatly for, in these things? Yet he touched
+them, and all the world are touched by them. Your critic says there is
+no serious insight, no deep probing; a pretty wind blows over,--that is
+all.
+
+Yes, that is all; but how many are there who can set such sweet currents
+of wind aflow?
+
+Only a bruised daisy, only a wounded hare, only Halloween,--and Burns,
+with all his fresh, healthy, hearty manhood, and only a peasant's pen,
+touches them in such way that his touch is making the nerves of men and
+women vibrate, where-ever our Saxon speech is uttered.
+
+There is many a light thing that we cherish,--with which we will not
+easily part. That souvenir of some dear, dead one we do not value by its
+weight in gold; that sweet story of the Vicar we do not measure by its
+breadth of logic. And no American, no matter how late born he may be,
+but, if he wander in the Catskills, shall hear the rumble of the Dutch
+revellers at their bowling in the gorges of the mountains,--not one but
+shall read, and reading shall love, the story of Rip Van Winkle.
+
+It was only a quiet old gentleman of six-and-seventy who was buried
+awhile ago from his home upon the Hudson: yet the village-shops were all
+closed; the streets, the houses, the station, were hung in black;
+thousands from the city thirty miles away thronged the high-road leading
+to the little church where prayers were to be said.
+
+How shall we explain this? The author is dead, indeed, whose writings
+were admired by all; but there is something worthier to be said than
+this:--At the little church lay the body of the man whom all men loved.
+
+
+
+
+THE RIM.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St.
+George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who,
+perceiving that Éloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was
+satisfactory; and Éloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of
+her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others
+with the result of bad government; their association with the
+Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was
+broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was
+light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull
+them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and
+even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would
+not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there
+was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect
+order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was,
+moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in
+Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the
+candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred
+matters about which he knew nothing at all,--and always given, in spite
+of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of
+taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it
+for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt
+under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such
+superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every
+one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George
+in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand
+friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength
+to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of
+all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a
+master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to
+follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and
+of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to
+have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's
+masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and
+was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.
+
+In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they
+did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut
+their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being
+yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or
+twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.
+
+A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and Éloise, weary of
+confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place,
+as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's
+people but adored her.
+
+"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at
+the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not
+deigning a second address for a second rebuff,--"It will be quite
+impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into
+rivers."
+
+Éloise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way,
+strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr.
+St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching
+tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to
+read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she
+had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the
+pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But
+she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page,
+and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it
+was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and
+only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she
+perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water
+had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light
+forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess
+the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by,
+there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was
+seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a
+seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which
+she had stood.
+
+"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her
+ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices
+our still life so well!"
+
+"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried Éloise, freeing herself.
+
+"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare
+not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught
+and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little
+witch!"
+
+"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"
+
+"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."
+
+"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."
+
+"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all
+safe,--it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising
+his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour
+ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find
+you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."
+
+Éloise was a little sobered.
+
+"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.
+
+"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you
+again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely
+impassable."
+
+And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a
+brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St.
+George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set
+her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St.
+George expected, Éloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then,
+looking up, said,--
+
+"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."
+
+Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her
+from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and
+immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.
+
+"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing
+out Éloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two
+mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him
+swear! He galloped off at last like mad."
+
+And as Éloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for
+her in the glass, the familiar girl added,--
+
+"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,--oh, no, indeed!--but at all of
+us, to think we'd let you go alone."
+
+"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken
+to your master about buying Vane?"
+
+"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise
+excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,--we
+minded ole Massa for lub,--but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St.
+George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean
+to,--as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested
+Hazel.
+
+"Mr. St. George," said Éloise, "is very good to his people; they ought
+to wish to obey him."
+
+"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business _here_."
+
+"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said Éloise, facing the
+suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."
+
+But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length
+glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny
+cheek, she added, in a low voice,--
+
+"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"
+
+"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."
+
+Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before
+Éloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather
+courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She
+was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past
+conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered
+slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order
+still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well
+have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.
+
+It was one afternoon that Éloise sat at the drawing-room window, having
+recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a
+place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect,
+just then,--her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along
+the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid
+down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her
+appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.
+
+"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.
+
+Éloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek.
+Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her
+heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she
+recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent
+portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved
+Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other,
+"I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George
+had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a
+hesitating voice came sliding towards him,--
+
+"Mr. St. George"----
+
+"I beg your pardon,--did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.
+
+"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Éloise.
+
+She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort,
+then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.
+
+"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid,
+who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger,
+and I became attached to her"----
+
+And before Éloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's
+riding-whip,--that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the
+appropriation of everything about her.
+
+"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."
+
+"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only
+seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,--just, you know, as I might
+have been"----
+
+Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that Éloise added, throwing back
+her head again,--
+
+"Just as I _am_, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for
+several----Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her.
+I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her
+initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with,
+when I was a little girl,--and she wouldn't let me have it, of course.
+Pretty initials!"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.
+
+Éloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and,
+unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George
+laughed.
+
+"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked
+Éloise then, mischievously.
+
+But before he could have replied, she resumed,--
+
+"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"----
+
+"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours,
+Miss Éloise?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen
+him; he is here a good deal,--by stealth: and they want to be married.
+But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and
+they are afraid, and--and--could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"
+
+"I could, Miss Changarnier."
+
+"And you will, then?" cried Éloise, springing up.
+
+"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."
+
+"Won't he?"
+
+"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off
+the place."
+
+"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."
+
+"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the
+vicious ones are transported."
+
+"But perhaps he would give him to you."
+
+"Miss Éloise, he would give him to _you_."
+
+"Me? I have never seen him."
+
+"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."
+
+"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give
+Vane to me?"
+
+"Miss Éloise, I will see what I can do about it first."
+
+"How kind you are! Thank you!"
+
+And Éloise was about to go.
+
+"One moment, if you please," said the other.
+
+And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in
+too assured a tone.
+
+"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an
+enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should
+you in turn grant that enemy a favor."
+
+"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."
+
+"Well, then,--I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,--promise me
+now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not
+ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much
+under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"
+
+And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.
+
+"A whole promise is rash," said Éloise, laughing. "Half a one I give
+you."
+
+"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned
+abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would
+know it too.
+
+It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one
+chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a
+fire upon the hearth, and Éloise sitting on the floor before it with her
+box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite
+her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went
+soaring up the chimney.
+
+"In pursuit of an _ignis-fatuus_?" asked he, stooping over her an
+instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a
+certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress,
+that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the
+cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.
+
+"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get
+the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,--but there 'a no lustre,
+no flicker,--I can't find out the secret of painting flame."
+
+"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George,
+unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.
+
+And Éloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and
+went to bed.
+
+So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a
+cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but
+Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on
+with her tatting and contrivances.
+
+Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each
+other with less frozen chill than St. George and Éloise did on the
+succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during
+which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Éloise silently cast
+up her accounts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter,
+Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,--
+
+"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests
+at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss
+Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.
+
+"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to
+Éloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor
+parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see
+you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."
+
+"I shall still have my work to do," said Éloise; and she went into the
+cabinet and sharpened her pens with a _vim_.
+
+It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and
+perplexity, if Éloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the
+guests; but that was not set down in her part, and Éloise rightly felt
+that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when
+she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and
+give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in
+through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent
+herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget
+all about it,--succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had
+died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.
+
+It was past noon when Éloise, having finished her task, and having
+remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon
+her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet,
+where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search
+of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.
+
+He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward,
+and said,--
+
+"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."
+
+"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to
+Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in
+time.
+
+Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black,
+of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a
+glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow,
+set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving
+about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the
+frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that
+would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in
+dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different
+from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted
+upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to
+seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in
+England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium.
+Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish
+his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his
+property,--through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an
+experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world
+afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing
+Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which
+Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.
+
+Éloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty
+pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person,
+constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of
+the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and
+ran away.
+
+Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.
+
+"Who would not be the Abélard to such an Éloise?" he said.
+
+There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the
+while a melancholy old tune.
+
+"I'll tell you what, St. George"----
+
+Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.
+
+"You were about to impart some information?"
+
+"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"
+
+"It is no nun of my shriving."
+
+"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with
+Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"
+
+"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am
+tyrant,--it is she who stands for that;--I am only Mordecai the Jew
+sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St.
+George,--"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of
+us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand
+Unapproachable."
+
+"_Tant mieux._ My way is all the clearer."
+
+"Your way to what?"
+
+"To the altar!"
+
+"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George,
+the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the
+heels taking an altitude.
+
+"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry Éloise Changarnier."
+
+"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."
+
+"You!"
+
+Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a
+new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.
+
+Meantime Éloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all
+having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation
+of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to
+the group, in grand _tenue_, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind
+up Éloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim
+with sundry fervent ejaculations.
+
+"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets
+with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king
+coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in
+a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell
+_me_. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes
+or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I
+declare----Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"
+
+"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put
+geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue
+poison-bells!"
+
+"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."
+
+"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said Éloise, turning with her
+smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.
+
+"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his
+shoulder, as he took Éloise out to dinner, "my intention was the
+earlier; it will succeed!"
+
+"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good
+general expose his campaign?"
+
+"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed
+it."
+
+"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George,
+severely.
+
+"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they
+moved on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether she would or not, Éloise found herself in exactly the same
+position in the house as before her adopted father's death,--partly
+because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no
+difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be
+so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was
+unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so
+blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to
+fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have
+her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of
+Éloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust
+back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half
+undone, or a mantle dropping off,--trifles that only gave one the desire
+to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of
+the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which
+only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers
+always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting
+strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant
+little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she
+thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was
+wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so
+controlled. But of that Éloise never dreamed.
+
+As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of
+Mr. Marlboro's devotion Éloise was quite aware,--and whereas, playing
+with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew
+to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty
+ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to
+theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up
+as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was
+in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare
+with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully
+Éloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro'
+begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never
+threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or
+loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have
+spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy
+eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him.
+But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made
+little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became
+impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache
+savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Éloise did not try to dispel
+the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory
+hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in
+good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro'
+bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle
+riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,--
+
+    "All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"
+
+and constant as the magnet to its poles.
+
+It was still the steps of Éloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he
+brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago
+they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow,
+he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery
+shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes;
+to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose
+essence told all his philosophy:--"The great error in government," he
+said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government,
+individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this
+error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."
+
+Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening,
+as Marlboro' thus harangued Éloise.
+
+"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all
+oppose."
+
+"Nullification is a good solvent."
+
+"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the
+horizon, man!"
+
+"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"
+
+"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr.
+St. George, bowing to Éloise; "and as to the last,--I'll none of it!"
+
+And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Éloise was about to
+ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly
+taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.
+
+"What has that _contrabandista_ been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St.
+George.
+
+Éloise looked ignorantly up.
+
+"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says,
+when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that
+we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let
+us make the best of it!"
+
+"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the
+disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"
+
+"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring
+the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I
+have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed
+under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.
+
+Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Éloise to take a
+vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily
+and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long
+morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears,
+or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a
+laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after
+sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded
+himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat,
+and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she
+found another awaiting her,--her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled
+towards her feet,--her side cramped, behold, a cushion,--she looked for
+fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which
+Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have
+preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject
+kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was
+precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.
+
+Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if Éloise had thought of once
+looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in
+whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,--that, if they
+rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with
+Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was
+secured,--and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and
+smiled and lightly talked the while,--not that her music was not sweet,
+but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask.
+Yet Éloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he
+who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he
+fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held
+the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there,
+she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that
+he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that,
+if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular
+expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and
+face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms
+and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still
+sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower
+beneath the sun;--to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool
+and curt to Earl St. George for days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea,
+Éloise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and
+observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had
+refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the
+delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks
+lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely
+shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white
+embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a
+gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St.
+George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt
+or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own
+part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which
+they were all acting, Éloise spilled her tea and made some work for
+Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on Éloise that she
+had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel
+was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that
+probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his
+ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first
+disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he
+had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.
+
+"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with
+something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the
+truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a
+favor."
+
+"Then _I_ shall."
+
+"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.
+
+But Éloise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back
+at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after
+her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.
+
+Éloise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty
+dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that,
+stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and
+bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to
+spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung
+above her head; and when Éloise laid her hand gently on her shoulder,
+she sprang as if one had struck her.
+
+"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.
+
+It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and
+Hazel, secure of Éloise's efforts, had married. It was one of the
+immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages
+allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew
+where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to
+the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves
+were wont to journey.
+
+Éloise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza,
+and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion,
+and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro'
+leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. Éloise went and
+took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating
+opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood
+upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery
+redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea,
+a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs,
+like an azure mist.
+
+"There is something there that I want," said Éloise, archly, looking at
+the Bluffs.
+
+"There? you shall not wish twice."
+
+Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which
+he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a
+subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for
+this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.
+
+"That is my little maid," said Éloise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles
+awhile, though. Is she not pretty,--Hazel?"
+
+"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you want Vane?"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."
+
+"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if
+overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous
+effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron
+fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the
+pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I
+would have difficulty, Miss Éloise, in pardoning such an offence to you,
+yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"
+
+Éloise laughed in her charming way, and said,--
+
+"But, Mr. Marlboro', would it not be an admirable lesson to your people,
+if Vane were sold?"
+
+"A lesson to teach them all to go and do likewise, eh, Marlboro'?" said
+St. George, passing, with Miss Humphreys on his arm.
+
+"I have never sold, I never sell, a slave," replied Marlboro', in his
+placid tone; but St. George was out of hearing. "Yet, Miss
+Éloise,--if--if you will accept him"----
+
+"Mr. Marlboro'! Indeed? Truly indeed? How happy you make me!"
+
+"And you can make me as happy,--happier, by the infinity of heaven over
+earth!"
+
+"But ought I to accept such a gift?" asked Éloise, oblivious of his last
+speech. "But can I?--may I?"--as St. George's warning stole into her
+memory.
+
+"Most certainly you can! most certainly you shall! he is yours!" And
+before Éloise could pour forth one of her multitudinous thanks, he had
+moved away.
+
+Marlboro's, however, was not that noble nature that spurns to beg at the
+moment when it grants. Directly, he had wheeled about, and with an eager
+air was again beside her.
+
+"And, Éloise," he said, "if in response I might have one smile, one
+hope"----
+
+Thoughtlessly enough, Éloise turned her smiling face upon him, and gave
+him her hand.
+
+"And you give it to me at last, this hand, to crown my life!" he
+said,--for to his excited brain the trifling deed seemed the weighty
+event, and when he looked up Éloise still was smiling. Only for a
+second, though, for her processes of thought were not instantaneous,
+while to him it was one of Mahomet's moments holding an eternity, and
+she smiled while she was thinking, thinking simply of her little
+handmaiden's pleasure. She tried to release her hand. But Mr. Marlboro'
+did not know that his grasp upon it was that of a vice, for under an
+artificial stimulus every action is as intense as the fired fancy
+itself. And as she found it impossible to free it without visible
+violence, other thoughts visited Éloise. Why should she not give it to
+him? Who else cared for it? What object had her lonely life? Speak
+sweetly as they might, what one of her old gallants forgot her loss of
+wealth? Here was a man to make happy, here was a heart to rest upon,
+here was a slave of his own passions to set free. Why should she
+continue to live with Mr. St. George for her haughty master, when here
+was this man at her feet? Why, but that suddenly the conviction smote
+her that she loved the one and despised the other, that she adored the
+master and despised the slave? And she snatched away her hand.
+
+Just then Mr. St. George was coming down the piazza again, on his
+promenade, his head bent low as he spoke to the clinging little lady on
+his arm. Passing Éloise, as he raised his face, their eyes met. She was
+doing, he thought, the very thing that he had disadvised, and, as if to
+warn her afresh, he looked long, a derisive smile curling his proud lip.
+That was enough. "He knows it!" exclaimed Éloise to herself. "He
+believes it! He thinks I love him! He never shall be sure of it!" And
+turning once more, her face hung down and away, she laid her hand in
+Marlboro's, without a word or a glance. He bent low over it in the
+shadow, pressing it with his fervent lips, murmuring, "Mine! mine at
+last! my own!" And St. George saw the whole.
+
+Just then a little sail crept in sight from where they stood, winding
+down the creek at the foot of the lawn.
+
+"Oh, how delightful to be on the water to-night!" cried Laura Murray.
+
+"You have but to command," said Mr. St. George, with a certain gayety
+that seemed struck out like sparks against the flinty fact of the late
+occurrence,--and half the party trooped down the turf to the shore. The
+boats were afloat and laden before one knew it. Mr. Marlboro' and Éloise
+were just one instant too late. Laura Murray shook a triumphant
+handkerchief at them, and St. George feathered his oar, pausing a moment
+as if he would return, and then gave a great sweep and his boat fairly
+leaped over the water.
+
+Mr. Marlboro' did not hesitate. There was the sail they had first seen,
+now on the point of being lowered beneath the alder-bushes by the young
+hunters who had sought shore for the night. Gold slipped from one hand
+to another, a word, a name, and a promise. Éloise was on board,
+expecting Mrs. Arles and Mrs. Houghton to follow. Marlboro' sprang upon
+the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a
+farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing
+and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of
+wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on their
+wild career.
+
+"Marlboro' is mad!" said St. George, with a whitening cheek.
+
+Marlboro', standing up, one arm about the mast, and catching the slant
+beam of the late-rising moon on his face, that shone awfully rapt and
+intent, saluted them with an ironical cheer, and dashed on. Éloise held
+the tiller for the moment, still pulsating with her late emotions, not
+above a trifling play of vanity, welcoming the exhilaration of a race,
+where she might half forget her trouble, and pleased with a vague
+anticipation of some intervention that might recall the word which even
+in these five dragging moments had already begun to corrode and eat into
+her heart like a rusting fetter. The oarsmen in the wherries bent their
+muscles to the strife, the boats danced over the tiny crests, the ladies
+sang their breeziest sea-songs to cheer them at the work. The sail-boat
+rounded a curve and was almost out of sight.
+
+"Oars never caught sails yet," muttered St. George, and he put his boat
+to the shore. "There, Murray, try your lazy mettle, and take my oar. As
+for me, I'm off,"--and he sprang upon the bank, sending the boat
+spinning off into the current again from his foot. In ten minutes a
+horseman went galloping by on the high-road skirting the shore, with a
+pace like that of the Spectre of the Storm.
+
+"Now, Mr. Marlboro'," said Éloise, "shall we not turn back, victorious?"
+
+"Turn?" said Marlboro', shaking loose another fold of the linen. "I
+never turn! Look your last on the tiny tribe,--we shall see them no
+more!"
+
+Éloise sprang to her feet. He caught her hand and replaced her; his face
+was so white that it shone, there was a wild glitter in his eye, and the
+smile that brooded over her had something in it absolutely terrific.
+
+"We have gone far enough," said Éloise, resolutely. "I wish to rejoin my
+friends."
+
+"You are with me!" said Marlboro', proudly.
+
+She was afraid to say another word, for to oppose him now in his
+exultant rage might only work the mood to frenzy. The creek had widened
+almost to a river,--the sea was close at hand, with its great tumbling
+surf. She looked at the horizon and the hill for help, but none came;
+destruction was before them, and on they flew.
+
+Marlboro' stood now, and steadied the tiller with his foot.
+
+"This is motion!" said he. "We fly upon the wings of the wind! The
+viewless wind comes roaring out of the black region of the East, it
+fills the high heaven, it roars on to the uttermost undulation of the
+atmosphere, and we are a part of it! We are only a mote upon its breath,
+a dust-atom driven before it, Éloise,--and yet one great happiness is
+greater than it, drowns it in a vaster flood of viewless power, can
+whisper to it calm!"
+
+How should Éloise contradict him? With such rude awakening, he might
+only snatch her in his arms and plunge down to death. Perhaps he half
+divined the fear.
+
+"Yes, Éloise," he said. "They are both here, life and death, at our
+beck! I can take you to my heart, one instant the tides divide, then
+they close above us, and you are mine for ever and ever and
+only,--sealed mine beneath all this crystal sphere of the waters! We
+hear the gentle lapping of the ripples on the shore, we hear the tones
+of evening-bells swim out and melt above us, we hear the oar shake off
+its shower of tinkling drops,--up the jewel-strewn deeps of heaven the
+planets hang out their golden lamps to light our slumbers! Heart to
+heart and lip to lip, we are at rest, we are at peace, nothing comes
+between us, our souls have the eternities in which to mingle!"
+
+He saw Éloise shudder, and turned from his dream, blazing full upon her.
+"Life, then, is best!" he cried. "But life together and alone, life
+where we count out its throbs in some far purple island of the main,
+prolonged who knows how far?--love shall make for us perpetual youth,
+there shall no gloom enter our Eden, perfect solitude and perfect bliss!
+Alone, we two in our pride and our joy can defy the powers of any other
+heaven, we shall become gods ourselves! Up helm and away! Life is best!"
+
+
+
+
+THE NEVA.
+
+
+        I walk, as in a dream,
+        Beside the sweeping stream,
+    Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:
+        Serene the temples stand,
+        And sleep, on either hand,
+    The palace-fronts along the granite quays.
+
+        Where golden domes, remote,
+        Above the sea-mist float,
+    The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;
+        And Peter's fortress-spire,
+        A slender lance of fire,
+    Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.
+
+        The pillared angel soars
+        Above the silent shores;
+    Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;
+        And down the watery line
+        The exiled Sphinxes pine
+    For Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.
+
+        I hear, amid the hush,
+        The restless current's rush,
+    The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:
+        A voice portentous, deep,
+        To charm a monarch's sleep
+    With dreams of power resistless as his own.
+
+        Strong from the stormy Lake,
+        Pure from the springs that break
+    In Valdaï vales the forest's mossy floor,
+        Greener than beryl-stone
+        From fir woods vast and lone,
+    In one full stream the braided currents pour.
+
+        "Build up your granite piles
+        Around my trembling isles,"
+    I hear the River's scornful Genius say:
+        "Raise for eternal time
+        Your palaces sublime,
+    And flash your golden turrets in the day!
+
+        "But in my waters cold
+        A mystery I hold,--
+    Of empires and of dynasties the fate:
+        I bend my haughty will,
+        Unchanged, unconquered still,
+    And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.
+
+        "Your fetters I allow,
+        As a strong man may bow
+    His sportive neck to meet a child's command,
+        And curb the conscious power
+        That in one awful hour
+    Could whelm your halls and temples where they stand.
+
+        "When infant Rurik first
+        His Norseland mother nursed,
+    My willing flood the future chieftain bore:
+        To Alexander's fame
+        I lent my ancient name,
+    What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.
+
+        "Then Peter came. I laughed
+        To feel his little craft
+    Borne on my bosom round the marshy isles:
+        His daring dream to aid,
+        My chafing floods I laid,
+    And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.
+
+        "I wait the far-off day
+        When other dreams shall sway
+    The House of Empire builded by my side,--
+        Dreams that already soar
+        From yonder palace-door,
+    And cast their wavering colors on my tide,--
+
+        "Dreams where white temples rise
+        Below the purple skies,
+    By waters blue, which winter never frets,--
+        Where trees of dusky green
+        From terraced gardens lean,
+    And shoot on high the reedy minarets.
+
+        "Shadows of mountain-peaks
+        Vex my unshadowed creeks;
+    Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;
+        And islands, bald and high,
+        Break my clear round of sky,
+    And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.
+
+        "Then, ere the cold winds chase
+        These visions from my face,
+    I see the starry phantom of a crown,
+        Beside whose blazing gold
+        This cheating pomp is cold,
+    A moment hover, as the veil drops down.
+
+        "Build on! That day shall see
+        My streams forever free.
+    Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,
+        The frost shall split each wall:
+        Your domes shall crack and fall:
+    My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"
+
+        On palace, temple, spire,
+        The morn's descending fire
+    In thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:
+        Life's rising murmur drowned
+        The Neva where he wound
+    Between his isles: he keeps his secret well.
+
+
+
+
+ROBSON.
+
+
+In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more
+disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest
+part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at
+her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and
+parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St.
+Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of
+Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a
+horrible little court branching northward from it good old George
+Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and
+prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter;
+and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his
+name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street
+becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the
+east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never
+passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up
+by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord
+Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we
+English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it
+down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the
+southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been
+razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the
+American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme
+languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal
+hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the
+strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse
+before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses,
+with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the
+picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their
+being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest
+offscourings of the enormous city. Next to _Napoli senza sole_, Wych
+Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest
+street I know.
+
+In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert,
+a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The
+entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance,
+so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of
+the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical
+classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come
+hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury
+Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have
+conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic.
+Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might
+observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little
+platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped
+awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the
+edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most
+Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very
+evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince
+of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of
+Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant
+visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this
+murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French
+_noblesse_, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock
+to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.
+
+My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present
+exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago,
+there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a
+rough wooden portico before it,--not unlike such a portico as I have
+recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,--and
+with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a
+man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of
+naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or
+meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made
+Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South
+Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from
+the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and
+a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of
+interludes and _burlettas_,--that is, of pieces in which the dialogue
+was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the
+patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice
+was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen
+into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To
+lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse.
+The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and
+Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There
+many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a
+perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's
+beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley
+and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of
+the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and
+Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried
+its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate
+adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place
+wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the
+Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of
+the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there
+was but one step.
+
+It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren,
+having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a
+considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded
+in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the
+other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre.
+He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very
+humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The
+Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank
+Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,--father and son are, alas! both
+dead,--and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master
+of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the
+town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the
+original _Sam Weller_ in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made
+people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of
+Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not
+nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no
+striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,--save in one
+particular,--they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to
+hear at clubs and in critical coteries--at the Albion and the Garrick
+and the Café de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Réunion in
+Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to
+reign supreme--rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing
+_Macbeth_ and _Shylock_ in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little
+stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody--among the
+bodies who were anybody--had ever heard of him before. Whence he came,
+or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this
+little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and
+grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the
+shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and
+his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He
+speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a
+European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his
+name was FREDERICK ROBSON.
+
+Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics
+were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had
+already attained middle age,--that he had been vegetating for years in
+that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low
+comedian of a country-theatre,--that he had come timidly to London and
+accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre
+half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the
+"Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and
+delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked
+success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little
+man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had
+a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty
+shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.
+
+A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic
+and his realization of financial success. The critics and the
+connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be
+persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That
+doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the
+wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned
+to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor,
+named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay
+twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen
+pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door
+for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in
+the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his
+dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender,
+half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the
+nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this,
+will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?
+
+The Olympic arose "like a phoenix from its ashes." To use language
+less poetical, a wealthy tradesman--a cheesemonger, I think--found the
+capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and
+almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as
+evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was
+in the old or the new Olympic--but I think it was in the new one--that
+the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager.
+He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious
+manner. He was a man about town, a _viveur_, a dandy; and it turned out
+one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe
+Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and
+that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was
+tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being
+a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his
+defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts
+was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor
+wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing
+criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was
+troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens;
+and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged
+himself in the jail.
+
+It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that
+Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very
+clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering
+Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play
+the part of _Jem Baggs_, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player,
+who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air
+hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson,
+who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a
+very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the
+ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by
+singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and
+the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills,
+considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in
+the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's
+despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched
+in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo
+and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right
+tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience
+was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely
+observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that
+such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year.
+"Vilikins and his Dinah" created a _furore_. My countrymen are always
+going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to
+go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip.
+Robson's portrait as _Jem Baggs_ was in every shop-window. A newspaper
+began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"--
+
+    "It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."
+
+A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one
+hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide
+him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible
+"Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of
+circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in _Jem Baggs_. His
+"make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an
+inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons
+every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat
+inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into
+preternatural shape.
+
+New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he
+showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years
+before, in _Macbeth_, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating,
+whiskey-drinking Scotchman,--and in _Shylock_, a servile, fawning,
+obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew.
+In the _Yellow Dwarf_ he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of
+Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,--full of mockery,
+mimicry, lubricity, and spite,--an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of
+Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How
+those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog!
+How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you
+shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs
+to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled
+out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this
+mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the
+_outré_, an unmistakably tragic element,--an element of depth and
+strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became
+inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the _cothurnus_ over his clogs.
+You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the
+mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more
+apparent in his subsequent personation of _Medea_, in Robert Brough's
+parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of
+the abandoned wife of _Jason_, the diabolic loathing in which she holds
+_Creüsa_, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children
+whom she is afterwards to slay,--all these were portrayed by Robson,
+through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with
+astonishing force and vigor. The original _Medea_, the great Ristori
+herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him.
+She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius
+struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue.
+_"Uomo straordinario!"_ she went away saying.
+
+I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of
+time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has
+always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after
+_Jem Baggs_ his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at
+the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In
+the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity--which some thought
+would prove a magnificent one to him--of showing the grotesque side of
+insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to
+him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to
+exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities.
+_A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine!_ Perhaps the
+piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run.
+A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a
+tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan
+fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a
+long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of
+_Sir Giles Overreach_ in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that
+_Sir Giles_, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark
+staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own
+character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing
+on a purely "legitimate" _rôle_. I was half persuaded to write a
+burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do
+his very best with _Sir Giles_; but a feeling, half of laziness, and
+half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got
+farther than the first scene.
+
+By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they
+could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more
+elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into
+play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative
+verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic
+drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious
+mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the
+melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in
+so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written
+expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy
+Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say
+written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not
+yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so
+skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes
+almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for
+instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently
+English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in
+reality, a translation from the French.
+
+The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended,
+and was genuine. In _Daddy Hardacre_, a skilful adaptation of the usurer
+in Balzac's "Eugénie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than
+ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless _Overreach_, foiled at
+last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of
+the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Molière's
+_Avare_ I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's
+_Volpone_, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully
+rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise
+most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment
+upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout
+solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the
+conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good
+actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper--the
+character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens--in Wilkie
+Collins's play, domestic drama was not his _forte_; or, rather, that it
+was not his _fortissimo_. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible,
+he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly
+be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could
+play _Daddy Hardacre_, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none
+but himself could at once awe and convulse in _Medea_ and _the Yellow
+Dwarf_. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their
+subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt
+sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,--their eternal grimacing and
+word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become
+exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You
+may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The
+burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness.
+Planché retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs
+died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before
+he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were
+scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas.
+Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that
+weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had
+succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has
+realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and
+actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to
+performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should
+properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his
+old loves, and _Jem Baggs_ and _Boots at the Swan_, _Medea_ and _the
+Yellow Dwarf_, continued to be his favorite parts.
+
+The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern
+actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities,
+decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or
+of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts
+as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the
+variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London
+always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury.
+Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and
+more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has
+gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from
+him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past.
+The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered
+wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest
+and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other
+public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly
+destitute of foundation. _Don Basilio_, in Beaumarchais's play, might
+have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel,
+"_Calomniez, calomniez, il en résultera toujours quelque chose_." He
+should have taught the world--if the world wants teaching--_how_ to
+calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If
+your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has
+gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he
+is separated from his wife; _and in any case, declare that he drinks_.
+He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like
+a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the
+parlor.
+
+Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial
+papers--the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a
+curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found--have
+attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from
+the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water.
+The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has
+for years been overworking himself,--and that latterly prosperity has
+laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon
+them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she
+frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she
+equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of
+flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when
+Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you
+_shall_ make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the
+goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a
+rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I
+opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out,
+"I am rich, I have enough, _Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios_, I will
+work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me
+down under my own fig-tree,"--Fortune dismisses him with a sneer:
+"Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and
+_ennui_, take gout and the palsy, with you."
+
+I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is
+once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say
+that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never _can_ spare a
+good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But
+there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere
+his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The
+American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good,
+bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready
+and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and
+our women-singers,--the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't
+sing, but _will_ sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and
+Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson
+has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be
+thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for
+one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for
+other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans
+are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of
+Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to
+whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in
+Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to
+foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own
+entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It
+would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable
+aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other
+great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of
+passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his
+simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you
+to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the
+image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and
+Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is
+perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his
+instance.
+
+Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the
+mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always
+was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally
+unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic
+criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had
+read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for
+it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in
+the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round
+the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't
+the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know
+him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the
+bashfulness, the _mauvaise honte_, which made him so shy and retiring in
+private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man
+became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful
+man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which
+in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art
+a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and
+how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it
+is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the
+temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form
+and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.
+
+
+
+
+THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY, IN SCOTLAND.
+
+
+There are phenomena in Nature which give the clue to so many of its
+mysteries that their correct interpretation leads at once to the
+broadest generalizations and to the rapid advance of science in new
+directions. The explanation of one very local and limited problem may
+clear up many collateral ones, since its solution includes the answer to
+a whole set of kindred inquiries. The "parallel roads" of Glen Roy offer
+such a problem. For half a century they have been the subject of patient
+investigation and the boldest speculation. To them natural philosophers
+have returned again and again to test their theories, and until they are
+fully understood no steady or permanent advance can be made in the
+various views which they have suggested to different observers. The
+theory of the formation of lakes by barriers, presented by McCulloch and
+Sir T. Lauder-Dick, that of continental upheavals and subsidences,
+advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that of inundations
+by great floods, maintained by Professor H. D. Rogers and Sir George
+Mackenzie, that of glacial action, brought forward by myself, have been
+duly discussed with reference to this difficult case; all have found
+their advocates, all have met with warm opposition, and the matter still
+remains a mooted point; but the one of all these theories which shall
+stand the test of time and repeated examination and be eventually
+accepted will explain many a problem besides the one it was meant to
+solve, and lead to farther progress in other directions.
+
+I propose here to reconsider the facts of the case, and to present anew
+my own explanation of them, now more than twenty years old, but which I
+have never had an opportunity of publishing in detail under a popular
+form, though it appeared in the scientific journals of the day.
+
+Before considering, however, the phenomena of Glen Roy, or the special
+glacial areas scattered over Scotland and the other British Isles, let
+us see what general evidence we have that glaciers ever existed at all
+in that realm. The reader will pardon me, if, at the risk of repetition,
+I sum up here the indications which, from our knowledge of glaciers as
+they at present exist, must be admitted, wherever they are found, as
+proof of their former existence. Such a summary may serve also as a
+guide to those who would look for glacial traces where they have not
+hitherto been sought.
+
+In the first place, we have to consider the singular abrasion of the
+surfaces over which the glacier has moved, quite unlike that produced by
+the action of water. We have seen that such surfaces, wherever the
+glacier-marks have not been erased by some subsequent action, have
+several unfailing characteristics: they are highly polished, and they
+are also marked with scratches or fine _striæ_, with grooves and deeper
+furrows. Where best preserved, the smooth surfaces are shining; they
+have a lustre like stone or marble artificially polished by the combined
+friction and pressure of some harder material than itself until all its
+inequalities have been completely levelled and its surface has become
+glossy. Any marble mantel-piece may serve as an example of this kind of
+glacier-worn surface.
+
+The levelling and abrading action of water on rock has an entirely
+different character. Tides or currents driven powerfully and constantly
+against a rocky shore, and bringing with them hard materials, may
+produce blunt, smooth surfaces, such as the repeated blows of a hammer
+on stone would cause; but they never bring it to a high polish, because,
+the grinding materials not being held steadily down, in firm, permanent
+contact with the rocky surfaces against which they move, as is the case
+with the glacier, but, on the contrary, dashed to and fro, they strike
+and rebound, making a succession of blows, but never a continuous,
+uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks
+made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by
+water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas
+the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light
+and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long
+distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen[A] that we have beneath
+every glacier a complete apparatus adapted to all the results described
+above. In the softer fragments ground to the finest powder under the
+incumbent mass we have a polishing paste; in the hard materials set in
+that paste, whether pebbles, or angular rocky fragments of different
+sizes, or grains of sand, we have the various graving instruments by
+which the finer or coarser lines are drawn. Not only are these lines
+frequently uninterrupted for a distance of many yards, but they are also
+parallel, except when some change takes place in the thickness of the
+ice, which may slightly modify the trend of the mass, or where lines in
+a variety of directions are produced by the intermittent action of
+separate glaciers running successively at different angles over the same
+surfaces. The deeper grooves sometimes present a succession of short
+staccato touches, just as when one presses the finger vertically along
+some surface where the resistance is sufficient to interrupt the action
+without actually stopping it,--a kind of grating motion, showing how
+firmly the instrument which produced it must have been held in the
+moving mass. No currents or sudden freshets carrying hard materials with
+them, even moving along straight paths down hill-sides or
+mountain-slopes, have ever been known to draw any such lines. They could
+be made only by some instrument held fast as in a vice by the moving
+power. Something of the kind is occasionally produced by the drag of a
+wheel grating over rocks covered with loose materials.
+
+It has been said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky
+shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level
+of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various
+directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It
+has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period,
+icebergs and floating ice from more northern latitudes might account for
+the extensive transportation of the loose materials scattered in a
+continuous sheet over a large portion of the globe. There can be no
+doubt that an immense amount of _débris_ of all sorts is carried to
+great distances by floating ice; where their presence is due to this
+cause, however, they are everywhere stranded along the shore or dropped
+to the sea-bottom. Large boulders are frequently left by the ice along
+the New-England coast, and we shall trace them hereafter among the
+sand-dunes of Cape Cod. But before it can be admitted that the
+drift-phenomena, and the polished and engraved surfaces with which they
+are everywhere intimately associated, are owing to floating ice or
+icebergs, it must be shown that all these appearances have been produced
+by some agency moving from the sea-board towards the land, and extending
+up to the very summits of the mountains, or else that all the countries
+exhibiting glacial phenomena have been sunk below the ocean to the
+greatest height at which glacier-marks are found, and have since
+gradually emerged to their present level. Now, though geologists are
+lavish of immersions when something is to be accounted for which they
+cannot otherwise explain, and a fresh baptism of old Mother Earth is
+made to wash away many obstacles to scientific theories, yet the common
+sense of the world will hardly admit the latter assumption without
+positive proof, and all the evidence of the kind we have, at the period
+under consideration, indicates only a comparatively slight change of
+relative level between sea and land within a narrow belt along the
+shores; and even this is shown to be posterior, not anterior, to the
+glacial phenomena. As to the supposition that the motion proceeded from
+the sea towards the land, all the facts are against it, since the whole
+trend of these phenomena is from inland centres toward the shore,
+instead of being from the coast upward.
+
+Certainly, no one familiar with the facts could suppose that floating
+ice or icebergs had abraded, polished, and furrowed the bottom of narrow
+valleys as we find them worn, polished, and grooved by glaciers. And it
+must be remembered that this is a theory founded not upon hypothesis,
+but upon the closest comparison. I have not become acquainted with these
+marks in regions where glaciers no longer exist, and made a theory to
+explain their presence. I have, on the contrary, studied them where they
+are in process of formation. I have seen the glacier engrave its lines,
+plough its grooves and furrows in the solid rock, and polish the
+surfaces over which it moved, and was familiar with all this when I
+found afterwards appearances corresponding exactly to those which I had
+investigated in the home of the present glaciers. I could therefore say,
+and I think with some reason, that "this also is the work of the glacier
+acting in ancient times as it now acts in Switzerland."
+
+There is another character of glacial action distinguishing it from any
+abrasions caused by water, even if freighted with a large amount of
+loose materials. On any surface over which water flows we shall find
+that the softer materials have yielded first and most completely. Hard
+dikes will be left standing out, while softer rocks around them are worn
+away,--furrows will be eaten into more deeply,--fissures will be
+widened,--clay-slates will be wasted,--while hard sandstone or limestone
+and granite will show greater resistance. Not so with surfaces over
+which the levelling plough of the glacier has passed. Wherever softer
+and harder rocks alternate, they are brought to one outline; where dikes
+intersect softer rock, they are cut to one level with it; where rents or
+fissures traverse the rock, they do not seem to have been widened or
+scooped out more deeply, but their edges are simply abraded on one line
+with the adjoining surfaces. Whatever be the inequality in the hardness
+of the materials of which the rock consists, even in the case of
+pudding-stone, the surface is abraded so evenly as to leave the
+impression that a rigid rasp has moved over all the undulations of the
+land, advancing in one and the same direction and levelling all before
+it.
+
+Among the inequalities of the glacier-worn surfaces which deserve
+especial notice, are the so-called "_roches moutonnées_." They are
+knolls of a peculiar appearance, frequent in the Alps, and first noticed
+by the illustrious De Saussure, who designated them by that name,
+because, where they are numerous and seen from a distance, they resemble
+the rounded backs of a flock of sheep resting on the ground. These
+knolls are the result of the prolonged abrasion of masses of rocks
+separated by deep indentations wide enough to be filled up by large
+glaciers, overtopping the summits of the intervening prominences, and
+passing over them like a river, or like tide-currents flowing over a
+submerged ledge of rock. It is evident that water rushing over such
+sunken hills or ledges, adapting itself readily to all the inequalities
+over which it flows, and forming eddies against the obstacles in its
+course, will scoop out tortuous furrows upon the bottom, and hollow out
+rounded cavities against the walls, acting especially along preëxisting
+fissures and upon the softer parts of the rock,--while the glacier,
+moving as a solid mass, and carrying on its under side its gigantic file
+set in a fine paste, will in course of time abrade uniformly the angles
+against which it strikes, equalize the depressions between the prominent
+masses, and round them off until they present those smooth bulging
+knolls known as the "_roches moutonnées_" in the Alps, and so
+characteristic everywhere of glacier-action. A comparison of any
+tide-worn hummock with such a glacier-worn mound will convince the
+observer that its smooth and evenly rounded surface was never produced
+by water.
+
+Besides their peculiar form, the _roches moutonnées_ present all the
+characteristic features of glacier-action in their polished surfaces
+accompanied with the straight lines, grooves, and furrows above
+described. But there are two circumstances connected with these knolls
+deserving special notice. They frequently present the glacial marks only
+on one side, while the opposite side has all the irregularities and
+roughness of a hill-slope not acted upon by ice. It is evident that the
+polished side was the one turned towards the advancing glacier, the side
+against which the ice pressed in its onward movement,--while it passed
+over the other side, the lee side as we may call it, without coming in
+immediate contact with it, bridging the depression, and touching bottom
+again a little farther on. As an additional evidence of this fact, we
+frequently find on the lee side of such knolls accumulations of the
+loose materials which the glacier carries with it. It is only, however,
+when the knolls are quite high, and abrupt enough to allow any rigid
+substance to bridge over the space in its descent from the summit to the
+surface below, that we find these conditions; when the knolls are low
+and slope gently downward in every direction, they present the
+characteristic glacier-surfaces equally on all sides. This circumstance
+should be borne in mind by all who investigate the traces of
+glacier-action; for this inequality in the surfaces presented by the
+opposite sides of any obstacle in the path of the ice is often an
+important means of determining the direction of its motion.
+
+The other characteristic peculiarity of these _roches moutonnées_
+consists in the direction of the glacier-scratches, which ascend the
+slope to its summit in a direct line on one side, while they deviate to
+the right and left on the other sides of the knoll, more or less
+obliquely according to its steepness. Occasionally, large boulders may
+be found perched on the very summit of such prominences. Their position
+is inexplicable by the supposition of currents as the cause of their
+transportation. Any current strong enough to carry a boulder to such a
+height would of course sweep it on with it. This phenomenon finds,
+however, an easy explanation in the glacial theory. The thickness of
+such a sheet of ice is of course less above such a hill or mound than
+over the lower levels adjoining it. Not only will the ice melt,
+therefore, more readily at this spot, but, as ice is transparent to
+heat, the summit of the prominence will become warmed by the rays of the
+sun, and will itself facilitate the melting of the ice above it. On the
+breaking up of the ice, therefore, such a spot will be the first to
+yield, and allow the boulders carried on the back of the glacier to fall
+into the hollow thus formed, where they will rest upon the projecting
+rock left uncovered. This is no theoretical explanation; there are such
+cases in Switzerland, where holes in the ice are formed immediately
+above the summit of hills or prominences over which the glacier passes,
+and into which it drops its burdens. Of course, where the ice is
+constantly renewed over such a spot by the onward progress of the
+glacier, these materials may be carried off again; but if we suppose
+such a case to occur at the breaking up of the glacier-period, when the
+ice was disappearing forever from such a spot, it is easy to account for
+the poising of these large boulders on prominent peaks or ledges.
+
+The appearances about the _roches moutonnées_, especially the straight
+scratches and grooves on the side up which the ice ascended, have led to
+a mistaken view of the mode in which large boulders are transported by
+ice. It has been supposed, by those who, while they accepted the glacial
+theory, were not wholly conversant with the mode of action of glaciers,
+that, in passing through the bottom of a valley, for instance, the
+glacier would take up large boulders, and, carrying them along with it,
+would push them up such a slope and deposit them on its summit. It is
+true that large boulders may sometimes be found in front of glaciers
+among the materials of their terminal moraines, and may, upon any
+advance of the glacier, be pushed forward by it. But I know of no
+example of erratic boulders being carried to considerable distances and
+raised from lower to higher levels by this means. All the angular
+boulders perched upon prominent rocks must have fallen upon the surface
+of the glacier in the upper part of its course, where rocky ledges rise
+above its surface and send down their broken fragments. The surface of
+any boulder carried under the ice, or pushed along for any distance at
+its terminus, would show the friction and pressure to which it had been
+subjected. In this connection it should be remembered that in the case
+of large glaciers low hills form no obstacle to their onward progress,
+especially when the glacier is thick enough to cover them completely,
+and even to rise far above them. The _roches moutonnées_ about the
+Grimsel show that hills many hundred feet high have been passed over by
+the great glacier of the Aar, when it descended as far as Meyringen,
+without having seemingly influenced its onward progress.
+
+But in enumerating the evidences of glacier-action, we have to remember
+not only the effects produced upon the surface of the ground by the ice
+itself, but also the deposits it has left behind it. The loose materials
+scattered over the face of the earth may point as distinctly to the
+source of their distribution as does the character of the rocky surfaces
+on which they rest indicate the different causes of abrasion. In
+characteristic localities the loose materials deposited by glaciers may
+readily be recognized at first sight, and distinguished from water-worn
+pebbles; nor is it difficult to distinguish both from loose materials
+resulting from the decomposition of rocks on the spot,--the latter
+always agreeing with the rocks on which they rest, while the
+decomposition to which they owe their separation from the solid rock is
+often still going on. Such _débris_ are found everywhere about
+disintegrating rocks, and they constantly mingle with the loose
+fragments brought from a distance by various agencies. They are found
+upon and among the glacier-worn pebbles, especially where the latter
+have themselves been disturbed since their accumulation. They are also
+found among water-worn pebbles, wherever the rocky beds of our rivers or
+the rocky bluffs of our sea-shores crumble down. In investigating the
+character of loose materials transported from greater or less distances,
+either by the agency of glaciers or by water-currents, it is important
+at the very outset to discriminate between these deposits of older date
+and the local accessions mingling with them.
+
+Occasionally we may have also to distinguish between all these deposits
+and the _débris_ brought down by land-slides, or by sudden freshets
+transporting to a distance a vast amount of loose materials which are
+neither ice-worn nor water-worn. At Rossberg, for instance, in the
+Canton of Schwitz, the land-slide which buried the village of Goldau
+under a terrific avalanche, and filled a part of the Lake of Lauertz,
+spread an immense number of huge boulders across the valley, some of
+which even rolled up the opposite side to a considerable height. Many of
+these boulders might easily be mistaken for erratic boulders, were not
+the aggregate of these loose materials traceable to the hills from which
+they descended. In this case water had no part in loosening or bringing
+down this mass of fragments. They simply rolled from the declivity, and
+stopped when they had exhausted the momentum imparted to them by their
+weight. In the case of the _débâcle_ of Bagnes, above Martigny, in a
+valley leading to the St. Bernard, the circumstances were very
+different. A glacier, advancing beyond its usual limits and rising
+against the opposite mountain-slope, dammed up the waters of the torrent
+and caused a lake to be formed. The obstruction gave way in the course
+of time, and the waters of the lake rushed out, carrying along with
+them huge boulders and a mass of loose materials of all sorts, and
+scattering them over the plain below. Such an accumulation of _débris_
+differs from the pebbles and loose fragments found in river-beds. The
+comparatively short distance over which they are carried, and the
+suddenness of the transportation, allow no time for the abrasion which
+produces the smooth surfaces of water-worn pebbles or the polished and
+scratched surfaces of glacier-worn ones. In the latter case, we have
+seen that the pebbles, being so set in the ice as to expose only one
+side, may be only partially polished, while others, more loosely held
+and turning in their sockets, may receive the same high polish on every
+side. In such a case the lines will intersect one another, in
+consequence of the different position in which the stone has been held
+at different times. No such appearances exist in the water-worn pebbles:
+their blunt surfaces, smoothed and rounded uniformly by the action of
+the water in which they have been rolled or tossed about, present
+everywhere the same aspect.
+
+The correlation between these different loose materials and the position
+in which they are found helps us also to detect their origin. The loose
+materials bearing glacier-marks are always found resting upon surfaces
+which have been worn, abraded, and engraved in the same manner, while
+the water-worn pebbles are everywhere found resting upon rocks the
+abrasion of which may be traced to water. It is true that in some
+localities, as, for instance, in the gravel-pit of Mount Auburn, near
+Cambridge, large masses of glacier-worn pebbles alternate with
+beach-shingle; but it is easy to show that there was here a glacier
+advancing into the sea, crowding its front moraine and the materials
+carried under it over and into the shingle washed up by the waves upon
+the beach. Not infrequently, also, river-pebbles may be found among
+glacial materials. This is especially the case where, after the
+disappearance of large glaciers, rivers have occupied their beds.
+Examples of this kind may be seen in all the valleys of the Alps.
+
+But, besides the special character of the individual fragments, the true
+origin of any accumulation of glacier-_débris_, commonly called drift,
+may be detected by the total absence of stratification, so essential a
+feature in all water-deposits. This absence of stratification throughout
+its mass is, after all, the great and important characteristic of the
+drift; and though I have alluded to it before, I reiterate it here, as
+that which distinguishes it from all like accumulations under water. I
+may be pardoned for dwelling upon this point, because the great
+controversy among geologists respecting the nature and origin of the
+sheet of loose materials scattered over a great part of the globe turns
+upon it. The _débris_ of which the drift consists are thrown together
+pell-mell, without any arrangement according to size or weight, larger
+and smaller fragments being mixed so indiscriminately that the heaviest
+materials may be on the very summit of the mass, and the lightest at the
+bottom in immediate contact with the underlying rock, or the larger
+pieces may stand at any level in the mass of finer ones. Impalpable
+powder, coarse sand, rounded, polished, and scratched fragments of every
+size are mixed together in a homogeneous paste, in which the larger
+materials are imbedded, to use a homely, but expressive comparison, like
+raisins and currants in a pudding. The adhesive paste holding all these
+fragments together is, no doubt, the result of the friction to which the
+whole was subjected under the glacier, and which has worked some of the
+softer materials into a kind of cement.
+
+The mode of aggregation of water-worn materials is very different.
+Examine the shingle along our beaches: we find it so distributed as to
+show that the fading tide-wave has carried the lighter materials farther
+than the heavier ones, and the successive deposits exhibit an imperfect
+cross-stratification resulting from changes in the height of the tide
+and the direction of the wind. Moreover, in any materials collected
+under water we find the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter on the
+top. It is true that large angular boulders may occasionally be found
+resting upon beach-shingle, but their presence in such a connection is
+easily explained. They may have been dropped there by floating icebergs,
+or have fallen from crumbling drift-cliffs.
+
+I should add, in speaking of drift-materials, that, while we find the
+large angular boulders resting above them, we occasionally find boulders
+of unusual size mingled with them; but, when this is the case, such
+massive fragments are more or less rounded, polished, and marked in the
+same way as the smaller pebbles, or as the surfaces over which the
+glacier has passed. This is important to remember, because, when we
+examine the drift in countries where the ice, during the glacier-period,
+overtopped nearly all the mountains, so that few fragments could fall
+from them upon its surface, we find scarcely any angular boulders, while
+the drift is interspersed with larger fragments of this character,
+carried under the ice, instead of on its back. Another distinction
+between water-worn deposits and drift consists in the fact that the
+former are washed clean, while the latter always retains the mud
+gathered during its journey and spread throughout its mass.
+
+In summing up the glacial evidences, I must not omit the moraines,
+though I have described them so fully in a previous article that I need
+not do more than allude to them here; but any argument for the glacial
+theory which did not include these characteristic walls erected by
+glaciers would be most imperfect. We need hardly discuss the theory of
+currents with reference to the formation of terminal moraines, extending
+across the valleys from side to side. Any current powerful enough to
+bring the boulders and _débris_ of all sorts of which these walls are
+composed to the places where they are found would certainly not build
+them up with such regularity, but would sweep them away or scatter them
+along the bottom of the valley. That this is actually the case is seen
+in the lower course of the valley of the Rhone, where there are no
+transverse moraines, while they are frequent and undisturbed in the
+upper part of the valley. This is no doubt owing to the fact, that, when
+the main glacier had already retreated considerably up the valley, the
+lateral glaciers from the chains of the Combin and the Diablerets still
+reached the valley of the Rhone at a lower point, and barred the outlet
+of the waters from the glaciers above. A lake was thus formed, which,
+when the lower glaciers retreated up the lateral valleys, swept away all
+the lower transverse moraines, and formed the flat bottom of Martigny.
+In this case, the moraines were totally obliterated; but there are many
+other instances in which the materials have been only broken up and
+scattered over a wider surface by currents. In such remodelled moraines,
+the glacier-mud has, of course, been more or less washed away. We have
+here a blending of the action of water with that of the glacier; and,
+indeed, how could it be otherwise, when the colossal glaciers of past
+ages gradually disappeared or retreated to the mountain-heights? The
+wasting ice must have occasioned immense freshets, the action of which
+we shall trace hereafter, when examining the formation of our
+drift-ponds, of our river-beds and estuaries, as well as the
+river-terraces standing far above the present water-level.
+
+And now, if it be asked how much of this evidence for the former
+existence of glaciers is to be found in Great Britain, I answer, that
+there is not a valley in Switzerland where all these traces are found in
+greater perfection than in the valleys of the Scotch Highlands, or of
+the mountains of Ireland and Wales, or of the lake-region in England.
+Not a link is wanting to the chain. Polished surfaces, traversed by
+striæ, grooves, and furrows, with a sheet of drift resting immediately
+upon them, extend throughout the realm,--the _roches moutonnées_
+raise their rounded backs from the ground there as in
+Switzerland,--transverse moraines bar their valleys and lateral ones
+border them, and the boulders from the hill-sides are scattered over the
+plains as thickly as between the Alps and the Jura, and are here and
+there perched upon the summits of isolated hills. This being the case,
+let us examine a little more closely the local phenomena connected with
+the ancient extension of glaciers in this region, and especially the
+parallel roads of Glen Roy.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+    G. R. Glen Roy.
+    M. Moeldhu Hill.
+    S. Spean River.
+    G. S. Glen Spean.
+    L. Loch Laggan.
+    T. Loch Treig.
+    G. Glen Gloy.
+    L. O. Loch Lochy.
+    A. Loch Arkeig.
+    E. Loch Eil.
+    N. Ben Nevis.
+    1,2,3. The three parallel roads.]
+
+Among the Grampian Hills, a little to the northeast of Ben Nevis, lies
+the valley of Glen Roy, a winding valley trending in a northeasterly
+direction, and some ten miles in length. Across the mouth of this
+valley, at right angles with it, runs the valley of Glen Spean, trending
+from east to west, Glen Roy thus opening directly at its southern
+extremity into Glen Spean. Around the walls of the Glen Roy valley run
+three terraces, one above the other, at different heights, like so many
+roads artificially cut in the sides of the valley, and indeed they go by
+the name of the "parallel roads." These three terraces, though in a less
+perfect state of preservation, are repeated for a short distance at
+exactly the same levels on the southern wall of the valley of Glen
+Spean, just opposite the opening of the Glen Roy valley; that is, they
+make the whole circuit of Glen Roy, stop abruptly, on both sides, at its
+southern extremity, and reappear again on the opposite wall of Glen
+Spean. I should add, however, that all three do not come to this sudden
+termination; for the lowest of these terraces turns eastward into the
+valley of Glen Spean, following the whole curve of the eastern half of
+the valley, while, of the two upper terraces, there is no trace
+whatever, nor is there any indication that either of the three ever
+existed in the western half of the valley. When I first visited the
+region, these phenomena had already been the subject of earnest
+discussion among English geologists. The commonly accepted explanation
+of the facts was that these terraces marked ancient sea-levels at a time
+when the ocean penetrated much farther into the interior, and Glen Roy
+and the adjoining valleys were as many fiords or estuaries. And though
+the present elevation of the locality made such an interpretation
+improbable at first sight, the first or highest of the terraces being
+eleven hundred and forty-four feet above the present sea-level, the
+second eighty-two feet below the first, and the third and lowest two
+hundred and twelve feet below the second, or eight hundred odd feet
+above the level of the sea, it was thought that the oscillations of the
+land, its alternate subsidences and upheavals, proved by the modern
+results of geology to have been so great and so frequent, might account
+even for so remarkable a change. There are, however, other objections to
+this theory not so easily explained away. There are no traces of organic
+life upon these terraces. If they were ancient sea-beaches, we should
+expect to find upon them the remains of marine animals, shells,
+crustacea, and the like. All the explanations given to lessen the
+significance of this absence of organic remains are futile. Again, why
+should the lower terrace alone be continued into the eastern end of the
+valley of Glen Spean, while there are no terraces at all in its western
+part, since both must have been as fully open to the sea as Glen Roy
+valley itself? This seemed the more inexplicable since all the terraces
+exist on the valley-wall opposite the outlet of Glen Roy, showing that
+this sheet of water, wherever it came from, filled the valley itself and
+the space between it and the southern wall of Glen Spean, but failed to
+spread, on either side of that space, into the eastern and western
+extension of Glen Spean. It is evident, that, at the time the water
+filled Glen Roy, some obstruction blocked the valley of Glen Spean, both
+to the east and west, leaving, however, that space in the centre free
+into which Glen Roy opens, while, by the time the water had sunk to the
+level of the lowest terrace, one of these barriers, that to the east,
+must have been removed, for the lowest terrace, as I have said, is
+continuous throughout the eastern part of Glen Spean.[B]
+
+Prepossessed as I was with the idea of glacial agency in times anterior
+to ours, these phenomena appeared to me under a new aspect. I found the
+bottom of Glen Spean so worn by glacial action as to leave no doubt in
+my mind that it must have been the bed of a great glacier, and Dr.
+Buckland fully concurred with me in this impression. Indeed, the face of
+the country throughout that region presents not only the glacier-marks
+in great perfection, but other evidences of the ancient presence of
+glaciers. There are moraines at the lower end of Glen Spean, remodelled,
+it is true, by the action of currents, but still retaining enough of
+their ancient character to be easily recognized; and some of the finest
+examples of the _roches moutonnées_ I have seen in Scotland are to be
+found at the entrance of the valley of Loch Treig, a lateral valley
+opening into Glen Spean on its southern side, and, as we shall see
+hereafter, intimately connected with the history of the parallel roads
+of Glen Roy. These _roches moutonnées_ may very fairly be compared with
+those of the Grimsel, and exhibit all the characteristic features of the
+Alpine ones. One of them, lying on the western side of the valley where
+it opens into Glen Spean, is crossed by a trap-dike. The general surface
+of the hill, consisting of rather soft mica, has been slightly worn down
+by atmospheric agencies, so that the dike stands out some three-quarters
+of an inch above it. On the dike, however, the glacier-marks extend for
+its whole length in great perfection, while they have entirely
+disappeared from the surrounding surfaces, so as to leave the dike thus
+standing out in full relief. This is an instructive case, showing how
+little disintegration has gone on since the drift-period. All the
+currents that have swept over it, all the rains that have beaten upon
+it, have not worn away one inch from the original surface of the hill. I
+have observed many other _roches moutonnées_ in Scotland, especially
+about the neighborhood of Loch Awe, Loch Fyne, and Loch Etive. In fact,
+they may be found in almost all the glens of Scotland, in the
+lake-region of England, and in the valleys of Wales and Ireland.
+
+Following the glacial indications wherever we could find them in the
+country about Glen Roy, it became evident to me that the whole western
+range of the Grampian Hills had once been a great centre of glaciers,
+that they had come down toward Glen Spean through all the valleys on the
+mountain-slopes to the north and south of it, so that this valley had
+become, as it were, the great drainage-bed for the masses of ice thus
+poured into it laterally, and moving down the valley from east to west
+as one immense glacier. It is natural to suppose, that, at the
+breaking-up of the great sheet of ice which, if my view of the case is
+correct, must have covered the whole country at this time, the ice would
+yield more readily in a valley like that of Glen Roy, lying open to the
+south and receiving the full force of the sun, than in those on the
+opposite side of Glen Spean, opening to the north. At all events, it is
+evident that at some time posterior to this universal glacial period,
+when the ice began to retreat, Glen Roy became the basin of a glacial
+lake such as we now find in the Alps of Switzerland, where occasionally
+a closed valley becomes a trough, as it were, into which the water from
+the surrounding hills is drained. In such a lake no animals are found,
+such as exist in any other sheet of fresh water, and this would account
+for the absence of any organic remains on the terraces of Glen Roy. But
+at first sight it seemed that this theory was open in one respect to the
+same objection as the other. What prevented this sheet of water from
+spreading east and west in Glen Spean? If it not only filled Glen Roy,
+but extended to the southern side of Glen Spean immediately opposite
+the opening of Glen Roy, what prevented it from filling the whole of
+that valley also? In endeavoring to answer this question, I found the
+solution of the mystery.
+
+The bed of Glen Spean, through its whole extent from east to west, is
+marked, as I have said, by glacial action, in rectilinear scratches and
+furrows. This westward track of the main glacier is crossed transversely
+near the centre of the valley by two other glacier-tracks cutting it at
+right angles. Upon tracing these cross-tracks carefully, I became
+satisfied, that, after the surrounding ice had begun to yield, after the
+masses of ice which descended from the northern and southern slopes of
+the mountains into Glen Spean had begun to retreat, and to form local
+limited glaciers, two of those lateral glaciers, one coming down from
+Ben Nevis on the southwest, the other from Loch Treig on the southeast,
+extended farther than the others and stretched across Glen Spean.[C]
+These two glaciers for a long time formed barriers across the western
+and eastern extension of this valley, damming back the waters which
+filled Glen Roy and the central part of Glen Spean.
+
+Evidently the glacier descending from Loch Treig was the first to yield,
+for, by the time the Glen Roy lake had sunk to the level of the lowest
+terrace, the entrance to the eastern extension of the valley must have
+been free, otherwise the water could not have spread throughout that
+basin as we find it did; but it would seem that by the time the western
+barrier, or the glacier from Ben Nevis, was removed, the sheet of water
+was too far reduced to have left permanent marks of its outflow into the
+Great Glen, except by disturbing and remodelling the large moraines of
+the older Glen Spean glacier. There are faint indications of other
+terraces in Glen Roy, even at a higher level than the uppermost parallel
+road, owing their origin probably to the short duration of a higher
+level of the glacier-lake, when the great general glacier had not yet
+been lowered to a more permanent level determined by a limited
+circumscription within the walls of the valleys. There are other
+terraces in neighboring valleys at still different levels,--in Glen
+Gloy, for instance, where the one horizontal road was no doubt formed in
+consequence of the damming of the valley by a glacier from Loch Arkeig.
+Mr. Darwin has seen another in Glen Kinfillen, which I would explain by
+the presence of a glacier in the Great Glen, the marks of which are
+particularly distinct about the eastern end of Glen Garry.
+
+The evidence of the ancient presence of glaciers is no less striking in
+other parts of the Scotch Highlands. Between the southeastern range of
+the Grampian Hills, in Forfarshire and Perthshire, and the opposite
+ridge of Sidlaw Hills, stretches the broad valley of Strathmore. At the
+time when Glen Spean received the masses of ice from the slopes of the
+western Grampian range, the glaciers descended from the valleys on the
+southern slope of the southeastern range and from those on the northern
+slope of Sidlaw Hills into the capacious bed of the valley which divides
+them. The glacial phenomena of this region present a striking
+resemblance in their general relations to those of the Alps and the
+Jura. The Grampian range on the northern side of Strathmore valley
+occupies the same position in reference to that of the Sidlaw Hills
+opposite, as does the range of the Alps to that of the Jura, while the
+intervening valley may be compared to the plain of Switzerland. As from
+the Bernese Oberland and from the valleys of the Reuss and Limmath
+gigantic glaciers came down and stretched across the plain of
+Switzerland to the Jura, scattering their erratic boulders over its
+summit and upon its slopes at the time of their greater extension, and,
+as they withdrew into the higher Alpine valleys, leaving them along
+their retreating track at the foot of the Jura and over the whole plain,
+so did the glaciers from Glen Prossen and parallel valleys on the
+Grampian Mountains extend across the valley of Strathmore, dropping
+their boulders not only on the slopes and along the base of the Sidlaw
+Hills, but scattering them in their retreat throughout the valley, until
+they were themselves reduced to isolated glaciers in the higher valleys.
+At the same time other glaciers came down from the heights of
+Schihallion on the west, and, descending through the valley of the Tay,
+joined the great masses of ice in the valley of Strathmore, thus
+combining with the eastern ice-field, just as the glacier from Mont
+Blanc and the valley of the Rhone formerly combined in the western part
+of Switzerland with those of the Bernese Oberland. The relations are
+identical, though the geographical position is reversed,--the higher
+range, or the Grampian Hills, lying to the north in Scotland, and the
+lower one, or the Sidlaw Hills, to the south, while in Switzerland, on
+the contrary, the higher range lies to the south and the lower to the
+north. I have alluded especially to Glen Prossen because the glacial
+marks in that valley are remarkably distinct, the whole bed of the
+valley being scratched, polished, and furrowed by the great rasp which
+has moved over it, while the concentric moraines at its lower extremity
+are very striking. But these signs, so perfectly preserved in Glen
+Prossen, recur with greater or less intensity in all the corresponding
+valleys, leaving no doubt that the same phenomena existed over the whole
+region.
+
+Among the localities of Scotland where the indications of glacial action
+are most marked is the region about Stirling. Near Stirling Castle the
+polished surfaces of the rocks with their distinct grooves and scratches
+show us the path followed by the ice as it moved down in a northeasterly
+direction toward the Frith of Forth from the mountains on the northwest.
+To the west of Edinburgh, also, there is a broad glacier-track, showing
+that here also the ice was ploughing its way eastward to find an outlet
+on the shore.
+
+The western slope of the great Scotch range is no less remarkable for
+its glacier-traces. The heads of Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Awe, and
+Loch Leven everywhere show upon their margins the most distinct glacial
+polish and furrows, while from the trend of these marks and the
+distribution of the moraines, especially about Ben Cruachan, it is
+obvious that in this part of the country the glaciers moved westward and
+southward. About Aberdeen, on the contrary, they moved eastward, while
+in the vicinity of Elgin they advanced toward the north.
+
+It thus appears that the whole range of the Grampians formed a great
+centre for the distribution of glaciers, and that a colossal ice-field
+spread itself over the whole country, extending in every direction
+toward the lower lands and the sea-shore. As the glaciers which now
+descend through all the valleys of the Alps, along their northern as
+well as their southern slopes, and in their eastern as well as their
+western prolongation, though limited, in our days, within the
+valley-walls, nevertheless once covered the plain of Switzerland and
+that of Northern Italy, so did the ice-fields of the Grampians during
+the greatest extension of the Scotch glaciers spread over the whole
+country. They also were, in course of time, reduced to local glaciers,
+circumscribed within the higher valleys of the more mountainous parts of
+the country, until they totally disappeared, as those of Switzerland
+would also have done, had it not been for the greater elevation of that
+country above the level of the sea. Scotland nowhere rises above the
+present level of perpetual snow, while in Switzerland the whole Alpine
+range has an altitude favorable to the preservation of glaciers. In the
+range of the Jura, however, which had at one time its local glaciers
+also, but which nowhere now rises above the line of perpetual snow, they
+have disappeared as completely as in the Grampian Hills.
+
+It would lead me too far, were I to give here a special account of all
+the investigations I made in 1840 upon the distribution of glaciers in
+Great Britain. I will therefore only point out a few of the more
+distinct areas of distribution. The region surrounding Ben Wyvis formed
+such a centre of dispersion from which glaciers radiated, and we have
+another in the Pentland Hills about Edinburgh. In Northumberland, the
+Cheviot Hills present a glacial centre of the same kind, and in the
+Westmoreland Hills we have still another. In the last-named locality,
+the glacial tracks can be followed in various directions, some of them
+descending toward the northwest from the heights of Helvellyn, others
+moving southward toward Ambleside. In Wales the same kind of glacial
+distribution has been observed; but, as Professor Ramsay has treated
+this subject in full, I would refer my readers to his masterly work for
+a further account of the ancient Welch glaciers. In Ireland I had also
+opportunities of making extensive local investigations of glacial
+action. I observed the centres of distribution in the neighborhood of
+Belfast, in the County of Wicklow, and in Cavan.
+
+But nowhere are these phenomena more striking than in Fermanagh County
+about the neighborhood of Enniskillen, and more especially in the
+immediate vicinity of Florence Court, the seat of the Earl of
+Enniskillen. On the northern slope of Ben Calcagh are five valleys lying
+parallel with each other and opening into the valley of Loch Nilly,
+which runs from east to west at the base of the mountain. A road now
+passes through this valley, and, where it crosses the mouth of either of
+the five valleys rising towards the mountain-slope, it cuts alternately
+through the two horns of a crescent-shaped wall which bars the lower end
+of every one of them. These crescent-shaped mounds are so many terminal
+moraines, built up by the five glaciers formerly descending through
+these lateral valleys into the valley of Loch Nilly. They bore the same
+relation to each other as the glaciers de Tour and d'Argentière, the
+Glacier des Bois with the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons and the
+Glacier de Taconet, now bear to each other in the valley of Chamouni;
+and were it not for the smaller dimensions of the whole, any one
+familiar with the tracks of ancient glaciers might easily fancy himself
+crossing the ancient moraines at the foot of the northern slope of the
+range of Mont Blanc, through which the Arve has cut its channel, the
+valley of Chamouni standing in the same relation to Mont Blanc as the
+valley of Loch Nilly does to Ben Calcagh.
+
+I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because
+they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch
+Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the
+many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian
+Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the
+Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear
+upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced
+their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in
+Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow
+them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and
+in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so
+that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the
+sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this
+all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the
+plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but
+the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses
+of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe,
+from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern
+promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action,
+showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole
+continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more
+limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines
+across the valleys, showing, that, as the general ice-sheet broke up and
+contracted into local glaciers, every cluster or chain of hills became a
+centre of glacial dispersion, such as the Alps are now, such as the
+Jura, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales and Ireland, the
+Alps of Scandinavia, the Hartz, the Black Forest, the Vosges, and many
+others have been in ancient times.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the next article we shall consider the glacial phenomena as they
+exist in America.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] See January No., p. 61.
+
+[B] Having enumerated the characteristic features of the glacial
+phenomena in the preceding pages, I throw into this note some
+explanation which may render my views of the parallel roads more
+intelligible, not to interrupt again the exposition with details. It
+would be desirable, however, that the reader should first make himself
+thoroughly familiar with the localities concerned, before proceeding any
+farther. I would therefore state here, that, in the wood-cut opposite,
+G. R. indicates the valley of Glen Roy, with the three parallel roads
+marked 1, 2, 3. Glen Spean is designated by G. S., and the river flowing
+at its bottom by S. Loch Laggan, out of which the River Spean rises, is
+marked L. G. indicates Glen Gloy, a little valley to the northwest of
+Glen Roy, with a single terrace. Loch Treig is designated by T., Loch
+Lochy by L. O., Loch Arkeig by A., and Moeldhu Hill by M., while E.
+indicates Loch Eil. The Great Glen of Scotland, through which the
+Caledonian Canal runs, extends in the direction of L. O. and E. The
+position of Ben Nevis is designated by N. The dotted area between N. and
+M. marks the place occupied by the great glacier of Ben Nevis, when it
+extended as far as Moeldhu; while the close continuous lines in front of
+Loch Treig indicate the direction of the glacial scratches left across
+Glen Spean by the glacier of Loch Treig, when it extended as far as the
+eastern termination of the two upper terraces. It ought to be
+remembered, in this connection, that the bottom of the valley of the
+Spean, as well as that of Glen Roy, is occupied by loose materials,
+partly drift, that is, materials acted upon by glaciers, and partly
+decomposed fragments of rocks brought down by the torrents, greatly
+impeding the observation of the polished surfaces. The river-bed is cut
+through this deposit, and here and there through the underlying rock.
+Besides the parallel roads, there are also peculiar accumulations of
+loose materials in Glen Roy and Glen Spean, more particularly connected
+with the lowest terrace, which Mr. Darwin and Professor Jamieson have
+shown to be little deltas formed during the existence of the lake of
+Glen Roy at the bottom of the gullies intersecting the shelves of the
+upper roads. The outlet for the water at the period during which the
+second terrace was formed, not known when I visited Glen Roy, has been
+discovered by Mr. Milne-Holme, and also observed by Professor Jamieson.
+During the formation of the upper terrace, the waters escaped through
+the westernmost tributary of the River Spey, in the direction of the
+northeast corner of the wood-cut, and during that of the lowest terrace,
+at the eastern end of Loch Laggan, also through the valley of the Spey.
+The state of preservation of the parallel roads is such as to prove that
+no disturbance of any importance can have taken place in the country
+since they were formed. Far from believing, therefore, that these
+remarkable shelves are ancient sea-beaches, I am prepared to maintain,
+that, had the area occupied by them been submerged only for a few days,
+under an ocean rising and falling for several feet with every tide, no
+vestige would have been left of their former existence.
+
+[C] The wood-cut on p. 730 is a reproduction of the little map
+accompanying a paper of mine upon "The Glacial Theory and its Recent
+Progress," printed in the "Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal" for
+October, 1842. I might have greatly improved the topography, and
+represented more accurately the details of the phenomenon, by availing
+myself of the much larger and very minute map recently published by
+Professor Thomas F. Jamieson, of Aberdeen; but I thought it advisable to
+leave my first sketch as I presented it twenty-two years ago, in order
+to show that Sir Charles Lyell is mistaken in ascribing (see "Antiquity
+of Man," pp. 260, 261) the discovery of the glacier of Loch Treig to
+Professor Jamieson. A comparison of his statements with mine will show
+that the solution of the problem offered by him is identical with that
+proposed by me, as he himself candidly admits ("Quarterly Journal of the
+Geological Society" for August, 1863, p. 239). I have only one fault to
+find with his observations, and, as I have never revisited the locality
+since, this remark may satisfy him that my examination of its features
+was not so hurried as he supposes. Professor Jamieson confounds the
+effects of two distinct glaciers moving in different valleys as the
+action of one and the same glacier. In my paper, it is true, I made no
+allusion to the great glacier of Glen Spean, the existence of which I
+had recognized along the river from Loch Laggan nearly to the Caledonian
+Canal. I publish my observations upon this great central glacier for the
+first time in the present article, having omitted them in my
+contributions upon this subject to the scientific periodicals of the day
+simply because I thought best not to complicate my exposition of the
+facts concerning the parallel roads by considerations foreign to their
+origin, convinced as I was, from the manner in which the glacial theory
+was then received, that they would not be understood, and still less
+admitted. But now that all the geologists of Great Britain seem to have
+given their adhesion to it, I may be permitted to state that I already
+knew then, what Professor Jamieson has overlooked in his latest paper,
+that a separate glacier had occupied the valley of the Spean _prior_ to
+the formation of the parallel roads, and that at that time the glacier
+of Loch Treig was only a lateral tributary of the same, just as the
+glacier of the Thierberg is a tributary of the glacier of the Aar. It
+was not until the Glen Spean glacier had retreated to the hills east of
+Loch Laggan that the glacier of Loch Treig could form a barrier across
+Glen Spean, and thus dam the waters in Glen Roy which produced the
+parallel roads. The marks left by the great Glen Spean glacier in the
+valley are mistaken by Professor Jamieson for indications, that, in its
+greatest extension, the glacier of Loch Treig not only advanced across
+Glen Spean, but divided into two branches, one moving westward down Glen
+Spean, the other eastward up Glen Spean, as far as Loch Laggan. Any one
+sufficiently familiar with existing glaciers to compare their action
+with the phenomena referred to above will at once see the impossibility
+of such a course for any glacier coming down from Loch Treig. At the
+time the Grampians had become a separate centre of glacial action a
+great glacier must have moved down, towards the Caledonian Canal,
+through Glen Spean, receiving as tributaries lateral glaciers not only
+from Loch Treig and Glen Roy, but also from all the other minor lateral
+valleys emptying into Glen Spean, the largest of which must have come
+from the range of Ben Nevis,--just as the great glacier of the valley of
+the Rhone once received as tributaries all the glaciers coming down into
+that valley from the southern slope of the Bernese Oberland, and from
+the northern slope of the Valesian Alps, and at one time also from the
+eastern slopes of the range of Mont Blanc. And when the large glacier
+occupying the lower, and therefore warmer, level gradually disappeared
+and retreated far away to levels where it could maintain itself against
+the effect of a returning milder climate, the opening spring of our era,
+as we may call it, the lateral glaciers, arising from the nearer high
+grounds, could extend across the valleys, but not before.
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE CLIFF.
+
+
+    "Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no?
+      Which needs the other's office, thou or I?
+    Dost want to be disburthened of a woe,
+      And can, in truth, my voice untie
+    Its links, and let it go?
+
+    "Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted,
+      Intrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
+    No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited
+      With falsehood,--love, at last aware
+    Of scorn,--hopes, early blighted,--
+
+    "We have them; but I know not any tone
+      So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow:
+    Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
+      If they knew any way to borrow
+    A pathos like thy own?
+
+    "Which sigh wouldst mock, of all the sighs? The one
+      So long escaping from lips starved and blue,
+    That lasts while on her pallet-bed the nun
+      Stretches her length; her foot comes through
+    The straw she shivers on,--
+
+    "You had not thought she was so tall; and spent,
+      Her shrunk lids open; her lean fingers shut
+    Close, close; their sharp and livid nails indent
+      The clammy palm; then all is mute:
+    That way, the spirit went.
+
+    "Or wouldst thou rather that I understand
+      Thy will to help me?--like the dog I found
+    Once, pacing sad this solitary strand,
+      Who would not take my food, poor hound,
+    But whined and licked my hand."
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    All this, and more, comes from some young man's pride
+      Of power to see, in failure and mistake,
+    Relinquishment, disgrace, on every side,
+      Merely examples for his sake,
+    Helps to his path untried:
+
+    Instances he must--simply recognize?
+      Oh, more than so!--must, with a learner's zeal,
+    Make doubly prominent, twice emphasize,
+      By added touches that reveal
+    The god in babe's disguise.
+
+    Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest,
+      Himself the undefeated that shall be!
+    Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test,--
+      His triumph in eternity
+    Too plainly manifest!
+
+    Whence judge if he learn forthwith what the wind
+      Means in its moaning,--by the happy, prompt,
+    Instinctive way of youth, I mean,--for kind
+      Calm years, exacting their accompt
+    Of pain, mature the mind:
+
+    And some midsummer morning, at the lull
+      Just about daybreak, as he looks across
+    A sparkling foreign country, wonderful
+      To the sea's edge for gloom and gloss
+    Next minute must annul,--
+
+    Then, when the wind begins among the vines,
+      So low, so low, what shall it mean but this?
+    "Here is the change beginning, here the lines
+      Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
+    The limit time assigns."
+
+    Nothing can be as it has been before;
+      Better, so call it, only not the same.
+    To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
+      And keep it changeless! such our claim;
+    So answered,--Never more!
+
+    Simple? Why, this is the old woe o' the world,
+      Tune to whose rise and fall we live and die.
+    Rise through it, then! Rejoice that man is hurled
+      From change to change unceasingly,
+    His soul's wings never furled!
+
+    That's a new question; still remains the fact,
+      Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
+    We moan in acquiescence: there's life's pact,
+      Perhaps probation,--do _I_ know?
+    God does: endure His act!
+
+    Only, for man, how bitter not to grave
+      On his soul's hands' palms one fair, good, wise thing
+    Just as he grasped it! For himself, death's wave;
+      While time first washes--ah, the sting!--
+    O'er all he'd sink to save.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE.
+
+
+It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller
+paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores
+the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no
+snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no
+aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his
+patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only
+change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean.
+Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless
+intervals of amber weather, and that _soi-disant_ summer is one entire
+amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no
+inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San
+Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth
+of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the
+poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,--a single flat doing service
+for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes-of-hand, the
+Almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons
+with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All The Year Round.
+
+Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits are produced! Fruit
+enough metaphorical: for the scientific man or artist who cannot make
+hay while such a sun shines from April to November must be a slothful
+laborer indeed. But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is
+lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his
+study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his
+breakfast,--who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time
+to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons,
+figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds?
+
+Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Occidental Hotel. Its
+comfort is like that of a royal home. There is nothing inn-ish about it.
+Remembering the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained to say
+that I have never, even in New York, seen its equal for elegance of
+appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of _cuisine_.
+Having come to this extreme of civilization from the extreme of
+barbarism, we found that it actually needed an exertion to leap from the
+lap of luxury, after a fortnight's pleasaunce, and take to the woods
+again in flannel and corduroys.
+
+But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the heavenly climate, the
+paradisiacal fruits, and the royal hotel of San Francisco, were the old
+friends whom we found, and the new ones we made there. With but one
+exception, (and that an express-company, not a man,) we were received by
+all our San-Francisco acquaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a
+welcome and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was honorable to
+them. Need I say whose brotherly hands were among the very first
+outstretched to us, in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by
+whose radiant face and golden speech we were most lovingly detained
+evening after evening and far into the night? A few days ago when we
+read that dreadful message, "_Starr King is dead_," the lightning that
+carried it seemed to end in our hearts. We withered under it; California
+had lost its soul for us; at noon or in dreams that balmy land would
+nevermore be the paradise it once was to us. The last hand that pressed
+our own, when we sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the same
+that had been first to give us our California welcome. Just before the
+lines were cast off, Starr King stood at the door of our state-room, and
+said,--
+
+"I could not bear to have you go away without one more good-bye. Here
+are the _cartes-de-visite_ I promised. They look hard-worked, but they
+look like me. Good bye! God bless you! I hope to make a visit to the
+East next summer, and then we will get together somewhere by the sea.
+Good bye!"
+
+He went down the ladder. When the steamer glided off, his bright face
+sent benedictions after us as far as we could see; and then, for the
+last time on earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded from
+our sight,--but, oh! never from our hearts, either in the here or the
+hereafter. "We shall see him, but not now." We shall be together with
+him "in the summer, by the sea"; but that summer shall have other glory
+than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.
+
+King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. We little knew that we
+were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily
+intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously
+disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work
+for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.
+
+If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of
+Eden,--into a region which out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the
+valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the
+Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of
+comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from
+his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine
+cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a
+couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh
+scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be
+compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.
+
+We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months
+before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across
+the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's
+window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in
+Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,--I,
+let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to
+believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very
+prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.
+
+No Saratoga affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and
+curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the
+San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on")
+her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the
+Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous
+system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her
+"skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood
+once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three
+or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp
+there,--though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her
+life.
+
+Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry
+day since my return I was riding in a train on the New-York Central,
+when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of
+beeves, accosted me with the question,--"Friend, yeou've travelled
+consid'able, and believe in the religion of Natur', don't ye?" "Why so?"
+I responded. "_Them boots_," replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a
+pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite.
+Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had,--and it is not difficult
+to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were
+armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had
+come with us across the continent; our ammunition we got in San
+Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth
+transportation: our necessaries we left to be purchased at that
+jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our
+pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like
+ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits,
+sardines, and apple-butter,--in the latter, a jug of sirup for the
+inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our
+narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him
+and starvation; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to
+stick!
+
+The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite
+(and he must be rather of the Count-Devereux than the Foppington-Flutter
+school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good
+saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California.
+Everybody rides there; if you wish to create a sensation with your
+horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not
+well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun
+to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franciscan Boulevards) with its
+cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging
+through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by
+Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat
+in the next Congress. The nation of beggars-on-horseback which first
+colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of
+conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even
+less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and
+Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly
+in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that
+Americans who never sat even so little as an Atlantic-State's pony, on
+coming here presently take to the saddle with all their hearts. In most
+of the smaller Californian towns, a very serviceable half- or
+quarter-breed saddle-horse is to be had for forty dollars,--the "breed"
+portion of his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the remaining
+fraction being native or Mustang stock. This animal, if need be, will
+live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule,--travel all day
+long on an easy "lope," never offering to stop till fatigue makes him
+fall,--and, if you let him, will take you through _chaparrals_, and up
+and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would
+break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts,
+supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with
+saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in
+gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York
+market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and
+fifty dollars.
+
+It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started,
+but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there
+be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a
+good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on
+which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be
+imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend
+nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted
+to the rider's form as an old "_incroyable's_" pair of pantaloons. There
+is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower
+lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a
+broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward
+in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,--thus
+affording capital relief both to one's self and one's horse, and
+bringing in both from a fifty-miles' march comparatively unjaded.
+
+The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like
+an Omega upside-down (U)[Transcriber's note: upside down Omega], left
+unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a
+half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the
+toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances.
+Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly
+ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of
+the rider's leg. The surcingle, or, _Californicè_, the _cinch_, is a
+broad strip of hair-cloth with a padded ring at either end through which
+you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings
+under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than
+our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your
+girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.
+
+The only particular in which I could not commend and adopt the native
+practice was the Mexican bit. It is a dreadful instrument of torture,
+putting immense leverage in the rider's hands, and enabling him at will
+to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces; indeed, the horse on which it
+is used is guided entirely by pressure on the opposite side of the neck
+from that in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of drawing his
+head around would so lift the bit as to drive him frantic. There are
+very few horses of any breed, even the Mustang, that _never_ stumble;
+and as I prefer lifting my horse to letting him break his knees or neck,
+I want a bridle I can pull upon without tearing his mouth. So, in spite
+of its handsome appearance and the very manageable single white cord
+into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed the Mexican head-gear,
+and took the ordinary Eastern snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed
+our accoutrement,--whips being here unknown.
+
+I may as well make a word-map of our route before going farther.
+Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship themselves and their horses from San
+Francisco by steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Joaquin, the
+most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada
+water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State,--a series,
+indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the
+Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region,
+that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying
+the northern portion of the State,--resembling in its physical features,
+much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated
+trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is
+almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which
+debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,--and that rises east of
+the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is
+one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach
+the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good
+United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to
+the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or
+would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You
+will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving
+the San Joaquin at Stockton _en route_ for Mariposa,--the Stanislaus,
+the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to
+Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between
+fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains,
+somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges
+of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small
+settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you
+come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish _plaza_, and Yankee notions sold
+around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to
+Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize";
+besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in
+Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our
+extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their
+first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to
+neither of which each other's society or their own new trade was
+congenial.
+
+I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole
+road is interesting,--especially to one making a specialty of owls. The
+only game within easy reach is the dove and the California
+ground-squirrel,--a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray,
+barring the former's subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the
+road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when
+the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the
+river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of
+the Sierra,--or ought to be: many cattle died along the San Joaquin last
+summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the
+refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water
+on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that
+I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we
+forded it at Roberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior
+to the finest white-oaks of the East, but surpassed in beauty every
+tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as
+exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a New-England meadow, and wept
+at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,--possessing,
+moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal _embonpoint_,
+unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we
+lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a
+desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of
+color from our artists' hands.
+
+At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade
+of pack-animals, transferred our wagon-load to their backs, (the average
+mule-pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,)
+roped it there in the most approved _muletero_-fashion, and started into
+the wilderness.
+
+Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who
+with myself had formed the original overland-party, we numbered two
+young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in
+California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Düsseldorf
+friend,--also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally,
+Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco.
+
+To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former,
+perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as
+will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in
+return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after
+looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and
+finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold
+dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for
+the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair,
+serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then
+it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been
+General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of
+Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went
+into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him,
+marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing
+which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the
+matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance,
+whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by
+some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional
+greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our _pis-aller_,--we
+finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to
+help pack our mules or care for them and the horses.
+
+The boy we obtained near Mariposa. He was an independent squire to the
+man of whom we got the extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of
+trustee and _prochein amy_ to an orphan family of mules. At fifteen
+years and in jackets, he was one of the keenest speculators in fire-arms
+I ever saw; could swap horses or play poker with anybody; and, take him
+for all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall never look upon
+his like again.
+
+Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five pack-beasts by as
+many tow-lines, we struck up into the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills,
+commencing our climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole
+distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve of these we pursued a
+road in some degree practicable to carts, and leading to one of those
+inevitable steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his first
+swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing the saw-mill in the very
+act of astonishing the wilderness with a dinner-whistle, we struck a
+trail and fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was almost a
+continuous alternation of descent and climb over outlying ridges of the
+Sierra. Our raw-recruited mules, and the elementary condition of our
+intellects in the science of professional packing, spun out this portion
+of our journey to three days,--though allowance is to be made for the
+fact of our stopping at noon of the second day and not resuming our
+trail till the morning of the third. This interim we spent in visiting
+the Big Trees, which are situated four or five miles off the Yo-Semite
+track.
+
+"Clark's," where tourists stop for this purpose, is just half-way
+between Mariposa and the great Valley. "Clark" himself is one of the
+best-informed men, one of the very best guides, I ever met in the
+Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, stalwart old
+grizzly-hunter and miner of the '49 days, wears a noble full beard hued
+like his favorite game, but no head-covering of any kind since he
+recovered from a fever which left his head intolerant of even a slouch.
+He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in the winter, and in summer
+occupies a hermitage built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty
+valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest
+poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild-strawberry
+sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.
+
+Before reaching Clark's we had been astonished at the dimensions of the
+ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through
+forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and
+trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very
+largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.
+
+But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as
+thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain
+forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the
+literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants.
+People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to
+realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted
+proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the
+look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves,
+and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that,
+though I always thought I _had_ believed travellers in their recitals on
+this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no
+such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the
+friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.
+
+Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty-two
+trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in
+circumference; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet;
+fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and
+sixty; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and
+eighty; two between eighty and ninety; two between ninety and one
+hundred; two are just one hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This
+last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet.
+I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,--for it is
+prostrate,--and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark.
+I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the
+measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet,--its
+circumference one hundred and two feet _plus_ a fraction. Of course the
+thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in
+depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.
+
+To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount
+to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house.
+You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of
+the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope _up_ from your roof-peak.
+Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end,
+our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one
+hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation
+had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of
+trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried
+throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and
+finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included
+in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still
+living, and all have the bark upon them still, while _the_ tree is to
+some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live
+wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,--over one hundred and
+twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle
+of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these
+largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings
+were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some
+of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when
+Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the
+Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a
+reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these
+marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though
+with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and
+how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them
+half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque,
+the rest of us _izing_ away at something scientific,--Botany,
+Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to
+do here or in the Valley,--the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada
+granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our
+artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing
+picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt
+frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a
+cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt
+for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's,
+your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an
+average timber-tree as a large man against _Sequoia gigantea_. What our
+artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees'
+color,--a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety
+to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical
+figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned
+almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy
+fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a
+plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by
+fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.
+
+Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped
+down intensely cold through the granite chasms,--all of them fed from
+the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque,--most of them good
+trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving
+Clark's, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which
+flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of
+tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us
+quite _apropos_ at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one
+side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily
+furnished us with frogs enough for an _entrée_. Between two and three in
+the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were
+now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall
+the Yo-Semite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy,
+save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.
+
+Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again
+into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or
+the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from
+before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our
+trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name
+unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied
+in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the
+hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless;
+but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This
+was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with an
+odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of
+our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail
+turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."
+
+That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous
+expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to
+be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe
+as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just
+been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my
+vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged
+translation of any Scripture of Nature.
+
+We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in
+height,--a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance
+baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green
+_spiculæ_--they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun
+on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first
+gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.
+
+There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we
+could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it
+splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians
+have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and
+five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.
+
+I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly,
+for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the
+tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the
+serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,--broadly burning, rather
+than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From
+that sun, clear back to the first _avant-courier_ trace of purple
+twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim--yes, as if it were the very
+butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven--ran that wall, always
+sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel
+might climb or sparrow fly,--so broad that it was just faint-lined like
+the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,--so
+lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines
+and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on
+the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first
+astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and
+seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to
+examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice
+surpassed our immediate _vis-à-vis_ in height.
+
+First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the
+Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that
+might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second
+Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there
+the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway
+and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no
+more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a
+pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built
+on its grand flat top. And, oh! the gorgeous masses of light and shadow
+which the falling sun cast on it,--the shadows like great waves, the
+lights like their spumy tops and flying mist,--thrown up from the
+heaving breast of a golden sea! In California at this season the dome of
+heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be done for the
+bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken
+winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly
+four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the
+Valley's tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish _alias_,--some
+Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "_El Capitan_" the idea
+of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.
+
+Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the
+sky-line, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere
+of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to
+hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous
+To-coy-æ, better known through Watkins's photographs as the Great North
+Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is
+certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose
+here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far
+more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.
+
+We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own
+wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand-point
+to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its
+least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which
+topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of
+a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same
+plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the
+opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories,
+and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an
+angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were
+standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper
+edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory
+of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the
+North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer
+mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as
+elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked
+semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller
+Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing
+to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered _glacis_ of
+detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life
+save the palæozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus
+from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a
+Yo-Semite crag _inorganic_, as I used to speak of everything not
+strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that
+utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the
+_débris_ at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and _exuviæ_ of a
+stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were
+going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us
+because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before
+Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in
+the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived
+long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but
+one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads
+at a time,--if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of
+some one small being in the fenceless _vivarium_ of the Universe? Let
+not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly
+upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we
+bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.
+
+I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the
+native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful
+Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few
+short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave.
+Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was
+its fostering god,--the former a radiant maiden, the latter an
+ever-young immortal,--
+
+    "amorous as the month of May."
+
+Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula
+spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer,
+kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley-tribes began to
+starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened,
+and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to
+prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her
+nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to
+the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty
+cone split from heaven to earth,--its frontal half falling down to dam
+the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful
+Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches,--its other segment
+remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the
+_in-memoriam_ title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to
+save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony
+Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he
+had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan,--where a lively faith
+and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.
+
+Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the
+doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,--in
+the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact,
+and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by
+time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and
+passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his
+own way; but a fact with its facets cut--otherwise a poem--is
+unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody
+tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal
+translation; poems circulate virgin and _verbatim_. In some future
+article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River,
+and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by
+the lantern of Indian legend.
+
+Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as
+seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass
+turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,--chrysoprase beautiful
+enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic
+heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of
+green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the
+westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great
+mountain-ranges,--into a field of perfect light, misty by its own
+excess,--into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the
+phoenix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some
+rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a
+dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man
+or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for
+ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on
+rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy
+dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the
+crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's
+self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a
+sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new
+cycle,--spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and
+hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth
+below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the
+shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the
+middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset
+wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.
+
+To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from
+possessing it. Only the _silleros_ of the Andes, our mules, horses, and
+selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking
+was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most
+circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their
+impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the
+mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a
+green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.
+
+Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,--calling it "Camp Rosalie,"
+after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs
+and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow,
+with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in
+ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got
+together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring
+fire,--made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a
+three-forked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks,--selected a
+cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and
+as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant _baldacchini_ for
+the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep
+on evergreen-strewings.
+
+During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to
+rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold
+Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the
+game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks
+and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the
+testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from
+picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the
+sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the
+gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a
+gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of
+injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.
+
+Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists
+began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a
+living landscape, _color_-studies on the spot; and though I am not here
+to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks'
+camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for
+future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the
+feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided
+orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or
+the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting
+specimens of all kinds,--_Agassizing_, so to speak.
+
+I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of
+sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish,--to that
+select minority of _illuminati_ who go trouting for intellectual
+culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a _Sonata_ of
+Beethoven's,--who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the
+divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola
+in the cast of a fly,--who call three little troutlings "_a splendid
+day's sport, me boy_!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have
+been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to
+them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier
+curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to
+the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or
+fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon,--and those the dull,
+black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots,--I gave over
+bothering the unambitious burghers of the flood with invitations to a
+rise in life, and took to the meadows with a butterfly-net.
+
+My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) should chase the
+butterfly on horseback. You are liable to put your net over your horse's
+head instead of the butterfly. The butterfly keeps rather ahead of the
+horse. You may throw your horse when you mean to throw the net. The idea
+is a romantic one; it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when
+court-butterflies _were_ said to have been netted from the saddle,--but
+it carries you nowhere else in particular, unless perhaps into a small
+branch of the Merced, where you don't want to go. Then, too, if you slip
+down and leave your horse standing while you steal on a giant _Papilio_
+which is sucking the deer-weed in _such_ a sweet spot for a cast, your
+horse (perhaps he has heard of the French general who said, "Asses and
+_savans_ to the centre!") may discover that he also is a sage, and
+retire to botanize while you are butterflying,--a contingency which
+entails your wading the Merced after him five several times, and finally
+going back to camp in wet disgust to procure another horse and a lariat.
+An experience faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon convinced
+me that the great arm of the service in butterfly-warfare is infantry.
+After I had turned myself into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to
+success. Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of its groves and
+meadows is sucked by some of the largest, the most magnificent, and most
+widely varied butterflies in the world.
+
+At noon those of us who came back to camp had a substantial dinner out
+of our abundant stores, reinforced occasionally with grouse, quail, or
+pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined _à la
+fourchette_, in their workshop,--something in a pail being carried out
+to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness,
+and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the
+lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, "Death on the
+Pail-Horse." At evening, when the artists returned, half an hour was
+passed in a "private view" of their day's studies; then came another
+dinner, called a supper; then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and
+brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the genial way to
+bed-time.
+
+In his charming "Peculiar," Epes Sargent has given us an episode called
+the "Story of Estelle." It is the greatest of compliments to him that I
+could get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore the name of
+one of the most audacious and _picaresque_ mortals I ever knew,--our
+hired man, who sold us--our----But hear my episode: it is
+
+
+THE STORY OF VANCE.
+
+Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with the Secesh uncle. I will be
+brief. Our stores began to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a
+horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of purchases, and eighty
+golden dollars, bidding him good-speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was
+to return laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, and oil,
+on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. Seven days glided by, and
+the material for more slapjacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our
+bag-bottoms.
+
+One morning I determined to save the party from starvation, and with a
+fresh supply of the currency set out for Mariposa. At Clark's I learned
+that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned
+his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest
+of the sunlight in a _siesta_. When he arose, his animals were
+undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse to go in
+search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen him since.
+
+Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I resumed my way toward
+the settlements. Coming by the steam saw-mill, I recognized Vance's
+steed grazing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, and led
+him in triumph to Mariposa. There I arrived at eight in the evening of
+the day I left the Valley,--having performed fifty miles of the hardest
+mountain-trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve
+hours, making allowance for our halt and noon-feed at Clark's. If ever a
+California horse was tried, it was mine on that occasion; and he came
+into Mariposa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled or jaded
+in the least.
+
+Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory had carried him home to
+his old stable,--also the remaining events in Vance's brief, but
+brilliant career. That ornament of the Utah and Yo-Semite expeditions
+had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse,--lost our eighty golden dollars
+at a single session of bluff,--departed gayly for Coulterville, where he
+sold Clark's horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and
+bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire
+purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving
+title,)--and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his
+pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of
+California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the
+days of Gil Blas!
+
+Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own animals to waste time
+in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our
+commissariat needed,--nooned at Clark's, on my way back, the third day
+after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my
+rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon
+they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three
+days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen
+people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover-bread; but, after
+such an experience as our party's, I venture to say they would have
+regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the
+Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell
+within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same
+enthusiasm shared our artists, _savans_, and gentlemen, embracing the
+shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized
+that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, "A
+slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation"?
+
+Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a
+position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful
+grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced
+margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream,
+and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice
+opposite. This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian,
+"Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited
+with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early
+period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without
+break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the
+headlong flood from cataract to rapids for about four hundred feet; but
+the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen
+hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be
+imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst
+of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from
+the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the
+grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.
+
+While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit "Po-ho-nó," or "The
+Bridal Veil," which was passed on the southern side in our way to the
+second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was a good,
+so is Po-ho-nó an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is
+scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been
+carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water
+forever rushing down a _cañon_ through which the stream breaks from its
+feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers
+his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-nó; while the
+very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of
+the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap
+of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet
+perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the
+Valley-cataracts to the Yo-Semite itself, and having a width of fifty
+feet. Its name of "The Bridal Veil" is one of the few successes in
+fantastic nomenclature; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy
+sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free
+of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth
+at her granite wedding,--no commemorator of any fifty-years' bagatelle
+like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her
+nuptials.
+
+On either side of Po-ho-nó the sky-line of the precipice is
+magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown
+of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly
+bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is
+Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three
+hundred feet. A little farther are "Eleachas," or "The Three Brothers,"
+flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior
+bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of
+thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.
+
+One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the shore of Lake
+Ah-wi-yah,--a crystal pond of several acres in extent, fed by the north
+fork of the Valley-stream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow
+strait between the North and South Domes. By this tranquil water we
+pitched our third camp, and when the rising sun began to shine through
+the mighty cleft before us, the play of color and _chiaroscuro_ on its
+rugged walls was something for which an artist apt to oversleep himself
+might well have sat up all the night. No such precaution was needed by
+ourselves. Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out by
+dawn; for the studies were grander, the grouse and quail plentier, and
+the butterflies more gorgeous than we found in any other portion of the
+Valley. After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the river more
+enchanting at every step. I was obliged to penetrate in this direction
+entirely on foot,--clambering between squared blocks of granite
+dislodged from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of which might
+have been excavated into a commodious church, and discovering, for the
+pains cost by a reconnoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest
+shady stretches of singing water and some of the finest minor waterfalls
+in our American scenery.
+
+Our last camp was pitched among the crags and forests behind the South
+Dome,--where the Middle Fork descends through two successive waterfalls,
+which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass Cho-looke, while the
+loftiest is nearly as high as Po-ho-nó. About three miles west of the
+Domes, the south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep _cañon_
+leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through this _cañon_ comes the
+Middle Fork, and along its banks lies our course to the great
+"Pi-wi-ack" (senselessly Englished as "Vernal") and the Nevada Falls.
+For three miles from our camp opposite the Yo-Semite Fall the _cañon_ is
+threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we
+dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our
+own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than
+the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to
+squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent
+danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles; in others we became
+quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main
+precipice had made but slight compromise. But for our light marching
+order,--our only dress being knee-boots, hunting-shirt, and
+trowsers,--it would have been next to impossible to reach our goal at
+all.
+
+But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the
+end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is
+brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our
+slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down
+which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge;
+an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across the mighty caldron
+at the base of the fall; and straight before us in one unbroken leap
+came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite shelf nearly four hundred feet in
+height and sixty feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterprising
+speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five
+cents' toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders
+against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it
+still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so
+close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its
+rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to
+the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect
+breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the
+_cañon_ to the very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves need not
+have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat
+rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we
+had just climbed.
+
+Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite
+cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about
+forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a
+crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest
+_manzanita_ may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here
+and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues
+upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one
+side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other,--creating thus
+the very typical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining barrenness
+of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome
+which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any
+metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the
+Alleghany chain.
+
+Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream's
+immediate margin,--getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork
+of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls
+which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,--we came at
+last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.
+
+This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most
+beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the
+surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great
+height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its
+exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest
+portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt
+by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants
+sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the
+fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over
+this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a
+half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.
+
+At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a _cul-de-sac_ of Nature's
+grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us
+in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite _barathrum_,
+whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the
+crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous
+series of Yo-Semite _effects_; eight hundred feet above us, could we
+climb there, we should find the silent causes of power. There lie the
+broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow-peaks;
+thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the
+eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us
+as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came.
+Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the
+battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun,
+towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting
+snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cutting the sky
+at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,--of
+holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way
+have we toiled since then,--and we know better now. Have we endured all
+these pains only to learn still deeper Life's saddest lesson,--"Climb
+forever, and there is still an Inaccessible"?
+
+Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature's topmost
+treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye answers us ere we turn back from the
+Yo-Semite's last precipice toward the haunts of men:--
+
+"Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down to you!"
+
+
+
+
+HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
+
+BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.
+
+
+VI.
+
+"My dear Chris," said my wife, "isn't it time to be writing the next
+'House and Home Paper'?"
+
+I was lying back in my study-chair, with my heels luxuriously propped on
+an ottoman, reading for the two-hundredth time Hawthorne's "Mosses from
+an Old Manse," or his "Twice-Told Tales," I forget which,--I only know
+that these books constitute my cloud-land, where I love to sail away in
+dreamy quietude, forgetting the war, the price of coal and flour, the
+rates of exchange, and the rise and fall of gold. What do all these
+things matter, as seen from those enchanted gardens in Padua where the
+weird Rappaccini tends his enchanted plants, and his gorgeous daughter
+fills us with the light and magic of her presence, and saddens us with
+the shadowy allegoric mystery of her preternatural destiny? But my wife
+represents the positive forces of time, place, and number in our family,
+and, having also a chronological head, she knows the day of the month,
+and therefore gently reminded me that by inevitable dates the time drew
+near for preparing my--which is it now, May or June number?
+
+"Well, my dear, you are right," I said, as by an exertion I came
+head-uppermost, and laid down the fascinating volume. "Let me see, what
+was I to write about?"
+
+"Why, you remember you were to answer that letter from the lady who does
+her own work."
+
+"Enough!" said I, seizing the pen with alacrity; "you have hit the exact
+phrase:--
+
+"'The _lady_ who _does her own work_.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+America is the only country where such a title is possible,--the only
+country where there is a class of women who may be described as _ladies_
+who do their own work. By a lady we mean a woman of education,
+cultivation, and refinement, of liberal tastes and ideas, who, without
+any very material additions or changes, would be recognized as a lady in
+any circle of the Old World or the New.
+
+What I have said is, that the existence of such a class is a fact
+peculiar to American society, a clear, plain result of the new
+principles involved in the doctrine of universal equality.
+
+When the colonists first came to this country, of however mixed
+ingredients their ranks might have been composed, and however imbued
+with the spirit of feudal and aristocratic ideas, the discipline of the
+wilderness soon brought them to a democratic level; the gentleman felled
+the wood for his log-cabin side by side with the ploughman, and thews
+and sinews rose in the market. "A man was deemed honorable in proportion
+as he lifted his hand upon the high trees of the forest." So in the
+interior domestic circle. Mistress and maid, living in a log-cabin
+together, became companions, and sometimes the maid, as the more
+accomplished and stronger, took precedence of the mistress. It became
+natural and unavoidable that children should begin to work as early as
+they were capable of it. The result was a generation of intelligent
+people brought up to labor from necessity, but turning on the problem of
+labor the acuteness of a disciplined brain. The mistress, outdone in
+sinews and muscles by her maid, kept her superiority by skill and
+contrivance. If she could not lift a pail of water, she could invent
+methods which made lifting the pail unnecessary,--if she could not take
+a hundred steps without weariness, she could make twenty answer the
+purpose of a hundred.
+
+Slavery, it is true, was to some extent introduced into New England, but
+it never suited the genius of the people, never struck deep root, or
+spread so as to choke the good seed of self-helpfulness. Many were
+opposed to it from conscientious principle,--many from far-sighted
+thrift, and from a love of thoroughness and well-doing which despised
+the rude, unskilled work of barbarians. People, having once felt the
+thorough neatness and beauty of execution which came of free, educated,
+and thoughtful labor, could not tolerate the clumsiness of slavery. Thus
+it came to pass that for many years the rural population of New England,
+as a general rule, did their own work, both out doors and in. If there
+were a black man or black woman or bound girl, they were emphatically
+only the _helps_, following humbly the steps of master and mistress, and
+used by them as instruments of lightening certain portions of their
+toil. The master and mistress with their children were the head workers.
+
+Great merriment has been excited in the Old Country, because years ago
+the first English travellers found that the class of persons by them
+denominated servants were in America denominated _help_ or helpers. But
+the term was the very best exponent of the state of society. There were
+few servants, in the European sense of the word; there was a society of
+educated workers, where all were practically equal, and where, if there
+was a deficiency in one family and an excess in another, a _helper_, not
+a servant, was hired. Mrs. Browne, who has six sons and no daughters,
+enters into agreement with Mrs. Jones, who has six daughters and no
+sons. She borrows a daughter, and pays her good wages to help in her
+domestic toil, and sends a son to help the labors of Mr. Jones. These
+two young people go into the families in which they are to be employed
+in all respects as equals and companions, and so the work of the
+community is equalized. Hence arose, and for many years continued, a
+state of society more nearly solving than any other ever did the problem
+of combining the highest culture of the mind with the highest culture of
+the muscles and the physical faculties.
+
+Then were to be seen families of daughters, handsome, strong females,
+rising each day to their in-door work with cheerful alertness,--one to
+sweep the room, another to make the fire, while a third prepared the
+breakfast for the father and brothers who were going out to manly labor;
+and they chatted meanwhile of books, studies, embroidery, discussed the
+last new poem, or some historical topic started by graver reading, or
+perhaps a rural ball that was to come off the next week. They spun with
+the book tied to the distaff; they wove; they did all manner of fine
+needle-work; they made lace, painted flowers, and, in short, in the
+boundless consciousness of activity, invention, and perfect health, set
+themselves to any work they had ever read or thought of. A bride in
+those days was married with sheets and table-cloths of her own weaving,
+with counterpanes and toilet-covers wrought in divers embroidery by her
+own and her sisters' hands. The amount of fancy-work done in our days by
+girls who have nothing else to do will not equal what was done by these,
+who performed besides, among them, the whole work of the family.
+
+For many years these habits of life characterized the majority of our
+rural towns. They still exist among a class respectable in numbers and
+position, though perhaps not as happy in perfect self-satisfaction and a
+conviction of the dignity and desirableness of its lot as in former
+days. Human nature is above all things--lazy. Every one confesses in the
+abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind
+is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they
+can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than
+circumstances drive him to do. Even I would not write this article, were
+not the publication-day hard on my heels. I should read Hawthorne and
+Emerson and Holmes, and dream in my arm-chair, and project in the clouds
+those lovely unwritten stories that curl and veer and change like
+mist-wreaths in the sun. So, also, however dignified, however
+invigorating, however really desirable are habits of life involving
+daily physical toil, there is a constant evil demon at every one's
+elbow, seducing him to evade it, or to bear its weight with sullen,
+discontented murmurs.
+
+I will venture to say that there are at least, to speak very moderately,
+a hundred houses where these humble lines will be read and discussed,
+where there are no servants except the ladies of the household. I will
+venture to say, also, that these households, many of them, are not
+inferior in the air of cultivation and refined elegance to many which
+are conducted by the ministration of domestics. I will venture to
+assert, furthermore, that these same ladies who live thus find quite as
+much time for reading, letter-writing, drawing, embroidery, and
+fancy-work, as the women of families otherwise arranged. I am quite
+certain that they would be found on an average to be in the enjoyment of
+better health, and more of that sense of capability and vitality which
+gives one confidence in one's ability to look into life and meet it with
+cheerful courage, than three-quarters of the women who keep
+servants,--and that on the whole their domestic establishment is
+regulated more exactly to their mind, their food prepared and served
+more to their taste. And yet, with all this, I will _not_ venture to
+assert that they are satisfied with this way of living, and that they
+would not change it forthwith, if they could. They have a secret feeling
+all the while that they are being abused, that they are working harder
+than they ought to, and that women who live in their houses like
+boarders, who have only to speak and it is done, are the truly enviable
+ones. One after another of their associates, as opportunity offers and
+means increase, desert the ranks, and commit their domestic affairs to
+the hands of hired servants. Self-respect takes the alarm. Is it
+altogether genteel to live as we do? To be sure, we are accustomed to
+it; we have it all systematized and arranged; the work of our own hands
+suits us better than any we can hire; in fact, when we do hire, we are
+discontented and uncomfortable,--for who will do for us what we will do
+for ourselves? But when we have company! there's the rub, to get out all
+our best things and put them back,--to cook the meals and wash the
+dishes ingloriously,--and to make all appear as if we didn't do it, and
+had servants like other people.
+
+There, after all, is the rub. A want of hardy self-belief and
+self-respect,--an unwillingness to face with dignity the actual facts
+and necessities of our situation in life,--this, after all, is the worst
+and most dangerous feature of the case. It is the same sort of pride
+which makes Smilax think he must hire a waiter in white gloves, and get
+up a circuitous dinner-party on English principles, to entertain a
+friend from England. Because the friend in England lives in such and
+such a style, he must make believe for a day that he lives so too, when
+in fact it is a whirlwind in his domestic establishment equal to a
+removal or a fire, and threatens the total extinction of Mrs. Smilax.
+Now there are two principles of hospitality that people are very apt to
+overlook. One is, that their guests like to be made at home, and treated
+with confidence; and another is, that people are always interested in
+the details of a way of life that is new to them. The Englishman comes
+to America as weary of his old, easy, family-coach life as you can be of
+yours; he wants to see something new under the sun,--something American;
+and forthwith we all bestir ourselves to give him something as near as
+we can fancy exactly like what he is already tired of. So city-people
+come to the country, not to sit in the best parlor, and to see the
+nearest imitation of city-life, but to lie on the hay-mow, to swing in
+the barn, to form intimacy with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to
+eat baked potatoes exactly on the critical moment when they are done,
+from the oven of the cooking-stove,--and we remark, _en passant_, that
+nobody has ever truly eaten a baked potato, unless he has seized it at
+that precise and fortunate moment.
+
+I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three happy
+women together. You are all so well that you know not how it feels to be
+sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in bed, if you
+could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest,
+neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so
+that really for the greater part of the time in your house there seems
+to a looker-on to be nothing to do. You rise in the morning and despatch
+your husband, father, and brothers to the farm or wood-lot; you go
+sociably about chatting with each other, while you skim the milk, make
+the butter, turn the cheeses. The forenoon is long; it's ten to one that
+all the so-called morning work is over, and you have leisure for an
+hour's sewing or reading before it is time to start the
+dinner-preparations. By two o'clock your house-work is done, and you
+have the long afternoon for books, needle-work, or drawing,--for perhaps
+there is among you one with a gift at her pencil. Perhaps one of you
+reads aloud while the others sew, and you manage in that way to keep up
+with a great deal of reading. I see on your book-shelves Prescott,
+Macaulay, Irving, besides the lighter fry of poems and novels, and, if I
+mistake not, the friendly covers of the "Atlantic." When you have
+company, you invite Mrs. Smith or Brown or Jones to tea; you have no
+trouble; they come early, with their knitting or sewing; your particular
+crony sits with you by your polished stove while you watch the baking of
+those light biscuits and tea-rusks for which you are so famous, and Mrs.
+Somebody-else chats with your sister, who is spreading the table with
+your best china in the best room. When tea is over, there is plenty of
+volunteering to help you wash your pretty India teacups, and get them
+back into the cupboard. There is no special fatigue or exertion in all
+this, though you have taken down the best things and put them back,
+because you have done all without anxiety or effort, among those who
+would do precisely the same, if you were their visitors.
+
+But now comes down pretty Mrs. Simmons and her pretty daughter to spend
+a week with you, and forthwith you are troubled. Your youngest, Fanny,
+visited them in New York last fall, and tells you of their cook and
+chambermaid, and the servant in white gloves that waits on table. You
+say in your soul, "What shall we do? they never can be contented to live
+as we do; how shall we manage?" And now you long for servants.
+
+This is the very time that you should know that Mrs. Simmons is tired to
+death of her fine establishment, and weighed down with the task of
+keeping the peace among her servants. She is a quiet soul, dearly loving
+her ease, and hating strife; and yet last week she had five quarrels to
+settle between her invaluable cook and the other members of her staff,
+because invaluable cook, on the strength of knowing how to get up
+state-dinners and to manage all sorts of mysteries which her mistress
+knows nothing about, asserts the usual right of spoiled favorites to
+insult all her neighbors with impunity, and rule with a rod of iron over
+the whole house. Anything that is not in the least like her own home and
+ways of living will be a blessed relief and change to Mrs. Simmons. Your
+clean, quiet house, your delicate cookery, your cheerful morning tasks,
+if you will let her follow you about, and sit and talk with you while
+you are at your work, will all seem a pleasant contrast to her own life.
+Of course, if it came to the case of offering to change lots in life,
+she would not do it; but very likely she _thinks_ she would, and sighs
+over and pities herself, and thinks sentimentally how fortunate you are,
+how snugly and securely you live, and wishes she were as untrammelled
+and independent as you. And she is more than half right; for, with her
+helpless habits, her utter ignorance of the simplest facts concerning
+the reciprocal relations of milk, eggs, butter, saleratus, soda, and
+yeast, she is completely the victim and slave of the person she pretends
+to rule.
+
+Only imagine some of the frequent scenes and rehearsals in her family.
+After many trials, she at last engages a seamstress who promises to
+prove a perfect treasure,--neat, dapper, nimble, skilful, and spirited.
+The very soul of Mrs. Simmons rejoices in heaven. Illusive bliss! The
+new-comer proves to be no favorite with Madam Cook, and the domestic
+fates evolve the catastrophe, as follows. First, low murmur of distant
+thunder in the kitchen; then a day or two of sulky silence, in which the
+atmosphere seems heavy with an approaching storm. At last comes the
+climax. The parlor-door flies open during breakfast. Enter seamstress,
+in tears, followed by Mrs. Cook with a face swollen and red with wrath,
+who tersely introduces the subject-matter of the drama in a voice
+trembling with rage.
+
+"Would you be plased, Ma'am, to suit yersilf with another cook? Me week
+will be up next Tuesday, and I want to be going."
+
+"Why, Bridget, what's the matter?"
+
+"Matter enough, Ma'am! I niver could live with them Cork girls in a
+house, nor I won't; them as likes the Cork girls is welcome for all me;
+but it's not for the likes of me to live with them, and she been in the
+kitchen a-upsettin' of me gravies with her flat-irons and things."
+
+Here bursts in the seamstress with a whirlwind of denial, and the
+altercation wages fast and furious, and poor, little, delicate Mrs.
+Simmons stands like a kitten in a thunder-storm in the midst of a
+regular Irish row.
+
+Cook, of course, is sure of her victory. She knows that a great dinner
+is to come off Wednesday, and that her mistress has not the smallest
+idea how to manage it, and that, therefore, whatever happens, she must
+be conciliated.
+
+Swelling with secret indignation at the tyrant, poor Mrs. Simmons
+dismisses her seamstress with longing looks. She suited her mistress
+exactly, but she didn't suit cook!
+
+Now, if Mrs. Simmons had been brought up in early life with the
+experience that _you_ have, she would be mistress in her own house. She
+would quietly say to Madam Cook, "If my family-arrangements do not suit
+you, you can leave. I can see to the dinner myself." And she _could_ do
+it. Her well-trained muscles would not break down under a little extra
+work; her skill, adroitness, and perfect familiarity with everything
+that is to be done would enable her at once to make cooks of any bright
+girls of good capacity who might still be in her establishment; and,
+above all, she would feel herself mistress in her own house. This is
+what would come of an experience in doing her own work as you do. She
+who can at once put her own trained hand to the machine in any spot
+where a hand is needed never comes to be the slave of a coarse, vulgar
+Irish-woman.
+
+So, also, in forming a judgment of what is to be expected of servants in
+a given time, and what ought to be expected of a given amount of
+provisions, poor Mrs. Simmons is absolutely at sea. If even for one six
+months in her life she had been a practical cook, and had really had the
+charge of the larder, she would not now be haunted, as she constantly
+is, by an indefinite apprehension of an immense wastefulness, perhaps of
+the disappearance of provisions through secret channels of relationship
+and favoritism. She certainly could not be made to believe in the
+absolute necessity of so many pounds of sugar, quarts of milk, and
+dozens of eggs, not to mention spices and wine, as are daily required
+for the accomplishment of Madam Cook's purposes. But though now she does
+suspect and apprehend, she cannot speak with certainty. She cannot say,
+"_I_ have made these things. I know exactly what they require. I have
+done this and that myself, and know it can be done, and done well, in a
+certain time." It is said that women who have been accustomed to doing
+their own work become hard mistresses. They are certainly more sure of
+the ground they stand on,--they are less open to imposition,--they can
+speak and act in their own houses more as those "having authority," and
+therefore are less afraid to exact what is justly their due, and less
+willing to endure impertinence and unfaithfulness. Their general error
+lies in expecting that any servant ever will do as well for them as they
+will do for themselves, and that an untrained, undisciplined human being
+ever _can_ do house-work, or any other work, with the neatness and
+perfection that a person of trained intelligence can. It has been
+remarked in our armies that the men of cultivation, though bred in
+delicate and refined spheres, can bear up under the hardships of
+camp-life better and longer than rough laborers. The reason is, that an
+educated mind knows how to use and save its body, to work it and spare
+it, as an uneducated mind cannot; and so the college-bred youth brings
+himself safely through fatigues which kill the unreflective laborer.
+Cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of
+their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head
+save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and
+arrangement, they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less
+expense of time and strength than others. The old New-England motto,
+_Get your work done up in the forenoon_, applied to an amount of work
+which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to sunset.
+
+A lady living in one of our obscure New-England towns, where there were
+no servants to be hired, at last by sending to a distant city succeeded
+in procuring a raw Irish maid-of-all-work, a creature of immense bone
+and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one fortnight she
+established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the kitchen and
+through the house, that her mistress, a delicate woman, incumbered with
+the care of young children, began seriously to think that she made more
+work each day than she performed, and dismissed her. What was now to be
+done? Fortunately, the daughter of a neighboring farmer was going to be
+married in six months, and wanted a little ready money for her
+_trousseau_. The lady was informed that Miss So-and-so would come to
+her, not as a servant, but as hired "help." She was fain to accept any
+help with gladness. Forthwith came into the family-circle a tall,
+well-dressed young person, grave, unobtrusive, self-respecting, yet not
+in the least presuming, who sat at the family-table and observed all its
+decorums with the modest self-possession of a lady. The new-comer took a
+survey of the labors of a family of ten members, including four or five
+young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system,
+matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking,
+cleaning, rose early, moved deftly, and in a single day the slatternly
+and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often
+strikes one in New-England farm-houses. The work seemed to be all gone.
+Everything was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and stayed in
+place; the floors, when cleaned, remained clean; the work was always
+done, and not doing; and every afternoon the young lady sat neatly
+dressed in her own apartment, either quietly writing letters to her
+betrothed, or sewing on her bridal outfit. Such is the result of
+employing those who have been brought up to do their own work. That
+tall, fine-looking girl, for aught we know, may yet be mistress of a
+fine house on Fifth Avenue; and if she is, she will, we fear, prove
+rather an exacting mistress to Irish Biddy and Bridget; but _she_ will
+never be threatened by her cook and chambermaid, after the first one or
+two have tried the experiment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having written thus far on my article, I laid it aside till evening,
+when, as usual, I was saluted by the inquiry, "Has papa been writing
+anything to-day?" and then followed loud petitions to hear it; and so I
+read as far, reader, as you have.
+
+"Well, papa," said Jennie, "what are you meaning to make out there? Do
+you really think it would be best for us all to try to go back to that
+old style of living you describe? After all, you have shown only the
+dark side of an establishment with servants, and the bright side of the
+other way of living. Mamma does not have such trouble with her servants;
+matters have always gone smoothly in our family; and if we are not such
+wonderful girls as those you describe, yet we may make pretty good
+housekeepers on the modern system, after all."
+
+"You don't know all the troubles your mamma has had in your day," said
+my wife. "I have often, in the course of my family-history, seen the day
+when I have heartily wished for the strength and ability to manage my
+household matters as my grandmother of notable memory managed hers. But
+I fear that those remarkable women of the olden times are like the
+ancient painted glass,--the art of making them is lost; my mother was
+less than her mother, and I am less than my mother."
+
+"And Marianne and I come out entirely at the little end of the horn,"
+said Jennie, laughing; "yet I wash the breakfast-cups and dust the
+parlors, and have always fancied myself a notable housekeeper."
+
+"It is just as I told you," I said. "Human nature is always the same.
+Nobody ever is or does more than circumstances force him to be and do.
+Those remarkable women of old were made by circumstances. There were,
+comparatively speaking, no servants to be had, and so children were
+trained to habits of industry and mechanical adroitness from the cradle,
+and every household process was reduced to the very minimum of labor.
+Every step required in a process was counted, every movement calculated;
+and she who took ten steps, when one would do, lost her reputation for
+'faculty.' Certainly such an early drill was of use in developing the
+health and the bodily powers, as well as in giving precision to the
+practical mental faculties. All household economies were arranged with
+equal niceness in those thoughtful minds. A trained housekeeper knew
+just how many sticks of hickory of a certain size were required to heat
+her oven, and how many of each different kind of wood. She knew by a
+sort of intuition just what kinds of food would yield the most palatable
+nutriment with the least outlay of accessories in cooking. She knew to a
+minute the time when each article must go into and be withdrawn from her
+oven; and if she could only lie in her chamber and direct, she could
+guide an intelligent child through the processes with mathematical
+certainty. It is impossible, however, that anything but early training
+and long experience can produce these results, and it is earnestly to be
+wished that the grandmothers of New England had only written down their
+experiences for our children; they would have been a mine of maxims and
+traditions, better than any other traditions of the elders which we know
+of."
+
+"One thing I know," said Marianne,--"and that is, I wish I had been
+brought up so, and knew all that I should, and had all the strength and
+adroitness that those women had. I should not dread to begin
+housekeeping, as I now do. I should feel myself independent. I should
+feel that I knew how to direct my servants, and what it was reasonable
+and proper to expect of them; and then, as you say, I shouldn't be
+dependent on all their whims and caprices of temper. I dread those
+household storms, of all things."
+
+Silently pondering these anxieties of the young expectant housekeeper, I
+resumed my pen, and concluded my paper as follows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
+superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to
+a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of
+liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They
+are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder
+is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic
+blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the
+measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements.
+But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
+interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
+interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
+whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
+the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
+strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
+knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to keep
+her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of looking at
+all these things which makes them particularly hard and distasteful to
+her. She does not escape being obliged to do house-work at intervals,
+but she does it in a weak, blundering, confused way, that makes it twice
+as hard and disagreeable as it need be.
+
+Now what I have to say is, that, if every young woman learned to do
+house-work and cultivated her practical faculties in early life, she
+would, in the first place, be much more likely to keep her servants,
+and, in the second place, if she lost them temporarily, would avoid all
+that wear and tear of the nervous system which comes from constant
+ill-success in those departments on which family health and temper
+mainly depend. This is one of the peculiarities of our American life
+which require a peculiar training. Why not face it sensibly?
+
+The second thing I have to say is, that our land is now full of
+motorpathic institutions to which women are sent at great expense to
+have hired operators stretch and exercise their inactive muscles. They
+lie for hours to have their feet twigged, their arms flexed, and all the
+different muscles of the body worked for them, because they are so
+flaccid and torpid that the powers of life do not go on. Would it not be
+quite as cheerful and less expensive a process, if young girls from
+early life developed the muscles in sweeping, dusting, ironing, rubbing
+furniture, and all the multiplied domestic processes which our
+grandmothers knew of? A woman who did all these, and diversified the
+intervals with spinning on the great and little wheel, never came to
+need the gymnastics of Dio Lewis or of the Swedish motorpathist, which
+really are a necessity now. Does it not seem poor economy to pay
+servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then to pay operators
+to exercise them for us? I will venture to say that our grandmothers in
+a week went over every movement that any gymnast has invented, and went
+over them to some productive purpose too.
+
+Lastly, my paper will not have been in vain, if those ladies who have
+learned and practise the invaluable accomplishment of doing their own
+work will know their own happiness and dignity, and properly value their
+great acquisition, even though it may have been forced upon them by
+circumstances.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKSPEARE.
+
+APRIL 23, 1864.
+
+
+    "Who claims our Shakspeare from that realm unknown,
+      Beyond the storm-vexed islands of the deep,
+    Where Genoa's deckless caravels were blown?
+      Her twofold Saint's-day let our England keep;
+    Shall warring aliens share her holy task?"
+          The Old-World echoes ask.
+
+    O land of Shakspeare! ours with all thy past,
+      Till these last years that make the sea so wide,
+    Think not the jar of battle's trumpet-blast
+      Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride
+    In every noble word thy sons bequeathed
+          The air our fathers breathed!
+
+    War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife,
+      We turn to other days and far-off lands,
+    Live o'er in dreams the Poet's faded life,
+      Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands
+    To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,--
+          Not his the need, but ours!
+
+    We call those poets who are first to mark
+      Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,--
+    Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark,
+      While others only note that day is gone;
+    For him the Lord of light the curtain rent
+          That veils the firmament.
+
+    The greatest for its greatness is half known,
+      Stretching beyond our narrow quadrant-lines,--
+    As in that world of Nature all outgrown
+      Where Calaveras lifts his awful pines,
+    And cast from Mariposa's mountain-wall
+          Nevada's cataracts fall.
+
+    Yet heaven's remotest orb is partly ours,
+      Throbbing its radiance like a beating heart;
+    In the wide compass of angelic powers
+      The instinct of the blindworm has its part;
+    So in God's kingliest creature we behold
+          The flower our buds infold.
+
+    With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name
+      Stamped once on dust that moved with pulse and breath,
+    As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame
+      Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death:
+    We praise not star or sun; in these we see
+          Thee, Father, only Thee!
+
+    Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love:
+      We read, we reverence on this human soul,--
+    Earth's clearest mirror of the light above,--
+      Plain as the record on Thy prophet's scroll,
+    When o'er his page the effluent splendors poured,
+          Thine own, "Thus saith the Lord!"
+
+    This player was a prophet from on high,
+      Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage,
+    For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by,--
+      Sidney's fair youth, and Raleigh's ripened age,
+    Spenser's chaste soul, and his imperial mind
+          Who taught and shamed mankind.
+
+    Therefore we bid our hearts' _Te Deum_ rise,
+      Nor fear to make Thy worship less divine,
+    And hear the shouted choral shake the skies,
+      Counting all glory, power, and wisdom Thine,--
+    For Thy great gift Thy greater name adore,
+         And praise Thee evermore!
+
+    In this dread hour of Nature's utmost need,
+      Thanks for these unstained drops of freshening dew!
+    Oh, while our martyrs fall, our heroes bleed,
+      Keep us to every sweet remembrance true,
+    Till from this blood-red sunset springs new-born
+          Our Nation's second morn!
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO USE VICTORY.
+
+
+The policy of the nation, since the war began, has been eminently the
+Anglo-Saxon policy. That is to say, we have not adapted our actions to
+any preconceived theory, nor to any central idea. From the President
+downward, every one has done as well as he could in every single day,
+doubtful, and perhaps indifferent, as to what he should do the next day.
+This is the method dear to the Anglo-Saxon mind. The English writers
+acknowledge this; they call it the "practical system," and make an
+especial boast that it is the method of their theology, their
+philosophy, their physical science, their manufactures, and their trade.
+In the language of philosophy, it directs us "to do the duty that comes
+next us"; in a figure drawn from the card-table, it bids us "follow our
+hand." The only branch of the Keltic race which adopts it expresses it
+in the warlike direction, "When you see a head, hit it."
+
+We have no objection to make to this so-called practical system in the
+present case, if it only be broadly and generously adopted. If it reduce
+us to a war of posts, to hand-to-mouth finance, and to that wretched
+bureau-administration which thinks the day's work is done when the day's
+letters have been opened, docketed, and answered, it becomes, it is
+true, a very unpractical system, and soon reduces a great state to be a
+very little one. But if the men who direct any country will, in good
+faith, enlarge their view every day, from their impressions of yesterday
+to the new realities of to-day,--if they will rise at once to the new
+demands of to-day, and meet those demands under the new light of
+to-day,--all the better is it, undoubtedly, if they are not hampered by
+traditionary theories, if they are even indifferent as to the
+consistency of their record, and are, thus, as able as they are willing
+to work out God's present will with all their power. For it must be that
+the present light of noonday will guide us better at noonday than any
+prophecies which we could make at midnight or at dawn.
+
+The country, at this moment, demands this broad and generous use of its
+great present advantages. In three years of sacrifice we have won
+extraordinary victories. We have driven back the beach-line of rebellion
+so that its territory is now two islands, both together of not half the
+size of the continent which it boasted when it began. We have seen such
+demonstrations of loyalty and the love of liberty that we dare say that
+this is to be one free nation, as we never dared say it before the war
+began. We are on the edge, as we firmly believe, of yet greater
+victories, both in the field and in the conscience of the nation. The
+especial demand, then, made on our statesmen, and on that intelligent
+people which, as it appears, leads the statesmen, instead of being led
+by them, is, "How shall we use our victories?" We have no longer the
+right to say that the difficult questions will settle themselves. We
+must not say that Providence will take care of them. We must not say
+that we are trying experiments. The time for all this has gone by. We
+have won victories. We are going to win more. We must show we know how
+to use them.
+
+As our armies advance, for instance, very considerable regions of
+territory come, for the time, under the military government of the
+United States. If we painted a map of the country, giving to the Loyal
+States each its individual chosen color, and to the Rebel States their
+favorite Red or Black, we should find that the latter were surrounded by
+a strip of that circumambient and eternal Blue which indicates the love
+and the strength of the National Government. The strip is here broad,
+and there narrow. It is broad in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It
+stretches up in a narrow line along the Sea Islands and the Atlantic
+coast. What do we mean to do with this strip, while it is in the special
+charge of the nation? Do we mean to leave it to the chapter of
+accidents, as we have done? A few charitable organizations have kept the
+Sea Islands along, so that they are a range of flourishing plantations,
+as they used to be. A masterly inactivity, on the other hand, leaves the
+northern counties of Virginia, this summer, within the very sight of the
+Capitol, to be the desert and disgrace which they were when they were
+the scenes of actual war. A handful of banditti rides through them when
+it chooses, and even insults the communications of our largest army. The
+people of that State are permitted to point at this desolation, and to
+say that such are the consequences of Federal victories. For another
+instance, take the "Four-Million question." These four million negroes,
+from whose position the war has sprung, are now almost all set free, in
+law. A very large number of them--possibly a quarter part of them--are
+free in fact. One hundred and thirty thousand of them are in the
+national army. With regard to these men the question is not, "What are
+you going to do with them when the war is done?" but, "What will you do
+with them to-day and to-morrow?" Your duty is to use victory in the
+moment of victory. You are not to wait for its last ramification before
+you lead in peace and plenty, which ought to follow close in its first
+footsteps.
+
+To an observing and sensitive nation it seems as if all these questions,
+and many others like them, were not yet fully regarded. Yet they are now
+the questions of the hour, because they are a part of the great central
+question, "How will you break down the armed power of the Rebel States?"
+To maintain the conquered belt between us and our "wayward sisters" as a
+land of plenty, and not as a desert,--to establish on system the blacks
+whose masters desert them, or who take refuge within our lines,--and
+also to maintain in that border-strip a resident peasantry, armed and
+loyal,--these are not matters of sentiment, which may be postponed to a
+more convenient season, but they are essential to the stiff, steady, and
+successful prosecution of our campaigns. It is not, therefore, simply
+for charity Boards of Education to discuss such subjects. It is for the
+Government to determine its policy, and for the people, who make that
+Government, to compel it so to determine. The Government may not shake
+off questions of confiscated lands, pay of negro troops, superintendence
+of fugitives, and the like, as if they were the unimportant details of a
+halcyon future. Because this is the moment of impending victory, because
+that victory should be used on the instant, the Government is bound to
+attend to such provisions now. It is said, that, when General McClellan
+landed below Yorktown, now two years ago, the Washington Post-Office had
+made the complete arrangements for resuming the mail-service to
+Richmond. Undoubtedly the Post-Office Department was right in such
+foresight. At the present moment, it is equally right for the Government
+to be prepared for the immediate use of the victories for which, as we
+write, we are all hoping.
+
+The experiments which we have had to try, in the care and treatment of
+liberated blacks, have been tried under very different conditions. When
+the masters on the Sea Islands escaped from their slaves, leaving but
+one white man behind them, in the midst of fifteen thousand negroes,
+those negroes were, in general, in their old familiar homes. They had,
+indeed, trusted themselves to the tender mercies of the "Yankees"
+because they would not abandon home. The islands on which they lived
+were easily protected, and, thanks to the generous foresight of those
+who early had the charge of them, a body of humane and intelligent
+superintendents soon appeared, to watch over all their interests. In the
+District of Columbia, on the other hand, the blacks whom the war first
+liberated had themselves fled from their masters. They found themselves
+in cities where every condition of life was different from their old
+home. It was hardly to be expected that in one of these cases the
+results should be as cheerful or as favorable as in the other. Nor was
+it to be supposed that the policy to be pursued, in two such cases,
+should be in outward form the same.
+
+But the country has, on the whole, in the various different conditions
+of these questions, had the advantage of great administrative ability.
+General Butler, General Banks, and General Saxton are three men who may
+well be satisfied with their military record, if it shall bear the test
+of time as well as their administrative successes in this department bid
+fair to do. We can be reconciled, in a measure, to gross failure and
+want of system in other places, when we observe the successes which have
+been wrought out for the blacks, in different ways, under the policy of
+these three statesmen. For we believe that in that policy the principles
+are to be found by which the Government ought at once to direct all its
+policy in the use of its victories. We believe those principles are most
+adequately stated in General Butler's General Order No. 46, issued at
+Fort Monroe on the fifth of December last. For General Banks has had his
+hands tied, from the beginning, by the unfortunate exemption from the
+Emancipation Proclamation of the first two districts in Louisiana.
+Considering the difficulties by which he was thus entangled, we have
+never seen but he used to the best his opportunities. General Saxton's
+island-district has been so small, and in a measure so peculiar, that it
+may be urged that the result learned there would not be applicable on
+the mainland, on a large scale. But General Butler has had all the
+negroes of the sea-board of Virginia and North Carolina to look after.
+He has given us a census of them,--and we have already official returns
+of their _status_. There seems no reason why what has been done there
+may not be done anywhere.
+
+In General Butler's department, there were, in the beginning of April,
+sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and forty-seven negroes. Of these,
+eight thousand three hundred and forty-four were soldiers, who had
+voluntarily enlisted into the service of the United States. These men
+enlisted with no bounty but what the General so well named as the "great
+boon awarded to each of them, the result of the war,--Freedom for
+himself and his race forever." They enlisted, knowing that at that time
+the Government promised them but ten dollars a month. In view of these
+facts, we consider the proportion of soldiers, nearly one in eight,
+extraordinary,--though we are aware that the number includes many who
+had not lived in those counties, who came into our lines with the
+purpose of enlisting. These simple figures involve the first feature of
+the true policy in the "Four-Million question." The war offers the
+negroes this priceless bounty. Let them fight for it. Let us enlist
+them, to the last man we can persuade to serve.
+
+"If you do that," says Brazen-Face, "you have left on your hands a horde
+of starving imbeciles, women, and orphans, to support, from whom you
+have cruelly separated their able-bodied men." No, Brazen-Face, we have
+no such thing. In the month of March the Government had to supply
+rations in the district we have named to only seven thousand eight
+hundred and fifty persons who were members of the families of these
+soldiers,--the cost being about one dollar a month for each of them. Now
+the State of Massachusetts, dear Brazen-Face, supplies "State-aid" to
+the families of its soldiers; and for this support, in this very city of
+yours, it pays on the average five times as much in proportion as the
+United States has to pay for the families of these colored soldiers.
+Nay, you may even take all the persons relieved by Government in General
+Butler's district,--the number is sixteen thousand seven hundred and
+sixteen,--count them all as the families of soldiers, which not one-half
+of them are, and the whole support which they all receive from
+Government is not half as much as the families of the same number of
+soldiers are costing the State of Massachusetts. So much for the expense
+of this system. There is no money-bounty, and the "family-aid" is but
+one-fifth of that we pay in the case of our own brothers. The figures in
+General Saxton's district are as gratifying. We have not the Louisiana
+statistics at hand. And we have not learned that anybody has attempted
+any statistics in the District of Columbia, or on the Mississippi River.
+But this illustration, in two districts where the enlistment of colored
+troops has been pushed to the very edge of its development, is enough to
+make out another point in the policy of victory, which is, that the
+colored soldier is the cheapest soldier whom we have in our lines,
+though we pay him, as of course we should do, full pay.
+
+How is this cheapness of administration gained? The answer is in the
+second great principle which belongs to the policy of using our
+victories. Change the homes of the people as little as possible. The
+families of negroes in the Virginia district are put upon separate farms
+as far as possible,--on land, and for crops, as nearly as possible, the
+same as they were used to. These people are conservative. They are fond
+of home. They are used to work; and they can take care of themselves.
+Every inducement is given them, therefore, to establish themselves.
+Farms of eight or ten acres each from abandoned property are allotted
+them. Where the Government employs any of them, it employs them only at
+the same rate as the soldier is paid,--so that, if the negro can earn
+more than that, he does so, and is urged, as well as permitted to do
+so. He is not bound to the soil, except by merely temporary agreement.
+What follows is that he uses the gift of freedom to his own best
+advantage. "Political freedom," says the philosophical General, "rightly
+defined, is liberty to work." The negroes in his command show that they
+understand the definition. And this is the reason why, as we have
+explained, the "family-relief" costs but one-fifth what it does here in
+Boston.
+
+"But," says Grunnio, at this point, "how will you protect your ten-acre
+farms from invidious neighbors, from wandering guerrillas?" We will
+advise them, dear grumbler, to protect themselves. That is one of the
+responsibilities which freemen have to take as the price of freedom. In
+the department of Norfolk, where seventeen thousand blacks are
+supporting themselves on scattered farms, we believe not a pig has been
+stolen nor a fence broken down on their little plantations by semi-loyal
+neighbors, who had, perhaps, none too much sympathy, at the first, with
+their prosperity. These amiable neighbors were taught, from the first,
+that the rights of the colored farmers were just the same as their own,
+and that they would be very apt to retaliate in kind for injuries. Of
+such a system one result is that no guerrilla-warfare has yet been known
+in the counties of Virginia where such a peasantry is establishing
+itself. It is near our posts, it is true,--not nearer, however, than
+some of the regions where Mosby has won his laurels. We believe that
+this system deserves to be pressed much farther. We can see that the
+farmers on such farms may have to be supplied in part with arms for
+their defence. They may have to be taught to use them. Without providing
+depots of supplies for an enemy, however, we believe there might be a
+regular system of establishing the negro in his own home, on or near the
+plantation where he was born, which would give us from the beginning the
+advantages of a settled country, instead of a desert in the regions in
+the rear of our lines.
+
+These three suggestions are enough to determine a general policy which
+shall give us, in all instances, the immediate use of our victories. Let
+us enlist all the able-bodied men we can from the negroes. Let us
+establish the rest as near their old homes as we can,--not in
+poor-houses or phalansteries, but on their own farms. Let us appoint for
+each proper district a small staff of officers sufficient to see that
+their rights are respected by their neighbors, and that they have means
+to defend themselves against reckless or unorganized aggression. There
+seems to be no need of sending them as fugitives to our rear. There
+seems to be no need of leaving the country we pass a desert. There seems
+to be no need of waiting a year or two before we find for them their
+places. God has found for them their places. Let them stay where they
+were born. We have made them freemen. Let them understand that they must
+maintain their freedom.
+
+More simply stated, such a policy amounts merely to this: "Treat them as
+you would treat white people."
+
+"What would you do with the blacks?" said a Commission of Inquiry to an
+intelligent jurist who had made some very brilliant decisions at New
+Orleans.
+
+"I would not do anything with them," was his very happy and suggestive
+reply.
+
+He would let them alone. If we could free ourselves of the notion that
+we must huddle them together, or that we must carry them to some strange
+land,--in short, that they have no rights of home and fireside,--we
+should find that we had a much smaller problem to deal with. Keep them
+where you find them, unless they will go on and fight with you. Whether
+they go or stay, let them understand that they are your friends and you
+are theirs, and that they must defend themselves, if they expect you to
+defend them.
+
+The education and the civilization will follow. "The church and the
+school," as John Adams says, "belong with the town and the militia." The
+statistics of General Butler's department begin to show that a larger
+proportion of blacks are at school there than of whites. As we write
+these words, we receive General Banks's Order No. 38, issued March 22,
+providing for a board of education, and a tax upon property to establish
+schools for black and for white children. We have no fears that such
+results will be slow, if the enfranchised peasantry, one million or four
+million, have the right to work on their own land, or to accept the
+highest wage that offers,--if they find they are not arbitrarily removed
+from their old homes,--and if the protection of those homes is, in the
+first instance, intrusted to themselves.
+
+These are the first-fruits of freedom for them. For us they are the
+legitimate use of victory. It only remains that we shall mildly, but
+firmly, instruct all officers of the Government that it is time for some
+policy to be adopted which shall involve such uses of victory. The
+country will be encouraged, the moment it sees that the freedmen are
+finding their proper places in the new civilization. The country expects
+its rulers not to wait for chapters of accidents or for volunteer boards
+to work out such policy, but themselves to provide the system of
+administration, and the intelligent men who shall promptly and skilfully
+avail themselves of every victory.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_History of the Romans under the Empire._ By CHARLES MERIVALE,
+B. D., late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. From the Fourth
+London Edition. With a Copious Analytical Index. New York: D. Appleton &
+Co. 8vo. Vols. I. & II.
+
+People of the last century had a very easy time with their Roman
+history, and any gentleman could pick up enough of it "in course of his
+morning's reading" to answer the demands of a lifetime. Men read and
+believed. They had no more doubt of the existence of Romulus and Remus
+than of the existence of Fairfax and Cromwell. As to the story of those
+dropped children being nursed by a she-wolf, had it not been established
+that wolves did sometimes suckle humanity's young? and why should it be
+supposed that no lupine nursery had ever existed at the foot of the
+Palatine Hill? After swallowing the wolf-story, everything else was
+easy; and the history of the Roman Kings was as gravely received as the
+history of the Roman Emperors. The Brutus who upset the Tarquins was as
+much an historical character as the Brutus who assassinated Cæsar and
+killed himself. Tullia had lived and sinned, just like Messallina. The
+Horatii were of flesh and blood, like the Triumvirs. So was it with
+regard to the Empire. The same short work that was made with Regal Rome
+and the early Republican period was applied to the Imperial age. Julius
+Cæsar was the destroyer of Roman liberty, and Pompeius was the unlucky
+champion of his country's constitution. With few exceptions, the
+Emperors were the greatest moral monsters that ever had lived and
+reigned. It is true that two or three critical writers had so handled
+historical subjects as to create some doubts as to the exact correctness
+of the popular view of Roman history; but those doubts were monopolized
+by a few scholars, and by no means tended to shake the faith which even
+the educated classes had in the vulgar view of the actions of the mighty
+conquering race of antiquity.
+
+But all has been changed. For half a century, learned men have been
+busily employed in pulling down the edifice of Roman history, until they
+have unsettled everybody's faith in that history. No one now pretends,
+seriously, to believe anything that is told of the Romans farther back
+than the time of Pyrrhus. Clouds and darkness rest over the earlier
+centuries, and defy penetration. What Sir Thomas Browne says of Egypt is
+not inapplicable to early Rome. History mumbleth something to the
+inquirer, "but what it is he heareth not." Not even the story of Curtius
+now finds believers. He must have been a contractor, who made an
+enormous fortune at the time of the secession of the plebs, and ruined
+himself by the operation. So far as relates to early Roman history, want
+of faith is very natural; for what documents have we to go upon in
+making up an opinion concerning it? None to speak of. But it is strange,
+at the first thought, that there should be any difficulty in making up a
+judgment concerning the history of the last century or two of the
+Republic, and of the Imperial period. Of those times much that was then
+written still survives, and many of the works that were familiar to the
+Romans are even more familiar to the moderns. Yet there is a wide
+difference of sentiment as to the character of the Roman Revolution, and
+the objects and the actions of the eminent men who figured in that
+Revolution are yet in dispute; and the contention is almost as fierce,
+at times, as it was in the days of Pharsalia and Philippi. There are
+Pompeians and Cæsarians now, as there were nineteen centuries ago, only
+that the pen with them is indeed mightier than the sword. Cæsar's case
+has been reviewed, and the current of opinion is now setting strongly in
+his favor. Instead of being looked upon as a mere vulgar usurper, who
+differed from other usurpers only in having a greater stage, and talents
+proportioned to that stage, he is held up as the man of his times, and
+as the only man who could fulfil the demands of the crisis that existed
+after the death of Sulla. According to Mr. Merivale, who is a very
+moderate Cæsarian, Cæsar was "the true captain and lawgiver and prophet
+of the age" in which he lived. When such an assertion can be made by an
+English gentleman of well-balanced mind, we may form some idea of the
+intensity of that Cæsarism which prevails in fiercer minds, and which is
+intended to have an effect on contemporary rule. For the controversy
+which exists relative to the merits of Romans "dead, and turned to
+clay," is not merely critical and scholastic, but is enlivened by its
+direct bearing upon living men and contending parties. Cæsarism means
+Napoleonism. The Bonaparte family is the Julian family of to-day.
+Napoleon I. stood for the great Julius, and Napoleon III. is the modern
+(and very Gallic) Cæsar Augustus, the avenger of his ill-used uncle, and
+the crusher of the Junii and the Crassi, and all the rest of the
+aristocrats, who overthrew him, and caused his early death. It is not
+necessary to point out the utter absurdity of this attempt to justify
+modern despotism by referring to the action of men who lived and acted
+in the greatest of ancient revolutions; and those men who admire Julius
+Cæsar, but who are not disposed to see in his conduct a justification of
+the conduct of living men, object to the French Imperial view of his
+career. Mommsen, whose admiration of Cæsar is as ardent as his knowledge
+of Roman history is great, speaks with well-deserved scorn of the
+efforts that are made to defend contemporary usurpation by
+misrepresentation of the history of antiquity. One of his remarks is
+curious, read in connection with that history which daily appears in our
+journals. Writing before our civil war began, he declared, that, if ever
+the slaveholding aristocracy of the Southern States of America should
+bring matters to such a pass as their counterparts in the Rome of Sulla,
+Cæsarism would be pronounced legitimate there also by the spirit of
+history,--an observation that derived new interest from the report that
+General Lee was to be made Dictator of the Confederacy, and Mr. Davis
+allowed to go into that retirement which is so much admired and so
+little sought by all politicians. Mommsen, after the remark above
+quoted, proceeds to say, that, whenever Cæsarism "appears under other
+social conditions, it is at once a usurpation and a caricature. History,
+however, will not consent to curtail the honor due to the true Cæsar,
+because her decision, in the presence of false Cæsars, may give occasion
+to simplicity to play the fool and to villany to play the rogue. She,
+too, is a Bible, and if she can as little prevent herself from being
+misunderstood by the fool and quoted by the Devil, she ought as little
+to be prejudiced by either." Strong words, but very natural as coming
+from a learned German who finds his own theory turned to account by the
+supporters of a house which Germany once helped to overthrow, and which
+she would gladly aid in overthrowing again. Perhaps Dr. Mommsen will
+soon have an opportunity to speak more at length of French Cæsarism, for
+the first two volumes of Napoleon III.'s "Life of Julius Cæsar" are
+announced as nearly ready for publication, and their appearance cannot
+fail to be the signal for a battle royal, as few scholars, we presume,
+will be content to take historical law from an Emperor. The modern
+master of forty legions will not be as fortunate as Hadrian in finding
+philosophers disinclined to question his authority in letters; and he
+may fare even worse at their hands than he fared at those of Mr.
+Kinglake. The republic of letters is not to be mastered by a _coup
+d'état_.
+
+The opponents of Cæsarism have not been silent, and it would be neither
+uninteresting nor unprofitable, did time permit, to show how well they
+have disposed of most of the arguments of their foes. The question is
+not the old one, whether the party of Cæsar or that of Pompeius was the
+better one, for at bottom the two were very much the same, the struggle
+being for supremacy over the whole Roman dominion; and it is certain
+that there would have been no essential change of political procedure,
+had the decision at Pharsalia been reversed. On that field Cæsar was the
+nominal champion of the liberal faction, and Pompeius was the nominal
+champion of the _optimates_. Had Cæsar lost the day, the plebeian
+Pompeian house would have furnished an imperial line, instead of that
+line proceeding from the patrician Julii. Pompeius would have been as
+little inclined to abandon the fruits of his victory to the aristocrats
+as Cæsar showed himself to set up the rule of the Forum-populace, to
+whose support he owed so much. It was to free himself from the weight of
+his equals that Pompeius selected the East for the seat of war, when
+there were so many strong military reasons why he should have proceeded
+to the West, to Romanized Spain, where he had veteran legions that might
+under his lead have been found the equals of Cæsar's small, but most
+efficient army. He wished to get out of the Republican atmosphere, and
+into a country where "the one-man power" was the recognized idea of
+rule. He acted as a politician, not as a soldier, when he sailed from
+Brundisium to the East, and the nobility were not blind to the fact, and
+were not long in getting their revenge; for it was through their
+political influence that Pompeius was forced to deliver battle at
+Pharsalia, when there were strong military reasons for refusing to
+fight. That they were involved in their chief's fall was only in
+accordance with the usual course of things, there being nothing to equal
+the besotted blindness of faction, as our current history but too
+clearly proves.
+
+As between Cæsar and Pompeius, therefore, it is natural and just that
+modern liberals should sympathize with the former, and contemplate his
+triumph with pleasure, as he was by far the abler and better man, and
+did not stain his success by bloodshed and plunder, things which the
+Pompeians had promised themselves on a scale that would have astonished
+Marius and Sulla, and which the Triumvirs never thought of equalling.
+But when we are asked to behold as the result of the Roman Revolution
+the deliverance of the provincials, and that as of purpose on the part
+of the victor, we are inclined, in return, to ask of the Cæsarians
+whether they think mankind are such fools as not to be able to read and
+to understand the Imperial history. That Cæsar's success was beneficial
+to Rome's subjects we do not dispute; but that the change he effected
+was of the sweeping character claimed for it, or that Cæsar ever thought
+of being the reformer that his admirers declare him to have been, are
+things yet to be proved. The change that came from the substitution of
+the Imperial polity for the Republican was the result of circumstances,
+and it was of slow growth. Imperialism was an Octavian, not a Julian
+creation, as any reader will be able to understand who goes through the
+closing chapters of Mr. Merivale's third volume. The first Cæsar's
+imperial career was too short, and too full of hard military work, to
+admit of much being done by him of a political character; nor would it
+have been possible for him, had he been a much younger man, and had he
+lived for years, to accomplish what was effected by Augustus. The
+terrible crisis that followed his death, and which lasted until the
+decision of "the world's debate" at Actium gave a master to the Roman
+world, prepared the way for the work that was done by his grand-nephew
+and adopted son. The severe discipline which the Romans went through
+between the day of Munda and that of Actium made them more acquiescent
+in despotism than they would have been found, if Julius Cæsar's mild
+sway had been continued through that interval. It has been said that the
+Triumvirate converted Cæsar's sword into daggers, and the expression is
+by no means too strong, as the world has never witnessed such another
+reign of terror as followed from the union of Octavius, Antonius, and
+Lepidus. If that union was formed for the purpose of reconciling men to
+despotic rule, it must be allowed the merit that belongs to a perfect
+invention. Without it the Roman Empire might never have had an
+existence.
+
+Mr. Merivale's work may be considered as forming the text-book of
+moderate Cæsarism. An Englishman, he cannot be an advocate of despotism;
+but he sees that the time had come for a change, and that under Cæsar's
+direction the change could be better made than under that of Pompeius or
+his party. This is something very different from blind advocacy of
+Cæsarism; and we can follow him through his clear and vigorous narrative
+of the events of the Revolution with general acquiescence in his views.
+His first and second volumes, which are immediately under consideration,
+may be said to form the history of the career of Cæsar, and to present
+the best account of that career which has been published in our
+language. Introductory matter apart, his book opens with the appearance
+of the first Emperor on the political stage, and the second volume
+closes at the date of his assassination. His various political actions,
+his achievements in Gaul and Britain, his marvellous exploits in Italy,
+Spain, Macedonia, Greece, and Africa in the Civil War, and the character
+of his legislation, are here told and set forth in a manner that comes
+very near to perfection. There is a vividness in the narrative, and a
+bringing-out of individual portraits, that make the work read like a
+history of contemporary events. Nor does the author's just admiration of
+Cæsar's extraordinary intellect and wonderful deeds cause him to be
+unjust to the eminent men on the other side, though as a rule he deals
+severely with those Romans whom the world admires, when treating of the
+effects of their conduct. It has been objected to his history, that he
+speaks with freedom of Cicero's conduct on many occasions, but we think
+that he has not exceeded the bounds of just criticism when considering
+the course of the Roman orator; and in his third volume, when summing up
+his character, he employs the most generous and lofty language in
+speaking of him. "After all the severe judgments we are compelled to
+pass on his conduct," he says, "we must acknowledge that there remains a
+residue of what is amiable in his character and noble in his teaching
+beyond all ancient example. Cicero lived and died in faith. He has made
+converts to the belief in virtue, and had disciples in the wisdom of
+love. There have been dark periods in the history of man, when the
+feeble ray of religious instruction paled before the torch of his
+generous philanthropy. The praise which the great critic pronounced upon
+his excellence in oratory may be justly extended to the qualities of his
+heart; and even in our enlightened days it may be held no mean advance
+in virtue to venerate the master of Roman philosophy." An intelligent
+admirer of the most illustrious victim of the Triumvirate will consider
+these words something far better than anything that can be found in
+Middleton's "lying legend in honor of St. Tully." It may be observed
+that admiration of Cicero and sympathy with the Roman aristocratical
+party mostly go together; and yet the Roman aristocracy disliked Cicero,
+and their writers treated him harshly, while he received kind treatment
+from writers on the other side. Livy, whom Augustus himself called the
+_Pompeian_, says of Cicero that "he bore none of his calamities as a man
+should, except his death"; and "Lucan denounces his perverse impolicy."
+Mr. Merivale, in a note, observes that it can hardly be accidental that
+Tacitus, in his historical works, never mentions him, and adds, "The
+most glowing tribute to Cicero's merits is the well-known passage in
+Juvenal, and this is written in the spirit of a Marian, or
+anti-oligarch." Velleius, who is generally spoken of as a sort of
+literary flunky of the Cæsars, warmly panegyrizes Cicero. Had the
+Pompeians triumphed, Cicero would not have found Italy the safe place
+that it was to him under Cæsar's rule. He would have fared as badly at
+their hands as he did at those of the Clodian rabble, and Pompeius might
+have been to him what Antonius became after Cæsar's death.
+
+The portrait which Mr. Merivale has drawn of Cato does not meet with the
+approval of those persons who admire old Roman virtue, of which Cato
+was the impersonation; but they would find it difficult to show that he
+has done that stubborn Stoic any injustice. Cato modelled himself on his
+great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, a mean fellow, who sold his old
+slaves in order that they might not become a charge upon him; but, as
+our author remarks, the character of the Censor had been simple and true
+to Nature, while that of his descendant was a system of elaborate,
+though unconscious affectations. Cato behaved as absurdly as an American
+would behave who should attempt to imitate his great-grandfather, the
+old gentleman having died a loyal subject of George II. He was an honest
+man, according to the Roman standard of honesty, which allowed a great
+margin for the worst villany, provided it were done for the public good,
+or what was supposed to be the public good. Like some politicians of our
+time, he thought, that, when he had made it appear that a certain course
+would be in accordance with ancient precedent, it should be
+adopted,--making no allowance for the thousand disturbing causes which
+the practical politician knows must be found on any path that may be
+selected. Of all the men whose conduct brought about the Civil War, he
+was the most virtuous, and he had the sagacity to oppose a resort to
+arms; though how he succeeded in reconciling his aversion to war with
+his support of a policy that led directly to its existence is one of the
+mysteries of those days. The Pompeians found him a bore, and, had they
+been victorious, would have saved him the trouble of killing himself, by
+cutting off his head. Cato was one of the very few persons for whom
+Cæsar felt a strong dislike; but he would not have harmed him, had he
+got his own consent to live. From Cato he had experienced no such insult
+as he had met with from M. Marcellus, and Marcellus received permission
+to return to Rome; but Cato was of an unmalleable nature, and preferred,
+to an ignoble silence in Italy, the noble silence of the grave. He died
+"after the high Roman fashion." Suicide might be called the natural
+death of a Roman leader of that age, and nothing but the violence of
+enemies could dispute the title with it. Cato, Brutus, Cassius,
+Antonius, and others fell by their own hands, or by the hands of persons
+who acted by their orders. Cæsar, Pompeius, Cicero, and Crassus were
+murdered. Nothing serves more to show how much Augustus differed from
+most Romans of his century than the fact that he died in his bed at
+extreme old age.
+
+That Mr. Merivale's Cæsarism does not prevent him from doing justice to
+the opponents of Cæsar is proved by his portrait of Q. Lutatius Catulus,
+the best leader of the _optimates_, and whom he pronounces to have been
+the most moderate and disinterested of all the great men of his
+day,--"indeed," he adds, "there is perhaps no character in the history
+of the Commonwealth which commanded more general esteem, or obtained
+more blameless distinction in political life." Yet Catulus was one of
+those men with whom Cæsar came earliest in collision, each as the
+representative of his party on vital points of difference. Our
+historian's estimate of the life, labors, purposes, and character of
+Pompeius is singularly correct, when we consider the temptation that he
+has to underrate the man with whom Cæsar has stood in direct opposition
+for nineteen centuries. There are few more emphatic passages in the
+historical literature of our language than the account which is given in
+Vol. II. ch. 18, of the last days and death of Pompeius, and which is
+followed by a most judicious summing-up of his history and position as a
+Roman leader. The historian's mind appears to be strongly affected by
+the fate of the Pompeian house, as much so as was the imagination of the
+Romans, which it seems to have haunted. This is in part due, we presume,
+to the free use which he has made of Lucan's "Pharsalia," a work of
+great value to those who would understand how the grand contest for
+supremacy was viewed by the beaten party in after times. That poem is
+the funeral wail of the Roman aristocracy, and it embodies the ideas and
+traditions of the vanquished as they existed far down into the Imperial
+age. It testifies to the original vitality of the aristocratical
+faction, when we find a youthful contemporary of Nero dedicating his
+genius to its service more than a century after the contest had been
+decided on the battlefield. Whether Lucan was a patriot, or a selfish,
+but disappointed courtier, we may feel certain that he never could have
+written in the Pompeian spirit, if that spirit was not still dominant
+in the minds of a large number of those men and women who formed the
+most cultivated portion of Roman society. To a critical historian, such
+as Mr. Merivale is, his poem must be very useful, though it would be
+dangerous authority in unskilful hands.
+
+The leading merit of this history is that it supplies a want, and
+supplies it effectually. Opening about sixty years before the beginning
+of the Christian era, it terminates with the death of M. Aurelius
+Antoninus, the point where Gibbon's work begins. We still need a work
+beginning with the close of the Second Punic War and ending with the
+death of Sulla, to connect Merivale with Arnold; but Mr. George Long is
+about to supply the want, at least in part. The first two volumes, as we
+have said, end at the date of Cæsar's death. The third and fourth
+embrace the long period in which Augustus was the principal character,
+and when the Roman Empire was formed. The fifth and sixth cover the
+reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, and
+Vitellius, and a portion of the reign of Vespasian. The seventh and last
+volume is devoted to the first Flavian house,--Vespasian, Titus, and
+Domitian,--and to those "five good Emperors"--Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
+and the Antonines--whose reigns are renowned in the history of monarchy
+for their excellence. The materials of the work are, for the most part,
+ample, and they have been well employed by the historian, a man of
+extensive scholarship and of critical sagacity. Whether we subscribe to
+his opinions or not, there can be no doubt of his having presented a
+brilliant picture of the civilized world during about two and a half
+eventful centuries. His is the only readable work that we have which
+affords a continuous narrative of the history of Rome from the
+appearance of Cæsar to the appearance of Commodus. Had it no other claim
+upon us, this alone would justify us in recommending it to the closest
+attention of all who desire to become acquainted with the facts that
+make up the sum of Roman Imperial history. But it has other claims to
+the consideration of readers. It makes Roman Imperial history thoroughly
+intelligible, because events are philosophically treated, and their
+bearing upon each other is rendered clear. It is written with vivacity,
+force, and elegance. The style is the style of a gentleman, and the
+sentiments are those of a Christian scholar. There is not a paragraph in
+it which we could wish to see omitted, or essentially changed. It has
+won for its author a place in the list of first-rate English historians,
+and he is to be ranked with Macaulay, Grote, Hallam, Froude, Kinglake,
+and others of those great writers who have done so much to illustrate
+the English name and to advance the cause of humanity. Being familiar
+with the work from the time that the first and second volumes were
+published in England, in 1850, we have always desired that it should be
+placed before the American reading public, confident that here its high
+merits would secure for it a great and deserved popularity; and it is
+with a sense of personal gratification that we have seen its publication
+begun in New York, in a form that pleases the eye and gratifies good
+taste.
+
+
+_Church Pastorals_: Hymns and Tunes for Public and Social Worship.
+Collected and Arranged by NEHEMIAH ADAMS, D. D. Boston: Ticknor
+& Fields.
+
+The Rev. Dr. Bushnell, in August, 1852, delivered an address upon
+"Religious Music" before the Beethoven Society of Yale College at the
+opening of their new organ. In the peroration of this address, after
+remarking upon the great assistance which Christian feeling receives in
+the praise of God from "things without life giving sound," he goes on to
+say,--"Let me suggest, also, in this connection, the very great
+importance of the cultivation of religious music. Every family should be
+trained in it; every Sunday or common school should have it as one of
+its exercises. The Moravians have it as a kind of ordinance of grace for
+the children: not without reason; for the powers of feeling and
+imagination, and the sense of spiritual realities, are developed as much
+by a training of childhood in religious music as by any other means. We
+complain that choirs and organs take the music to themselves in our
+churches, and that nothing is left to the people but to hear their
+undistinguishable piping, which no one else can join or follow or
+interpret. This must always be the complaint, till the congregations
+themselves have exercise enough in singing to make the performance
+theirs. As soon as they are able to throw in masses of sound that are
+not barbarous, but Christian, and have a right enjoyment of their
+feeling in it, they will have the tunes and the style of the exercise in
+their own way,--not before.... The more sorrowful is it, that, in our
+present defect of culture, there are so many voices which are more
+incapable of the right distinctions of sound than things without life,
+and which, when they attempt to sing, contribute more to the feeling of
+woe than of praise."
+
+These words are as true to-day as when they were uttered twelve years
+ago. Congregations which do not desire, or cannot afford, to resign the
+musical portion of their service to professional singers, have something
+more to do than to complain that the music is bad, or that they do not
+like paid vocalists to troll out psalmody for them. They must go to work
+and make their own music,--real music; for in these days unharmonious
+sounds are almost as much out of place in the worship of God as an
+uncatholic spirit and an heretical doctrine. The truth of this principle
+many societies admit, and some, like the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's, have
+already put it into practice; the majority, however, wait for help to
+free themselves from the customs which have kept them listeners when
+they should be creators of vocal praise. The great obstacle to
+congregational singing has been that the range of tunes already familiar
+was very limited, while the providing a whole society with the
+paraphernalia of music-books involved great expense to small purpose,
+since a large portion of the tunes contained in these books are
+unavailable for such use, being prepared with a view to the wants of
+thoroughly trained singers; besides which, the reference to two books,
+one for the words and the other for the music, is to many persons
+perplexing, and to all inconvenient.
+
+"Church Pastorals" is an attempt to overcome this obstacle, and to
+extend that help which is wanted. Other attempts have been made before,
+but we regard this as the most successful, and consider that Dr. Adams
+has prepared the best hymn-and-tune-book that has yet been issued, as we
+propose briefly to illustrate by a recapitulation of his plan and his
+manner of executing it.
+
+The hymns, which are nine hundred and eighty-eight in number, are
+selected from the great mass of hymn-writers; although Watts and the
+Wesleys furnish the foundation, and the materials of the superstructure
+are largely drawn from Doddridge, Cowper, Toplady, Montgomery, and
+others of kindred spirit, yet many beautiful things have been added from
+the later religious poetry, which are no less fervid in feeling, while
+less pronounced in doctrinal expression. These hymns are arranged in
+judicious general divisions, which are again analytically separated into
+special topics placed in logical sequence. After the hymns follow
+thirty-eight doxologies, the editor having added to the short list of
+common ones others which are fine enough to become standard at once.
+
+But it is less as a hymn- than as a tune-book that "Church Pastorals"
+merits the notice of societies and individuals who are truly interested
+in religious music, and we pass at once to our remarks upon this portion
+of the work. The compiler, although holding himself personally
+responsible for every selection, has availed himself of the advice and
+assistance of persons professionally eminent in sacred music, one of
+whom placed at his disposal a library which is unique in this country,
+containing works of which few Americans have owned or seen duplicates,
+such as rare "Choral-Bücher" of German cathedrals, and curious
+collections of English ecclesiastical compositions, a partial list of
+which is included in the volume, for the benefit of those who are
+curious in such matters, or wish to know how far Dr. Adams's researches
+have led him. To ascertain how many new melodies of the purest
+devotional character have been derived from these rich sources a careful
+examination is necessary, as also to comprehend with what skill the
+harmony has been preserved or adapted, in order to secure the two
+desirable results,--absolute freshness and beauty of treatment, and
+practicability for ordinary use; but a casual inspection will give
+sufficient indication of the spirit in which the work was undertaken,
+and of the faithfulness with which it has been completed.
+
+While originality has been properly sought, the old, familiar elements
+have not been neglected, and those simple songs which were upon the lips
+of our parents and grandparents, and are yet dear to us from association
+and intrinsic worth, are set in among the newer strains. The first
+lines only are given of such as need merely to be recalled to the memory
+of any who ever sing; but of others, equally prized, but less likely to
+be remembered, the full score is given.
+
+The doxologies are for the most part set to noble chorals of such
+strong, straightforward character that they cannot fail to become
+friends and intimates at once. In them, as in all the tunes, the compass
+of ordinary voices has been considered; and although nothing has been
+left undone which could give beauty to melody or scholarly variousness
+to harmony, the whole has been brought within the range of all singers.
+
+A novel and peculiar feature of the book is its "Stanzas to be sung
+_impromptu_." Occasions often arise at social meetings or special
+services, when it becomes desirable to sing a portion, or even the
+whole, of some homely, hearty hymn, but, while "the spirit moves," the
+opportunity is lost in the search for the words or the fit air, or in an
+attempt to "set the tune." To meet this want, Dr. Adams has brought
+together a variety of such stanzas, suited to all times and places, and,
+coupled with each, the first line of a familiar melody, that the
+propitious moment may be enjoyed and improved.
+
+It will of course be understood that the tune appointed for each hymn is
+printed directly above it, all four parts being given at length, the two
+trebles printed in a not unusual way upon one staff, the tenor and bass
+having each separate lines. Therefore no difficulty in singing the hymns
+can be felt even by the inexperienced, especially as one stanza is
+printed with the notes to show the exact adaptation.
+
+In fine, "Church Pastorals" is a work worthy of an extended circulation
+and capable of great usefulness. It can serve every purpose of public
+worship, for it embraces all services of the Sabbath congregation or the
+week-day gathering, and it touches upon all thoughts and feelings of
+religious assemblies; it is not above the tastes and abilities of an
+earnest congregation, nor beneath the notice and use of the independent
+choir. More than this, it has a particular value for the home and the
+fireside. Every household knows some quiet hour when the family-voices
+seek to join in the happy harmony of some unpretending hymn, and when
+the only limit to such grateful music is the failure of memory or the
+meagreness of the library, which furnishes only the hymns, or, giving
+the tunes, supplies only a part of the words,--for few families possess
+both sorts of books in plenty for their convenient use. This volume
+offers all,--the hymn, solemn, hopeful, sad, or jubilant, and united to
+it a tune, perhaps remembered from recollection's earliest days, perhaps
+unknown and untried, but suiting well the spirit of the words, and ready
+at an instant's desire to express the sentiment or emotion that rises
+for utterance. If "Church Pastorals" had no other merit, this alone
+would make it worth possessing by all who love and ever practise sacred
+music.
+
+A thorough and elaborate index includes in one ingenious list all
+references, whether to hymns, tunes, or metres; and the inaccuracies
+which will creep into even as handsome typography as this are
+unimportant, and rectified as quickly as observed. The size is
+convenient, and the shape comely.
+
+
+_Illustrations of Progress_: A Series of Discussions by HERBERT
+SPENCER. With a Notice of Spencer's "New System of Philosophy." New
+York: D. Appleton & Co.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer is already a power in the world. Yet it is not the
+vulgar apprehension of power which is associated with notoriety that we
+claim for him. He holds no position of civil authority, neither
+do his works compete with Miss Braddon's poorest novel in the
+circulating-libraries. But he has already influenced the silent life of
+a few thinking men whose belief marks the point to which the
+civilization of the age must struggle to rise. In America, we may even
+now confess our obligations to the writings of Mr. Spencer, for here
+sooner than elsewhere the mass feel as utility what a few recognize as
+truth. The reader acquainted with the admirable papers upon Education,
+which have been republished and extensively circulated in this country,
+has recognized their author's fresh and vigorous spirit, his power of
+separating the essential from the accidental, as well as his success in
+grasping the main features of a subject divested of frivolous and
+subordinate details. That he possesses a thinking faculty of rare
+comprehensiveness, as well as acuteness, will be allowed by all who will
+study his other works now in course of republication in New York.
+
+Mr. Spencer is at present engaged in an heroic attempt to construct a
+sufficing system of philosophy, which shall include Biology, Psychology,
+Sociology, and Morality. The great interest to mankind of the discussion
+proposed, as well as Mr. Spencer's claims to be intrusted with it, are
+set forth with singular clearness and felicity in the essay which
+introduces the present volume. Whatever success the latest discoveries
+in science render possible to solid intellectual force assisted by the
+keenest instruments of logic will doubtless be attained. As far as the
+frontiers of knowledge where the intellect may go, there is no living
+man whose guidance may more safely be trusted. Mr. Spencer represents
+the scientific spirit of the age. He makes note of all that comes within
+the range of sensuous experience, and declares whatever may be derived
+therefrom by a careful induction. As a philosopher he does not go
+farther. Yet beyond this the heart of humanity must ever penetrate. Let
+it be true, as it doubtless is, that, when the understanding by process
+of logic seeks to demonstrate the Cause of All, it finds a barren
+abstraction destitute of personality. It is no less true that God
+reveals Himself to the human feeling without intermediate agency. For
+the religious _sentiment_ Mr. Spencer finds an indestructible
+foundation. While maintaining that man can grasp and know only the
+finite, he yet holds that science does not fill the whole region of
+mental activity. Man may realize in consciousness what he may not grasp
+in thought.
+
+Of the other doctrines of Mr. Spencer we attempt no exposition. His
+attitude towards theology is to us more satisfactory than that of any
+recent thinker of the first class. But whatever his conclusions, every
+true man will respect and encourage that rectitude of mind which follows
+the issues of its reasoning at any cost. It was not the philosopher in
+his brain, but the fool _in his heart_, who said, "There is no God." It
+is of little matter what inappropriate name narrow people may have
+chosen for Mr. Spencer. Here is a conscientious investigator who finds
+duty everywhere, who labors to give men truths which shall elevate and
+reform their lives; but he believes that the hope of humanity was
+potentially shut in an egg, and never in an ark. And there is the
+"reader upon the sofa,"--church-member he may be,--who tosses aside
+"Vanity Fair" with the reflection that a gossiping of London snobs is
+human life, and that the best thing to be done is to pay pew-rates and
+lie still and gird at it. Which of these two, think you, is the modern
+representative of King David's "fool"?
+
+We would not be charged with the superfluity of commending to scholars
+the writings of Mr. Spencer. They have long ago found them out. It is to
+the mass of working men and women who make time for a solid book or two
+in the course of the year that we submit their claims. While those who
+have the leisure and training to realize Mr. Spencer's system as a
+developed unity must necessarily be few, no reader of tolerable
+intelligence can fail to find much of interest and suggestion in its
+several parts. With a common allowance for the abstruse nature of the
+subjects of which he treats, Mr. Spencer may be called a _popular_
+writer. His philosophical terminology will not be found troublesome in
+those of his writings which will first attract the reader. The "Social
+Statics," the "Essays," and the treatise on "Education" are very
+clearly, as well as most gracefully, written. And after these have been
+mastered, most readers will not be repelled by the less easy reading of
+the "Principles of Psychology," and the "New System of Philosophy." All
+these works are rich in materials for forming intelligent opinions, even
+where we are unable to agree with those put forward by the author. Much
+may be learnt from them in departments in which our common educational
+system is very deficient. The active citizen may derive from them
+accurate, systematized information concerning his highest duties to
+society, and the principles on which they are based. He may gain clearer
+notions of the value and bearing of evidence, and be better able to
+distinguish between facts and inferences. He may find common things
+suggestive of wiser thought--nay, we will venture to say, of truer
+emotion--than before. For Mr. Spencer is not of that school of
+"philosophy" which teaches the hopelessness of human effort, and, by
+implication, the abandonment of moral dignity. From profound
+generalizations upon society, he rises to make the duty of the
+individual most solemn and imperative. Above all, he has this best
+prerogative of really great thinkers,--he is able to change sentiments
+to convictions.
+
+If we have not particularized the claims of the single volume whose
+title is at the head of our notice, it is because all that Mr. Spencer
+has written moves towards one end and is equally worthy of attention.
+The essays here given are selected from two series, the first published
+in 1857, the second in 1863. The present arrangement has been chosen by
+the author as more suitable to develop the general purpose which governs
+his work. While the doctrine of Evolution is more or less illustrated in
+each of these papers, the variety of subjects discussed must touch at
+some point the taste and pursuit of any reader. From "Manners and
+Fashion" to "The Nebular Hypothesis" is a sweep bold enough to include
+most prominent topics with which we are concerned. Indeed, we can recall
+no modern volume of the same size which so thoroughly credits its author
+with that faculty of looking about him which Pope thought it was man's
+business to exercise. There are the current phrases, "seeing life," and
+"knowing the world," which generally used to signify groping in the
+dirtiest corners of the one and fattening lazily upon the other; but if
+it were possible to rescue such expressions from their vulgar
+associations, we think that a candid reader would apply the best
+conceptions they suggested to the writer of the discussions here
+collected. The world as it is to-day is seen by Mr. Spencer as by few
+living men. The sciences, which taken singly too often seem only good to
+expel the false, have been summoned together to declare the true. Not
+Nature alone, but Humanity, which is greater than Nature, must be
+interrogated for answers that shall satisfy the ripest reason of the
+age. By the rare gifts of comparison which turn to account his wide
+observations, Mr. Spencer has already established principles which,
+however compelled for a time to compromise with prejudices and vested
+interests, will become the recognized basis of an improved society.
+
+Our only interest in recommending this author to our countrymen comes
+from the conviction that he is peculiarly capable of impressing for good
+the present condition of our national character. By giving us fuller
+realizations of liberty and justice his writings will tend to increase
+our self-reliance in the great emergency of civilization to which we
+have been summoned. "Our Progressive Independence," so brilliantly
+illustrated by Dr. Holmes, emancipating us from foreign fine-writing,
+leaves us free to welcome the true manhood and mature wisdom of Europe.
+In the time of our old prosperity, amusing a leisure evening over
+Kingsley or Ruskin, we were tempted to exclaim, with Sir Peter Teazle,
+"There's nothing half so noble as a man of sentiment!" But in these
+latter days we have seen "Mr. Gradgrind" step from Dickens's wretched
+caricature to bring his "facts" to the great cause of humanity, while
+"Joseph Surface" reserved his "sentiments" for the bloody business by
+which Slavery sought to subject all things to herself. We have seen the
+belles-lettres literature of England more deeply disgraced than when it
+smirked before the harlots of the second Charles, or chanted a
+blasphemous benediction over George IV. But the thought and science of
+the Old World it is still our privilege to recognize. And it can hardly
+be necessary to say that the sympathies of Mr. Spencer, like those of
+Mill and Cochin, have been with the government and loyal people of the
+United States. And so we take especial pleasure in mentioning that a
+considerable interest in the American copyright of his writings has been
+secured to the author, and also, despite the facilities of reading-clubs
+and circulating-libraries, that they are emphatically _books to own_.
+
+
+_Poems._ By FREDERICK GODDARD TUCKERMAN. Boston: Ticknor and
+Fields.
+
+These poems show by internal evidence that they are the productions of a
+man of refined organization and delicate sensibility to beauty, who has
+lived much in solitude and tasted of the cup of sorrow. Of decided
+originality in intellectual construction it cannot be said that they
+give emphatic proof: the poet, as Schiller has said, is the child of his
+age, and Mr. Tuckerman's poetry not unfrequently shows that he has been
+a diligent student of those masters in his art who have best caught and
+reproduced the spirit of the times in which we dwell. It has one quality
+to a high degree,--and that is, a minute knowledge of the peculiarities
+of the natural world as it appears in New England. In his long woodland
+walks, he has kept open an eye of observation as practised as that of
+the naturalist. The trees, the shrubs, the flowers of New England are
+known to him as they are to few. He is tempted to draw too largely upon
+this source of interest: in other words, there is too much of
+description in his volume. Life is hardly long enough for such elaborate
+painting. We may admire the skill of the delineation, but we cannot
+pause sufficiently before the canvas to do full justice to the painter.
+Those poems in which Mr. Tuckerman expresses the emotions of bereavement
+and sorrow are those which have the highest merit in point of thought
+and expression. They are full of tenderness and sensibility; but the
+poet should bear in mind that strings which vibrate such music should be
+sparingly struck.
+
+It may be somewhat paradoxical to say so, but it appears to us that the
+poetry of Mr. Tuckerman would be improved, if it had more of prose in
+it. It does not address itself to common emotions and every-day
+sympathies. His flour is bolted too fine. One must almost be a poet
+himself to enter into full communion with him. In intellectual
+productions the refining process should not be carried too far: beyond a
+certain point, what is gained in delicacy is lost in manliness and
+power.
+
+
+_Possibilities of Creation; or, What the World might have been._ A Book
+of Fancies. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.
+
+The author describes his work as a treatise of the Bridgewater class. We
+should rather describe it as a _reductio ad absurdum_ in Natural
+Philosophy. A great deal of humor, ingenuity, and information are
+brought into play to turn the world upside-down, for the very laudable
+purpose of demonstrating that it is better to be right side up,--a
+method of demonstration curious and interesting enough, if comprised in
+a single essay, but rather long-drawn-out, when spread over four hundred
+pages. Suppose, for instance, is the writer's mode of argument, a
+malicious demon let loose, with power to set the earth topsy-turvy, on
+condition of keeping it still an earth. With what exultation does he
+bestride the Himalayas to watch the convulsions which he causes! How
+does he kick his heels against the mountain-flanks, in ecstasy at seeing
+men bleached and blistered with the chlorine or nauseated with the
+sulphuretted hydrogen which he has substituted for our wholesome and
+pleasant air! Or what should we do, if potato-roots had happened to be
+moistened with gin instead of water? What if men, instead of standing
+god-like erect, had been great balls of flesh, rolling along the ground
+as best they could,--if Young's poetical figure had been a practical
+truth, and this globe were the Bedlam of the universe,--if the fixity of
+Nature had been shattered, and we sat down at our feasts to find the
+soup bitter as strychnine, the wine changed into vinegar, and mild ale
+fiery as vitriol? What if wrinkles and gray hairs came in the twinkling
+of an eye,--if children were born with matured minds,--if no one were
+capable of anger,--and men started at the same point to arrive at the
+same conclusions? In short,--
+
+    "If all the world was apple-pie,
+      And all the sea was ink,
+    And all the trees were bread and cheese,
+      What should we have for drink?"
+
+To all which startling inquiries we are fain to say, that, if Merrie
+England sits under her present squally skies in such a frame of bliss
+that she must have recourse to her imagination, when she wishes to
+contemplate a nice little _imbroglio_, she must be awarded the palm for
+being what Mark Tapley would call "jolly under creditable
+circumstances." For ourselves, we frankly confess that we find quite
+trouble enough in steering among the realities of creation, without
+caring to venture far out among its possibilities.
+
+
+
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+Full Returns of the Various Dioceses in the United States and British
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+
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+"Rome: its Ruler and its Institutions." New York. D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
+12mo. pp. xxi., 557. $1.50.
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+
+Letters to a Lady. By Wilhelm von Humboldt. From the German, with an
+Introduction by Charles Godfrey Leland. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo.
+pp. 257. $1.00.
+
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+Theodore Eben. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo. paper. pp. 51. 25 cts.
+
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+W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 263. $1.00.
+
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+
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+States Army. New York. Sheldon & Co. 8vo. pp. 480. $2.50.
+
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+illustrated on an Original System, by Means of Hands played completely
+through. By Cavendish. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 16mo. pp. 94. $1.25.
+
+Mount Vernon, and other Poems. By Harvey Rice. New York. D. Appleton &
+Co. 12mo. pp. 221. $1.00.
+
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+Leander Starr. New York. John Bradburn. 12mo. pp. 281. $1.25.
+
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+Nineteenth Army Corps. By James K. Hosmer, of the Fifty-Second Regiment
+Massachusetts Volunteers. Boston. Walker, Wise, & Co. 16mo. pp. xii.,
+244. $1.25.
+
+Life of William Hickling Prescott. By George Ticknor. Boston. Ticknor &
+Fields. 4to. pp. x., 491. $7.50.
+
+Tales of a Wayside Inn. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston. Ticknor &
+Fields. 12mo. pp. viii., 225. $1.25.
+
+A Woman's Ransom. By Frederick William Robinson, Author of
+"Grandmother's Money," etc. Boston. T. O. H. P. Burnham. 12mo. pp.
+viii., 412. $1.50.
+
+Sunshine: A New Name for a Popular Lecture on Health. By Mrs. Dall,
+Author of "Woman's Right to Labor," etc. Boston. Walker, Wise, & Co.
+16mo. paper. pp. 64. 35 cts.
+
+The Wife's Secret. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson
+& Brothers. 12mo. pp. 480. $1.50.
+
+Lyrics of a Day; or, Newspaper Poetry. By a Volunteer in the United
+States Service. New York. G. W. Carleton. 16mo. pp. xii., 160. 75 cts.
+
+Work and Play; or, Literary Varieties. By Horace Bushnell. New York.
+Charles Scribner. 12mo. pp. 464. $1.50.
+
+The School-Girl's Garland. A Selection of Poetry. In Four Parts. By Mrs.
+C. M. Kirkland. Second Series. Parts Third and Fourth. New York. Charles
+Scribner. 16mo. pp. 360. $1.25.
+
+England's Liability for Indemnity: Remarks on the Letter of
+"Historicus," dated November 4th, 1863; printed in the London "Times,"
+November 7th; and reprinted in the "Boston Daily Advertiser," November
+25th. By Charles G. Loring. Boston. W. V. Spencer. 8vo. paper. pp.
+viii., 46. 25 cts.
+
+Satan's Devices and the Believer's Victory. By Rev. William L. Parsons,
+A. M. Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 312. $1.25.
+
+Hints to Riflemen. By H. W. S. Cleveland. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
+12mo. pp. 260. $1.25.
+
+Illustrations of Universal Progress; A Series of Discussions. By Herbert
+Spencer, Author of "The Principles of Psychology," etc. With a Notice of
+Spencer's "New System of Philosophy." New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo.
+pp. xxxi., 446. $1.75.
+
+The National Almanac and Annual Record for the Year 1864. Philadelphia.
+G. W. Childs. 12mo. pp. 641. $1.50.
+
+Annual of Scientific Discovery; or, Year-Book of Facts in Science and
+Art for 1864. Exhibiting the most Important Discoveries and Improvements
+in Mechanics, Useful Arts, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Astronomy,
+Geology, Zoölogy, Botany, Mineralogy, Meteorology, Geography,
+Antiquities, etc. Together with Notes on the Progress of Science during
+the Year 1863; a List of Recent Scientific Publications; Obituaries of
+Eminent Scientific Men, etc. Edited by David A. Wells, A. M., M. D.
+Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 351. $1.50.
+
+The Red Track. A Tale of Life in Mexico. By Gustave Aimard.
+Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson & Brothers. 8vo. paper. pp. 157. 50 cts.
+
+Dangerfield's Rest; or, Before the Storm. A Novel of American Life and
+Manners, New York. Sheldon & Co. 12mo. pp. 392. $1.50.
+
+The Philanthropic Results of the War in America. Collected from Official
+and other Authentic Sources. By an American Citizen. New York. Sheldon &
+Co. 18mo. pp. 160. 50 cts.
+
+A Treatise on Military Surveying, Theoretical and Practical. Including a
+Description of Surveying Instruments. By G. H. Mendell, Captain of
+Engineers. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 12mo. pp. 193. $2.00.
+
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+Alston, Comfort Tyler, Devereaux, Dayton, Adair, Miro, Emmett, Theodosia
+Burr Alston, Mrs. Blennerhassett, and others, their Contemporaries;
+developing the Purposes and Aims of those engaged in the Attempted
+Wilkinson and Burr Revolution; embracing also the First Account of the
+"Spanish Association of Kentucky," and a Memoir of Blennerhassett. By
+William H. Safford. Cincinnati. Moore, Wilstach, & Baldwin, 8vo. pp.
+665. $3.00.
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+Church Essays. By George Cumming McWhorter, Author of "A Popular
+Hand-Book of the New Testament." New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp.
+175. $1.00.
+
+My Cave-Life in Vicksburg. With Letters of Trial and Travel. By a Lady.
+New York. D. Appleton & Co. 16mo. pp. 196. $1.00.
+
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+
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+Historical Notes. By Horatio B. Hackett, Professor of Biblical
+Literature and Interpretation in Newton Theological Institute. Boston.
+Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 252. $1.50.
+
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+Brothers. 12mo. pp. 396. $1.50.
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+United States. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York. C. Scribner. 8vo. pp.
+viii., 460. $2.50.
+
+Synonymes of the New Testament. By Richard Chevenix Trench, D. D. Second
+Part. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp. iv., 214. $1.00.
+
+The Management of Steel, including Forging, Hardening, Tempering,
+Annealing, Shrinking, and Expansion; also the Case-Hardening of Iron. By
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+Arsenal. First American, from Second London Edition. New York. D.
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+Thoughts for the Christian Life. By Rev. James Drummond. With an
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+xxi., 371. $1.50.
+
+History of the Romans under the Empire. By Charles Merivale, B. D., late
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+With a Copious Analytical Index. Vol. III. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
+12mo. pp. 431. $2.00.
+
+The Federalist. A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. A
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+Hamilton, Author of "The History of the Republic of the United States."
+Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo. pp. clxvi., 660, vi. $3.50.
+
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+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No.
+80, June, 1864, by Various
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80,
+June, 1864, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: November 16, 2006 [EBook #19827]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h4>THE</h4>
+
+<h1>ATLANTIC MONTHLY.</h1>
+
+<h2>A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.</h2>
+
+<h3>VOL. XIII.&mdash;JUNE, 1864.&mdash;NO. LXXX.</h3>
+
+<p>Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by <span class="smcap">Ticknor
+and Fields</span>, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<!-- Autogenerated TOC. Modify or delete as required. -->
+<p>
+<a href="#A_TALK_ABOUT_GUIDES"><b>A TALK ABOUT GUIDES.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_KALIF_OF_BALDACCA"><b>THE KALIF OF BALDACCA.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#LIFE_ON_THE_SEA_ISLANDS"><b>LIFE ON THE SEA ISLANDS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#A_FAST-DAY_AT_FOXDEN"><b>A FAST-DAY AT FOXDEN.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#PROSPICE"><b>PROSPICE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#WASHINGTON_IRVING"><b>WASHINGTON IRVING.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_RIM"><b>THE RIM.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_NEVA"><b>THE NEVA.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#ROBSON"><b>ROBSON.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_PARALLEL_ROADS_OF_GLEN_ROY_IN_SCOTLAND"><b>THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY, IN SCOTLAND.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#UNDER_THE_CLIFF"><b>UNDER THE CLIFF.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SEVEN_WEEKS_IN_THE_GREAT_YO-SEMITE"><b>SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#HOUSE_AND_HOME_PAPERS"><b>HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#SHAKSPEARE"><b>SHAKSPEARE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#HOW_TO_USE_VICTORY"><b>HOW TO USE VICTORY.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES"><b>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#RECENT_AMERICAN_PUBLICATIONS"><b>RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS</b></a><br />
+</p>
+<!-- End Autogenerated TOC. -->
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>Transcriber's note: Minor typos have been corrected. Footnotes have been
+moved to the end of the article. Table of contents have been generated for the HTML version.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="A_TALK_ABOUT_GUIDES" id="A_TALK_ABOUT_GUIDES"></a>A TALK ABOUT GUIDES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Talk about guides! Let Independence, Self-Conceit, and Go-ahead
+undervalue them, if they will; but I, Sola F&#339;mina, (for that is the
+name I go by,) of Ignorance, (the place I hail from,) casting up my
+unbalanced accounts, (with a view to settling,) find a large credit due
+to this class of individuals, which (though I have not the means to
+meet) I have no intention to repudiate.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then, to be sure, I, S. F., have been reminded in my journeyings
+of poor dear E., whose lively spirit was so chafed by the exactions made
+upon his purse and his temper at the hands of this imperturbable race,
+that at last he turned, like a stag at bay, and vented all his wrath in
+the face of a startled old woman by the abrupt and emphatic query,
+"What'll you take to clear out?"</p>
+
+<p>Still, dogmatic and prosing as they sometimes proved, my experience on
+the whole was favorable; and from the motherly old portress of the
+English church at Honeybourne, who fed me with bread and butter under
+her cottage-roof, and sent me away laden with garden-flowers and a
+blessing, to faithful Michel, who held me over the blue fissures of the
+glaciers that I might get a glimpse of their secret waterfalls, who
+gathered violets for me on the margin of the icy sea, and, when I had
+carelessly dropped them by the way, treasured up the faded things to
+restore them to me at nightfall,&mdash;from the aged woman, with her "Good
+bye till we meet in heaven," to the rough mountaineer, with his hearty
+hand-pressure and God-speed at parting, I would not willingly lose one
+link out of the chain of such fast friends which stretched along my way.</p>
+
+<p>There is Warwick Castle,&mdash;a written history, no doubt, to scholars, a
+mine of wealth to antiquaries and architects; but how incomplete would
+my associations be with the spot, were you banished from the picture, my
+sturdy friend, fit type of the female retainers of the household of the
+King-Maker, who, stationed within the ivied approach to the castle,
+presided at the brazen porridge-pot, once holding food enough to satisfy
+ten score of men, now empty, save for the volume of sound which stuns
+the ear when you strike it with your ponderous iron bar! Can I ever
+forget the scene of laughter and riot, when you installed me within the
+capacious vessel, dubbed me "Countess Guy, of the Porridge-Pot," and,
+the rest of my party having been induced to accept the hospitalities of
+the place, and mount my triumphal car, declared your intention to light
+a fire beneath and have the finest stew in all England? The castle is a
+stern place, perhaps; but how can I ever think it grim, with such a
+jolly old flatterer as you stationed at its portal?</p>
+
+<p>And here, in my blundering way, I have stumbled on the secret spring of
+my whole subject; so I may as well make a merit of confession, and
+acknowledge frankly that the trap in which these wary guides entangled
+my affections was generally neither more nor less than a net of silken
+flattery. Your good guide, your dear guide, your pet guide, whom
+Neighbor So-and-so, going abroad, must look up immediately on his
+arrival, this invaluable creature, depend upon it, is an arrant
+flatterer. He does not go out of his way for you; he does not tell it
+you to your face; but, somehow or other, (if he knows his vocation,) he
+makes you believe, that, of all the travellers he ever escorted, (and he
+has been a travellers' escort from his infancy,) you are the first, the
+only one, in whose behalf duty became a privilege.</p>
+
+<p>Do you suppose I put faith in Michel, when, on my second Alpine
+excursion, this companion of the previous day's peril placed himself in
+close proximity to my mule, took the bridle with an air of satisfaction,
+and whispered with an insinuating smile, "I go with <i>you</i> to-day; see,
+there is another guide for Mademoiselle"? He was mistaken. It was my
+young friend whom he was, on this occasion, destined to escort over the
+mountain. He was as devoted to her as if she had been the apple of his
+eye. Whether I followed next in the file, brought up the rear, or was
+dashed over the precipice, I doubt if he looked behind him to discover.
+Was I fool enough, then, to trust his professions? I acknowledge the
+weakness. I was but a novice, he a practised courtier in the guise of a
+mountaineer. To make a clean breast of it, I even suspect that his
+self-gratulatory whisper is still ringing in my ear, for I find that
+Mademoiselle and I are rivals in our devotion to Michel.</p>
+
+<p>And Ann Harris, of Honeybourne, widow, portress of the ancient
+village-church, surrounded by villagers' graves, approached by four
+foot-paths over four stiles, perfect model of all the churches in all
+the novels of English literature,&mdash;was it partiality for me, ancient
+matron, or an eye to a silver sixpence, which made you, and makes you
+still, the heroine of my day of romance? At any rate, I shall never
+cease to invoke a blessing on that immaculate railway-company which
+decoyed me from London into the heart of England, and, with a coolness
+unexampled in the new districts of Iowa, dropped me at the sweetest nook
+under the sun, there to wait three hours for the train which should have
+taken me at once to Stratford,&mdash;three golden hours, in which I might
+bask like a bee in a Honeybourne beyond my hopes.</p>
+
+<p>Not that my Honeybourne was precisely the spot where the railway-train
+left me standing deserted and alone,&mdash;alone save for a Stratford
+furniture-dealer, who, unceremoniously set down in the midst of his new
+stock of tables and chairs, and with nothing else in sight but a
+platform, a shed, and me, looked at the last-mentioned object for
+sympathy, while he cursed the departing train and swore the usual oath
+of vengeance, namely, that he would never travel that road again.</p>
+
+<p><i>He</i> got red with passion and cursed the road; <i>I</i> stared round me and
+kept cool. Was I more philosophical than he? No, but there was this
+difference: he was bent on business, I on pleasure; he was in a hurry, I
+could afford to wait.</p>
+
+<p>Three hours,&mdash;and only a platform, a shed, and an infuriated
+furniture-dealer to keep me company! This was the Honeybourne station,
+but not Honeybourne. I found a railway-official hard by, had my baggage
+stowed in the shed, crossed the platform, looked at my watch to make
+sure of the time, then struck out into the open country. Through shady
+lanes, over stiles, across the fields, on I went, in the direction
+pointed out to me by two laborers whom I met at starting. The sweet
+white may smiled at me from the hedges; the great sober eyes of the
+cattle at pasture reflected my sense of contentment; the nonchalant
+English sheep showed no signs of disturbance at my approach (unlike the
+American species, which invariably take to their heels); the children
+set to watch them lifted their heads from the long grass and looked
+lazily after me, never doubting my right to tread the well-worn
+foot-path with which every green field beguiled me on. I came out in the
+vegetable-garden of a rustic cottage, one of some dozen thatched-roofed
+dwellings, which, with the church and simple parsonage, constituted
+sweet Honeybourne. "Oh that it were the bourne from which no traveller
+returns!" was the thought of my heart, as, with a dreamy sense of
+longings fulfilled, I wandered through the miniature village, across it,
+around it, beyond it, and back to it again, as a bee saturated with
+sweets floats round the hive.</p>
+
+<p>And now to my queen-bee, Ann Harris, aforesaid!</p>
+
+<p>"All the way from Lunnon! Alone, and such a distance! Bless my heart!"
+cried the primitive Ann, with hands and eyes uplifted. "Come in and rest
+you, and have something to eat! I have bread and butter, sweet and good,
+and will boil the kettle and make you a cup of tea, if you say so."</p>
+
+<p>I had already made the circuit of the church, strolled among the ancient
+gravestones, crossed the moss-covered bridge, threaded the paths beneath
+the hawthorn, had a vision of boundless beauty, drunk in the silence,
+and dreamed out my dream of solitude, independence, and the joy of being
+no one but myself knew where. Could I do better than accept this
+invitation to enter the humble cottage, with the prospect of an
+admittance also to an old woman's heart? Did I win the latter? or did I
+only fancy it? Did the motherly creature believe me lost? or was her
+astonishment only feigned? Was she really, despite her poverty, ready to
+share her last crust with a stranger? or was the benignant glance which
+gave me in my loneliness the sense of adoption merely an eye to
+self-interest?</p>
+
+<p>Dear old soul! One of us, at least, was simple-hearted and true,&mdash;either
+she in her innocent professions, or I in my silly credulity. I have
+faith that it was she. At all events, I do so cherish the memory of her
+kindness, that, so far from treasuring the notion of the silver
+sixpence, I hereby pledge myself, that, if ever the reminiscence I am
+penning should be worth half as much to me in gold as it is in memory, I
+will send Ann Harris at least one shining guinea, as a token how
+willingly I would go shares with her in something.</p>
+
+<p>And the guinea would not come amiss, for Ann was poor; her clay-floored
+cottage boasted only its exquisite neatness, her furniture was of the
+humblest, her dress the cheapest. She was too old for hard work; her
+duties at the little church were light,&mdash;the profits, I fear, were
+lighter; for that visitors to the remote sanctuary were rare her
+reception of me was sufficient proof. As she guided me through the
+church, I asked her if it was well attended. She shook her head sadly,
+and, pointing in the direction of a neighboring village, answered,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Most of 'em go to chapel, yonder,&mdash;the more's the pity."</p>
+
+<p>She told me that she had no provision for the coming winter, and feared
+she must go to the Union. (It was not our own, then prosperous and
+unbroken, Union, to which she dreaded emigrating.) She merely meant the
+work-house; and as she spoke, her face wore a shadow that still clouds
+my recollections of Honeybourne. I do not know if her fears were
+realized,&mdash;if her cottage is forsaken,&mdash;if she dwells among paupers, or
+sleeps in the village church-yard; but I cannot think of her as lonely
+or poor or dead. Her saintly face told of blessed communion; I know that
+she was rich in faith and hope; and were I assured that her spirit had
+left the flesh, I should only picture her to myself standing erect at
+heaven's doorway, welcoming strangers with the same serenity with which
+she said to me at parting,&mdash;"I shall meet you <i>there</i>."</p>
+
+<p>She offered me a farewell gift of flowers from her garden. It was a
+beautiful cottage-garden, and many of the flowers were brilliant and
+even rare, giving proof of careful, if not scientific culture. Still I
+hesitated. My hands were full of sweet may, red campion, and other
+native field-blossoms, which had introduced themselves to me
+anonymously. They were the children of the green sod which I had been
+treading so lightly on my way to the village; and, in the quiet of my
+ramble, they had seemed to me like whispers from Him who made them, and
+with whom I had never felt so utterly alone. I could not bear to see
+them displaced by Ann's garden-belles, tempting as the latter would have
+been at any other moment. She saw my indifference to her offer. I knew
+she saw it working in my face. I attempted to apologize for my
+preference, but she did not understand me; so I blurted out my thought,
+awkwardly enough, saying,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yours are beautiful; but God made these, you know,&mdash;and&mdash;and&mdash;I like
+them best."</p>
+
+<p>She looked down upon me gravely, pityingly, smiling, too, with a
+tenderness which was neither grave nor pitying. I have seen
+long-visioned people look with just that expression at the eyes of the
+short-sighted, on the latter's confessing their inability to detect an
+object at no great distance.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>He made them all</i>," she said; and her words were an ascription of
+praise.</p>
+
+<p>They come to me often now. They bid me look farther and see more. They
+tell me how <i>mine</i> and <i>thine</i> have no place in this world of <i>His</i>.
+False distinctions shrink away from the light of the old woman's clearer
+faith; I see how the ablest workers are but instruments in higher
+hands,&mdash;how science, culture, inspiration itself, are but gifts to be
+laid on His altar.</p>
+
+<p>I need scarcely say that I at once found room for Ann's flowers in my
+hand, as for her lesson in my heart. Some of the former are pressed and
+laid away as a sacred memento, and something of the latter is treasured
+up among good seed sown by the way-side.</p>
+
+<p>I would gladly have lingered longer in this little nook, into which I
+seemed to have been drifted by chance; but my time was up,&mdash;I had a mile
+or two to walk over the fields in the direction of the railway,&mdash;my
+friends were to meet me at Stratford. Should I miss the train this time,
+my philosophy might fail me as signally as that of the above-mentioned
+furniture-dealer failed him.</p>
+
+<p>A few hours after I bade my old friend farewell, I was at my
+destination. Millions have shared my experiences at the tomb of the
+great poet. Everybody is familiar with William Shakspeare and
+Stratford-on-Avon, but I hug the thought that nobody but I knows
+anything about Ann Harris and Honeybourne.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I have dwelt upon an occasion in which the humble office of a guide
+resulted in companionship, friendship, instruction. A brief sojourn in
+Alpine regions has furnished me with a similar reminiscence.</p>
+
+<p>We were setting forth for a day's ride across the T&ecirc;te-Noire. Our party
+consisted of five, and we had two guides. Our baggage, which was for the
+most part light, was strapped on the backs of the mules behind the
+riders. One article, however, a square box of considerable proportions,
+proved refractory, and, veering from side to side, refused to maintain
+the even balance which, owing to the rough nature of the bridle-path,
+was essential to the safety of both mule and rider. We were obliged to
+halt again and again, that the box might be restrapped, always with
+doubtful success. Each time that we drew up in line for this purpose we
+were overtaken by a Swiss youth, who had perceived our dilemma, and who
+hoped, by following us up closely, to make a job out of it. There was
+but a limited knowledge of French among us, (the language in which the
+youth spoke,) still, by aid of his vehement gestures, he made us
+understand that he was ready, for a consideration, to accompany us on
+our toilsome journey, and carry the box on his back.</p>
+
+<p>"Eight francs, Monsieur,&mdash;I will do it for eight francs!" But the box
+was righted, his services seemed superfluous, and we moved on,
+regardless of his beseeching looks.</p>
+
+<p>A fresh delay soon ensued, the boy came panting up, and this time it was
+"Seven francs,"&mdash;nay, as we rode away from him, he frantically shouted,
+"Six!" His prospects seemed hopeless, but destiny and perseverance were
+on his side,&mdash;the box gave another alarming lurch,&mdash;the heated and
+almost discouraged youth made one last appeal,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Four francs, Monsieur! I will do it for four francs!" and the day was
+his.</p>
+
+<p>He was not a regular guide, appointed by Government and furnished with a
+certificate, as is the law of the Alpine district for all who serve in
+this responsible capacity. We had engaged him simply as a porter. Still,
+the docile youth had no sooner strapped the box on his back than, seeing
+that I was the only lady unprovided with an attendant, he drew my mule's
+bridle through his arm, and quietly took me in charge.</p>
+
+<p>No matter how charming a travelling-party you belong to, the moment they
+are all mounted and climbing a mountain, single file, you feel yourself
+a unit in creation. Everybody has turned his back upon you, and you have
+turned your back upon everybody. You are a solitary traveller. Are you
+aghast at your own situation on the steep slope of a mule's back, with a
+precipice above your head and your feet dangling over a gulf below?
+There is no help for it. Imagine yourself a sack of meal, if you can,
+and expect as little sympathy as would be accorded to that article. Are
+you moved to a keen sense of the ridiculous, as a curve in the road
+discloses the figures of your elongated party, unused to riding, and
+rendered the more grotesque by their mountain-equipment? A laugh
+unshared is no laugh at all, so you may as well smother it at once. Does
+the scenery through which you are passing awaken emotions of sublimity?
+It would be sacrilege to shout out your sentiments to the occupant of
+the next mule in such tones as a watchman would employ to cry, "Fire!"
+No,&mdash;if you are essentially a social creature, there is nothing for it
+but to bottle up your sensibilities and await the opportunity for an
+explosion when you reach your inn.</p>
+
+<p>Something like this result occurred, I remember, on the evening of that
+very day, when Mademoiselle, who, under the charge of Michel, led the
+van, met me at the hotel at Martigny, at which place she had of course
+arrived a little in advance. We were not usually more demonstrative in
+our manners than is customary among New-England women, but the moment I
+could alight we rushed into each other's embrace, regardless of a crowd
+of astonished porters and guides, mutually insisting, by way of apology,
+that it seemed as if we had not met for a year.</p>
+
+<p>Having dwelt upon this peculiar isolation experienced by the Alpine
+traveller, it may be conjectured, that, when the boy, Auguste, drew my
+bridle through his arm, I felt very much as Robinson Crusoe did when he
+was joined by his man Friday. Auguste and I soon became friends. He was
+a large, round-faced, mild-eyed youth, who, the instant the excitement
+of securing his employment was past, subsided into a soft, even pace
+like that of a dog. Now and then, too, he looked up at the mule and me,
+precisely as a dog, accompanying his master, looks up to see if all is
+right.</p>
+
+<p>I did not talk to him at first. His mere presence was satisfaction
+enough. After a while we grew more sociable. He spoke a French <i>patois</i>.
+So did I. His was peculiar to the province,&mdash;mine wholly original,&mdash;but
+both answered the purpose of communication, and so were satisfactory.
+He had the essential characteristic of his profession,&mdash;he was one of
+the oily-tongued tribe, simple as he seemed, and I the willing victim;
+for I am confident that I straightened in my saddle, and talked more
+glibly than ever in the language peculiar to myself, on the strength of
+his <i>na&iuml;ve</i> surprise at learning the place of my nativity, and his
+polite exclamation, "<i>De l'Am&egrave;rique! O! j'avais cru que vous &eacute;tiez de
+Paris</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>The conversation you hold with your guide has this advantage,&mdash;you can
+suspend it at will. There are miles of travel, in crossing the
+T&ecirc;te-Noire, when, if your most sympathizing friend walked beside you,
+the thought of both hearts would be, "Let all the earth keep silence!"
+and in the absence of such unspoken sympathy, the next best thing is the
+innocent gravity of an attendant hired for so many francs a day, and not
+presuming to speak unless spoken to.</p>
+
+<p>But when these sublimer passages are passed, when the path skirts the
+edge of the valley, when the giant mountains have retired a little and
+you slacken the tense cord of emotion which for a while has held you
+spell-bound, it is a relief to loosen the tongue also, and reassure
+yourself with the sound of the human voice. Thus Auguste and I had
+frequent dialogues. He told me something of his past life, which I do
+not remember very well. I think its chief incident was his having been
+drafted for the army, and having served his term. Of his future,
+however, he spoke with an earnestness which has left its impression on
+my mind. He said that the next winter he meant to go to Paris and seek a
+service; and his perseverance in wringing employment out of us inclines
+me to think that he fulfilled his intention. Savoy, to which province he
+belonged, had just been annexed to France. A party of guides from
+Chamouni had the day before succeeded, with difficulty, in planting the
+imperial flag on the summit of Mont Blanc. Was it this which had
+awakened the ambition of the young Savoyard to share the spoils of the
+empire of which he had so suddenly become a member? Perhaps (I never
+thought of it before, but perhaps) he was already seeking means for his
+journey to the capital. Perhaps the price of his hard-won service was to
+be the nucleus of his savings. Have I, then, aided your purpose,
+Auguste? helped to transform you from a simple mountain-lad to a mere
+link in a chain of street-sweepers, an artful official of a third-rate
+billiard-saloon, or a roystering cab-driver with his perpetual entreaty
+for an extra fee in the form of "<i>Quelque chose &agrave; boire</i>"? My mind
+shrinks from the possibility, for I cannot bear to think of him as other
+than he then seemed,&mdash;a child of Nature and of the truth.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of our day's journey we drew near a little village. I had
+been chatting with Auguste and felt in a loquacious mood, but paused as
+I found myself passing through the village,&mdash;in other words, sneaking
+round the corner of one shabby hut, and straight through the farm-yard
+of the next, and close by the windows of a third,&mdash;the three, and a few
+other stray buildings, constituting the hamlet. As it seemed an
+impertinence to follow such an intrusive, inquisitive little road at
+all, we could, of course, do no less than maintain a dumb propriety in
+the presence of the children and kitchen-utensils, but, as we left them
+behind and struck across an open field, my eye fell on one of those
+way-side shrines common in all Roman-Catholic districts. It was a
+miniature arch of plastered or whitewashed stone, and contained, as
+nearly as I could judge from the glimpse I had in passing, two coarse
+dolls, intended to represent the Virgin and Child.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that, Auguste?" I asked, with feigned ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>"A place of worship," he answered; "the people come there to pray."</p>
+
+<p>"But what do they come <i>there</i> for?" I continued.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>God is there</i>," he answered, with emphasis, pointing at the same time
+to the gayly dressed puppets.</p>
+
+<p>"No, He is not," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>He turned round and looked at me defiantly. His mild face became that
+of a fanatic, and I actually quailed beneath his angry eye, as he
+retorted,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"He <i>is</i> there."</p>
+
+<p>My mistake flashed upon me, too, at the instant, and I hastened to
+explain myself in the simplest manner my poor French would allow,
+saying,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>"Oui, Auguste, Il est l&agrave;, c'est vrai; mais Il est l&agrave; aussi!"</i>&mdash;and I
+pointed to the snow-capped mountains on my right,&mdash;<i>"et l&agrave;!"</i>&mdash;and I
+waved my hand towards the deeply shadowed heights on the opposite side
+of the valley.</p>
+
+<p>He caught my meaning as by an inspiration. His fierce frown melted
+instantly into an intelligent smile.</p>
+
+<p><i>"Il est partout!"</i> exclaimed the youth, with enthusiasm, his childlike,
+eager eyes seeking a response in mine.</p>
+
+<p>I nodded in affirmation of the truth. It was enough. Catholic and
+Protestant had met on common ground,&mdash;we understood each other,&mdash;we were
+reconciled.</p>
+
+<p>Has he carried his large faith with him into the great metropolis? and
+have I kept mine unshaken in spite of the storm that is raging in my
+native land? Armed in his simplicity only, he has gone to meet the gusts
+of temptation; and I have lived to see the Republic, which I believed
+inviolable as Mother Earth herself, tremble and totter, as one after
+another of her rotten pillars has fallen away. God grant that we may
+both, in this day of our peril, be able, as then, to realize that "<i>Il
+est partout</i>"!</p>
+
+<p>During my short Alpine journey I held the office of paymaster for our
+party, my election being due not so much to proficiency in the queer
+dialect above alluded to as to courage in the use of it. It is always a
+pleasant office to disburse the funds, but was never more so than when,
+late at night, Michel and Auguste came to the hotel at Martigny to
+receive the reward of their day's toil. Michel had his full dues in
+money, and plenty of praise to boot; Auguste, evidently much to his
+surprise, a trifle more than his minimum price. Each of them then
+grasped my hand in his horny palm,&mdash;an unexpected salutation, but not a
+harsh one, for each hand had a heart in it, or I believed it had, which
+was all the same to me. They made the customary promise not to forget
+me, but credulity must stop somewhere, and at this point I must confess
+my easy faith gave out, and left me skeptical.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I have given the preference in order of narrative, as well as in memory,
+to guides who proved competent, willing, and true, who, if they seasoned
+the intercourse between us with a little encouragement to my
+self-esteem, had nothing in them obsequious or timeserving, and who set
+me a wholesome example of clear convictions and firmness in the
+maintenance of right. But not only are the virtues of the race whom I
+have chosen for a theme subjects of congratulation; even the
+uncertainties and misfits of these frequently rusty keys to the past
+excite a mirth that lightens the toil with which one rummages through
+the corridors of time. It would be treason to tell the name of that
+antique university-chapel where a certain wooden-headed verger was
+betrayed into the absurdest error; it would be personal to give the name
+of the waggish friend who made him his innocent butt; but the facts and
+the joke claim no disguise.</p>
+
+<p>The solemn British beadle had been rehearsing the history of numerous
+sarcophagi and monuments, dwelling with mingled pathos and indignation
+upon the injuries which the chapel, its railings, and its statues had
+sustained at the hands of that arch-destroyer and his soldiery who, in
+their zeal for the new Commonwealth, trampled brutally upon the records
+of past grandeur and royalty.</p>
+
+<p>"He stabled his 'osses 'ere! yes, 'ere,&mdash;in this wery chapel! ugh!" was
+the wrathful exclamation of our guide; and as he pointed towards the
+tablets without corners and the effigies lacking noses or feet, there
+was a low muttering in his throat and a look at us intended to excite
+sympathetic ire on our part.</p>
+
+<p>One only of our party responded to the look.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see,&mdash;Cromwell was a terrible Catholic, wasn't he?" gravely
+inquired our fellow-traveller, as if in this way, and this way only,
+could the sacrilege be accounted for,&mdash;one blue eye, as he spoke, full
+of sage earnestness, the other twinkling with fun.</p>
+
+<p>The stolid face of our guide now became a study. He had no instructions
+for such an emergency as this. The question had made war with his poor
+wits. For a moment they staggered, felt themselves defeated, and were
+about to surrender. But, resolute Briton that he was, the old man soon
+rallied his forces. True servant both of Church and State, he saw that
+there was no consistent course for him but to consign the enemy of
+royalty and the contemner of sacred monuments to the abominable Scarlet
+Lady. He gave one appealing look at his interrogator, but the side of
+the face turned towards him was immovable. It gave no positive
+discouragement to an affirmative reply; it even feigned ignorance.
+Seeking enlightenment, and taking heart of faith, the verger assented in
+the words, "Y-e-e-e-s,&mdash;I be-e-e-lieve so!" Then, his courage rising as
+he felt himself committed to the fact, he continued, with emphasis and a
+dictatorial nodding of the head, "Yes,&mdash;yes, he <i>was</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Many and laughable are the instances of such perplexity and mistake
+among the aged pieces of mechanism who have for years been sounding the
+same tune to generations of unquestioning ears, and who, not having an
+extra note in their gamut, can by no means bear to be played upon by
+strange hands. Age has its exemptions and immunities, however; might
+makes right, and one who has long been a dictator comes to be deemed an
+infallible authority. So they whine on, and are oftener believed than
+otherwise. As they constitute a class, and those whom I have to do with
+are chiefly the exceptions, I will forbear to dwell on stereotyped
+specimens, and turn to one so unlike the generality of her tribe, so
+utterly lawless, so completely at variance with all her surroundings,
+that I must beg leave to introduce her precisely as she introduced
+herself.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There is an old place in England (there may be many such, but I know
+there is one) which is consecrated to imagination, romance, and memory.
+Abandoned by its owners as a residence, it is nevertheless maintained in
+sufficient repair to prevent its walls from crumbling or its beauty of
+outline from being marred, and stands forth a living epic, written in
+stone and oak, and meriting a place among the classics of the land.</p>
+
+<p>The favorite of tourists, artists, and antiquaries, it can well dispense
+with anything like an accurate description from a traveller who went
+thither, not to study, but to muse; so, putting in a plea, beforehand,
+for possible failures in observation and memory, I propose to myself
+nothing more than a re-indulgence of the reverie which took possession
+of me on my visit to Haddon Hall.</p>
+
+<p>We had spent the middle hours of the day at Chatsworth, that palace and
+museum of modern art, and, with senses bewildered and eyes dazzled by
+the magnificence of a ducal residence unparalleled, perhaps, in the
+world for its wealth and culture, we had set off, in the latter part of
+the afternoon, to view its antipodes. The circumstances and the hour
+were not inappropriate. Sated with the most perfect display of luxury
+and taste which the present age can boast, and somewhat weary with the
+toil of sight-seeing, a six-mile drive, the gradual decline of the
+summer day, the shadows gathering over the landscape, all acted as a
+gentle narcotic, and were a fit preparative for our approach to that
+old, deserted homestead, the first glimpse of which set my fancy
+roaming, and carried me away into a world of dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto I had been the contented occupant of an old yellow coach, and
+had been satisfied with the pace of two jaded post-horses. But, as I
+crossed the drawbridge and climbed the steep hill which led to the
+principal gateway, I found myself mounted on rapid wings, and whirling
+through the centuries. Not that I was rushing on in advance of the age.
+No,&mdash;the wings flapped backwards, they careered disdainfully over and
+beyond the region of reality; as we flew, the present became merged in
+the past, the actual gave place to the ideal.</p>
+
+<p>I am approaching a feudal fortress. The deep moat, the turreted walls,
+the old gray towers, the lattice of my lady's bower, the sentry pacing
+the battlements, the warder stationed at the gate, the severe exterior
+of the grim pile, the smoking hospitality that reigns within,&mdash;I
+recognize them all. Much that I have taken on faith from my childhood
+has already been realized since I touched English shores,&mdash;why not this?
+I climb the steep slope leading to the principal entrance, and knock at
+the gate. Hark! is not that the sound of an answering horn? Is not that
+distant rattling the clash of armor on the stones? Do I not hear the
+voice of the stout baron mustering his retainers to bid me welcome? If
+so, they are a long time about it,&mdash;for I have knocked once, twice,
+three times, and there is no admittance. It is a severe process, too;
+for, though the original gate, which may have been an iron portcullis
+for aught I know, has given place to rough boards, the latter are not
+particularly tender of my knuckles, and, though romance is romance, pain
+is a fact. So I fold my airy wings for the present, and look about me
+for a big stone to pound with. It is of no use. The old castle is deaf
+and dumb. It neither hears nor answers. I creep along the edge of a
+steep bank, pry round a corner of the building, gaze up at the high
+Gothic windows, but see nothing like a practicable approach, and turn
+back, discouraged. We take counsel together, I and my party, and at
+length condescend to the belief that our best hope of obtaining an
+entrance lies in a modern farm-house, at the foot of the eminence on
+which the fortress stands. The farm-house is beyond the hail of our
+voices, but our coachman, who is stationed there with his post-chaise, a
+witness of our embarrassment, makes an encouraging sign. That the
+farm-house bears some relation to the manor-house is suggested also by
+the fact that its garden boasts a yew-tree cut into the form of a
+peacock, and the book of heraldry says that the crest of the noble Earls
+of Rutland, who occupied the hall for centuries, includes, among its
+other belongings, "a peacock, in pride, proper."</p>
+
+<p>At last, just as our impatience had reached the verge of indignation, a
+little figure emerged from the shadow of the farm-house, and sauntered
+towards us. She was a pretty child, a true daughter of the Saxon race,
+fair-haired, blue-eyed, and sunny-complexioned. She was the pink of
+neatness, too, and it was evident that the time we had spent in waiting
+had been passed by her at her toilet, for the folds were still fresh in
+her snowy apron, and her golden hair glistened smoothly within the bars
+of a net,&mdash;that unfailing net, sure emblem of British female
+nationality. Her dainty little hat was trimmed with white ribbons, which
+streamed behind her in the breeze, and, altogether, she was as complete
+a picture as one would wish to see of youth, health, and
+self-complacency.</p>
+
+<p>The nonchalance with which she approached us was a thing I have never
+seen equalled. The independence of American children is proverbial; but
+democratic institutions never produced anything more saucily
+self-reliant than this little Briton. Without looking at us, or deigning
+any apology for the great gate,&mdash;which, it seems, is a mere barricade,
+not made to be opened,&mdash;she unlocked a side-postern, a rude door,
+consisting of two or three rough boards, and made a motion for us to
+enter. As we trod the time-worn pavement of the outer court, and gained
+an open quadrangle round which various apartments were grouped,
+imagination once more took possession of me, and I found myself peopling
+the place with its original inmates.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how old and story-like!" I exclaimed to my companions. "Can you not
+imagine knights on horseback prancing over these stones, and alighting
+at the great hall-door beyond?"</p>
+
+<p>"Horses never came up here!" was the interruption which my suggestion
+met from our practical little guide. "Horses couldn't climb those
+stairs," she added, somewhat scornfully; and I then observed that I had
+unconsciously ascended a rough, angular stairway, passable only to
+foot-passengers.</p>
+
+<p>Knights on foot, then, my fancy at once substituted; and as the child,
+now commencing her duties as show-woman, pointed out the servants'
+offices, it was no difficult matter to picture the baron's retainers
+lazily grouped around the stone walls of the low cells, for such the
+apartments were, polishing their master's armor, or bousing over jugs of
+ale, while handsome pages loitered about the court-yard, waiting the
+summons of their lord, or the sound of their lady's silver whistle.
+Fancy was an indispensable attendant in making the circuit of the
+apartments, which surrounded at least three sides of this outer
+quadrangle. Without her aid, they were simply remarkable for their
+similarity, their vacancy, their unfitness for any modern purpose save
+that of sheep-pens or lumber-rooms. Destitute of windows, so that the
+sun and air found admittance only through the doorway, without
+fireplaces, boarded floors, or plastered walls, they presented simply so
+many square feet of space walled in by stone and mortar. But Fancy had
+the power to enliven, furnish, people them. She suggested that their
+very number was an indication of sociability, excitement, noise, and
+mirth. Here, as in all feudal dwellings, the vast disproportion between
+the space allotted to the dependents and that reserved for the lord of
+the manor pointed to the time when each castle was a walled city, each
+baronial hall the home of a crowd of petty retainers. In that long-ago,
+what multitudes of voices had stirred the silence of the court-yard! The
+bare walls of the apartments then were hung with breast-plate, spear,
+and cross-bow,&mdash;trophies of war and the chase furnished decorations
+suited to the taste of the occupants, and the hides of slaughtered
+beasts carpeted the cold floor. Stirring tales of love and warfare
+gathered little knots of listeners; wandering minstrels sought
+hospitality, and repaid it in songs and rhymes; the beef and the bowl
+went round; my lord's jester made his privileged way into every circle
+in turn, and cracked his jokes at everybody's expense; and pretty Bess,
+my lady's maid, peeped in at the open door, just in time to join in the
+laugh against her lover.</p>
+
+<p>But Fancy only whispered, and another little attendant, whose name was
+Fact, spoke out, and interrupted her.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you like to see the family-plate?" asked our guide, with the air
+of one who felt she had really nothing worth showing, but was bound to
+fulfil her task; and, entering one of the stone-walled apartments, she
+pointed out a few enormous pewter platters, much dimmed by time and
+neglect, leaning against the wall.</p>
+
+<p>What visions of Christmas feasts and wassails these relics might have
+awakened in me, had I been left to gaze on them undisturbed, it is
+impossible to say; but my mind was not permitted to follow its own bent.</p>
+
+<p>"There's nicer ones down at the house, all brightened up," said the
+child, with simplicity, and looking disdain at the heirlooms she was
+displaying.</p>
+
+<p>The estimate put by the little girl upon the comparative value of old
+pewter dishes was suggestive. Whether the farm-house had robbed the
+castle, or the castle the farm-house, became at once an open question,
+and romance died in doubt.</p>
+
+<p>There could be no doubt, however, as to the genuineness of the rude old
+dining-hall to which we were conducted next. The clumsy oaken table
+still occupied the raised end of the apartment, where the baron feasted
+his principal guests. The carved and panelled gallery whence his
+minstrels cheered the banquet still stood firm on its massive pillars,
+and the great stags'-antlers which surmounted it told of his skill as a
+sportsman. What giant logs might once have burned in the wide
+fireplaces, what sounds of revelry have gone up to the bare rafters! Our
+guide's tongue went glibly as she pointed out these familiar objects,
+and in the kitchen, buttery, and wine-vault, which were situated
+conveniently near to the dining-hall, she seemed equally at home. It was
+easy to recognize in the great stone chimneys, with their heavy hooks
+and cross-bars, symptoms of banquets for which bullocks were roasted
+whole and sheep and calves slain by the dozen; but we needed her
+practised lips to suggest the uses of the huge stone chopping-blocks,
+the deeply sunk troughs, the narrow gutters that crossed the stone
+pavement, all illustrative of the primitive days when butcher and cook
+wrought simultaneously, and this contracted cellar served at once for
+slaughter-house and kitchen. Her little airy figure was in strange
+contrast with these gloomy passages, these stones that had reeked with
+blood and smoke. She glided before us into the mysterious depths of the
+storehouse and ale-vault, as the new moon glides among damp, black
+clouds; as she directed our attention to the oaken cupboards for bread
+and cheese, the stone benches that once supported long rows of casks,
+the little wicket in the doorway, through which the butler doled out
+provisions to a waiting crowd of poor, she might well have been likened
+to a freshly trimmed lamp, lighting up the dark, mysterious past.</p>
+
+<p>Freshly trimmed she unquestionably was, and by careful hands, but not a
+voluntary light; for, the moment her explanations were finished, or our
+curiosity satisfied, she sank into an indifference of speech and
+attitude which proved her distaste to a place and a task utterly foreign
+to her nature. Evidently, the hall which we had come so far to see, and
+were so eager to explore, was at once the most familiar object of her
+life and her most utter aversion. She had been drilled into a mechanical
+knowledge of its history, but the place itself was to her what an old
+grammar or spelling-book is to the unwilling pupil,&mdash;a thing to be
+learned by rote, to be abused, contemned, escaped from. As we finished
+our exploration of the lower floor, she probably breathed a sigh of
+relief, feeling that the first chapter of her task was concluded.</p>
+
+<p>But a second and more difficult was yet to follow,&mdash;for we now ascended
+a staircase of uncemented blocks of stone, crossed a passage, and found
+ourselves in a long gallery or hall, the finest and best-preserved room
+in the castle, the state-apartment and ball-room of the lords of the
+manor. Our admiration at once broke forth in words of surprise and
+delight. The architecture of this room was of much more recent date than
+that portion of the building which we had already visited. It was
+Elizabethan in its style, and one of the finest specimens of the period.
+It was floored and wainscoted with oak; its frieze richly carved and
+adorned with boars' heads, thistles, and roses; its ceiling, also of
+oak, beautifully panelled and ornamented. There was a great square
+recess in the middle of the gallery, and along one side of it a row of
+bow-windows, through whose diamond panes a fine view was afforded of the
+quaint old garden and balconies below. Here, doubtless, knights and
+dames of the olden time had danced, coquetted, quarrelled, and been
+reconciled. Within those deep embrasures courtiers in ruffs and plumes
+had sued for ladies' favors, and plotted deep intrigues of state. What
+stories these walls could tell, had they but tongues to speak! What
+dreams did their very silence conjure up!</p>
+
+<p>Led by a more erratic spirit than that even of our child-guide, I am
+afraid I lent an inattentive ear to her accurate statement of the
+length, breadth, and height of the gallery in which we stood, the
+precise date of its erection, the noble owners of the various
+coats-of-arms carved above the doorway; for I remember only that she
+seemed confident and well-informed, and recited her lesson faithfully
+so long as she was suffered to follow the beaten track. How impossible
+it was to extract anything beyond that from her we soon had proof.</p>
+
+<p>She ushered us next into my lord's parlor, which nearly adjoined the
+gallery. This room was hung with arras, retained a few articles of
+ancient furniture, had one or two pictures hanging on its walls, and
+presented, altogether, a more habitable look than any other portion of
+the castle. Our little maid had got on well with her description of this
+room, had pointed out the portrait of Prince Arthur, once a resident at
+the hall, had introduced that of Will Somers, my lord's jester, as
+glibly as if Will were a playmate of her own, had deciphered for us the
+excellent moral precept carved in old English beneath the royal arms,
+"Drede God and honour the King," and was proceeding rapidly with an
+array of measurements and dates, when I unluckily interrupted her,&mdash;I
+think it was to ask some question about the tapestry. She looked at me
+reproachfully, indignantly,&mdash;just as a child reciting the
+multiplication-table before the School-Committee would look, if tripped
+up between the numbers, or as a boy, taken advantage of in play, might
+cry, "No fair!" She did not condescend to answer me, perhaps she could
+not, but paused a moment, reflected, went deliberately back in her
+recital, repeated the last few dates and phrases by way of gaining an
+impetus, and then went on without faltering to the end of her prescribed
+narration.</p>
+
+<p>Poor child! She had my sympathy, and has still. What a grudge she must
+owe us tourists, even the tamest and most submissive of us, for whom she
+is thus compelled to tax her unwilling memory!</p>
+
+<p>But if her spirits were damped, her good-humor threatened, it was for a
+minute only. Upon completing our rapid survey of my lord's parlor, and
+looking round for the guide who should conduct us farther, she had
+become invisible. So we moved on without her, and commenced exploring a
+narrow passage with a certain sense of bewilderment at its loneliness,
+and the doubt whither it might lead, when, suddenly, we were startled by
+a merry laugh, which seemed to ring through the air directly above our
+heads. Was it a mocking spirit that haunted the place? or one of the old
+figures on the tapestry, started into life? We looked up, and there, on
+a rough platform of pine boards, projecting from the wall, stood our
+Fenella. She was leaning over the shoulder of an artist-boy, who, seated
+at his easel, was copying one of the Gorgon-heads that stood out on the
+faded tapestry. She had dismissed us wholly from her thoughts, and,
+giving play to her native fun and coquetry, was taunting the youth with
+the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she
+last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the
+boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive
+which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some
+elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her
+future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer
+felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall,
+and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring out in
+fresh colors the staring eyes and mummied cheeks which would otherwise
+soon be lost to memory. She certainly made the most of her opportunity
+to taunt and tease him, for there was time for a laugh and a word of
+raillery only, to which he seemed too shamefaced to respond, before she
+was at our side again, gravely announcing, "My lady's chamber!"&mdash;and as
+we looked around the apartment, whose furniture and decorations imparted
+to it a superior air of neatness and refinement to that observable
+elsewhere, she pointed out to us a private doorway, conducting to a
+flight of steps, and affording an exit by which "my lady" had easy
+access to the court-yard, and thence to the chapel where she performed
+her devotions.</p>
+
+<p>"And what are the rooms opposite?" we asked, pointing to a long row of
+windows on the second floor, on the opposite side of the quadrangle to
+that of which we had now completed the inspection.</p>
+
+<p>"Those rooms are never shown," was the mysterious answer.</p>
+
+<p>"But you will show them to <i>us</i>" (spoken coaxingly).</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head, and sealed her lips, with an expression of
+determination.</p>
+
+<p>"What is in them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothing in particular."</p>
+
+<p>"Then we might see them."</p>
+
+<p>No encouragement, but, on the contrary, a resolute negative.</p>
+
+<p>A bribe was held out,&mdash;for, by this time, the child's air of mystery and
+reserve had suggested a closet like that of Bluebeard, a chamber of
+torture, or, at least, the proofs of some family-secret.</p>
+
+<p>We might as well have offered a two-shilling bribe to the Iron Duke
+himself. The miniature castle-keeper was so firm and so non-committal
+that she disarmed us of all our ingenuity, defeated all our tactics, and
+we gave up the point. I have since learned that this quarter of the
+mansion consists of a labyrinth of rooms, shut up because devoid of
+interest, and containing only some old lumber. To have conducted us
+through them would have been to disobey orders, and, worse still,
+establish a precedent, from which the child might well shrink. It would
+have doubled her arduous round of duty. It was policy, no less than
+loyalty, which had inspired her.</p>
+
+<p>So, too, when we came to inspect the chapel. She mounted an old oak
+chest in the rear of the little sanctuary, just beneath the solitary
+window, whose quaint patterns in stained glass pointed to centuries long
+past. Seated comfortably on this elevation, she rehearsed the history
+and described the architecture of the most primitive place of worship I
+ever saw,&mdash;or, if she left her post to point out some minuter detail,
+she returned to it as jealously as a watch-dog to some spot which he is
+specially appointed to guard. When our curiosity was otherwise
+satisfied,&mdash;when we had even ascended to the rude confessional, which
+was a mere excavation in the soft stone of the wall,&mdash;when we had put
+our hands in the hollow, not unlike a swallow's nest in a mud-bank, once
+the receptacle for holy water,&mdash;when we had descended the stony pathway,
+for it was so worn as scarcely to merit the name of staircase,&mdash;when,
+standing once more on the chapel-pavement, with minds excited by the
+thought of those monkish days when priestcraft ruled the land,&mdash;our eyes
+naturally fell on the old oak chest. What further revelation might not
+this disclose! What sacred relics, what curious church-plate, what
+vellum manuscript, might not be hidden beneath this heavy lid! Would she
+rise and let us see?</p>
+
+<p>No,&mdash;she maintained her seat and her reserve with as much rigidity as on
+the former occasion. Unconvinced by this experience, our imaginations
+still ran riot. They shadowed forth every possible beauty and horror
+which such a giant chest might contain. The story even of "The Bride of
+the Mistletoe-Bough" might be verified, if we could but get a peep. At
+last we prevailed. The child was persuaded to dismount, we lifted the
+cover, and the chest was empty,&mdash;literally empty.</p>
+
+<p>Once more the plain fact of the present had swept away the cobwebs of
+the past, the real had banished the ideal. While the child of to-day
+sought only a comfortable rest from weariness, we had been seeking
+myths. She looked on as indignant as a dethroned queen. We turned away a
+little mortified, and a good deal disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>But the Fenella of the castle was not so very tired, after all. True,
+she was tired of the old manor-house, tired of us, tired of her own dull
+routine of duty; but there was a well-spring of freshness in her yet.
+She moved languidly, to be sure, as she now led the way to the tower,
+the only portion of the castle yet unvisited. Following her, we
+ascended, first, to a bare upper room, a sort of anteroom, from which
+the ascent to the tower commenced. It presented a solid inclosure of
+stone, except on the western side, where it was dimly lighted through
+one or two slits in the masonry. Turning my eyes in this direction, I
+saw our little guide leaning against the stone framework of one of these
+chinks in the wall. The beams of western sunlight came slanting in at
+precisely the angle of her figure as she leaned back in infantile
+repose; her white ribbons, her snowy apron, her golden hair caught and
+held the sunshine, and the ray of light which relieved the gloom of the
+gray old vault seemed to emanate from the child.</p>
+
+<p>One of our party addressed some question to her regarding the probable
+design of the empty room in which we stood; but there was no
+answer,&mdash;not even a responsive glance. Her eyes were fixed upon the
+stone roof. She looked spell-bound. Before we could follow the direction
+of her steady gaze, we were startled by the flapping of wings overhead,
+and, still more, by the sudden rushing forward of the child with a loud
+cry of "Shoo! shoo!" and with her hands stretched eagerly into the air.
+Our presence had disturbed a swallow, which had found its way in through
+one of the slits, and, perhaps, built a nest in some crevice of the
+wall. The girl's languor was instantaneously dispelled by the discovery
+and the excitement of pursuit. Here, now, was congenial sport. Hopeless
+as was the attempt to catch the bird, the joy of frightening it was
+sure; and our guide sprang wildly from side to side of the building,
+uttering exciting exclamations, and making vain passes at the little
+creature, which flew round high above her head, now and then settling in
+some secure "coigne of vantage." In these intervals we endeavored to
+catch the attention of the mischievous fowler, but her task had ended
+with this tower-room, she had done with us, she had found an unexpected
+source of sport, and was not to be deterred from an enjoyment which she
+probably thought well-earned. With one eye following the least motion of
+the bird, she informed us, at last, in reply to repeated inquiries, that
+there was nothing to be told about the room we were in,&mdash;that it merely
+led to the tower,&mdash;we could go up into the tower, if we wished.</p>
+
+<p>She must go with us and show us the way.</p>
+
+<p>"No," was the cool reply. She never went into the tower; she never went
+any farther than this.</p>
+
+<p>Glancing at the dilapidated state of the stairs leading to the
+successive stones of the tower, we were almost tempted to believe that
+her instinct of self-preservation had reached its climax here,&mdash;that we
+might break our necks, if we liked,&mdash;she preferred not to run the risk.
+Resolved to satisfy our suspicions, we pressed the point, and, after
+many inquiries and waiting a considerable time upon the motions of the
+child and her new plaything, we got the brief and somewhat scornful
+explanation,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What if some other party should come while I was away?"</p>
+
+<p>"We part here, then?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded in assent, received the fee for her services without
+acknowledgment, and saw us depart on our breakneck expedition with an
+indifference equalled only by the nonchalance with which she had
+admitted us on our arrival. The moment our backs were turned, she
+resumed her play.</p>
+
+<p>After exploring the successive stories of the tower in safety, we
+descended by way of the anteroom, but the bird and its pursuer had both
+of them flown. We passed through a door she had previously pointed out,
+and gained the garden as surreptitiously as did Dorothy Vernon, of old,
+when, according to the tradition, she escaped through this same doorway
+on the night of her sister's nuptials, and eloped with her lover, Mr.
+(afterwards Sir John) Manners, who had long been haunting the
+neighboring forest as an outlaw. We strolled through the ancient garden,
+all ivied and moss-grown, admired the stone balustrade, which,
+time-stained and mouldy, is still the student's favorite bit of
+architecture, and at last made our way back to the farm-house,&mdash;I am
+sure I do not remember how, for we were as deficient in a guide as on
+our first attempt at entrance. Whether another party arrived while we
+were in the tower, and were engrossing her attention,&mdash;whether she was
+engaged in the more agreeable office of coquetting with the young
+artist, or was still chasing the swallow from room to room of the
+manor-house, I do not know. We saw her no more. She had barely
+condescended to let us in, and now left us to find our way out as we
+could.</p>
+
+<p>She cared nothing at all for us. All the interest we had manifested in
+her (and it was considerable) had failed to awaken any emotion. We were
+a stereotyped feature of the old hall; and the old hall, though she had
+sprung from its root, and her life had been nourished by its strength,
+was no part of herself,&mdash;was her antipathy. Still I never think of the
+mansion, with all the romantic associations which cluster around it, but
+the image of this child comes to break my reverie, as she did on the day
+when it was first indulged.</p>
+
+<p>So we go to visit some royal oak, and bring away, as a memento, the
+daisy which blooms at its foot; so we stand, as the reward of toil and
+fatigue, upon an Alpine glacier, and the trophy and pledge of our visit
+are the forget-me-not that grew on its margin. Thus youth and beauty
+ever press on the footsteps of old age, and youth and beauty bear away
+the palm.</p>
+
+<p>My faith in legendary lore is confirmed, when I call to mind the Gothic
+fortress, with its strong defences against the enemy, its rude
+suggestions of centuries of hospitality, its tower-lattices, whence
+generation after generation of high-born maids waved signals to knightly
+lovers, its stairways, worn slippery with the tread of heavy-mailed
+warriors, its chapel-vault, where chivalrous lord and noble dame have
+turned to dust. But there is a faith more precious than the faith in old
+song and legend; and the golden-haired child, who flourishes so fresh
+and fair amidst all this ruin and decay, stands forth to my mind as an
+emblem of that power which renovates earth and defies time. Had she been
+a pattern child, had her instructors (whoever they were) succeeded in
+moulding her into a mere machine, she might not so vividly have roused
+my interest; but there was something in her saucy independence, her
+wayward freaks, her coquettish airs, her fiery chase after the swallow,
+which&mdash;breaking in, as they did, upon the docility with which she
+otherwise went through her round of duty&mdash;revivified the desolation of
+the old hall with a sudden outburst of humanity. Everywhere else the
+fountain of life seemed to have died out, but here it gushed forth a
+living stream.</p>
+
+<p>We gaze down the centuries and see in them ignorance, error, warning,
+and ruin at last. What hope for the race, then, if this were all? But it
+is not all. The child's foot treading lightly over the graves is the
+type of the <i>time-is</i> triumphing over the <i>time-was</i>. Full of faults and
+imperfections, she is still the daughter of Hope and Opportunity. She
+has the past for her teacher, and the door of knowledge, repentance, and
+faith stands open before her. Thus childhood is the rainbow of God's
+providence, and the brightest feature of His covenant with men.</p>
+
+<p>Silence, desolation, and decay have set their seal upon old Haddon Hall,
+but chance has set a child over them all, and the lesson her simple
+presence teaches is worth more to me than all the Idyls of the King.</p>
+
+<p>And thus it is that I treasure up the memory of her among my catalogue
+of guides; and so she did more for me than she promised, when she
+undertook to lend me her light through the old Hall.</p>
+
+<p>If there are any who can live without thus borrowing, then let them
+disparage guides. For the rest, the best guide is Humility. We have all
+so many dark paths to tread from the cradle to the grave, that we need
+to lay hold on all the helps we can. Groping blindly down the avenues
+of Time, who is there that does not long to grasp some friendly hand, or
+follow in the track of some traveller familiar with the way?</p>
+
+<p>For me, Experience is a staff on which I am glad to lean, Simplicity is
+an unfailing leader where Learning might go astray. Trust is a lamp that
+burns through the darkest night; and sometimes, when strong men are weak
+and wise men foolish, strength and wisdom are given unto babes, and he
+whom the counsels of the elders cannot save may walk the narrowest path
+in safety with his hand in the hand of a little child.</p>
+
+<p>God grant me guides, then, to my journey's end! God guide us all,
+whether we will or no! guide the nations, and make for them a way
+through the dust, the turmoil, and the strife which Time has heaped in
+their path, to the freshness and promise of the new birth! guide each
+poor yearning soul through the darkness and doubt that overshadow it, as
+it journeys on to the clear light of immortal day!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_KALIF_OF_BALDACCA" id="THE_KALIF_OF_BALDACCA"></a>THE KALIF OF BALDACCA.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Into the city of Kambalu,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the road that leadeth to Ispahan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At the head of his dusty caravan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Laden with treasure from realms afar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Baldacca and Kelat and Kandahar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rode the great captain Ala&ugrave;.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Khan from his palace-window gazed:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He saw in the thronging street beneath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the light of the setting sun, that blazed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through the clouds of dust by the caravan raised,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The flash of harness and jewelled sheath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the shining scimitars of the guard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the weary camels that bared their teeth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As they passed and passed through the gates unbarred<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the shade of the palace-yard.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thus into the city of Kambalu<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rode the great captain Ala&ugrave;;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And he stood before the Khan, and said,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"The enemies of my lord are dead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the Kalifs of all the West<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bow and obey his least behest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The plains are dark with the mulberry-trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The weavers are busy in Samarcand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The miners are sifting the golden sand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The divers are plunging for pearls in the seas,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And peace and plenty are in the land.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Only Baldacca's Kalif alone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rose in rebellion against thy throne:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His treasures are at thy palace-door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the swords and the shawls and the jewels he wore;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His body is dust o'er the Desert blown.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A mile outside of Baldacca's gate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I left my forces to lie in wait,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Concealed by forests and hillocks of sand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And forward dashed with a handful of men<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lure the old tiger from his den<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the ambush I had planned.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere we reached the town the alarm was spread,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For we heard the sound of gongs from within;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With clash of cymbals and warlike din<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The gates swung wide; we turned and fled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the garrison sallied forth and pursued,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the gray old Kalif at their head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And above them the banner of Mahomed:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus we snared them all, and the town was subdued.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"As in at the gate we rode, behold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A tower that was called the Tower of Gold!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For there the Kalif had hidden his wealth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaped and hoarded and piled on high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like sacks of wheat in a granary;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there the old miser crept by stealth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To feel of the gold that gave him health,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To gaze and gloat with his hungry eye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On jewels that gleamed like a glow-worm's spark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the eyes of a panther in the dark.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I said to the Kalif,&mdash;'Thou art old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou hast no need of so much gold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till the breath of battle was hot and near,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But have sown through the land these useless hoards<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To spring into shining blades of swords,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And keep thine honor sweet and clear.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These grains of gold are not grains of wheat;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These bars of silver thou canst not eat;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These jewels and pearls and precious stones<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cannot cure the aches in thy bones,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor keep the feet of Death one hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From climbing the stairways of thy tower!'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then into this dungeon I locked the drone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And left him to feed there all alone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the honey-cells of his golden hive:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was heard from those massive walls of stone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor again was the Kalif seen alive!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When at last we unlocked the door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We found him dead upon the floor;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rings had dropped from his withered hands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His teeth were like bones in the Desert sands;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still clutching his treasures he had died;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And as he lay there, he appeared<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A statue of gold with a silver beard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His arms outstretched as if crucified."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This is the story, strange and true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That the great captain Ala&ugrave;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Told to his brother the Tartar Khan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When he rode that day into Kambalu<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the road that leadeth to Ispahan.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="LIFE_ON_THE_SEA_ISLANDS" id="LIFE_ON_THE_SEA_ISLANDS"></a>LIFE ON THE SEA ISLANDS.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>PART II.</h3>
+
+<p>A few days before Christmas, we were delighted at receiving a beautiful
+Christmas Hymn from Whittier, written by request, especially for our
+children. They learned it very easily, and enjoyed singing it. We showed
+them the writer's picture, and told them he was a very good friend of
+theirs, who felt the deepest interest in them, and had written this hymn
+expressly for them to sing,&mdash;which made them very proud and happy. Early
+Christmas morning, we were wakened by the people knocking at the doors
+and windows, and shouting, "Merry Christmas!" After distributing some
+little presents among them, we went to the church, which had been
+decorated with holly, pine, cassena, mistletoe, and the hanging moss,
+and had a very Christmas-like look. The children of our school assembled
+there, and we gave them the nice, comfortable clothing, and the
+picture-books, which had been kindly sent by some Philadelphia ladies.
+There were at least a hundred and fifty children present. It was very
+pleasant to see their happy, expectant little faces. To them, it was a
+wonderful Christmas-Day,&mdash;such as they had never dreamed of before.
+There was cheerful sunshine without, lighting up the beautiful
+moss-drapery of the oaks, and looking in joyously through the open
+windows; and there were bright faces and glad hearts within. The long,
+dark night of the Past, with all its sorrows and its fears, was
+forgotten; and for the Future,&mdash;the eyes of these freed children see no
+clouds in it. It is full of sunlight, they think, and they trust in it,
+perfectly.</p>
+
+<p>After the distribution of the gifts, the children were addressed by some
+of the gentlemen present. They then sang Whittier's Hymn, the "John
+Brown" song, and several of their own hymns, among them a very singular
+one, commencing,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I wonder where my mudder gone;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sing, O graveyard!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Graveyard ought to know me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ring, Jerusalem!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grass grow in de graveyard;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sing, O graveyard!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Graveyard ought to know me;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ring, Jerusalem!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They improvise many more words as they sing. It is one of the strangest,
+most mournful things I ever heard. It is impossible to give any idea of
+the deep pathos of the refrain,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sing, O graveyard!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In this, and many other hymns, the words seem to have but little
+meaning; but the tones,&mdash;a whole lifetime of despairing sadness is
+concentrated in them. They sing, also, "Jehovyah, Hallelujah," which we
+like particularly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"De foxes hab holes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">An' de birdies hab nes',<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But de Son ob Man he hab not where<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To lay de weary head.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8"><span class="smcap">Chorus.</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Jehovyah, Hallelujah! De Lord He will purvide!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Jehovyah, Hallelujah! De Lord He will purvide!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They repeat the words many times. "De foxes hab holes," and the
+succeeding lines, are sung in the most touching, mournful tones; and
+then the chorus&mdash;"Jehovyah, Hallelujah"&mdash;swells forth triumphantly, in
+glad contrast.</p>
+
+<p>Christmas night, the children came in and had several grand shouts. They
+were too happy to keep still.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Miss, all I want to do is to sing and shout!" said our little pet,
+Amaretta. And sing and shout she did, to her heart's content.</p>
+
+<p>She read nicely, and was very fond of books. The tiniest children are
+delighted to get a book in their hands. Many of them already know their
+letters. The parents are eager to have them learn. They sometimes said
+to me,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Do, Miss, let de chil'en learn eberyting dey can. <i>We</i> nebber hab no
+chance to learn nuttin', but we wants de chil'en to learn."</p>
+
+<p>They are willing to make many sacrifices that their children may attend
+school. One old woman, who had a large family of children and
+grandchildren, came regularly to school in the winter, and took her seat
+among the little ones. She was at least sixty years old. Another
+woman&mdash;who had one of the best faces I ever saw&mdash;came daily, and brought
+her baby in her arms. It happened to be one of the best babies in the
+world, a perfect little "model of deportment," and allowed its mother to
+pursue her studies without interruption.</p>
+
+<p>While taking charge of the store, one day, one of the men who came in
+told me a story which interested me much. He was a carpenter, living on
+this island, and just before the capture of Port Royal had been taken by
+his master to the mainland,&mdash;"the Main," as the people call it,&mdash;to
+assist in building some houses which were to shelter the families of the
+Rebels in case the "Yankees" should come. The master afterward sent him
+back to the island, providing him with a pass, to bring away a boat and
+some of the people. On his arrival he found that the Union troops were
+in possession, and determined to remain here with his family instead of
+returning to his master. Some of his fellow-servants, who had been left
+on "the Main," hearing that the Federal troops had come, resolved to
+make their escape to the islands. They found a boat of their master's,
+out of which a piece six feet square had been cut. In the night they
+went to the boat, which had been sunk in a creek near the house,
+measured the hole, and, after several nights' work in the woods, made a
+piece large enough to fit in. They then mended and sank it again, as
+they had found it. The next night five of them embarked. They had a
+perilous journey, often passing quite near the enemy's boats. They
+travelled at night, and in the day ran close up to the shore out of
+sight. Sometimes they could hear the hounds, which had been sent in
+pursuit of them, baying in the woods. Their provisions gave out, and
+they were nearly exhausted. At last they succeeded in passing all the
+enemy's boats, and reached one of our gun-boats in safety. They were
+taken on board and kindly cared for, and then sent to this island, where
+their families, who had no hope of ever seeing them again, welcomed them
+with great rejoicing.</p>
+
+<p>We were also told the story of two girls, one about ten, the other
+fifteen, who, having been taken by their master up into the country, on
+the mainland, at the time of the capture of the islands, determined to
+try to escape to their parents, who had been left on this island. They
+stole away at night, and travelled through woods and swamps for two
+days, without eating. Sometimes their strength gave out, and they would
+sink down, thinking they could go no farther; but they had brave little
+hearts, and got up again and struggled on, till at last they reached
+Port-Royal Ferry, in a state of utter exhaustion. They were seen there
+by a boat-load of people who were also making their escape. The boat was
+too full to take them in; but the people, on reaching this island, told
+the children's father of their whereabouts, and he immediately took a
+boat, and hastened to the ferry. The poor little creatures were almost
+wild with joy when they saw him. When they were brought to their mother,
+she fell down "jes' as if she was dead,"&mdash;so our informant expressed
+it,&mdash;overpowered with joy on beholding the "lost who were found."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>New-Year's-Day&mdash;Emancipation-Day&mdash;was a glorious one to us. The morning
+was quite cold, the coldest we had experienced; but we were determined
+to go to the celebration at Camp Saxton,&mdash;the camp of the First Regiment
+South-Carolina Volunteers,&mdash;whither the General and Colonel Higginson
+had bidden us, on this, "the greatest day in the nation's history." We
+enjoyed perfectly the exciting scene on board the Flora. There was an
+eager, wondering crowd of the freed people in their holiday-attire, with
+the gayest of head-handkerchiefs, the whitest of aprons, and the
+happiest of faces. The band was playing, the flags streaming, everybody
+talking merrily and feeling strangely happy. The sun shone brightly, the
+very waves seemed to partake of the universal gayety, and danced and
+sparkled more joyously than ever before. Long before we reached Camp
+Saxton we could see the beautiful grove, and the ruins of the old
+Huguenot fort near it. Some companies of the First Regiment were drawn
+up in line under the trees, near the landing, to receive us. A fine,
+soldierly-looking set of men; their brilliant dress against the trees
+(they were then wearing red pantaloons) invested them with a
+semi-barbaric splendor. It was my good fortune to find among the
+officers an old friend,&mdash;and what it was to meet a friend from the
+North, in our isolated Southern life, no one can imagine who has not
+experienced the pleasure. Letters were an unspeakable luxury,&mdash;we
+hungered for them, we could never get enough; but to meet old
+friends,&mdash;that was "too much, too much," as the people here say, when
+they are very much in earnest. Our friend took us over the camp, and
+showed us all the arrangements. Everything looked clean and comfortable,
+much neater, we were told, than in most of the white camps. An officer
+told us that he had never seen a regiment in which the men were so
+honest. "In many other camps," said he, "the colonel and the rest of us
+would find it necessary to place a guard before our tents. We never do
+it here. They are left entirely unguarded. Yet nothing has ever been
+touched." We were glad to know that. It is a remarkable fact, when we
+consider that these men have all their lives been <i>slaves</i>; and we know
+what the teachings of Slavery are.</p>
+
+<p>The celebration took place in the beautiful grove of live-oaks adjoining
+the camp. It was the largest grove we had seen. I wish it were possible
+to describe fitly the scene which met our eyes as we sat upon the stand,
+and looked down on the crowd before us. There were the black soldiers in
+their blue coats and scarlet pantaloons, the officers of this and other
+regiments in their handsome uniforms, and crowds of lookers-on,&mdash;men,
+women, and children, of every complexion, grouped in various attitudes
+under the moss-hung trees. The faces of all wore a happy, interested
+look. The exercises commenced with a prayer by the chaplain of the
+regiment. An ode, written for the occasion by Professor Zachos, was read
+by him, and then sung. Colonel Higginson then introduced Dr. Brisbane,
+who read the President's Proclamation, which was enthusiastically
+cheered. Rev. Mr. French presented to the Colonel two very elegant
+flags, a gift to the regiment from the Church of the Puritans,
+accompanying them by an appropriate and enthusiastic speech. At its
+conclusion, before Colonel Higginson could reply, and while he still
+stood holding the flags in his hand, some of the colored people, of
+their own accord, commenced singing, "My Country, 'tis of thee." It was
+a touching and beautiful incident, and sent a thrill through all our
+hearts. The Colonel was deeply moved by it. He said that that reply was
+far more effective than any speech he could make. But he did make one of
+those stirring speeches which are "half battles." All hearts swelled
+with emotion as we listened to his glorious words,&mdash;"stirring the soul
+like the sound of a trumpet."</p>
+
+<p>His soldiers are warmly attached to him, and he evidently feels towards
+them all as if they were his children. The people speak of him as "the
+officer who never leaves his regiment for pleasure," but devotes
+himself, with all his rich gifts of mind and heart, to their interests.
+It is not strange that his judicious kindness, ready sympathy, and rare
+fascination of manner should attach them to him strongly. He is one's
+ideal of an officer. There is in him much of the grand, knightly spirit
+of the olden time,&mdash;scorn of all that is mean and ignoble, pity for the
+weak, chivalrous devotion to the cause of the oppressed.</p>
+
+<p>General Saxton spoke also, and was received with great enthusiasm.
+Throughout the morning, repeated cheers were given for him by the
+regiment, and joined in heartily by all the people. They know him to be
+one of the best and noblest men in the world. His Proclamation for
+Emancipation-Day we thought, if possible, even more beautiful than the
+Thanksgiving Proclamation.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of Colonel Higginson's speech he presented the flags to the
+color-bearers, Sergeant Rivers and Sergeant Sutton, with an earnest
+charge, to which they made appropriate replies. We were particularly
+pleased with Robert Sutton, who is a man of great natural intelligence,
+and whose remarks were simple, eloquent, and forcible.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gage also uttered some earnest words; and then the regiment sang
+"John Brown" with much spirit. After the meeting we saw the
+dress-parade, a brilliant and beautiful sight. An officer told us that
+the men went through the drill remarkably well,&mdash;that the ease and
+rapidity with which they learned the movements were wonderful. To us it
+seemed strange as a miracle,&mdash;this black regiment, the first mustered
+into the service of the United States, doing itself honor in the sight
+of the officers of other regiments, many of whom, doubtless, "came to
+scoff." The men afterwards had a great feast, ten oxen having been
+roasted whole for their especial benefit.</p>
+
+<p>We went to the landing, intending to take the next boat for Beaufort;
+but finding it very much crowded, waited for another. It was the
+softest, loveliest moonlight; we seated ourselves on the ruined wall of
+the old fort; and when the boat had got a short distance from the shore
+the band in it commenced playing "Sweet Home." The moonlight on the
+water, the perfect stillness around, the wildness and solitude of the
+ruins, all seemed to give new pathos to that ever dear and beautiful old
+song. It came very near to all of us,&mdash;strangers in that strange
+Southern land. After a while we retired to one of the tents,&mdash;for the
+night-air, as usual, grew dangerously damp,&mdash;and, sitting around the
+bright wood-fire, enjoyed the brilliant and entertaining conversation.
+Very unwilling were we to go home; for, besides the attractive society,
+we knew that the soldiers were to have grand shouts and a general
+jubilee that night. But the Flora was coming, and we were obliged to say
+a reluctant farewell to Camp Saxton and the hospitable dwellers therein,
+and hasten to the landing. We promenaded the deck of the steamer, sang
+patriotic songs, and agreed that moonlight and water had never looked so
+beautiful as on that night. At Beaufort we took the row-boat for St.
+Helena; and the boatmen, as they rowed, sang some of their sweetest,
+wildest hymns. It was a fitting close to such a day. Our hearts were
+filled with an exceeding great gladness; for, although the Government
+had left much undone, we knew that Freedom was surely born in our land
+that day. It seemed too glorious a good to realize,&mdash;this beginning of
+the great work we had so longed and prayed for.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>L. and I had one day an interesting visit to a plantation about six
+miles from ours. The house is beautifully situated in the midst of noble
+pine-trees, on the banks of a large creek. The place was owned by a very
+wealthy Rebel family, and is one of the pleasantest and healthiest on
+the island. The vicinity of the pines makes it quite healthy. There were
+a hundred and fifty people on it,&mdash;one hundred of whom had come from
+Edisto Island at the time of its evacuation by our troops. There were
+not houses enough to accommodate them, and they had to take shelter in
+barns, out-houses, or any other place they could find. They afterwards
+built rude dwellings for themselves, which did not, however, afford them
+much protection in bad weather. The superintendent told us that they
+were well-behaved and industrious. One old woman interested us greatly.
+Her name was Daphne; she was probably more than a hundred years old; had
+had fifty grandchildren, sixty-five great-grandchildren, and three
+great-great-grandchildren. Entirely blind, she yet seemed very cheerful
+and happy. She told us that she was brought with her parents from Africa
+at the time of the Revolution. A bright, happy old face was hers, and
+she retained her faculties remarkably well. Fifteen of the people had
+escaped from the mainland in the previous spring. They were pursued, and
+one of them was overtaken by his master in the swamps. A fierce grapple
+ensued,&mdash;the master on horseback, the man on foot. The former drew a
+pistol and shot his slave through the arm, shattering it dreadfully.
+Still, the heroic man fought desperately, and at last succeeded in
+unhorsing his master, and beating him until he was senseless. He then
+made his escape, and joined the rest of the party.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most interesting sights we saw was a baptism among the
+people. On one Sunday there were a hundred and fifty baptized in the
+creek near the church. They looked very picturesque in their white
+aprons and bright frocks and handkerchiefs. As they marched in
+procession down to the river's edge, and during the ceremony, the
+spectators, with whom the banks were crowded, sang glad, triumphant
+songs. The freed people on this island are all Baptists.</p>
+
+<p>We were much disappointed in the Southern climate. We found it much
+colder than we had expected,&mdash;quite cold enough for as thick winter
+clothing as one would wear at the North. The houses, heated only by open
+fires, were never comfortably warm. In the floor of our sitting-room
+there was a large crack through which we could see the ground beneath;
+and through this and the crevices of the numerous doors and windows the
+wind came chillingly. The church in which we taught school was
+particularly damp and cold. There was no chimney, and we could have no
+fire at all. Near the close of the winter a stove came for us, but it
+could not be made to draw; we were nearly suffocated with smoke, and
+gave it up in despair. We got so thoroughly chilled and benumbed within,
+that for several days we had school out-of-doors, where it was much
+warmer. Our school-room was a pleasant one,&mdash;for ceiling the blue sky
+above, for walls the grand old oaks with their beautiful
+moss-drapery,&mdash;but the dampness of the ground made it unsafe for us to
+continue the experiment.</p>
+
+<p>At a later period, during a few days' visit to some friends living on
+the Milne Plantation, then the head-quarters of the First
+South-Carolina, which was on picket-duty at Port-Royal Ferry, we had an
+opportunity of seeing something of Port-Royal Island. We had pleasant
+rides through the pine barrens. Indeed, riding on horseback was our
+chief recreation at the South, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. The
+"Secesh" horses, though small, poor, and mean-looking, when compared
+with ours, are generally excellent for the saddle, well-trained and very
+easy. I remember particularly one ride that we had while on Port-Royal
+Island. We visited the Barnwell Plantation, one of the finest places on
+the island. It is situated on Broad River. The grounds are extensive,
+and are filled with magnificent live-oaks, magnolias, and other trees.
+We saw one noble old oak, said to be the largest on these islands. Some
+of the branches have been cut off, but the remaining ones cover an area
+of more than a hundred feet in circumference. We rode to a point whence
+the Rebels on the opposite side of the river are sometimes to be seen.
+But they were not visible that day; and we were disappointed in our
+long-cherished hope of seeing a "real live Rebel." On leaving the
+plantation, we rode through a long avenue of oaks,&mdash;the moss-hung
+branches forming a perfect arch over our heads,&mdash;and then for miles
+through the pine barrens. There was an Italian softness in the April
+air. Only a low, faint murmur&mdash;hardly "the slow song of the sea"&mdash;could
+be heard among the pines. The ground was thickly carpeted with ferns of
+a vivid green. We found large violets, purple and white, and azaleas of
+a deeper pink and heavier fragrance than ours. It was leaving Paradise,
+to emerge from the beautiful woods upon the public road,&mdash;the shell-road
+which runs from Beaufort to the Ferry. Then we entered a by-way leading
+to the plantation, where we found the Cherokee rose in all its glory.
+The hedges were white with it; it canopied the trees, and hung from
+their branches its long sprays of snowy blossoms and dark, shining
+leaves, forming perfect arches, and bowers which seemed fitting places
+for fairies to dwell in. How it gladdened our eyes and hearts! It was as
+if all the dark shadows that have so long hung over this Southern land
+had flitted away, and, in this garment of purest white, it shone forth
+transfigured, beautified, forevermore.</p>
+
+<p>On returning to the house, we were met by the exciting news that the
+Rebels were bringing up pontoon-bridges, and were expected to attempt
+crossing over near the Ferry, which was only two or three miles from us.
+Couriers came in every few moments with various reports. A
+superintendent whose plantation was very near the Ferry had been
+watching through his glass the movements on the opposite side, and
+reported that the Rebels were gathering in large force, and evidently
+preparing for some kind of demonstration. A messenger was despatched to
+Beaufort for reinforcements, and for some time we were in a state of
+expectancy, not entirely without excitement, but entirely without fear.
+The officers evidently enjoyed the prospect of a fight. One of them
+assured me that I should have the pleasure of seeing a Rebel shell
+during the afternoon. It was proposed that the women should be sent into
+Beaufort in an ambulance; against which ignoble treatment we indignantly
+protested, and declared our intention of remaining at our post, if the
+Colonel would consent; and finally, to our great joy, the best of
+colonels did consent that we should remain, as he considered it quite
+safe for us to do so. Soon a light battery arrived, and during the
+evening a brisk firing was kept up. We could hear the explosion of the
+shells. It was quite like being in the war; and as the firing was
+principally on our side, and the enemy was getting the worst of it, we
+rather enjoyed it. For a little while the Colonel read to us, in his
+spirited way, some of the stirring "Lays of the Old Cavaliers." It was
+just the time to appreciate them thoroughly, and he was of all men the
+fittest person to read them. But soon came a courier, "in hot haste," to
+make report of the doings without, and the reading was at an end. In the
+midst of the firing, Mrs. D. and I went to bed, and slept soundly until
+morning. We learned afterward that the Rebels had not intended to cross
+over, but were attempting to take the guns off one of our boats, which
+they had sunk a few days previous. The timely arrival of the battery
+from Beaufort prevented them from accomplishing their purpose.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In April we left Oaklands, which had always been considered a
+particularly unhealthy place during the summer, and came to "Seaside," a
+plantation on another and healthier part of the island. The place
+contains nearly a hundred people. The house is large and comparatively
+comfortable. Notwithstanding the name, we have not even a distant
+glimpse of the sea, although we can sometimes hear its roar. At low tide
+there is not a drop of water to be seen,&mdash;only dreary stretches of
+marsh-land, reminding us of the sad outlook of Mariana in the Moated
+Grange,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The level waste and rounding gray."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But at night we have generally a good sea-breeze, and during the hottest
+weather the air is purer and more invigorating than in many parts of the
+island.</p>
+
+<p>On this, as on several other large plantations, there is a
+"Praise-House," which is the special property of the people. Even in the
+old days of Slavery, they were allowed to hold meetings here; and they
+still keep up the custom. They assemble on several nights of the week,
+and on Sunday afternoons. First, they hold what is called the
+"Praise-Meeting," which consists of singing, praying, and preaching. We
+have heard some of the old negro preachers make prayers that were really
+beautiful and touching. In these meetings they sing only the
+church-hymns which the Northern ministers have taught them, and which
+are far less suited to their voices than their own. At the close of the
+Praise-Meeting they all shake hands with each other in the most solemn
+manner. Afterward, as a kind of appendix, they have a grand "shout,"
+during which they sing their own hymns. Maurice, an old blind man, leads
+the singing. He has a remarkable voice, and sings with the greatest
+enthusiasm. The first shout that we witnessed in the Praise-House
+impressed us very much. The large, gloomy room, with its blackened
+walls,&mdash;the wild, whirling dance of the shouters,&mdash;the crowd of dark,
+eager faces gathered around,&mdash;the figure of the old blind man, whose
+excitement could hardly be controlled, and whose attitude and gestures
+while singing were very fine,&mdash;and over all, the red glare of the
+burning pine-knot, which shed a circle of light around it, but only
+seemed to deepen and darken the shadows in the other parts of the
+room,&mdash;these all formed a wild, strange, and deeply impressive picture,
+not soon to be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Maurice's especial favorite is one of the grandest hymns that we have
+yet heard:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"De tallest tree in Paradise<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">De Christian calls de Tree ob Life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To my New Jerusalem.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i15"><span class="smcap">Chorus.</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Blow, Gabriel! trumpet, blow louder, louder!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To my New Jerusalem!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"Paul and Silas jail-bound<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sing God's praise both night and day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To my New Jerusalem.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i15"><span class="smcap">Chorus.</span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Blow, Gabriel! trumpet, blow louder, louder!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To my New Jerusalem!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The chorus has a glad, triumphal sound, and in singing it the voice of
+old Maurice rings out in wonderfully clear, trumpet-like tones. His
+blindness was caused by a blow on the head from a loaded whip. He was
+struck by his master in a fit of anger. "I feel great distress when I
+become blind," said Maurice; "but den I went to seek de Lord; and eber
+since I know I see in de next world, I always hab great satisfaction."
+We are told that the master was not a "hard man" except when in a
+passion, and then he seems to have been very cruel.</p>
+
+<p>One of the women on the place, Old Bess, bears on her limbs many marks
+of the whip. Some of the scars are three and four inches long. She was
+used principally as a house-servant. She says, "Ebery time I lay de
+table I put cow-skin on one end, an' I git beatin' and thumpin' all de
+time. Hab all kinds o' work to do, and sich a gang [of children] to look
+after! One person couldn't git along wid so much work, so it go wrong,
+and den I git beatin'."</p>
+
+<p>But the cruelty of Bess's master sinks into insignificance, when
+compared with the far-famed wickedness of another slave-holder, known
+all over the island as "Old Joe Eddings." There seem to have been no
+bounds to his cruelty and licentiousness; and the people tell tales of
+him which make one shudder. We were once asking some questions about him
+of an old, half-witted woman, a former slave of his. The look of horror
+and loathing which overspread her face was perfectly indescribable, as,
+with upraised hands, she exclaimed, "What! Old Joe Eddings? Lord,
+Missus, he second to none in de world but de Debil!" She had, indeed,
+good cause to detest him; for, some years before, her daughter, a young
+black girl, maddened by his persecutions, had thrown herself into the
+creek and been drowned, after having been severely beaten for refusing
+to degrade herself. Outraged, despised, and black, she yet preferred
+death to dishonor. But these are things too heart-sickening to dwell
+upon. God alone knows how many hundreds of plantations, all over the
+South, might furnish a similar record.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Early in June, before the summer heat had become unendurable, we made a
+pleasant excursion to Edisto Island. We left St. Helena village in the
+morning, dined on one of the gun-boats stationed near our island, and in
+the afternoon proceeded to Edisto in two row-boats. There were six of
+us, besides an officer and the boats' crews, who were armed with guns
+and cutlasses. There was no actual danger; but as we were going into the
+enemy's country, we thought it wisest to guard against surprises. After
+a delightful row, we reached the island near sunset, landing at a place
+called Eddingsville, which was a favorite summer resort with the
+aristocracy of Edisto. It has a fine beach several miles in length.
+Along the beach there is a row of houses, which must once have been very
+desirable dwellings, but have now a desolate, dismantled look. The
+sailors explored the beach for some distance, and returned, reporting
+"all quiet, and nobody to be seen"; so we walked on, feeling quite safe,
+stopping here and there to gather the beautiful tiny shells which were
+buried deep in the sands.</p>
+
+<p>We took supper in a room of one of the deserted houses, using for seats
+some old bureau-drawers turned edgewise. Afterward we sat on the piazza,
+watching the lightning playing from a low, black cloud over a sky
+flushed with sunset, and listening to the merry songs of the sailors who
+occupied the next house. They had built a large fire, the cheerful glow
+of which shone through the windows, and we could see them dancing,
+evidently in great glee. Later, we had another walk on the beach, in the
+lovely moonlight. It was very quiet then. The deep stillness was broken
+only by the low, musical murmur of the waves. The moon shone bright and
+clear over the deserted houses and gardens, and gave them a still wilder
+and more desolate look.</p>
+
+<p>We went within-doors for the night very unwillingly. Having, of course,
+no beds, we made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the floor, with
+boat-cushions, blankets, and shawls. No fear of Rebels disturbed us.
+There was but one road by which they could get to us, and on that a
+watch was kept, and in case of their approach, we knew we should have
+ample time to get to the boats and make our escape. So, despite the
+mosquitoes, we had a sound night's sleep.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning we took the boats again, and followed the course of the
+most winding of little creeks. In and out, in and out, the boats went.
+Sometimes it seemed as if we were going into the very heart of the
+woods; and through the deep silence we half expected to hear the sound
+of a Rebel rifle. The banks were overhung with a thick tangle of shrubs
+and bushes, which threatened to catch our boats, as we passed close
+beneath their branches. In some places the stream was so narrow that we
+ran aground, and then the men had to get out, and drag and pull with all
+their might before we could be got clear again. After a row full of
+excitement and pleasure, we reached our place of destination,&mdash;the
+Eddings Plantation, whither some of the freedmen had preceded us in
+their search for corn. It must once have been a beautiful place. The
+grounds were laid out with great taste, and filled with fine trees,
+among which we noticed particularly the oleander, laden with deep
+rose-hued and deliciously fragrant flowers, and the magnolia, with its
+wonderful, large blossoms, which shone dazzlingly white among the dark
+leaves. We explored the house,&mdash;after it had first been examined by our
+guard, to see that no foes lurked there,&mdash;but found nothing but heaps of
+rubbish, an old bedstead, and a bathing-tub, of which we afterward made
+good use. When we returned to the shore, we found that the tide had gone
+out, and between us and the boats lay a tract of marsh-land, which it
+would have been impossible to cross without a wetting. The gentlemen
+determined on wading. But what were we to do? In this dilemma somebody
+suggested the bathing-tub, a suggestion which was eagerly seized upon.
+We were placed in it, one at a time, borne aloft in triumph on the
+shoulders of four stout sailors, and safely deposited in the boat. But,
+through a mistake, the tub was not sent back for two of the ladies, and
+they were brought over on the crossed hands of two of the sailors, in
+the "carry-a-lady-to-London" style. Again we rowed through the windings
+of the creek, then out into the open sea, among the white, exhilarating
+breakers,&mdash;reached the gun-boat, dined again with its hospitable
+officers, and then returned to our island, which we reached after
+nightfall, feeling thoroughly tired, but well pleased with our
+excursion.</p>
+
+<p>From what we saw of Edisto, however, we did not like it better than our
+own island,&mdash;except, of course, the beach; but we are told that farther
+in the interior it is much more beautiful. The freed people, who left it
+at the time of its evacuation, think it the loveliest place in the
+world, and long to return. When we were going, Miss T.&mdash;the much-loved
+and untiring friend and physician of the people&mdash;asked some whom we met
+if we should give their love to Edisto. "Oh, yes, yes, Miss!" they said.
+"Ah, Edisto a beautiful city!" And when we came back, they inquired,
+eagerly,&mdash;"How you like Edisto? How Edisto stan'?" Only the fear of
+again falling into the hands of the "Secesh" prevents them from
+returning to their much-loved home.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>As the summer advanced, the heat became intense. We found it almost
+overpowering, driving to school near the middle of the day, as we were
+obliged to do. I gave up riding, and mounted a sulky, such as a single
+gentleman drives in at the North. It was exceedingly high, and I found
+it no small task to mount up into it. Its already very comical
+appearance was enhanced by the addition of a cover of black India-rubber
+cloth, with which a friend kindly provided me. Thus adorned, it looked
+like the skeleton of some strange creature surmounted by a huge bonnet,
+and afforded endless amusement to the soldiers we chanced to meet, who
+hailed its appearance with shouts of laughter, and cries of "Here comes
+the Calithumpian!" This unique vehicle, with several others on our
+island, kindred, but not quite equal to it, would create a decided
+sensation in the streets of a Northern city.</p>
+
+<p>No description of life on these islands would be complete without a word
+concerning the fleas. They appeared at the opening of spring, and kept
+constantly "risin'," as the people said, until they reached a height the
+possibility of which we had never conceived. We had heard and read of
+fleas. We had never <i>realized</i> them before. Words utterly fail to
+describe the tortures we endured for months from these horrible little
+tyrants. Remembering our sufferings "through weary day and weary
+<i>night</i>," we warn everybody not gifted with extraordinary powers of
+endurance to beware of a summer on the Sea Islands.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the heat, we determined to celebrate the Fourth of July
+as worthily as we could. The freed people and the children of the
+different schools assembled in the grove near the Baptist Church. The
+flag was hung across the road, between two magnificent live-oaks, and
+the children, being grouped under it, sang "The Star-Spangled Banner"
+with much spirit. Our good General could not come, but addresses were
+made by Mr. P.,&mdash;the noble-hearted founder of the movement for the
+benefit of the people here, and from first to last their stanch and
+much-loved friend,&mdash;by Mr. L., a young colored minister, and others.
+Then the people sang some of their own hymns; and the woods resounded
+with the grand notes of "Roll, Jordan, roll." They all afterward partook
+of refreshments, consisting of molasses and water,&mdash;a very great luxury
+to them,&mdash;and hardtack.</p>
+
+<p>Among the visitors present was the noble young Colonel Shaw, whose
+regiment was then stationed on the island. We had met him a few nights
+before, when he came to our house to witness one of the people's shouts.
+We looked upon him with the deepest interest. There was something in his
+face finer, more exquisite, than one often sees in a man's face, yet it
+was full of courage and decision. The rare and singular charm of his
+manner drew all hearts to him. He was deeply interested in the singing
+and appearance of the people. A few days afterwards we saw his regiment
+on dress-parade, and admired its remarkably fine and manly appearance.
+After taking supper with the Colonel we sat outside the tent, while some
+of his men entertained us with excellent singing. Every moment we became
+more and more charmed with him. How full of life and hope and lofty
+aspirations he was that night! How eagerly he expressed his wish that
+they might soon be ordered to Charleston! "I do hope they will give <i>us</i>
+a chance," he said. It was the desire of his soul that his men should do
+themselves honor,&mdash;that they should prove themselves to an unbelieving
+world as brave soldiers as though their skins were white. And for
+himself, he was like the Chevalier of old, "without reproach or fear."
+After we had mounted our horses and rode away, we seemed still to feel
+the kind clasp of his hand,&mdash;to hear the pleasant, genial tones of his
+voice, as he bade us good-bye, and hoped that we might meet again. We
+never saw him afterward. In two short weeks came the terrible massacre
+at Fort Wagner, and the beautiful head of the young hero and martyr was
+laid low in the dust. Never shall we forget the heart-sickness with
+which we heard of his death. We could not realize it at first,&mdash;we, who
+had seen him so lately in all the strength and glory of his young
+manhood. For days we clung to a vain hope; then it fell away from us,
+and we knew that he was gone. We knew that he died gloriously, but still
+it seemed very hard. Our hearts bled for the mother whom he so
+loved,&mdash;for the young wife, left desolate. And then we said, as we say
+now,&mdash;"God comfort them! He only can." During a few of the sad days
+which followed the attack on Fort Wagner, I was in one of the hospitals
+of Beaufort, occupied with the wounded soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth
+Massachusetts. The first morning was spent in mending the bullet-holes
+and rents in their clothing. What a story they told! Some of the jackets
+of the poor fellows were literally cut in pieces. It was pleasant to see
+the brave, cheerful spirit among them. Some of them were severely
+wounded, but they uttered no complaint; and in the letters which they
+dictated to their absent friends there was no word of regret, but the
+same cheerful tone throughout. They expressed an eager desire to get
+well, that they might "go at it again." Their attachment to their young
+colonel was beautiful to see. They felt his death deeply. One and all
+united in the warmest and most enthusiastic praise of him. He was,
+indeed, exactly the person to inspire the most loyal devotion in the
+hearts of his men. And with everything to live for, he had given up his
+life for them. Heaven's best gifts had been showered upon him, but for
+them he had laid them all down. I think they truly appreciated the
+greatness of the sacrifice. May they ever prove worthy of such a leader!
+Already, they, and the regiments of freedmen here, as well, have shown
+that true manhood has no limitations of color.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Daily the long-oppressed people of these islands are demonstrating their
+capacity for improvement in learning and labor. What they have
+accomplished in one short year exceeds our utmost expectations. Still
+the sky is dark; but through the darkness we can discern a brighter
+future. We cannot but feel that the day of final and entire deliverance,
+so long and often so hopelessly prayed for, has at length begun to dawn
+upon this much-enduring race. An old freedman said to me one day, "De
+Lord make me suffer long time, Miss. 'Peared like we nebber was gwine to
+git troo. But now we's free. He bring us all out right at las'." In
+their darkest hours they have clung to Him, and we know He will not
+forsake them.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The poor among men shall rejoice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the terrible one is brought to nought."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>While writing these pages I am once more nearing Port Royal. The
+Fortunate Isles of Freedom are before me. I shall again tread the
+flower-skirted wood-paths of St. Helena, and the sombre pines and
+bearded oaks shall whisper in the sea-wind their grave welcome. I shall
+dwell again among "mine own people." I shall gather my scholars about
+me, and see smiles of greeting break over their dusk faces. My heart
+sings a song of thanksgiving, at the thought that even I am permitted to
+do something for a long-abused race, and aid in promoting a higher,
+holier, and happier life on the Sea Islands.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="A_FAST-DAY_AT_FOXDEN" id="A_FAST-DAY_AT_FOXDEN"></a>A FAST-DAY AT FOXDEN.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>Colonel Elijah Prowley, like all good and true genealogists, held the
+mother-country in tender reverence. For, if there be any truth in the
+well-known <i>mot</i> which calls Paris the Paradise of virtuous Yankees, it
+is limited to a few city-bucks of mongrel caste. England must be the
+Promised Land for the genuine representative of the Puritan. Whatever we
+may have felt about her lately,&mdash;and I confess there have been times
+when the declaration of the Fee-Faw-Fum giant of nursery-romance seemed
+to be of a moral and praiseworthy character,&mdash;there is no doubt, that,
+in the year of grace of which I write, and in the regards of many
+ratherish-scholarly gentlemen of our country-towns, the British Islands
+were the nearest terrestrial correspondences to the Islands of the
+Blest. About the massive Past Colonel Prowley never ceased to thrust his
+epistolary tendrils. Was not Great Britain a genealogical hunting-ground
+where game of rarest plumage might be started? Was not a
+family-connection with Sir Walter Raleigh (whose name should be written
+<i>Praleigh</i>, a common corruption of "Prowley" in the sixteenth century)
+susceptible of the clearest proof? There were, in fact, few
+distinguished Englishmen of the present day, who, if a provoking
+ancestor or two could be unearthed, might not be shown to have the
+Prowley fluid in their veins. To many of these eminent personages the
+head of the American branch of the family had written, and with several
+he had succeeded in establishing a correspondence. Old sermons, moral
+obituaries of public characters, celebrations of centennial
+anniversaries, and heavy reading of like description, constantly left
+the Foxden Post-Office addressed to the British Museum. The printed
+formulas of acknowledgment which arrived in return were preserved as the
+rarest treasures.</p>
+
+<p>And in fulness of time all this corresponding and presenting produced a
+glorious result. Elijah Prowley, of Foxden, was chosen an Honorary
+Member of the Royal Society of British Sextons,&mdash;an association than
+which there is none more mouldy in the whole world. Certainly, this was
+glory enough for any Western genealogist,&mdash;yet Fortune had a higher
+gratification to bestow. For, in His Worship, the Most Primordial, the
+High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of all Sextons, Colonel
+Prowley soon discovered a relative of his own. Sir Joseph Barley, a
+rubicund old knight, and the Most Primordial in question, after an
+elaborate investigation and counter-investigation, a jockeying of the
+wits of very old women, and a raid into divers registers, scrolls,
+schedules, archives, and the like,&mdash;Sir Joseph Barley, I say, turned out
+to be <i>a long-lost cousin</i>. "Barley," it appeared, had anciently been
+written "Parley," and "Praley," and even "Proley." Having arrived at
+this point, Sir Joseph conjectured that his ancestor Proley might have
+dropped a <i>w</i> out of his name, and the Colonel conjectured that his
+progenitor, the Puritan, might have put one into his. Now it did not
+matter which was right, for, as was convincingly underscored in one of
+my letters from Foxden, "<i>upon either hypothesis</i>, the relationship of
+the Barleys of Old England to the Prowleys of New England was positively
+established."</p>
+
+<p>And so Sir Joseph Barley was dead!</p>
+
+<p>Although shocked, when the fact of his demise was abruptly announced in
+the familiar chirography of my old friend, I was unable to prevent a
+certain sense of the grotesque from mingling with the idea. A portrait
+in pastel, which hung over the chimney-piece in the Colonel's study, had
+given me a thorough acquaintance with the outward Sir Joseph. That
+brief, but bulky figure, clad in official robes as High Senior
+Governour, that weighty seal of the Sextons which dangled from the fob,
+those impressive spectacles with the glasses cut in parallelograms,
+above all, that full-blown face blandly contemplating our American
+rudeness like a smiling Ph&#339;bus from British skies,&mdash;how could all
+these things, which had so individualized the natural body of Sir Joseph
+Barley, be dispensed with in its spiritual counterpart? No answer to
+such question,&mdash;only the grim facts, that one brother more had "gone
+over to the majority," and that the living minority got on very
+comfortably without him. Comfortably? Ay, truly; for in the very letter
+that brought the news I was begged to spend the approaching Fast-Day in
+Foxden, just as if nothing had happened. The season, so I was assured,
+was unusually advanced, and already the flavor of spring was perceptible
+in the air; moreover, the different congregations in town were to unite
+in services at the Orthodox Church, and, by extraordinary favor, one of
+the Colonel's Boston correspondents, no less a man than the
+distinguished Dr. Burge, was to preach the sermon.</p>
+
+<p>A noble specimen of our New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held
+the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their
+faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last
+transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from a&euml;rial
+or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His
+parishioners supplied him with a wood-fire, a saddle-horse, and, it was
+maliciously said, a boxing-master; and he, on his part,&mdash;so ran the idle
+rumor of the street,&mdash;covenanted never to call upon them for cod-liver
+oil, Bourbon whiskey, or a tour to Europe. In his majestic presence
+there was a total impression sanative to body and soul. The full powers
+of manner and tone, of pause and emphasis, were at his command. He would
+rise in a shingled meeting-house as effective as choir, organ, and
+sacerdotal vestments in full cathedral-service. I was glad to learn that
+this stalwart servant of the Word would be at Foxden. He had formerly
+been well acquainted with the Reverend Charles Clifton, late pastor of a
+church in that place. He might deal wisely with the evil intelligence,
+or, possibly, the infatuated egotism, which controlled that unfortunate
+man. Dr. Burge would possess his soul in calmness in presence of the
+singular epidemic which was then running through Foxden, as it had
+previously run through, and run out of, other river-towns.</p>
+
+<p>And now it has come in my way to speak of that strange murmuring of
+phantoms and their attendant seers, psychometers, and dactylomancers,
+which in these latter days has revived among us. And what I may have to
+say about what is called Spiritualism will reflect actual observations.
+I do not forget that to the advocacy of the "New Dispensation" are
+devoted many men of earnestness and a few of ability. It is possible
+that the facts they build upon may render mine exceptional and
+unimportant. What is here set down is but a trifling contribution to
+that mass of human testimony and human opinion from which the truth must
+be finally elicited.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stellato had been celestially commissioned to Barnum the spirits in
+their Foxden exhibitions. Two years previously this gentleman was to be
+seen at the head of a fanatical and tumultuary offshoot from a cause the
+most humane and noble. He had done whatever his slender abilities
+permitted to bring into discredit large-hearted and devoted men and
+women whom history will honorably remember as New-England Reformers. But
+to lead anything on a large scale, without a continual winding-up by his
+companion, the fibrous Mrs. Romulus, was beyond the crassitude of
+Stellato's pursy nature. Now it had come to pass that this acidulated
+lady, essaying fresh flurries of progression, discovering higher
+passional affinities and new duties of demolition, proving that in
+Church and State every brick was loose and every timber rotten,
+testifying ever to the existence of a certain harmonial mortar by which
+the rubbish of a demolished civilization could be rebuilt into
+unexceptionable forms,&mdash;it happened that this woman, having towered for
+one proud moment at the very apex of her mission, slipped suddenly into
+the Romish communion, and was no more seen of men. Stellato, perceiving
+that the peculiar machinery be had been taught to manage was now out of
+repair and impracticable, looked about for some new invention whereby to
+gain a livelihood from the credulity of his neighbors. "The spirits,"
+then at the height of their profit and renown, were adapted to his
+purpose. A blank and vacant mind was freely offered to any power of
+earth or air which would condescend to enter and possess it. And so Mr.
+Stellato, with his three parts knavery and two parts delusion, became a
+popular and successful ghost-monger.</p>
+
+<p>The parsonage had been closed since Charles Clifton terminated his
+connection with the parish two years before. The newest lights of the
+Liberal persuasion, fledglings from divinity-schools, youths of every
+possible variety of creed and no creed, had by turns occupied the vacant
+pulpit. The Gospel vibrated at all points between the interpretations of
+Calvin and Strauss. The congregation grew more and more critical, and
+could agree upon no candidate for settlement. They demanded the
+respectability of belief with the showy talents of skepticism,&mdash;an
+impossible combination, at least for a parish which offered only eight
+hundred dollars and a decrepit house. At length Colonel Prowley took a
+pew in the Orthodox Church;&mdash;it was a temporary arrangement, he said, to
+be terminated whenever a settled minister should be provided for the
+First Parish.</p>
+
+<p>The Reverend Charles Clifton seldom left the rooms which he had taken in
+a farmer's family on the outskirts of the town. We have seen how this
+man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional
+and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a
+mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton
+possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was
+full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other
+men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them.
+The deep passion for metaphysical knowledge, which in his youth had been
+kindled, was stilled, but never overcome. Wifeless, childless, he was
+put under no bonds to struggle with the world. He knew the coldness of
+the church in which he had been ordained to minister,&mdash;the hard and
+dreary lives of those whom he had undertaken to illumine. But he made
+the fatal mistake&mdash;inexcusable, it would seem, in a man of his liberal
+nurture&mdash;of supposing that this world's evil was owing to the absence of
+right opinion, and not of right feeling. It is to be feared that it was
+not principle, but only a paroxysm of cowardice, which caused Clifton to
+bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister
+found himself unable to dismiss a certain thin and impalpable fantasy
+which lingered behind that ponderous speculation of an all-embracing
+philosophy. For the past two years he had fitfully sought, or rather
+persuaded himself that he sought, some clue through the sad labyrinth of
+his fate. He had indulged in the most morbid conditions of his physical
+organism; there was neither steadiness in his purpose nor firmness in
+his action. He yearned for that proximity to hidden things, which, if
+not forbidden to all men, yet is dangerous to most men. At length he
+succeeded in freeing his soul from the weight of conscious intellectual
+life which had become too heavy for it to bear. And while the Foxden
+people were wondering about the occupation of a late pastor in one of
+their churches, and inquiring of each other whether he would again speak
+before them, their gossiping solicitude was suddenly set at rest.
+Printed show-bills were posted about the streets: "Grand Festival of
+Spiritualists at the Town Hall." "The Reverend Charles Clifton will
+speak"&mdash;a line of largest type gloated upon the scandal&mdash;"IN A
+TRANCE-STATE."</p>
+
+<p>"I really ought to apologize," said Colonel Prowley, upon opening the
+hall-door for my admittance, on the afternoon of the second Wednesday in
+April, and this after repeated summons had been sounded by the brazen
+knocker,&mdash;"I ought to apologize for keeping you here so long; but there
+has been so much knocking about the house of late, and our cook and
+housemaid having turned out to be such excellent mediums, taking just as
+much interest in their circle down-stairs as we do in ours in the
+parlor, and then Mrs. Colfodder being so positive that it was either Sir
+Joseph Barley or Roger Williams,&mdash;though I am sure neither of them ever
+knocked half so satisfactorily before, and besides"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Sir," interrupted I, "no excuse is necessary. I have
+seen enough of 'the spirits' to know how they put aside all
+conventionalities. I should have accompanied Dr. Burge to the hotel, had
+I anticipated disturbing the circle which, I infer, is at present in
+session."</p>
+
+<p>"You would have grieved me very much by doing so," rejoined the kind old
+gentleman. "Dr. Burge dines with me to-morrow, and I confess&mdash;not yet
+calling myself a convert to these miracles which are now vouchsafed in
+Foxden&mdash;it would not be amiss to rid my premises of the amiable
+magicians congregated in my parlor before a minister were invited to
+enter. But a layman, as I take it, might witness these thaumaturgical
+matters without scandal,&mdash;nay, perchance you may help me to that
+wholesome credence in their reality which my celestial visitants so
+unceasingly demand."</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Prowley was in the state of mind not unusual to many
+well-meaning, unoccupied people, when this modern necromancy was thrust
+upon them by those pecuniarily or socially interested in its advocacy.
+The upheaval to the air of that dark inward nature which is ever working
+in us,&mdash;the startling proof of that loudly proclaimed, faintly realized
+truth, that this mind, so pervading every fibre of the body, is yet
+separate in its essence,&mdash;the novel gratification of the petty vanities
+and petty questionings which beset undecided men,&mdash;what wonder that
+persons not accustomed to sound analysis of evidence should be beguiled
+by these subtilest adaptations to their conditions, and hold dalliance
+with the feeble shades that imposture or enthusiasm vended about the
+towns? Historical personages&mdash;a nerveless mimicry of the conventional
+stage-representation of them&mdash;stalked the Colonel's parlor. Departed
+friends, Indians <i>&agrave; discr&eacute;tion</i>, local celebrities, Deacon Golly, who in
+the year '90 took the ten first shares in the Wrexford Turnpike, the
+very Pelatiah Brimble from whom "Brimble's Corner" had taken its name,
+the identical Timson forever immortal in "Timson's Common,"&mdash;these
+defunct worthies were audibly, visibly, or tangibly present, pecking at
+great subjects in ghostly feebleness, swimming in Tupperic dilutions of
+cheapest wisdom, and finally inducing in their patrons strange
+derangements of mind and body.</p>
+
+<p>The circle, which was very select, consisted of three highly susceptible
+ladies and Stellato as medium-in-chief. Miss Turligood, a sort of
+Oroveso to the Druidical chorus, was a muscular spinster, fierce and
+forty, sporting steel spectacles, a frizette of the most scrupulous
+honesty, and a towering comb which formed what the landscape-gardeners
+call "an object" in the distance. Next this commanding lady, with fat
+hands sprawled upon the table, sat Mrs. Colfodder, widow, according to
+the flesh, of a respectable Foxden grocer. By later spiritual
+communications, however, it appeared that matters stood very
+differently; for no sooner had the departed Colfodder looked about him a
+little in the world to come than he proceeded to contract marriage with
+Queen Elizabeth of England, thereby leaving his mortal relict quite free
+to receive the addresses of the late Lord Byron, whose proposals were of
+the most honorable as well as amatory character. Miss Branly, by far the
+most pleasing of the lady-patronesses, was a fragile, stove-dried
+mantua-maker,&mdash;and, truly, it seemed something like poetic justice to
+recompense her depressed existence with the satisfactions of a material
+heaven full of marryings and givings in marriage.</p>
+
+<p>"Will Sir Joseph tip for us again?" inquired Miss Turligood, with her
+eyes fixed upon a crack in the mahogany table. "Will he? Will he not?
+Will he?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir Joseph vouchsafed no answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Hark! wasn't that a rap?" cried Stellato, in a husky whisper.</p>
+
+<p>Here every one pricked an ear towards the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor Franklin, is that you?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Doctor promised to be present to give a scientific and
+philosophical view of these communications," parenthesized the
+interrogator.</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor Franklin, is that <i>you</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>A faint creaking is audible.</p>
+
+<p>"Byron's sign, as I'm a living woman!" ejaculated the Widow Colfodder.</p>
+
+<p>"Her spiritual partner and guardian-angel," explained Miss
+Turligood,&mdash;and this for my satisfaction as the last-comer.</p>
+
+<p>Direct examination by the widow:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Have you brought your patent lyre here to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>For the enlightenment of the company:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"He played the lyre so beautiful on earth, that when he got to the
+spheres a committee gave him a golden one, with all the modern
+improvements."</p>
+
+<p>Question concerning the lyre repeated. A mysterious rubbing interpreted
+as an affirmative reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you brought Pocahontas with you? (she 'most always comes with
+him)&mdash;and if so, can she kiss me to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>The table is exceedingly doubtful.</p>
+
+<p>"Could she kiss Colonel Prowley, or even pull his hair a little?"</p>
+
+<p>No certainty of either.</p>
+
+<p>"Can she kiss Miss Turligood?"</p>
+
+<p>The table is satisfied that it couldn't be done.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me try her," urged Stellato, with the confidence of an expert; then
+in seductive tones,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't Pocahontas kiss Miss Branly, if all the lights were put out?"</p>
+
+<p>Pocahontas thought it highly probable that she could.</p>
+
+<p>Here some interesting badgering. Miss Branly declined being kissed in
+the dark. Miss Turligood thought it would be very satisfactory, if she
+would, and couldn't see why any one should object to it. She (Miss
+Turligood) would willingly be kissed in the dark, or in the light, in
+furtherance of scientific investigation.</p>
+
+<p>Stellato suggested a compromise.</p>
+
+<p>"Might not the kissing be done through a medium?"</p>
+
+<p>At first the table thought it couldn't, but afterwards relented, and
+thought it might.</p>
+
+<p>"Would Pocahontas appoint that medium?"</p>
+
+<p>She would.</p>
+
+<p>"Should the alphabet be called?"</p>
+
+<p>It should not.</p>
+
+<p>"Would the table tip towards the medium indicated?"</p>
+
+<p>It could not be done.</p>
+
+<p>"Should somebody call over the names of all mediums present, and would
+the table tip at the right one?"</p>
+
+<p>Ah, that was it!</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you and I have no share in this Gift Enterprise," whispered
+Colonel Prowley.</p>
+
+<p>"Order! order!" shouted Miss Turligood, glancing in our direction with
+great severity. "This general conversation cannot be permitted. We are
+about to have a most interesting manifestation.&mdash;Pocahontas, do you wish
+me to call over the names?"</p>
+
+<p>Pocahontas did not object.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then, you will tip when I come to the name of the medium
+through whom you consent to kiss Miss Sarah Branly?"</p>
+
+<p>Pocahontas certainly would.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it Mrs. Colfodder?"</p>
+
+<p>No reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it I, Eugenia Turligood?"</p>
+
+<p>No, it certainly was not.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I suppose it must be Mr. Stellato!"</p>
+
+<p>Here the table was violently convulsed, as if somebody were pulling it
+very hard upon Mr. Stellato's side, and somebody else holding it with
+rigid firmness upon the other.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Is</i> it Mr. Stellato?"</p>
+
+<p>Convulsion repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think you stopped long enough at Mrs. Colfodder's name,"
+interposed Miss Branly. "I am sure the table was going to move, if you
+had given it time."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing easier than to try again," responded Miss Turligood. "Is it
+Mrs. Colfodder?"</p>
+
+<p>This time the table fairly sprang into the lap of the lady indicated.</p>
+
+<p>And so that worthy widow arose and saluted&mdash;or rather Pocahontas,
+through her mediumship, arose and saluted&mdash;Miss Sarah Branly. And the
+skeptic will please take notice that this extraordinary manifestation is
+neither enlarged nor magnified, but that it actually happened precisely
+as is here set down.</p>
+
+<p>After this, Mr. Stellato, being put under inspiration, delivered a
+discursive homily upon the "New Dispensation" which was at present
+vouchsafed to the citizens of Foxden. He testified to the great relief
+of getting clear of the "Old Theology,"&mdash;meaning thereby such
+interpretations of Scripture as are held by the mass of our New-England
+churches. Moreover, he would announce his personal satisfaction in
+having, under spiritual guidance, eradicated every vestige of belief in
+hell,&mdash;a circumstance upon which, it is needless to say, that a
+gentleman of his profession might be honestly congratulated. With a
+view, as I could not help thinking, to my peculiar necessities, Stellato
+finally enlarged upon what he termed "the principle of the thing," or,
+as he otherwise phrased it, "a scientific explanation of the way the
+spirits worked mediums,"&mdash;"<i>sperrets</i>" and "<i>meejums</i>" according to
+celestial pronunciation, but I am loath to disturb the carnal
+orthography. This philosophical exposition, drawled forth in
+interminable sentences, was a dark doctrine to the uninitiated. There
+was a good deal about "Essences," which, at times, seemed to relate to
+the perfumery vended in the fancy-department of apothecaries' shops, and
+then again to some obscure matters of "Zones," "Interiors," "Magnetic
+Relations," and the like. The central revelation, if I remember rightly,
+had to do with a sort of putty, by which, according to the Stellato
+cosmogony, Chaos had been stuck together into a Universe. This adhesive
+composition was known as "Detached Vitalized Electricity." And having
+got upon this sounding title, which conveyed no meaning whatever to the
+"undeveloped" understanding, Stellato was profuse in windy talk. This
+Detached Vitalized Electricity, spread out over space, connected the
+parts of all systems; it appeared at that very instant in the form of
+"power" about Miss Turligood's head; in short, it diluted all stray bits
+of modern rhetoric, all exploded feats of ancient magic, into the
+thinnest of spiritual gruel, which was to supersede the strong meat upon
+which the Puritan walked before his Maker.</p>
+
+<p>Somebody summoned the eminent Twynintuft. Like every spirit that was
+ever called for, this ex-elocutionist happened to be within a few
+seconds' flight of the circle, and had nothing in the world to do but to
+swoop down and tip as long as the company could possibly endure him.</p>
+
+<p>The following information was elicited by affirmative or negative
+replies to the interrogatories of those present:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The spirit communicating was Twynintuft, grandfather to Mrs. Widesworth.
+Was unable to give his Christian name. Thought Mrs. Colfodder's lungs in
+a healthy condition. Could not undertake to move the table when no hands
+were upon it. If the room were made totally dark, would attempt that
+curious experiment. Was unable to give the maiden name of his earthly
+wife. Thought Mr. Stellato was a healing-medium of great power. Had been
+something of a Root-Doctor when in the body, and would gladly prescribe
+through that gentleman for the cure of all diseases. Considered mineral
+medicines destructive to the vital principle. Doctor Dastick, being a
+drug-doctor, would not be recognized by any medical association in the
+spheres. Would give any information about the fixed stars. The
+inhabitants of the Milky Way telegraphed to each other by means of the
+Detached Vitalized Electricity. Also, they bottled up the same to cure
+humors. Would privately impart their recipe to Mr. Stellato. It could
+not be afforded upon this earth at less than three dollars a bottle.
+Would, however, authorize an exception in favor of clergymen, when they
+gave certificates of cures. <i>The spirits did not recognize
+Fast-Day</i>,&mdash;it was a remnant of the Old Mythological Religion. Demanded
+further investigation, and promised greater marvels in future.</p>
+
+<p>Here Miss Turligood became violently convulsed, and, having slapped the
+table some forty times or more, seized a pencil and began to write:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Dear Prowley</span>,&mdash;Surrounded by a bank of
+silver-tunicked attendants, I hover near you. The atmosphere is
+redolent of costly herbs, which, with the well-known rotary
+motion of the earth, impart density and spacefulness to our
+spheral persons: this is the philosophy of our presence. Many
+shining friends, supported upon fluted pillars, are with you
+this evening. These grieve at your lack of faith, and flap
+gold-bespattered wings in unison. Spherically yours,</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Sir Joseph Barley</span>."</p></div>
+
+<p>"Why does he sign himself <i>Sir</i>?" inquired Colonel Prowley, rather taken
+aback at the sudden termination of this exquisite composition.</p>
+
+<p>It was evidently an oversight, for the medium's hand erased the
+offending title.</p>
+
+<p>"When did Sir Joseph die?" I ventured to ask.</p>
+
+<p>"That I cannot tell you," replied his late correspondent. "I have heard
+nothing from him for several months. When he last wrote, he was
+suffering under a severe influenza which must have terminated fatally.
+But why not ask <i>him</i> the question?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is just my purpose.&mdash;Sir Joseph Barley, can you give me the date
+of your death?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is hard for spirits to give numbers," said Mr. Stellato.</p>
+
+<p>"It is sometimes done by tips," quoth Miss Turligood.</p>
+
+<p>I pressed the demand, and, after much cajoling and counting, a certain
+day of March was fixed upon.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you give me the place?"</p>
+
+<p>I was instructed to call over the names of such foreign cities as I
+might remember, and assured that Sir Joseph would tip at the right one.</p>
+
+<p>It turned out to be "London."</p>
+
+<p>"And now, Sir Joseph, could you oblige me with the name of the physician
+who attended your last sickness?"</p>
+
+<p>But no sooner had I propounded this final query than Mr. Stellato
+declared his consciousness of a skeptical influence in the company which
+would go far to impede other manifestations. Where people were not
+harmonial, he explained, the Detached Vitalized Electricity being unable
+to unite with the Imponderable Magnetic Fluid given off by mediums,
+satisfactory results could not be obtained.</p>
+
+<p>"But we have at least obtained this satisfaction," said I, addressing
+Colonel Prowley: "Sir Joseph has committed himself about the day and
+place of his decease. You must soon hear from some member of his family.
+If these particulars have been correctly given, there will be, at least,
+the beginning of evidence upon which to establish his identity."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Colfodder was so shocked with the perversity of unbelief which she
+detected in this harmless remark, that, nudging Miss Branly, she
+solemnly arose and moved to break up the circle for the night. And as it
+was already past nine o'clock, no violent objection was made to the
+proposition.</p>
+
+<p>"The circle will meet in this place to-morrow morning at eight o'clock,
+for the pursuance of further investigations," proclaimed Miss Turligood,
+in sonorous accents.</p>
+
+<p>"Fast-Day, Madam," mildly suggested Colonel Prowley.</p>
+
+<p>"The spirits do not recognize Fast-Day. Tomorrow at eight o'clock. In
+this place. Let every medium be punctual. It is to be <i>hoped</i> that the
+<i>conditions</i> will <i>then</i> be <i>favorable</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>This latter aspiration, with its feminine redundancy of emphasis, was
+cast in my direction, as Miss Turligood swept haughtily from the room.</p>
+
+<p>Her final exit, however, was neither curt nor in any way effective. For
+it was no easy matter to gather up the bags, parcels, shawls, and other
+devices which the good lady had brought with her and scattered about the
+entry. One India-rubber shoe in particular eluded our search, till I was
+ready to admit the supposition that the spirits had carried it off, as
+entirely reasonable and satisfactory. A good-natured Irishman, servant
+to Miss Turligood, who had come with a lantern to see her home, at
+length discovered this missing bit of apparel upon Miss Branly's
+foot,&mdash;that medium, as it appeared, having in a fit of abstraction
+appropriated three. Finally the lantern glimmered down the gravel-walk,
+and Mr. Stellato, with a lady upon each arm, was persuaded to follow it.
+It was waking from a nightmare to get rid of them.</p>
+
+<p>"Over at last!" exclaimed Miss Prowley, when we returned to the
+drawing-room. She had been sitting in silence in an obscure corner, and
+I had scarcely realized her presence. "Over at last! and of all
+fatiguing and unprofitable employments that the folly of man ever
+devised, this trifling with spirits is certainly the chief."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, my dear," urged the brother, in his placid way, "these good people
+who have fastened themselves upon us seem so anxious to continue the
+investigation that I cannot find it in my heart to refuse them. I <i>did</i>
+wish, to be sure, that we might have our Fast-Day in quiet; but Miss
+Turligood, who knows much more about the matter than we do, thinks the
+spirits would not like it, if we did, and so&mdash;although we will absent
+ourselves from the sitting long enough to go to church&mdash;we must really
+make the best of it, and receive the circle."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak like a believer, Colonel Prowley," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"No, not quite that," replied the old gentleman,&mdash;"yet, truly, I
+sometimes hardly know why I am not. The knockings alone are quite
+inexplicable; and when it comes to a fiery hand ringing the dinner-bell,
+which Stellato can show in the dark&mdash;&mdash;Besides, there are the
+communications from distinguished characters, many of them so very
+important and interesting. To be sure, my poor cousin Barley did not do
+himself justice this evening, though some of his ideas were very
+poetical; but, really, the other night, when he told us how much the
+Royal Sextons were thought of in the spheres, and repeated that very
+high compliment which Thomas Herne paid to my family-history, it all
+seemed so marvellous, and yet so natural, that I could not help
+subscribing pretty handsomely to the cause."</p>
+
+<p>"And one of the privileges that your subscription has gone to purchase I
+am yet to enjoy. Dr. Burge wished me to visit, in his company, your
+former pastor, Mr. Clifton,&mdash;and we must look for him, as I see, at the
+Spiritualists' Festival in the Town Hall."</p>
+
+<p>"Sad! sad!" cried Colonel Prowley, thoughtfully chewing upon my remark.
+"It is an abiding shame for a minister of the gospel to meddle with
+these things, except, possibly, in the way of exorcism. Truly, a deep
+humiliation has fallen upon the town."</p>
+
+<p>And the chagrin of this respected gentleman was wholly sincere. The
+Puritanical distinction between clergy and laity had scarcely faded in
+his mind. The pastor of the First Church had belonged to a cherished
+class,&mdash;a class whose moral and intellectual consequence must be
+maintained by avoidance of all dangerous inquiries, common interests,
+and secular amusements. A minister attending a Jenny-Lind
+Charity-Concert in a play-house, or leading armed men in the most sacred
+cause for which human blood might be shed,&mdash;what offences would these
+have been to this titular Colonel of Foxden, who had won his honors by a
+six-months' finery and dining as aide-de-camp to some forgotten
+Governor!</p>
+
+<p>"I fear I shall not be back before you wish to close the house."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, you remember the old arrangement: door-key under the
+scraper,&mdash;light burning in the drawing-room."</p>
+
+<p>With hearty thanks I went forth to keep my appointment with Dr. Burge.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>The narrative here takes us to a portion of the shadowy perturbation
+which any who have turned these pages as a fictitious rendering of the
+grotesque in experience will do well to omit. Only a mortifying, though
+perchance salutary, sense of human infirmity comes from beholding one
+set over the people as intercessor and counsellor struggling in the
+meshes of that snare which the Enemy had spread for the undisciplined
+and wandering multitude. No, not even struggling now. That Clifton had
+fought through solitary days against the wretched enervation which
+invited him, I had reason to know. But he had dared to tamper with the
+normal functions of mind and body, to try fantastic tricks with that
+mysterious agent through which the healthy will commands the organism.
+And when the mental disorder, mocked at and preached against in happier
+years, at length ran through Foxden, the morbid condition of his system
+was powerless to resist the contagion.</p>
+
+<p>And let us not overlook the fact that in these manifestations there was
+to be found a palpable reality, a positive marvel, well calculated to
+lay hold of a skeptic like Clifton. His early associations with the
+Transcendentalists had undermined his faith in all popular presentations
+of Christianity. But his peculiarly emotional nature could never dwell
+in that haziness of opinion upon august subjects in which sounder men
+among the brethren made out to live cheerfully and to work vigorously.
+While Clifton madly sought a position of intelligence and satisfaction
+beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and
+stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For
+with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less
+than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess.
+And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every
+graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity
+had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete
+heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, which
+the best minds of Pagan civilization found no difficulty in pronouncing
+a delusion and a lie.</p>
+
+<p>I knew Dr. Burge for one of those most useful instructors who will
+patiently examine with the intellect what the instinct teaches them to
+condemn. He seldom helped the doctrine he assailed by denying it such
+facts as were true and such attractions as were real. He had cheerfully
+accepted whatever reproach came to him from frequenting circles in the
+attempt to see the mystery from the believers' point of view. I was not
+surprised at finding him upon one of the back benches in the Town Hall.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing noteworthy," he said, as I joined him. "Only women have
+spoken,&mdash;the excited nervous system careering without restraint,&mdash;no
+spirits yet."</p>
+
+<p>"They pretend inspiration, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes; and it is not surprising that semi-educated people, ignorant
+of analogous phenomena, should take the <i>omne ignotum pro magnifico</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet you are said to be a believer in the possession which the mediums
+claim?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," replied Dr. Burge, "and to just this extent:&mdash;I do not
+doubt the possibility of intercourse between man and the lower grades of
+immaterial life, and I am willing to adopt this hypothesis to explain
+any occurrence where the facts demand it. That, in rare cases, such may
+be the most simple and natural supposition, I readily admit. The
+ordinary performances, however, may be accounted for without calling in
+god or demon to untie the knot."</p>
+
+<p>I remarked that Mr. Clifton was not to be seen upon the platform.</p>
+
+<p>"He is kept out of the way until the last,&mdash;in the Selectmen's Room, as
+I am told, and alone."</p>
+
+<p>"I fear all appeal would now be in vain; yet, Sir, I would not have you
+spare an effort to awaken him to the peril of his course."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go to him, then," assented Dr. Burge.</p>
+
+<p>Upon common occasions, the Selectmen's Room failed to suggest any
+exceptional character in its occupants. It was a narrow, ill-lighted,
+unventilated apartment, bitter with the after-taste of taxes,
+prophetically flavorous of taxes yet to be. Stove-accommodation beyond
+the criticism of the most fastidious salamander, a liberal sprinkling of
+sand with a view to the ruminant necessities of the town-patricians, two
+or three stiff armchairs with straws protruding from their well-worn
+cushions, intolerant benches for unofficial occupancy,&mdash;altogether a
+gloomy aggregate result of the diverse ideals of social well-being to be
+found among the inhabitants of Foxden. But now I recognized a new
+element in this familiar chamber; a strange contagion hung about the
+walls; a something which imparted delicate edge to the nervous system
+was perceptible in the dry heat of the air. Near an oracular table,
+which bore evidence of recent manipulation, stood the Reverend Charles
+Clifton: others had evidently been with him before our entrance; he was
+now alone. An oil-lamp sputtered feebly in the corner. The stove-devil
+glared at us through his one glazed eye, and puffed out his mephitic
+welcome as I shut the door.</p>
+
+<p>"Clifton, my old friend!" exclaimed Dr. Burge.</p>
+
+<p>The person addressed raised his head, half closed his eyes, as one who
+endeavors to fix objects which are flitting before him. It seemed
+necessary to withdraw his inward gaze from some delicious dazzlement of
+dream-land. At last he spoke slowly and with effort.</p>
+
+<p>"Burge, you here?&mdash;and one of us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven forbid!" cried my companion. "I but look upon these things for
+my own warning, and in the way of my duty as teacher to those who might
+be disposed to tamper with unknown powers, within or without."</p>
+
+<p>"Say, rather, to melt the iron links which gyve soul to body," said
+Clifton, in constrained articulation, through which a moaning undertone
+seemed ever trying to be heard. "Say, rather, to produce a finer
+exaltation than wine, opium, or hashish,&mdash;for it is most sweet to
+subject the animal organism to the control of spirit-wills."</p>
+
+<p>"A grateful doctrine to those who dare to substitute a morbid
+receptivity for an active endeavor!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is to soothe the sense-powers, so that others may use them to give
+us intimations far beyond their common capacity."</p>
+
+<p>"'<i>I</i> keep under my body and bring it into subjection,'" quoted Dr.
+Burge, emphasizing the personal pronoun. "The Apostle declares that his
+own immortal individuality alone controls his members,&mdash;and why? 'lest,
+when I have preached unto others, I myself should become a castaway.'"</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor delivered the last sentence with rich cathedral-emphasis, and
+with the full unction of priestly authority.</p>
+
+<p>Clifton, or whatever vague and dusky power controlled him, cowered at
+the rebuke. The nervous energy with which he had experimented, or which
+he had left passive for the experiments of others, seemed withdrawn from
+his frame.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Burge perceived his advantage, and continued:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I speak to you, my fallen brother, as I cannot speak to the foolish
+people who grope in this miasma of delusion. Silly women, yielding to
+the natural vanity of their sex, may mistake hysterics for inspiration.
+Vacillating and vacant men may seek a new sensation by encouraging a
+revival of the demoniacal epidemics of heathendom. But you, who have
+been a preacher of the gospel, though, as I must now more than ever
+believe, after a devitalized and perverted method,&mdash;you, to leave the
+honest work of a dweller upon earth, to chatter of immensity, to weaken
+the brain that it may no longer separate the true from the
+false!&mdash;believe me, Clifton, you have been bought by the shallowest
+promises which the King of Evil ever exchanged for a sacred and
+inviolable soul."</p>
+
+<p>"You have spoken according to your business," replied Mr. Clifton,
+impatiently. "You, who begin by assuming the impossibility of
+spirit-intercourse since Bible times, with what candor can you examine
+the facts we build upon?"</p>
+
+<p>"I make no such assumption," was the rejoinder. "Has it not been
+foretold that 'in the latter times some shall depart from the faith,
+giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils'? Have we not
+aforetime been vexed with them in this very New England? For I almost
+justify Mather's words, when he stigmatizes the necromancy of his day as
+'a terrible Plague of Evil Angels,' or, in still plainer speech, as 'a
+prodigious descent of devils upon divers places near the centre of this
+Province.' And how better can we characterize this confused and
+distracting babblement which gives no good gift to man?"</p>
+
+<p>"It has given him this," exclaimed Clifton, advancing towards Dr. Burge,
+and seeming for a few moments to resume his old personality,&mdash;"it has
+given him the knowledge of a life to come! You think it, preach it,
+believe it,&mdash;but you do not <i>know</i> it. A susceptibility to impressions
+from the inmost characters of men has been mine through life. It has
+been given me to perceive what facts and feelings most deeply adhered in
+the mental consciousness. And I tell you, Burge, ministers both of your
+communion and of mine repeat the old words of sublimest assurance, sway
+congregations with descriptions bright or lurid of future worlds, yet
+behind all this glowing speech and blatant confidence there has
+lurked,&mdash;oh, will you deny it?&mdash;there has lurked a grovelling doubt of
+man's immortality."</p>
+
+<p>"I will not deny it," said Dr. Burge, with slow solemnity. "Sinners that
+we are, how can we ask that faith be at no moment confused by the
+thousand cries of infidelity which our profession requires us to answer?
+Let my soul be chilled by transient shades of skepticism, rather than
+dote in a blind and puerile credulity! If I am not at all times equally
+penetrated by the great fact of man's conscious immortality, it is
+because of my undesert. A way to <i>know</i> of the doctrine has been
+revealed: it is by doing the will of the Father: who of us has fulfilled
+the condition? But I can meet you on lower ground, and declare, that,
+according to our human observation, it is not well for man to <i>know</i> the
+destiny of his being in all its details until the trials and victories
+of life have taught him to turn such knowledge to elevating use. It is
+the deplorable sinfulness of our nature which seeks to obtain without
+deserving, to possess the end and despise the appointed means."</p>
+
+<p>Some reply would doubtless have been made to these pertinent
+considerations, had not the confused tramp of a committee been heard at
+the door. The professors of the "New Dispensation" had come to conduct
+the Reverend Charles Clifton to their platform. The distinguished
+convert shuddered, as if affected by some incorporeal presence, and
+suffered himself to be led away.</p>
+
+<p>"I can do nothing more," murmured Dr. Burge; "and why should I stay to
+hear diluted rhetoric, or inflated commonplace, from lips which, however
+unworthily, once proclaimed the simplicity of the gospel?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because it is not well to prejudge what may offer some possible variety
+in this credence," I ventured to suggest.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right; we will stay."</p>
+
+<p>A murmur of applause followed the appearance of Clifton upon the
+platform,&mdash;yet it was only a murmur; for the flock, long pastured upon
+delicate delusions, received as matter of course whatever shepherding
+chance offered. Did not the face of the medium wear an expression of
+earthly disappointment at this slender recognition? Could it be that
+there was needed the hot-house heat of a carnal "success" to favor this
+exquisite flowering of the spirit? Can we suppose that this whole matter
+was no other than some Yankee patent to avoid the awful solitude in
+which each human soul must enter into relations with the unseen?</p>
+
+<p>Slowly and in dreamy heaviness the discourse began. The inspirational
+claims seemed to lie in the manifest improbability of a man of Clifton's
+cultivation being so dull and diffuse in a natural condition. Yet, as
+the message wore on, it cannot be denied that a strange influence was at
+work. The words followed each other with greater fluency and in richer
+abundance. The meaning, to be sure, was still vague enough; and whenever
+some commonplace truth or plausibility protruded from the general
+washiness, it was seized upon and beaten and stretched to the last
+degree of tenuity. Phrases upon phrases of gorgeous dreaminess. A
+soothing delight,&mdash;yet such delight as only the bodily senses demanded.
+A joyful deliverance from the bondage of intellectual life. Hints that
+our human consciousness of sin was a vain delusion from which the
+"developed" man was happily delivered. "Come up here," said the
+preacher, in substance, "and escape from this moral accountability which
+sits so heavily upon you. Here is a sensuous paradise, sweet and
+debilitating, offering varied delights to the eclecticism of personal
+taste. All angular and harsh things may be dissolved in copious floods
+of words, and washed into a ravishing, enervating Universe."</p>
+
+<p>An hour&mdash;two hours&mdash;passed. The air was thick and poisonous. Attention
+had been strained to the utmost. Other things were to be noted by those
+accustomed to regard mental disorder from a physiological point of view.</p>
+
+<p>And now, by some abnormal mode of cerebral activity, the trance-speaker
+won strange sympathies from his auditors. Certain faculties in Clifton
+had reached an expansion not permitted to the healthy man. A plastic
+power came from him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences
+groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time
+it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium or
+his audience might be stimulated into specious blossom. Phenomena were
+exhibited which transcended the conscious powers of the human
+soul,&mdash;nay, which testified of its latent ability to work without
+organic conditions. Our unemployed brain-organs, as Hamilton and others
+have clearly proved, are always employing themselves. And from this
+self-employment&mdash;or was it demon-employment?&mdash;there swept through the
+consciousness a vague delirium of excitement. In all that assembly a
+single pulse beat feverish measures. The climax was reached. Without was
+the soft spring night veiling the scarcely touched range of knowledge
+and beauty offered to the healthy energies of man; within were dazed
+wanderers in a region of morbid emotion, seeking to intensify the colors
+of Nature, willing to waste precious vitality in conjurations of the
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>The wretched thraldom was over,&mdash;and what had it left?</p>
+
+<p>An exquisite sensitiveness of the nerves of sense, imagination exalted,
+memory goaded, reason and judgment overthrown.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III.</h3>
+
+<p>In his Fast-Day sermon Dr. Burge delivered himself of much weighty
+testimony against those thaumaturgical incantations of heathenism which
+had been revived among us. With his splendor of clerical pause and
+emphasis he read the denunciations against a sinful nation to which the
+prophet Isaiah has affixed the awful words,&mdash;"Saith the Lord, the Lord
+of Hosts."</p>
+
+<p>"And they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one
+against his neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom."</p>
+
+<p>Here the preacher's dark eyes left the sacred volume, and seemed to gaze
+upon some coming struggle in which the sins of the people would meet a
+bloody retribution. Then, referring to the page, he pronounced with
+bitterness of holy indignation the prophetic curse which was that day
+fulfilled in our cherished New England.</p>
+
+<p>"And they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that
+have familiar spirits, and to the wizards."</p>
+
+<p>The sermon made no more visible impression upon the sinful portion of
+the congregation than homilies against novel and pleasant indulgences
+are wont to do.</p>
+
+<p>"The Apostle was right, after all," said Colonel Prowley, quoting the
+text upon the meeting-house steps; "we <i>should</i> 'try the spirits.'"</p>
+
+<p>"No objection to that," said the post-master; "but here's Dr. Burge
+tells us to keep out of their way, and call them all humbugs, without
+trying them at all."</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman referred to joined our party upon the meeting-house
+green, and accompanied us home.</p>
+
+<p>As we entered the house, our ears were saluted by a sort of scuffling
+noise, with an accompaniment of broken English. Miss Turligood, highly
+charged with the Detached Vitalized Electricity, or some stimulant of
+equal potency, ran to meet us in the entry, to enjoin silence and a
+passive state of mind before entering the parlor. The manifestations
+during service had been most wonderful. Twynintuft had lifted the table
+to the ceiling, with Mr. Stellato clinging to the legs. Mrs. Colfodder
+had had her back-hair taken down, and the housemaid was certain that
+somebody tried to kiss her.</p>
+
+<p>We made for the parlor with all convenient speed. Notwithstanding the
+solemn adjurations of Dr. Burge, we entertained guilty hopes of seeing
+some of the marvels which had become such positive drugs in our absence.
+But to <i>see</i> anything was, for a long time, out of the question; for the
+spirits had insisted upon having the shutters closed, and shawls pinned
+up before the cracks in the same, ere they would favor mortals with an
+exhibition. Finally, dim outlines revealed themselves through the
+obscurity. We made out a female figure (it was the cook, so Miss Prowley
+whispered) who was haranguing the assembly at the rate of a word every
+thirty seconds, or thereabouts.</p>
+
+<p><i>Cook as Twynintuft:</i>&mdash;"I am Mister Twynintuft. I set lots by you all. I
+left my bright spirit-home to come here to-day. The squashes was musty
+afore they was brought into the house. No blame to the cook. Them
+pickled termarterses couldn't keep into spring, and so I tell you now.
+The spheres is a dry place, and everythin' is most a-beautiful here."</p>
+
+<p><i>Betty, the housemaid, loquitur.</i>&mdash;(She appears in the character of
+Red-Jacket, a popular personation upon these occasions,&mdash;it being very
+easy to talk <i>Indian</i> by the simple recipe of transposing the nominative
+and objective cases of the personal pronoun.) "Me don't like what you
+say, old Twyney! I's name's Red-Jacket. Pale-face give fire-water to I.
+The squashes was good enough till cook left 'em out in the rain. Me have
+hunting-ground in fifth sphere. When me puts up tomatoes in the
+spirit-world, me rosins 'em when they bile. Great influence comes from I
+to-day; also, much development."</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Burge," whispered I, "you claim to have devoted some time to the
+examination of these delusions; but I will venture to say you have never
+witnessed anything so humiliating as this!"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Sir," murmured the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to
+be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel
+than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but
+upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal teachings
+ever blessed mankind."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think these people voluntary impostors?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; it would be nearer the truth to say that they are voluntary victims
+of a mental epidemic like that which developed itself in the St. Vitus's
+dance of the Middle Ages. The subjects of that disease went through the
+same spasms, convulsions, and painful racking of the limbs which
+accompany such cases of this personation as are not designed deceptions.
+Even those accidentally present, when the effects of the ancient
+contagion were exhibited, became infected and were irresistibly impelled
+to join in the extravagance. Look at Miss Turligood and Mr. Stellato,
+and see if the parallel is not supported."</p>
+
+<p>The individuals named were seen to be twisting themselves up and making
+an awkward sort of obeisance to the housemaid, who (still as Red-Jacket)
+thus delivered herself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Me goin' to dancey war-dance. Great Spirit sends lots more Indians come
+dancey too."</p>
+
+<p>A cry of acquiescence,&mdash;perchance intended for a ghostly war-whoop,&mdash;and
+the beloved of my Lord Byron broke into a savage polka.</p>
+
+<p>Stellato seized a paper-knife, and proceeded to scalp a chair with
+merciless ferocity.</p>
+
+<p>Those unfortunate ladies, Miss Branly and Miss Turligood, were unable to
+resist the infection, and so sprang among the party, whirled about, and
+exhibited absurdities painful and unnecessary to relate.</p>
+
+<p>"By the Muse of my ancestor the Poet!" exclaimed Colonel Prowley,
+indignantly, "I will no longer endure this clumsy travesty of that
+choric saltation with which Apollo was said to inspire his Pythian
+virgins. Dr. Burge, you will oblige me by pulling down that shawl!
+Sister, you will please to open the shutters of the south window!"</p>
+
+<p>The requests were instantly complied with. The wholesome sunlight burst
+into the room, and checked, as if by magic, the unseemly mumming of
+these deluded convulsionaries. Mrs. Colfodder sank down exhausted upon
+the sofa. Betty ceased to be Red-Jacket. Mr. Stellato gave up his
+scalping-knife, flopped feebly upon a chair, and again became a
+transparent jelly-fish of philosophy and water. It was harder to bring
+Miss Turligood to herself, by reason of the singular intractability of
+the squaw who had taken possession of the premises, and was only to be
+dislodged by much tediousness of argument and adjuration. At length,
+however, even this was accomplished. The Indians sulked off into space,
+and their terrestrial mediums once more prepared to collect about the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, bless me! past one, I declare!" said Miss Turligood, consulting
+her watch. "How spirits do make the time pass! A brief adjournment for
+dinner will now take place. The circle will meet for renewed
+investigation this afternoon at three o'clock. Every member will be
+punctual. Remember, in this place, at three o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>"Stay," said Miss Prowley, in a gentle, but at the same time decided
+tone; "it will not be convenient to us to receive this party again. The
+presence of friends from the city, who are in Foxden only for the day,
+renders a meeting this afternoon out of the question. And having once
+broken up our regular sittings, it will not be worth while to resume
+them,&mdash;at least, here."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Madam, Madam, you forget that the spirits have positively
+commanded us to hold sittings in your parlor three times a day till
+further notice!" gasped Miss Turligood, in extreme astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not recognize the authority of the spirits. They have no right to
+dictate the uses of my parlor."</p>
+
+<p>Here was a confession indeed on the part of Miss Prowley. <i>Not recognize
+the authority of the spirits!</i> Miss Turligood fairly staggered, when she
+heard the impious announcement. The smooth sciolist Stellato rallied his
+weak wits and uttered a cry of wonder at such flagitious heresy. The
+future Lady Byron, taking as a deliberate insult any doubts of the
+identity and authority of her posthumous spouse, threw up her arms in
+horror, and trotted out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, we got rid of them all,&mdash;<i>how</i>, I don't exactly remember, and
+if I did, it would not concern the reader to know. We delivered Miss
+Turligood over to her Irishman, (who had brought a carryall with him
+this time,) and charged him never to drive her back; Betty and the cook
+were restored to the kitchen; Stellato and Miss Branly disappeared, no
+one could say where.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," exclaimed Colonel Prowley, with a sigh of relief, "let us
+forget this nonsense, and go to dinner,&mdash;for the spirits have given me
+an appetite, if nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you intend to follow what I understand to be the teaching of your
+invisible visitors," remarked Dr. Burge, pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p>"How so?"</p>
+
+<p>"You do not recognize Fast-Day."</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! ha!" laughed the Colonel; "I doubt if the ghosts were quite
+unreasonable about that."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, brother, you should tell our good minister that we have but a cold
+collation, and that prepared on the previous day, as is our custom on
+the Sabbath," urged Miss Prowley, with the dignity of an exact and
+consistent housekeeper.</p>
+
+<p>"It is as well we have," was the reply; "for those precious Indians,
+although wise in medicine, knew little enough about cookery. They would
+have made sorry work, had it been necessary to give a culinary direction
+to the inspirations of our damsels below-stairs."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet, after all," resumed our host, meditatively, and after a
+moment's pause, "it seems scarcely right to make a jest of this matter;
+for, although the manifestations of to-day have been ridiculous
+enough,&mdash;yet&mdash;really&mdash;when I think of some of those instructive
+observations of poor Sir Joseph Barley"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The remark was never concluded, for a sudden rattling and whoaing and
+bumping of baggage was heard. The interruption came from before the
+front-door. The "Railroad-Omnibus" had driven up to the house.</p>
+
+<p>"It is, doubtless, my good friend Professor Owlsdarck," said Colonel
+Prowley,&mdash;courteously rebuking an exclamation of astonishment from his
+sister, who had gone to the window;&mdash;"to be sure, we did not expect him
+to-day, but he is ever a most welcome guest."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is <i>not</i> Professor Owlsdarck!" cried the sister, in shrillest
+tones of feminine amazement. "That portly figure to which the pencil of
+the artist has done such feeble justice! the spectacles with the square
+glasses! the enormous seal of the Sextons!&mdash;it can be but one man!"</p>
+
+<p>"What! you don't mean"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but I <i>do</i> mean! Come and see for yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>"A ghost in an omnibus! Why, sister, sister, the
+Detached&mdash;what-you-may-call-it has got into your head,&mdash;or, heavens! can
+it be that our unbelief is punished with this frightful manifestation?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is Sir Joseph Barley himself!" ejaculated Miss Prowley.</p>
+
+<p>"Surrounded by his bank of silver-tunicked attendants?" gasped the
+Colonel, in desperate interrogation.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, nothing of the kind," said Dr. Burge, assuringly; "he has not
+brought even a footman."</p>
+
+<p>And it <i>was</i> Sir Joseph Barley,&mdash;in the flesh,&mdash;and in a good deal of
+it, too;&mdash;Sir Joseph Barley, full to overflowing with talk and
+compliments. He had long planned a journey to America, and a surprise to
+his Fellow-Sexton in Foxden. The trip had been necessarily postponed
+from week to week, and then from month to month. Always expecting to
+leave by the next steamer, he had never thought it worth while to write.
+Had been on shore exactly nine hours, was delighted with the country,
+and had already written the first chapter of a book about it. Was,
+nevertheless, surprised to see none of the native Red Men upon the wharf
+when the Canada arrived. Should have thought the spectacle would have
+been both novel and imposing to them. After dinner, would, with
+permission, go into the forests about Foxden, and visit this singular
+people in their national wigwams.</p>
+
+<p>How picture the delight of hospitable Colonel Prowley, when, volubly
+delivering these and other sentiments, the High Priest and Potentate
+over all Sextondom entered the parlor and made himself comfortable in a
+rocking-chair?</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to dwell upon the matronly bustle of Miss Prowley, who,
+utterly ignoring the proper ordinances of the day, proceeded to send to
+the hotel for a beefsteak and a bottle of British Stout which could be
+warranted of genuine importation.</p>
+
+<p>"And stop, stop, sister!" whispered the Colonel, pursuing her to the
+door; "the idea seems absurd, to be sure, but still don't you think it
+barely possible, that, if Betty ran down to the river and caught a few
+of those snapping-turtles sunning themselves upon the old log, we might
+boil them into something which would faintly remind Sir Joseph of the
+Lord Mayor's soup?"</p>
+
+<p>This proposition being dismissed as impracticable,&mdash;first, by reason of
+the notorious unwillingness of the turtles to be caught, and, waiving
+that objection, because of the length of time it would take to achieve
+any passable imitation of the aldermanic dainty,&mdash;I was moved to an
+<i>aside</i>-declaration to the effect that my slight observation of the
+tastes of British tourists in the Federal States led to the suggestion
+of <i>oysters</i> as delicacies not wholly unlikely to find favor with their
+eminent guest.</p>
+
+<p>An explosion of impulsive gratitude responded to the hint. There was a
+new "saloon" just opened in Main Street,&mdash;Betty should stop there and
+leave a generous order.</p>
+
+<p>Well! it was some time before we were summoned to our amended dinner;
+but, when we did get it, it was a dinner worth waiting for.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Joseph Barley&mdash;Heaven bless him!&mdash;knew nothing of that smattering of
+Cosmos into which we hungry New-Englanders are wont to thrust our wits.
+He bluntly declared that he had never heard of Detached Vitalized
+Electricity, Woman's Rights, or Harmonial Development; also, he was
+delightfully confident that&mdash;he, Sir Joseph Barley, British subject,
+<i>not</i> having heard of them&mdash;they could not, by any possibility, be worth
+hearing about. Moreover, he had not read a word of Carlyle, and
+positively did not know of the existence of any English poet called
+Browning. Dr. Burge, he thoughtfully suggested, had probably mistaken
+the name; it was Byron, or possibly Bulwer, about whom he wished to
+inquire. The former of these personages was a British Peer, and a writer
+of some celebrity; he was, however, no longer living, having never
+recovered from a fever he took at a place called Missolonghi, in
+Greece;&mdash;the latter had written a book entitled "Pelham," once popular,
+but now thought inferior to a series of romances known in Great Britain
+as the "Waverley Novels"; these were the work of one Scott, a native of
+Edinburgh, whom George IV. honored with a baronetcy,&mdash;a splendid
+recompense for his great literary industry.</p>
+
+<p>This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the
+New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was
+good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and
+satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather
+narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant
+that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease
+of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of
+infinite space,&mdash;were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had
+never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American
+citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It
+is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth
+class&mdash;ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of
+life&mdash;who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of
+an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments&mdash;why not confess it? for is
+not man body as well as soul?&mdash;when it is a relief to get away from our
+mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a
+brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of
+his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past. Yet let
+this estate be temporary; for it is well to return to our thin diet,
+and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring
+phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life
+of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you,
+would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend,
+if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are
+seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers
+sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon
+hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise
+and grasp. And why this digression? I think its suggestion lay in the
+fact that Sir Joseph, being the type of the ordinary Englishman, held
+and imparted a fine sunniness of temper, and a perfectly balanced
+serenity,&mdash;good gifts, which, so far as my experience goes, are
+possessed in full measure by only one or two exceptional Americans, and
+these men of high and acknowledged genius.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't understand it, upon my honor," cried our visitor, after we had
+endeavored to explain to him his own spiritual intrusion on the previous
+evening. "I have heard of Doctor Pordage and the Dragon, and of the
+Drummer of Tedworth; but when you tell a sane British subject that his
+apparition comes before him, and takes, as it were, the froth off his
+welcome"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, my dear friend," interrupted Colonel Prowley, "you must know
+that nothing could do that! As to the obituary I had written, it may do
+for some other time,&mdash;for, indeed, my felicity in such compositions has
+been highly commended, and this by mundane authorities of no common
+weight."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us change the subject," said Sir Joseph, dryly; "I have no wish to
+test your powers in that direction; and so long as I don't give up the
+ghost, I suppose you must."</p>
+
+<p>"I would only say this," observed the Colonel,&mdash;"that in your book upon
+America I hope you will not fail to declare, that, in folly, deception,
+and unmitigated humbug, our Foxden spirits exceed all others ever seen
+or heard."</p>
+
+<p>"Sir Joseph Barley would be a foolish chronicler to commit himself to
+any such statement," said Dr. Burge, who seemed to feel it his duty to
+speak the moral <i>tag</i> to our little Fast-Day interlude. "I cannot allow
+that these Foxden manifestations are one whit more silly or equivocal
+than many I have seen elsewhere. This shamming the ghost of somebody
+still alive is no uncommon deception: several cases of the sort have
+come under my recent observation. And it is well that they sometimes
+occur; for they must cause reflection in all who are not victims of a
+mental disorder which seems to confound the reasoning powers of
+man,&mdash;causing its subjects to accept as teachers phantoms of their
+morbid imaginations, or deceiving intelligences from without. To all, I
+say, but such as these, an imposition of the sort here noticed must send
+reflections of our total inability to identify any pretended spirit
+merely because he flatters our vanity, or talks what may seem <i>to us</i>
+good morality or sound sense."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Burge had laid aside his knife and fork, and had launched bravely
+forth upon his theme. Sir Joseph moved uneasily. Things were getting
+serious. Our host happily interposed,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Very true, Doctor, all very true;&mdash;yet there is one piece of wisdom
+regulating the spiritual practice which now seems worth considering."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is that, pray?"</p>
+
+<p>"They do not recognize Fast-Day."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well," said Dr. Burge, taking the hint with the utmost
+good-humor, "perhaps they were not altogether wrong there; and so I will
+trouble Miss Prowley for a bit more of the steak, and&mdash;&mdash;No, thank you,
+no beer for me; I am a water-drinker of twenty years' standing."</p>
+
+<p>"The toast I am about to propose," observed Colonel Prowley, "may, with
+exceeding propriety, be drunk in water,&mdash;that is, whenever
+milk-and-water is not to be had:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>"Our spiritual demagogues, much weaker than our political ones, may
+they not be as much worse!"</i></p>
+
+<p>"And there is one other sentiment," said good Dr. Burge, brimming over
+with an honest hilarity,&mdash;"a toast which I should be willing to drink in
+pretty strong&mdash;coffee."</p>
+
+<p>"I have not forgotten that," exclaimed our host, proffering a hearty
+shake of the hand to the High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch
+of All Sextons,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>"Health and a long life to Sir Joseph Barley!"</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PROSPICE" id="PROSPICE"></a>PROSPICE.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fear death?&mdash;to feel the fog in my throat,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The mist in my face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the snows begin, and the blasts denote<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I am nearing the place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The power of the night, the press of the storm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The post of the foe;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Yet the strong man must go:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the journey is done and the summit attained,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the barriers fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The reward of it all.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I was ever a fighter, so&mdash;one fight more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The best and the last!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And bade me creep past.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The heroes of old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of pain, darkness, and cold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The black minute's at end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Shall dwindle, shall blend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Then a light, then thy breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And with God be the rest!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="WASHINGTON_IRVING" id="WASHINGTON_IRVING"></a>WASHINGTON IRVING.</h2>
+
+
+<p>We have, at last, a full story of the life of Mr. Irving. It is from the
+hand of a near relative, who has brought to the task an almost filial
+reverence, with a modest reserve of language, and a delicacy of
+treatment, which, while they disarm criticism, would of themselves
+suffice to attest the kinship of the writer with the distinguished
+subject of his biography. It is a quiet and tranquil picture that he has
+given us, of a serene and tranquil life. As we have turned it over
+delightedly, chapter after chapter, and volume upon volume, we have
+wished at times that the coy biographer had been endowed with a spice of
+garrulity or of egotism; for, say what we will, these qualities
+contribute largely to the interest with which we follow the story of a
+life about whose incidents and development the public has greed of
+knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>If Boswell had invariably governed his biographic record by the
+instincts of a gentleman, we should have possessed far less wealth of
+gossip by which to judge of the manhood and the familiar surroundings
+of the great lexicographer. And we can readily imagine that a
+conscientious man, in setting about the task of writing the life of a
+favorite author, would ask himself, over and over, how much should be
+yielded to the eager curiosity of the public, and how much a refined
+courtesy of feeling should keep in reserve. There are men, indeed, whose
+history, by whomsoever recorded, would suggest no such questioning,&mdash;men
+who have elbowed their way through life, bent upon some single aim, with
+a grand and coarse disregard of all the heart-burnings they may have
+caused, and all the idols they may have brushed down. Washington Irving
+was by no means such a man; he was kind-hearted to the last degree; and
+yet, remembering as we do that sly look of humor which lurked always in
+the corner of his eye, we cannot believe but that in his freer moments
+he has pricked through many a bag of bombast, and made dashing onslaught
+upon noisy literary pretension. Of all this, however, we find nothing in
+the volumes before us,&mdash;nothing in his own books. Always, in his contact
+with the world, he is genial; the face of every friend is beautiful to
+him; every acquaintance is at the least comely; in rollicking Tom Moore
+he sees (what all of us cannot see) a big heart,&mdash;in Espartero a bold,
+frank, honest soldier,&mdash;in every fair young girl a charmer,&mdash;and in
+almost every woman a fair young girl.</p>
+
+<p>In all these respects the biography of Mr. Pierre Irving is in fitting
+accord with what we had known and believed of his eminent kinsman. And
+we are delighted at being confirmed in the belief. We yield all measure
+of respect for the grace, the purity, the dignity, which Washington
+Irving has added to our literature; and yet we honor still more that
+true American heart which beams through all his writings, and throughout
+this record of his life. The rare kindliness of the man so hallows and
+sublimes his memory that we half forget his artistic power, his purity
+of touch, his keenness of observation, his delightful and abounding
+humor.</p>
+
+<p>There are no storms in this life of his: it is, as we have said, a quiet
+picture of a career that is full of honor indeed, full of triumphs, but
+full of serenity. Here is no Don Quixote searching for enemies with whom
+to do battle,&mdash;no John Knox thwacking terribly upon all heretical pates,
+and sweating with his obstinacy, as much as with the vigor of his blows;
+but the kindly gentleman, giving tone and beauty to the common sentiment
+of us all, piquing our wonder by his adroitness, kindling our smiles by
+his arch sallies, winning our admiration by his thousand graces, and our
+respect by his honesty and truth.</p>
+
+<p>In 1797, Washington Irving, a roguish lad of fifteen, living in William
+Street, in New York, and not a little rebellious against the severe
+orthodoxy of his father,&mdash;who was a deacon of the Presbyterian
+Church,&mdash;sometimes slipped out from his chamber, after evening prayers,
+for an hour or two at the theatre; he attended school, where he stole
+the reading of such books as "Robinson Crusoe," and "Sinbad the Sailor";
+and he wrote compositions for such of his fellows as would make good his
+tasks in mathematics. This was a study which he never loved, and to the
+last he abjured all stringency of method. The writer of this paper
+remembers on one occasion asking him what system he pursued in massing
+his notes for the "Life of Washington." "Don't ask me for system," said
+he; "I never had any. If you want to know what a man can do by
+arrangement, talk with B&mdash;&mdash;; his whole mind is pigeon-holed."</p>
+
+<p>At sixteen we find him in a lawyer's office; he does not, like some of
+his brothers, enjoy the advantages (if there be any) of a collegiate
+education. But he loves law as little as he loves mathematics. Feeble
+health gives occasion for frequent absences and journeyings; and it is
+plain to see that he loves a voyage up the Hudson, and adventurous
+travel through the wilds of Northern New York, better than he loves
+Judge Livingston, or the books of his law-patron, Mr. Hoffman. He has a
+scribbling mood upon him at this early day, too, and contributes to the
+New-York "Morning Chronicle" certain letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, which
+are remarked for their pleasant humor. At the age of twenty-one (1804)
+continued ill-health suggests a sea-voyage. He leaves law and his jolly
+companions,&mdash;Brevoort, Kemble, Paulding, and the rest,&mdash;and sails for
+Bordeaux. He wanders through Southern Europe delightedly,&mdash;meets
+Washington Allston at Rome, and is half tempted to turn painter,&mdash;sees
+Humboldt, De Sta&euml;l, Cooke, Siddons; and while all England is jubilant
+over Nelson's victory, and all England mourning over Nelson's death, he
+sails, in 1806, for home.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived in New York a sound man, he goes through a process of cramming
+for admission to the bar, and is presently instated&mdash;attorney-at-law.
+But at the very time of his examination he is concocting with James
+Paulding the project of "Salmagundi," which presently enlivens and
+perplexes people with the vagaries of Launcelot Langstaff. A little
+after, he plans and commences the Knickerbocker History.</p>
+
+<p>But meantime an interesting episode of his life is developing, which by
+its unfortunate issue is to give a certain color to all after-expression
+of his sentiment. While in the family of Mr. Hoffman, as law-student, he
+has conceived a strong attachment for his daughter; in certain
+memoranda, marked "private," which come under the eyes of the biographer
+only after Mr. Irving's death, he says,&mdash;"I idolized her. I felt at
+times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity, and as if I was a
+coarse, unworthy being in comparison.... I saw her fade rapidly away,
+beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelical to the very last.... I
+was by her when she died.... I was the last one she looked upon." The
+memorandum from which this extract is taken had been originally written,
+it appeared, for the eye of an intimate lady-friend abroad, to whom we
+shall have occasion to refer.</p>
+
+<p>In 1809, at the age of twenty-six, is published his "History of New
+York." There were a few punctilious Dutch families who were offended at
+its sallies; but cultivated people generally welcomed its fun, its
+spirit, its quiet satire, with heartiness and applause.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after he entered into a commercial partnership with his
+brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, of whom one was established in England,
+the other in New York. In the War of 1812 we find him acting as military
+aid to Governor Tompkins; and in 1815 he embarks again for Europe. He
+passes many years in England, in the course of which time the commercial
+firm, of which he is a member goes into bankruptcy. Upon this, he is of
+course thrown adrift. But through the influence of his friends at home
+he is offered the position of Chief Clerk of the Navy Department, with a
+salary of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. This, however, after some
+misgivings, he declines. He does not like the idea of being cramped by
+official routine of duty. He will try what he can do with his pen. And
+for months after making this decision (we have heard it with unction
+from his own lips) he can do nothing. His friend Allston is going back
+to America; Leslie is making a reputation; and he, a bankrupt, and
+having wantonly thrown up the chance for a lucrative position at home,
+is suddenly bereft of all capacity for literary work; he makes trial;
+but it is in vain. The "Sketch-Book" is floating in his thought; but he
+cannot commit its graces to paper.</p>
+
+<p>The months roll on; something must be done; the secretaryship at home is
+abandoned; he must try again; he does try; he sends off "Sketch-Book No.
+I." to America. We know what came of it: success, delight. Number upon
+number followed. There was an early republication, under the author's
+auspices, in London. He was f&ecirc;ted: it was so odd that an American should
+write with such control of language, with such a play of fancy, with
+such pathetic grace. There was a kind of social <i>furor</i> to meet and to
+see the man who, notwithstanding his Transatlantic birth, had conquered
+all the witchery of British speech, who knew its possible delicacies of
+expression, and who graced it with a humor that reminded of Goldsmith.</p>
+
+<p>No American author had ever dreamed of such ovation before: an ovation
+not due to any incisive thought, not due to any novelty of his
+subject-matter,&mdash;but due to the fact that a man born overseas had
+suddenly appeared among British writers, who could lay hold upon their
+own resources of sentiment, and inwrap it in language which charmed them
+by its grace and provoked them by its purity.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Murray entered upon the publication of the "Sketch-Book" in 1820,
+Mr. Irving being at that time thirty-seven years of age. Of his pleasant
+intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, of his junketings in Paris, of his
+meeting with Tom Moore, of his unfortunate enlistment in a
+steamboat-enterprise upon the Seine, there is full and most lively
+account in the "Life and Letters" before us. "Bracebridge Hall,"
+despatched from Paris in 1822, is received with the same favor which had
+attended the publication of the "Sketch-Book"; and the pecuniary returns
+are so liberal that he can lie upon his oars for a while, and (what
+pleases him more) can effectually aid his brother Peter, who was a party
+to the unfortunate steamboat-scheme.</p>
+
+<p>After this comes a merry whirl through Europe. The Rhine, Heidelberg,
+Munich, Vienna, we visit again in his sparkling letters, dated forty odd
+years ago. His reputation, and the good offices of French and English
+friends, open an easy path for him; everywhere he finds hospitality and
+acquaintances, and everywhere, by that frank, genial manner of his, he
+transmutes even chance acquaintances into confidential friends. The
+winter of 1822-3 is passed in the delightful city of Dresden. He meets
+with a warm welcome at the little Saxon court; he has the <i>entr&eacute;e</i> of a
+pleasant English household, where he becomes fairly domesticated. Mrs.
+Foster, its accomplished mistress, is a lady of fortune, who has two
+"lovely daughters." Mr. Irving, in concert with two or three
+gentlemen-friends, organizes certain home-theatricals, in which the
+Misses Foster engage with ready zeal and a charming grace. There are
+Italian readings, and country-excursions, to all of which Mr. Irving is
+a delighted party. He hardly knows how to tear himself away from scenes
+so enchanting. To Miss Foster he writes, on the occasion of a little
+foray into Bohemia,&mdash;"I am almost wishing myself back already. I ought
+to be off like your bird, but I feel I shall not be able to keep clear
+of the cage." Mrs. Foster, with a womanly curiosity, is eager to know
+how a man so susceptible as Mr. Irving, and so domestically inclined,
+should have reached the mature age of forty as a bachelor. Mr. Irving
+amiably gratifies her curiosity by detailing to her the story of his
+early and unfortunate attachment, in the shape of the memorandum to
+which we have already alluded. He closes this confidential disclosure by
+saying,&mdash;"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was
+not long since.... My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims
+upon my thoughts, and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
+I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for."</p>
+
+<p>We have dwelt upon this little episode, not because it has any essential
+importance in itself, but because it has been the subject of a most
+unseemly interpolation in the British reprint of the biography. Mr.
+Bentley, "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty," was, it appears, the
+purchaser, at a small sum, of the advance-sheets of the book; but, in
+order to secure English copyright, he conceived the idea of introducing
+extraneous matter of British origin. In prosecution of this design, he
+found as <i>collaborateurs</i> the two Misses Foster above alluded to, who
+are now wives of clergymen of the Church of England. Mrs. Fuller, the
+elder of the sisters, and the special favorite of the author, gives upon
+the whole a modest and pleasant account of their association with Mr.
+Irving, and closes with a few lines which, she says, he wrote in her
+scrap-book in 1832. "He declared it was impossible for him to be less in
+a writing-mood." And thereupon follow the well-known lines entitled
+"Echo and Silence." They certainly do not prove very much for the
+writing-mood of Mr. Irving,&mdash;whatever they may prove for Sir Egerton
+Brydges. The contribution of the younger sister, Mrs. Flora Dawson, is
+in a somewhat exaggerated and melodramatic vein, in the course of which
+she takes occasion to expend a great deal of pity upon "poor Irving,"
+who is made to appear in the character of a rejected suitor for the hand
+of her sister. It is true that the testimony of Mr. Irving's biographer,
+and of his private papers, is largely against this absurdly romantic
+construction; but, although it had been perfectly authentic, it is
+almost incredible that a lady of delicacy should make such blazon of the
+affair, for the sake of securing a copyright to "Her Majesty's Publisher
+in Ordinary." We are sorry that Mrs. Dawson has not made a better
+<i>d&eacute;but</i> in literature. As for Mr. Bentley, we can characterize his
+conduct in the matter only by the word&mdash;disgraceful. In the whole
+history of griping literary piracies (of which Americans must bear their
+share) we can recall no one which shows so bad a taste, and so bad a
+faith, as this of Mr. Bentley, the "Publisher in Ordinary to Her
+Majesty."</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1824 we find Mr. Irving at work in Paris chambers upon the
+"Tales of a Traveller"; then follow three or four joyous and workful
+years in Spain, between Madrid, Seville, and the Alhambra. We have all
+tasted the fruit of that pleasant sojourn; "Columbus" is on every
+library-shelf; and we remember a certain dog's-eared copy of the
+"Conquest of Granada" which once upon a time set all the boys of a
+certain school agog with a martial furor. How we shook our javelins at
+some bewildered cow blundering into the play-ground! What piratical
+forays we made upon the neighbors' orchards, after the manner of the
+brave old Muley Aben Hassan! And as for the Alhambra, the tinkle of the
+water in the marble basins of its court is lingering on our ears even
+yet.</p>
+
+<p>In Spain, as elsewhere, Mr. Irving makes a circle of friends about him
+whom it is hard to leave; but it must be. Accusing comrades at home say
+he has deserted his country; he turns his face Westward at last, and,
+full of honors, sails for New York once more, in the year 1832, at the
+ripe age of forty-nine. There never was a warmer welcome given to a
+returning citizen. A feast is made for him, at which all the magnates of
+the city of Manhattan assist; and the author's sensibility is so touched
+that he can make only stammering acknowledgments,&mdash;at which the cheers
+and the plaudits are heartier than ever.</p>
+
+<p>After this comes the opening of that idyllic life at Sunnyside,&mdash;the
+building of the gables, the gilding of the weather-cocks, the planting
+of the ivies. "Astoria" and "Bonneville" and the "Tour on the Prairies"
+keep his hand active and his brain in play. Near and dear relatives
+relieve his bachelor home of all loneliness. Nine years or more have
+passed after his return, when he is surprised&mdash;and not a little
+shocked&mdash;by his appointment, at the instance of Mr. Webster, as Minister
+to Madrid.</p>
+
+<p>He cannot resist the memories of the Alhambra, of Seville, of the
+Guadalquivir. Many pleasant associations are revived in England, in
+France, and not a few in the now revolutionary Spain. But it is plain to
+see that the official visit is not so enjoyable as the old untrammelled
+life in the Peninsula. No matter how light the duties, routine is a
+harness that galls him. We can almost hear his cheer of thanksgiving as
+he breaks away from it, and comes once more to his cherished home of
+Sunnyside. He is not an old man yet, though he counts well into the
+sixties. He contrives new additions to his cottage; he dashes off the
+charming "Life of Goldsmith" at a heat. His older books come pouring
+from the press, and are met with the cordial welcome of new ones.</p>
+
+<p>His brothers, to whom he had been so fondly knit, are all gone save one;
+Brevoort is gone; Kemble is just above him, at his forge, under the lee
+of the Highlands. The river by quiet Tarrytown is strung up and down
+with new "gentlemen's places."</p>
+
+<p>He puts himself resolutely at work upon the "Life of Washington."
+Frequently recurring illness, and a little shakiness in his step, warn
+him that his time is nearly up. He knows it. There is only one more task
+to make good. We hear of him at Mount Vernon, at Arlington, at Saratoga.
+Volume by volume the work comes forward. The public welcome it,&mdash;for
+they love the author, and they love the subject. Three volumes,&mdash;four
+volumes; and there are rumors that the old gentleman is failing. But
+whoever finds admission to that delightful home of Sunnyside meets the
+old smile, the old cheer. Seventy years have shaken the frame, but have
+not shaken the heartiness of the man. The jest leaps from his eye before
+his lip can clothe it, as it did twenty years before. There is a
+friendly pat for his little terrier, and a friendly word for his
+gardener, as in the old days.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth volume is in progress; but there is a cough that distresses
+him sorely. He pushes on, however, through his task. The step is growing
+feebler and the cough more annoying. It is the year 1859, and the
+seventy-seventh of his age, when, upon a certain November evening, with
+one little sharp cry of pain, he falls upon his chamber-floor&mdash;dead.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There are men whose works we admire, but for whose lives we care
+nothing. Mr. Irving was not one of them. There is such a manly
+heartiness in him that we crave close contact: we cannot know him too
+well. Surely, this sympathy of readers, spontaneous, inevitable, will
+keep his name always green. There may come greater purists,&mdash;though they
+must con the language well; writers of more dramatic power we have now,
+possibly a quainter humor,&mdash;but one more tender, that puts us in such
+immediate sympathy with the author, hardly in our day, or in any day,
+shall we see again.</p>
+
+<p>It is plain enough that Mr. Irving depended largely on his
+friendships,&mdash;that, unconsciously, his courage for meeting and
+conquering whatever of difficulty lay in his path was fed very much by
+the encouraging words of those he loved and respected. His were no
+brawny shoulders to push their way, no matter what points were galled by
+contact,&mdash;no self-asserting, irresistible press of purpose, which is
+careless of opinion. Throughout, we see in his kindly nature a longing
+for sympathy: if from those intellectually strong, so much the better;
+if from dear friends, better yet; if from casual acquaintances, still it
+is good and serviceable to him, and helps him to keep his poise.</p>
+
+<p>He is a man, too, who clearly shuns controversy, who does not like to
+take blows or to give blows, and whose intellectual life and development
+find shape and color from this dread of the combative. Not that he is
+without a quiet power and exercise of satire,&mdash;not that follies which
+strike his attention do not get a thrust from his fine rapier; but they
+are such follies, for the most part, as everybody condemns. By reason of
+this quality in him, he avoids strongly controverted points in history;
+or, if his course lies over them, he gives a fairly adjusted average of
+opinion; he is not in mood for trenchant assertions of this or that
+belief. This same quality, again, makes him shun political life. He has
+a horror of its wordy wars, its flood of objurgation. Not that he is
+without opinions, calmly formed, and firmly held; but the entertainment
+of kindred belief he does not make the measure of his friendships. His
+character counted on the side of all charity, of forbearance, against
+harsh judgments; it was largely and Christianly catholic, as well in
+things political as literary. He never made haste to condemn.</p>
+
+<p>There is a rashness in criminating this retirement from every-day
+political conflicts which is, to say the least, very short-sighted.
+Extreme radicalism spurns the comparative inactivity, and says, "Lo, a
+sluggard!" Extreme conservatism spurns it, and says, "Lo, a coward!" It
+is only too true that cowards and sluggards both may take shelter under
+a shield of indifference; but it is equally true that any reasonably
+acute mind, if only charitably disposed, can readily distinguish between
+an inactivity which springs from craven or sluggish propensity, and that
+other which belongs to constitutional temperament, and which, while
+passing calm and dispassionate judgment upon excesses of opinion of
+either party, contributes insensibly to moderate the violence of both.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever may have been Mr. Irving's reluctance to ally himself
+intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special
+measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken
+utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country.
+There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he
+had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge
+he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so
+grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the
+sneers he flings at the country of others. It was not in Mr. Irving's
+nature to sneer at even an enemy; it was not his way of making conquest.
+He recognized fully the advantages of a foreign life (at his date) in
+following up that career of belles-lettres study which he had marked out
+for himself. The free <i>entr&eacute;e</i> of European libraries and galleries, and
+familiar association with a class of cultivated men of leisure, (in
+countries where such a class exists,) offered opportunity for refining
+his taste, for enlarging his stock of available material, and for
+stimulating his mental activity, of which he was not slow to perceive
+the value, and of which he has given ample account.</p>
+
+<p>There is much that is interesting in the Life before us in regard to Mr.
+Irving's habit of work. He was, like most men of extreme sensitiveness,
+moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions,
+with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his
+labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon
+these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale
+manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted;
+he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless
+blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months
+during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then it passes
+suddenly, like a cloud, and the air (as at Seville) wooes him to his
+charmingest fancies.</p>
+
+<p>We do not propose a critical estimate of the books of Mr. Irving. We
+have neither space nor present temper for this. The world has indorsed
+his great popularity with the heart, as much as with the brain. There
+are those who have objected that the last subject of his labor&mdash;the
+"Life of Washington"&mdash;was little suited to his imaginative tone of mind,
+and should have been worked up with a larger and more philosophic grasp
+of thought. It may well be that at some future time we shall have a more
+profound estimate of the relations which our great Leader held to his
+cause and to his time; but, however profound and just such a work may
+be, we feel quite safe in predicting that it will never supplant the
+graceful labor of Mr. Irving in the hearts of the American people.
+Precisely what was wanted Mr. Irving has given: such charming, faithful,
+truthful picture of the great hero of our Revolution as should carry
+knowledge of him, of the battles he fought, of his large, self-denying,
+unswerving patriotism, of the purity of his life, into every household.
+No man could have done this work better; nor do we think any other will
+ever do it as well.</p>
+
+<p>And there is his "Sketch-Book,"&mdash;in blue and gold, in green and gold, in
+red and gold;&mdash;in what colors, and in what language, does it not appear?
+Yet the themes are of the simplest: a broken heart; a rural funeral; a
+Christmas among the hollies; an hour in the Abbey of Westminster: what
+is there new, or to care greatly for, in these things? Yet he touched
+them, and all the world are touched by them. Your critic says there is
+no serious insight, no deep probing; a pretty wind blows over,&mdash;that is
+all.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that is all; but how many are there who can set such sweet currents
+of wind aflow?</p>
+
+<p>Only a bruised daisy, only a wounded hare, only Halloween,&mdash;and Burns,
+with all his fresh, healthy, hearty manhood, and only a peasant's pen,
+touches them in such way that his touch is making the nerves of men and
+women vibrate, where-ever our Saxon speech is uttered.</p>
+
+<p>There is many a light thing that we cherish,&mdash;with which we will not
+easily part. That souvenir of some dear, dead one we do not value by its
+weight in gold; that sweet story of the Vicar we do not measure by its
+breadth of logic. And no American, no matter how late born he may be,
+but, if he wander in the Catskills, shall hear the rumble of the Dutch
+revellers at their bowling in the gorges of the mountains,&mdash;not one but
+shall read, and reading shall love, the story of Rip Van Winkle.</p>
+
+<p>It was only a quiet old gentleman of six-and-seventy who was buried
+awhile ago from his home upon the Hudson: yet the village-shops were all
+closed; the streets, the houses, the station, were hung in black;
+thousands from the city thirty miles away thronged the high-road leading
+to the little church where prayers were to be said.</p>
+
+<p>How shall we explain this? The author is dead, indeed, whose writings
+were admired by all; but there is something worthier to be said than
+this:&mdash;At the little church lay the body of the man whom all men loved.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_RIM" id="THE_RIM"></a>THE RIM.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>PART II.</h3>
+
+<p>Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St.
+George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who,
+perceiving that &Eacute;loise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was
+satisfactory; and &Eacute;loise refused herself to all, the better by reason of
+her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others
+with the result of bad government; their association with the
+Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was
+broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was
+light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull
+them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and
+even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would
+not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there
+was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect
+order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was,
+moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in
+Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the
+candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred
+matters about which he knew nothing at all,&mdash;and always given, in spite
+of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of
+taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it
+for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt
+under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such
+superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every
+one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George
+in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand
+friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength
+to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of
+all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a
+master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to
+follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and
+of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to
+have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's
+masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and
+was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they
+did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut
+their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being
+yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or
+twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and &Eacute;loise, weary of
+confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place,
+as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's
+people but adored her.</p>
+
+<p>"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at
+the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not
+deigning a second address for a second rebuff,&mdash;"It will be quite
+impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into
+rivers."</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way,
+strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr.
+St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching
+tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to
+read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she
+had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the
+pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But
+she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page,
+and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it
+was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and
+only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she
+perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water
+had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light
+forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess
+the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by,
+there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was
+seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a
+seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which
+she had stood.</p>
+
+<p>"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her
+ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices
+our still life so well!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried &Eacute;loise, freeing herself.</p>
+
+<p>"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare
+not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught
+and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little
+witch!"</p>
+
+<p>"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"</p>
+
+<p>"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."</p>
+
+<p>"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."</p>
+
+<p>"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all
+safe,&mdash;it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising
+his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour
+ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find
+you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise was a little sobered.</p>
+
+<p>"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you
+again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely
+impassable."</p>
+
+<p>And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a
+brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St.
+George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set
+her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St.
+George expected, &Eacute;loise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then,
+looking up, said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her
+from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and
+immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.</p>
+
+<p>"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing
+out &Eacute;loise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two
+mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him
+swear! He galloped off at last like mad."</p>
+
+<p>And as &Eacute;loise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for
+her in the glass, the familiar girl added,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,&mdash;oh, no, indeed!&mdash;but at all of
+us, to think we'd let you go alone."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken
+to your master about buying Vane?"</p>
+
+<p>"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise
+excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,&mdash;we
+minded ole Massa for lub,&mdash;but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St.
+George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean
+to,&mdash;as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested
+Hazel.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. St. George," said &Eacute;loise, "is very good to his people; they ought
+to wish to obey him."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business <i>here</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said &Eacute;loise, facing the
+suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."</p>
+
+<p>But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length
+glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny
+cheek, she added, in a low voice,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"</p>
+
+<p>"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before
+&Eacute;loise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather
+courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She
+was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past
+conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered
+slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order
+still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well
+have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.</p>
+
+<p>It was one afternoon that &Eacute;loise sat at the drawing-room window, having
+recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a
+place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect,
+just then,&mdash;her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along
+the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid
+down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her
+appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.</p>
+
+<p>"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek.
+Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her
+heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she
+recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent
+portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved
+Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other,
+"I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George
+had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a
+hesitating voice came sliding towards him,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. St. George"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon,&mdash;did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied &Eacute;loise.</p>
+
+<p>She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort,
+then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.</p>
+
+<p>"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid,
+who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger,
+and I became attached to her"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>And before &Eacute;loise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's
+riding-whip,&mdash;that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the
+appropriation of everything about her.</p>
+
+<p>"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only
+seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,&mdash;just, you know, as I might
+have been"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that &Eacute;loise added, throwing back
+her head again,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Just as I <i>am</i>, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for
+several&mdash;&mdash;Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her.
+I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her
+initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with,
+when I was a little girl,&mdash;and she wouldn't let me have it, of course.
+Pretty initials!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and,
+unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George
+laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked
+&Eacute;loise then, mischievously.</p>
+
+<p>But before he could have replied, she resumed,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours,
+Miss &Eacute;loise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed!"</p>
+
+<p>"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen
+him; he is here a good deal,&mdash;by stealth: and they want to be married.
+But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and
+they are afraid, and&mdash;and&mdash;could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"</p>
+
+<p>"I could, Miss Changarnier."</p>
+
+<p>"And you will, then?" cried &Eacute;loise, springing up.</p>
+
+<p>"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."</p>
+
+<p>"Won't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off
+the place."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."</p>
+
+<p>"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the
+vicious ones are transported."</p>
+
+<p>"But perhaps he would give him to you."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss &Eacute;loise, he would give him to <i>you</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Me? I have never seen him."</p>
+
+<p>"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give
+Vane to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss &Eacute;loise, I will see what I can do about it first."</p>
+
+<p>"How kind you are! Thank you!"</p>
+
+<p>And &Eacute;loise was about to go.</p>
+
+<p>"One moment, if you please," said the other.</p>
+
+<p>And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in
+too assured a tone.</p>
+
+<p>"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an
+enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should
+you in turn grant that enemy a favor."</p>
+
+<p>"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then,&mdash;I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,&mdash;promise me
+now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not
+ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much
+under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"</p>
+
+<p>And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.</p>
+
+<p>"A whole promise is rash," said &Eacute;loise, laughing. "Half a one I give
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned
+abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would
+know it too.</p>
+
+<p>It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one
+chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a
+fire upon the hearth, and &Eacute;loise sitting on the floor before it with her
+box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite
+her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went
+soaring up the chimney.</p>
+
+<p>"In pursuit of an <i>ignis-fatuus</i>?" asked he, stooping over her an
+instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a
+certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress,
+that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the
+cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.</p>
+
+<p>"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get
+the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,&mdash;but there 'a no lustre,
+no flicker,&mdash;I can't find out the secret of painting flame."</p>
+
+<p>"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George,
+unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.</p>
+
+<p>And &Eacute;loise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and
+went to bed.</p>
+
+<p>So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a
+cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but
+Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on
+with her tatting and contrivances.</p>
+
+<p>Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each
+other with less frozen chill than St. George and &Eacute;loise did on the
+succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during
+which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and &Eacute;loise silently cast
+up her accounts.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter,
+Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests
+at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss
+Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to
+&Eacute;loise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor
+parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see
+you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."</p>
+
+<p>"I shall still have my work to do," said &Eacute;loise; and she went into the
+cabinet and sharpened her pens with a <i>vim</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and
+perplexity, if &Eacute;loise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the
+guests; but that was not set down in her part, and &Eacute;loise rightly felt
+that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when
+she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and
+give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in
+through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent
+herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget
+all about it,&mdash;succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had
+died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.</p>
+
+<p>It was past noon when &Eacute;loise, having finished her task, and having
+remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon
+her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet,
+where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search
+of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward,
+and said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to
+Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black,
+of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a
+glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow,
+set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving
+about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the
+frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that
+would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in
+dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different
+from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted
+upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to
+seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in
+England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium.
+Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish
+his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his
+property,&mdash;through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an
+experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world
+afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing
+Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which
+Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty
+pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person,
+constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of
+the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and
+ran away.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.</p>
+
+<p>"Who would not be the Ab&eacute;lard to such an &Eacute;loise?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the
+while a melancholy old tune.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you what, St. George"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.</p>
+
+<p>"You were about to impart some information?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is no nun of my shriving."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with
+Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"</p>
+
+<p>"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am
+tyrant,&mdash;it is she who stands for that;&mdash;I am only Mordecai the Jew
+sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St.
+George,&mdash;"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of
+us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand
+Unapproachable."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Tant mieux.</i> My way is all the clearer."</p>
+
+<p>"Your way to what?"</p>
+
+<p>"To the altar!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George,
+the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the
+heels taking an altitude.</p>
+
+<p>"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry &Eacute;loise Changarnier."</p>
+
+<p>"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."</p>
+
+<p>"You!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a
+new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime &Eacute;loise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all
+having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation
+of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to
+the group, in grand <i>tenue</i>, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind
+up &Eacute;loise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim
+with sundry fervent ejaculations.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets
+with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king
+coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in
+a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell
+<i>me</i>. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes
+or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I
+declare&mdash;&mdash;Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put
+geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue
+poison-bells!"</p>
+
+<p>"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."</p>
+
+<p>"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said &Eacute;loise, turning with her
+smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.</p>
+
+<p>"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his
+shoulder, as he took &Eacute;loise out to dinner, "my intention was the
+earlier; it will succeed!"</p>
+
+<p>"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good
+general expose his campaign?"</p>
+
+<p>"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed
+it."</p>
+
+<p>"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George,
+severely.</p>
+
+<p>"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they
+moved on.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Whether she would or not, &Eacute;loise found herself in exactly the same
+position in the house as before her adopted father's death,&mdash;partly
+because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no
+difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be
+so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was
+unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so
+blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to
+fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have
+her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of
+&Eacute;loise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust
+back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half
+undone, or a mantle dropping off,&mdash;trifles that only gave one the desire
+to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of
+the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which
+only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers
+always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting
+strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant
+little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she
+thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was
+wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so
+controlled. But of that &Eacute;loise never dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of
+Mr. Marlboro's devotion &Eacute;loise was quite aware,&mdash;and whereas, playing
+with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew
+to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty
+ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to
+theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up
+as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was
+in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare
+with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully
+&Eacute;loise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro'
+begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never
+threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or
+loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have
+spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy
+eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him.
+But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made
+little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became
+impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache
+savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately &Eacute;loise did not try to dispel
+the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory
+hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in
+good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro'
+bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle
+riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and constant as the magnet to its poles.</p>
+
+<p>It was still the steps of &Eacute;loise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he
+brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago
+they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow,
+he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery
+shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes;
+to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose
+essence told all his philosophy:&mdash;"The great error in government," he
+said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government,
+individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this
+error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening,
+as Marlboro' thus harangued &Eacute;loise.</p>
+
+<p>"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all
+oppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Nullification is a good solvent."</p>
+
+<p>"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the
+horizon, man!"</p>
+
+<p>"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr.
+St. George, bowing to &Eacute;loise; "and as to the last,&mdash;I'll none of it!"</p>
+
+<p>And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as &Eacute;loise was about to
+ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly
+taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.</p>
+
+<p>"What has that <i>contrabandista</i> been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St.
+George.</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise looked ignorantly up.</p>
+
+<p>"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says,
+when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that
+we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let
+us make the best of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the
+disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"</p>
+
+<p>"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring
+the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I
+have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed
+under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged &Eacute;loise to take a
+vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily
+and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long
+morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears,
+or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a
+laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after
+sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded
+himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat,
+and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she
+found another awaiting her,&mdash;her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled
+towards her feet,&mdash;her side cramped, behold, a cushion,&mdash;she looked for
+fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which
+Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have
+preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject
+kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was
+precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if &Eacute;loise had thought of once
+looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in
+whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,&mdash;that, if they
+rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with
+Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was
+secured,&mdash;and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and
+smiled and lightly talked the while,&mdash;not that her music was not sweet,
+but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask.
+Yet &Eacute;loise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he
+who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he
+fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held
+the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there,
+she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that
+he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that,
+if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular
+expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and
+face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms
+and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still
+sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower
+beneath the sun;&mdash;to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool
+and curt to Earl St. George for days.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea,
+&Eacute;loise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and
+observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had
+refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the
+delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks
+lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely
+shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white
+embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a
+gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St.
+George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt
+or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own
+part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which
+they were all acting, &Eacute;loise spilled her tea and made some work for
+Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on &Eacute;loise that she
+had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel
+was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that
+probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his
+ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first
+disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he
+had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with
+something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the
+truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a
+favor."</p>
+
+<p>"Then <i>I</i> shall."</p>
+
+<p>"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.</p>
+
+<p>But &Eacute;loise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back
+at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after
+her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty
+dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that,
+stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and
+bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to
+spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung
+above her head; and when &Eacute;loise laid her hand gently on her shoulder,
+she sprang as if one had struck her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and
+Hazel, secure of &Eacute;loise's efforts, had married. It was one of the
+immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages
+allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew
+where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to
+the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves
+were wont to journey.</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza,
+and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion,
+and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro'
+leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. &Eacute;loise went and
+took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating
+opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood
+upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery
+redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea,
+a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs,
+like an azure mist.</p>
+
+<p>"There is something there that I want," said &Eacute;loise, archly, looking at
+the Bluffs.</p>
+
+<p>"There? you shall not wish twice."</p>
+
+<p>Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which
+he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a
+subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for
+this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.</p>
+
+<p>"That is my little maid," said &Eacute;loise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles
+awhile, though. Is she not pretty,&mdash;Hazel?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And you want Vane?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."</p>
+
+<p>"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if
+overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous
+effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron
+fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the
+pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I
+would have difficulty, Miss &Eacute;loise, in pardoning such an offence to you,
+yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise laughed in her charming way, and said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"But, Mr. Marlboro', would it not be an admirable lesson to your people,
+if Vane were sold?"</p>
+
+<p>"A lesson to teach them all to go and do likewise, eh, Marlboro'?" said
+St. George, passing, with Miss Humphreys on his arm.</p>
+
+<p>"I have never sold, I never sell, a slave," replied Marlboro', in his
+placid tone; but St. George was out of hearing. "Yet, Miss
+&Eacute;loise,&mdash;if&mdash;if you will accept him"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Marlboro'! Indeed? Truly indeed? How happy you make me!"</p>
+
+<p>"And you can make me as happy,&mdash;happier, by the infinity of heaven over
+earth!"</p>
+
+<p>"But ought I to accept such a gift?" asked &Eacute;loise, oblivious of his last
+speech. "But can I?&mdash;may I?"&mdash;as St. George's warning stole into her
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>"Most certainly you can! most certainly you shall! he is yours!" And
+before &Eacute;loise could pour forth one of her multitudinous thanks, he had
+moved away.</p>
+
+<p>Marlboro's, however, was not that noble nature that spurns to beg at the
+moment when it grants. Directly, he had wheeled about, and with an eager
+air was again beside her.</p>
+
+<p>"And, &Eacute;loise," he said, "if in response I might have one smile, one
+hope"&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Thoughtlessly enough, &Eacute;loise turned her smiling face upon him, and gave
+him her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"And you give it to me at last, this hand, to crown my life!" he
+said,&mdash;for to his excited brain the trifling deed seemed the weighty
+event, and when he looked up &Eacute;loise still was smiling. Only for a
+second, though, for her processes of thought were not instantaneous,
+while to him it was one of Mahomet's moments holding an eternity, and
+she smiled while she was thinking, thinking simply of her little
+handmaiden's pleasure. She tried to release her hand. But Mr. Marlboro'
+did not know that his grasp upon it was that of a vice, for under an
+artificial stimulus every action is as intense as the fired fancy
+itself. And as she found it impossible to free it without visible
+violence, other thoughts visited &Eacute;loise. Why should she not give it to
+him? Who else cared for it? What object had her lonely life? Speak
+sweetly as they might, what one of her old gallants forgot her loss of
+wealth? Here was a man to make happy, here was a heart to rest upon,
+here was a slave of his own passions to set free. Why should she
+continue to live with Mr. St. George for her haughty master, when here
+was this man at her feet? Why, but that suddenly the conviction smote
+her that she loved the one and despised the other, that she adored the
+master and despised the slave? And she snatched away her hand.</p>
+
+<p>Just then Mr. St. George was coming down the piazza again, on his
+promenade, his head bent low as he spoke to the clinging little lady on
+his arm. Passing &Eacute;loise, as he raised his face, their eyes met. She was
+doing, he thought, the very thing that he had disadvised, and, as if to
+warn her afresh, he looked long, a derisive smile curling his proud lip.
+That was enough. "He knows it!" exclaimed &Eacute;loise to herself. "He
+believes it! He thinks I love him! He never shall be sure of it!" And
+turning once more, her face hung down and away, she laid her hand in
+Marlboro's, without a word or a glance. He bent low over it in the
+shadow, pressing it with his fervent lips, murmuring, "Mine! mine at
+last! my own!" And St. George saw the whole.</p>
+
+<p>Just then a little sail crept in sight from where they stood, winding
+down the creek at the foot of the lawn.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how delightful to be on the water to-night!" cried Laura Murray.</p>
+
+<p>"You have but to command," said Mr. St. George, with a certain gayety
+that seemed struck out like sparks against the flinty fact of the late
+occurrence,&mdash;and half the party trooped down the turf to the shore. The
+boats were afloat and laden before one knew it. Mr. Marlboro' and &Eacute;loise
+were just one instant too late. Laura Murray shook a triumphant
+handkerchief at them, and St. George feathered his oar, pausing a moment
+as if he would return, and then gave a great sweep and his boat fairly
+leaped over the water.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Marlboro' did not hesitate. There was the sail they had first seen,
+now on the point of being lowered beneath the alder-bushes by the young
+hunters who had sought shore for the night. Gold slipped from one hand
+to another, a word, a name, and a promise. &Eacute;loise was on board,
+expecting Mrs. Arles and Mrs. Houghton to follow. Marlboro' sprang upon
+the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a
+farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing
+and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of
+wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on their
+wild career.</p>
+
+<p>"Marlboro' is mad!" said St. George, with a whitening cheek.</p>
+
+<p>Marlboro', standing up, one arm about the mast, and catching the slant
+beam of the late-rising moon on his face, that shone awfully rapt and
+intent, saluted them with an ironical cheer, and dashed on. &Eacute;loise held
+the tiller for the moment, still pulsating with her late emotions, not
+above a trifling play of vanity, welcoming the exhilaration of a race,
+where she might half forget her trouble, and pleased with a vague
+anticipation of some intervention that might recall the word which even
+in these five dragging moments had already begun to corrode and eat into
+her heart like a rusting fetter. The oarsmen in the wherries bent their
+muscles to the strife, the boats danced over the tiny crests, the ladies
+sang their breeziest sea-songs to cheer them at the work. The sail-boat
+rounded a curve and was almost out of sight.</p>
+
+<p>"Oars never caught sails yet," muttered St. George, and he put his boat
+to the shore. "There, Murray, try your lazy mettle, and take my oar. As
+for me, I'm off,"&mdash;and he sprang upon the bank, sending the boat
+spinning off into the current again from his foot. In ten minutes a
+horseman went galloping by on the high-road skirting the shore, with a
+pace like that of the Spectre of the Storm.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Mr. Marlboro'," said &Eacute;loise, "shall we not turn back, victorious?"</p>
+
+<p>"Turn?" said Marlboro', shaking loose another fold of the linen. "I
+never turn! Look your last on the tiny tribe,&mdash;we shall see them no
+more!"</p>
+
+<p>&Eacute;loise sprang to her feet. He caught her hand and replaced her; his face
+was so white that it shone, there was a wild glitter in his eye, and the
+smile that brooded over her had something in it absolutely terrific.</p>
+
+<p>"We have gone far enough," said &Eacute;loise, resolutely. "I wish to rejoin my
+friends."</p>
+
+<p>"You are with me!" said Marlboro', proudly.</p>
+
+<p>She was afraid to say another word, for to oppose him now in his
+exultant rage might only work the mood to frenzy. The creek had widened
+almost to a river,&mdash;the sea was close at hand, with its great tumbling
+surf. She looked at the horizon and the hill for help, but none came;
+destruction was before them, and on they flew.</p>
+
+<p>Marlboro' stood now, and steadied the tiller with his foot.</p>
+
+<p>"This is motion!" said he. "We fly upon the wings of the wind! The
+viewless wind comes roaring out of the black region of the East, it
+fills the high heaven, it roars on to the uttermost undulation of the
+atmosphere, and we are a part of it! We are only a mote upon its breath,
+a dust-atom driven before it, &Eacute;loise,&mdash;and yet one great happiness is
+greater than it, drowns it in a vaster flood of viewless power, can
+whisper to it calm!"</p>
+
+<p>How should &Eacute;loise contradict him? With such rude awakening, he might
+only snatch her in his arms and plunge down to death. Perhaps he half
+divined the fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, &Eacute;loise," he said. "They are both here, life and death, at our
+beck! I can take you to my heart, one instant the tides divide, then
+they close above us, and you are mine for ever and ever and
+only,&mdash;sealed mine beneath all this crystal sphere of the waters! We
+hear the gentle lapping of the ripples on the shore, we hear the tones
+of evening-bells swim out and melt above us, we hear the oar shake off
+its shower of tinkling drops,&mdash;up the jewel-strewn deeps of heaven the
+planets hang out their golden lamps to light our slumbers! Heart to
+heart and lip to lip, we are at rest, we are at peace, nothing comes
+between us, our souls have the eternities in which to mingle!"</p>
+
+<p>He saw &Eacute;loise shudder, and turned from his dream, blazing full upon her.
+"Life, then, is best!" he cried. "But life together and alone, life
+where we count out its throbs in some far purple island of the main,
+prolonged who knows how far?&mdash;love shall make for us perpetual youth,
+there shall no gloom enter our Eden, perfect solitude and perfect bliss!
+Alone, we two in our pride and our joy can defy the powers of any other
+heaven, we shall become gods ourselves! Up helm and away! Life is best!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_NEVA" id="THE_NEVA"></a>THE NEVA.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">I walk, as in a dream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Beside the sweeping stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Serene the temples stand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And sleep, on either hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The palace-fronts along the granite quays.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Where golden domes, remote,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Above the sea-mist float,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And Peter's fortress-spire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">A slender lance of fire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">The pillared angel soars<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Above the silent shores;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And down the watery line<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The exiled Sphinxes pine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">I hear, amid the hush,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The restless current's rush,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">A voice portentous, deep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To charm a monarch's sleep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With dreams of power resistless as his own.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Strong from the stormy Lake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Pure from the springs that break<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In Valda&iuml; vales the forest's mossy floor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Greener than beryl-stone<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">From fir woods vast and lone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In one full stream the braided currents pour.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Build up your granite piles<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Around my trembling isles,"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I hear the River's scornful Genius say:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">"Raise for eternal time<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Your palaces sublime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And flash your golden turrets in the day!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"But in my waters cold<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">A mystery I hold,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of empires and of dynasties the fate:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">I bend my haughty will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Unchanged, unconquered still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Your fetters I allow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">As a strong man may bow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His sportive neck to meet a child's command,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And curb the conscious power<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That in one awful hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could whelm your halls and temples where they stand.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"When infant Rurik first<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">His Norseland mother nursed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My willing flood the future chieftain bore:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To Alexander's fame<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">I lent my ancient name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Then Peter came. I laughed<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To feel his little craft<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Borne on my bosom round the marshy isles:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">His daring dream to aid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">My chafing floods I laid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"I wait the far-off day<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">When other dreams shall sway<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The House of Empire builded by my side,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Dreams that already soar<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">From yonder palace-door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And cast their wavering colors on my tide,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Dreams where white temples rise<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Below the purple skies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By waters blue, which winter never frets,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Where trees of dusky green<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">From terraced gardens lean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And shoot on high the reedy minarets.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Shadows of mountain-peaks<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Vex my unshadowed creeks;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And islands, bald and high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Break my clear round of sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Then, ere the cold winds chase<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">These visions from my face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I see the starry phantom of a crown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Beside whose blazing gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">This cheating pomp is cold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A moment hover, as the veil drops down.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Build on! That day shall see<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">My streams forever free.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The frost shall split each wall:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Your domes shall crack and fall:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">On palace, temple, spire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The morn's descending fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Life's rising murmur drowned<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The Neva where he wound<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Between his isles: he keeps his secret well.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ROBSON" id="ROBSON"></a>ROBSON.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more
+disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest
+part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at
+her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and
+parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St.
+Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of
+Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a
+horrible little court branching northward from it good old George
+Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and
+prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter;
+and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his
+name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street
+becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the
+east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never
+passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up
+by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord
+Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we
+English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it
+down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the
+southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been
+razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the
+American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme
+languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal
+hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the
+strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse
+before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses,
+with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the
+picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their
+being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest
+offscourings of the enormous city. Next to <i>Napoli senza sole</i>, Wych
+Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest
+street I know.</p>
+
+<p>In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert,
+a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The
+entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance,
+so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of
+the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical
+classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come
+hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury
+Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have
+conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic.
+Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might
+observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little
+platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped
+awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the
+edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most
+Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very
+evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince
+of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of
+Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant
+visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this
+murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French
+<i>noblesse</i>, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock
+to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.</p>
+
+<p>My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present
+exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago,
+there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a
+rough wooden portico before it,&mdash;not unlike such a portico as I have
+recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,&mdash;and
+with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a
+man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of
+naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or
+meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made
+Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South
+Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from
+the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and
+a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of
+interludes and <i>burlettas</i>,&mdash;that is, of pieces in which the dialogue
+was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the
+patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice
+was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen
+into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To
+lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse.
+The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and
+Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There
+many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a
+perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's
+beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley
+and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of
+the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and
+Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried
+its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate
+adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place
+wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the
+Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of
+the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there
+was but one step.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren,
+having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a
+considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded
+in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the
+other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre.
+He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very
+humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The
+Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank
+Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,&mdash;father and son are, alas! both
+dead,&mdash;and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master
+of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the
+town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the
+original <i>Sam Weller</i> in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made
+people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of
+Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not
+nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no
+striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,&mdash;save in one
+particular,&mdash;they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to
+hear at clubs and in critical coteries&mdash;at the Albion and the Garrick
+and the Caf&eacute; de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the R&eacute;union in
+Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to
+reign supreme&mdash;rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing
+<i>Macbeth</i> and <i>Shylock</i> in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little
+stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody&mdash;among the
+bodies who were anybody&mdash;had ever heard of him before. Whence he came,
+or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this
+little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and
+grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the
+shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and
+his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He
+speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a
+European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his
+name was <span class="smcap">Frederick Robson</span>.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics
+were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had
+already attained middle age,&mdash;that he had been vegetating for years in
+that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low
+comedian of a country-theatre,&mdash;that he had come timidly to London and
+accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre
+half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the
+"Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and
+delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked
+success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little
+man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had
+a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty
+shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.</p>
+
+<p>A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic
+and his realization of financial success. The critics and the
+connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be
+persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That
+doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the
+wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned
+to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor,
+named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay
+twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen
+pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door
+for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in
+the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his
+dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender,
+half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the
+nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this,
+will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?</p>
+
+<p>The Olympic arose "like a ph&#339;nix from its ashes." To use language
+less poetical, a wealthy tradesman&mdash;a cheesemonger, I think&mdash;found the
+capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and
+almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as
+evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was
+in the old or the new Olympic&mdash;but I think it was in the new one&mdash;that
+the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager.
+He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious
+manner. He was a man about town, a <i>viveur</i>, a dandy; and it turned out
+one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe
+Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and
+that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was
+tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being
+a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his
+defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts
+was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor
+wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing
+criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was
+troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens;
+and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged
+himself in the jail.</p>
+
+<p>It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that
+Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very
+clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering
+Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play
+the part of <i>Jem Baggs</i>, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player,
+who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air
+hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson,
+who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a
+very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the
+ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by
+singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and
+the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills,
+considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in
+the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's
+despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched
+in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo
+and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right
+tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience
+was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely
+observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that
+such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year.
+"Vilikins and his Dinah" created a <i>furore</i>. My countrymen are always
+going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to
+go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip.
+Robson's portrait as <i>Jem Baggs</i> was in every shop-window. A newspaper
+began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one
+hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide
+him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible
+"Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of
+circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in <i>Jem Baggs</i>. His
+"make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an
+inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons
+every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat
+inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into
+preternatural shape.</p>
+
+<p>New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he
+showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years
+before, in <i>Macbeth</i>, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating,
+whiskey-drinking Scotchman,&mdash;and in <i>Shylock</i>, a servile, fawning,
+obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew.
+In the <i>Yellow Dwarf</i> he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of
+Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,&mdash;full of mockery,
+mimicry, lubricity, and spite,&mdash;an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of
+Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How
+those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog!
+How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you
+shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs
+to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled
+out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this
+mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the
+<i>outr&eacute;</i>, an unmistakably tragic element,&mdash;an element of depth and
+strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became
+inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the <i>cothurnus</i> over his clogs.
+You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the
+mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more
+apparent in his subsequent personation of <i>Medea</i>, in Robert Brough's
+parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of
+the abandoned wife of <i>Jason</i>, the diabolic loathing in which she holds
+<i>Cre&uuml;sa</i>, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children
+whom she is afterwards to slay,&mdash;all these were portrayed by Robson,
+through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with
+astonishing force and vigor. The original <i>Medea</i>, the great Ristori
+herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him.
+She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius
+struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue.
+<i>"Uomo straordinario!"</i> she went away saying.</p>
+
+<p>I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of
+time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has
+always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after
+<i>Jem Baggs</i> his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at
+the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In
+the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity&mdash;which some thought
+would prove a magnificent one to him&mdash;of showing the grotesque side of
+insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to
+him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to
+exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities.
+<i>A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine!</i> Perhaps the
+piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run.
+A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a
+tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan
+fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a
+long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of
+<i>Sir Giles Overreach</i> in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that
+<i>Sir Giles</i>, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark
+staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own
+character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing
+on a purely "legitimate" <i>r&ocirc;le</i>. I was half persuaded to write a
+burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do
+his very best with <i>Sir Giles</i>; but a feeling, half of laziness, and
+half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got
+farther than the first scene.</p>
+
+<p>By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they
+could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more
+elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into
+play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative
+verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic
+drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious
+mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the
+melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in
+so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written
+expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy
+Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say
+written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not
+yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so
+skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes
+almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for
+instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently
+English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in
+reality, a translation from the French.</p>
+
+<p>The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended,
+and was genuine. In <i>Daddy Hardacre</i>, a skilful adaptation of the usurer
+in Balzac's "Eug&eacute;nie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than
+ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless <i>Overreach</i>, foiled at
+last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of
+the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Moli&egrave;re's
+<i>Avare</i> I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's
+<i>Volpone</i>, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully
+rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise
+most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment
+upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout
+solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the
+conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good
+actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper&mdash;the
+character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens&mdash;in Wilkie
+Collins's play, domestic drama was not his <i>forte</i>; or, rather, that it
+was not his <i>fortissimo</i>. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible,
+he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly
+be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could
+play <i>Daddy Hardacre</i>, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none
+but himself could at once awe and convulse in <i>Medea</i> and <i>the Yellow
+Dwarf</i>. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their
+subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt
+sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,&mdash;their eternal grimacing and
+word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become
+exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You
+may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The
+burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness.
+Planch&eacute; retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs
+died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before
+he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were
+scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas.
+Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that
+weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had
+succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has
+realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and
+actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to
+performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should
+properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his
+old loves, and <i>Jem Baggs</i> and <i>Boots at the Swan</i>, <i>Medea</i> and <i>the
+Yellow Dwarf</i>, continued to be his favorite parts.</p>
+
+<p>The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern
+actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities,
+decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or
+of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts
+as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the
+variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London
+always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury.
+Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and
+more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has
+gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from
+him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past.
+The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered
+wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest
+and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other
+public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly
+destitute of foundation. <i>Don Basilio</i>, in Beaumarchais's play, might
+have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel,
+"<i>Calomniez, calomniez, il en r&eacute;sultera toujours quelque chose</i>." He
+should have taught the world&mdash;if the world wants teaching&mdash;<i>how</i> to
+calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If
+your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has
+gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he
+is separated from his wife; <i>and in any case, declare that he drinks</i>.
+He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like
+a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the
+parlor.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial
+papers&mdash;the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a
+curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found&mdash;have
+attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from
+the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water.
+The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has
+for years been overworking himself,&mdash;and that latterly prosperity has
+laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon
+them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she
+frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she
+equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of
+flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when
+Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you
+<i>shall</i> make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the
+goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a
+rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I
+opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out,
+"I am rich, I have enough, <i>Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios</i>, I will
+work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me
+down under my own fig-tree,"&mdash;Fortune dismisses him with a sneer:
+"Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and
+<i>ennui</i>, take gout and the palsy, with you."</p>
+
+<p>I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is
+once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say
+that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never <i>can</i> spare a
+good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But
+there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere
+his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The
+American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good,
+bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready
+and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and
+our women-singers,&mdash;the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't
+sing, but <i>will</i> sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and
+Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson
+has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be
+thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for
+one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for
+other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans
+are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of
+Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to
+whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in
+Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to
+foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own
+entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It
+would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable
+aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other
+great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of
+passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his
+simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you
+to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the
+image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and
+Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is
+perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his
+instance.</p>
+
+<p>Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the
+mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always
+was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally
+unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic
+criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had
+read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for
+it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in
+the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round
+the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't
+the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know
+him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the
+bashfulness, the <i>mauvaise honte</i>, which made him so shy and retiring in
+private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man
+became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful
+man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which
+in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art
+a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and
+how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it
+is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the
+temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form
+and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_PARALLEL_ROADS_OF_GLEN_ROY_IN_SCOTLAND" id="THE_PARALLEL_ROADS_OF_GLEN_ROY_IN_SCOTLAND"></a>THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY, IN SCOTLAND.</h2>
+
+
+<p>There are phenomena in Nature which give the clue to so many of its
+mysteries that their correct interpretation leads at once to the
+broadest generalizations and to the rapid advance of science in new
+directions. The explanation of one very local and limited problem may
+clear up many collateral ones, since its solution includes the answer to
+a whole set of kindred inquiries. The "parallel roads" of Glen Roy offer
+such a problem. For half a century they have been the subject of patient
+investigation and the boldest speculation. To them natural philosophers
+have returned again and again to test their theories, and until they are
+fully understood no steady or permanent advance can be made in the
+various views which they have suggested to different observers. The
+theory of the formation of lakes by barriers, presented by McCulloch and
+Sir T. Lauder-Dick, that of continental upheavals and subsidences,
+advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that of inundations
+by great floods, maintained by Professor H. D. Rogers and Sir George
+Mackenzie, that of glacial action, brought forward by myself, have been
+duly discussed with reference to this difficult case; all have found
+their advocates, all have met with warm opposition, and the matter still
+remains a mooted point; but the one of all these theories which shall
+stand the test of time and repeated examination and be eventually
+accepted will explain many a problem besides the one it was meant to
+solve, and lead to farther progress in other directions.</p>
+
+<p>I propose here to reconsider the facts of the case, and to present anew
+my own explanation of them, now more than twenty years old, but which I
+have never had an opportunity of publishing in detail under a popular
+form, though it appeared in the scientific journals of the day.</p>
+
+<p>Before considering, however, the phenomena of Glen Roy, or the special
+glacial areas scattered over Scotland and the other British Isles, let
+us see what general evidence we have that glaciers ever existed at all
+in that realm. The reader will pardon me, if, at the risk of repetition,
+I sum up here the indications which, from our knowledge of glaciers as
+they at present exist, must be admitted, wherever they are found, as
+proof of their former existence. Such a summary may serve also as a
+guide to those who would look for glacial traces where they have not
+hitherto been sought.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, we have to consider the singular abrasion of the
+surfaces over which the glacier has moved, quite unlike that produced by
+the action of water. We have seen that such surfaces, wherever the
+glacier-marks have not been erased by some subsequent action, have
+several unfailing characteristics: they are highly polished, and they
+are also marked with scratches or fine <i>stri&aelig;</i>, with grooves and deeper
+furrows. Where best preserved, the smooth surfaces are shining; they
+have a lustre like stone or marble artificially polished by the combined
+friction and pressure of some harder material than itself until all its
+inequalities have been completely levelled and its surface has become
+glossy. Any marble mantel-piece may serve as an example of this kind of
+glacier-worn surface.</p>
+
+<p>The levelling and abrading action of water on rock has an entirely
+different character. Tides or currents driven powerfully and constantly
+against a rocky shore, and bringing with them hard materials, may
+produce blunt, smooth surfaces, such as the repeated blows of a hammer
+on stone would cause; but they never bring it to a high polish, because,
+the grinding materials not being held steadily down, in firm, permanent
+contact with the rocky surfaces against which they move, as is the case
+with the glacier, but, on the contrary, dashed to and fro, they strike
+and rebound, making a succession of blows, but never a continuous,
+uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks
+made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by
+water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas
+the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light
+and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long
+distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> that we have beneath
+every glacier a complete apparatus adapted to all the results described
+above. In the softer fragments ground to the finest powder under the
+incumbent mass we have a polishing paste; in the hard materials set in
+that paste, whether pebbles, or angular rocky fragments of different
+sizes, or grains of sand, we have the various graving instruments by
+which the finer or coarser lines are drawn. Not only are these lines
+frequently uninterrupted for a distance of many yards, but they are also
+parallel, except when some change takes place in the thickness of the
+ice, which may slightly modify the trend of the mass, or where lines in
+a variety of directions are produced by the intermittent action of
+separate glaciers running successively at different angles over the same
+surfaces. The deeper grooves sometimes present a succession of short
+staccato touches, just as when one presses the finger vertically along
+some surface where the resistance is sufficient to interrupt the action
+without actually stopping it,&mdash;a kind of grating motion, showing how
+firmly the instrument which produced it must have been held in the
+moving mass. No currents or sudden freshets carrying hard materials with
+them, even moving along straight paths down hill-sides or
+mountain-slopes, have ever been known to draw any such lines. They could
+be made only by some instrument held fast as in a vice by the moving
+power. Something of the kind is occasionally produced by the drag of a
+wheel grating over rocks covered with loose materials.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky
+shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level
+of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various
+directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It
+has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period,
+icebergs and floating ice from more northern latitudes might account for
+the extensive transportation of the loose materials scattered in a
+continuous sheet over a large portion of the globe. There can be no
+doubt that an immense amount of <i>d&eacute;bris</i> of all sorts is carried to
+great distances by floating ice; where their presence is due to this
+cause, however, they are everywhere stranded along the shore or dropped
+to the sea-bottom. Large boulders are frequently left by the ice along
+the New-England coast, and we shall trace them hereafter among the
+sand-dunes of Cape Cod. But before it can be admitted that the
+drift-phenomena, and the polished and engraved surfaces with which they
+are everywhere intimately associated, are owing to floating ice or
+icebergs, it must be shown that all these appearances have been produced
+by some agency moving from the sea-board towards the land, and extending
+up to the very summits of the mountains, or else that all the countries
+exhibiting glacial phenomena have been sunk below the ocean to the
+greatest height at which glacier-marks are found, and have since
+gradually emerged to their present level. Now, though geologists are
+lavish of immersions when something is to be accounted for which they
+cannot otherwise explain, and a fresh baptism of old Mother Earth is
+made to wash away many obstacles to scientific theories, yet the common
+sense of the world will hardly admit the latter assumption without
+positive proof, and all the evidence of the kind we have, at the period
+under consideration, indicates only a comparatively slight change of
+relative level between sea and land within a narrow belt along the
+shores; and even this is shown to be posterior, not anterior, to the
+glacial phenomena. As to the supposition that the motion proceeded from
+the sea towards the land, all the facts are against it, since the whole
+trend of these phenomena is from inland centres toward the shore,
+instead of being from the coast upward.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, no one familiar with the facts could suppose that floating
+ice or icebergs had abraded, polished, and furrowed the bottom of narrow
+valleys as we find them worn, polished, and grooved by glaciers. And it
+must be remembered that this is a theory founded not upon hypothesis,
+but upon the closest comparison. I have not become acquainted with these
+marks in regions where glaciers no longer exist, and made a theory to
+explain their presence. I have, on the contrary, studied them where they
+are in process of formation. I have seen the glacier engrave its lines,
+plough its grooves and furrows in the solid rock, and polish the
+surfaces over which it moved, and was familiar with all this when I
+found afterwards appearances corresponding exactly to those which I had
+investigated in the home of the present glaciers. I could therefore say,
+and I think with some reason, that "this also is the work of the glacier
+acting in ancient times as it now acts in Switzerland."</p>
+
+<p>There is another character of glacial action distinguishing it from any
+abrasions caused by water, even if freighted with a large amount of
+loose materials. On any surface over which water flows we shall find
+that the softer materials have yielded first and most completely. Hard
+dikes will be left standing out, while softer rocks around them are worn
+away,&mdash;furrows will be eaten into more deeply,&mdash;fissures will be
+widened,&mdash;clay-slates will be wasted,&mdash;while hard sandstone or limestone
+and granite will show greater resistance. Not so with surfaces over
+which the levelling plough of the glacier has passed. Wherever softer
+and harder rocks alternate, they are brought to one outline; where dikes
+intersect softer rock, they are cut to one level with it; where rents or
+fissures traverse the rock, they do not seem to have been widened or
+scooped out more deeply, but their edges are simply abraded on one line
+with the adjoining surfaces. Whatever be the inequality in the hardness
+of the materials of which the rock consists, even in the case of
+pudding-stone, the surface is abraded so evenly as to leave the
+impression that a rigid rasp has moved over all the undulations of the
+land, advancing in one and the same direction and levelling all before
+it.</p>
+
+<p>Among the inequalities of the glacier-worn surfaces which deserve
+especial notice, are the so-called "<i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i>." They are
+knolls of a peculiar appearance, frequent in the Alps, and first noticed
+by the illustrious De Saussure, who designated them by that name,
+because, where they are numerous and seen from a distance, they resemble
+the rounded backs of a flock of sheep resting on the ground. These
+knolls are the result of the prolonged abrasion of masses of rocks
+separated by deep indentations wide enough to be filled up by large
+glaciers, overtopping the summits of the intervening prominences, and
+passing over them like a river, or like tide-currents flowing over a
+submerged ledge of rock. It is evident that water rushing over such
+sunken hills or ledges, adapting itself readily to all the inequalities
+over which it flows, and forming eddies against the obstacles in its
+course, will scoop out tortuous furrows upon the bottom, and hollow out
+rounded cavities against the walls, acting especially along pre&euml;xisting
+fissures and upon the softer parts of the rock,&mdash;while the glacier,
+moving as a solid mass, and carrying on its under side its gigantic file
+set in a fine paste, will in course of time abrade uniformly the angles
+against which it strikes, equalize the depressions between the prominent
+masses, and round them off until they present those smooth bulging
+knolls known as the "<i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i>" in the Alps, and so
+characteristic everywhere of glacier-action. A comparison of any
+tide-worn hummock with such a glacier-worn mound will convince the
+observer that its smooth and evenly rounded surface was never produced
+by water.</p>
+
+<p>Besides their peculiar form, the <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i> present all the
+characteristic features of glacier-action in their polished surfaces
+accompanied with the straight lines, grooves, and furrows above
+described. But there are two circumstances connected with these knolls
+deserving special notice. They frequently present the glacial marks only
+on one side, while the opposite side has all the irregularities and
+roughness of a hill-slope not acted upon by ice. It is evident that the
+polished side was the one turned towards the advancing glacier, the side
+against which the ice pressed in its onward movement,&mdash;while it passed
+over the other side, the lee side as we may call it, without coming in
+immediate contact with it, bridging the depression, and touching bottom
+again a little farther on. As an additional evidence of this fact, we
+frequently find on the lee side of such knolls accumulations of the
+loose materials which the glacier carries with it. It is only, however,
+when the knolls are quite high, and abrupt enough to allow any rigid
+substance to bridge over the space in its descent from the summit to the
+surface below, that we find these conditions; when the knolls are low
+and slope gently downward in every direction, they present the
+characteristic glacier-surfaces equally on all sides. This circumstance
+should be borne in mind by all who investigate the traces of
+glacier-action; for this inequality in the surfaces presented by the
+opposite sides of any obstacle in the path of the ice is often an
+important means of determining the direction of its motion.</p>
+
+<p>The other characteristic peculiarity of these <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i>
+consists in the direction of the glacier-scratches, which ascend the
+slope to its summit in a direct line on one side, while they deviate to
+the right and left on the other sides of the knoll, more or less
+obliquely according to its steepness. Occasionally, large boulders may
+be found perched on the very summit of such prominences. Their position
+is inexplicable by the supposition of currents as the cause of their
+transportation. Any current strong enough to carry a boulder to such a
+height would of course sweep it on with it. This phenomenon finds,
+however, an easy explanation in the glacial theory. The thickness of
+such a sheet of ice is of course less above such a hill or mound than
+over the lower levels adjoining it. Not only will the ice melt,
+therefore, more readily at this spot, but, as ice is transparent to
+heat, the summit of the prominence will become warmed by the rays of the
+sun, and will itself facilitate the melting of the ice above it. On the
+breaking up of the ice, therefore, such a spot will be the first to
+yield, and allow the boulders carried on the back of the glacier to fall
+into the hollow thus formed, where they will rest upon the projecting
+rock left uncovered. This is no theoretical explanation; there are such
+cases in Switzerland, where holes in the ice are formed immediately
+above the summit of hills or prominences over which the glacier passes,
+and into which it drops its burdens. Of course, where the ice is
+constantly renewed over such a spot by the onward progress of the
+glacier, these materials may be carried off again; but if we suppose
+such a case to occur at the breaking up of the glacier-period, when the
+ice was disappearing forever from such a spot, it is easy to account for
+the poising of these large boulders on prominent peaks or ledges.</p>
+
+<p>The appearances about the <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i>, especially the straight
+scratches and grooves on the side up which the ice ascended, have led to
+a mistaken view of the mode in which large boulders are transported by
+ice. It has been supposed, by those who, while they accepted the glacial
+theory, were not wholly conversant with the mode of action of glaciers,
+that, in passing through the bottom of a valley, for instance, the
+glacier would take up large boulders, and, carrying them along with it,
+would push them up such a slope and deposit them on its summit. It is
+true that large boulders may sometimes be found in front of glaciers
+among the materials of their terminal moraines, and may, upon any
+advance of the glacier, be pushed forward by it. But I know of no
+example of erratic boulders being carried to considerable distances and
+raised from lower to higher levels by this means. All the angular
+boulders perched upon prominent rocks must have fallen upon the surface
+of the glacier in the upper part of its course, where rocky ledges rise
+above its surface and send down their broken fragments. The surface of
+any boulder carried under the ice, or pushed along for any distance at
+its terminus, would show the friction and pressure to which it had been
+subjected. In this connection it should be remembered that in the case
+of large glaciers low hills form no obstacle to their onward progress,
+especially when the glacier is thick enough to cover them completely,
+and even to rise far above them. The <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i> about the
+Grimsel show that hills many hundred feet high have been passed over by
+the great glacier of the Aar, when it descended as far as Meyringen,
+without having seemingly influenced its onward progress.</p>
+
+<p>But in enumerating the evidences of glacier-action, we have to remember
+not only the effects produced upon the surface of the ground by the ice
+itself, but also the deposits it has left behind it. The loose materials
+scattered over the face of the earth may point as distinctly to the
+source of their distribution as does the character of the rocky surfaces
+on which they rest indicate the different causes of abrasion. In
+characteristic localities the loose materials deposited by glaciers may
+readily be recognized at first sight, and distinguished from water-worn
+pebbles; nor is it difficult to distinguish both from loose materials
+resulting from the decomposition of rocks on the spot,&mdash;the latter
+always agreeing with the rocks on which they rest, while the
+decomposition to which they owe their separation from the solid rock is
+often still going on. Such <i>d&eacute;bris</i> are found everywhere about
+disintegrating rocks, and they constantly mingle with the loose
+fragments brought from a distance by various agencies. They are found
+upon and among the glacier-worn pebbles, especially where the latter
+have themselves been disturbed since their accumulation. They are also
+found among water-worn pebbles, wherever the rocky beds of our rivers or
+the rocky bluffs of our sea-shores crumble down. In investigating the
+character of loose materials transported from greater or less distances,
+either by the agency of glaciers or by water-currents, it is important
+at the very outset to discriminate between these deposits of older date
+and the local accessions mingling with them.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally we may have also to distinguish between all these deposits
+and the <i>d&eacute;bris</i> brought down by land-slides, or by sudden freshets
+transporting to a distance a vast amount of loose materials which are
+neither ice-worn nor water-worn. At Rossberg, for instance, in the
+Canton of Schwitz, the land-slide which buried the village of Goldau
+under a terrific avalanche, and filled a part of the Lake of Lauertz,
+spread an immense number of huge boulders across the valley, some of
+which even rolled up the opposite side to a considerable height. Many of
+these boulders might easily be mistaken for erratic boulders, were not
+the aggregate of these loose materials traceable to the hills from which
+they descended. In this case water had no part in loosening or bringing
+down this mass of fragments. They simply rolled from the declivity, and
+stopped when they had exhausted the momentum imparted to them by their
+weight. In the case of the <i>d&eacute;b&acirc;cle</i> of Bagnes, above Martigny, in a
+valley leading to the St. Bernard, the circumstances were very
+different. A glacier, advancing beyond its usual limits and rising
+against the opposite mountain-slope, dammed up the waters of the torrent
+and caused a lake to be formed. The obstruction gave way in the course
+of time, and the waters of the lake rushed out, carrying along with
+them huge boulders and a mass of loose materials of all sorts, and
+scattering them over the plain below. Such an accumulation of <i>d&eacute;bris</i>
+differs from the pebbles and loose fragments found in river-beds. The
+comparatively short distance over which they are carried, and the
+suddenness of the transportation, allow no time for the abrasion which
+produces the smooth surfaces of water-worn pebbles or the polished and
+scratched surfaces of glacier-worn ones. In the latter case, we have
+seen that the pebbles, being so set in the ice as to expose only one
+side, may be only partially polished, while others, more loosely held
+and turning in their sockets, may receive the same high polish on every
+side. In such a case the lines will intersect one another, in
+consequence of the different position in which the stone has been held
+at different times. No such appearances exist in the water-worn pebbles:
+their blunt surfaces, smoothed and rounded uniformly by the action of
+the water in which they have been rolled or tossed about, present
+everywhere the same aspect.</p>
+
+<p>The correlation between these different loose materials and the position
+in which they are found helps us also to detect their origin. The loose
+materials bearing glacier-marks are always found resting upon surfaces
+which have been worn, abraded, and engraved in the same manner, while
+the water-worn pebbles are everywhere found resting upon rocks the
+abrasion of which may be traced to water. It is true that in some
+localities, as, for instance, in the gravel-pit of Mount Auburn, near
+Cambridge, large masses of glacier-worn pebbles alternate with
+beach-shingle; but it is easy to show that there was here a glacier
+advancing into the sea, crowding its front moraine and the materials
+carried under it over and into the shingle washed up by the waves upon
+the beach. Not infrequently, also, river-pebbles may be found among
+glacial materials. This is especially the case where, after the
+disappearance of large glaciers, rivers have occupied their beds.
+Examples of this kind may be seen in all the valleys of the Alps.</p>
+
+<p>But, besides the special character of the individual fragments, the true
+origin of any accumulation of glacier-<i>d&eacute;bris</i>, commonly called drift,
+may be detected by the total absence of stratification, so essential a
+feature in all water-deposits. This absence of stratification throughout
+its mass is, after all, the great and important characteristic of the
+drift; and though I have alluded to it before, I reiterate it here, as
+that which distinguishes it from all like accumulations under water. I
+may be pardoned for dwelling upon this point, because the great
+controversy among geologists respecting the nature and origin of the
+sheet of loose materials scattered over a great part of the globe turns
+upon it. The <i>d&eacute;bris</i> of which the drift consists are thrown together
+pell-mell, without any arrangement according to size or weight, larger
+and smaller fragments being mixed so indiscriminately that the heaviest
+materials may be on the very summit of the mass, and the lightest at the
+bottom in immediate contact with the underlying rock, or the larger
+pieces may stand at any level in the mass of finer ones. Impalpable
+powder, coarse sand, rounded, polished, and scratched fragments of every
+size are mixed together in a homogeneous paste, in which the larger
+materials are imbedded, to use a homely, but expressive comparison, like
+raisins and currants in a pudding. The adhesive paste holding all these
+fragments together is, no doubt, the result of the friction to which the
+whole was subjected under the glacier, and which has worked some of the
+softer materials into a kind of cement.</p>
+
+<p>The mode of aggregation of water-worn materials is very different.
+Examine the shingle along our beaches: we find it so distributed as to
+show that the fading tide-wave has carried the lighter materials farther
+than the heavier ones, and the successive deposits exhibit an imperfect
+cross-stratification resulting from changes in the height of the tide
+and the direction of the wind. Moreover, in any materials collected
+under water we find the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter on the
+top. It is true that large angular boulders may occasionally be found
+resting upon beach-shingle, but their presence in such a connection is
+easily explained. They may have been dropped there by floating icebergs,
+or have fallen from crumbling drift-cliffs.</p>
+
+<p>I should add, in speaking of drift-materials, that, while we find the
+large angular boulders resting above them, we occasionally find boulders
+of unusual size mingled with them; but, when this is the case, such
+massive fragments are more or less rounded, polished, and marked in the
+same way as the smaller pebbles, or as the surfaces over which the
+glacier has passed. This is important to remember, because, when we
+examine the drift in countries where the ice, during the glacier-period,
+overtopped nearly all the mountains, so that few fragments could fall
+from them upon its surface, we find scarcely any angular boulders, while
+the drift is interspersed with larger fragments of this character,
+carried under the ice, instead of on its back. Another distinction
+between water-worn deposits and drift consists in the fact that the
+former are washed clean, while the latter always retains the mud
+gathered during its journey and spread throughout its mass.</p>
+
+<p>In summing up the glacial evidences, I must not omit the moraines,
+though I have described them so fully in a previous article that I need
+not do more than allude to them here; but any argument for the glacial
+theory which did not include these characteristic walls erected by
+glaciers would be most imperfect. We need hardly discuss the theory of
+currents with reference to the formation of terminal moraines, extending
+across the valleys from side to side. Any current powerful enough to
+bring the boulders and <i>d&eacute;bris</i> of all sorts of which these walls are
+composed to the places where they are found would certainly not build
+them up with such regularity, but would sweep them away or scatter them
+along the bottom of the valley. That this is actually the case is seen
+in the lower course of the valley of the Rhone, where there are no
+transverse moraines, while they are frequent and undisturbed in the
+upper part of the valley. This is no doubt owing to the fact, that, when
+the main glacier had already retreated considerably up the valley, the
+lateral glaciers from the chains of the Combin and the Diablerets still
+reached the valley of the Rhone at a lower point, and barred the outlet
+of the waters from the glaciers above. A lake was thus formed, which,
+when the lower glaciers retreated up the lateral valleys, swept away all
+the lower transverse moraines, and formed the flat bottom of Martigny.
+In this case, the moraines were totally obliterated; but there are many
+other instances in which the materials have been only broken up and
+scattered over a wider surface by currents. In such remodelled moraines,
+the glacier-mud has, of course, been more or less washed away. We have
+here a blending of the action of water with that of the glacier; and,
+indeed, how could it be otherwise, when the colossal glaciers of past
+ages gradually disappeared or retreated to the mountain-heights? The
+wasting ice must have occasioned immense freshets, the action of which
+we shall trace hereafter, when examining the formation of our
+drift-ponds, of our river-beds and estuaries, as well as the
+river-terraces standing far above the present water-level.</p>
+
+<p>And now, if it be asked how much of this evidence for the former
+existence of glaciers is to be found in Great Britain, I answer, that
+there is not a valley in Switzerland where all these traces are found in
+greater perfection than in the valleys of the Scotch Highlands, or of
+the mountains of Ireland and Wales, or of the lake-region in England.
+Not a link is wanting to the chain. Polished surfaces, traversed by
+stri&aelig;, grooves, and furrows, with a sheet of drift resting immediately
+upon them, extend throughout the realm,&mdash;the <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i>
+raise their rounded backs from the ground there as in
+Switzerland,&mdash;transverse moraines bar their valleys and lateral ones
+border them, and the boulders from the hill-sides are scattered over the
+plains as thickly as between the Alps and the Jura, and are here and
+there perched upon the summits of isolated hills. This being the case,
+let us examine a little more closely the local phenomena connected with
+the ancient extension of glaciers in this region, and especially the
+parallel roads of Glen Roy.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;">
+<img src="images/image736.jpg" width="350" height="313" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p>Among the Grampian Hills, a little to the northeast of Ben Nevis, lies
+the valley of Glen Roy, a winding valley trending in a northeasterly
+direction, and some ten miles in length. Across the mouth of this
+valley, at right angles with it, runs the valley of Glen Spean, trending
+from east to west, Glen Roy thus opening directly at its southern
+extremity into Glen Spean. Around the walls of the Glen Roy valley run
+three terraces, one above the other, at different heights, like so many
+roads artificially cut in the sides of the valley, and indeed they go by
+the name of the "parallel roads." These three terraces, though in a less
+perfect state of preservation, are repeated for a short distance at
+exactly the same levels on the southern wall of the valley of Glen
+Spean, just opposite the opening of the Glen Roy valley; that is, they
+make the whole circuit of Glen Roy, stop abruptly, on both sides, at its
+southern extremity, and reappear again on the opposite wall of Glen
+Spean. I should add, however, that all three do not come to this sudden
+termination; for the lowest of these terraces turns eastward into the
+valley of Glen Spean, following the whole curve of the eastern half of
+the valley, while, of the two upper terraces, there is no trace
+whatever, nor is there any indication that either of the three ever
+existed in the western half of the valley. When I first visited the
+region, these phenomena had already been the subject of earnest
+discussion among English geologists. The commonly accepted explanation
+of the facts was that these terraces marked ancient sea-levels at a time
+when the ocean penetrated much farther into the interior, and Glen Roy
+and the adjoining valleys were as many fiords or estuaries. And though
+the present elevation of the locality made such an interpretation
+improbable at first sight, the first or highest of the terraces being
+eleven hundred and forty-four feet above the present sea-level, the
+second eighty-two feet below the first, and the third and lowest two
+hundred and twelve feet below the second, or eight hundred odd feet
+above the level of the sea, it was thought that the oscillations of the
+land, its alternate subsidences and upheavals, proved by the modern
+results of geology to have been so great and so frequent, might account
+even for so remarkable a change. There are, however, other objections to
+this theory not so easily explained away. There are no traces of organic
+life upon these terraces. If they were ancient sea-beaches, we should
+expect to find upon them the remains of marine animals, shells,
+crustacea, and the like. All the explanations given to lessen the
+significance of this absence of organic remains are futile. Again, why
+should the lower terrace alone be continued into the eastern end of the
+valley of Glen Spean, while there are no terraces at all in its western
+part, since both must have been as fully open to the sea as Glen Roy
+valley itself? This seemed the more inexplicable since all the terraces
+exist on the valley-wall opposite the outlet of Glen Roy, showing that
+this sheet of water, wherever it came from, filled the valley itself and
+the space between it and the southern wall of Glen Spean, but failed to
+spread, on either side of that space, into the eastern and western
+extension of Glen Spean. It is evident, that, at the time the water
+filled Glen Roy, some obstruction blocked the valley of Glen Spean, both
+to the east and west, leaving, however, that space in the centre free
+into which Glen Roy opens, while, by the time the water had sunk to the
+level of the lowest terrace, one of these barriers, that to the east,
+must have been removed, for the lowest terrace, as I have said, is
+continuous throughout the eastern part of Glen Spean.<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a></p>
+
+<p>Prepossessed as I was with the idea of glacial agency in times anterior
+to ours, these phenomena appeared to me under a new aspect. I found the
+bottom of Glen Spean so worn by glacial action as to leave no doubt in
+my mind that it must have been the bed of a great glacier, and Dr.
+Buckland fully concurred with me in this impression. Indeed, the face of
+the country throughout that region presents not only the glacier-marks
+in great perfection, but other evidences of the ancient presence of
+glaciers. There are moraines at the lower end of Glen Spean, remodelled,
+it is true, by the action of currents, but still retaining enough of
+their ancient character to be easily recognized; and some of the finest
+examples of the <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i> I have seen in Scotland are to be
+found at the entrance of the valley of Loch Treig, a lateral valley
+opening into Glen Spean on its southern side, and, as we shall see
+hereafter, intimately connected with the history of the parallel roads
+of Glen Roy. These <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i> may very fairly be compared with
+those of the Grimsel, and exhibit all the characteristic features of the
+Alpine ones. One of them, lying on the western side of the valley where
+it opens into Glen Spean, is crossed by a trap-dike. The general surface
+of the hill, consisting of rather soft mica, has been slightly worn down
+by atmospheric agencies, so that the dike stands out some three-quarters
+of an inch above it. On the dike, however, the glacier-marks extend for
+its whole length in great perfection, while they have entirely
+disappeared from the surrounding surfaces, so as to leave the dike thus
+standing out in full relief. This is an instructive case, showing how
+little disintegration has gone on since the drift-period. All the
+currents that have swept over it, all the rains that have beaten upon
+it, have not worn away one inch from the original surface of the hill. I
+have observed many other <i>roches moutonn&eacute;es</i> in Scotland, especially
+about the neighborhood of Loch Awe, Loch Fyne, and Loch Etive. In fact,
+they may be found in almost all the glens of Scotland, in the
+lake-region of England, and in the valleys of Wales and Ireland.</p>
+
+<p>Following the glacial indications wherever we could find them in the
+country about Glen Roy, it became evident to me that the whole western
+range of the Grampian Hills had once been a great centre of glaciers,
+that they had come down toward Glen Spean through all the valleys on the
+mountain-slopes to the north and south of it, so that this valley had
+become, as it were, the great drainage-bed for the masses of ice thus
+poured into it laterally, and moving down the valley from east to west
+as one immense glacier. It is natural to suppose, that, at the
+breaking-up of the great sheet of ice which, if my view of the case is
+correct, must have covered the whole country at this time, the ice would
+yield more readily in a valley like that of Glen Roy, lying open to the
+south and receiving the full force of the sun, than in those on the
+opposite side of Glen Spean, opening to the north. At all events, it is
+evident that at some time posterior to this universal glacial period,
+when the ice began to retreat, Glen Roy became the basin of a glacial
+lake such as we now find in the Alps of Switzerland, where occasionally
+a closed valley becomes a trough, as it were, into which the water from
+the surrounding hills is drained. In such a lake no animals are found,
+such as exist in any other sheet of fresh water, and this would account
+for the absence of any organic remains on the terraces of Glen Roy. But
+at first sight it seemed that this theory was open in one respect to the
+same objection as the other. What prevented this sheet of water from
+spreading east and west in Glen Spean? If it not only filled Glen Roy,
+but extended to the southern side of Glen Spean immediately opposite
+the opening of Glen Roy, what prevented it from filling the whole of
+that valley also? In endeavoring to answer this question, I found the
+solution of the mystery.</p>
+
+<p>The bed of Glen Spean, through its whole extent from east to west, is
+marked, as I have said, by glacial action, in rectilinear scratches and
+furrows. This westward track of the main glacier is crossed transversely
+near the centre of the valley by two other glacier-tracks cutting it at
+right angles. Upon tracing these cross-tracks carefully, I became
+satisfied, that, after the surrounding ice had begun to yield, after the
+masses of ice which descended from the northern and southern slopes of
+the mountains into Glen Spean had begun to retreat, and to form local
+limited glaciers, two of those lateral glaciers, one coming down from
+Ben Nevis on the southwest, the other from Loch Treig on the southeast,
+extended farther than the others and stretched across Glen Spean.<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a>
+These two glaciers for a long time formed barriers across the western
+and eastern extension of this valley, damming back the waters which
+filled Glen Roy and the central part of Glen Spean.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently the glacier descending from Loch Treig was the first to yield,
+for, by the time the Glen Roy lake had sunk to the level of the lowest
+terrace, the entrance to the eastern extension of the valley must have
+been free, otherwise the water could not have spread throughout that
+basin as we find it did; but it would seem that by the time the western
+barrier, or the glacier from Ben Nevis, was removed, the sheet of water
+was too far reduced to have left permanent marks of its outflow into the
+Great Glen, except by disturbing and remodelling the large moraines of
+the older Glen Spean glacier. There are faint indications of other
+terraces in Glen Roy, even at a higher level than the uppermost parallel
+road, owing their origin probably to the short duration of a higher
+level of the glacier-lake, when the great general glacier had not yet
+been lowered to a more permanent level determined by a limited
+circumscription within the walls of the valleys. There are other
+terraces in neighboring valleys at still different levels,&mdash;in Glen
+Gloy, for instance, where the one horizontal road was no doubt formed in
+consequence of the damming of the valley by a glacier from Loch Arkeig.
+Mr. Darwin has seen another in Glen Kinfillen, which I would explain by
+the presence of a glacier in the Great Glen, the marks of which are
+particularly distinct about the eastern end of Glen Garry.</p>
+
+<p>The evidence of the ancient presence of glaciers is no less striking in
+other parts of the Scotch Highlands. Between the southeastern range of
+the Grampian Hills, in Forfarshire and Perthshire, and the opposite
+ridge of Sidlaw Hills, stretches the broad valley of Strathmore. At the
+time when Glen Spean received the masses of ice from the slopes of the
+western Grampian range, the glaciers descended from the valleys on the
+southern slope of the southeastern range and from those on the northern
+slope of Sidlaw Hills into the capacious bed of the valley which divides
+them. The glacial phenomena of this region present a striking
+resemblance in their general relations to those of the Alps and the
+Jura. The Grampian range on the northern side of Strathmore valley
+occupies the same position in reference to that of the Sidlaw Hills
+opposite, as does the range of the Alps to that of the Jura, while the
+intervening valley may be compared to the plain of Switzerland. As from
+the Bernese Oberland and from the valleys of the Reuss and Limmath
+gigantic glaciers came down and stretched across the plain of
+Switzerland to the Jura, scattering their erratic boulders over its
+summit and upon its slopes at the time of their greater extension, and,
+as they withdrew into the higher Alpine valleys, leaving them along
+their retreating track at the foot of the Jura and over the whole plain,
+so did the glaciers from Glen Prossen and parallel valleys on the
+Grampian Mountains extend across the valley of Strathmore, dropping
+their boulders not only on the slopes and along the base of the Sidlaw
+Hills, but scattering them in their retreat throughout the valley, until
+they were themselves reduced to isolated glaciers in the higher valleys.
+At the same time other glaciers came down from the heights of
+Schihallion on the west, and, descending through the valley of the Tay,
+joined the great masses of ice in the valley of Strathmore, thus
+combining with the eastern ice-field, just as the glacier from Mont
+Blanc and the valley of the Rhone formerly combined in the western part
+of Switzerland with those of the Bernese Oberland. The relations are
+identical, though the geographical position is reversed,&mdash;the higher
+range, or the Grampian Hills, lying to the north in Scotland, and the
+lower one, or the Sidlaw Hills, to the south, while in Switzerland, on
+the contrary, the higher range lies to the south and the lower to the
+north. I have alluded especially to Glen Prossen because the glacial
+marks in that valley are remarkably distinct, the whole bed of the
+valley being scratched, polished, and furrowed by the great rasp which
+has moved over it, while the concentric moraines at its lower extremity
+are very striking. But these signs, so perfectly preserved in Glen
+Prossen, recur with greater or less intensity in all the corresponding
+valleys, leaving no doubt that the same phenomena existed over the whole
+region.</p>
+
+<p>Among the localities of Scotland where the indications of glacial action
+are most marked is the region about Stirling. Near Stirling Castle the
+polished surfaces of the rocks with their distinct grooves and scratches
+show us the path followed by the ice as it moved down in a northeasterly
+direction toward the Frith of Forth from the mountains on the northwest.
+To the west of Edinburgh, also, there is a broad glacier-track, showing
+that here also the ice was ploughing its way eastward to find an outlet
+on the shore.</p>
+
+<p>The western slope of the great Scotch range is no less remarkable for
+its glacier-traces. The heads of Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Awe, and
+Loch Leven everywhere show upon their margins the most distinct glacial
+polish and furrows, while from the trend of these marks and the
+distribution of the moraines, especially about Ben Cruachan, it is
+obvious that in this part of the country the glaciers moved westward and
+southward. About Aberdeen, on the contrary, they moved eastward, while
+in the vicinity of Elgin they advanced toward the north.</p>
+
+<p>It thus appears that the whole range of the Grampians formed a great
+centre for the distribution of glaciers, and that a colossal ice-field
+spread itself over the whole country, extending in every direction
+toward the lower lands and the sea-shore. As the glaciers which now
+descend through all the valleys of the Alps, along their northern as
+well as their southern slopes, and in their eastern as well as their
+western prolongation, though limited, in our days, within the
+valley-walls, nevertheless once covered the plain of Switzerland and
+that of Northern Italy, so did the ice-fields of the Grampians during
+the greatest extension of the Scotch glaciers spread over the whole
+country. They also were, in course of time, reduced to local glaciers,
+circumscribed within the higher valleys of the more mountainous parts of
+the country, until they totally disappeared, as those of Switzerland
+would also have done, had it not been for the greater elevation of that
+country above the level of the sea. Scotland nowhere rises above the
+present level of perpetual snow, while in Switzerland the whole Alpine
+range has an altitude favorable to the preservation of glaciers. In the
+range of the Jura, however, which had at one time its local glaciers
+also, but which nowhere now rises above the line of perpetual snow, they
+have disappeared as completely as in the Grampian Hills.</p>
+
+<p>It would lead me too far, were I to give here a special account of all
+the investigations I made in 1840 upon the distribution of glaciers in
+Great Britain. I will therefore only point out a few of the more
+distinct areas of distribution. The region surrounding Ben Wyvis formed
+such a centre of dispersion from which glaciers radiated, and we have
+another in the Pentland Hills about Edinburgh. In Northumberland, the
+Cheviot Hills present a glacial centre of the same kind, and in the
+Westmoreland Hills we have still another. In the last-named locality,
+the glacial tracks can be followed in various directions, some of them
+descending toward the northwest from the heights of Helvellyn, others
+moving southward toward Ambleside. In Wales the same kind of glacial
+distribution has been observed; but, as Professor Ramsay has treated
+this subject in full, I would refer my readers to his masterly work for
+a further account of the ancient Welch glaciers. In Ireland I had also
+opportunities of making extensive local investigations of glacial
+action. I observed the centres of distribution in the neighborhood of
+Belfast, in the County of Wicklow, and in Cavan.</p>
+
+<p>But nowhere are these phenomena more striking than in Fermanagh County
+about the neighborhood of Enniskillen, and more especially in the
+immediate vicinity of Florence Court, the seat of the Earl of
+Enniskillen. On the northern slope of Ben Calcagh are five valleys lying
+parallel with each other and opening into the valley of Loch Nilly,
+which runs from east to west at the base of the mountain. A road now
+passes through this valley, and, where it crosses the mouth of either of
+the five valleys rising towards the mountain-slope, it cuts alternately
+through the two horns of a crescent-shaped wall which bars the lower end
+of every one of them. These crescent-shaped mounds are so many terminal
+moraines, built up by the five glaciers formerly descending through
+these lateral valleys into the valley of Loch Nilly. They bore the same
+relation to each other as the glaciers de Tour and d'Argenti&egrave;re, the
+Glacier des Bois with the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons and the
+Glacier de Taconet, now bear to each other in the valley of Chamouni;
+and were it not for the smaller dimensions of the whole, any one
+familiar with the tracks of ancient glaciers might easily fancy himself
+crossing the ancient moraines at the foot of the northern slope of the
+range of Mont Blanc, through which the Arve has cut its channel, the
+valley of Chamouni standing in the same relation to Mont Blanc as the
+valley of Loch Nilly does to Ben Calcagh.</p>
+
+<p>I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because
+they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch
+Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the
+many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian
+Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the
+Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear
+upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced
+their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in
+Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow
+them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and
+in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so
+that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the
+sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this
+all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the
+plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but
+the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses
+of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe,
+from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern
+promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action,
+showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole
+continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more
+limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines
+across the valleys, showing, that, as the general ice-sheet broke up and
+contracted into local glaciers, every cluster or chain of hills became a
+centre of glacial dispersion, such as the Alps are now, such as the
+Jura, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales and Ireland, the
+Alps of Scandinavia, the Hartz, the Black Forest, the Vosges, and many
+others have been in ancient times.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the next article we shall consider the glacial phenomena as they
+exist in America.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> See January No., p. 61.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> Having enumerated the characteristic features of the
+glacial phenomena in the preceding pages, I throw into this note some
+explanation which may render my views of the parallel roads more
+intelligible, not to interrupt again the exposition with details. It
+would be desirable, however, that the reader should first make himself
+thoroughly familiar with the localities concerned, before proceeding any
+farther. I would therefore state here, that, in the wood-cut opposite,
+G. R. indicates the valley of Glen Roy, with the three parallel roads
+marked 1, 2, 3. Glen Spean is designated by G. S., and the river flowing
+at its bottom by S. Loch Laggan, out of which the River Spean rises, is
+marked L. G. indicates Glen Gloy, a little valley to the northwest of
+Glen Roy, with a single terrace. Loch Treig is designated by T., Loch
+Lochy by L. O., Loch Arkeig by A., and Moeldhu Hill by M., while E.
+indicates Loch Eil. The Great Glen of Scotland, through which the
+Caledonian Canal runs, extends in the direction of L. O. and E. The
+position of Ben Nevis is designated by N. The dotted area between N. and
+M. marks the place occupied by the great glacier of Ben Nevis, when it
+extended as far as Moeldhu; while the close continuous lines in front of
+Loch Treig indicate the direction of the glacial scratches left across
+Glen Spean by the glacier of Loch Treig, when it extended as far as the
+eastern termination of the two upper terraces. It ought to be
+remembered, in this connection, that the bottom of the valley of the
+Spean, as well as that of Glen Roy, is occupied by loose materials,
+partly drift, that is, materials acted upon by glaciers, and partly
+decomposed fragments of rocks brought down by the torrents, greatly
+impeding the observation of the polished surfaces. The river-bed is cut
+through this deposit, and here and there through the underlying rock.
+Besides the parallel roads, there are also peculiar accumulations of
+loose materials in Glen Roy and Glen Spean, more particularly connected
+with the lowest terrace, which Mr. Darwin and Professor Jamieson have
+shown to be little deltas formed during the existence of the lake of
+Glen Roy at the bottom of the gullies intersecting the shelves of the
+upper roads. The outlet for the water at the period during which the
+second terrace was formed, not known when I visited Glen Roy, has been
+discovered by Mr. Milne-Holme, and also observed by Professor Jamieson.
+During the formation of the upper terrace, the waters escaped through
+the westernmost tributary of the River Spey, in the direction of the
+northeast corner of the wood-cut, and during that of the lowest terrace,
+at the eastern end of Loch Laggan, also through the valley of the Spey.
+The state of preservation of the parallel roads is such as to prove that
+no disturbance of any importance can have taken place in the country
+since they were formed. Far from believing, therefore, that these
+remarkable shelves are ancient sea-beaches, I am prepared to maintain,
+that, had the area occupied by them been submerged only for a few days,
+under an ocean rising and falling for several feet with every tide, no
+vestige would have been left of their former existence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_3" id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_3"><span class="label">[C]</span></a> The wood-cut on p. 730 is a reproduction of the little map
+accompanying a paper of mine upon "The Glacial Theory and its Recent
+Progress," printed in the "Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal" for
+October, 1842. I might have greatly improved the topography, and
+represented more accurately the details of the phenomenon, by availing
+myself of the much larger and very minute map recently published by
+Professor Thomas F. Jamieson, of Aberdeen; but I thought it advisable to
+leave my first sketch as I presented it twenty-two years ago, in order
+to show that Sir Charles Lyell is mistaken in ascribing (see "Antiquity
+of Man," pp. 260, 261) the discovery of the glacier of Loch Treig to
+Professor Jamieson. A comparison of his statements with mine will show
+that the solution of the problem offered by him is identical with that
+proposed by me, as he himself candidly admits ("Quarterly Journal of the
+Geological Society" for August, 1863, p. 239). I have only one fault to
+find with his observations, and, as I have never revisited the locality
+since, this remark may satisfy him that my examination of its features
+was not so hurried as he supposes. Professor Jamieson confounds the
+effects of two distinct glaciers moving in different valleys as the
+action of one and the same glacier. In my paper, it is true, I made no
+allusion to the great glacier of Glen Spean, the existence of which I
+had recognized along the river from Loch Laggan nearly to the Caledonian
+Canal. I publish my observations upon this great central glacier for the
+first time in the present article, having omitted them in my
+contributions upon this subject to the scientific periodicals of the day
+simply because I thought best not to complicate my exposition of the
+facts concerning the parallel roads by considerations foreign to their
+origin, convinced as I was, from the manner in which the glacial theory
+was then received, that they would not be understood, and still less
+admitted. But now that all the geologists of Great Britain seem to have
+given their adhesion to it, I may be permitted to state that I already
+knew then, what Professor Jamieson has overlooked in his latest paper,
+that a separate glacier had occupied the valley of the Spean <i>prior</i> to
+the formation of the parallel roads, and that at that time the glacier
+of Loch Treig was only a lateral tributary of the same, just as the
+glacier of the Thierberg is a tributary of the glacier of the Aar. It
+was not until the Glen Spean glacier had retreated to the hills east of
+Loch Laggan that the glacier of Loch Treig could form a barrier across
+Glen Spean, and thus dam the waters in Glen Roy which produced the
+parallel roads. The marks left by the great Glen Spean glacier in the
+valley are mistaken by Professor Jamieson for indications, that, in its
+greatest extension, the glacier of Loch Treig not only advanced across
+Glen Spean, but divided into two branches, one moving westward down Glen
+Spean, the other eastward up Glen Spean, as far as Loch Laggan. Any one
+sufficiently familiar with existing glaciers to compare their action
+with the phenomena referred to above will at once see the impossibility
+of such a course for any glacier coming down from Loch Treig. At the
+time the Grampians had become a separate centre of glacial action a
+great glacier must have moved down, towards the Caledonian Canal,
+through Glen Spean, receiving as tributaries lateral glaciers not only
+from Loch Treig and Glen Roy, but also from all the other minor lateral
+valleys emptying into Glen Spean, the largest of which must have come
+from the range of Ben Nevis,&mdash;just as the great glacier of the valley of
+the Rhone once received as tributaries all the glaciers coming down into
+that valley from the southern slope of the Bernese Oberland, and from
+the northern slope of the Valesian Alps, and at one time also from the
+eastern slopes of the range of Mont Blanc. And when the large glacier
+occupying the lower, and therefore warmer, level gradually disappeared
+and retreated far away to levels where it could maintain itself against
+the effect of a returning milder climate, the opening spring of our era,
+as we may call it, the lateral glaciers, arising from the nearer high
+grounds, could extend across the valleys, but not before.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="UNDER_THE_CLIFF" id="UNDER_THE_CLIFF"></a>UNDER THE CLIFF.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Which needs the other's office, thou or I?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost want to be disburthened of a woe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And can, in truth, my voice untie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its links, and let it go?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Intrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With falsehood,&mdash;love, at last aware<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of scorn,&mdash;hopes, early blighted,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We have them; but I know not any tone<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost think men would go mad without a moan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">If they knew any way to borrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pathos like thy own?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Which sigh wouldst mock, of all the sighs? The one<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So long escaping from lips starved and blue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That lasts while on her pallet-bed the nun<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stretches her length; her foot comes through<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The straw she shivers on,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You had not thought she was so tall; and spent,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Her shrunk lids open; her lean fingers shut<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Close, close; their sharp and livid nails indent<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The clammy palm; then all is mute:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That way, the spirit went.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Or wouldst thou rather that I understand<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thy will to help me?&mdash;like the dog I found<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Once, pacing sad this solitary strand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who would not take my food, poor hound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But whined and licked my hand."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">All this, and more, comes from some young man's pride<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of power to see, in failure and mistake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Relinquishment, disgrace, on every side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Merely examples for his sake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Helps to his path untried:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Instances he must&mdash;simply recognize?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Oh, more than so!&mdash;must, with a learner's zeal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make doubly prominent, twice emphasize,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By added touches that reveal<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The god in babe's disguise.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Himself the undefeated that shall be!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">His triumph in eternity<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too plainly manifest!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whence judge if he learn forthwith what the wind<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Means in its moaning,&mdash;by the happy, prompt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Instinctive way of youth, I mean,&mdash;for kind<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Calm years, exacting their accompt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of pain, mature the mind:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And some midsummer morning, at the lull<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Just about daybreak, as he looks across<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A sparkling foreign country, wonderful<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the sea's edge for gloom and gloss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Next minute must annul,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then, when the wind begins among the vines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So low, so low, what shall it mean but this?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Here is the change beginning, here the lines<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The limit time assigns."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nothing can be as it has been before;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Better, so call it, only not the same.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And keep it changeless! such our claim;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So answered,&mdash;Never more!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Simple? Why, this is the old woe o' the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Tune to whose rise and fall we live and die.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rise through it, then! Rejoice that man is hurled<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From change to change unceasingly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His soul's wings never furled!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That's a new question; still remains the fact,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We moan in acquiescence: there's life's pact,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Perhaps probation,&mdash;do <i>I</i> know?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God does: endure His act!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Only, for man, how bitter not to grave<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On his soul's hands' palms one fair, good, wise thing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Just as he grasped it! For himself, death's wave;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">While time first washes&mdash;ah, the sting!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O'er all he'd sink to save.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SEVEN_WEEKS_IN_THE_GREAT_YO-SEMITE" id="SEVEN_WEEKS_IN_THE_GREAT_YO-SEMITE"></a>SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller
+paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores
+the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no
+snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no
+aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his
+patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only
+change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean.
+Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless
+intervals of amber weather, and that <i>soi-disant</i> summer is one entire
+amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no
+inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San
+Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth
+of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the
+poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,&mdash;a single flat doing service
+for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes-of-hand, the
+Almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons
+with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All The Year Round.</p>
+
+<p>Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits are produced! Fruit
+enough metaphorical: for the scientific man or artist who cannot make
+hay while such a sun shines from April to November must be a slothful
+laborer indeed. But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is
+lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his
+study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his
+breakfast,&mdash;who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time
+to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons,
+figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds?</p>
+
+<p>Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Occidental Hotel. Its
+comfort is like that of a royal home. There is nothing inn-ish about it.
+Remembering the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained to say
+that I have never, even in New York, seen its equal for elegance of
+appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of <i>cuisine</i>.
+Having come to this extreme of civilization from the extreme of
+barbarism, we found that it actually needed an exertion to leap from the
+lap of luxury, after a fortnight's pleasaunce, and take to the woods
+again in flannel and corduroys.</p>
+
+<p>But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the heavenly climate, the
+paradisiacal fruits, and the royal hotel of San Francisco, were the old
+friends whom we found, and the new ones we made there. With but one
+exception, (and that an express-company, not a man,) we were received by
+all our San-Francisco acquaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a
+welcome and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was honorable to
+them. Need I say whose brotherly hands were among the very first
+outstretched to us, in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by
+whose radiant face and golden speech we were most lovingly detained
+evening after evening and far into the night? A few days ago when we
+read that dreadful message, "<i>Starr King is dead</i>," the lightning that
+carried it seemed to end in our hearts. We withered under it; California
+had lost its soul for us; at noon or in dreams that balmy land would
+nevermore be the paradise it once was to us. The last hand that pressed
+our own, when we sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the same
+that had been first to give us our California welcome. Just before the
+lines were cast off, Starr King stood at the door of our state-room, and
+said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I could not bear to have you go away without one more good-bye. Here
+are the <i>cartes-de-visite</i> I promised. They look hard-worked, but they
+look like me. Good bye! God bless you! I hope to make a visit to the
+East next summer, and then we will get together somewhere by the sea.
+Good bye!"</p>
+
+<p>He went down the ladder. When the steamer glided off, his bright face
+sent benedictions after us as far as we could see; and then, for the
+last time on earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded from
+our sight,&mdash;but, oh! never from our hearts, either in the here or the
+hereafter. "We shall see him, but not now." We shall be together with
+him "in the summer, by the sea"; but that summer shall have other glory
+than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.</p>
+
+<p>King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. We little knew that we
+were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily
+intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously
+disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work
+for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.</p>
+
+<p>If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of
+Eden,&mdash;into a region which out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the
+valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the
+Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of
+comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from
+his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine
+cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a
+couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh
+scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be
+compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.</p>
+
+<p>We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months
+before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across
+the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's
+window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in
+Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,&mdash;I,
+let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to
+believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very
+prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>No Saratoga affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and
+curling-kids. Driven by the &#339;strum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the
+San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on")
+her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the
+Sierra, and, like John Ph&#339;nix's old lady who had her whole osseous
+system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her
+"skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood
+once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three
+or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp
+there,&mdash;though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry
+day since my return I was riding in a train on the New-York Central,
+when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of
+beeves, accosted me with the question,&mdash;"Friend, yeou've travelled
+consid'able, and believe in the religion of Natur', don't ye?" "Why so?"
+I responded. "<i>Them boots</i>," replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a
+pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite.
+Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had,&mdash;and it is not difficult
+to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were
+armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had
+come with us across the continent; our ammunition we got in San
+Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth
+transportation: our necessaries we left to be purchased at that
+jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our
+pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like
+ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits,
+sardines, and apple-butter,&mdash;in the latter, a jug of sirup for the
+inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our
+narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him
+and starvation; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to
+stick!</p>
+
+<p>The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite
+(and he must be rather of the Count-Devereux than the Foppington-Flutter
+school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good
+saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California.
+Everybody rides there; if you wish to create a sensation with your
+horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not
+well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun
+to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franciscan Boulevards) with its
+cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging
+through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by
+Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat
+in the next Congress. The nation of beggars-on-horseback which first
+colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of
+conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even
+less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and
+Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly
+in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that
+Americans who never sat even so little as an Atlantic-State's pony, on
+coming here presently take to the saddle with all their hearts. In most
+of the smaller Californian towns, a very serviceable half- or
+quarter-breed saddle-horse is to be had for forty dollars,&mdash;the "breed"
+portion of his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the remaining
+fraction being native or Mustang stock. This animal, if need be, will
+live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule,&mdash;travel all day
+long on an easy "lope," never offering to stop till fatigue makes him
+fall,&mdash;and, if you let him, will take you through <i>chaparrals</i>, and up
+and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would
+break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts,
+supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with
+saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in
+gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York
+market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and
+fifty dollars.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started,
+but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there
+be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a
+good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on
+which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be
+imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend
+nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted
+to the rider's form as an old "<i>incroyable's</i>" pair of pantaloons. There
+is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower
+lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a
+broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward
+in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,&mdash;thus
+affording capital relief both to one's self and one's horse, and
+bringing in both from a fifty-miles' march comparatively unjaded.</p>
+
+<p>The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like
+an Omega upside-down (U)[Transcriber's note: upside down Omega], left
+unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a
+half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the
+toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances.
+Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly
+ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of
+the rider's leg. The surcingle, or, <i>Californic&egrave;</i>, the <i>cinch</i>, is a
+broad strip of hair-cloth with a padded ring at either end through which
+you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings
+under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than
+our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your
+girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.</p>
+
+<p>The only particular in which I could not commend and adopt the native
+practice was the Mexican bit. It is a dreadful instrument of torture,
+putting immense leverage in the rider's hands, and enabling him at will
+to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces; indeed, the horse on which it
+is used is guided entirely by pressure on the opposite side of the neck
+from that in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of drawing his
+head around would so lift the bit as to drive him frantic. There are
+very few horses of any breed, even the Mustang, that <i>never</i> stumble;
+and as I prefer lifting my horse to letting him break his knees or neck,
+I want a bridle I can pull upon without tearing his mouth. So, in spite
+of its handsome appearance and the very manageable single white cord
+into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed the Mexican head-gear,
+and took the ordinary Eastern snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed
+our accoutrement,&mdash;whips being here unknown.</p>
+
+<p>I may as well make a word-map of our route before going farther.
+Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship themselves and their horses from San
+Francisco by steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Joaquin, the
+most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada
+water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State,&mdash;a series,
+indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the
+Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region,
+that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying
+the northern portion of the State,&mdash;resembling in its physical features,
+much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated
+trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is
+almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which
+debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,&mdash;and that rises east of
+the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is
+one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach
+the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good
+United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to
+the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or
+would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You
+will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving
+the San Joaquin at Stockton <i>en route</i> for Mariposa,&mdash;the Stanislaus,
+the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to
+Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between
+fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains,
+somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges
+of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small
+settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you
+come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish <i>plaza</i>, and Yankee notions sold
+around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to
+Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize";
+besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in
+Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our
+extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their
+first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to
+neither of which each other's society or their own new trade was
+congenial.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole
+road is interesting,&mdash;especially to one making a specialty of owls. The
+only game within easy reach is the dove and the California
+ground-squirrel,&mdash;a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray,
+barring the former's subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the
+road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when
+the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the
+river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of
+the Sierra,&mdash;or ought to be: many cattle died along the San Joaquin last
+summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the
+refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water
+on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that
+I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we
+forded it at Roberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior
+to the finest white-oaks of the East, but surpassed in beauty every
+tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as
+exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a New-England meadow, and wept
+at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,&mdash;possessing,
+moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal <i>embonpoint</i>,
+unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we
+lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a
+desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of
+color from our artists' hands.</p>
+
+<p>At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade
+of pack-animals, transferred our wagon-load to their backs, (the average
+mule-pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,)
+roped it there in the most approved <i>muletero</i>-fashion, and started into
+the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who
+with myself had formed the original overland-party, we numbered two
+young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in
+California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient D&uuml;sseldorf
+friend,&mdash;also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally,
+Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former,
+perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as
+will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in
+return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after
+looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and
+finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold
+dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for
+the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair,
+serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then
+it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been
+General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of
+Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went
+into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him,
+marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing
+which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the
+matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance,
+whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by
+some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional
+greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our <i>pis-aller</i>,&mdash;we
+finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to
+help pack our mules or care for them and the horses.</p>
+
+<p>The boy we obtained near Mariposa. He was an independent squire to the
+man of whom we got the extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of
+trustee and <i>prochein amy</i> to an orphan family of mules. At fifteen
+years and in jackets, he was one of the keenest speculators in fire-arms
+I ever saw; could swap horses or play poker with anybody; and, take him
+for all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall never look upon
+his like again.</p>
+
+<p>Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five pack-beasts by as
+many tow-lines, we struck up into the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills,
+commencing our climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole
+distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve of these we pursued a
+road in some degree practicable to carts, and leading to one of those
+inevitable steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his first
+swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing the saw-mill in the very
+act of astonishing the wilderness with a dinner-whistle, we struck a
+trail and fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was almost a
+continuous alternation of descent and climb over outlying ridges of the
+Sierra. Our raw-recruited mules, and the elementary condition of our
+intellects in the science of professional packing, spun out this portion
+of our journey to three days,&mdash;though allowance is to be made for the
+fact of our stopping at noon of the second day and not resuming our
+trail till the morning of the third. This interim we spent in visiting
+the Big Trees, which are situated four or five miles off the Yo-Semite
+track.</p>
+
+<p>"Clark's," where tourists stop for this purpose, is just half-way
+between Mariposa and the great Valley. "Clark" himself is one of the
+best-informed men, one of the very best guides, I ever met in the
+Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, stalwart old
+grizzly-hunter and miner of the '49 days, wears a noble full beard hued
+like his favorite game, but no head-covering of any kind since he
+recovered from a fever which left his head intolerant of even a slouch.
+He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in the winter, and in summer
+occupies a hermitage built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty
+valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest
+poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild-strawberry
+sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.</p>
+
+<p>Before reaching Clark's we had been astonished at the dimensions of the
+ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through
+forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and
+trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very
+largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.</p>
+
+<p>But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as
+thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain
+forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the
+literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants.
+People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to
+realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted
+proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the
+look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves,
+and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that,
+though I always thought I <i>had</i> believed travellers in their recitals on
+this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no
+such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the
+friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.</p>
+
+<p>Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty-two
+trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in
+circumference; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet;
+fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and
+sixty; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and
+eighty; two between eighty and ninety; two between ninety and one
+hundred; two are just one hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This
+last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet.
+I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,&mdash;for it is
+prostrate,&mdash;and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark.
+I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the
+measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet,&mdash;its
+circumference one hundred and two feet <i>plus</i> a fraction. Of course the
+thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in
+depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.</p>
+
+<p>To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount
+to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house.
+You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of
+the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope <i>up</i> from your roof-peak.
+Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end,
+our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one
+hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation
+had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of
+trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried
+throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and
+finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included
+in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still
+living, and all have the bark upon them still, while <i>the</i> tree is to
+some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live
+wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,&mdash;over one hundred and
+twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle
+of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these
+largest giants as far as 1200 <span class="smcap">B. C.</span> Thus their tender saplings
+were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some
+of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when
+Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the
+Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a
+reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these
+marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though
+with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and
+how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them
+half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque,
+the rest of us <i>izing</i> away at something scientific,&mdash;Botany,
+Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to
+do here or in the Valley,&mdash;the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada
+granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our
+artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing
+picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt
+frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a
+cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt
+for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's,
+your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an
+average timber-tree as a large man against <i>Sequoia gigantea</i>. What our
+artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees'
+color,&mdash;a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety
+to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical
+figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned
+almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy
+fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a
+plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by
+fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.</p>
+
+<p>Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped
+down intensely cold through the granite chasms,&mdash;all of them fed from
+the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque,&mdash;most of them good
+trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving
+Clark's, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which
+flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of
+tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us
+quite <i>apropos</i> at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one
+side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily
+furnished us with frogs enough for an <i>entr&eacute;e</i>. Between two and three in
+the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were
+now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall
+the Yo-Semite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy,
+save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again
+into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or
+the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from
+before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our
+trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name
+unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied
+in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the
+hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless;
+but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This
+was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with an
+odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of
+our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail
+turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."</p>
+
+<p>That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous
+expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to
+be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe
+as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just
+been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my
+vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged
+translation of any Scripture of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in
+height,&mdash;a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance
+baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green
+<i>spicul&aelig;</i>&mdash;they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun
+on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first
+gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.</p>
+
+<p>There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we
+could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it
+splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians
+have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and
+five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.</p>
+
+<p>I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly,
+for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the
+tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the
+serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,&mdash;broadly burning, rather
+than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From
+that sun, clear back to the first <i>avant-courier</i> trace of purple
+twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim&mdash;yes, as if it were the very
+butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven&mdash;ran that wall, always
+sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel
+might climb or sparrow fly,&mdash;so broad that it was just faint-lined like
+the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,&mdash;so
+lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines
+and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on
+the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first
+astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and
+seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to
+examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice
+surpassed our immediate <i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i> in height.</p>
+
+<p>First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the
+Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that
+might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second
+Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there
+the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway
+and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no
+more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a
+pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built
+on its grand flat top. And, oh! the gorgeous masses of light and shadow
+which the falling sun cast on it,&mdash;the shadows like great waves, the
+lights like their spumy tops and flying mist,&mdash;thrown up from the
+heaving breast of a golden sea! In California at this season the dome of
+heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be done for the
+bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken
+winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly
+four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the
+Valley's tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish <i>alias</i>,&mdash;some
+Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "<i>El Capitan</i>" the idea
+of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.</p>
+
+<p>Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the
+sky-line, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere
+of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to
+hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous
+To-coy-&aelig;, better known through Watkins's photographs as the Great North
+Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is
+certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose
+here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far
+more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.</p>
+
+<p>We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own
+wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand-point
+to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its
+least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which
+topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of
+a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same
+plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the
+opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories,
+and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an
+angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were
+standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper
+edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory
+of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the
+North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer
+mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as
+elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked
+semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller
+Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing
+to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered <i>glacis</i> of
+detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life
+save the pal&aelig;ozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus
+from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a
+Yo-Semite crag <i>inorganic</i>, as I used to speak of everything not
+strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that
+utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the
+<i>d&eacute;bris</i> at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and <i>exuvi&aelig;</i> of a
+stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were
+going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us
+because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before
+Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in
+the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived
+long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but
+one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads
+at a time,&mdash;if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of
+some one small being in the fenceless <i>vivarium</i> of the Universe? Let
+not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly
+upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we
+bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.</p>
+
+<p>I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the
+native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful
+Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few
+short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave.
+Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was
+its fostering god,&mdash;the former a radiant maiden, the latter an
+ever-young immortal,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"amorous as the month of May."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula
+spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer,
+kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley-tribes began to
+starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened,
+and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to
+prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her
+nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to
+the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty
+cone split from heaven to earth,&mdash;its frontal half falling down to dam
+the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful
+Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches,&mdash;its other segment
+remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the
+<i>in-memoriam</i> title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to
+save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony
+Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he
+had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan,&mdash;where a lively faith
+and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the
+doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,&mdash;in
+the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact,
+and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by
+time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and
+passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his
+own way; but a fact with its facets cut&mdash;otherwise a poem&mdash;is
+unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody
+tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal
+translation; poems circulate virgin and <i>verbatim</i>. In some future
+article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River,
+and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by
+the lantern of Indian legend.</p>
+
+<p>Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as
+seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass
+turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,&mdash;chrysoprase beautiful
+enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic
+heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of
+green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the
+westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great
+mountain-ranges,&mdash;into a field of perfect light, misty by its own
+excess,&mdash;into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the
+ph&#339;nix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some
+rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a
+dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man
+or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for
+ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on
+rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy
+dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the
+crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's
+self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a
+sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new
+cycle,&mdash;spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and
+hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth
+below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the
+shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the
+middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset
+wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.</p>
+
+<p>To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from
+possessing it. Only the <i>silleros</i> of the Andes, our mules, horses, and
+selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking
+was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most
+circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their
+impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the
+mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a
+green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.</p>
+
+<p>Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,&mdash;calling it "Camp Rosalie,"
+after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs
+and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow,
+with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in
+ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got
+together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring
+fire,&mdash;made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a
+three-forked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks,&mdash;selected a
+cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and
+as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant <i>baldacchini</i> for
+the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep
+on evergreen-strewings.</p>
+
+<p>During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to
+rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold
+Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the
+game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks
+and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the
+testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from
+picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the
+sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the
+gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a
+gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of
+injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists
+began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a
+living landscape, <i>color</i>-studies on the spot; and though I am not here
+to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks'
+camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for
+future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the
+feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided
+orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or
+the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting
+specimens of all kinds,&mdash;<i>Agassizing</i>, so to speak.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of
+sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish,&mdash;to that
+select minority of <i>illuminati</i> who go trouting for intellectual
+culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a <i>Sonata</i> of
+Beethoven's,&mdash;who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the
+divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola
+in the cast of a fly,&mdash;who call three little troutlings "<i>a splendid
+day's sport, me boy</i>!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have
+been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to
+them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier
+curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to
+the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or
+fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon,&mdash;and those the dull,
+black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots,&mdash;I gave over
+bothering the unambitious burghers of the flood with invitations to a
+rise in life, and took to the meadows with a butterfly-net.</p>
+
+<p>My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) should chase the
+butterfly on horseback. You are liable to put your net over your horse's
+head instead of the butterfly. The butterfly keeps rather ahead of the
+horse. You may throw your horse when you mean to throw the net. The idea
+is a romantic one; it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when
+court-butterflies <i>were</i> said to have been netted from the saddle,&mdash;but
+it carries you nowhere else in particular, unless perhaps into a small
+branch of the Merced, where you don't want to go. Then, too, if you slip
+down and leave your horse standing while you steal on a giant <i>Papilio</i>
+which is sucking the deer-weed in <i>such</i> a sweet spot for a cast, your
+horse (perhaps he has heard of the French general who said, "Asses and
+<i>savans</i> to the centre!") may discover that he also is a sage, and
+retire to botanize while you are butterflying,&mdash;a contingency which
+entails your wading the Merced after him five several times, and finally
+going back to camp in wet disgust to procure another horse and a lariat.
+An experience faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon convinced
+me that the great arm of the service in butterfly-warfare is infantry.
+After I had turned myself into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to
+success. Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of its groves and
+meadows is sucked by some of the largest, the most magnificent, and most
+widely varied butterflies in the world.</p>
+
+<p>At noon those of us who came back to camp had a substantial dinner out
+of our abundant stores, reinforced occasionally with grouse, quail, or
+pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined <i>&agrave; la
+fourchette</i>, in their workshop,&mdash;something in a pail being carried out
+to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness,
+and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the
+lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, "Death on the
+Pail-Horse." At evening, when the artists returned, half an hour was
+passed in a "private view" of their day's studies; then came another
+dinner, called a supper; then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and
+brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the genial way to
+bed-time.</p>
+
+<p>In his charming "Peculiar," Epes Sargent has given us an episode called
+the "Story of Estelle." It is the greatest of compliments to him that I
+could get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore the name of
+one of the most audacious and <i>picaresque</i> mortals I ever knew,&mdash;our
+hired man, who sold us&mdash;our&mdash;&mdash;But hear my episode: it is</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE STORY OF VANCE.</h3>
+
+<p>Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with the Secesh uncle. I will be
+brief. Our stores began to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a
+horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of purchases, and eighty
+golden dollars, bidding him good-speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was
+to return laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, and oil,
+on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. Seven days glided by, and
+the material for more slapjacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our
+bag-bottoms.</p>
+
+<p>One morning I determined to save the party from starvation, and with a
+fresh supply of the currency set out for Mariposa. At Clark's I learned
+that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned
+his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest
+of the sunlight in a <i>siesta</i>. When he arose, his animals were
+undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse to go in
+search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen him since.</p>
+
+<p>Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I resumed my way toward
+the settlements. Coming by the steam saw-mill, I recognized Vance's
+steed grazing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, and led
+him in triumph to Mariposa. There I arrived at eight in the evening of
+the day I left the Valley,&mdash;having performed fifty miles of the hardest
+mountain-trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve
+hours, making allowance for our halt and noon-feed at Clark's. If ever a
+California horse was tried, it was mine on that occasion; and he came
+into Mariposa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled or jaded
+in the least.</p>
+
+<p>Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory had carried him home to
+his old stable,&mdash;also the remaining events in Vance's brief, but
+brilliant career. That ornament of the Utah and Yo-Semite expeditions
+had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse,&mdash;lost our eighty golden dollars
+at a single session of bluff,&mdash;departed gayly for Coulterville, where he
+sold Clark's horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and
+bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire
+purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving
+title,)&mdash;and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his
+pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of
+California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the
+days of Gil Blas!</p>
+
+<p>Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own animals to waste time
+in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our
+commissariat needed,&mdash;nooned at Clark's, on my way back, the third day
+after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my
+rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon
+they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three
+days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen
+people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover-bread; but, after
+such an experience as our party's, I venture to say they would have
+regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the
+Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell
+within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same
+enthusiasm shared our artists, <i>savans</i>, and gentlemen, embracing the
+shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized
+that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, "A
+slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation"?</p>
+
+<p>Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a
+position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful
+grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced
+margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream,
+and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice
+opposite. This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian,
+"Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited
+with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early
+period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without
+break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the
+headlong flood from cataract to rapids for about four hundred feet; but
+the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen
+hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be
+imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst
+of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from
+the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the
+grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.</p>
+
+<p>While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit "Po-ho-n&oacute;," or "The
+Bridal Veil," which was passed on the southern side in our way to the
+second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was a good,
+so is Po-ho-n&oacute; an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is
+scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been
+carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water
+forever rushing down a <i>ca&ntilde;on</i> through which the stream breaks from its
+feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers
+his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-n&oacute;; while the
+very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of
+the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap
+of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet
+perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the
+Valley-cataracts to the Yo-Semite itself, and having a width of fifty
+feet. Its name of "The Bridal Veil" is one of the few successes in
+fantastic nomenclature; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy
+sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free
+of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth
+at her granite wedding,&mdash;no commemorator of any fifty-years' bagatelle
+like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her
+nuptials.</p>
+
+<p>On either side of Po-ho-n&oacute; the sky-line of the precipice is
+magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown
+of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly
+bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is
+Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three
+hundred feet. A little farther are "Eleachas," or "The Three Brothers,"
+flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior
+bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of
+thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.</p>
+
+<p>One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the shore of Lake
+Ah-wi-yah,&mdash;a crystal pond of several acres in extent, fed by the north
+fork of the Valley-stream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow
+strait between the North and South Domes. By this tranquil water we
+pitched our third camp, and when the rising sun began to shine through
+the mighty cleft before us, the play of color and <i>chiaroscuro</i> on its
+rugged walls was something for which an artist apt to oversleep himself
+might well have sat up all the night. No such precaution was needed by
+ourselves. Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out by
+dawn; for the studies were grander, the grouse and quail plentier, and
+the butterflies more gorgeous than we found in any other portion of the
+Valley. After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the river more
+enchanting at every step. I was obliged to penetrate in this direction
+entirely on foot,&mdash;clambering between squared blocks of granite
+dislodged from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of which might
+have been excavated into a commodious church, and discovering, for the
+pains cost by a reconnoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest
+shady stretches of singing water and some of the finest minor waterfalls
+in our American scenery.</p>
+
+<p>Our last camp was pitched among the crags and forests behind the South
+Dome,&mdash;where the Middle Fork descends through two successive waterfalls,
+which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass Cho-looke, while the
+loftiest is nearly as high as Po-ho-n&oacute;. About three miles west of the
+Domes, the south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep <i>ca&ntilde;on</i>
+leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through this <i>ca&ntilde;on</i> comes the
+Middle Fork, and along its banks lies our course to the great
+"Pi-wi-ack" (senselessly Englished as "Vernal") and the Nevada Falls.
+For three miles from our camp opposite the Yo-Semite Fall the <i>ca&ntilde;on</i> is
+threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we
+dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our
+own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than
+the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to
+squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent
+danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles; in others we became
+quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main
+precipice had made but slight compromise. But for our light marching
+order,&mdash;our only dress being knee-boots, hunting-shirt, and
+trowsers,&mdash;it would have been next to impossible to reach our goal at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the
+end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is
+brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our
+slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down
+which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge;
+an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across the mighty caldron
+at the base of the fall; and straight before us in one unbroken leap
+came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite shelf nearly four hundred feet in
+height and sixty feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterprising
+speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five
+cents' toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders
+against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it
+still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so
+close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its
+rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to
+the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect
+breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the
+<i>ca&ntilde;on</i> to the very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves need not
+have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat
+rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we
+had just climbed.</p>
+
+<p>Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite
+cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about
+forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a
+crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest
+<i>manzanita</i> may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here
+and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues
+upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one
+side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other,&mdash;creating thus
+the very typical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining barrenness
+of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome
+which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any
+metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the
+Alleghany chain.</p>
+
+<p>Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream's
+immediate margin,&mdash;getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork
+of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls
+which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,&mdash;we came at
+last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.</p>
+
+<p>This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most
+beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the
+surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great
+height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its
+exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest
+portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt
+by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants
+sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the
+fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over
+this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a
+half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.</p>
+
+<p>At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a <i>cul-de-sac</i> of Nature's
+grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us
+in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite <i>barathrum</i>,
+whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the
+crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous
+series of Yo-Semite <i>effects</i>; eight hundred feet above us, could we
+climb there, we should find the silent causes of power. There lie the
+broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow-peaks;
+thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the
+eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us
+as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came.
+Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the
+battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun,
+towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting
+snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cutting the sky
+at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,&mdash;of
+holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way
+have we toiled since then,&mdash;and we know better now. Have we endured all
+these pains only to learn still deeper Life's saddest lesson,&mdash;"Climb
+forever, and there is still an Inaccessible"?</p>
+
+<p>Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature's topmost
+treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye answers us ere we turn back from the
+Yo-Semite's last precipice toward the haunts of men:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down to you!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="HOUSE_AND_HOME_PAPERS" id="HOUSE_AND_HOME_PAPERS"></a>HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.</h2>
+
+<h3>BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.</h3>
+
+
+<h3>VI.</h3>
+
+<p>"My dear Chris," said my wife, "isn't it time to be writing the next
+'House and Home Paper'?"</p>
+
+<p>I was lying back in my study-chair, with my heels luxuriously propped on
+an ottoman, reading for the two-hundredth time Hawthorne's "Mosses from
+an Old Manse," or his "Twice-Told Tales," I forget which,&mdash;I only know
+that these books constitute my cloud-land, where I love to sail away in
+dreamy quietude, forgetting the war, the price of coal and flour, the
+rates of exchange, and the rise and fall of gold. What do all these
+things matter, as seen from those enchanted gardens in Padua where the
+weird Rappaccini tends his enchanted plants, and his gorgeous daughter
+fills us with the light and magic of her presence, and saddens us with
+the shadowy allegoric mystery of her preternatural destiny? But my wife
+represents the positive forces of time, place, and number in our family,
+and, having also a chronological head, she knows the day of the month,
+and therefore gently reminded me that by inevitable dates the time drew
+near for preparing my&mdash;which is it now, May or June number?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear, you are right," I said, as by an exertion I came
+head-uppermost, and laid down the fascinating volume. "Let me see, what
+was I to write about?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you remember you were to answer that letter from the lady who does
+her own work."</p>
+
+<p>"Enough!" said I, seizing the pen with alacrity; "you have hit the exact
+phrase:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'The <i>lady</i> who <i>does her own work</i>.'"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>America is the only country where such a title is possible,&mdash;the only
+country where there is a class of women who may be described as <i>ladies</i>
+who do their own work. By a lady we mean a woman of education,
+cultivation, and refinement, of liberal tastes and ideas, who, without
+any very material additions or changes, would be recognized as a lady in
+any circle of the Old World or the New.</p>
+
+<p>What I have said is, that the existence of such a class is a fact
+peculiar to American society, a clear, plain result of the new
+principles involved in the doctrine of universal equality.</p>
+
+<p>When the colonists first came to this country, of however mixed
+ingredients their ranks might have been composed, and however imbued
+with the spirit of feudal and aristocratic ideas, the discipline of the
+wilderness soon brought them to a democratic level; the gentleman felled
+the wood for his log-cabin side by side with the ploughman, and thews
+and sinews rose in the market. "A man was deemed honorable in proportion
+as he lifted his hand upon the high trees of the forest." So in the
+interior domestic circle. Mistress and maid, living in a log-cabin
+together, became companions, and sometimes the maid, as the more
+accomplished and stronger, took precedence of the mistress. It became
+natural and unavoidable that children should begin to work as early as
+they were capable of it. The result was a generation of intelligent
+people brought up to labor from necessity, but turning on the problem of
+labor the acuteness of a disciplined brain. The mistress, outdone in
+sinews and muscles by her maid, kept her superiority by skill and
+contrivance. If she could not lift a pail of water, she could invent
+methods which made lifting the pail unnecessary,&mdash;if she could not take
+a hundred steps without weariness, she could make twenty answer the
+purpose of a hundred.</p>
+
+<p>Slavery, it is true, was to some extent introduced into New England, but
+it never suited the genius of the people, never struck deep root, or
+spread so as to choke the good seed of self-helpfulness. Many were
+opposed to it from conscientious principle,&mdash;many from far-sighted
+thrift, and from a love of thoroughness and well-doing which despised
+the rude, unskilled work of barbarians. People, having once felt the
+thorough neatness and beauty of execution which came of free, educated,
+and thoughtful labor, could not tolerate the clumsiness of slavery. Thus
+it came to pass that for many years the rural population of New England,
+as a general rule, did their own work, both out doors and in. If there
+were a black man or black woman or bound girl, they were emphatically
+only the <i>helps</i>, following humbly the steps of master and mistress, and
+used by them as instruments of lightening certain portions of their
+toil. The master and mistress with their children were the head workers.</p>
+
+<p>Great merriment has been excited in the Old Country, because years ago
+the first English travellers found that the class of persons by them
+denominated servants were in America denominated <i>help</i> or helpers. But
+the term was the very best exponent of the state of society. There were
+few servants, in the European sense of the word; there was a society of
+educated workers, where all were practically equal, and where, if there
+was a deficiency in one family and an excess in another, a <i>helper</i>, not
+a servant, was hired. Mrs. Browne, who has six sons and no daughters,
+enters into agreement with Mrs. Jones, who has six daughters and no
+sons. She borrows a daughter, and pays her good wages to help in her
+domestic toil, and sends a son to help the labors of Mr. Jones. These
+two young people go into the families in which they are to be employed
+in all respects as equals and companions, and so the work of the
+community is equalized. Hence arose, and for many years continued, a
+state of society more nearly solving than any other ever did the problem
+of combining the highest culture of the mind with the highest culture of
+the muscles and the physical faculties.</p>
+
+<p>Then were to be seen families of daughters, handsome, strong females,
+rising each day to their in-door work with cheerful alertness,&mdash;one to
+sweep the room, another to make the fire, while a third prepared the
+breakfast for the father and brothers who were going out to manly labor;
+and they chatted meanwhile of books, studies, embroidery, discussed the
+last new poem, or some historical topic started by graver reading, or
+perhaps a rural ball that was to come off the next week. They spun with
+the book tied to the distaff; they wove; they did all manner of fine
+needle-work; they made lace, painted flowers, and, in short, in the
+boundless consciousness of activity, invention, and perfect health, set
+themselves to any work they had ever read or thought of. A bride in
+those days was married with sheets and table-cloths of her own weaving,
+with counterpanes and toilet-covers wrought in divers embroidery by her
+own and her sisters' hands. The amount of fancy-work done in our days by
+girls who have nothing else to do will not equal what was done by these,
+who performed besides, among them, the whole work of the family.</p>
+
+<p>For many years these habits of life characterized the majority of our
+rural towns. They still exist among a class respectable in numbers and
+position, though perhaps not as happy in perfect self-satisfaction and a
+conviction of the dignity and desirableness of its lot as in former
+days. Human nature is above all things&mdash;lazy. Every one confesses in the
+abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind
+is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they
+can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than
+circumstances drive him to do. Even I would not write this article, were
+not the publication-day hard on my heels. I should read Hawthorne and
+Emerson and Holmes, and dream in my arm-chair, and project in the clouds
+those lovely unwritten stories that curl and veer and change like
+mist-wreaths in the sun. So, also, however dignified, however
+invigorating, however really desirable are habits of life involving
+daily physical toil, there is a constant evil demon at every one's
+elbow, seducing him to evade it, or to bear its weight with sullen,
+discontented murmurs.</p>
+
+<p>I will venture to say that there are at least, to speak very moderately,
+a hundred houses where these humble lines will be read and discussed,
+where there are no servants except the ladies of the household. I will
+venture to say, also, that these households, many of them, are not
+inferior in the air of cultivation and refined elegance to many which
+are conducted by the ministration of domestics. I will venture to
+assert, furthermore, that these same ladies who live thus find quite as
+much time for reading, letter-writing, drawing, embroidery, and
+fancy-work, as the women of families otherwise arranged. I am quite
+certain that they would be found on an average to be in the enjoyment of
+better health, and more of that sense of capability and vitality which
+gives one confidence in one's ability to look into life and meet it with
+cheerful courage, than three-quarters of the women who keep
+servants,&mdash;and that on the whole their domestic establishment is
+regulated more exactly to their mind, their food prepared and served
+more to their taste. And yet, with all this, I will <i>not</i> venture to
+assert that they are satisfied with this way of living, and that they
+would not change it forthwith, if they could. They have a secret feeling
+all the while that they are being abused, that they are working harder
+than they ought to, and that women who live in their houses like
+boarders, who have only to speak and it is done, are the truly enviable
+ones. One after another of their associates, as opportunity offers and
+means increase, desert the ranks, and commit their domestic affairs to
+the hands of hired servants. Self-respect takes the alarm. Is it
+altogether genteel to live as we do? To be sure, we are accustomed to
+it; we have it all systematized and arranged; the work of our own hands
+suits us better than any we can hire; in fact, when we do hire, we are
+discontented and uncomfortable,&mdash;for who will do for us what we will do
+for ourselves? But when we have company! there's the rub, to get out all
+our best things and put them back,&mdash;to cook the meals and wash the
+dishes ingloriously,&mdash;and to make all appear as if we didn't do it, and
+had servants like other people.</p>
+
+<p>There, after all, is the rub. A want of hardy self-belief and
+self-respect,&mdash;an unwillingness to face with dignity the actual facts
+and necessities of our situation in life,&mdash;this, after all, is the worst
+and most dangerous feature of the case. It is the same sort of pride
+which makes Smilax think he must hire a waiter in white gloves, and get
+up a circuitous dinner-party on English principles, to entertain a
+friend from England. Because the friend in England lives in such and
+such a style, he must make believe for a day that he lives so too, when
+in fact it is a whirlwind in his domestic establishment equal to a
+removal or a fire, and threatens the total extinction of Mrs. Smilax.
+Now there are two principles of hospitality that people are very apt to
+overlook. One is, that their guests like to be made at home, and treated
+with confidence; and another is, that people are always interested in
+the details of a way of life that is new to them. The Englishman comes
+to America as weary of his old, easy, family-coach life as you can be of
+yours; he wants to see something new under the sun,&mdash;something American;
+and forthwith we all bestir ourselves to give him something as near as
+we can fancy exactly like what he is already tired of. So city-people
+come to the country, not to sit in the best parlor, and to see the
+nearest imitation of city-life, but to lie on the hay-mow, to swing in
+the barn, to form intimacy with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to
+eat baked potatoes exactly on the critical moment when they are done,
+from the oven of the cooking-stove,&mdash;and we remark, <i>en passant</i>, that
+nobody has ever truly eaten a baked potato, unless he has seized it at
+that precise and fortunate moment.</p>
+
+<p>I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three happy
+women together. You are all so well that you know not how it feels to be
+sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in bed, if you
+could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest,
+neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so
+that really for the greater part of the time in your house there seems
+to a looker-on to be nothing to do. You rise in the morning and despatch
+your husband, father, and brothers to the farm or wood-lot; you go
+sociably about chatting with each other, while you skim the milk, make
+the butter, turn the cheeses. The forenoon is long; it's ten to one that
+all the so-called morning work is over, and you have leisure for an
+hour's sewing or reading before it is time to start the
+dinner-preparations. By two o'clock your house-work is done, and you
+have the long afternoon for books, needle-work, or drawing,&mdash;for perhaps
+there is among you one with a gift at her pencil. Perhaps one of you
+reads aloud while the others sew, and you manage in that way to keep up
+with a great deal of reading. I see on your book-shelves Prescott,
+Macaulay, Irving, besides the lighter fry of poems and novels, and, if I
+mistake not, the friendly covers of the "Atlantic." When you have
+company, you invite Mrs. Smith or Brown or Jones to tea; you have no
+trouble; they come early, with their knitting or sewing; your particular
+crony sits with you by your polished stove while you watch the baking of
+those light biscuits and tea-rusks for which you are so famous, and Mrs.
+Somebody-else chats with your sister, who is spreading the table with
+your best china in the best room. When tea is over, there is plenty of
+volunteering to help you wash your pretty India teacups, and get them
+back into the cupboard. There is no special fatigue or exertion in all
+this, though you have taken down the best things and put them back,
+because you have done all without anxiety or effort, among those who
+would do precisely the same, if you were their visitors.</p>
+
+<p>But now comes down pretty Mrs. Simmons and her pretty daughter to spend
+a week with you, and forthwith you are troubled. Your youngest, Fanny,
+visited them in New York last fall, and tells you of their cook and
+chambermaid, and the servant in white gloves that waits on table. You
+say in your soul, "What shall we do? they never can be contented to live
+as we do; how shall we manage?" And now you long for servants.</p>
+
+<p>This is the very time that you should know that Mrs. Simmons is tired to
+death of her fine establishment, and weighed down with the task of
+keeping the peace among her servants. She is a quiet soul, dearly loving
+her ease, and hating strife; and yet last week she had five quarrels to
+settle between her invaluable cook and the other members of her staff,
+because invaluable cook, on the strength of knowing how to get up
+state-dinners and to manage all sorts of mysteries which her mistress
+knows nothing about, asserts the usual right of spoiled favorites to
+insult all her neighbors with impunity, and rule with a rod of iron over
+the whole house. Anything that is not in the least like her own home and
+ways of living will be a blessed relief and change to Mrs. Simmons. Your
+clean, quiet house, your delicate cookery, your cheerful morning tasks,
+if you will let her follow you about, and sit and talk with you while
+you are at your work, will all seem a pleasant contrast to her own life.
+Of course, if it came to the case of offering to change lots in life,
+she would not do it; but very likely she <i>thinks</i> she would, and sighs
+over and pities herself, and thinks sentimentally how fortunate you are,
+how snugly and securely you live, and wishes she were as untrammelled
+and independent as you. And she is more than half right; for, with her
+helpless habits, her utter ignorance of the simplest facts concerning
+the reciprocal relations of milk, eggs, butter, saleratus, soda, and
+yeast, she is completely the victim and slave of the person she pretends
+to rule.</p>
+
+<p>Only imagine some of the frequent scenes and rehearsals in her family.
+After many trials, she at last engages a seamstress who promises to
+prove a perfect treasure,&mdash;neat, dapper, nimble, skilful, and spirited.
+The very soul of Mrs. Simmons rejoices in heaven. Illusive bliss! The
+new-comer proves to be no favorite with Madam Cook, and the domestic
+fates evolve the catastrophe, as follows. First, low murmur of distant
+thunder in the kitchen; then a day or two of sulky silence, in which the
+atmosphere seems heavy with an approaching storm. At last comes the
+climax. The parlor-door flies open during breakfast. Enter seamstress,
+in tears, followed by Mrs. Cook with a face swollen and red with wrath,
+who tersely introduces the subject-matter of the drama in a voice
+trembling with rage.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you be plased, Ma'am, to suit yersilf with another cook? Me week
+will be up next Tuesday, and I want to be going."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Bridget, what's the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Matter enough, Ma'am! I niver could live with them Cork girls in a
+house, nor I won't; them as likes the Cork girls is welcome for all me;
+but it's not for the likes of me to live with them, and she been in the
+kitchen a-upsettin' of me gravies with her flat-irons and things."</p>
+
+<p>Here bursts in the seamstress with a whirlwind of denial, and the
+altercation wages fast and furious, and poor, little, delicate Mrs.
+Simmons stands like a kitten in a thunder-storm in the midst of a
+regular Irish row.</p>
+
+<p>Cook, of course, is sure of her victory. She knows that a great dinner
+is to come off Wednesday, and that her mistress has not the smallest
+idea how to manage it, and that, therefore, whatever happens, she must
+be conciliated.</p>
+
+<p>Swelling with secret indignation at the tyrant, poor Mrs. Simmons
+dismisses her seamstress with longing looks. She suited her mistress
+exactly, but she didn't suit cook!</p>
+
+<p>Now, if Mrs. Simmons had been brought up in early life with the
+experience that <i>you</i> have, she would be mistress in her own house. She
+would quietly say to Madam Cook, "If my family-arrangements do not suit
+you, you can leave. I can see to the dinner myself." And she <i>could</i> do
+it. Her well-trained muscles would not break down under a little extra
+work; her skill, adroitness, and perfect familiarity with everything
+that is to be done would enable her at once to make cooks of any bright
+girls of good capacity who might still be in her establishment; and,
+above all, she would feel herself mistress in her own house. This is
+what would come of an experience in doing her own work as you do. She
+who can at once put her own trained hand to the machine in any spot
+where a hand is needed never comes to be the slave of a coarse, vulgar
+Irish-woman.</p>
+
+<p>So, also, in forming a judgment of what is to be expected of servants in
+a given time, and what ought to be expected of a given amount of
+provisions, poor Mrs. Simmons is absolutely at sea. If even for one six
+months in her life she had been a practical cook, and had really had the
+charge of the larder, she would not now be haunted, as she constantly
+is, by an indefinite apprehension of an immense wastefulness, perhaps of
+the disappearance of provisions through secret channels of relationship
+and favoritism. She certainly could not be made to believe in the
+absolute necessity of so many pounds of sugar, quarts of milk, and
+dozens of eggs, not to mention spices and wine, as are daily required
+for the accomplishment of Madam Cook's purposes. But though now she does
+suspect and apprehend, she cannot speak with certainty. She cannot say,
+"<i>I</i> have made these things. I know exactly what they require. I have
+done this and that myself, and know it can be done, and done well, in a
+certain time." It is said that women who have been accustomed to doing
+their own work become hard mistresses. They are certainly more sure of
+the ground they stand on,&mdash;they are less open to imposition,&mdash;they can
+speak and act in their own houses more as those "having authority," and
+therefore are less afraid to exact what is justly their due, and less
+willing to endure impertinence and unfaithfulness. Their general error
+lies in expecting that any servant ever will do as well for them as they
+will do for themselves, and that an untrained, undisciplined human being
+ever <i>can</i> do house-work, or any other work, with the neatness and
+perfection that a person of trained intelligence can. It has been
+remarked in our armies that the men of cultivation, though bred in
+delicate and refined spheres, can bear up under the hardships of
+camp-life better and longer than rough laborers. The reason is, that an
+educated mind knows how to use and save its body, to work it and spare
+it, as an uneducated mind cannot; and so the college-bred youth brings
+himself safely through fatigues which kill the unreflective laborer.
+Cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of
+their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head
+save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and
+arrangement, they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less
+expense of time and strength than others. The old New-England motto,
+<i>Get your work done up in the forenoon</i>, applied to an amount of work
+which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to sunset.</p>
+
+<p>A lady living in one of our obscure New-England towns, where there were
+no servants to be hired, at last by sending to a distant city succeeded
+in procuring a raw Irish maid-of-all-work, a creature of immense bone
+and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one fortnight she
+established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the kitchen and
+through the house, that her mistress, a delicate woman, incumbered with
+the care of young children, began seriously to think that she made more
+work each day than she performed, and dismissed her. What was now to be
+done? Fortunately, the daughter of a neighboring farmer was going to be
+married in six months, and wanted a little ready money for her
+<i>trousseau</i>. The lady was informed that Miss So-and-so would come to
+her, not as a servant, but as hired "help." She was fain to accept any
+help with gladness. Forthwith came into the family-circle a tall,
+well-dressed young person, grave, unobtrusive, self-respecting, yet not
+in the least presuming, who sat at the family-table and observed all its
+decorums with the modest self-possession of a lady. The new-comer took a
+survey of the labors of a family of ten members, including four or five
+young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system,
+matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking,
+cleaning, rose early, moved deftly, and in a single day the slatternly
+and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often
+strikes one in New-England farm-houses. The work seemed to be all gone.
+Everything was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and stayed in
+place; the floors, when cleaned, remained clean; the work was always
+done, and not doing; and every afternoon the young lady sat neatly
+dressed in her own apartment, either quietly writing letters to her
+betrothed, or sewing on her bridal outfit. Such is the result of
+employing those who have been brought up to do their own work. That
+tall, fine-looking girl, for aught we know, may yet be mistress of a
+fine house on Fifth Avenue; and if she is, she will, we fear, prove
+rather an exacting mistress to Irish Biddy and Bridget; but <i>she</i> will
+never be threatened by her cook and chambermaid, after the first one or
+two have tried the experiment.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Having written thus far on my article, I laid it aside till evening,
+when, as usual, I was saluted by the inquiry, "Has papa been writing
+anything to-day?" and then followed loud petitions to hear it; and so I
+read as far, reader, as you have.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, papa," said Jennie, "what are you meaning to make out there? Do
+you really think it would be best for us all to try to go back to that
+old style of living you describe? After all, you have shown only the
+dark side of an establishment with servants, and the bright side of the
+other way of living. Mamma does not have such trouble with her servants;
+matters have always gone smoothly in our family; and if we are not such
+wonderful girls as those you describe, yet we may make pretty good
+housekeepers on the modern system, after all."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know all the troubles your mamma has had in your day," said
+my wife. "I have often, in the course of my family-history, seen the day
+when I have heartily wished for the strength and ability to manage my
+household matters as my grandmother of notable memory managed hers. But
+I fear that those remarkable women of the olden times are like the
+ancient painted glass,&mdash;the art of making them is lost; my mother was
+less than her mother, and I am less than my mother."</p>
+
+<p>"And Marianne and I come out entirely at the little end of the horn,"
+said Jennie, laughing; "yet I wash the breakfast-cups and dust the
+parlors, and have always fancied myself a notable housekeeper."</p>
+
+<p>"It is just as I told you," I said. "Human nature is always the same.
+Nobody ever is or does more than circumstances force him to be and do.
+Those remarkable women of old were made by circumstances. There were,
+comparatively speaking, no servants to be had, and so children were
+trained to habits of industry and mechanical adroitness from the cradle,
+and every household process was reduced to the very minimum of labor.
+Every step required in a process was counted, every movement calculated;
+and she who took ten steps, when one would do, lost her reputation for
+'faculty.' Certainly such an early drill was of use in developing the
+health and the bodily powers, as well as in giving precision to the
+practical mental faculties. All household economies were arranged with
+equal niceness in those thoughtful minds. A trained housekeeper knew
+just how many sticks of hickory of a certain size were required to heat
+her oven, and how many of each different kind of wood. She knew by a
+sort of intuition just what kinds of food would yield the most palatable
+nutriment with the least outlay of accessories in cooking. She knew to a
+minute the time when each article must go into and be withdrawn from her
+oven; and if she could only lie in her chamber and direct, she could
+guide an intelligent child through the processes with mathematical
+certainty. It is impossible, however, that anything but early training
+and long experience can produce these results, and it is earnestly to be
+wished that the grandmothers of New England had only written down their
+experiences for our children; they would have been a mine of maxims and
+traditions, better than any other traditions of the elders which we know
+of."</p>
+
+<p>"One thing I know," said Marianne,&mdash;"and that is, I wish I had been
+brought up so, and knew all that I should, and had all the strength and
+adroitness that those women had. I should not dread to begin
+housekeeping, as I now do. I should feel myself independent. I should
+feel that I knew how to direct my servants, and what it was reasonable
+and proper to expect of them; and then, as you say, I shouldn't be
+dependent on all their whims and caprices of temper. I dread those
+household storms, of all things."</p>
+
+<p>Silently pondering these anxieties of the young expectant housekeeper, I
+resumed my pen, and concluded my paper as follows.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
+superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to
+a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of
+liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They
+are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder
+is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic
+blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the
+measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements.
+But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
+interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
+interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
+whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
+the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
+strength,&mdash;no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
+knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to keep
+her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of looking at
+all these things which makes them particularly hard and distasteful to
+her. She does not escape being obliged to do house-work at intervals,
+but she does it in a weak, blundering, confused way, that makes it twice
+as hard and disagreeable as it need be.</p>
+
+<p>Now what I have to say is, that, if every young woman learned to do
+house-work and cultivated her practical faculties in early life, she
+would, in the first place, be much more likely to keep her servants,
+and, in the second place, if she lost them temporarily, would avoid all
+that wear and tear of the nervous system which comes from constant
+ill-success in those departments on which family health and temper
+mainly depend. This is one of the peculiarities of our American life
+which require a peculiar training. Why not face it sensibly?</p>
+
+<p>The second thing I have to say is, that our land is now full of
+motorpathic institutions to which women are sent at great expense to
+have hired operators stretch and exercise their inactive muscles. They
+lie for hours to have their feet twigged, their arms flexed, and all the
+different muscles of the body worked for them, because they are so
+flaccid and torpid that the powers of life do not go on. Would it not be
+quite as cheerful and less expensive a process, if young girls from
+early life developed the muscles in sweeping, dusting, ironing, rubbing
+furniture, and all the multiplied domestic processes which our
+grandmothers knew of? A woman who did all these, and diversified the
+intervals with spinning on the great and little wheel, never came to
+need the gymnastics of Dio Lewis or of the Swedish motorpathist, which
+really are a necessity now. Does it not seem poor economy to pay
+servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then to pay operators
+to exercise them for us? I will venture to say that our grandmothers in
+a week went over every movement that any gymnast has invented, and went
+over them to some productive purpose too.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, my paper will not have been in vain, if those ladies who have
+learned and practise the invaluable accomplishment of doing their own
+work will know their own happiness and dignity, and properly value their
+great acquisition, even though it may have been forced upon them by
+circumstances.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SHAKSPEARE" id="SHAKSPEARE"></a>SHAKSPEARE.</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">April</span> 23, 1864.</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who claims our Shakspeare from that realm unknown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beyond the storm-vexed islands of the deep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where Genoa's deckless caravels were blown?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Her twofold Saint's-day let our England keep;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall warring aliens share her holy task?"<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">The Old-World echoes ask.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O land of Shakspeare! ours with all thy past,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Till these last years that make the sea so wide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Think not the jar of battle's trumpet-blast<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In every noble word thy sons bequeathed<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">The air our fathers breathed!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We turn to other days and far-off lands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Live o'er in dreams the Poet's faded life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Not his the need, but ours!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We call those poets who are first to mark<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">While others only note that day is gone;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For him the Lord of light the curtain rent<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">That veils the firmament.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The greatest for its greatness is half known,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stretching beyond our narrow quadrant-lines,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As in that world of Nature all outgrown<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where Calaveras lifts his awful pines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And cast from Mariposa's mountain-wall<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Nevada's cataracts fall.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yet heaven's remotest orb is partly ours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Throbbing its radiance like a beating heart;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the wide compass of angelic powers<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The instinct of the blindworm has its part;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So in God's kingliest creature we behold<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">The flower our buds infold.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stamped once on dust that moved with pulse and breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We praise not star or sun; in these we see<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Thee, Father, only Thee!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We read, we reverence on this human soul,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Earth's clearest mirror of the light above,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Plain as the record on Thy prophet's scroll,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When o'er his page the effluent splendors poured,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Thine own, "Thus saith the Lord!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This player was a prophet from on high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sidney's fair youth, and Raleigh's ripened age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Spenser's chaste soul, and his imperial mind<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Who taught and shamed mankind.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Therefore we bid our hearts' <i>Te Deum</i> rise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor fear to make Thy worship less divine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hear the shouted choral shake the skies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Counting all glory, power, and wisdom Thine,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Thy great gift Thy greater name adore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i5">And praise Thee evermore!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In this dread hour of Nature's utmost need,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Thanks for these unstained drops of freshening dew!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, while our martyrs fall, our heroes bleed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Keep us to every sweet remembrance true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till from this blood-red sunset springs new-born<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Our Nation's second morn!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="HOW_TO_USE_VICTORY" id="HOW_TO_USE_VICTORY"></a>HOW TO USE VICTORY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The policy of the nation, since the war began, has been eminently the
+Anglo-Saxon policy. That is to say, we have not adapted our actions to
+any preconceived theory, nor to any central idea. From the President
+downward, every one has done as well as he could in every single day,
+doubtful, and perhaps indifferent, as to what he should do the next day.
+This is the method dear to the Anglo-Saxon mind. The English writers
+acknowledge this; they call it the "practical system," and make an
+especial boast that it is the method of their theology, their
+philosophy, their physical science, their manufactures, and their trade.
+In the language of philosophy, it directs us "to do the duty that comes
+next us"; in a figure drawn from the card-table, it bids us "follow our
+hand." The only branch of the Keltic race which adopts it expresses it
+in the warlike direction, "When you see a head, hit it."</p>
+
+<p>We have no objection to make to this so-called practical system in the
+present case, if it only be broadly and generously adopted. If it reduce
+us to a war of posts, to hand-to-mouth finance, and to that wretched
+bureau-administration which thinks the day's work is done when the day's
+letters have been opened, docketed, and answered, it becomes, it is
+true, a very unpractical system, and soon reduces a great state to be a
+very little one. But if the men who direct any country will, in good
+faith, enlarge their view every day, from their impressions of yesterday
+to the new realities of to-day,&mdash;if they will rise at once to the new
+demands of to-day, and meet those demands under the new light of
+to-day,&mdash;all the better is it, undoubtedly, if they are not hampered by
+traditionary theories, if they are even indifferent as to the
+consistency of their record, and are, thus, as able as they are willing
+to work out God's present will with all their power. For it must be that
+the present light of noonday will guide us better at noonday than any
+prophecies which we could make at midnight or at dawn.</p>
+
+<p>The country, at this moment, demands this broad and generous use of its
+great present advantages. In three years of sacrifice we have won
+extraordinary victories. We have driven back the beach-line of rebellion
+so that its territory is now two islands, both together of not half the
+size of the continent which it boasted when it began. We have seen such
+demonstrations of loyalty and the love of liberty that we dare say that
+this is to be one free nation, as we never dared say it before the war
+began. We are on the edge, as we firmly believe, of yet greater
+victories, both in the field and in the conscience of the nation. The
+especial demand, then, made on our statesmen, and on that intelligent
+people which, as it appears, leads the statesmen, instead of being led
+by them, is, "How shall we use our victories?" We have no longer the
+right to say that the difficult questions will settle themselves. We
+must not say that Providence will take care of them. We must not say
+that we are trying experiments. The time for all this has gone by. We
+have won victories. We are going to win more. We must show we know how
+to use them.</p>
+
+<p>As our armies advance, for instance, very considerable regions of
+territory come, for the time, under the military government of the
+United States. If we painted a map of the country, giving to the Loyal
+States each its individual chosen color, and to the Rebel States their
+favorite Red or Black, we should find that the latter were surrounded by
+a strip of that circumambient and eternal Blue which indicates the love
+and the strength of the National Government. The strip is here broad,
+and there narrow. It is broad in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It
+stretches up in a narrow line along the Sea Islands and the Atlantic
+coast. What do we mean to do with this strip, while it is in the special
+charge of the nation? Do we mean to leave it to the chapter of
+accidents, as we have done? A few charitable organizations have kept the
+Sea Islands along, so that they are a range of flourishing plantations,
+as they used to be. A masterly inactivity, on the other hand, leaves the
+northern counties of Virginia, this summer, within the very sight of the
+Capitol, to be the desert and disgrace which they were when they were
+the scenes of actual war. A handful of banditti rides through them when
+it chooses, and even insults the communications of our largest army. The
+people of that State are permitted to point at this desolation, and to
+say that such are the consequences of Federal victories. For another
+instance, take the "Four-Million question." These four million negroes,
+from whose position the war has sprung, are now almost all set free, in
+law. A very large number of them&mdash;possibly a quarter part of them&mdash;are
+free in fact. One hundred and thirty thousand of them are in the
+national army. With regard to these men the question is not, "What are
+you going to do with them when the war is done?" but, "What will you do
+with them to-day and to-morrow?" Your duty is to use victory in the
+moment of victory. You are not to wait for its last ramification before
+you lead in peace and plenty, which ought to follow close in its first
+footsteps.</p>
+
+<p>To an observing and sensitive nation it seems as if all these questions,
+and many others like them, were not yet fully regarded. Yet they are now
+the questions of the hour, because they are a part of the great central
+question, "How will you break down the armed power of the Rebel States?"
+To maintain the conquered belt between us and our "wayward sisters" as a
+land of plenty, and not as a desert,&mdash;to establish on system the blacks
+whose masters desert them, or who take refuge within our lines,&mdash;and
+also to maintain in that border-strip a resident peasantry, armed and
+loyal,&mdash;these are not matters of sentiment, which may be postponed to a
+more convenient season, but they are essential to the stiff, steady, and
+successful prosecution of our campaigns. It is not, therefore, simply
+for charity Boards of Education to discuss such subjects. It is for the
+Government to determine its policy, and for the people, who make that
+Government, to compel it so to determine. The Government may not shake
+off questions of confiscated lands, pay of negro troops, superintendence
+of fugitives, and the like, as if they were the unimportant details of a
+halcyon future. Because this is the moment of impending victory, because
+that victory should be used on the instant, the Government is bound to
+attend to such provisions now. It is said, that, when General McClellan
+landed below Yorktown, now two years ago, the Washington Post-Office had
+made the complete arrangements for resuming the mail-service to
+Richmond. Undoubtedly the Post-Office Department was right in such
+foresight. At the present moment, it is equally right for the Government
+to be prepared for the immediate use of the victories for which, as we
+write, we are all hoping.</p>
+
+<p>The experiments which we have had to try, in the care and treatment of
+liberated blacks, have been tried under very different conditions. When
+the masters on the Sea Islands escaped from their slaves, leaving but
+one white man behind them, in the midst of fifteen thousand negroes,
+those negroes were, in general, in their old familiar homes. They had,
+indeed, trusted themselves to the tender mercies of the "Yankees"
+because they would not abandon home. The islands on which they lived
+were easily protected, and, thanks to the generous foresight of those
+who early had the charge of them, a body of humane and intelligent
+superintendents soon appeared, to watch over all their interests. In the
+District of Columbia, on the other hand, the blacks whom the war first
+liberated had themselves fled from their masters. They found themselves
+in cities where every condition of life was different from their old
+home. It was hardly to be expected that in one of these cases the
+results should be as cheerful or as favorable as in the other. Nor was
+it to be supposed that the policy to be pursued, in two such cases,
+should be in outward form the same.</p>
+
+<p>But the country has, on the whole, in the various different conditions
+of these questions, had the advantage of great administrative ability.
+General Butler, General Banks, and General Saxton are three men who may
+well be satisfied with their military record, if it shall bear the test
+of time as well as their administrative successes in this department bid
+fair to do. We can be reconciled, in a measure, to gross failure and
+want of system in other places, when we observe the successes which have
+been wrought out for the blacks, in different ways, under the policy of
+these three statesmen. For we believe that in that policy the principles
+are to be found by which the Government ought at once to direct all its
+policy in the use of its victories. We believe those principles are most
+adequately stated in General Butler's General Order No. 46, issued at
+Fort Monroe on the fifth of December last. For General Banks has had his
+hands tied, from the beginning, by the unfortunate exemption from the
+Emancipation Proclamation of the first two districts in Louisiana.
+Considering the difficulties by which he was thus entangled, we have
+never seen but he used to the best his opportunities. General Saxton's
+island-district has been so small, and in a measure so peculiar, that it
+may be urged that the result learned there would not be applicable on
+the mainland, on a large scale. But General Butler has had all the
+negroes of the sea-board of Virginia and North Carolina to look after.
+He has given us a census of them,&mdash;and we have already official returns
+of their <i>status</i>. There seems no reason why what has been done there
+may not be done anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>In General Butler's department, there were, in the beginning of April,
+sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and forty-seven negroes. Of these,
+eight thousand three hundred and forty-four were soldiers, who had
+voluntarily enlisted into the service of the United States. These men
+enlisted with no bounty but what the General so well named as the "great
+boon awarded to each of them, the result of the war,&mdash;Freedom for
+himself and his race forever." They enlisted, knowing that at that time
+the Government promised them but ten dollars a month. In view of these
+facts, we consider the proportion of soldiers, nearly one in eight,
+extraordinary,&mdash;though we are aware that the number includes many who
+had not lived in those counties, who came into our lines with the
+purpose of enlisting. These simple figures involve the first feature of
+the true policy in the "Four-Million question." The war offers the
+negroes this priceless bounty. Let them fight for it. Let us enlist
+them, to the last man we can persuade to serve.</p>
+
+<p>"If you do that," says Brazen-Face, "you have left on your hands a horde
+of starving imbeciles, women, and orphans, to support, from whom you
+have cruelly separated their able-bodied men." No, Brazen-Face, we have
+no such thing. In the month of March the Government had to supply
+rations in the district we have named to only seven thousand eight
+hundred and fifty persons who were members of the families of these
+soldiers,&mdash;the cost being about one dollar a month for each of them. Now
+the State of Massachusetts, dear Brazen-Face, supplies "State-aid" to
+the families of its soldiers; and for this support, in this very city of
+yours, it pays on the average five times as much in proportion as the
+United States has to pay for the families of these colored soldiers.
+Nay, you may even take all the persons relieved by Government in General
+Butler's district,&mdash;the number is sixteen thousand seven hundred and
+sixteen,&mdash;count them all as the families of soldiers, which not one-half
+of them are, and the whole support which they all receive from
+Government is not half as much as the families of the same number of
+soldiers are costing the State of Massachusetts. So much for the expense
+of this system. There is no money-bounty, and the "family-aid" is but
+one-fifth of that we pay in the case of our own brothers. The figures in
+General Saxton's district are as gratifying. We have not the Louisiana
+statistics at hand. And we have not learned that anybody has attempted
+any statistics in the District of Columbia, or on the Mississippi River.
+But this illustration, in two districts where the enlistment of colored
+troops has been pushed to the very edge of its development, is enough to
+make out another point in the policy of victory, which is, that the
+colored soldier is the cheapest soldier whom we have in our lines,
+though we pay him, as of course we should do, full pay.</p>
+
+<p>How is this cheapness of administration gained? The answer is in the
+second great principle which belongs to the policy of using our
+victories. Change the homes of the people as little as possible. The
+families of negroes in the Virginia district are put upon separate farms
+as far as possible,&mdash;on land, and for crops, as nearly as possible, the
+same as they were used to. These people are conservative. They are fond
+of home. They are used to work; and they can take care of themselves.
+Every inducement is given them, therefore, to establish themselves.
+Farms of eight or ten acres each from abandoned property are allotted
+them. Where the Government employs any of them, it employs them only at
+the same rate as the soldier is paid,&mdash;so that, if the negro can earn
+more than that, he does so, and is urged, as well as permitted to do
+so. He is not bound to the soil, except by merely temporary agreement.
+What follows is that he uses the gift of freedom to his own best
+advantage. "Political freedom," says the philosophical General, "rightly
+defined, is liberty to work." The negroes in his command show that they
+understand the definition. And this is the reason why, as we have
+explained, the "family-relief" costs but one-fifth what it does here in
+Boston.</p>
+
+<p>"But," says Grunnio, at this point, "how will you protect your ten-acre
+farms from invidious neighbors, from wandering guerrillas?" We will
+advise them, dear grumbler, to protect themselves. That is one of the
+responsibilities which freemen have to take as the price of freedom. In
+the department of Norfolk, where seventeen thousand blacks are
+supporting themselves on scattered farms, we believe not a pig has been
+stolen nor a fence broken down on their little plantations by semi-loyal
+neighbors, who had, perhaps, none too much sympathy, at the first, with
+their prosperity. These amiable neighbors were taught, from the first,
+that the rights of the colored farmers were just the same as their own,
+and that they would be very apt to retaliate in kind for injuries. Of
+such a system one result is that no guerrilla-warfare has yet been known
+in the counties of Virginia where such a peasantry is establishing
+itself. It is near our posts, it is true,&mdash;not nearer, however, than
+some of the regions where Mosby has won his laurels. We believe that
+this system deserves to be pressed much farther. We can see that the
+farmers on such farms may have to be supplied in part with arms for
+their defence. They may have to be taught to use them. Without providing
+depots of supplies for an enemy, however, we believe there might be a
+regular system of establishing the negro in his own home, on or near the
+plantation where he was born, which would give us from the beginning the
+advantages of a settled country, instead of a desert in the regions in
+the rear of our lines.</p>
+
+<p>These three suggestions are enough to determine a general policy which
+shall give us, in all instances, the immediate use of our victories. Let
+us enlist all the able-bodied men we can from the negroes. Let us
+establish the rest as near their old homes as we can,&mdash;not in
+poor-houses or phalansteries, but on their own farms. Let us appoint for
+each proper district a small staff of officers sufficient to see that
+their rights are respected by their neighbors, and that they have means
+to defend themselves against reckless or unorganized aggression. There
+seems to be no need of sending them as fugitives to our rear. There
+seems to be no need of leaving the country we pass a desert. There seems
+to be no need of waiting a year or two before we find for them their
+places. God has found for them their places. Let them stay where they
+were born. We have made them freemen. Let them understand that they must
+maintain their freedom.</p>
+
+<p>More simply stated, such a policy amounts merely to this: "Treat them as
+you would treat white people."</p>
+
+<p>"What would you do with the blacks?" said a Commission of Inquiry to an
+intelligent jurist who had made some very brilliant decisions at New
+Orleans.</p>
+
+<p>"I would not do anything with them," was his very happy and suggestive
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>He would let them alone. If we could free ourselves of the notion that
+we must huddle them together, or that we must carry them to some strange
+land,&mdash;in short, that they have no rights of home and fireside,&mdash;we
+should find that we had a much smaller problem to deal with. Keep them
+where you find them, unless they will go on and fight with you. Whether
+they go or stay, let them understand that they are your friends and you
+are theirs, and that they must defend themselves, if they expect you to
+defend them.</p>
+
+<p>The education and the civilization will follow. "The church and the
+school," as John Adams says, "belong with the town and the militia." The
+statistics of General Butler's department begin to show that a larger
+proportion of blacks are at school there than of whites. As we write
+these words, we receive General Banks's Order No. 38, issued March 22,
+providing for a board of education, and a tax upon property to establish
+schools for black and for white children. We have no fears that such
+results will be slow, if the enfranchised peasantry, one million or four
+million, have the right to work on their own land, or to accept the
+highest wage that offers,&mdash;if they find they are not arbitrarily removed
+from their old homes,&mdash;and if the protection of those homes is, in the
+first instance, intrusted to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>These are the first-fruits of freedom for them. For us they are the
+legitimate use of victory. It only remains that we shall mildly, but
+firmly, instruct all officers of the Government that it is time for some
+policy to be adopted which shall involve such uses of victory. The
+country will be encouraged, the moment it sees that the freedmen are
+finding their proper places in the new civilization. The country expects
+its rulers not to wait for chapters of accidents or for volunteer boards
+to work out such policy, but themselves to provide the system of
+administration, and the intelligent men who shall promptly and skilfully
+avail themselves of every victory.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES" id="REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES"></a>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>History of the Romans under the Empire.</i> By <span class="smcap">Charles Merivale</span>,
+B. D., late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. From the Fourth
+London Edition. With a Copious Analytical Index. New York: D. Appleton &amp;
+Co. 8vo. Vols. I. &amp; II.</p>
+
+<p>People of the last century had a very easy time with their Roman
+history, and any gentleman could pick up enough of it "in course of his
+morning's reading" to answer the demands of a lifetime. Men read and
+believed. They had no more doubt of the existence of Romulus and Remus
+than of the existence of Fairfax and Cromwell. As to the story of those
+dropped children being nursed by a she-wolf, had it not been established
+that wolves did sometimes suckle humanity's young? and why should it be
+supposed that no lupine nursery had ever existed at the foot of the
+Palatine Hill? After swallowing the wolf-story, everything else was
+easy; and the history of the Roman Kings was as gravely received as the
+history of the Roman Emperors. The Brutus who upset the Tarquins was as
+much an historical character as the Brutus who assassinated C&aelig;sar and
+killed himself. Tullia had lived and sinned, just like Messallina. The
+Horatii were of flesh and blood, like the Triumvirs. So was it with
+regard to the Empire. The same short work that was made with Regal Rome
+and the early Republican period was applied to the Imperial age. Julius
+C&aelig;sar was the destroyer of Roman liberty, and Pompeius was the unlucky
+champion of his country's constitution. With few exceptions, the
+Emperors were the greatest moral monsters that ever had lived and
+reigned. It is true that two or three critical writers had so handled
+historical subjects as to create some doubts as to the exact correctness
+of the popular view of Roman history; but those doubts were monopolized
+by a few scholars, and by no means tended to shake the faith which even
+the educated classes had in the vulgar view of the actions of the mighty
+conquering race of antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>But all has been changed. For half a century, learned men have been
+busily employed in pulling down the edifice of Roman history, until they
+have unsettled everybody's faith in that history. No one now pretends,
+seriously, to believe anything that is told of the Romans farther back
+than the time of Pyrrhus. Clouds and darkness rest over the earlier
+centuries, and defy penetration. What Sir Thomas Browne says of Egypt is
+not inapplicable to early Rome. History mumbleth something to the
+inquirer, "but what it is he heareth not." Not even the story of Curtius
+now finds believers. He must have been a contractor, who made an
+enormous fortune at the time of the secession of the plebs, and ruined
+himself by the operation. So far as relates to early Roman history, want
+of faith is very natural; for what documents have we to go upon in
+making up an opinion concerning it? None to speak of. But it is strange,
+at the first thought, that there should be any difficulty in making up a
+judgment concerning the history of the last century or two of the
+Republic, and of the Imperial period. Of those times much that was then
+written still survives, and many of the works that were familiar to the
+Romans are even more familiar to the moderns. Yet there is a wide
+difference of sentiment as to the character of the Roman Revolution, and
+the objects and the actions of the eminent men who figured in that
+Revolution are yet in dispute; and the contention is almost as fierce,
+at times, as it was in the days of Pharsalia and Philippi. There are
+Pompeians and C&aelig;sarians now, as there were nineteen centuries ago, only
+that the pen with them is indeed mightier than the sword. C&aelig;sar's case
+has been reviewed, and the current of opinion is now setting strongly in
+his favor. Instead of being looked upon as a mere vulgar usurper, who
+differed from other usurpers only in having a greater stage, and talents
+proportioned to that stage, he is held up as the man of his times, and
+as the only man who could fulfil the demands of the crisis that existed
+after the death of Sulla. According to Mr. Merivale, who is a very
+moderate C&aelig;sarian, C&aelig;sar was "the true captain and lawgiver and prophet
+of the age" in which he lived. When such an assertion can be made by an
+English gentleman of well-balanced mind, we may form some idea of the
+intensity of that C&aelig;sarism which prevails in fiercer minds, and which is
+intended to have an effect on contemporary rule. For the controversy
+which exists relative to the merits of Romans "dead, and turned to
+clay," is not merely critical and scholastic, but is enlivened by its
+direct bearing upon living men and contending parties. C&aelig;sarism means
+Napoleonism. The Bonaparte family is the Julian family of to-day.
+Napoleon I. stood for the great Julius, and Napoleon III. is the modern
+(and very Gallic) C&aelig;sar Augustus, the avenger of his ill-used uncle, and
+the crusher of the Junii and the Crassi, and all the rest of the
+aristocrats, who overthrew him, and caused his early death. It is not
+necessary to point out the utter absurdity of this attempt to justify
+modern despotism by referring to the action of men who lived and acted
+in the greatest of ancient revolutions; and those men who admire Julius
+C&aelig;sar, but who are not disposed to see in his conduct a justification of
+the conduct of living men, object to the French Imperial view of his
+career. Mommsen, whose admiration of C&aelig;sar is as ardent as his knowledge
+of Roman history is great, speaks with well-deserved scorn of the
+efforts that are made to defend contemporary usurpation by
+misrepresentation of the history of antiquity. One of his remarks is
+curious, read in connection with that history which daily appears in our
+journals. Writing before our civil war began, he declared, that, if ever
+the slaveholding aristocracy of the Southern States of America should
+bring matters to such a pass as their counterparts in the Rome of Sulla,
+C&aelig;sarism would be pronounced legitimate there also by the spirit of
+history,&mdash;an observation that derived new interest from the report that
+General Lee was to be made Dictator of the Confederacy, and Mr. Davis
+allowed to go into that retirement which is so much admired and so
+little sought by all politicians. Mommsen, after the remark above
+quoted, proceeds to say, that, whenever C&aelig;sarism "appears under other
+social conditions, it is at once a usurpation and a caricature. History,
+however, will not consent to curtail the honor due to the true C&aelig;sar,
+because her decision, in the presence of false C&aelig;sars, may give occasion
+to simplicity to play the fool and to villany to play the rogue. She,
+too, is a Bible, and if she can as little prevent herself from being
+misunderstood by the fool and quoted by the Devil, she ought as little
+to be prejudiced by either." Strong words, but very natural as coming
+from a learned German who finds his own theory turned to account by the
+supporters of a house which Germany once helped to overthrow, and which
+she would gladly aid in overthrowing again. Perhaps Dr. Mommsen will
+soon have an opportunity to speak more at length of French C&aelig;sarism, for
+the first two volumes of Napoleon III.'s "Life of Julius C&aelig;sar" are
+announced as nearly ready for publication, and their appearance cannot
+fail to be the signal for a battle royal, as few scholars, we presume,
+will be content to take historical law from an Emperor. The modern
+master of forty legions will not be as fortunate as Hadrian in finding
+philosophers disinclined to question his authority in letters; and he
+may fare even worse at their hands than he fared at those of Mr.
+Kinglake. The republic of letters is not to be mastered by a <i>coup
+d'&eacute;tat</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The opponents of C&aelig;sarism have not been silent, and it would be neither
+uninteresting nor unprofitable, did time permit, to show how well they
+have disposed of most of the arguments of their foes. The question is
+not the old one, whether the party of C&aelig;sar or that of Pompeius was the
+better one, for at bottom the two were very much the same, the struggle
+being for supremacy over the whole Roman dominion; and it is certain
+that there would have been no essential change of political procedure,
+had the decision at Pharsalia been reversed. On that field C&aelig;sar was the
+nominal champion of the liberal faction, and Pompeius was the nominal
+champion of the <i>optimates</i>. Had C&aelig;sar lost the day, the plebeian
+Pompeian house would have furnished an imperial line, instead of that
+line proceeding from the patrician Julii. Pompeius would have been as
+little inclined to abandon the fruits of his victory to the aristocrats
+as C&aelig;sar showed himself to set up the rule of the Forum-populace, to
+whose support he owed so much. It was to free himself from the weight of
+his equals that Pompeius selected the East for the seat of war, when
+there were so many strong military reasons why he should have proceeded
+to the West, to Romanized Spain, where he had veteran legions that might
+under his lead have been found the equals of C&aelig;sar's small, but most
+efficient army. He wished to get out of the Republican atmosphere, and
+into a country where "the one-man power" was the recognized idea of
+rule. He acted as a politician, not as a soldier, when he sailed from
+Brundisium to the East, and the nobility were not blind to the fact, and
+were not long in getting their revenge; for it was through their
+political influence that Pompeius was forced to deliver battle at
+Pharsalia, when there were strong military reasons for refusing to
+fight. That they were involved in their chief's fall was only in
+accordance with the usual course of things, there being nothing to equal
+the besotted blindness of faction, as our current history but too
+clearly proves.</p>
+
+<p>As between C&aelig;sar and Pompeius, therefore, it is natural and just that
+modern liberals should sympathize with the former, and contemplate his
+triumph with pleasure, as he was by far the abler and better man, and
+did not stain his success by bloodshed and plunder, things which the
+Pompeians had promised themselves on a scale that would have astonished
+Marius and Sulla, and which the Triumvirs never thought of equalling.
+But when we are asked to behold as the result of the Roman Revolution
+the deliverance of the provincials, and that as of purpose on the part
+of the victor, we are inclined, in return, to ask of the C&aelig;sarians
+whether they think mankind are such fools as not to be able to read and
+to understand the Imperial history. That C&aelig;sar's success was beneficial
+to Rome's subjects we do not dispute; but that the change he effected
+was of the sweeping character claimed for it, or that C&aelig;sar ever thought
+of being the reformer that his admirers declare him to have been, are
+things yet to be proved. The change that came from the substitution of
+the Imperial polity for the Republican was the result of circumstances,
+and it was of slow growth. Imperialism was an Octavian, not a Julian
+creation, as any reader will be able to understand who goes through the
+closing chapters of Mr. Merivale's third volume. The first C&aelig;sar's
+imperial career was too short, and too full of hard military work, to
+admit of much being done by him of a political character; nor would it
+have been possible for him, had he been a much younger man, and had he
+lived for years, to accomplish what was effected by Augustus. The
+terrible crisis that followed his death, and which lasted until the
+decision of "the world's debate" at Actium gave a master to the Roman
+world, prepared the way for the work that was done by his grand-nephew
+and adopted son. The severe discipline which the Romans went through
+between the day of Munda and that of Actium made them more acquiescent
+in despotism than they would have been found, if Julius C&aelig;sar's mild
+sway had been continued through that interval. It has been said that the
+Triumvirate converted C&aelig;sar's sword into daggers, and the expression is
+by no means too strong, as the world has never witnessed such another
+reign of terror as followed from the union of Octavius, Antonius, and
+Lepidus. If that union was formed for the purpose of reconciling men to
+despotic rule, it must be allowed the merit that belongs to a perfect
+invention. Without it the Roman Empire might never have had an
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Merivale's work may be considered as forming the text-book of
+moderate C&aelig;sarism. An Englishman, he cannot be an advocate of despotism;
+but he sees that the time had come for a change, and that under C&aelig;sar's
+direction the change could be better made than under that of Pompeius or
+his party. This is something very different from blind advocacy of
+C&aelig;sarism; and we can follow him through his clear and vigorous narrative
+of the events of the Revolution with general acquiescence in his views.
+His first and second volumes, which are immediately under consideration,
+may be said to form the history of the career of C&aelig;sar, and to present
+the best account of that career which has been published in our
+language. Introductory matter apart, his book opens with the appearance
+of the first Emperor on the political stage, and the second volume
+closes at the date of his assassination. His various political actions,
+his achievements in Gaul and Britain, his marvellous exploits in Italy,
+Spain, Macedonia, Greece, and Africa in the Civil War, and the character
+of his legislation, are here told and set forth in a manner that comes
+very near to perfection. There is a vividness in the narrative, and a
+bringing-out of individual portraits, that make the work read like a
+history of contemporary events. Nor does the author's just admiration of
+C&aelig;sar's extraordinary intellect and wonderful deeds cause him to be
+unjust to the eminent men on the other side, though as a rule he deals
+severely with those Romans whom the world admires, when treating of the
+effects of their conduct. It has been objected to his history, that he
+speaks with freedom of Cicero's conduct on many occasions, but we think
+that he has not exceeded the bounds of just criticism when considering
+the course of the Roman orator; and in his third volume, when summing up
+his character, he employs the most generous and lofty language in
+speaking of him. "After all the severe judgments we are compelled to
+pass on his conduct," he says, "we must acknowledge that there remains a
+residue of what is amiable in his character and noble in his teaching
+beyond all ancient example. Cicero lived and died in faith. He has made
+converts to the belief in virtue, and had disciples in the wisdom of
+love. There have been dark periods in the history of man, when the
+feeble ray of religious instruction paled before the torch of his
+generous philanthropy. The praise which the great critic pronounced upon
+his excellence in oratory may be justly extended to the qualities of his
+heart; and even in our enlightened days it may be held no mean advance
+in virtue to venerate the master of Roman philosophy." An intelligent
+admirer of the most illustrious victim of the Triumvirate will consider
+these words something far better than anything that can be found in
+Middleton's "lying legend in honor of St. Tully." It may be observed
+that admiration of Cicero and sympathy with the Roman aristocratical
+party mostly go together; and yet the Roman aristocracy disliked Cicero,
+and their writers treated him harshly, while he received kind treatment
+from writers on the other side. Livy, whom Augustus himself called the
+<i>Pompeian</i>, says of Cicero that "he bore none of his calamities as a man
+should, except his death"; and "Lucan denounces his perverse impolicy."
+Mr. Merivale, in a note, observes that it can hardly be accidental that
+Tacitus, in his historical works, never mentions him, and adds, "The
+most glowing tribute to Cicero's merits is the well-known passage in
+Juvenal, and this is written in the spirit of a Marian, or
+anti-oligarch." Velleius, who is generally spoken of as a sort of
+literary flunky of the C&aelig;sars, warmly panegyrizes Cicero. Had the
+Pompeians triumphed, Cicero would not have found Italy the safe place
+that it was to him under C&aelig;sar's rule. He would have fared as badly at
+their hands as he did at those of the Clodian rabble, and Pompeius might
+have been to him what Antonius became after C&aelig;sar's death.</p>
+
+<p>The portrait which Mr. Merivale has drawn of Cato does not meet with the
+approval of those persons who admire old Roman virtue, of which Cato
+was the impersonation; but they would find it difficult to show that he
+has done that stubborn Stoic any injustice. Cato modelled himself on his
+great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, a mean fellow, who sold his old
+slaves in order that they might not become a charge upon him; but, as
+our author remarks, the character of the Censor had been simple and true
+to Nature, while that of his descendant was a system of elaborate,
+though unconscious affectations. Cato behaved as absurdly as an American
+would behave who should attempt to imitate his great-grandfather, the
+old gentleman having died a loyal subject of George II. He was an honest
+man, according to the Roman standard of honesty, which allowed a great
+margin for the worst villany, provided it were done for the public good,
+or what was supposed to be the public good. Like some politicians of our
+time, he thought, that, when he had made it appear that a certain course
+would be in accordance with ancient precedent, it should be
+adopted,&mdash;making no allowance for the thousand disturbing causes which
+the practical politician knows must be found on any path that may be
+selected. Of all the men whose conduct brought about the Civil War, he
+was the most virtuous, and he had the sagacity to oppose a resort to
+arms; though how he succeeded in reconciling his aversion to war with
+his support of a policy that led directly to its existence is one of the
+mysteries of those days. The Pompeians found him a bore, and, had they
+been victorious, would have saved him the trouble of killing himself, by
+cutting off his head. Cato was one of the very few persons for whom
+C&aelig;sar felt a strong dislike; but he would not have harmed him, had he
+got his own consent to live. From Cato he had experienced no such insult
+as he had met with from M. Marcellus, and Marcellus received permission
+to return to Rome; but Cato was of an unmalleable nature, and preferred,
+to an ignoble silence in Italy, the noble silence of the grave. He died
+"after the high Roman fashion." Suicide might be called the natural
+death of a Roman leader of that age, and nothing but the violence of
+enemies could dispute the title with it. Cato, Brutus, Cassius,
+Antonius, and others fell by their own hands, or by the hands of persons
+who acted by their orders. C&aelig;sar, Pompeius, Cicero, and Crassus were
+murdered. Nothing serves more to show how much Augustus differed from
+most Romans of his century than the fact that he died in his bed at
+extreme old age.</p>
+
+<p>That Mr. Merivale's C&aelig;sarism does not prevent him from doing justice to
+the opponents of C&aelig;sar is proved by his portrait of Q. Lutatius Catulus,
+the best leader of the <i>optimates</i>, and whom he pronounces to have been
+the most moderate and disinterested of all the great men of his
+day,&mdash;"indeed," he adds, "there is perhaps no character in the history
+of the Commonwealth which commanded more general esteem, or obtained
+more blameless distinction in political life." Yet Catulus was one of
+those men with whom C&aelig;sar came earliest in collision, each as the
+representative of his party on vital points of difference. Our
+historian's estimate of the life, labors, purposes, and character of
+Pompeius is singularly correct, when we consider the temptation that he
+has to underrate the man with whom C&aelig;sar has stood in direct opposition
+for nineteen centuries. There are few more emphatic passages in the
+historical literature of our language than the account which is given in
+Vol. II. ch. 18, of the last days and death of Pompeius, and which is
+followed by a most judicious summing-up of his history and position as a
+Roman leader. The historian's mind appears to be strongly affected by
+the fate of the Pompeian house, as much so as was the imagination of the
+Romans, which it seems to have haunted. This is in part due, we presume,
+to the free use which he has made of Lucan's "Pharsalia," a work of
+great value to those who would understand how the grand contest for
+supremacy was viewed by the beaten party in after times. That poem is
+the funeral wail of the Roman aristocracy, and it embodies the ideas and
+traditions of the vanquished as they existed far down into the Imperial
+age. It testifies to the original vitality of the aristocratical
+faction, when we find a youthful contemporary of Nero dedicating his
+genius to its service more than a century after the contest had been
+decided on the battlefield. Whether Lucan was a patriot, or a selfish,
+but disappointed courtier, we may feel certain that he never could have
+written in the Pompeian spirit, if that spirit was not still dominant
+in the minds of a large number of those men and women who formed the
+most cultivated portion of Roman society. To a critical historian, such
+as Mr. Merivale is, his poem must be very useful, though it would be
+dangerous authority in unskilful hands.</p>
+
+<p>The leading merit of this history is that it supplies a want, and
+supplies it effectually. Opening about sixty years before the beginning
+of the Christian era, it terminates with the death of M. Aurelius
+Antoninus, the point where Gibbon's work begins. We still need a work
+beginning with the close of the Second Punic War and ending with the
+death of Sulla, to connect Merivale with Arnold; but Mr. George Long is
+about to supply the want, at least in part. The first two volumes, as we
+have said, end at the date of C&aelig;sar's death. The third and fourth
+embrace the long period in which Augustus was the principal character,
+and when the Roman Empire was formed. The fifth and sixth cover the
+reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, and
+Vitellius, and a portion of the reign of Vespasian. The seventh and last
+volume is devoted to the first Flavian house,&mdash;Vespasian, Titus, and
+Domitian,&mdash;and to those "five good Emperors"&mdash;Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
+and the Antonines&mdash;whose reigns are renowned in the history of monarchy
+for their excellence. The materials of the work are, for the most part,
+ample, and they have been well employed by the historian, a man of
+extensive scholarship and of critical sagacity. Whether we subscribe to
+his opinions or not, there can be no doubt of his having presented a
+brilliant picture of the civilized world during about two and a half
+eventful centuries. His is the only readable work that we have which
+affords a continuous narrative of the history of Rome from the
+appearance of C&aelig;sar to the appearance of Commodus. Had it no other claim
+upon us, this alone would justify us in recommending it to the closest
+attention of all who desire to become acquainted with the facts that
+make up the sum of Roman Imperial history. But it has other claims to
+the consideration of readers. It makes Roman Imperial history thoroughly
+intelligible, because events are philosophically treated, and their
+bearing upon each other is rendered clear. It is written with vivacity,
+force, and elegance. The style is the style of a gentleman, and the
+sentiments are those of a Christian scholar. There is not a paragraph in
+it which we could wish to see omitted, or essentially changed. It has
+won for its author a place in the list of first-rate English historians,
+and he is to be ranked with Macaulay, Grote, Hallam, Froude, Kinglake,
+and others of those great writers who have done so much to illustrate
+the English name and to advance the cause of humanity. Being familiar
+with the work from the time that the first and second volumes were
+published in England, in 1850, we have always desired that it should be
+placed before the American reading public, confident that here its high
+merits would secure for it a great and deserved popularity; and it is
+with a sense of personal gratification that we have seen its publication
+begun in New York, in a form that pleases the eye and gratifies good
+taste.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Church Pastorals</i>: Hymns and Tunes for Public and Social Worship.
+Collected and Arranged by <span class="smcap">Nehemiah Adams</span>, D. D. Boston: Ticknor
+&amp; Fields.</p>
+
+<p>The Rev. Dr. Bushnell, in August, 1852, delivered an address upon
+"Religious Music" before the Beethoven Society of Yale College at the
+opening of their new organ. In the peroration of this address, after
+remarking upon the great assistance which Christian feeling receives in
+the praise of God from "things without life giving sound," he goes on to
+say,&mdash;"Let me suggest, also, in this connection, the very great
+importance of the cultivation of religious music. Every family should be
+trained in it; every Sunday or common school should have it as one of
+its exercises. The Moravians have it as a kind of ordinance of grace for
+the children: not without reason; for the powers of feeling and
+imagination, and the sense of spiritual realities, are developed as much
+by a training of childhood in religious music as by any other means. We
+complain that choirs and organs take the music to themselves in our
+churches, and that nothing is left to the people but to hear their
+undistinguishable piping, which no one else can join or follow or
+interpret. This must always be the complaint, till the congregations
+themselves have exercise enough in singing to make the performance
+theirs. As soon as they are able to throw in masses of sound that are
+not barbarous, but Christian, and have a right enjoyment of their
+feeling in it, they will have the tunes and the style of the exercise in
+their own way,&mdash;not before.... The more sorrowful is it, that, in our
+present defect of culture, there are so many voices which are more
+incapable of the right distinctions of sound than things without life,
+and which, when they attempt to sing, contribute more to the feeling of
+woe than of praise."</p>
+
+<p>These words are as true to-day as when they were uttered twelve years
+ago. Congregations which do not desire, or cannot afford, to resign the
+musical portion of their service to professional singers, have something
+more to do than to complain that the music is bad, or that they do not
+like paid vocalists to troll out psalmody for them. They must go to work
+and make their own music,&mdash;real music; for in these days unharmonious
+sounds are almost as much out of place in the worship of God as an
+uncatholic spirit and an heretical doctrine. The truth of this principle
+many societies admit, and some, like the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's, have
+already put it into practice; the majority, however, wait for help to
+free themselves from the customs which have kept them listeners when
+they should be creators of vocal praise. The great obstacle to
+congregational singing has been that the range of tunes already familiar
+was very limited, while the providing a whole society with the
+paraphernalia of music-books involved great expense to small purpose,
+since a large portion of the tunes contained in these books are
+unavailable for such use, being prepared with a view to the wants of
+thoroughly trained singers; besides which, the reference to two books,
+one for the words and the other for the music, is to many persons
+perplexing, and to all inconvenient.</p>
+
+<p>"Church Pastorals" is an attempt to overcome this obstacle, and to
+extend that help which is wanted. Other attempts have been made before,
+but we regard this as the most successful, and consider that Dr. Adams
+has prepared the best hymn-and-tune-book that has yet been issued, as we
+propose briefly to illustrate by a recapitulation of his plan and his
+manner of executing it.</p>
+
+<p>The hymns, which are nine hundred and eighty-eight in number, are
+selected from the great mass of hymn-writers; although Watts and the
+Wesleys furnish the foundation, and the materials of the superstructure
+are largely drawn from Doddridge, Cowper, Toplady, Montgomery, and
+others of kindred spirit, yet many beautiful things have been added from
+the later religious poetry, which are no less fervid in feeling, while
+less pronounced in doctrinal expression. These hymns are arranged in
+judicious general divisions, which are again analytically separated into
+special topics placed in logical sequence. After the hymns follow
+thirty-eight doxologies, the editor having added to the short list of
+common ones others which are fine enough to become standard at once.</p>
+
+<p>But it is less as a hymn- than as a tune-book that "Church Pastorals"
+merits the notice of societies and individuals who are truly interested
+in religious music, and we pass at once to our remarks upon this portion
+of the work. The compiler, although holding himself personally
+responsible for every selection, has availed himself of the advice and
+assistance of persons professionally eminent in sacred music, one of
+whom placed at his disposal a library which is unique in this country,
+containing works of which few Americans have owned or seen duplicates,
+such as rare "Choral-B&uuml;cher" of German cathedrals, and curious
+collections of English ecclesiastical compositions, a partial list of
+which is included in the volume, for the benefit of those who are
+curious in such matters, or wish to know how far Dr. Adams's researches
+have led him. To ascertain how many new melodies of the purest
+devotional character have been derived from these rich sources a careful
+examination is necessary, as also to comprehend with what skill the
+harmony has been preserved or adapted, in order to secure the two
+desirable results,&mdash;absolute freshness and beauty of treatment, and
+practicability for ordinary use; but a casual inspection will give
+sufficient indication of the spirit in which the work was undertaken,
+and of the faithfulness with which it has been completed.</p>
+
+<p>While originality has been properly sought, the old, familiar elements
+have not been neglected, and those simple songs which were upon the lips
+of our parents and grandparents, and are yet dear to us from association
+and intrinsic worth, are set in among the newer strains. The first
+lines only are given of such as need merely to be recalled to the memory
+of any who ever sing; but of others, equally prized, but less likely to
+be remembered, the full score is given.</p>
+
+<p>The doxologies are for the most part set to noble chorals of such
+strong, straightforward character that they cannot fail to become
+friends and intimates at once. In them, as in all the tunes, the compass
+of ordinary voices has been considered; and although nothing has been
+left undone which could give beauty to melody or scholarly variousness
+to harmony, the whole has been brought within the range of all singers.</p>
+
+<p>A novel and peculiar feature of the book is its "Stanzas to be sung
+<i>impromptu</i>." Occasions often arise at social meetings or special
+services, when it becomes desirable to sing a portion, or even the
+whole, of some homely, hearty hymn, but, while "the spirit moves," the
+opportunity is lost in the search for the words or the fit air, or in an
+attempt to "set the tune." To meet this want, Dr. Adams has brought
+together a variety of such stanzas, suited to all times and places, and,
+coupled with each, the first line of a familiar melody, that the
+propitious moment may be enjoyed and improved.</p>
+
+<p>It will of course be understood that the tune appointed for each hymn is
+printed directly above it, all four parts being given at length, the two
+trebles printed in a not unusual way upon one staff, the tenor and bass
+having each separate lines. Therefore no difficulty in singing the hymns
+can be felt even by the inexperienced, especially as one stanza is
+printed with the notes to show the exact adaptation.</p>
+
+<p>In fine, "Church Pastorals" is a work worthy of an extended circulation
+and capable of great usefulness. It can serve every purpose of public
+worship, for it embraces all services of the Sabbath congregation or the
+week-day gathering, and it touches upon all thoughts and feelings of
+religious assemblies; it is not above the tastes and abilities of an
+earnest congregation, nor beneath the notice and use of the independent
+choir. More than this, it has a particular value for the home and the
+fireside. Every household knows some quiet hour when the family-voices
+seek to join in the happy harmony of some unpretending hymn, and when
+the only limit to such grateful music is the failure of memory or the
+meagreness of the library, which furnishes only the hymns, or, giving
+the tunes, supplies only a part of the words,&mdash;for few families possess
+both sorts of books in plenty for their convenient use. This volume
+offers all,&mdash;the hymn, solemn, hopeful, sad, or jubilant, and united to
+it a tune, perhaps remembered from recollection's earliest days, perhaps
+unknown and untried, but suiting well the spirit of the words, and ready
+at an instant's desire to express the sentiment or emotion that rises
+for utterance. If "Church Pastorals" had no other merit, this alone
+would make it worth possessing by all who love and ever practise sacred
+music.</p>
+
+<p>A thorough and elaborate index includes in one ingenious list all
+references, whether to hymns, tunes, or metres; and the inaccuracies
+which will creep into even as handsome typography as this are
+unimportant, and rectified as quickly as observed. The size is
+convenient, and the shape comely.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Illustrations of Progress</i>: A Series of Discussions by <span class="smcap">Herbert
+Spencer</span>. With a Notice of Spencer's "New System of Philosophy." New
+York: D. Appleton &amp; Co.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Herbert Spencer is already a power in the world. Yet it is not the
+vulgar apprehension of power which is associated with notoriety that we
+claim for him. He holds no position of civil authority, neither
+do his works compete with Miss Braddon's poorest novel in the
+circulating-libraries. But he has already influenced the silent life of
+a few thinking men whose belief marks the point to which the
+civilization of the age must struggle to rise. In America, we may even
+now confess our obligations to the writings of Mr. Spencer, for here
+sooner than elsewhere the mass feel as utility what a few recognize as
+truth. The reader acquainted with the admirable papers upon Education,
+which have been republished and extensively circulated in this country,
+has recognized their author's fresh and vigorous spirit, his power of
+separating the essential from the accidental, as well as his success in
+grasping the main features of a subject divested of frivolous and
+subordinate details. That he possesses a thinking faculty of rare
+comprehensiveness, as well as acuteness, will be allowed by all who will
+study his other works now in course of republication in New York.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Spencer is at present engaged in an heroic attempt to construct a
+sufficing system of philosophy, which shall include Biology, Psychology,
+Sociology, and Morality. The great interest to mankind of the discussion
+proposed, as well as Mr. Spencer's claims to be intrusted with it, are
+set forth with singular clearness and felicity in the essay which
+introduces the present volume. Whatever success the latest discoveries
+in science render possible to solid intellectual force assisted by the
+keenest instruments of logic will doubtless be attained. As far as the
+frontiers of knowledge where the intellect may go, there is no living
+man whose guidance may more safely be trusted. Mr. Spencer represents
+the scientific spirit of the age. He makes note of all that comes within
+the range of sensuous experience, and declares whatever may be derived
+therefrom by a careful induction. As a philosopher he does not go
+farther. Yet beyond this the heart of humanity must ever penetrate. Let
+it be true, as it doubtless is, that, when the understanding by process
+of logic seeks to demonstrate the Cause of All, it finds a barren
+abstraction destitute of personality. It is no less true that God
+reveals Himself to the human feeling without intermediate agency. For
+the religious <i>sentiment</i> Mr. Spencer finds an indestructible
+foundation. While maintaining that man can grasp and know only the
+finite, he yet holds that science does not fill the whole region of
+mental activity. Man may realize in consciousness what he may not grasp
+in thought.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other doctrines of Mr. Spencer we attempt no exposition. His
+attitude towards theology is to us more satisfactory than that of any
+recent thinker of the first class. But whatever his conclusions, every
+true man will respect and encourage that rectitude of mind which follows
+the issues of its reasoning at any cost. It was not the philosopher in
+his brain, but the fool <i>in his heart</i>, who said, "There is no God." It
+is of little matter what inappropriate name narrow people may have
+chosen for Mr. Spencer. Here is a conscientious investigator who finds
+duty everywhere, who labors to give men truths which shall elevate and
+reform their lives; but he believes that the hope of humanity was
+potentially shut in an egg, and never in an ark. And there is the
+"reader upon the sofa,"&mdash;church-member he may be,&mdash;who tosses aside
+"Vanity Fair" with the reflection that a gossiping of London snobs is
+human life, and that the best thing to be done is to pay pew-rates and
+lie still and gird at it. Which of these two, think you, is the modern
+representative of King David's "fool"?</p>
+
+<p>We would not be charged with the superfluity of commending to scholars
+the writings of Mr. Spencer. They have long ago found them out. It is to
+the mass of working men and women who make time for a solid book or two
+in the course of the year that we submit their claims. While those who
+have the leisure and training to realize Mr. Spencer's system as a
+developed unity must necessarily be few, no reader of tolerable
+intelligence can fail to find much of interest and suggestion in its
+several parts. With a common allowance for the abstruse nature of the
+subjects of which he treats, Mr. Spencer may be called a <i>popular</i>
+writer. His philosophical terminology will not be found troublesome in
+those of his writings which will first attract the reader. The "Social
+Statics," the "Essays," and the treatise on "Education" are very
+clearly, as well as most gracefully, written. And after these have been
+mastered, most readers will not be repelled by the less easy reading of
+the "Principles of Psychology," and the "New System of Philosophy." All
+these works are rich in materials for forming intelligent opinions, even
+where we are unable to agree with those put forward by the author. Much
+may be learnt from them in departments in which our common educational
+system is very deficient. The active citizen may derive from them
+accurate, systematized information concerning his highest duties to
+society, and the principles on which they are based. He may gain clearer
+notions of the value and bearing of evidence, and be better able to
+distinguish between facts and inferences. He may find common things
+suggestive of wiser thought&mdash;nay, we will venture to say, of truer
+emotion&mdash;than before. For Mr. Spencer is not of that school of
+"philosophy" which teaches the hopelessness of human effort, and, by
+implication, the abandonment of moral dignity. From profound
+generalizations upon society, he rises to make the duty of the
+individual most solemn and imperative. Above all, he has this best
+prerogative of really great thinkers,&mdash;he is able to change sentiments
+to convictions.</p>
+
+<p>If we have not particularized the claims of the single volume whose
+title is at the head of our notice, it is because all that Mr. Spencer
+has written moves towards one end and is equally worthy of attention.
+The essays here given are selected from two series, the first published
+in 1857, the second in 1863. The present arrangement has been chosen by
+the author as more suitable to develop the general purpose which governs
+his work. While the doctrine of Evolution is more or less illustrated in
+each of these papers, the variety of subjects discussed must touch at
+some point the taste and pursuit of any reader. From "Manners and
+Fashion" to "The Nebular Hypothesis" is a sweep bold enough to include
+most prominent topics with which we are concerned. Indeed, we can recall
+no modern volume of the same size which so thoroughly credits its author
+with that faculty of looking about him which Pope thought it was man's
+business to exercise. There are the current phrases, "seeing life," and
+"knowing the world," which generally used to signify groping in the
+dirtiest corners of the one and fattening lazily upon the other; but if
+it were possible to rescue such expressions from their vulgar
+associations, we think that a candid reader would apply the best
+conceptions they suggested to the writer of the discussions here
+collected. The world as it is to-day is seen by Mr. Spencer as by few
+living men. The sciences, which taken singly too often seem only good to
+expel the false, have been summoned together to declare the true. Not
+Nature alone, but Humanity, which is greater than Nature, must be
+interrogated for answers that shall satisfy the ripest reason of the
+age. By the rare gifts of comparison which turn to account his wide
+observations, Mr. Spencer has already established principles which,
+however compelled for a time to compromise with prejudices and vested
+interests, will become the recognized basis of an improved society.</p>
+
+<p>Our only interest in recommending this author to our countrymen comes
+from the conviction that he is peculiarly capable of impressing for good
+the present condition of our national character. By giving us fuller
+realizations of liberty and justice his writings will tend to increase
+our self-reliance in the great emergency of civilization to which we
+have been summoned. "Our Progressive Independence," so brilliantly
+illustrated by Dr. Holmes, emancipating us from foreign fine-writing,
+leaves us free to welcome the true manhood and mature wisdom of Europe.
+In the time of our old prosperity, amusing a leisure evening over
+Kingsley or Ruskin, we were tempted to exclaim, with Sir Peter Teazle,
+"There's nothing half so noble as a man of sentiment!" But in these
+latter days we have seen "Mr. Gradgrind" step from Dickens's wretched
+caricature to bring his "facts" to the great cause of humanity, while
+"Joseph Surface" reserved his "sentiments" for the bloody business by
+which Slavery sought to subject all things to herself. We have seen the
+belles-lettres literature of England more deeply disgraced than when it
+smirked before the harlots of the second Charles, or chanted a
+blasphemous benediction over George IV. But the thought and science of
+the Old World it is still our privilege to recognize. And it can hardly
+be necessary to say that the sympathies of Mr. Spencer, like those of
+Mill and Cochin, have been with the government and loyal people of the
+United States. And so we take especial pleasure in mentioning that a
+considerable interest in the American copyright of his writings has been
+secured to the author, and also, despite the facilities of reading-clubs
+and circulating-libraries, that they are emphatically <i>books to own</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Poems.</i> By <span class="smcap">Frederick Goddard Tuckerman</span>. Boston: Ticknor and
+Fields.</p>
+
+<p>These poems show by internal evidence that they are the productions of a
+man of refined organization and delicate sensibility to beauty, who has
+lived much in solitude and tasted of the cup of sorrow. Of decided
+originality in intellectual construction it cannot be said that they
+give emphatic proof: the poet, as Schiller has said, is the child of his
+age, and Mr. Tuckerman's poetry not unfrequently shows that he has been
+a diligent student of those masters in his art who have best caught and
+reproduced the spirit of the times in which we dwell. It has one quality
+to a high degree,&mdash;and that is, a minute knowledge of the peculiarities
+of the natural world as it appears in New England. In his long woodland
+walks, he has kept open an eye of observation as practised as that of
+the naturalist. The trees, the shrubs, the flowers of New England are
+known to him as they are to few. He is tempted to draw too largely upon
+this source of interest: in other words, there is too much of
+description in his volume. Life is hardly long enough for such elaborate
+painting. We may admire the skill of the delineation, but we cannot
+pause sufficiently before the canvas to do full justice to the painter.
+Those poems in which Mr. Tuckerman expresses the emotions of bereavement
+and sorrow are those which have the highest merit in point of thought
+and expression. They are full of tenderness and sensibility; but the
+poet should bear in mind that strings which vibrate such music should be
+sparingly struck.</p>
+
+<p>It may be somewhat paradoxical to say so, but it appears to us that the
+poetry of Mr. Tuckerman would be improved, if it had more of prose in
+it. It does not address itself to common emotions and every-day
+sympathies. His flour is bolted too fine. One must almost be a poet
+himself to enter into full communion with him. In intellectual
+productions the refining process should not be carried too far: beyond a
+certain point, what is gained in delicacy is lost in manliness and
+power.</p>
+
+
+<p><i>Possibilities of Creation; or, What the World might have been.</i> A Book
+of Fancies. London: Simpkin, Marshall, &amp; Co.</p>
+
+<p>The author describes his work as a treatise of the Bridgewater class. We
+should rather describe it as a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> in Natural
+Philosophy. A great deal of humor, ingenuity, and information are
+brought into play to turn the world upside-down, for the very laudable
+purpose of demonstrating that it is better to be right side up,&mdash;a
+method of demonstration curious and interesting enough, if comprised in
+a single essay, but rather long-drawn-out, when spread over four hundred
+pages. Suppose, for instance, is the writer's mode of argument, a
+malicious demon let loose, with power to set the earth topsy-turvy, on
+condition of keeping it still an earth. With what exultation does he
+bestride the Himalayas to watch the convulsions which he causes! How
+does he kick his heels against the mountain-flanks, in ecstasy at seeing
+men bleached and blistered with the chlorine or nauseated with the
+sulphuretted hydrogen which he has substituted for our wholesome and
+pleasant air! Or what should we do, if potato-roots had happened to be
+moistened with gin instead of water? What if men, instead of standing
+god-like erect, had been great balls of flesh, rolling along the ground
+as best they could,&mdash;if Young's poetical figure had been a practical
+truth, and this globe were the Bedlam of the universe,&mdash;if the fixity of
+Nature had been shattered, and we sat down at our feasts to find the
+soup bitter as strychnine, the wine changed into vinegar, and mild ale
+fiery as vitriol? What if wrinkles and gray hairs came in the twinkling
+of an eye,&mdash;if children were born with matured minds,&mdash;if no one were
+capable of anger,&mdash;and men started at the same point to arrive at the
+same conclusions? In short,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If all the world was apple-pie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And all the sea was ink,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all the trees were bread and cheese,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">What should we have for drink?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>To all which startling inquiries we are fain to say, that, if Merrie
+England sits under her present squally skies in such a frame of bliss
+that she must have recourse to her imagination, when she wishes to
+contemplate a nice little <i>imbroglio</i>, she must be awarded the palm for
+being what Mark Tapley would call "jolly under creditable
+circumstances." For ourselves, we frankly confess that we find quite
+trouble enough in steering among the realities of creation, without
+caring to venture far out among its possibilities.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="RECENT_AMERICAN_PUBLICATIONS" id="RECENT_AMERICAN_PUBLICATIONS"></a>RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS</h2>
+
+<h3>RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Cudjo's Cave. By J. T. Trowbridge, Author of "Neighbor Jackwood," etc.
+Boston. J. E. Tilton &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. 504. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Sadlier's Catholic Almanac and Ordo for the Year of our Lord 1864. With
+Full Returns of the Various Dioceses in the United States and British
+North America. And a List of the Archbishops, Bishops, and Priests in
+Ireland. New York. D. &amp; J. Sadlier &amp; Co. 12mo. paper. pp. 330. 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p>The Natural History of Secession; or, Despotism and Democracy at
+Necessary, Eternal, Exterminating War. By Thomas Shepard Goodwin, A. M.
+New York. John Bradburn. 12mo. pp. 328. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Squadron Tactics under Steam. [By Authority of the Navy Department.] By
+Foxhall A. Parker, Commander United States Navy. New York. D. Van
+Nostrand. 8vo. pp. 172. $5.00.</p>
+
+<p>Father Mathew: A Biography. By John Francis Maguire, M. P., Author of
+"Rome: its Ruler and its Institutions." New York. D. &amp; J. Sadlier &amp; Co.
+12mo. pp. xxi., 557. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Eliza Woodson; or, The Early Days of one of the World's Workers. A Story
+of American Life. New York. A. J. Davis &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. 425. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Letters to a Lady. By Wilhelm von Humboldt. From the German, with an
+Introduction by Charles Godfrey Leland. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo.
+pp. 257. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Four American Poems, metrically translated into German. By Charles
+Theodore Eben. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo. paper. pp. 51. 25 cts.</p>
+
+<p>The Art of Conversation; with Directions for Self-Education. New York.
+G. W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 234. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Tales from the Operas. Edited by George Frederick Pardon. New York. G.
+W. Carleton. 12mo. pp. 263. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Historical Memoir of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Compiled from
+Authentic Sources. Boston. Patrick Donahoe. 16mo. pp. 344. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Report on the Organization and Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac: to
+which is added an Account of the Campaign in Western Virginia, with
+Plans of Battle-Fields. By George B. McClellan, Major-General United
+States Army. New York. Sheldon &amp; Co. 8vo. pp. 480. $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Laws and Principles of Whist stated and explained, and its Practice
+illustrated on an Original System, by Means of Hands played completely
+through. By Cavendish. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 16mo. pp. 94. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Mount Vernon, and other Poems. By Harvey Rice. New York. D. Appleton &amp;
+Co. 12mo. pp. 221. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>La Gaviolta: A Spanish Novel. By Fernan Caballero. Translated by J.
+Leander Starr. New York. John Bradburn. 12mo. pp. 281. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>The Color-Guard: being a Corporal's Notes of Military Service in the
+Nineteenth Army Corps. By James K. Hosmer, of the Fifty-Second Regiment
+Massachusetts Volunteers. Boston. Walker, Wise, &amp; Co. 16mo. pp. xii.,
+244. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Life of William Hickling Prescott. By George Ticknor. Boston. Ticknor &amp;
+Fields. 4to. pp. x., 491. $7.50.</p>
+
+<p>Tales of a Wayside Inn. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston. Ticknor &amp;
+Fields. 12mo. pp. viii., 225. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>A Woman's Ransom. By Frederick William Robinson, Author of
+"Grandmother's Money," etc. Boston. T. O. H. P. Burnham. 12mo. pp.
+viii., 412. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Sunshine: A New Name for a Popular Lecture on Health. By Mrs. Dall,
+Author of "Woman's Right to Labor," etc. Boston. Walker, Wise, &amp; Co.
+16mo. paper. pp. 64. 35 cts.</p>
+
+<p>The Wife's Secret. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson
+&amp; Brothers. 12mo. pp. 480. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Lyrics of a Day; or, Newspaper Poetry. By a Volunteer in the United
+States Service. New York. G. W. Carleton. 16mo. pp. xii., 160. 75 cts.</p>
+
+<p>Work and Play; or, Literary Varieties. By Horace Bushnell. New York.
+Charles Scribner. 12mo. pp. 464. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>The School-Girl's Garland. A Selection of Poetry. In Four Parts. By Mrs.
+C. M. Kirkland. Second Series. Parts Third and Fourth. New York. Charles
+Scribner. 16mo. pp. 360. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>England's Liability for Indemnity: Remarks on the Letter of
+"Historicus," dated November 4th, 1863; printed in the London "Times,"
+November 7th; and reprinted in the "Boston Daily Advertiser," November
+25th. By Charles G. Loring. Boston. W. V. Spencer. 8vo. paper. pp.
+viii., 46. 25 cts.</p>
+
+<p>Satan's Devices and the Believer's Victory. By Rev. William L. Parsons,
+A. M. Boston. Gould &amp; Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 312. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Hints to Riflemen. By H. W. S. Cleveland. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+12mo. pp. 260. $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Illustrations of Universal Progress; A Series of Discussions. By Herbert
+Spencer, Author of "The Principles of Psychology," etc. With a Notice of
+Spencer's "New System of Philosophy." New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 12mo.
+pp. xxxi., 446. $1.75.</p>
+
+<p>The National Almanac and Annual Record for the Year 1864. Philadelphia.
+G. W. Childs. 12mo. pp. 641. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Annual of Scientific Discovery; or, Year-Book of Facts in Science and
+Art for 1864. Exhibiting the most Important Discoveries and Improvements
+in Mechanics, Useful Arts, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Astronomy,
+Geology, Zo&ouml;logy, Botany, Mineralogy, Meteorology, Geography,
+Antiquities, etc. Together with Notes on the Progress of Science during
+the Year 1863; a List of Recent Scientific Publications; Obituaries of
+Eminent Scientific Men, etc. Edited by David A. Wells, A. M., M. D.
+Boston. Gould &amp; Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 351. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Red Track. A Tale of Life in Mexico. By Gustave Aimard.
+Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &amp; Brothers. 8vo. paper. pp. 157. 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p>Dangerfield's Rest; or, Before the Storm. A Novel of American Life and
+Manners, New York. Sheldon &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. 392. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Philanthropic Results of the War in America. Collected from Official
+and other Authentic Sources. By an American Citizen. New York. Sheldon &amp;
+Co. 18mo. pp. 160. 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p>A Treatise on Military Surveying, Theoretical and Practical. Including a
+Description of Surveying Instruments. By G. H. Mendell, Captain of
+Engineers. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 12mo. pp. 193. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Blennerhassett Papers. Embodying the Private Journal of Harman
+Blennerhassett, and the hitherto Unpublished Correspondence of Burr,
+Alston, Comfort Tyler, Devereaux, Dayton, Adair, Miro, Emmett, Theodosia
+Burr Alston, Mrs. Blennerhassett, and others, their Contemporaries;
+developing the Purposes and Aims of those engaged in the Attempted
+Wilkinson and Burr Revolution; embracing also the First Account of the
+"Spanish Association of Kentucky," and a Memoir of Blennerhassett. By
+William H. Safford. Cincinnati. Moore, Wilstach, &amp; Baldwin, 8vo. pp.
+665. $3.00.</p>
+
+<p>Church Essays. By George Cumming McWhorter, Author of "A Popular
+Hand-Book of the New Testament." New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 12mo. pp.
+175. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>My Cave-Life in Vicksburg. With Letters of Trial and Travel. By a Lady.
+New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 16mo. pp. 196. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Field Tactics for Infantry: comprising the Battalion Movements and
+Brigade Evolutions Useful in the Field, on the March, and in the
+Presence of the Enemy. By Brigadier-General William H. Morris. New York.
+D. Van Nostrand. 18mo. pp. 146. 75 cts.</p>
+
+<p>Christian Memorials of the War; or, Scenes and Incidents Illustrative of
+Religious Faith and Principle, Patriotism and Bravery, in our Army. With
+Historical Notes. By Horatio B. Hackett, Professor of Biblical
+Literature and Interpretation in Newton Theological Institute. Boston.
+Gould &amp; Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 252. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Family Pride. By the Author of "Pique." Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &amp;
+Brothers. 12mo. pp. 396. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>America and her Commentators. With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the
+United States. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York. C. Scribner. 8vo. pp.
+viii., 460. $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>Synonymes of the New Testament. By Richard Chevenix Trench, D. D. Second
+Part. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp. iv., 214. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Management of Steel, including Forging, Hardening, Tempering,
+Annealing, Shrinking, and Expansion; also the Case-Hardening of Iron. By
+George Ede, employed in the Royal Gun Factories Department, Woolwich
+Arsenal. First American, from Second London Edition. New York. D.
+Appleton &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. 41. 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughts for the Christian Life. By Rev. James Drummond. With an
+Introduction by Rev. J. G. Holland. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp.
+xxi., 371. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>History of the Romans under the Empire. By Charles Merivale, B. D., late
+Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. From the Fourth London Edition.
+With a Copious Analytical Index. Vol. III. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+12mo. pp. 431. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Federalist. A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. A
+Collection of Essays, by Alexander Hamilton, Jay, and Madison. Also, The
+Continentalist and other Papers, by Hamilton. Edited by John C.
+Hamilton, Author of "The History of the Republic of the United States."
+Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott &amp; Co. 8vo. pp. clxvi., 660, vi. $3.50.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No.
+80, June, 1864, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 19827-h.htm or 19827-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/9/8/2/19827/
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80,
+June, 1864, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: November 16, 2006 [EBook #19827]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+VOL. XIII.--JUNE, 1864.--NO. LXXX.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR
+AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the
+District of Massachusetts.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected. Footnotes have been
+moved to the end of the article.
+
+
+
+
+A TALK ABOUT GUIDES.
+
+
+Talk about guides! Let Independence, Self-Conceit, and Go-ahead
+undervalue them, if they will; but I, Sola Foemina, (for that is the
+name I go by,) of Ignorance, (the place I hail from,) casting up my
+unbalanced accounts, (with a view to settling,) find a large credit due
+to this class of individuals, which (though I have not the means to
+meet) I have no intention to repudiate.
+
+Now and then, to be sure, I, S. F., have been reminded in my journeyings
+of poor dear E., whose lively spirit was so chafed by the exactions made
+upon his purse and his temper at the hands of this imperturbable race,
+that at last he turned, like a stag at bay, and vented all his wrath in
+the face of a startled old woman by the abrupt and emphatic query,
+"What'll you take to clear out?"
+
+Still, dogmatic and prosing as they sometimes proved, my experience on
+the whole was favorable; and from the motherly old portress of the
+English church at Honeybourne, who fed me with bread and butter under
+her cottage-roof, and sent me away laden with garden-flowers and a
+blessing, to faithful Michel, who held me over the blue fissures of the
+glaciers that I might get a glimpse of their secret waterfalls, who
+gathered violets for me on the margin of the icy sea, and, when I had
+carelessly dropped them by the way, treasured up the faded things to
+restore them to me at nightfall,--from the aged woman, with her "Good
+bye till we meet in heaven," to the rough mountaineer, with his hearty
+hand-pressure and God-speed at parting, I would not willingly lose one
+link out of the chain of such fast friends which stretched along my way.
+
+There is Warwick Castle,--a written history, no doubt, to scholars, a
+mine of wealth to antiquaries and architects; but how incomplete would
+my associations be with the spot, were you banished from the picture, my
+sturdy friend, fit type of the female retainers of the household of the
+King-Maker, who, stationed within the ivied approach to the castle,
+presided at the brazen porridge-pot, once holding food enough to satisfy
+ten score of men, now empty, save for the volume of sound which stuns
+the ear when you strike it with your ponderous iron bar! Can I ever
+forget the scene of laughter and riot, when you installed me within the
+capacious vessel, dubbed me "Countess Guy, of the Porridge-Pot," and,
+the rest of my party having been induced to accept the hospitalities of
+the place, and mount my triumphal car, declared your intention to light
+a fire beneath and have the finest stew in all England? The castle is a
+stern place, perhaps; but how can I ever think it grim, with such a
+jolly old flatterer as you stationed at its portal?
+
+And here, in my blundering way, I have stumbled on the secret spring of
+my whole subject; so I may as well make a merit of confession, and
+acknowledge frankly that the trap in which these wary guides entangled
+my affections was generally neither more nor less than a net of silken
+flattery. Your good guide, your dear guide, your pet guide, whom
+Neighbor So-and-so, going abroad, must look up immediately on his
+arrival, this invaluable creature, depend upon it, is an arrant
+flatterer. He does not go out of his way for you; he does not tell it
+you to your face; but, somehow or other, (if he knows his vocation,) he
+makes you believe, that, of all the travellers he ever escorted, (and he
+has been a travellers' escort from his infancy,) you are the first, the
+only one, in whose behalf duty became a privilege.
+
+Do you suppose I put faith in Michel, when, on my second Alpine
+excursion, this companion of the previous day's peril placed himself in
+close proximity to my mule, took the bridle with an air of satisfaction,
+and whispered with an insinuating smile, "I go with _you_ to-day; see,
+there is another guide for Mademoiselle"? He was mistaken. It was my
+young friend whom he was, on this occasion, destined to escort over the
+mountain. He was as devoted to her as if she had been the apple of his
+eye. Whether I followed next in the file, brought up the rear, or was
+dashed over the precipice, I doubt if he looked behind him to discover.
+Was I fool enough, then, to trust his professions? I acknowledge the
+weakness. I was but a novice, he a practised courtier in the guise of a
+mountaineer. To make a clean breast of it, I even suspect that his
+self-gratulatory whisper is still ringing in my ear, for I find that
+Mademoiselle and I are rivals in our devotion to Michel.
+
+And Ann Harris, of Honeybourne, widow, portress of the ancient
+village-church, surrounded by villagers' graves, approached by four
+foot-paths over four stiles, perfect model of all the churches in all
+the novels of English literature,--was it partiality for me, ancient
+matron, or an eye to a silver sixpence, which made you, and makes you
+still, the heroine of my day of romance? At any rate, I shall never
+cease to invoke a blessing on that immaculate railway-company which
+decoyed me from London into the heart of England, and, with a coolness
+unexampled in the new districts of Iowa, dropped me at the sweetest nook
+under the sun, there to wait three hours for the train which should have
+taken me at once to Stratford,--three golden hours, in which I might
+bask like a bee in a Honeybourne beyond my hopes.
+
+Not that my Honeybourne was precisely the spot where the railway-train
+left me standing deserted and alone,--alone save for a Stratford
+furniture-dealer, who, unceremoniously set down in the midst of his new
+stock of tables and chairs, and with nothing else in sight but a
+platform, a shed, and me, looked at the last-mentioned object for
+sympathy, while he cursed the departing train and swore the usual oath
+of vengeance, namely, that he would never travel that road again.
+
+_He_ got red with passion and cursed the road; _I_ stared round me and
+kept cool. Was I more philosophical than he? No, but there was this
+difference: he was bent on business, I on pleasure; he was in a hurry, I
+could afford to wait.
+
+Three hours,--and only a platform, a shed, and an infuriated
+furniture-dealer to keep me company! This was the Honeybourne station,
+but not Honeybourne. I found a railway-official hard by, had my baggage
+stowed in the shed, crossed the platform, looked at my watch to make
+sure of the time, then struck out into the open country. Through shady
+lanes, over stiles, across the fields, on I went, in the direction
+pointed out to me by two laborers whom I met at starting. The sweet
+white may smiled at me from the hedges; the great sober eyes of the
+cattle at pasture reflected my sense of contentment; the nonchalant
+English sheep showed no signs of disturbance at my approach (unlike the
+American species, which invariably take to their heels); the children
+set to watch them lifted their heads from the long grass and looked
+lazily after me, never doubting my right to tread the well-worn
+foot-path with which every green field beguiled me on. I came out in the
+vegetable-garden of a rustic cottage, one of some dozen thatched-roofed
+dwellings, which, with the church and simple parsonage, constituted
+sweet Honeybourne. "Oh that it were the bourne from which no traveller
+returns!" was the thought of my heart, as, with a dreamy sense of
+longings fulfilled, I wandered through the miniature village, across it,
+around it, beyond it, and back to it again, as a bee saturated with
+sweets floats round the hive.
+
+And now to my queen-bee, Ann Harris, aforesaid!
+
+"All the way from Lunnon! Alone, and such a distance! Bless my heart!"
+cried the primitive Ann, with hands and eyes uplifted. "Come in and rest
+you, and have something to eat! I have bread and butter, sweet and good,
+and will boil the kettle and make you a cup of tea, if you say so."
+
+I had already made the circuit of the church, strolled among the ancient
+gravestones, crossed the moss-covered bridge, threaded the paths beneath
+the hawthorn, had a vision of boundless beauty, drunk in the silence,
+and dreamed out my dream of solitude, independence, and the joy of being
+no one but myself knew where. Could I do better than accept this
+invitation to enter the humble cottage, with the prospect of an
+admittance also to an old woman's heart? Did I win the latter? or did I
+only fancy it? Did the motherly creature believe me lost? or was her
+astonishment only feigned? Was she really, despite her poverty, ready to
+share her last crust with a stranger? or was the benignant glance which
+gave me in my loneliness the sense of adoption merely an eye to
+self-interest?
+
+Dear old soul! One of us, at least, was simple-hearted and true,--either
+she in her innocent professions, or I in my silly credulity. I have
+faith that it was she. At all events, I do so cherish the memory of her
+kindness, that, so far from treasuring the notion of the silver
+sixpence, I hereby pledge myself, that, if ever the reminiscence I am
+penning should be worth half as much to me in gold as it is in memory, I
+will send Ann Harris at least one shining guinea, as a token how
+willingly I would go shares with her in something.
+
+And the guinea would not come amiss, for Ann was poor; her clay-floored
+cottage boasted only its exquisite neatness, her furniture was of the
+humblest, her dress the cheapest. She was too old for hard work; her
+duties at the little church were light,--the profits, I fear, were
+lighter; for that visitors to the remote sanctuary were rare her
+reception of me was sufficient proof. As she guided me through the
+church, I asked her if it was well attended. She shook her head sadly,
+and, pointing in the direction of a neighboring village, answered,--
+
+"Most of 'em go to chapel, yonder,--the more's the pity."
+
+She told me that she had no provision for the coming winter, and feared
+she must go to the Union. (It was not our own, then prosperous and
+unbroken, Union, to which she dreaded emigrating.) She merely meant the
+work-house; and as she spoke, her face wore a shadow that still clouds
+my recollections of Honeybourne. I do not know if her fears were
+realized,--if her cottage is forsaken,--if she dwells among paupers, or
+sleeps in the village church-yard; but I cannot think of her as lonely
+or poor or dead. Her saintly face told of blessed communion; I know that
+she was rich in faith and hope; and were I assured that her spirit had
+left the flesh, I should only picture her to myself standing erect at
+heaven's doorway, welcoming strangers with the same serenity with which
+she said to me at parting,--"I shall meet you _there_."
+
+She offered me a farewell gift of flowers from her garden. It was a
+beautiful cottage-garden, and many of the flowers were brilliant and
+even rare, giving proof of careful, if not scientific culture. Still I
+hesitated. My hands were full of sweet may, red campion, and other
+native field-blossoms, which had introduced themselves to me
+anonymously. They were the children of the green sod which I had been
+treading so lightly on my way to the village; and, in the quiet of my
+ramble, they had seemed to me like whispers from Him who made them, and
+with whom I had never felt so utterly alone. I could not bear to see
+them displaced by Ann's garden-belles, tempting as the latter would have
+been at any other moment. She saw my indifference to her offer. I knew
+she saw it working in my face. I attempted to apologize for my
+preference, but she did not understand me; so I blurted out my thought,
+awkwardly enough, saying,--
+
+"Yours are beautiful; but God made these, you know,--and--and--I like
+them best."
+
+She looked down upon me gravely, pityingly, smiling, too, with a
+tenderness which was neither grave nor pitying. I have seen
+long-visioned people look with just that expression at the eyes of the
+short-sighted, on the latter's confessing their inability to detect an
+object at no great distance.
+
+"_He made them all_," she said; and her words were an ascription of
+praise.
+
+They come to me often now. They bid me look farther and see more. They
+tell me how _mine_ and _thine_ have no place in this world of _His_.
+False distinctions shrink away from the light of the old woman's clearer
+faith; I see how the ablest workers are but instruments in higher
+hands,--how science, culture, inspiration itself, are but gifts to be
+laid on His altar.
+
+I need scarcely say that I at once found room for Ann's flowers in my
+hand, as for her lesson in my heart. Some of the former are pressed and
+laid away as a sacred memento, and something of the latter is treasured
+up among good seed sown by the way-side.
+
+I would gladly have lingered longer in this little nook, into which I
+seemed to have been drifted by chance; but my time was up,--I had a mile
+or two to walk over the fields in the direction of the railway,--my
+friends were to meet me at Stratford. Should I miss the train this time,
+my philosophy might fail me as signally as that of the above-mentioned
+furniture-dealer failed him.
+
+A few hours after I bade my old friend farewell, I was at my
+destination. Millions have shared my experiences at the tomb of the
+great poet. Everybody is familiar with William Shakspeare and
+Stratford-on-Avon, but I hug the thought that nobody but I knows
+anything about Ann Harris and Honeybourne.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have dwelt upon an occasion in which the humble office of a guide
+resulted in companionship, friendship, instruction. A brief sojourn in
+Alpine regions has furnished me with a similar reminiscence.
+
+We were setting forth for a day's ride across the Tete-Noire. Our party
+consisted of five, and we had two guides. Our baggage, which was for the
+most part light, was strapped on the backs of the mules behind the
+riders. One article, however, a square box of considerable proportions,
+proved refractory, and, veering from side to side, refused to maintain
+the even balance which, owing to the rough nature of the bridle-path,
+was essential to the safety of both mule and rider. We were obliged to
+halt again and again, that the box might be restrapped, always with
+doubtful success. Each time that we drew up in line for this purpose we
+were overtaken by a Swiss youth, who had perceived our dilemma, and who
+hoped, by following us up closely, to make a job out of it. There was
+but a limited knowledge of French among us, (the language in which the
+youth spoke,) still, by aid of his vehement gestures, he made us
+understand that he was ready, for a consideration, to accompany us on
+our toilsome journey, and carry the box on his back.
+
+"Eight francs, Monsieur,--I will do it for eight francs!" But the box
+was righted, his services seemed superfluous, and we moved on,
+regardless of his beseeching looks.
+
+A fresh delay soon ensued, the boy came panting up, and this time it was
+"Seven francs,"--nay, as we rode away from him, he frantically shouted,
+"Six!" His prospects seemed hopeless, but destiny and perseverance were
+on his side,--the box gave another alarming lurch,--the heated and
+almost discouraged youth made one last appeal,--
+
+"Four francs, Monsieur! I will do it for four francs!" and the day was
+his.
+
+He was not a regular guide, appointed by Government and furnished with a
+certificate, as is the law of the Alpine district for all who serve in
+this responsible capacity. We had engaged him simply as a porter. Still,
+the docile youth had no sooner strapped the box on his back than, seeing
+that I was the only lady unprovided with an attendant, he drew my mule's
+bridle through his arm, and quietly took me in charge.
+
+No matter how charming a travelling-party you belong to, the moment they
+are all mounted and climbing a mountain, single file, you feel yourself
+a unit in creation. Everybody has turned his back upon you, and you have
+turned your back upon everybody. You are a solitary traveller. Are you
+aghast at your own situation on the steep slope of a mule's back, with a
+precipice above your head and your feet dangling over a gulf below?
+There is no help for it. Imagine yourself a sack of meal, if you can,
+and expect as little sympathy as would be accorded to that article. Are
+you moved to a keen sense of the ridiculous, as a curve in the road
+discloses the figures of your elongated party, unused to riding, and
+rendered the more grotesque by their mountain-equipment? A laugh
+unshared is no laugh at all, so you may as well smother it at once. Does
+the scenery through which you are passing awaken emotions of sublimity?
+It would be sacrilege to shout out your sentiments to the occupant of
+the next mule in such tones as a watchman would employ to cry, "Fire!"
+No,--if you are essentially a social creature, there is nothing for it
+but to bottle up your sensibilities and await the opportunity for an
+explosion when you reach your inn.
+
+Something like this result occurred, I remember, on the evening of that
+very day, when Mademoiselle, who, under the charge of Michel, led the
+van, met me at the hotel at Martigny, at which place she had of course
+arrived a little in advance. We were not usually more demonstrative in
+our manners than is customary among New-England women, but the moment I
+could alight we rushed into each other's embrace, regardless of a crowd
+of astonished porters and guides, mutually insisting, by way of apology,
+that it seemed as if we had not met for a year.
+
+Having dwelt upon this peculiar isolation experienced by the Alpine
+traveller, it may be conjectured, that, when the boy, Auguste, drew my
+bridle through his arm, I felt very much as Robinson Crusoe did when he
+was joined by his man Friday. Auguste and I soon became friends. He was
+a large, round-faced, mild-eyed youth, who, the instant the excitement
+of securing his employment was past, subsided into a soft, even pace
+like that of a dog. Now and then, too, he looked up at the mule and me,
+precisely as a dog, accompanying his master, looks up to see if all is
+right.
+
+I did not talk to him at first. His mere presence was satisfaction
+enough. After a while we grew more sociable. He spoke a French _patois_.
+So did I. His was peculiar to the province,--mine wholly original,--but
+both answered the purpose of communication, and so were satisfactory.
+He had the essential characteristic of his profession,--he was one of
+the oily-tongued tribe, simple as he seemed, and I the willing victim;
+for I am confident that I straightened in my saddle, and talked more
+glibly than ever in the language peculiar to myself, on the strength of
+his _naive_ surprise at learning the place of my nativity, and his
+polite exclamation, "_De l'Amerique! O! j'avais cru que vous etiez de
+Paris_!"
+
+The conversation you hold with your guide has this advantage,--you can
+suspend it at will. There are miles of travel, in crossing the
+Tete-Noire, when, if your most sympathizing friend walked beside you,
+the thought of both hearts would be, "Let all the earth keep silence!"
+and in the absence of such unspoken sympathy, the next best thing is the
+innocent gravity of an attendant hired for so many francs a day, and not
+presuming to speak unless spoken to.
+
+But when these sublimer passages are passed, when the path skirts the
+edge of the valley, when the giant mountains have retired a little and
+you slacken the tense cord of emotion which for a while has held you
+spell-bound, it is a relief to loosen the tongue also, and reassure
+yourself with the sound of the human voice. Thus Auguste and I had
+frequent dialogues. He told me something of his past life, which I do
+not remember very well. I think its chief incident was his having been
+drafted for the army, and having served his term. Of his future,
+however, he spoke with an earnestness which has left its impression on
+my mind. He said that the next winter he meant to go to Paris and seek a
+service; and his perseverance in wringing employment out of us inclines
+me to think that he fulfilled his intention. Savoy, to which province he
+belonged, had just been annexed to France. A party of guides from
+Chamouni had the day before succeeded, with difficulty, in planting the
+imperial flag on the summit of Mont Blanc. Was it this which had
+awakened the ambition of the young Savoyard to share the spoils of the
+empire of which he had so suddenly become a member? Perhaps (I never
+thought of it before, but perhaps) he was already seeking means for his
+journey to the capital. Perhaps the price of his hard-won service was to
+be the nucleus of his savings. Have I, then, aided your purpose,
+Auguste? helped to transform you from a simple mountain-lad to a mere
+link in a chain of street-sweepers, an artful official of a third-rate
+billiard-saloon, or a roystering cab-driver with his perpetual entreaty
+for an extra fee in the form of "_Quelque chose a boire_"? My mind
+shrinks from the possibility, for I cannot bear to think of him as other
+than he then seemed,--a child of Nature and of the truth.
+
+In the course of our day's journey we drew near a little village. I had
+been chatting with Auguste and felt in a loquacious mood, but paused as
+I found myself passing through the village,--in other words, sneaking
+round the corner of one shabby hut, and straight through the farm-yard
+of the next, and close by the windows of a third,--the three, and a few
+other stray buildings, constituting the hamlet. As it seemed an
+impertinence to follow such an intrusive, inquisitive little road at
+all, we could, of course, do no less than maintain a dumb propriety in
+the presence of the children and kitchen-utensils, but, as we left them
+behind and struck across an open field, my eye fell on one of those
+way-side shrines common in all Roman-Catholic districts. It was a
+miniature arch of plastered or whitewashed stone, and contained, as
+nearly as I could judge from the glimpse I had in passing, two coarse
+dolls, intended to represent the Virgin and Child.
+
+"What is that, Auguste?" I asked, with feigned ignorance.
+
+"A place of worship," he answered; "the people come there to pray."
+
+"But what do they come _there_ for?" I continued.
+
+"_God is there_," he answered, with emphasis, pointing at the same time
+to the gayly dressed puppets.
+
+"No, He is not," I replied.
+
+He turned round and looked at me defiantly. His mild face became that
+of a fanatic, and I actually quailed beneath his angry eye, as he
+retorted,--
+
+"He _is_ there."
+
+My mistake flashed upon me, too, at the instant, and I hastened to
+explain myself in the simplest manner my poor French would allow,
+saying,--
+
+_"Oui, Auguste, Il est la, c'est vrai; mais Il est la aussi!"_--and I
+pointed to the snow-capped mountains on my right,--_"et la!"_--and I
+waved my hand towards the deeply shadowed heights on the opposite side
+of the valley.
+
+He caught my meaning as by an inspiration. His fierce frown melted
+instantly into an intelligent smile.
+
+_"Il est partout!"_ exclaimed the youth, with enthusiasm, his childlike,
+eager eyes seeking a response in mine.
+
+I nodded in affirmation of the truth. It was enough. Catholic and
+Protestant had met on common ground,--we understood each other,--we were
+reconciled.
+
+Has he carried his large faith with him into the great metropolis? and
+have I kept mine unshaken in spite of the storm that is raging in my
+native land? Armed in his simplicity only, he has gone to meet the gusts
+of temptation; and I have lived to see the Republic, which I believed
+inviolable as Mother Earth herself, tremble and totter, as one after
+another of her rotten pillars has fallen away. God grant that we may
+both, in this day of our peril, be able, as then, to realize that "_Il
+est partout_"!
+
+During my short Alpine journey I held the office of paymaster for our
+party, my election being due not so much to proficiency in the queer
+dialect above alluded to as to courage in the use of it. It is always a
+pleasant office to disburse the funds, but was never more so than when,
+late at night, Michel and Auguste came to the hotel at Martigny to
+receive the reward of their day's toil. Michel had his full dues in
+money, and plenty of praise to boot; Auguste, evidently much to his
+surprise, a trifle more than his minimum price. Each of them then
+grasped my hand in his horny palm,--an unexpected salutation, but not a
+harsh one, for each hand had a heart in it, or I believed it had, which
+was all the same to me. They made the customary promise not to forget
+me, but credulity must stop somewhere, and at this point I must confess
+my easy faith gave out, and left me skeptical.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have given the preference in order of narrative, as well as in memory,
+to guides who proved competent, willing, and true, who, if they seasoned
+the intercourse between us with a little encouragement to my
+self-esteem, had nothing in them obsequious or timeserving, and who set
+me a wholesome example of clear convictions and firmness in the
+maintenance of right. But not only are the virtues of the race whom I
+have chosen for a theme subjects of congratulation; even the
+uncertainties and misfits of these frequently rusty keys to the past
+excite a mirth that lightens the toil with which one rummages through
+the corridors of time. It would be treason to tell the name of that
+antique university-chapel where a certain wooden-headed verger was
+betrayed into the absurdest error; it would be personal to give the name
+of the waggish friend who made him his innocent butt; but the facts and
+the joke claim no disguise.
+
+The solemn British beadle had been rehearsing the history of numerous
+sarcophagi and monuments, dwelling with mingled pathos and indignation
+upon the injuries which the chapel, its railings, and its statues had
+sustained at the hands of that arch-destroyer and his soldiery who, in
+their zeal for the new Commonwealth, trampled brutally upon the records
+of past grandeur and royalty.
+
+"He stabled his 'osses 'ere! yes, 'ere,--in this wery chapel! ugh!" was
+the wrathful exclamation of our guide; and as he pointed towards the
+tablets without corners and the effigies lacking noses or feet, there
+was a low muttering in his throat and a look at us intended to excite
+sympathetic ire on our part.
+
+One only of our party responded to the look.
+
+"Let me see,--Cromwell was a terrible Catholic, wasn't he?" gravely
+inquired our fellow-traveller, as if in this way, and this way only,
+could the sacrilege be accounted for,--one blue eye, as he spoke, full
+of sage earnestness, the other twinkling with fun.
+
+The stolid face of our guide now became a study. He had no instructions
+for such an emergency as this. The question had made war with his poor
+wits. For a moment they staggered, felt themselves defeated, and were
+about to surrender. But, resolute Briton that he was, the old man soon
+rallied his forces. True servant both of Church and State, he saw that
+there was no consistent course for him but to consign the enemy of
+royalty and the contemner of sacred monuments to the abominable Scarlet
+Lady. He gave one appealing look at his interrogator, but the side of
+the face turned towards him was immovable. It gave no positive
+discouragement to an affirmative reply; it even feigned ignorance.
+Seeking enlightenment, and taking heart of faith, the verger assented in
+the words, "Y-e-e-e-s,--I be-e-e-lieve so!" Then, his courage rising as
+he felt himself committed to the fact, he continued, with emphasis and a
+dictatorial nodding of the head, "Yes,--yes, he _was_."
+
+Many and laughable are the instances of such perplexity and mistake
+among the aged pieces of mechanism who have for years been sounding the
+same tune to generations of unquestioning ears, and who, not having an
+extra note in their gamut, can by no means bear to be played upon by
+strange hands. Age has its exemptions and immunities, however; might
+makes right, and one who has long been a dictator comes to be deemed an
+infallible authority. So they whine on, and are oftener believed than
+otherwise. As they constitute a class, and those whom I have to do with
+are chiefly the exceptions, I will forbear to dwell on stereotyped
+specimens, and turn to one so unlike the generality of her tribe, so
+utterly lawless, so completely at variance with all her surroundings,
+that I must beg leave to introduce her precisely as she introduced
+herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is an old place in England (there may be many such, but I know
+there is one) which is consecrated to imagination, romance, and memory.
+Abandoned by its owners as a residence, it is nevertheless maintained in
+sufficient repair to prevent its walls from crumbling or its beauty of
+outline from being marred, and stands forth a living epic, written in
+stone and oak, and meriting a place among the classics of the land.
+
+The favorite of tourists, artists, and antiquaries, it can well dispense
+with anything like an accurate description from a traveller who went
+thither, not to study, but to muse; so, putting in a plea, beforehand,
+for possible failures in observation and memory, I propose to myself
+nothing more than a re-indulgence of the reverie which took possession
+of me on my visit to Haddon Hall.
+
+We had spent the middle hours of the day at Chatsworth, that palace and
+museum of modern art, and, with senses bewildered and eyes dazzled by
+the magnificence of a ducal residence unparalleled, perhaps, in the
+world for its wealth and culture, we had set off, in the latter part of
+the afternoon, to view its antipodes. The circumstances and the hour
+were not inappropriate. Sated with the most perfect display of luxury
+and taste which the present age can boast, and somewhat weary with the
+toil of sight-seeing, a six-mile drive, the gradual decline of the
+summer day, the shadows gathering over the landscape, all acted as a
+gentle narcotic, and were a fit preparative for our approach to that
+old, deserted homestead, the first glimpse of which set my fancy
+roaming, and carried me away into a world of dreams.
+
+Hitherto I had been the contented occupant of an old yellow coach, and
+had been satisfied with the pace of two jaded post-horses. But, as I
+crossed the drawbridge and climbed the steep hill which led to the
+principal gateway, I found myself mounted on rapid wings, and whirling
+through the centuries. Not that I was rushing on in advance of the age.
+No,--the wings flapped backwards, they careered disdainfully over and
+beyond the region of reality; as we flew, the present became merged in
+the past, the actual gave place to the ideal.
+
+I am approaching a feudal fortress. The deep moat, the turreted walls,
+the old gray towers, the lattice of my lady's bower, the sentry pacing
+the battlements, the warder stationed at the gate, the severe exterior
+of the grim pile, the smoking hospitality that reigns within,--I
+recognize them all. Much that I have taken on faith from my childhood
+has already been realized since I touched English shores,--why not this?
+I climb the steep slope leading to the principal entrance, and knock at
+the gate. Hark! is not that the sound of an answering horn? Is not that
+distant rattling the clash of armor on the stones? Do I not hear the
+voice of the stout baron mustering his retainers to bid me welcome? If
+so, they are a long time about it,--for I have knocked once, twice,
+three times, and there is no admittance. It is a severe process, too;
+for, though the original gate, which may have been an iron portcullis
+for aught I know, has given place to rough boards, the latter are not
+particularly tender of my knuckles, and, though romance is romance, pain
+is a fact. So I fold my airy wings for the present, and look about me
+for a big stone to pound with. It is of no use. The old castle is deaf
+and dumb. It neither hears nor answers. I creep along the edge of a
+steep bank, pry round a corner of the building, gaze up at the high
+Gothic windows, but see nothing like a practicable approach, and turn
+back, discouraged. We take counsel together, I and my party, and at
+length condescend to the belief that our best hope of obtaining an
+entrance lies in a modern farm-house, at the foot of the eminence on
+which the fortress stands. The farm-house is beyond the hail of our
+voices, but our coachman, who is stationed there with his post-chaise, a
+witness of our embarrassment, makes an encouraging sign. That the
+farm-house bears some relation to the manor-house is suggested also by
+the fact that its garden boasts a yew-tree cut into the form of a
+peacock, and the book of heraldry says that the crest of the noble Earls
+of Rutland, who occupied the hall for centuries, includes, among its
+other belongings, "a peacock, in pride, proper."
+
+At last, just as our impatience had reached the verge of indignation, a
+little figure emerged from the shadow of the farm-house, and sauntered
+towards us. She was a pretty child, a true daughter of the Saxon race,
+fair-haired, blue-eyed, and sunny-complexioned. She was the pink of
+neatness, too, and it was evident that the time we had spent in waiting
+had been passed by her at her toilet, for the folds were still fresh in
+her snowy apron, and her golden hair glistened smoothly within the bars
+of a net,--that unfailing net, sure emblem of British female
+nationality. Her dainty little hat was trimmed with white ribbons, which
+streamed behind her in the breeze, and, altogether, she was as complete
+a picture as one would wish to see of youth, health, and
+self-complacency.
+
+The nonchalance with which she approached us was a thing I have never
+seen equalled. The independence of American children is proverbial; but
+democratic institutions never produced anything more saucily
+self-reliant than this little Briton. Without looking at us, or deigning
+any apology for the great gate,--which, it seems, is a mere barricade,
+not made to be opened,--she unlocked a side-postern, a rude door,
+consisting of two or three rough boards, and made a motion for us to
+enter. As we trod the time-worn pavement of the outer court, and gained
+an open quadrangle round which various apartments were grouped,
+imagination once more took possession of me, and I found myself peopling
+the place with its original inmates.
+
+"Oh, how old and story-like!" I exclaimed to my companions. "Can you not
+imagine knights on horseback prancing over these stones, and alighting
+at the great hall-door beyond?"
+
+"Horses never came up here!" was the interruption which my suggestion
+met from our practical little guide. "Horses couldn't climb those
+stairs," she added, somewhat scornfully; and I then observed that I had
+unconsciously ascended a rough, angular stairway, passable only to
+foot-passengers.
+
+Knights on foot, then, my fancy at once substituted; and as the child,
+now commencing her duties as show-woman, pointed out the servants'
+offices, it was no difficult matter to picture the baron's retainers
+lazily grouped around the stone walls of the low cells, for such the
+apartments were, polishing their master's armor, or bousing over jugs of
+ale, while handsome pages loitered about the court-yard, waiting the
+summons of their lord, or the sound of their lady's silver whistle.
+Fancy was an indispensable attendant in making the circuit of the
+apartments, which surrounded at least three sides of this outer
+quadrangle. Without her aid, they were simply remarkable for their
+similarity, their vacancy, their unfitness for any modern purpose save
+that of sheep-pens or lumber-rooms. Destitute of windows, so that the
+sun and air found admittance only through the doorway, without
+fireplaces, boarded floors, or plastered walls, they presented simply so
+many square feet of space walled in by stone and mortar. But Fancy had
+the power to enliven, furnish, people them. She suggested that their
+very number was an indication of sociability, excitement, noise, and
+mirth. Here, as in all feudal dwellings, the vast disproportion between
+the space allotted to the dependents and that reserved for the lord of
+the manor pointed to the time when each castle was a walled city, each
+baronial hall the home of a crowd of petty retainers. In that long-ago,
+what multitudes of voices had stirred the silence of the court-yard! The
+bare walls of the apartments then were hung with breast-plate, spear,
+and cross-bow,--trophies of war and the chase furnished decorations
+suited to the taste of the occupants, and the hides of slaughtered
+beasts carpeted the cold floor. Stirring tales of love and warfare
+gathered little knots of listeners; wandering minstrels sought
+hospitality, and repaid it in songs and rhymes; the beef and the bowl
+went round; my lord's jester made his privileged way into every circle
+in turn, and cracked his jokes at everybody's expense; and pretty Bess,
+my lady's maid, peeped in at the open door, just in time to join in the
+laugh against her lover.
+
+But Fancy only whispered, and another little attendant, whose name was
+Fact, spoke out, and interrupted her.
+
+"Would you like to see the family-plate?" asked our guide, with the air
+of one who felt she had really nothing worth showing, but was bound to
+fulfil her task; and, entering one of the stone-walled apartments, she
+pointed out a few enormous pewter platters, much dimmed by time and
+neglect, leaning against the wall.
+
+What visions of Christmas feasts and wassails these relics might have
+awakened in me, had I been left to gaze on them undisturbed, it is
+impossible to say; but my mind was not permitted to follow its own bent.
+
+"There's nicer ones down at the house, all brightened up," said the
+child, with simplicity, and looking disdain at the heirlooms she was
+displaying.
+
+The estimate put by the little girl upon the comparative value of old
+pewter dishes was suggestive. Whether the farm-house had robbed the
+castle, or the castle the farm-house, became at once an open question,
+and romance died in doubt.
+
+There could be no doubt, however, as to the genuineness of the rude old
+dining-hall to which we were conducted next. The clumsy oaken table
+still occupied the raised end of the apartment, where the baron feasted
+his principal guests. The carved and panelled gallery whence his
+minstrels cheered the banquet still stood firm on its massive pillars,
+and the great stags'-antlers which surmounted it told of his skill as a
+sportsman. What giant logs might once have burned in the wide
+fireplaces, what sounds of revelry have gone up to the bare rafters! Our
+guide's tongue went glibly as she pointed out these familiar objects,
+and in the kitchen, buttery, and wine-vault, which were situated
+conveniently near to the dining-hall, she seemed equally at home. It was
+easy to recognize in the great stone chimneys, with their heavy hooks
+and cross-bars, symptoms of banquets for which bullocks were roasted
+whole and sheep and calves slain by the dozen; but we needed her
+practised lips to suggest the uses of the huge stone chopping-blocks,
+the deeply sunk troughs, the narrow gutters that crossed the stone
+pavement, all illustrative of the primitive days when butcher and cook
+wrought simultaneously, and this contracted cellar served at once for
+slaughter-house and kitchen. Her little airy figure was in strange
+contrast with these gloomy passages, these stones that had reeked with
+blood and smoke. She glided before us into the mysterious depths of the
+storehouse and ale-vault, as the new moon glides among damp, black
+clouds; as she directed our attention to the oaken cupboards for bread
+and cheese, the stone benches that once supported long rows of casks,
+the little wicket in the doorway, through which the butler doled out
+provisions to a waiting crowd of poor, she might well have been likened
+to a freshly trimmed lamp, lighting up the dark, mysterious past.
+
+Freshly trimmed she unquestionably was, and by careful hands, but not a
+voluntary light; for, the moment her explanations were finished, or our
+curiosity satisfied, she sank into an indifference of speech and
+attitude which proved her distaste to a place and a task utterly foreign
+to her nature. Evidently, the hall which we had come so far to see, and
+were so eager to explore, was at once the most familiar object of her
+life and her most utter aversion. She had been drilled into a mechanical
+knowledge of its history, but the place itself was to her what an old
+grammar or spelling-book is to the unwilling pupil,--a thing to be
+learned by rote, to be abused, contemned, escaped from. As we finished
+our exploration of the lower floor, she probably breathed a sigh of
+relief, feeling that the first chapter of her task was concluded.
+
+But a second and more difficult was yet to follow,--for we now ascended
+a staircase of uncemented blocks of stone, crossed a passage, and found
+ourselves in a long gallery or hall, the finest and best-preserved room
+in the castle, the state-apartment and ball-room of the lords of the
+manor. Our admiration at once broke forth in words of surprise and
+delight. The architecture of this room was of much more recent date than
+that portion of the building which we had already visited. It was
+Elizabethan in its style, and one of the finest specimens of the period.
+It was floored and wainscoted with oak; its frieze richly carved and
+adorned with boars' heads, thistles, and roses; its ceiling, also of
+oak, beautifully panelled and ornamented. There was a great square
+recess in the middle of the gallery, and along one side of it a row of
+bow-windows, through whose diamond panes a fine view was afforded of the
+quaint old garden and balconies below. Here, doubtless, knights and
+dames of the olden time had danced, coquetted, quarrelled, and been
+reconciled. Within those deep embrasures courtiers in ruffs and plumes
+had sued for ladies' favors, and plotted deep intrigues of state. What
+stories these walls could tell, had they but tongues to speak! What
+dreams did their very silence conjure up!
+
+Led by a more erratic spirit than that even of our child-guide, I am
+afraid I lent an inattentive ear to her accurate statement of the
+length, breadth, and height of the gallery in which we stood, the
+precise date of its erection, the noble owners of the various
+coats-of-arms carved above the doorway; for I remember only that she
+seemed confident and well-informed, and recited her lesson faithfully
+so long as she was suffered to follow the beaten track. How impossible
+it was to extract anything beyond that from her we soon had proof.
+
+She ushered us next into my lord's parlor, which nearly adjoined the
+gallery. This room was hung with arras, retained a few articles of
+ancient furniture, had one or two pictures hanging on its walls, and
+presented, altogether, a more habitable look than any other portion of
+the castle. Our little maid had got on well with her description of this
+room, had pointed out the portrait of Prince Arthur, once a resident at
+the hall, had introduced that of Will Somers, my lord's jester, as
+glibly as if Will were a playmate of her own, had deciphered for us the
+excellent moral precept carved in old English beneath the royal arms,
+"Drede God and honour the King," and was proceeding rapidly with an
+array of measurements and dates, when I unluckily interrupted her,--I
+think it was to ask some question about the tapestry. She looked at me
+reproachfully, indignantly,--just as a child reciting the
+multiplication-table before the School-Committee would look, if tripped
+up between the numbers, or as a boy, taken advantage of in play, might
+cry, "No fair!" She did not condescend to answer me, perhaps she could
+not, but paused a moment, reflected, went deliberately back in her
+recital, repeated the last few dates and phrases by way of gaining an
+impetus, and then went on without faltering to the end of her prescribed
+narration.
+
+Poor child! She had my sympathy, and has still. What a grudge she must
+owe us tourists, even the tamest and most submissive of us, for whom she
+is thus compelled to tax her unwilling memory!
+
+But if her spirits were damped, her good-humor threatened, it was for a
+minute only. Upon completing our rapid survey of my lord's parlor, and
+looking round for the guide who should conduct us farther, she had
+become invisible. So we moved on without her, and commenced exploring a
+narrow passage with a certain sense of bewilderment at its loneliness,
+and the doubt whither it might lead, when, suddenly, we were startled by
+a merry laugh, which seemed to ring through the air directly above our
+heads. Was it a mocking spirit that haunted the place? or one of the old
+figures on the tapestry, started into life? We looked up, and there, on
+a rough platform of pine boards, projecting from the wall, stood our
+Fenella. She was leaning over the shoulder of an artist-boy, who, seated
+at his easel, was copying one of the Gorgon-heads that stood out on the
+faded tapestry. She had dismissed us wholly from her thoughts, and,
+giving play to her native fun and coquetry, was taunting the youth with
+the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she
+last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the
+boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive
+which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some
+elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her
+future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer
+felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall,
+and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring out in
+fresh colors the staring eyes and mummied cheeks which would otherwise
+soon be lost to memory. She certainly made the most of her opportunity
+to taunt and tease him, for there was time for a laugh and a word of
+raillery only, to which he seemed too shamefaced to respond, before she
+was at our side again, gravely announcing, "My lady's chamber!"--and as
+we looked around the apartment, whose furniture and decorations imparted
+to it a superior air of neatness and refinement to that observable
+elsewhere, she pointed out to us a private doorway, conducting to a
+flight of steps, and affording an exit by which "my lady" had easy
+access to the court-yard, and thence to the chapel where she performed
+her devotions.
+
+"And what are the rooms opposite?" we asked, pointing to a long row of
+windows on the second floor, on the opposite side of the quadrangle to
+that of which we had now completed the inspection.
+
+"Those rooms are never shown," was the mysterious answer.
+
+"But you will show them to _us_" (spoken coaxingly).
+
+She shook her head, and sealed her lips, with an expression of
+determination.
+
+"What is in them?"
+
+"Oh, nothing in particular."
+
+"Then we might see them."
+
+No encouragement, but, on the contrary, a resolute negative.
+
+A bribe was held out,--for, by this time, the child's air of mystery and
+reserve had suggested a closet like that of Bluebeard, a chamber of
+torture, or, at least, the proofs of some family-secret.
+
+We might as well have offered a two-shilling bribe to the Iron Duke
+himself. The miniature castle-keeper was so firm and so non-committal
+that she disarmed us of all our ingenuity, defeated all our tactics, and
+we gave up the point. I have since learned that this quarter of the
+mansion consists of a labyrinth of rooms, shut up because devoid of
+interest, and containing only some old lumber. To have conducted us
+through them would have been to disobey orders, and, worse still,
+establish a precedent, from which the child might well shrink. It would
+have doubled her arduous round of duty. It was policy, no less than
+loyalty, which had inspired her.
+
+So, too, when we came to inspect the chapel. She mounted an old oak
+chest in the rear of the little sanctuary, just beneath the solitary
+window, whose quaint patterns in stained glass pointed to centuries long
+past. Seated comfortably on this elevation, she rehearsed the history
+and described the architecture of the most primitive place of worship I
+ever saw,--or, if she left her post to point out some minuter detail,
+she returned to it as jealously as a watch-dog to some spot which he is
+specially appointed to guard. When our curiosity was otherwise
+satisfied,--when we had even ascended to the rude confessional, which
+was a mere excavation in the soft stone of the wall,--when we had put
+our hands in the hollow, not unlike a swallow's nest in a mud-bank, once
+the receptacle for holy water,--when we had descended the stony pathway,
+for it was so worn as scarcely to merit the name of staircase,--when,
+standing once more on the chapel-pavement, with minds excited by the
+thought of those monkish days when priestcraft ruled the land,--our eyes
+naturally fell on the old oak chest. What further revelation might not
+this disclose! What sacred relics, what curious church-plate, what
+vellum manuscript, might not be hidden beneath this heavy lid! Would she
+rise and let us see?
+
+No,--she maintained her seat and her reserve with as much rigidity as on
+the former occasion. Unconvinced by this experience, our imaginations
+still ran riot. They shadowed forth every possible beauty and horror
+which such a giant chest might contain. The story even of "The Bride of
+the Mistletoe-Bough" might be verified, if we could but get a peep. At
+last we prevailed. The child was persuaded to dismount, we lifted the
+cover, and the chest was empty,--literally empty.
+
+Once more the plain fact of the present had swept away the cobwebs of
+the past, the real had banished the ideal. While the child of to-day
+sought only a comfortable rest from weariness, we had been seeking
+myths. She looked on as indignant as a dethroned queen. We turned away a
+little mortified, and a good deal disappointed.
+
+But the Fenella of the castle was not so very tired, after all. True,
+she was tired of the old manor-house, tired of us, tired of her own dull
+routine of duty; but there was a well-spring of freshness in her yet.
+She moved languidly, to be sure, as she now led the way to the tower,
+the only portion of the castle yet unvisited. Following her, we
+ascended, first, to a bare upper room, a sort of anteroom, from which
+the ascent to the tower commenced. It presented a solid inclosure of
+stone, except on the western side, where it was dimly lighted through
+one or two slits in the masonry. Turning my eyes in this direction, I
+saw our little guide leaning against the stone framework of one of these
+chinks in the wall. The beams of western sunlight came slanting in at
+precisely the angle of her figure as she leaned back in infantile
+repose; her white ribbons, her snowy apron, her golden hair caught and
+held the sunshine, and the ray of light which relieved the gloom of the
+gray old vault seemed to emanate from the child.
+
+One of our party addressed some question to her regarding the probable
+design of the empty room in which we stood; but there was no
+answer,--not even a responsive glance. Her eyes were fixed upon the
+stone roof. She looked spell-bound. Before we could follow the direction
+of her steady gaze, we were startled by the flapping of wings overhead,
+and, still more, by the sudden rushing forward of the child with a loud
+cry of "Shoo! shoo!" and with her hands stretched eagerly into the air.
+Our presence had disturbed a swallow, which had found its way in through
+one of the slits, and, perhaps, built a nest in some crevice of the
+wall. The girl's languor was instantaneously dispelled by the discovery
+and the excitement of pursuit. Here, now, was congenial sport. Hopeless
+as was the attempt to catch the bird, the joy of frightening it was
+sure; and our guide sprang wildly from side to side of the building,
+uttering exciting exclamations, and making vain passes at the little
+creature, which flew round high above her head, now and then settling in
+some secure "coigne of vantage." In these intervals we endeavored to
+catch the attention of the mischievous fowler, but her task had ended
+with this tower-room, she had done with us, she had found an unexpected
+source of sport, and was not to be deterred from an enjoyment which she
+probably thought well-earned. With one eye following the least motion of
+the bird, she informed us, at last, in reply to repeated inquiries, that
+there was nothing to be told about the room we were in,--that it merely
+led to the tower,--we could go up into the tower, if we wished.
+
+She must go with us and show us the way.
+
+"No," was the cool reply. She never went into the tower; she never went
+any farther than this.
+
+Glancing at the dilapidated state of the stairs leading to the
+successive stones of the tower, we were almost tempted to believe that
+her instinct of self-preservation had reached its climax here,--that we
+might break our necks, if we liked,--she preferred not to run the risk.
+Resolved to satisfy our suspicions, we pressed the point, and, after
+many inquiries and waiting a considerable time upon the motions of the
+child and her new plaything, we got the brief and somewhat scornful
+explanation,--
+
+"What if some other party should come while I was away?"
+
+"We part here, then?"
+
+She nodded in assent, received the fee for her services without
+acknowledgment, and saw us depart on our breakneck expedition with an
+indifference equalled only by the nonchalance with which she had
+admitted us on our arrival. The moment our backs were turned, she
+resumed her play.
+
+After exploring the successive stories of the tower in safety, we
+descended by way of the anteroom, but the bird and its pursuer had both
+of them flown. We passed through a door she had previously pointed out,
+and gained the garden as surreptitiously as did Dorothy Vernon, of old,
+when, according to the tradition, she escaped through this same doorway
+on the night of her sister's nuptials, and eloped with her lover, Mr.
+(afterwards Sir John) Manners, who had long been haunting the
+neighboring forest as an outlaw. We strolled through the ancient garden,
+all ivied and moss-grown, admired the stone balustrade, which,
+time-stained and mouldy, is still the student's favorite bit of
+architecture, and at last made our way back to the farm-house,--I am
+sure I do not remember how, for we were as deficient in a guide as on
+our first attempt at entrance. Whether another party arrived while we
+were in the tower, and were engrossing her attention,--whether she was
+engaged in the more agreeable office of coquetting with the young
+artist, or was still chasing the swallow from room to room of the
+manor-house, I do not know. We saw her no more. She had barely
+condescended to let us in, and now left us to find our way out as we
+could.
+
+She cared nothing at all for us. All the interest we had manifested in
+her (and it was considerable) had failed to awaken any emotion. We were
+a stereotyped feature of the old hall; and the old hall, though she had
+sprung from its root, and her life had been nourished by its strength,
+was no part of herself,--was her antipathy. Still I never think of the
+mansion, with all the romantic associations which cluster around it, but
+the image of this child comes to break my reverie, as she did on the day
+when it was first indulged.
+
+So we go to visit some royal oak, and bring away, as a memento, the
+daisy which blooms at its foot; so we stand, as the reward of toil and
+fatigue, upon an Alpine glacier, and the trophy and pledge of our visit
+are the forget-me-not that grew on its margin. Thus youth and beauty
+ever press on the footsteps of old age, and youth and beauty bear away
+the palm.
+
+My faith in legendary lore is confirmed, when I call to mind the Gothic
+fortress, with its strong defences against the enemy, its rude
+suggestions of centuries of hospitality, its tower-lattices, whence
+generation after generation of high-born maids waved signals to knightly
+lovers, its stairways, worn slippery with the tread of heavy-mailed
+warriors, its chapel-vault, where chivalrous lord and noble dame have
+turned to dust. But there is a faith more precious than the faith in old
+song and legend; and the golden-haired child, who flourishes so fresh
+and fair amidst all this ruin and decay, stands forth to my mind as an
+emblem of that power which renovates earth and defies time. Had she been
+a pattern child, had her instructors (whoever they were) succeeded in
+moulding her into a mere machine, she might not so vividly have roused
+my interest; but there was something in her saucy independence, her
+wayward freaks, her coquettish airs, her fiery chase after the swallow,
+which--breaking in, as they did, upon the docility with which she
+otherwise went through her round of duty--revivified the desolation of
+the old hall with a sudden outburst of humanity. Everywhere else the
+fountain of life seemed to have died out, but here it gushed forth a
+living stream.
+
+We gaze down the centuries and see in them ignorance, error, warning,
+and ruin at last. What hope for the race, then, if this were all? But it
+is not all. The child's foot treading lightly over the graves is the
+type of the _time-is_ triumphing over the _time-was_. Full of faults and
+imperfections, she is still the daughter of Hope and Opportunity. She
+has the past for her teacher, and the door of knowledge, repentance, and
+faith stands open before her. Thus childhood is the rainbow of God's
+providence, and the brightest feature of His covenant with men.
+
+Silence, desolation, and decay have set their seal upon old Haddon Hall,
+but chance has set a child over them all, and the lesson her simple
+presence teaches is worth more to me than all the Idyls of the King.
+
+And thus it is that I treasure up the memory of her among my catalogue
+of guides; and so she did more for me than she promised, when she
+undertook to lend me her light through the old Hall.
+
+If there are any who can live without thus borrowing, then let them
+disparage guides. For the rest, the best guide is Humility. We have all
+so many dark paths to tread from the cradle to the grave, that we need
+to lay hold on all the helps we can. Groping blindly down the avenues
+of Time, who is there that does not long to grasp some friendly hand, or
+follow in the track of some traveller familiar with the way?
+
+For me, Experience is a staff on which I am glad to lean, Simplicity is
+an unfailing leader where Learning might go astray. Trust is a lamp that
+burns through the darkest night; and sometimes, when strong men are weak
+and wise men foolish, strength and wisdom are given unto babes, and he
+whom the counsels of the elders cannot save may walk the narrowest path
+in safety with his hand in the hand of a little child.
+
+God grant me guides, then, to my journey's end! God guide us all,
+whether we will or no! guide the nations, and make for them a way
+through the dust, the turmoil, and the strife which Time has heaped in
+their path, to the freshness and promise of the new birth! guide each
+poor yearning soul through the darkness and doubt that overshadow it, as
+it journeys on to the clear light of immortal day!
+
+
+
+
+THE KALIF OF BALDACCA.
+
+
+    Into the city of Kambalu,
+    By the road that leadeth to Ispahan,
+    At the head of his dusty caravan,
+    Laden with treasure from realms afar,
+    Baldacca and Kelat and Kandahar,
+    Rode the great captain Alau.
+
+    The Khan from his palace-window gazed:
+    He saw in the thronging street beneath,
+    In the light of the setting sun, that blazed
+    Through the clouds of dust by the caravan raised,
+    The flash of harness and jewelled sheath,
+    And the shining scimitars of the guard,
+    And the weary camels that bared their teeth,
+    As they passed and passed through the gates unbarred
+    Into the shade of the palace-yard.
+
+    Thus into the city of Kambalu
+    Rode the great captain Alau;
+    And he stood before the Khan, and said,--
+    "The enemies of my lord are dead;
+    All the Kalifs of all the West
+    Bow and obey his least behest;
+    The plains are dark with the mulberry-trees,
+    The weavers are busy in Samarcand,
+    The miners are sifting the golden sand,
+    The divers are plunging for pearls in the seas,
+    And peace and plenty are in the land.
+
+    "Only Baldacca's Kalif alone
+    Rose in rebellion against thy throne:
+    His treasures are at thy palace-door,
+    With the swords and the shawls and the jewels he wore;
+    His body is dust o'er the Desert blown.
+
+    "A mile outside of Baldacca's gate
+    I left my forces to lie in wait,
+    Concealed by forests and hillocks of sand,
+    And forward dashed with a handful of men
+    To lure the old tiger from his den
+    Into the ambush I had planned.
+    Ere we reached the town the alarm was spread,
+    For we heard the sound of gongs from within;
+    With clash of cymbals and warlike din
+    The gates swung wide; we turned and fled,
+    And the garrison sallied forth and pursued,
+    With the gray old Kalif at their head,
+    And above them the banner of Mahomed:
+    Thus we snared them all, and the town was subdued.
+
+    "As in at the gate we rode, behold,
+    A tower that was called the Tower of Gold!
+    For there the Kalif had hidden his wealth,
+    Heaped and hoarded and piled on high,
+    Like sacks of wheat in a granary;
+    And there the old miser crept by stealth
+    To feel of the gold that gave him health,
+    To gaze and gloat with his hungry eye
+    On jewels that gleamed like a glow-worm's spark,
+    Or the eyes of a panther in the dark.
+
+    "I said to the Kalif,--'Thou art old,
+    Thou hast no need of so much gold.
+    Thou shouldst not have heaped and hidden it here,
+    Till the breath of battle was hot and near,
+    But have sown through the land these useless hoards
+    To spring into shining blades of swords,
+    And keep thine honor sweet and clear.
+    These grains of gold are not grains of wheat;
+    These bars of silver thou canst not eat;
+    These jewels and pearls and precious stones
+    Cannot cure the aches in thy bones,
+    Nor keep the feet of Death one hour
+    From climbing the stairways of thy tower!'
+
+    "Then into this dungeon I locked the drone,
+    And left him to feed there all alone
+    In the honey-cells of his golden hive:
+    Never a prayer, nor a cry, nor a groan
+    Was heard from those massive walls of stone,
+    Nor again was the Kalif seen alive!
+
+    "When at last we unlocked the door,
+    We found him dead upon the floor;
+    The rings had dropped from his withered hands,
+    His teeth were like bones in the Desert sands;
+    Still clutching his treasures he had died;
+    And as he lay there, he appeared
+    A statue of gold with a silver beard,
+    His arms outstretched as if crucified."
+
+    This is the story, strange and true,
+    That the great captain Alau
+    Told to his brother the Tartar Khan,
+    When he rode that day into Kambalu
+    By the road that leadeth to Ispahan.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE ON THE SEA ISLANDS.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+A few days before Christmas, we were delighted at receiving a beautiful
+Christmas Hymn from Whittier, written by request, especially for our
+children. They learned it very easily, and enjoyed singing it. We showed
+them the writer's picture, and told them he was a very good friend of
+theirs, who felt the deepest interest in them, and had written this hymn
+expressly for them to sing,--which made them very proud and happy. Early
+Christmas morning, we were wakened by the people knocking at the doors
+and windows, and shouting, "Merry Christmas!" After distributing some
+little presents among them, we went to the church, which had been
+decorated with holly, pine, cassena, mistletoe, and the hanging moss,
+and had a very Christmas-like look. The children of our school assembled
+there, and we gave them the nice, comfortable clothing, and the
+picture-books, which had been kindly sent by some Philadelphia ladies.
+There were at least a hundred and fifty children present. It was very
+pleasant to see their happy, expectant little faces. To them, it was a
+wonderful Christmas-Day,--such as they had never dreamed of before.
+There was cheerful sunshine without, lighting up the beautiful
+moss-drapery of the oaks, and looking in joyously through the open
+windows; and there were bright faces and glad hearts within. The long,
+dark night of the Past, with all its sorrows and its fears, was
+forgotten; and for the Future,--the eyes of these freed children see no
+clouds in it. It is full of sunlight, they think, and they trust in it,
+perfectly.
+
+After the distribution of the gifts, the children were addressed by some
+of the gentlemen present. They then sang Whittier's Hymn, the "John
+Brown" song, and several of their own hymns, among them a very singular
+one, commencing,--
+
+    "I wonder where my mudder gone;
+      Sing, O graveyard!
+    Graveyard ought to know me;
+      Ring, Jerusalem!
+    Grass grow in de graveyard;
+      Sing, O graveyard!
+    Graveyard ought to know me;
+      Ring, Jerusalem!"
+
+They improvise many more words as they sing. It is one of the strangest,
+most mournful things I ever heard. It is impossible to give any idea of
+the deep pathos of the refrain,--
+
+    "Sing, O graveyard!"
+
+In this, and many other hymns, the words seem to have but little
+meaning; but the tones,--a whole lifetime of despairing sadness is
+concentrated in them. They sing, also, "Jehovyah, Hallelujah," which we
+like particularly:--
+
+      "De foxes hab holes,
+      An' de birdies hab nes',
+      But de Son ob Man he hab not where
+      To lay de weary head.
+
+            CHORUS.
+
+    "Jehovyah, Hallelujah! De Lord He will purvide!
+    Jehovyah, Hallelujah! De Lord He will purvide!"
+
+They repeat the words many times. "De foxes hab holes," and the
+succeeding lines, are sung in the most touching, mournful tones; and
+then the chorus--"Jehovyah, Hallelujah"--swells forth triumphantly, in
+glad contrast.
+
+Christmas night, the children came in and had several grand shouts. They
+were too happy to keep still.
+
+"Oh, Miss, all I want to do is to sing and shout!" said our little pet,
+Amaretta. And sing and shout she did, to her heart's content.
+
+She read nicely, and was very fond of books. The tiniest children are
+delighted to get a book in their hands. Many of them already know their
+letters. The parents are eager to have them learn. They sometimes said
+to me,--
+
+"Do, Miss, let de chil'en learn eberyting dey can. _We_ nebber hab no
+chance to learn nuttin', but we wants de chil'en to learn."
+
+They are willing to make many sacrifices that their children may attend
+school. One old woman, who had a large family of children and
+grandchildren, came regularly to school in the winter, and took her seat
+among the little ones. She was at least sixty years old. Another
+woman--who had one of the best faces I ever saw--came daily, and brought
+her baby in her arms. It happened to be one of the best babies in the
+world, a perfect little "model of deportment," and allowed its mother to
+pursue her studies without interruption.
+
+While taking charge of the store, one day, one of the men who came in
+told me a story which interested me much. He was a carpenter, living on
+this island, and just before the capture of Port Royal had been taken by
+his master to the mainland,--"the Main," as the people call it,--to
+assist in building some houses which were to shelter the families of the
+Rebels in case the "Yankees" should come. The master afterward sent him
+back to the island, providing him with a pass, to bring away a boat and
+some of the people. On his arrival he found that the Union troops were
+in possession, and determined to remain here with his family instead of
+returning to his master. Some of his fellow-servants, who had been left
+on "the Main," hearing that the Federal troops had come, resolved to
+make their escape to the islands. They found a boat of their master's,
+out of which a piece six feet square had been cut. In the night they
+went to the boat, which had been sunk in a creek near the house,
+measured the hole, and, after several nights' work in the woods, made a
+piece large enough to fit in. They then mended and sank it again, as
+they had found it. The next night five of them embarked. They had a
+perilous journey, often passing quite near the enemy's boats. They
+travelled at night, and in the day ran close up to the shore out of
+sight. Sometimes they could hear the hounds, which had been sent in
+pursuit of them, baying in the woods. Their provisions gave out, and
+they were nearly exhausted. At last they succeeded in passing all the
+enemy's boats, and reached one of our gun-boats in safety. They were
+taken on board and kindly cared for, and then sent to this island, where
+their families, who had no hope of ever seeing them again, welcomed them
+with great rejoicing.
+
+We were also told the story of two girls, one about ten, the other
+fifteen, who, having been taken by their master up into the country, on
+the mainland, at the time of the capture of the islands, determined to
+try to escape to their parents, who had been left on this island. They
+stole away at night, and travelled through woods and swamps for two
+days, without eating. Sometimes their strength gave out, and they would
+sink down, thinking they could go no farther; but they had brave little
+hearts, and got up again and struggled on, till at last they reached
+Port-Royal Ferry, in a state of utter exhaustion. They were seen there
+by a boat-load of people who were also making their escape. The boat was
+too full to take them in; but the people, on reaching this island, told
+the children's father of their whereabouts, and he immediately took a
+boat, and hastened to the ferry. The poor little creatures were almost
+wild with joy when they saw him. When they were brought to their mother,
+she fell down "jes' as if she was dead,"--so our informant expressed
+it,--overpowered with joy on beholding the "lost who were found."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+New-Year's-Day--Emancipation-Day--was a glorious one to us. The morning
+was quite cold, the coldest we had experienced; but we were determined
+to go to the celebration at Camp Saxton,--the camp of the First Regiment
+South-Carolina Volunteers,--whither the General and Colonel Higginson
+had bidden us, on this, "the greatest day in the nation's history." We
+enjoyed perfectly the exciting scene on board the Flora. There was an
+eager, wondering crowd of the freed people in their holiday-attire, with
+the gayest of head-handkerchiefs, the whitest of aprons, and the
+happiest of faces. The band was playing, the flags streaming, everybody
+talking merrily and feeling strangely happy. The sun shone brightly, the
+very waves seemed to partake of the universal gayety, and danced and
+sparkled more joyously than ever before. Long before we reached Camp
+Saxton we could see the beautiful grove, and the ruins of the old
+Huguenot fort near it. Some companies of the First Regiment were drawn
+up in line under the trees, near the landing, to receive us. A fine,
+soldierly-looking set of men; their brilliant dress against the trees
+(they were then wearing red pantaloons) invested them with a
+semi-barbaric splendor. It was my good fortune to find among the
+officers an old friend,--and what it was to meet a friend from the
+North, in our isolated Southern life, no one can imagine who has not
+experienced the pleasure. Letters were an unspeakable luxury,--we
+hungered for them, we could never get enough; but to meet old
+friends,--that was "too much, too much," as the people here say, when
+they are very much in earnest. Our friend took us over the camp, and
+showed us all the arrangements. Everything looked clean and comfortable,
+much neater, we were told, than in most of the white camps. An officer
+told us that he had never seen a regiment in which the men were so
+honest. "In many other camps," said he, "the colonel and the rest of us
+would find it necessary to place a guard before our tents. We never do
+it here. They are left entirely unguarded. Yet nothing has ever been
+touched." We were glad to know that. It is a remarkable fact, when we
+consider that these men have all their lives been _slaves_; and we know
+what the teachings of Slavery are.
+
+The celebration took place in the beautiful grove of live-oaks adjoining
+the camp. It was the largest grove we had seen. I wish it were possible
+to describe fitly the scene which met our eyes as we sat upon the stand,
+and looked down on the crowd before us. There were the black soldiers in
+their blue coats and scarlet pantaloons, the officers of this and other
+regiments in their handsome uniforms, and crowds of lookers-on,--men,
+women, and children, of every complexion, grouped in various attitudes
+under the moss-hung trees. The faces of all wore a happy, interested
+look. The exercises commenced with a prayer by the chaplain of the
+regiment. An ode, written for the occasion by Professor Zachos, was read
+by him, and then sung. Colonel Higginson then introduced Dr. Brisbane,
+who read the President's Proclamation, which was enthusiastically
+cheered. Rev. Mr. French presented to the Colonel two very elegant
+flags, a gift to the regiment from the Church of the Puritans,
+accompanying them by an appropriate and enthusiastic speech. At its
+conclusion, before Colonel Higginson could reply, and while he still
+stood holding the flags in his hand, some of the colored people, of
+their own accord, commenced singing, "My Country, 'tis of thee." It was
+a touching and beautiful incident, and sent a thrill through all our
+hearts. The Colonel was deeply moved by it. He said that that reply was
+far more effective than any speech he could make. But he did make one of
+those stirring speeches which are "half battles." All hearts swelled
+with emotion as we listened to his glorious words,--"stirring the soul
+like the sound of a trumpet."
+
+His soldiers are warmly attached to him, and he evidently feels towards
+them all as if they were his children. The people speak of him as "the
+officer who never leaves his regiment for pleasure," but devotes
+himself, with all his rich gifts of mind and heart, to their interests.
+It is not strange that his judicious kindness, ready sympathy, and rare
+fascination of manner should attach them to him strongly. He is one's
+ideal of an officer. There is in him much of the grand, knightly spirit
+of the olden time,--scorn of all that is mean and ignoble, pity for the
+weak, chivalrous devotion to the cause of the oppressed.
+
+General Saxton spoke also, and was received with great enthusiasm.
+Throughout the morning, repeated cheers were given for him by the
+regiment, and joined in heartily by all the people. They know him to be
+one of the best and noblest men in the world. His Proclamation for
+Emancipation-Day we thought, if possible, even more beautiful than the
+Thanksgiving Proclamation.
+
+At the close of Colonel Higginson's speech he presented the flags to the
+color-bearers, Sergeant Rivers and Sergeant Sutton, with an earnest
+charge, to which they made appropriate replies. We were particularly
+pleased with Robert Sutton, who is a man of great natural intelligence,
+and whose remarks were simple, eloquent, and forcible.
+
+Mrs. Gage also uttered some earnest words; and then the regiment sang
+"John Brown" with much spirit. After the meeting we saw the
+dress-parade, a brilliant and beautiful sight. An officer told us that
+the men went through the drill remarkably well,--that the ease and
+rapidity with which they learned the movements were wonderful. To us it
+seemed strange as a miracle,--this black regiment, the first mustered
+into the service of the United States, doing itself honor in the sight
+of the officers of other regiments, many of whom, doubtless, "came to
+scoff." The men afterwards had a great feast, ten oxen having been
+roasted whole for their especial benefit.
+
+We went to the landing, intending to take the next boat for Beaufort;
+but finding it very much crowded, waited for another. It was the
+softest, loveliest moonlight; we seated ourselves on the ruined wall of
+the old fort; and when the boat had got a short distance from the shore
+the band in it commenced playing "Sweet Home." The moonlight on the
+water, the perfect stillness around, the wildness and solitude of the
+ruins, all seemed to give new pathos to that ever dear and beautiful old
+song. It came very near to all of us,--strangers in that strange
+Southern land. After a while we retired to one of the tents,--for the
+night-air, as usual, grew dangerously damp,--and, sitting around the
+bright wood-fire, enjoyed the brilliant and entertaining conversation.
+Very unwilling were we to go home; for, besides the attractive society,
+we knew that the soldiers were to have grand shouts and a general
+jubilee that night. But the Flora was coming, and we were obliged to say
+a reluctant farewell to Camp Saxton and the hospitable dwellers therein,
+and hasten to the landing. We promenaded the deck of the steamer, sang
+patriotic songs, and agreed that moonlight and water had never looked so
+beautiful as on that night. At Beaufort we took the row-boat for St.
+Helena; and the boatmen, as they rowed, sang some of their sweetest,
+wildest hymns. It was a fitting close to such a day. Our hearts were
+filled with an exceeding great gladness; for, although the Government
+had left much undone, we knew that Freedom was surely born in our land
+that day. It seemed too glorious a good to realize,--this beginning of
+the great work we had so longed and prayed for.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+L. and I had one day an interesting visit to a plantation about six
+miles from ours. The house is beautifully situated in the midst of noble
+pine-trees, on the banks of a large creek. The place was owned by a very
+wealthy Rebel family, and is one of the pleasantest and healthiest on
+the island. The vicinity of the pines makes it quite healthy. There were
+a hundred and fifty people on it,--one hundred of whom had come from
+Edisto Island at the time of its evacuation by our troops. There were
+not houses enough to accommodate them, and they had to take shelter in
+barns, out-houses, or any other place they could find. They afterwards
+built rude dwellings for themselves, which did not, however, afford them
+much protection in bad weather. The superintendent told us that they
+were well-behaved and industrious. One old woman interested us greatly.
+Her name was Daphne; she was probably more than a hundred years old; had
+had fifty grandchildren, sixty-five great-grandchildren, and three
+great-great-grandchildren. Entirely blind, she yet seemed very cheerful
+and happy. She told us that she was brought with her parents from Africa
+at the time of the Revolution. A bright, happy old face was hers, and
+she retained her faculties remarkably well. Fifteen of the people had
+escaped from the mainland in the previous spring. They were pursued, and
+one of them was overtaken by his master in the swamps. A fierce grapple
+ensued,--the master on horseback, the man on foot. The former drew a
+pistol and shot his slave through the arm, shattering it dreadfully.
+Still, the heroic man fought desperately, and at last succeeded in
+unhorsing his master, and beating him until he was senseless. He then
+made his escape, and joined the rest of the party.
+
+One of the most interesting sights we saw was a baptism among the
+people. On one Sunday there were a hundred and fifty baptized in the
+creek near the church. They looked very picturesque in their white
+aprons and bright frocks and handkerchiefs. As they marched in
+procession down to the river's edge, and during the ceremony, the
+spectators, with whom the banks were crowded, sang glad, triumphant
+songs. The freed people on this island are all Baptists.
+
+We were much disappointed in the Southern climate. We found it much
+colder than we had expected,--quite cold enough for as thick winter
+clothing as one would wear at the North. The houses, heated only by open
+fires, were never comfortably warm. In the floor of our sitting-room
+there was a large crack through which we could see the ground beneath;
+and through this and the crevices of the numerous doors and windows the
+wind came chillingly. The church in which we taught school was
+particularly damp and cold. There was no chimney, and we could have no
+fire at all. Near the close of the winter a stove came for us, but it
+could not be made to draw; we were nearly suffocated with smoke, and
+gave it up in despair. We got so thoroughly chilled and benumbed within,
+that for several days we had school out-of-doors, where it was much
+warmer. Our school-room was a pleasant one,--for ceiling the blue sky
+above, for walls the grand old oaks with their beautiful
+moss-drapery,--but the dampness of the ground made it unsafe for us to
+continue the experiment.
+
+At a later period, during a few days' visit to some friends living on
+the Milne Plantation, then the head-quarters of the First
+South-Carolina, which was on picket-duty at Port-Royal Ferry, we had an
+opportunity of seeing something of Port-Royal Island. We had pleasant
+rides through the pine barrens. Indeed, riding on horseback was our
+chief recreation at the South, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. The
+"Secesh" horses, though small, poor, and mean-looking, when compared
+with ours, are generally excellent for the saddle, well-trained and very
+easy. I remember particularly one ride that we had while on Port-Royal
+Island. We visited the Barnwell Plantation, one of the finest places on
+the island. It is situated on Broad River. The grounds are extensive,
+and are filled with magnificent live-oaks, magnolias, and other trees.
+We saw one noble old oak, said to be the largest on these islands. Some
+of the branches have been cut off, but the remaining ones cover an area
+of more than a hundred feet in circumference. We rode to a point whence
+the Rebels on the opposite side of the river are sometimes to be seen.
+But they were not visible that day; and we were disappointed in our
+long-cherished hope of seeing a "real live Rebel." On leaving the
+plantation, we rode through a long avenue of oaks,--the moss-hung
+branches forming a perfect arch over our heads,--and then for miles
+through the pine barrens. There was an Italian softness in the April
+air. Only a low, faint murmur--hardly "the slow song of the sea"--could
+be heard among the pines. The ground was thickly carpeted with ferns of
+a vivid green. We found large violets, purple and white, and azaleas of
+a deeper pink and heavier fragrance than ours. It was leaving Paradise,
+to emerge from the beautiful woods upon the public road,--the shell-road
+which runs from Beaufort to the Ferry. Then we entered a by-way leading
+to the plantation, where we found the Cherokee rose in all its glory.
+The hedges were white with it; it canopied the trees, and hung from
+their branches its long sprays of snowy blossoms and dark, shining
+leaves, forming perfect arches, and bowers which seemed fitting places
+for fairies to dwell in. How it gladdened our eyes and hearts! It was as
+if all the dark shadows that have so long hung over this Southern land
+had flitted away, and, in this garment of purest white, it shone forth
+transfigured, beautified, forevermore.
+
+On returning to the house, we were met by the exciting news that the
+Rebels were bringing up pontoon-bridges, and were expected to attempt
+crossing over near the Ferry, which was only two or three miles from us.
+Couriers came in every few moments with various reports. A
+superintendent whose plantation was very near the Ferry had been
+watching through his glass the movements on the opposite side, and
+reported that the Rebels were gathering in large force, and evidently
+preparing for some kind of demonstration. A messenger was despatched to
+Beaufort for reinforcements, and for some time we were in a state of
+expectancy, not entirely without excitement, but entirely without fear.
+The officers evidently enjoyed the prospect of a fight. One of them
+assured me that I should have the pleasure of seeing a Rebel shell
+during the afternoon. It was proposed that the women should be sent into
+Beaufort in an ambulance; against which ignoble treatment we indignantly
+protested, and declared our intention of remaining at our post, if the
+Colonel would consent; and finally, to our great joy, the best of
+colonels did consent that we should remain, as he considered it quite
+safe for us to do so. Soon a light battery arrived, and during the
+evening a brisk firing was kept up. We could hear the explosion of the
+shells. It was quite like being in the war; and as the firing was
+principally on our side, and the enemy was getting the worst of it, we
+rather enjoyed it. For a little while the Colonel read to us, in his
+spirited way, some of the stirring "Lays of the Old Cavaliers." It was
+just the time to appreciate them thoroughly, and he was of all men the
+fittest person to read them. But soon came a courier, "in hot haste," to
+make report of the doings without, and the reading was at an end. In the
+midst of the firing, Mrs. D. and I went to bed, and slept soundly until
+morning. We learned afterward that the Rebels had not intended to cross
+over, but were attempting to take the guns off one of our boats, which
+they had sunk a few days previous. The timely arrival of the battery
+from Beaufort prevented them from accomplishing their purpose.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In April we left Oaklands, which had always been considered a
+particularly unhealthy place during the summer, and came to "Seaside," a
+plantation on another and healthier part of the island. The place
+contains nearly a hundred people. The house is large and comparatively
+comfortable. Notwithstanding the name, we have not even a distant
+glimpse of the sea, although we can sometimes hear its roar. At low tide
+there is not a drop of water to be seen,--only dreary stretches of
+marsh-land, reminding us of the sad outlook of Mariana in the Moated
+Grange,--
+
+    "The level waste and rounding gray."
+
+But at night we have generally a good sea-breeze, and during the hottest
+weather the air is purer and more invigorating than in many parts of the
+island.
+
+On this, as on several other large plantations, there is a
+"Praise-House," which is the special property of the people. Even in the
+old days of Slavery, they were allowed to hold meetings here; and they
+still keep up the custom. They assemble on several nights of the week,
+and on Sunday afternoons. First, they hold what is called the
+"Praise-Meeting," which consists of singing, praying, and preaching. We
+have heard some of the old negro preachers make prayers that were really
+beautiful and touching. In these meetings they sing only the
+church-hymns which the Northern ministers have taught them, and which
+are far less suited to their voices than their own. At the close of the
+Praise-Meeting they all shake hands with each other in the most solemn
+manner. Afterward, as a kind of appendix, they have a grand "shout,"
+during which they sing their own hymns. Maurice, an old blind man, leads
+the singing. He has a remarkable voice, and sings with the greatest
+enthusiasm. The first shout that we witnessed in the Praise-House
+impressed us very much. The large, gloomy room, with its blackened
+walls,--the wild, whirling dance of the shouters,--the crowd of dark,
+eager faces gathered around,--the figure of the old blind man, whose
+excitement could hardly be controlled, and whose attitude and gestures
+while singing were very fine,--and over all, the red glare of the
+burning pine-knot, which shed a circle of light around it, but only
+seemed to deepen and darken the shadows in the other parts of the
+room,--these all formed a wild, strange, and deeply impressive picture,
+not soon to be forgotten.
+
+Maurice's especial favorite is one of the grandest hymns that we have
+yet heard:--
+
+      "De tallest tree in Paradise
+      De Christian calls de Tree ob Life,
+      An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+      To my New Jerusalem.
+
+                   CHORUS.
+
+    "Blow, Gabriel! trumpet, blow louder, louder!
+    An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+    To my New Jerusalem!
+
+      "Paul and Silas jail-bound
+      Sing God's praise both night and day,
+      An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+      To my New Jerusalem.
+
+                   CHORUS.
+
+    "Blow, Gabriel! trumpet, blow louder, louder!
+    An' I hope dat trumpet blow me home
+    To my New Jerusalem!"
+
+The chorus has a glad, triumphal sound, and in singing it the voice of
+old Maurice rings out in wonderfully clear, trumpet-like tones. His
+blindness was caused by a blow on the head from a loaded whip. He was
+struck by his master in a fit of anger. "I feel great distress when I
+become blind," said Maurice; "but den I went to seek de Lord; and eber
+since I know I see in de next world, I always hab great satisfaction."
+We are told that the master was not a "hard man" except when in a
+passion, and then he seems to have been very cruel.
+
+One of the women on the place, Old Bess, bears on her limbs many marks
+of the whip. Some of the scars are three and four inches long. She was
+used principally as a house-servant. She says, "Ebery time I lay de
+table I put cow-skin on one end, an' I git beatin' and thumpin' all de
+time. Hab all kinds o' work to do, and sich a gang [of children] to look
+after! One person couldn't git along wid so much work, so it go wrong,
+and den I git beatin'."
+
+But the cruelty of Bess's master sinks into insignificance, when
+compared with the far-famed wickedness of another slave-holder, known
+all over the island as "Old Joe Eddings." There seem to have been no
+bounds to his cruelty and licentiousness; and the people tell tales of
+him which make one shudder. We were once asking some questions about him
+of an old, half-witted woman, a former slave of his. The look of horror
+and loathing which overspread her face was perfectly indescribable, as,
+with upraised hands, she exclaimed, "What! Old Joe Eddings? Lord,
+Missus, he second to none in de world but de Debil!" She had, indeed,
+good cause to detest him; for, some years before, her daughter, a young
+black girl, maddened by his persecutions, had thrown herself into the
+creek and been drowned, after having been severely beaten for refusing
+to degrade herself. Outraged, despised, and black, she yet preferred
+death to dishonor. But these are things too heart-sickening to dwell
+upon. God alone knows how many hundreds of plantations, all over the
+South, might furnish a similar record.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in June, before the summer heat had become unendurable, we made a
+pleasant excursion to Edisto Island. We left St. Helena village in the
+morning, dined on one of the gun-boats stationed near our island, and in
+the afternoon proceeded to Edisto in two row-boats. There were six of
+us, besides an officer and the boats' crews, who were armed with guns
+and cutlasses. There was no actual danger; but as we were going into the
+enemy's country, we thought it wisest to guard against surprises. After
+a delightful row, we reached the island near sunset, landing at a place
+called Eddingsville, which was a favorite summer resort with the
+aristocracy of Edisto. It has a fine beach several miles in length.
+Along the beach there is a row of houses, which must once have been very
+desirable dwellings, but have now a desolate, dismantled look. The
+sailors explored the beach for some distance, and returned, reporting
+"all quiet, and nobody to be seen"; so we walked on, feeling quite safe,
+stopping here and there to gather the beautiful tiny shells which were
+buried deep in the sands.
+
+We took supper in a room of one of the deserted houses, using for seats
+some old bureau-drawers turned edgewise. Afterward we sat on the piazza,
+watching the lightning playing from a low, black cloud over a sky
+flushed with sunset, and listening to the merry songs of the sailors who
+occupied the next house. They had built a large fire, the cheerful glow
+of which shone through the windows, and we could see them dancing,
+evidently in great glee. Later, we had another walk on the beach, in the
+lovely moonlight. It was very quiet then. The deep stillness was broken
+only by the low, musical murmur of the waves. The moon shone bright and
+clear over the deserted houses and gardens, and gave them a still wilder
+and more desolate look.
+
+We went within-doors for the night very unwillingly. Having, of course,
+no beds, we made ourselves as comfortable as we could on the floor, with
+boat-cushions, blankets, and shawls. No fear of Rebels disturbed us.
+There was but one road by which they could get to us, and on that a
+watch was kept, and in case of their approach, we knew we should have
+ample time to get to the boats and make our escape. So, despite the
+mosquitoes, we had a sound night's sleep.
+
+The next morning we took the boats again, and followed the course of the
+most winding of little creeks. In and out, in and out, the boats went.
+Sometimes it seemed as if we were going into the very heart of the
+woods; and through the deep silence we half expected to hear the sound
+of a Rebel rifle. The banks were overhung with a thick tangle of shrubs
+and bushes, which threatened to catch our boats, as we passed close
+beneath their branches. In some places the stream was so narrow that we
+ran aground, and then the men had to get out, and drag and pull with all
+their might before we could be got clear again. After a row full of
+excitement and pleasure, we reached our place of destination,--the
+Eddings Plantation, whither some of the freedmen had preceded us in
+their search for corn. It must once have been a beautiful place. The
+grounds were laid out with great taste, and filled with fine trees,
+among which we noticed particularly the oleander, laden with deep
+rose-hued and deliciously fragrant flowers, and the magnolia, with its
+wonderful, large blossoms, which shone dazzlingly white among the dark
+leaves. We explored the house,--after it had first been examined by our
+guard, to see that no foes lurked there,--but found nothing but heaps of
+rubbish, an old bedstead, and a bathing-tub, of which we afterward made
+good use. When we returned to the shore, we found that the tide had gone
+out, and between us and the boats lay a tract of marsh-land, which it
+would have been impossible to cross without a wetting. The gentlemen
+determined on wading. But what were we to do? In this dilemma somebody
+suggested the bathing-tub, a suggestion which was eagerly seized upon.
+We were placed in it, one at a time, borne aloft in triumph on the
+shoulders of four stout sailors, and safely deposited in the boat. But,
+through a mistake, the tub was not sent back for two of the ladies, and
+they were brought over on the crossed hands of two of the sailors, in
+the "carry-a-lady-to-London" style. Again we rowed through the windings
+of the creek, then out into the open sea, among the white, exhilarating
+breakers,--reached the gun-boat, dined again with its hospitable
+officers, and then returned to our island, which we reached after
+nightfall, feeling thoroughly tired, but well pleased with our
+excursion.
+
+From what we saw of Edisto, however, we did not like it better than our
+own island,--except, of course, the beach; but we are told that farther
+in the interior it is much more beautiful. The freed people, who left it
+at the time of its evacuation, think it the loveliest place in the
+world, and long to return. When we were going, Miss T.--the much-loved
+and untiring friend and physician of the people--asked some whom we met
+if we should give their love to Edisto. "Oh, yes, yes, Miss!" they said.
+"Ah, Edisto a beautiful city!" And when we came back, they inquired,
+eagerly,--"How you like Edisto? How Edisto stan'?" Only the fear of
+again falling into the hands of the "Secesh" prevents them from
+returning to their much-loved home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the summer advanced, the heat became intense. We found it almost
+overpowering, driving to school near the middle of the day, as we were
+obliged to do. I gave up riding, and mounted a sulky, such as a single
+gentleman drives in at the North. It was exceedingly high, and I found
+it no small task to mount up into it. Its already very comical
+appearance was enhanced by the addition of a cover of black India-rubber
+cloth, with which a friend kindly provided me. Thus adorned, it looked
+like the skeleton of some strange creature surmounted by a huge bonnet,
+and afforded endless amusement to the soldiers we chanced to meet, who
+hailed its appearance with shouts of laughter, and cries of "Here comes
+the Calithumpian!" This unique vehicle, with several others on our
+island, kindred, but not quite equal to it, would create a decided
+sensation in the streets of a Northern city.
+
+No description of life on these islands would be complete without a word
+concerning the fleas. They appeared at the opening of spring, and kept
+constantly "risin'," as the people said, until they reached a height the
+possibility of which we had never conceived. We had heard and read of
+fleas. We had never _realized_ them before. Words utterly fail to
+describe the tortures we endured for months from these horrible little
+tyrants. Remembering our sufferings "through weary day and weary
+_night_," we warn everybody not gifted with extraordinary powers of
+endurance to beware of a summer on the Sea Islands.
+
+Notwithstanding the heat, we determined to celebrate the Fourth of July
+as worthily as we could. The freed people and the children of the
+different schools assembled in the grove near the Baptist Church. The
+flag was hung across the road, between two magnificent live-oaks, and
+the children, being grouped under it, sang "The Star-Spangled Banner"
+with much spirit. Our good General could not come, but addresses were
+made by Mr. P.,--the noble-hearted founder of the movement for the
+benefit of the people here, and from first to last their stanch and
+much-loved friend,--by Mr. L., a young colored minister, and others.
+Then the people sang some of their own hymns; and the woods resounded
+with the grand notes of "Roll, Jordan, roll." They all afterward partook
+of refreshments, consisting of molasses and water,--a very great luxury
+to them,--and hardtack.
+
+Among the visitors present was the noble young Colonel Shaw, whose
+regiment was then stationed on the island. We had met him a few nights
+before, when he came to our house to witness one of the people's shouts.
+We looked upon him with the deepest interest. There was something in his
+face finer, more exquisite, than one often sees in a man's face, yet it
+was full of courage and decision. The rare and singular charm of his
+manner drew all hearts to him. He was deeply interested in the singing
+and appearance of the people. A few days afterwards we saw his regiment
+on dress-parade, and admired its remarkably fine and manly appearance.
+After taking supper with the Colonel we sat outside the tent, while some
+of his men entertained us with excellent singing. Every moment we became
+more and more charmed with him. How full of life and hope and lofty
+aspirations he was that night! How eagerly he expressed his wish that
+they might soon be ordered to Charleston! "I do hope they will give _us_
+a chance," he said. It was the desire of his soul that his men should do
+themselves honor,--that they should prove themselves to an unbelieving
+world as brave soldiers as though their skins were white. And for
+himself, he was like the Chevalier of old, "without reproach or fear."
+After we had mounted our horses and rode away, we seemed still to feel
+the kind clasp of his hand,--to hear the pleasant, genial tones of his
+voice, as he bade us good-bye, and hoped that we might meet again. We
+never saw him afterward. In two short weeks came the terrible massacre
+at Fort Wagner, and the beautiful head of the young hero and martyr was
+laid low in the dust. Never shall we forget the heart-sickness with
+which we heard of his death. We could not realize it at first,--we, who
+had seen him so lately in all the strength and glory of his young
+manhood. For days we clung to a vain hope; then it fell away from us,
+and we knew that he was gone. We knew that he died gloriously, but still
+it seemed very hard. Our hearts bled for the mother whom he so
+loved,--for the young wife, left desolate. And then we said, as we say
+now,--"God comfort them! He only can." During a few of the sad days
+which followed the attack on Fort Wagner, I was in one of the hospitals
+of Beaufort, occupied with the wounded soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth
+Massachusetts. The first morning was spent in mending the bullet-holes
+and rents in their clothing. What a story they told! Some of the jackets
+of the poor fellows were literally cut in pieces. It was pleasant to see
+the brave, cheerful spirit among them. Some of them were severely
+wounded, but they uttered no complaint; and in the letters which they
+dictated to their absent friends there was no word of regret, but the
+same cheerful tone throughout. They expressed an eager desire to get
+well, that they might "go at it again." Their attachment to their young
+colonel was beautiful to see. They felt his death deeply. One and all
+united in the warmest and most enthusiastic praise of him. He was,
+indeed, exactly the person to inspire the most loyal devotion in the
+hearts of his men. And with everything to live for, he had given up his
+life for them. Heaven's best gifts had been showered upon him, but for
+them he had laid them all down. I think they truly appreciated the
+greatness of the sacrifice. May they ever prove worthy of such a leader!
+Already, they, and the regiments of freedmen here, as well, have shown
+that true manhood has no limitations of color.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Daily the long-oppressed people of these islands are demonstrating their
+capacity for improvement in learning and labor. What they have
+accomplished in one short year exceeds our utmost expectations. Still
+the sky is dark; but through the darkness we can discern a brighter
+future. We cannot but feel that the day of final and entire deliverance,
+so long and often so hopelessly prayed for, has at length begun to dawn
+upon this much-enduring race. An old freedman said to me one day, "De
+Lord make me suffer long time, Miss. 'Peared like we nebber was gwine to
+git troo. But now we's free. He bring us all out right at las'." In
+their darkest hours they have clung to Him, and we know He will not
+forsake them.
+
+    "The poor among men shall rejoice,
+    For the terrible one is brought to nought."
+
+While writing these pages I am once more nearing Port Royal. The
+Fortunate Isles of Freedom are before me. I shall again tread the
+flower-skirted wood-paths of St. Helena, and the sombre pines and
+bearded oaks shall whisper in the sea-wind their grave welcome. I shall
+dwell again among "mine own people." I shall gather my scholars about
+me, and see smiles of greeting break over their dusk faces. My heart
+sings a song of thanksgiving, at the thought that even I am permitted to
+do something for a long-abused race, and aid in promoting a higher,
+holier, and happier life on the Sea Islands.
+
+
+
+
+A FAST-DAY AT FOXDEN.
+
+
+I.
+
+Colonel Elijah Prowley, like all good and true genealogists, held the
+mother-country in tender reverence. For, if there be any truth in the
+well-known _mot_ which calls Paris the Paradise of virtuous Yankees, it
+is limited to a few city-bucks of mongrel caste. England must be the
+Promised Land for the genuine representative of the Puritan. Whatever we
+may have felt about her lately,--and I confess there have been times
+when the declaration of the Fee-Faw-Fum giant of nursery-romance seemed
+to be of a moral and praiseworthy character,--there is no doubt, that,
+in the year of grace of which I write, and in the regards of many
+ratherish-scholarly gentlemen of our country-towns, the British Islands
+were the nearest terrestrial correspondences to the Islands of the
+Blest. About the massive Past Colonel Prowley never ceased to thrust his
+epistolary tendrils. Was not Great Britain a genealogical hunting-ground
+where game of rarest plumage might be started? Was not a
+family-connection with Sir Walter Raleigh (whose name should be written
+_Praleigh_, a common corruption of "Prowley" in the sixteenth century)
+susceptible of the clearest proof? There were, in fact, few
+distinguished Englishmen of the present day, who, if a provoking
+ancestor or two could be unearthed, might not be shown to have the
+Prowley fluid in their veins. To many of these eminent personages the
+head of the American branch of the family had written, and with several
+he had succeeded in establishing a correspondence. Old sermons, moral
+obituaries of public characters, celebrations of centennial
+anniversaries, and heavy reading of like description, constantly left
+the Foxden Post-Office addressed to the British Museum. The printed
+formulas of acknowledgment which arrived in return were preserved as the
+rarest treasures.
+
+And in fulness of time all this corresponding and presenting produced a
+glorious result. Elijah Prowley, of Foxden, was chosen an Honorary
+Member of the Royal Society of British Sextons,--an association than
+which there is none more mouldy in the whole world. Certainly, this was
+glory enough for any Western genealogist,--yet Fortune had a higher
+gratification to bestow. For, in His Worship, the Most Primordial, the
+High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch of all Sextons, Colonel
+Prowley soon discovered a relative of his own. Sir Joseph Barley, a
+rubicund old knight, and the Most Primordial in question, after an
+elaborate investigation and counter-investigation, a jockeying of the
+wits of very old women, and a raid into divers registers, scrolls,
+schedules, archives, and the like,--Sir Joseph Barley, I say, turned out
+to be _a long-lost cousin_. "Barley," it appeared, had anciently been
+written "Parley," and "Praley," and even "Proley." Having arrived at
+this point, Sir Joseph conjectured that his ancestor Proley might have
+dropped a _w_ out of his name, and the Colonel conjectured that his
+progenitor, the Puritan, might have put one into his. Now it did not
+matter which was right, for, as was convincingly underscored in one of
+my letters from Foxden, "_upon either hypothesis_, the relationship of
+the Barleys of Old England to the Prowleys of New England was positively
+established."
+
+And so Sir Joseph Barley was dead!
+
+Although shocked, when the fact of his demise was abruptly announced in
+the familiar chirography of my old friend, I was unable to prevent a
+certain sense of the grotesque from mingling with the idea. A portrait
+in pastel, which hung over the chimney-piece in the Colonel's study, had
+given me a thorough acquaintance with the outward Sir Joseph. That
+brief, but bulky figure, clad in official robes as High Senior
+Governour, that weighty seal of the Sextons which dangled from the fob,
+those impressive spectacles with the glasses cut in parallelograms,
+above all, that full-blown face blandly contemplating our American
+rudeness like a smiling Phoebus from British skies,--how could all
+these things, which had so individualized the natural body of Sir Joseph
+Barley, be dispensed with in its spiritual counterpart? No answer to
+such question,--only the grim facts, that one brother more had "gone
+over to the majority," and that the living minority got on very
+comfortably without him. Comfortably? Ay, truly; for in the very letter
+that brought the news I was begged to spend the approaching Fast-Day in
+Foxden, just as if nothing had happened. The season, so I was assured,
+was unusually advanced, and already the flavor of spring was perceptible
+in the air; moreover, the different congregations in town were to unite
+in services at the Orthodox Church, and, by extraordinary favor, one of
+the Colonel's Boston correspondents, no less a man than the
+distinguished Dr. Burge, was to preach the sermon.
+
+A noble specimen of our New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held
+the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their
+faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last
+transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from aerial
+or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His
+parishioners supplied him with a wood-fire, a saddle-horse, and, it was
+maliciously said, a boxing-master; and he, on his part,--so ran the idle
+rumor of the street,--covenanted never to call upon them for cod-liver
+oil, Bourbon whiskey, or a tour to Europe. In his majestic presence
+there was a total impression sanative to body and soul. The full powers
+of manner and tone, of pause and emphasis, were at his command. He would
+rise in a shingled meeting-house as effective as choir, organ, and
+sacerdotal vestments in full cathedral-service. I was glad to learn that
+this stalwart servant of the Word would be at Foxden. He had formerly
+been well acquainted with the Reverend Charles Clifton, late pastor of a
+church in that place. He might deal wisely with the evil intelligence,
+or, possibly, the infatuated egotism, which controlled that unfortunate
+man. Dr. Burge would possess his soul in calmness in presence of the
+singular epidemic which was then running through Foxden, as it had
+previously run through, and run out of, other river-towns.
+
+And now it has come in my way to speak of that strange murmuring of
+phantoms and their attendant seers, psychometers, and dactylomancers,
+which in these latter days has revived among us. And what I may have to
+say about what is called Spiritualism will reflect actual observations.
+I do not forget that to the advocacy of the "New Dispensation" are
+devoted many men of earnestness and a few of ability. It is possible
+that the facts they build upon may render mine exceptional and
+unimportant. What is here set down is but a trifling contribution to
+that mass of human testimony and human opinion from which the truth must
+be finally elicited.
+
+Mr. Stellato had been celestially commissioned to Barnum the spirits in
+their Foxden exhibitions. Two years previously this gentleman was to be
+seen at the head of a fanatical and tumultuary offshoot from a cause the
+most humane and noble. He had done whatever his slender abilities
+permitted to bring into discredit large-hearted and devoted men and
+women whom history will honorably remember as New-England Reformers. But
+to lead anything on a large scale, without a continual winding-up by his
+companion, the fibrous Mrs. Romulus, was beyond the crassitude of
+Stellato's pursy nature. Now it had come to pass that this acidulated
+lady, essaying fresh flurries of progression, discovering higher
+passional affinities and new duties of demolition, proving that in
+Church and State every brick was loose and every timber rotten,
+testifying ever to the existence of a certain harmonial mortar by which
+the rubbish of a demolished civilization could be rebuilt into
+unexceptionable forms,--it happened that this woman, having towered for
+one proud moment at the very apex of her mission, slipped suddenly into
+the Romish communion, and was no more seen of men. Stellato, perceiving
+that the peculiar machinery be had been taught to manage was now out of
+repair and impracticable, looked about for some new invention whereby to
+gain a livelihood from the credulity of his neighbors. "The spirits,"
+then at the height of their profit and renown, were adapted to his
+purpose. A blank and vacant mind was freely offered to any power of
+earth or air which would condescend to enter and possess it. And so Mr.
+Stellato, with his three parts knavery and two parts delusion, became a
+popular and successful ghost-monger.
+
+The parsonage had been closed since Charles Clifton terminated his
+connection with the parish two years before. The newest lights of the
+Liberal persuasion, fledglings from divinity-schools, youths of every
+possible variety of creed and no creed, had by turns occupied the vacant
+pulpit. The Gospel vibrated at all points between the interpretations of
+Calvin and Strauss. The congregation grew more and more critical, and
+could agree upon no candidate for settlement. They demanded the
+respectability of belief with the showy talents of skepticism,--an
+impossible combination, at least for a parish which offered only eight
+hundred dollars and a decrepit house. At length Colonel Prowley took a
+pew in the Orthodox Church;--it was a temporary arrangement, he said, to
+be terminated whenever a settled minister should be provided for the
+First Parish.
+
+The Reverend Charles Clifton seldom left the rooms which he had taken in
+a farmer's family on the outskirts of the town. We have seen how this
+man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional
+and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a
+mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton
+possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was
+full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other
+men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them.
+The deep passion for metaphysical knowledge, which in his youth had been
+kindled, was stilled, but never overcome. Wifeless, childless, he was
+put under no bonds to struggle with the world. He knew the coldness of
+the church in which he had been ordained to minister,--the hard and
+dreary lives of those whom he had undertaken to illumine. But he made
+the fatal mistake--inexcusable, it would seem, in a man of his liberal
+nurture--of supposing that this world's evil was owing to the absence of
+right opinion, and not of right feeling. It is to be feared that it was
+not principle, but only a paroxysm of cowardice, which caused Clifton to
+bury Vannelle's legacy in the Mather Safe. At all events, the minister
+found himself unable to dismiss a certain thin and impalpable fantasy
+which lingered behind that ponderous speculation of an all-embracing
+philosophy. For the past two years he had fitfully sought, or rather
+persuaded himself that he sought, some clue through the sad labyrinth of
+his fate. He had indulged in the most morbid conditions of his physical
+organism; there was neither steadiness in his purpose nor firmness in
+his action. He yearned for that proximity to hidden things, which, if
+not forbidden to all men, yet is dangerous to most men. At length he
+succeeded in freeing his soul from the weight of conscious intellectual
+life which had become too heavy for it to bear. And while the Foxden
+people were wondering about the occupation of a late pastor in one of
+their churches, and inquiring of each other whether he would again speak
+before them, their gossiping solicitude was suddenly set at rest.
+Printed show-bills were posted about the streets: "Grand Festival of
+Spiritualists at the Town Hall." "The Reverend Charles Clifton will
+speak"--a line of largest type gloated upon the scandal--"IN A
+TRANCE-STATE."
+
+"I really ought to apologize," said Colonel Prowley, upon opening the
+hall-door for my admittance, on the afternoon of the second Wednesday in
+April, and this after repeated summons had been sounded by the brazen
+knocker,--"I ought to apologize for keeping you here so long; but there
+has been so much knocking about the house of late, and our cook and
+housemaid having turned out to be such excellent mediums, taking just as
+much interest in their circle down-stairs as we do in ours in the
+parlor, and then Mrs. Colfodder being so positive that it was either Sir
+Joseph Barley or Roger Williams,--though I am sure neither of them ever
+knocked half so satisfactorily before, and besides"----
+
+"My dear Sir," interrupted I, "no excuse is necessary. I have
+seen enough of 'the spirits' to know how they put aside all
+conventionalities. I should have accompanied Dr. Burge to the hotel, had
+I anticipated disturbing the circle which, I infer, is at present in
+session."
+
+"You would have grieved me very much by doing so," rejoined the kind old
+gentleman. "Dr. Burge dines with me to-morrow, and I confess--not yet
+calling myself a convert to these miracles which are now vouchsafed in
+Foxden--it would not be amiss to rid my premises of the amiable
+magicians congregated in my parlor before a minister were invited to
+enter. But a layman, as I take it, might witness these thaumaturgical
+matters without scandal,--nay, perchance you may help me to that
+wholesome credence in their reality which my celestial visitants so
+unceasingly demand."
+
+Colonel Prowley was in the state of mind not unusual to many
+well-meaning, unoccupied people, when this modern necromancy was thrust
+upon them by those pecuniarily or socially interested in its advocacy.
+The upheaval to the air of that dark inward nature which is ever working
+in us,--the startling proof of that loudly proclaimed, faintly realized
+truth, that this mind, so pervading every fibre of the body, is yet
+separate in its essence,--the novel gratification of the petty vanities
+and petty questionings which beset undecided men,--what wonder that
+persons not accustomed to sound analysis of evidence should be beguiled
+by these subtilest adaptations to their conditions, and hold dalliance
+with the feeble shades that imposture or enthusiasm vended about the
+towns? Historical personages--a nerveless mimicry of the conventional
+stage-representation of them--stalked the Colonel's parlor. Departed
+friends, Indians _a discretion_, local celebrities, Deacon Golly, who in
+the year '90 took the ten first shares in the Wrexford Turnpike, the
+very Pelatiah Brimble from whom "Brimble's Corner" had taken its name,
+the identical Timson forever immortal in "Timson's Common,"--these
+defunct worthies were audibly, visibly, or tangibly present, pecking at
+great subjects in ghostly feebleness, swimming in Tupperic dilutions of
+cheapest wisdom, and finally inducing in their patrons strange
+derangements of mind and body.
+
+The circle, which was very select, consisted of three highly susceptible
+ladies and Stellato as medium-in-chief. Miss Turligood, a sort of
+Oroveso to the Druidical chorus, was a muscular spinster, fierce and
+forty, sporting steel spectacles, a frizette of the most scrupulous
+honesty, and a towering comb which formed what the landscape-gardeners
+call "an object" in the distance. Next this commanding lady, with fat
+hands sprawled upon the table, sat Mrs. Colfodder, widow, according to
+the flesh, of a respectable Foxden grocer. By later spiritual
+communications, however, it appeared that matters stood very
+differently; for no sooner had the departed Colfodder looked about him a
+little in the world to come than he proceeded to contract marriage with
+Queen Elizabeth of England, thereby leaving his mortal relict quite free
+to receive the addresses of the late Lord Byron, whose proposals were of
+the most honorable as well as amatory character. Miss Branly, by far the
+most pleasing of the lady-patronesses, was a fragile, stove-dried
+mantua-maker,--and, truly, it seemed something like poetic justice to
+recompense her depressed existence with the satisfactions of a material
+heaven full of marryings and givings in marriage.
+
+"Will Sir Joseph tip for us again?" inquired Miss Turligood, with her
+eyes fixed upon a crack in the mahogany table. "Will he? Will he not?
+Will he?"
+
+Sir Joseph vouchsafed no answer.
+
+"Hark! wasn't that a rap?" cried Stellato, in a husky whisper.
+
+Here every one pricked an ear towards the table.
+
+"Doctor Franklin, is that you?"
+
+"The Doctor promised to be present to give a scientific and
+philosophical view of these communications," parenthesized the
+interrogator.
+
+"Doctor Franklin, is that _you_?"
+
+A faint creaking is audible.
+
+"Byron's sign, as I'm a living woman!" ejaculated the Widow Colfodder.
+
+"Her spiritual partner and guardian-angel," explained Miss
+Turligood,--and this for my satisfaction as the last-comer.
+
+Direct examination by the widow:--
+
+"Have you brought your patent lyre here to-night?"
+
+For the enlightenment of the company:--
+
+"He played the lyre so beautiful on earth, that when he got to the
+spheres a committee gave him a golden one, with all the modern
+improvements."
+
+Question concerning the lyre repeated. A mysterious rubbing interpreted
+as an affirmative reply.
+
+"Have you brought Pocahontas with you? (she 'most always comes with
+him)--and if so, can she kiss me to-night?"
+
+The table is exceedingly doubtful.
+
+"Could she kiss Colonel Prowley, or even pull his hair a little?"
+
+No certainty of either.
+
+"Can she kiss Miss Turligood?"
+
+The table is satisfied that it couldn't be done.
+
+"Let me try her," urged Stellato, with the confidence of an expert; then
+in seductive tones,--
+
+"Couldn't Pocahontas kiss Miss Branly, if all the lights were put out?"
+
+Pocahontas thought it highly probable that she could.
+
+Here some interesting badgering. Miss Branly declined being kissed in
+the dark. Miss Turligood thought it would be very satisfactory, if she
+would, and couldn't see why any one should object to it. She (Miss
+Turligood) would willingly be kissed in the dark, or in the light, in
+furtherance of scientific investigation.
+
+Stellato suggested a compromise.
+
+"Might not the kissing be done through a medium?"
+
+At first the table thought it couldn't, but afterwards relented, and
+thought it might.
+
+"Would Pocahontas appoint that medium?"
+
+She would.
+
+"Should the alphabet be called?"
+
+It should not.
+
+"Would the table tip towards the medium indicated?"
+
+It could not be done.
+
+"Should somebody call over the names of all mediums present, and would
+the table tip at the right one?"
+
+Ah, that was it!
+
+"I suppose you and I have no share in this Gift Enterprise," whispered
+Colonel Prowley.
+
+"Order! order!" shouted Miss Turligood, glancing in our direction with
+great severity. "This general conversation cannot be permitted. We are
+about to have a most interesting manifestation.--Pocahontas, do you wish
+me to call over the names?"
+
+Pocahontas did not object.
+
+"Very well, then, you will tip when I come to the name of the medium
+through whom you consent to kiss Miss Sarah Branly?"
+
+Pocahontas certainly would.
+
+"Is it Mrs. Colfodder?"
+
+No reply.
+
+"Is it I, Eugenia Turligood?"
+
+No, it certainly was not.
+
+"Well, then, I suppose it must be Mr. Stellato!"
+
+Here the table was violently convulsed, as if somebody were pulling it
+very hard upon Mr. Stellato's side, and somebody else holding it with
+rigid firmness upon the other.
+
+"_Is_ it Mr. Stellato?"
+
+Convulsion repeated.
+
+"I don't think you stopped long enough at Mrs. Colfodder's name,"
+interposed Miss Branly. "I am sure the table was going to move, if you
+had given it time."
+
+"Nothing easier than to try again," responded Miss Turligood. "Is it
+Mrs. Colfodder?"
+
+This time the table fairly sprang into the lap of the lady indicated.
+
+And so that worthy widow arose and saluted--or rather Pocahontas,
+through her mediumship, arose and saluted--Miss Sarah Branly. And the
+skeptic will please take notice that this extraordinary manifestation is
+neither enlarged nor magnified, but that it actually happened precisely
+as is here set down.
+
+After this, Mr. Stellato, being put under inspiration, delivered a
+discursive homily upon the "New Dispensation" which was at present
+vouchsafed to the citizens of Foxden. He testified to the great relief
+of getting clear of the "Old Theology,"--meaning thereby such
+interpretations of Scripture as are held by the mass of our New-England
+churches. Moreover, he would announce his personal satisfaction in
+having, under spiritual guidance, eradicated every vestige of belief in
+hell,--a circumstance upon which, it is needless to say, that a
+gentleman of his profession might be honestly congratulated. With a
+view, as I could not help thinking, to my peculiar necessities, Stellato
+finally enlarged upon what he termed "the principle of the thing," or,
+as he otherwise phrased it, "a scientific explanation of the way the
+spirits worked mediums,"--"_sperrets_" and "_meejums_" according to
+celestial pronunciation, but I am loath to disturb the carnal
+orthography. This philosophical exposition, drawled forth in
+interminable sentences, was a dark doctrine to the uninitiated. There
+was a good deal about "Essences," which, at times, seemed to relate to
+the perfumery vended in the fancy-department of apothecaries' shops, and
+then again to some obscure matters of "Zones," "Interiors," "Magnetic
+Relations," and the like. The central revelation, if I remember rightly,
+had to do with a sort of putty, by which, according to the Stellato
+cosmogony, Chaos had been stuck together into a Universe. This adhesive
+composition was known as "Detached Vitalized Electricity." And having
+got upon this sounding title, which conveyed no meaning whatever to the
+"undeveloped" understanding, Stellato was profuse in windy talk. This
+Detached Vitalized Electricity, spread out over space, connected the
+parts of all systems; it appeared at that very instant in the form of
+"power" about Miss Turligood's head; in short, it diluted all stray bits
+of modern rhetoric, all exploded feats of ancient magic, into the
+thinnest of spiritual gruel, which was to supersede the strong meat upon
+which the Puritan walked before his Maker.
+
+Somebody summoned the eminent Twynintuft. Like every spirit that was
+ever called for, this ex-elocutionist happened to be within a few
+seconds' flight of the circle, and had nothing in the world to do but to
+swoop down and tip as long as the company could possibly endure him.
+
+The following information was elicited by affirmative or negative
+replies to the interrogatories of those present:--
+
+The spirit communicating was Twynintuft, grandfather to Mrs. Widesworth.
+Was unable to give his Christian name. Thought Mrs. Colfodder's lungs in
+a healthy condition. Could not undertake to move the table when no hands
+were upon it. If the room were made totally dark, would attempt that
+curious experiment. Was unable to give the maiden name of his earthly
+wife. Thought Mr. Stellato was a healing-medium of great power. Had been
+something of a Root-Doctor when in the body, and would gladly prescribe
+through that gentleman for the cure of all diseases. Considered mineral
+medicines destructive to the vital principle. Doctor Dastick, being a
+drug-doctor, would not be recognized by any medical association in the
+spheres. Would give any information about the fixed stars. The
+inhabitants of the Milky Way telegraphed to each other by means of the
+Detached Vitalized Electricity. Also, they bottled up the same to cure
+humors. Would privately impart their recipe to Mr. Stellato. It could
+not be afforded upon this earth at less than three dollars a bottle.
+Would, however, authorize an exception in favor of clergymen, when they
+gave certificates of cures. _The spirits did not recognize
+Fast-Day_,--it was a remnant of the Old Mythological Religion. Demanded
+further investigation, and promised greater marvels in future.
+
+Here Miss Turligood became violently convulsed, and, having slapped the
+table some forty times or more, seized a pencil and began to write:--
+
+     "DEAR PROWLEY,--Surrounded by a bank of
+     silver-tunicked attendants, I hover near you. The atmosphere is
+     redolent of costly herbs, which, with the well-known rotary
+     motion of the earth, impart density and spacefulness to our
+     spheral persons: this is the philosophy of our presence. Many
+     shining friends, supported upon fluted pillars, are with you
+     this evening. These grieve at your lack of faith, and flap
+     gold-bespattered wings in unison. Spherically yours,
+
+     "SIR JOSEPH BARLEY."
+
+"Why does he sign himself _Sir_?" inquired Colonel Prowley, rather taken
+aback at the sudden termination of this exquisite composition.
+
+It was evidently an oversight, for the medium's hand erased the
+offending title.
+
+"When did Sir Joseph die?" I ventured to ask.
+
+"That I cannot tell you," replied his late correspondent. "I have heard
+nothing from him for several months. When he last wrote, he was
+suffering under a severe influenza which must have terminated fatally.
+But why not ask _him_ the question?"
+
+"That is just my purpose.--Sir Joseph Barley, can you give me the date
+of your death?"
+
+"It is hard for spirits to give numbers," said Mr. Stellato.
+
+"It is sometimes done by tips," quoth Miss Turligood.
+
+I pressed the demand, and, after much cajoling and counting, a certain
+day of March was fixed upon.
+
+"Can you give me the place?"
+
+I was instructed to call over the names of such foreign cities as I
+might remember, and assured that Sir Joseph would tip at the right one.
+
+It turned out to be "London."
+
+"And now, Sir Joseph, could you oblige me with the name of the physician
+who attended your last sickness?"
+
+But no sooner had I propounded this final query than Mr. Stellato
+declared his consciousness of a skeptical influence in the company which
+would go far to impede other manifestations. Where people were not
+harmonial, he explained, the Detached Vitalized Electricity being unable
+to unite with the Imponderable Magnetic Fluid given off by mediums,
+satisfactory results could not be obtained.
+
+"But we have at least obtained this satisfaction," said I, addressing
+Colonel Prowley: "Sir Joseph has committed himself about the day and
+place of his decease. You must soon hear from some member of his family.
+If these particulars have been correctly given, there will be, at least,
+the beginning of evidence upon which to establish his identity."
+
+Mrs. Colfodder was so shocked with the perversity of unbelief which she
+detected in this harmless remark, that, nudging Miss Branly, she
+solemnly arose and moved to break up the circle for the night. And as it
+was already past nine o'clock, no violent objection was made to the
+proposition.
+
+"The circle will meet in this place to-morrow morning at eight o'clock,
+for the pursuance of further investigations," proclaimed Miss Turligood,
+in sonorous accents.
+
+"Fast-Day, Madam," mildly suggested Colonel Prowley.
+
+"The spirits do not recognize Fast-Day. Tomorrow at eight o'clock. In
+this place. Let every medium be punctual. It is to be _hoped_ that the
+_conditions_ will _then_ be _favorable_!"
+
+This latter aspiration, with its feminine redundancy of emphasis, was
+cast in my direction, as Miss Turligood swept haughtily from the room.
+
+Her final exit, however, was neither curt nor in any way effective. For
+it was no easy matter to gather up the bags, parcels, shawls, and other
+devices which the good lady had brought with her and scattered about the
+entry. One India-rubber shoe in particular eluded our search, till I was
+ready to admit the supposition that the spirits had carried it off, as
+entirely reasonable and satisfactory. A good-natured Irishman, servant
+to Miss Turligood, who had come with a lantern to see her home, at
+length discovered this missing bit of apparel upon Miss Branly's
+foot,--that medium, as it appeared, having in a fit of abstraction
+appropriated three. Finally the lantern glimmered down the gravel-walk,
+and Mr. Stellato, with a lady upon each arm, was persuaded to follow it.
+It was waking from a nightmare to get rid of them.
+
+"Over at last!" exclaimed Miss Prowley, when we returned to the
+drawing-room. She had been sitting in silence in an obscure corner, and
+I had scarcely realized her presence. "Over at last! and of all
+fatiguing and unprofitable employments that the folly of man ever
+devised, this trifling with spirits is certainly the chief."
+
+"Nay, my dear," urged the brother, in his placid way, "these good people
+who have fastened themselves upon us seem so anxious to continue the
+investigation that I cannot find it in my heart to refuse them. I _did_
+wish, to be sure, that we might have our Fast-Day in quiet; but Miss
+Turligood, who knows much more about the matter than we do, thinks the
+spirits would not like it, if we did, and so--although we will absent
+ourselves from the sitting long enough to go to church--we must really
+make the best of it, and receive the circle."
+
+"You speak like a believer, Colonel Prowley," I said.
+
+"No, not quite that," replied the old gentleman,--"yet, truly, I
+sometimes hardly know why I am not. The knockings alone are quite
+inexplicable; and when it comes to a fiery hand ringing the dinner-bell,
+which Stellato can show in the dark----Besides, there are the
+communications from distinguished characters, many of them so very
+important and interesting. To be sure, my poor cousin Barley did not do
+himself justice this evening, though some of his ideas were very
+poetical; but, really, the other night, when he told us how much the
+Royal Sextons were thought of in the spheres, and repeated that very
+high compliment which Thomas Herne paid to my family-history, it all
+seemed so marvellous, and yet so natural, that I could not help
+subscribing pretty handsomely to the cause."
+
+"And one of the privileges that your subscription has gone to purchase I
+am yet to enjoy. Dr. Burge wished me to visit, in his company, your
+former pastor, Mr. Clifton,--and we must look for him, as I see, at the
+Spiritualists' Festival in the Town Hall."
+
+"Sad! sad!" cried Colonel Prowley, thoughtfully chewing upon my remark.
+"It is an abiding shame for a minister of the gospel to meddle with
+these things, except, possibly, in the way of exorcism. Truly, a deep
+humiliation has fallen upon the town."
+
+And the chagrin of this respected gentleman was wholly sincere. The
+Puritanical distinction between clergy and laity had scarcely faded in
+his mind. The pastor of the First Church had belonged to a cherished
+class,--a class whose moral and intellectual consequence must be
+maintained by avoidance of all dangerous inquiries, common interests,
+and secular amusements. A minister attending a Jenny-Lind
+Charity-Concert in a play-house, or leading armed men in the most sacred
+cause for which human blood might be shed,--what offences would these
+have been to this titular Colonel of Foxden, who had won his honors by a
+six-months' finery and dining as aide-de-camp to some forgotten
+Governor!
+
+"I fear I shall not be back before you wish to close the house."
+
+"Never mind, you remember the old arrangement: door-key under the
+scraper,--light burning in the drawing-room."
+
+With hearty thanks I went forth to keep my appointment with Dr. Burge.
+
+
+II.
+
+The narrative here takes us to a portion of the shadowy perturbation
+which any who have turned these pages as a fictitious rendering of the
+grotesque in experience will do well to omit. Only a mortifying, though
+perchance salutary, sense of human infirmity comes from beholding one
+set over the people as intercessor and counsellor struggling in the
+meshes of that snare which the Enemy had spread for the undisciplined
+and wandering multitude. No, not even struggling now. That Clifton had
+fought through solitary days against the wretched enervation which
+invited him, I had reason to know. But he had dared to tamper with the
+normal functions of mind and body, to try fantastic tricks with that
+mysterious agent through which the healthy will commands the organism.
+And when the mental disorder, mocked at and preached against in happier
+years, at length ran through Foxden, the morbid condition of his system
+was powerless to resist the contagion.
+
+And let us not overlook the fact that in these manifestations there was
+to be found a palpable reality, a positive marvel, well calculated to
+lay hold of a skeptic like Clifton. His early associations with the
+Transcendentalists had undermined his faith in all popular presentations
+of Christianity. But his peculiarly emotional nature could never dwell
+in that haziness of opinion upon august subjects in which sounder men
+among the brethren made out to live cheerfully and to work vigorously.
+While Clifton madly sought a position of intelligence and satisfaction
+beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and
+stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For
+with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less
+than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess.
+And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every
+graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity
+had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete
+heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, which
+the best minds of Pagan civilization found no difficulty in pronouncing
+a delusion and a lie.
+
+I knew Dr. Burge for one of those most useful instructors who will
+patiently examine with the intellect what the instinct teaches them to
+condemn. He seldom helped the doctrine he assailed by denying it such
+facts as were true and such attractions as were real. He had cheerfully
+accepted whatever reproach came to him from frequenting circles in the
+attempt to see the mystery from the believers' point of view. I was not
+surprised at finding him upon one of the back benches in the Town Hall.
+
+"Nothing noteworthy," he said, as I joined him. "Only women have
+spoken,--the excited nervous system careering without restraint,--no
+spirits yet."
+
+"They pretend inspiration, I suppose."
+
+"Oh, yes; and it is not surprising that semi-educated people, ignorant
+of analogous phenomena, should take the _omne ignotum pro magnifico_."
+
+"Yet you are said to be a believer in the possession which the mediums
+claim?"
+
+"Certainly," replied Dr. Burge, "and to just this extent:--I do not
+doubt the possibility of intercourse between man and the lower grades of
+immaterial life, and I am willing to adopt this hypothesis to explain
+any occurrence where the facts demand it. That, in rare cases, such may
+be the most simple and natural supposition, I readily admit. The
+ordinary performances, however, may be accounted for without calling in
+god or demon to untie the knot."
+
+I remarked that Mr. Clifton was not to be seen upon the platform.
+
+"He is kept out of the way until the last,--in the Selectmen's Room, as
+I am told, and alone."
+
+"I fear all appeal would now be in vain; yet, Sir, I would not have you
+spare an effort to awaken him to the peril of his course."
+
+"Let us go to him, then," assented Dr. Burge.
+
+Upon common occasions, the Selectmen's Room failed to suggest any
+exceptional character in its occupants. It was a narrow, ill-lighted,
+unventilated apartment, bitter with the after-taste of taxes,
+prophetically flavorous of taxes yet to be. Stove-accommodation beyond
+the criticism of the most fastidious salamander, a liberal sprinkling of
+sand with a view to the ruminant necessities of the town-patricians, two
+or three stiff armchairs with straws protruding from their well-worn
+cushions, intolerant benches for unofficial occupancy,--altogether a
+gloomy aggregate result of the diverse ideals of social well-being to be
+found among the inhabitants of Foxden. But now I recognized a new
+element in this familiar chamber; a strange contagion hung about the
+walls; a something which imparted delicate edge to the nervous system
+was perceptible in the dry heat of the air. Near an oracular table,
+which bore evidence of recent manipulation, stood the Reverend Charles
+Clifton: others had evidently been with him before our entrance; he was
+now alone. An oil-lamp sputtered feebly in the corner. The stove-devil
+glared at us through his one glazed eye, and puffed out his mephitic
+welcome as I shut the door.
+
+"Clifton, my old friend!" exclaimed Dr. Burge.
+
+The person addressed raised his head, half closed his eyes, as one who
+endeavors to fix objects which are flitting before him. It seemed
+necessary to withdraw his inward gaze from some delicious dazzlement of
+dream-land. At last he spoke slowly and with effort.
+
+"Burge, you here?--and one of us?"
+
+"Heaven forbid!" cried my companion. "I but look upon these things for
+my own warning, and in the way of my duty as teacher to those who might
+be disposed to tamper with unknown powers, within or without."
+
+"Say, rather, to melt the iron links which gyve soul to body," said
+Clifton, in constrained articulation, through which a moaning undertone
+seemed ever trying to be heard. "Say, rather, to produce a finer
+exaltation than wine, opium, or hashish,--for it is most sweet to
+subject the animal organism to the control of spirit-wills."
+
+"A grateful doctrine to those who dare to substitute a morbid
+receptivity for an active endeavor!"
+
+"It is to soothe the sense-powers, so that others may use them to give
+us intimations far beyond their common capacity."
+
+"'_I_ keep under my body and bring it into subjection,'" quoted Dr.
+Burge, emphasizing the personal pronoun. "The Apostle declares that his
+own immortal individuality alone controls his members,--and why? 'lest,
+when I have preached unto others, I myself should become a castaway.'"
+
+The Doctor delivered the last sentence with rich cathedral-emphasis, and
+with the full unction of priestly authority.
+
+Clifton, or whatever vague and dusky power controlled him, cowered at
+the rebuke. The nervous energy with which he had experimented, or which
+he had left passive for the experiments of others, seemed withdrawn from
+his frame.
+
+Dr. Burge perceived his advantage, and continued:--
+
+"I speak to you, my fallen brother, as I cannot speak to the foolish
+people who grope in this miasma of delusion. Silly women, yielding to
+the natural vanity of their sex, may mistake hysterics for inspiration.
+Vacillating and vacant men may seek a new sensation by encouraging a
+revival of the demoniacal epidemics of heathendom. But you, who have
+been a preacher of the gospel, though, as I must now more than ever
+believe, after a devitalized and perverted method,--you, to leave the
+honest work of a dweller upon earth, to chatter of immensity, to weaken
+the brain that it may no longer separate the true from the
+false!--believe me, Clifton, you have been bought by the shallowest
+promises which the King of Evil ever exchanged for a sacred and
+inviolable soul."
+
+"You have spoken according to your business," replied Mr. Clifton,
+impatiently. "You, who begin by assuming the impossibility of
+spirit-intercourse since Bible times, with what candor can you examine
+the facts we build upon?"
+
+"I make no such assumption," was the rejoinder. "Has it not been
+foretold that 'in the latter times some shall depart from the faith,
+giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils'? Have we not
+aforetime been vexed with them in this very New England? For I almost
+justify Mather's words, when he stigmatizes the necromancy of his day as
+'a terrible Plague of Evil Angels,' or, in still plainer speech, as 'a
+prodigious descent of devils upon divers places near the centre of this
+Province.' And how better can we characterize this confused and
+distracting babblement which gives no good gift to man?"
+
+"It has given him this," exclaimed Clifton, advancing towards Dr. Burge,
+and seeming for a few moments to resume his old personality,--"it has
+given him the knowledge of a life to come! You think it, preach it,
+believe it,--but you do not _know_ it. A susceptibility to impressions
+from the inmost characters of men has been mine through life. It has
+been given me to perceive what facts and feelings most deeply adhered in
+the mental consciousness. And I tell you, Burge, ministers both of your
+communion and of mine repeat the old words of sublimest assurance, sway
+congregations with descriptions bright or lurid of future worlds, yet
+behind all this glowing speech and blatant confidence there has
+lurked,--oh, will you deny it?--there has lurked a grovelling doubt of
+man's immortality."
+
+"I will not deny it," said Dr. Burge, with slow solemnity. "Sinners that
+we are, how can we ask that faith be at no moment confused by the
+thousand cries of infidelity which our profession requires us to answer?
+Let my soul be chilled by transient shades of skepticism, rather than
+dote in a blind and puerile credulity! If I am not at all times equally
+penetrated by the great fact of man's conscious immortality, it is
+because of my undesert. A way to _know_ of the doctrine has been
+revealed: it is by doing the will of the Father: who of us has fulfilled
+the condition? But I can meet you on lower ground, and declare, that,
+according to our human observation, it is not well for man to _know_ the
+destiny of his being in all its details until the trials and victories
+of life have taught him to turn such knowledge to elevating use. It is
+the deplorable sinfulness of our nature which seeks to obtain without
+deserving, to possess the end and despise the appointed means."
+
+Some reply would doubtless have been made to these pertinent
+considerations, had not the confused tramp of a committee been heard at
+the door. The professors of the "New Dispensation" had come to conduct
+the Reverend Charles Clifton to their platform. The distinguished
+convert shuddered, as if affected by some incorporeal presence, and
+suffered himself to be led away.
+
+"I can do nothing more," murmured Dr. Burge; "and why should I stay to
+hear diluted rhetoric, or inflated commonplace, from lips which, however
+unworthily, once proclaimed the simplicity of the gospel?"
+
+"Because it is not well to prejudge what may offer some possible variety
+in this credence," I ventured to suggest.
+
+"You are right; we will stay."
+
+A murmur of applause followed the appearance of Clifton upon the
+platform,--yet it was only a murmur; for the flock, long pastured upon
+delicate delusions, received as matter of course whatever shepherding
+chance offered. Did not the face of the medium wear an expression of
+earthly disappointment at this slender recognition? Could it be that
+there was needed the hot-house heat of a carnal "success" to favor this
+exquisite flowering of the spirit? Can we suppose that this whole matter
+was no other than some Yankee patent to avoid the awful solitude in
+which each human soul must enter into relations with the unseen?
+
+Slowly and in dreamy heaviness the discourse began. The inspirational
+claims seemed to lie in the manifest improbability of a man of Clifton's
+cultivation being so dull and diffuse in a natural condition. Yet, as
+the message wore on, it cannot be denied that a strange influence was at
+work. The words followed each other with greater fluency and in richer
+abundance. The meaning, to be sure, was still vague enough; and whenever
+some commonplace truth or plausibility protruded from the general
+washiness, it was seized upon and beaten and stretched to the last
+degree of tenuity. Phrases upon phrases of gorgeous dreaminess. A
+soothing delight,--yet such delight as only the bodily senses demanded.
+A joyful deliverance from the bondage of intellectual life. Hints that
+our human consciousness of sin was a vain delusion from which the
+"developed" man was happily delivered. "Come up here," said the
+preacher, in substance, "and escape from this moral accountability which
+sits so heavily upon you. Here is a sensuous paradise, sweet and
+debilitating, offering varied delights to the eclecticism of personal
+taste. All angular and harsh things may be dissolved in copious floods
+of words, and washed into a ravishing, enervating Universe."
+
+An hour--two hours--passed. The air was thick and poisonous. Attention
+had been strained to the utmost. Other things were to be noted by those
+accustomed to regard mental disorder from a physiological point of view.
+
+And now, by some abnormal mode of cerebral activity, the trance-speaker
+won strange sympathies from his auditors. Certain faculties in Clifton
+had reached an expansion not permitted to the healthy man. A plastic
+power came from him and took the impress of other minds. Old experiences
+groped out of forgotten corners and haunted the discourse. At one time
+it seemed as if all that was potential in the culture of the medium or
+his audience might be stimulated into specious blossom. Phenomena were
+exhibited which transcended the conscious powers of the human
+soul,--nay, which testified of its latent ability to work without
+organic conditions. Our unemployed brain-organs, as Hamilton and others
+have clearly proved, are always employing themselves. And from this
+self-employment--or was it demon-employment?--there swept through the
+consciousness a vague delirium of excitement. In all that assembly a
+single pulse beat feverish measures. The climax was reached. Without was
+the soft spring night veiling the scarcely touched range of knowledge
+and beauty offered to the healthy energies of man; within were dazed
+wanderers in a region of morbid emotion, seeking to intensify the colors
+of Nature, willing to waste precious vitality in conjurations of the
+dead.
+
+The wretched thraldom was over,--and what had it left?
+
+An exquisite sensitiveness of the nerves of sense, imagination exalted,
+memory goaded, reason and judgment overthrown.
+
+
+III.
+
+In his Fast-Day sermon Dr. Burge delivered himself of much weighty
+testimony against those thaumaturgical incantations of heathenism which
+had been revived among us. With his splendor of clerical pause and
+emphasis he read the denunciations against a sinful nation to which the
+prophet Isaiah has affixed the awful words,--"Saith the Lord, the Lord
+of Hosts."
+
+"And they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one
+against his neighbor, city against city, and kingdom against kingdom."
+
+Here the preacher's dark eyes left the sacred volume, and seemed to gaze
+upon some coming struggle in which the sins of the people would meet a
+bloody retribution. Then, referring to the page, he pronounced with
+bitterness of holy indignation the prophetic curse which was that day
+fulfilled in our cherished New England.
+
+"And they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that
+have familiar spirits, and to the wizards."
+
+The sermon made no more visible impression upon the sinful portion of
+the congregation than homilies against novel and pleasant indulgences
+are wont to do.
+
+"The Apostle was right, after all," said Colonel Prowley, quoting the
+text upon the meeting-house steps; "we _should_ 'try the spirits.'"
+
+"No objection to that," said the post-master; "but here's Dr. Burge
+tells us to keep out of their way, and call them all humbugs, without
+trying them at all."
+
+The gentleman referred to joined our party upon the meeting-house
+green, and accompanied us home.
+
+As we entered the house, our ears were saluted by a sort of scuffling
+noise, with an accompaniment of broken English. Miss Turligood, highly
+charged with the Detached Vitalized Electricity, or some stimulant of
+equal potency, ran to meet us in the entry, to enjoin silence and a
+passive state of mind before entering the parlor. The manifestations
+during service had been most wonderful. Twynintuft had lifted the table
+to the ceiling, with Mr. Stellato clinging to the legs. Mrs. Colfodder
+had had her back-hair taken down, and the housemaid was certain that
+somebody tried to kiss her.
+
+We made for the parlor with all convenient speed. Notwithstanding the
+solemn adjurations of Dr. Burge, we entertained guilty hopes of seeing
+some of the marvels which had become such positive drugs in our absence.
+But to _see_ anything was, for a long time, out of the question; for the
+spirits had insisted upon having the shutters closed, and shawls pinned
+up before the cracks in the same, ere they would favor mortals with an
+exhibition. Finally, dim outlines revealed themselves through the
+obscurity. We made out a female figure (it was the cook, so Miss Prowley
+whispered) who was haranguing the assembly at the rate of a word every
+thirty seconds, or thereabouts.
+
+_Cook as Twynintuft:_--"I am Mister Twynintuft. I set lots by you all. I
+left my bright spirit-home to come here to-day. The squashes was musty
+afore they was brought into the house. No blame to the cook. Them
+pickled termarterses couldn't keep into spring, and so I tell you now.
+The spheres is a dry place, and everythin' is most a-beautiful here."
+
+_Betty, the housemaid, loquitur._--(She appears in the character of
+Red-Jacket, a popular personation upon these occasions,--it being very
+easy to talk _Indian_ by the simple recipe of transposing the nominative
+and objective cases of the personal pronoun.) "Me don't like what you
+say, old Twyney! I's name's Red-Jacket. Pale-face give fire-water to I.
+The squashes was good enough till cook left 'em out in the rain. Me have
+hunting-ground in fifth sphere. When me puts up tomatoes in the
+spirit-world, me rosins 'em when they bile. Great influence comes from I
+to-day; also, much development."
+
+"Dr. Burge," whispered I, "you claim to have devoted some time to the
+examination of these delusions; but I will venture to say you have never
+witnessed anything so humiliating as this!"
+
+"My dear Sir," murmured the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to
+be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel
+than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but
+upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal teachings
+ever blessed mankind."
+
+"Do you think these people voluntary impostors?"
+
+"No; it would be nearer the truth to say that they are voluntary victims
+of a mental epidemic like that which developed itself in the St. Vitus's
+dance of the Middle Ages. The subjects of that disease went through the
+same spasms, convulsions, and painful racking of the limbs which
+accompany such cases of this personation as are not designed deceptions.
+Even those accidentally present, when the effects of the ancient
+contagion were exhibited, became infected and were irresistibly impelled
+to join in the extravagance. Look at Miss Turligood and Mr. Stellato,
+and see if the parallel is not supported."
+
+The individuals named were seen to be twisting themselves up and making
+an awkward sort of obeisance to the housemaid, who (still as Red-Jacket)
+thus delivered herself:--
+
+"Me goin' to dancey war-dance. Great Spirit sends lots more Indians come
+dancey too."
+
+A cry of acquiescence,--perchance intended for a ghostly war-whoop,--and
+the beloved of my Lord Byron broke into a savage polka.
+
+Stellato seized a paper-knife, and proceeded to scalp a chair with
+merciless ferocity.
+
+Those unfortunate ladies, Miss Branly and Miss Turligood, were unable to
+resist the infection, and so sprang among the party, whirled about, and
+exhibited absurdities painful and unnecessary to relate.
+
+"By the Muse of my ancestor the Poet!" exclaimed Colonel Prowley,
+indignantly, "I will no longer endure this clumsy travesty of that
+choric saltation with which Apollo was said to inspire his Pythian
+virgins. Dr. Burge, you will oblige me by pulling down that shawl!
+Sister, you will please to open the shutters of the south window!"
+
+The requests were instantly complied with. The wholesome sunlight burst
+into the room, and checked, as if by magic, the unseemly mumming of
+these deluded convulsionaries. Mrs. Colfodder sank down exhausted upon
+the sofa. Betty ceased to be Red-Jacket. Mr. Stellato gave up his
+scalping-knife, flopped feebly upon a chair, and again became a
+transparent jelly-fish of philosophy and water. It was harder to bring
+Miss Turligood to herself, by reason of the singular intractability of
+the squaw who had taken possession of the premises, and was only to be
+dislodged by much tediousness of argument and adjuration. At length,
+however, even this was accomplished. The Indians sulked off into space,
+and their terrestrial mediums once more prepared to collect about the
+table.
+
+"Why, bless me! past one, I declare!" said Miss Turligood, consulting
+her watch. "How spirits do make the time pass! A brief adjournment for
+dinner will now take place. The circle will meet for renewed
+investigation this afternoon at three o'clock. Every member will be
+punctual. Remember, in this place, at three o'clock."
+
+"Stay," said Miss Prowley, in a gentle, but at the same time decided
+tone; "it will not be convenient to us to receive this party again. The
+presence of friends from the city, who are in Foxden only for the day,
+renders a meeting this afternoon out of the question. And having once
+broken up our regular sittings, it will not be worth while to resume
+them,--at least, here."
+
+"But, Madam, Madam, you forget that the spirits have positively
+commanded us to hold sittings in your parlor three times a day till
+further notice!" gasped Miss Turligood, in extreme astonishment.
+
+"I do not recognize the authority of the spirits. They have no right to
+dictate the uses of my parlor."
+
+Here was a confession indeed on the part of Miss Prowley. _Not recognize
+the authority of the spirits!_ Miss Turligood fairly staggered, when she
+heard the impious announcement. The smooth sciolist Stellato rallied his
+weak wits and uttered a cry of wonder at such flagitious heresy. The
+future Lady Byron, taking as a deliberate insult any doubts of the
+identity and authority of her posthumous spouse, threw up her arms in
+horror, and trotted out of the house.
+
+Finally, we got rid of them all,--_how_, I don't exactly remember, and
+if I did, it would not concern the reader to know. We delivered Miss
+Turligood over to her Irishman, (who had brought a carryall with him
+this time,) and charged him never to drive her back; Betty and the cook
+were restored to the kitchen; Stellato and Miss Branly disappeared, no
+one could say where.
+
+"And now," exclaimed Colonel Prowley, with a sigh of relief, "let us
+forget this nonsense, and go to dinner,--for the spirits have given me
+an appetite, if nothing else."
+
+"Then you intend to follow what I understand to be the teaching of your
+invisible visitors," remarked Dr. Burge, pleasantly.
+
+"How so?"
+
+"You do not recognize Fast-Day."
+
+"Ha! ha!" laughed the Colonel; "I doubt if the ghosts were quite
+unreasonable about that."
+
+"Nay, brother, you should tell our good minister that we have but a cold
+collation, and that prepared on the previous day, as is our custom on
+the Sabbath," urged Miss Prowley, with the dignity of an exact and
+consistent housekeeper.
+
+"It is as well we have," was the reply; "for those precious Indians,
+although wise in medicine, knew little enough about cookery. They would
+have made sorry work, had it been necessary to give a culinary direction
+to the inspirations of our damsels below-stairs."
+
+"And yet, after all," resumed our host, meditatively, and after a
+moment's pause, "it seems scarcely right to make a jest of this matter;
+for, although the manifestations of to-day have been ridiculous
+enough,--yet--really--when I think of some of those instructive
+observations of poor Sir Joseph Barley"----
+
+The remark was never concluded, for a sudden rattling and whoaing and
+bumping of baggage was heard. The interruption came from before the
+front-door. The "Railroad-Omnibus" had driven up to the house.
+
+"It is, doubtless, my good friend Professor Owlsdarck," said Colonel
+Prowley,--courteously rebuking an exclamation of astonishment from his
+sister, who had gone to the window;--"to be sure, we did not expect him
+to-day, but he is ever a most welcome guest."
+
+"But it is _not_ Professor Owlsdarck!" cried the sister, in shrillest
+tones of feminine amazement. "That portly figure to which the pencil of
+the artist has done such feeble justice! the spectacles with the square
+glasses! the enormous seal of the Sextons!--it can be but one man!"
+
+"What! you don't mean"----
+
+"Yes, but I _do_ mean! Come and see for yourself!"
+
+"A ghost in an omnibus! Why, sister, sister, the
+Detached--what-you-may-call-it has got into your head,--or, heavens! can
+it be that our unbelief is punished with this frightful manifestation?"
+
+"It is Sir Joseph Barley himself!" ejaculated Miss Prowley.
+
+"Surrounded by his bank of silver-tunicked attendants?" gasped the
+Colonel, in desperate interrogation.
+
+"No, no, nothing of the kind," said Dr. Burge, assuringly; "he has not
+brought even a footman."
+
+And it _was_ Sir Joseph Barley,--in the flesh,--and in a good deal of
+it, too;--Sir Joseph Barley, full to overflowing with talk and
+compliments. He had long planned a journey to America, and a surprise to
+his Fellow-Sexton in Foxden. The trip had been necessarily postponed
+from week to week, and then from month to month. Always expecting to
+leave by the next steamer, he had never thought it worth while to write.
+Had been on shore exactly nine hours, was delighted with the country,
+and had already written the first chapter of a book about it. Was,
+nevertheless, surprised to see none of the native Red Men upon the wharf
+when the Canada arrived. Should have thought the spectacle would have
+been both novel and imposing to them. After dinner, would, with
+permission, go into the forests about Foxden, and visit this singular
+people in their national wigwams.
+
+How picture the delight of hospitable Colonel Prowley, when, volubly
+delivering these and other sentiments, the High Priest and Potentate
+over all Sextondom entered the parlor and made himself comfortable in a
+rocking-chair?
+
+There is no need to dwell upon the matronly bustle of Miss Prowley, who,
+utterly ignoring the proper ordinances of the day, proceeded to send to
+the hotel for a beefsteak and a bottle of British Stout which could be
+warranted of genuine importation.
+
+"And stop, stop, sister!" whispered the Colonel, pursuing her to the
+door; "the idea seems absurd, to be sure, but still don't you think it
+barely possible, that, if Betty ran down to the river and caught a few
+of those snapping-turtles sunning themselves upon the old log, we might
+boil them into something which would faintly remind Sir Joseph of the
+Lord Mayor's soup?"
+
+This proposition being dismissed as impracticable,--first, by reason of
+the notorious unwillingness of the turtles to be caught, and, waiving
+that objection, because of the length of time it would take to achieve
+any passable imitation of the aldermanic dainty,--I was moved to an
+_aside_-declaration to the effect that my slight observation of the
+tastes of British tourists in the Federal States led to the suggestion
+of _oysters_ as delicacies not wholly unlikely to find favor with their
+eminent guest.
+
+An explosion of impulsive gratitude responded to the hint. There was a
+new "saloon" just opened in Main Street,--Betty should stop there and
+leave a generous order.
+
+Well! it was some time before we were summoned to our amended dinner;
+but, when we did get it, it was a dinner worth waiting for.
+
+Sir Joseph Barley--Heaven bless him!--knew nothing of that smattering of
+Cosmos into which we hungry New-Englanders are wont to thrust our wits.
+He bluntly declared that he had never heard of Detached Vitalized
+Electricity, Woman's Rights, or Harmonial Development; also, he was
+delightfully confident that--he, Sir Joseph Barley, British subject,
+_not_ having heard of them--they could not, by any possibility, be worth
+hearing about. Moreover, he had not read a word of Carlyle, and
+positively did not know of the existence of any English poet called
+Browning. Dr. Burge, he thoughtfully suggested, had probably mistaken
+the name; it was Byron, or possibly Bulwer, about whom he wished to
+inquire. The former of these personages was a British Peer, and a writer
+of some celebrity; he was, however, no longer living, having never
+recovered from a fever he took at a place called Missolonghi, in
+Greece;--the latter had written a book entitled "Pelham," once popular,
+but now thought inferior to a series of romances known in Great Britain
+as the "Waverley Novels"; these were the work of one Scott, a native of
+Edinburgh, whom George IV. honored with a baronetcy,--a splendid
+recompense for his great literary industry.
+
+This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the
+New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was
+good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and
+satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather
+narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant
+that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease
+of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of
+infinite space,--were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had
+never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American
+citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It
+is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth
+class--ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of
+life--who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of
+an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments--why not confess it? for is
+not man body as well as soul?--when it is a relief to get away from our
+mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a
+brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of
+his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past. Yet let
+this estate be temporary; for it is well to return to our thin diet,
+and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring
+phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life
+of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you,
+would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend,
+if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are
+seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers
+sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon
+hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise
+and grasp. And why this digression? I think its suggestion lay in the
+fact that Sir Joseph, being the type of the ordinary Englishman, held
+and imparted a fine sunniness of temper, and a perfectly balanced
+serenity,--good gifts, which, so far as my experience goes, are
+possessed in full measure by only one or two exceptional Americans, and
+these men of high and acknowledged genius.
+
+"I don't understand it, upon my honor," cried our visitor, after we had
+endeavored to explain to him his own spiritual intrusion on the previous
+evening. "I have heard of Doctor Pordage and the Dragon, and of the
+Drummer of Tedworth; but when you tell a sane British subject that his
+apparition comes before him, and takes, as it were, the froth off his
+welcome"----
+
+"No, no, my dear friend," interrupted Colonel Prowley, "you must know
+that nothing could do that! As to the obituary I had written, it may do
+for some other time,--for, indeed, my felicity in such compositions has
+been highly commended, and this by mundane authorities of no common
+weight."
+
+"Let us change the subject," said Sir Joseph, dryly; "I have no wish to
+test your powers in that direction; and so long as I don't give up the
+ghost, I suppose you must."
+
+"I would only say this," observed the Colonel,--"that in your book upon
+America I hope you will not fail to declare, that, in folly, deception,
+and unmitigated humbug, our Foxden spirits exceed all others ever seen
+or heard."
+
+"Sir Joseph Barley would be a foolish chronicler to commit himself to
+any such statement," said Dr. Burge, who seemed to feel it his duty to
+speak the moral _tag_ to our little Fast-Day interlude. "I cannot allow
+that these Foxden manifestations are one whit more silly or equivocal
+than many I have seen elsewhere. This shamming the ghost of somebody
+still alive is no uncommon deception: several cases of the sort have
+come under my recent observation. And it is well that they sometimes
+occur; for they must cause reflection in all who are not victims of a
+mental disorder which seems to confound the reasoning powers of
+man,--causing its subjects to accept as teachers phantoms of their
+morbid imaginations, or deceiving intelligences from without. To all, I
+say, but such as these, an imposition of the sort here noticed must send
+reflections of our total inability to identify any pretended spirit
+merely because he flatters our vanity, or talks what may seem _to us_
+good morality or sound sense."
+
+Dr. Burge had laid aside his knife and fork, and had launched bravely
+forth upon his theme. Sir Joseph moved uneasily. Things were getting
+serious. Our host happily interposed,--
+
+"Very true, Doctor, all very true;--yet there is one piece of wisdom
+regulating the spiritual practice which now seems worth considering."
+
+"And what is that, pray?"
+
+"They do not recognize Fast-Day."
+
+"Well, well," said Dr. Burge, taking the hint with the utmost
+good-humor, "perhaps they were not altogether wrong there; and so I will
+trouble Miss Prowley for a bit more of the steak, and----No, thank you,
+no beer for me; I am a water-drinker of twenty years' standing."
+
+"The toast I am about to propose," observed Colonel Prowley, "may, with
+exceeding propriety, be drunk in water,--that is, whenever
+milk-and-water is not to be had:--
+
+_"Our spiritual demagogues, much weaker than our political ones, may
+they not be as much worse!"_
+
+"And there is one other sentiment," said good Dr. Burge, brimming over
+with an honest hilarity,--"a toast which I should be willing to drink in
+pretty strong--coffee."
+
+"I have not forgotten that," exclaimed our host, proffering a hearty
+shake of the hand to the High Senior Governour and Primitive Patriarch
+of All Sextons,--
+
+_"Health and a long life to Sir Joseph Barley!"_
+
+
+
+
+PROSPICE.
+
+
+    Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
+      The mist in my face,
+    When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
+      I am nearing the place,
+    The power of the night, the press of the storm,
+      The post of the foe;
+    Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
+      Yet the strong man must go:
+    For the journey is done and the summit attained,
+      And the barriers fall,
+    Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
+      The reward of it all.
+    I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
+      The best and the last!
+    I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
+      And bade me creep past.
+    No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
+      The heroes of old,
+    Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
+      Of pain, darkness, and cold.
+    For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
+      The black minute's at end,
+    And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
+      Shall dwindle, shall blend,
+    Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy,
+      Then a light, then thy breast,
+    O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
+      And with God be the rest!
+
+
+
+
+WASHINGTON IRVING.
+
+
+We have, at last, a full story of the life of Mr. Irving. It is from the
+hand of a near relative, who has brought to the task an almost filial
+reverence, with a modest reserve of language, and a delicacy of
+treatment, which, while they disarm criticism, would of themselves
+suffice to attest the kinship of the writer with the distinguished
+subject of his biography. It is a quiet and tranquil picture that he has
+given us, of a serene and tranquil life. As we have turned it over
+delightedly, chapter after chapter, and volume upon volume, we have
+wished at times that the coy biographer had been endowed with a spice of
+garrulity or of egotism; for, say what we will, these qualities
+contribute largely to the interest with which we follow the story of a
+life about whose incidents and development the public has greed of
+knowledge.
+
+If Boswell had invariably governed his biographic record by the
+instincts of a gentleman, we should have possessed far less wealth of
+gossip by which to judge of the manhood and the familiar surroundings
+of the great lexicographer. And we can readily imagine that a
+conscientious man, in setting about the task of writing the life of a
+favorite author, would ask himself, over and over, how much should be
+yielded to the eager curiosity of the public, and how much a refined
+courtesy of feeling should keep in reserve. There are men, indeed, whose
+history, by whomsoever recorded, would suggest no such questioning,--men
+who have elbowed their way through life, bent upon some single aim, with
+a grand and coarse disregard of all the heart-burnings they may have
+caused, and all the idols they may have brushed down. Washington Irving
+was by no means such a man; he was kind-hearted to the last degree; and
+yet, remembering as we do that sly look of humor which lurked always in
+the corner of his eye, we cannot believe but that in his freer moments
+he has pricked through many a bag of bombast, and made dashing onslaught
+upon noisy literary pretension. Of all this, however, we find nothing in
+the volumes before us,--nothing in his own books. Always, in his contact
+with the world, he is genial; the face of every friend is beautiful to
+him; every acquaintance is at the least comely; in rollicking Tom Moore
+he sees (what all of us cannot see) a big heart,--in Espartero a bold,
+frank, honest soldier,--in every fair young girl a charmer,--and in
+almost every woman a fair young girl.
+
+In all these respects the biography of Mr. Pierre Irving is in fitting
+accord with what we had known and believed of his eminent kinsman. And
+we are delighted at being confirmed in the belief. We yield all measure
+of respect for the grace, the purity, the dignity, which Washington
+Irving has added to our literature; and yet we honor still more that
+true American heart which beams through all his writings, and throughout
+this record of his life. The rare kindliness of the man so hallows and
+sublimes his memory that we half forget his artistic power, his purity
+of touch, his keenness of observation, his delightful and abounding
+humor.
+
+There are no storms in this life of his: it is, as we have said, a quiet
+picture of a career that is full of honor indeed, full of triumphs, but
+full of serenity. Here is no Don Quixote searching for enemies with whom
+to do battle,--no John Knox thwacking terribly upon all heretical pates,
+and sweating with his obstinacy, as much as with the vigor of his blows;
+but the kindly gentleman, giving tone and beauty to the common sentiment
+of us all, piquing our wonder by his adroitness, kindling our smiles by
+his arch sallies, winning our admiration by his thousand graces, and our
+respect by his honesty and truth.
+
+In 1797, Washington Irving, a roguish lad of fifteen, living in William
+Street, in New York, and not a little rebellious against the severe
+orthodoxy of his father,--who was a deacon of the Presbyterian
+Church,--sometimes slipped out from his chamber, after evening prayers,
+for an hour or two at the theatre; he attended school, where he stole
+the reading of such books as "Robinson Crusoe," and "Sinbad the Sailor";
+and he wrote compositions for such of his fellows as would make good his
+tasks in mathematics. This was a study which he never loved, and to the
+last he abjured all stringency of method. The writer of this paper
+remembers on one occasion asking him what system he pursued in massing
+his notes for the "Life of Washington." "Don't ask me for system," said
+he; "I never had any. If you want to know what a man can do by
+arrangement, talk with B----; his whole mind is pigeon-holed."
+
+At sixteen we find him in a lawyer's office; he does not, like some of
+his brothers, enjoy the advantages (if there be any) of a collegiate
+education. But he loves law as little as he loves mathematics. Feeble
+health gives occasion for frequent absences and journeyings; and it is
+plain to see that he loves a voyage up the Hudson, and adventurous
+travel through the wilds of Northern New York, better than he loves
+Judge Livingston, or the books of his law-patron, Mr. Hoffman. He has a
+scribbling mood upon him at this early day, too, and contributes to the
+New-York "Morning Chronicle" certain letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, which
+are remarked for their pleasant humor. At the age of twenty-one (1804)
+continued ill-health suggests a sea-voyage. He leaves law and his jolly
+companions,--Brevoort, Kemble, Paulding, and the rest,--and sails for
+Bordeaux. He wanders through Southern Europe delightedly,--meets
+Washington Allston at Rome, and is half tempted to turn painter,--sees
+Humboldt, De Stael, Cooke, Siddons; and while all England is jubilant
+over Nelson's victory, and all England mourning over Nelson's death, he
+sails, in 1806, for home.
+
+Arrived in New York a sound man, he goes through a process of cramming
+for admission to the bar, and is presently instated--attorney-at-law.
+But at the very time of his examination he is concocting with James
+Paulding the project of "Salmagundi," which presently enlivens and
+perplexes people with the vagaries of Launcelot Langstaff. A little
+after, he plans and commences the Knickerbocker History.
+
+But meantime an interesting episode of his life is developing, which by
+its unfortunate issue is to give a certain color to all after-expression
+of his sentiment. While in the family of Mr. Hoffman, as law-student, he
+has conceived a strong attachment for his daughter; in certain
+memoranda, marked "private," which come under the eyes of the biographer
+only after Mr. Irving's death, he says,--"I idolized her. I felt at
+times rebuked by her superior delicacy and purity, and as if I was a
+coarse, unworthy being in comparison.... I saw her fade rapidly away,
+beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelical to the very last.... I
+was by her when she died.... I was the last one she looked upon." The
+memorandum from which this extract is taken had been originally written,
+it appeared, for the eye of an intimate lady-friend abroad, to whom we
+shall have occasion to refer.
+
+In 1809, at the age of twenty-six, is published his "History of New
+York." There were a few punctilious Dutch families who were offended at
+its sallies; but cultivated people generally welcomed its fun, its
+spirit, its quiet satire, with heartiness and applause.
+
+Shortly after he entered into a commercial partnership with his
+brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, of whom one was established in England,
+the other in New York. In the War of 1812 we find him acting as military
+aid to Governor Tompkins; and in 1815 he embarks again for Europe. He
+passes many years in England, in the course of which time the commercial
+firm, of which he is a member goes into bankruptcy. Upon this, he is of
+course thrown adrift. But through the influence of his friends at home
+he is offered the position of Chief Clerk of the Navy Department, with a
+salary of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. This, however, after some
+misgivings, he declines. He does not like the idea of being cramped by
+official routine of duty. He will try what he can do with his pen. And
+for months after making this decision (we have heard it with unction
+from his own lips) he can do nothing. His friend Allston is going back
+to America; Leslie is making a reputation; and he, a bankrupt, and
+having wantonly thrown up the chance for a lucrative position at home,
+is suddenly bereft of all capacity for literary work; he makes trial;
+but it is in vain. The "Sketch-Book" is floating in his thought; but he
+cannot commit its graces to paper.
+
+The months roll on; something must be done; the secretaryship at home is
+abandoned; he must try again; he does try; he sends off "Sketch-Book No.
+I." to America. We know what came of it: success, delight. Number upon
+number followed. There was an early republication, under the author's
+auspices, in London. He was feted: it was so odd that an American should
+write with such control of language, with such a play of fancy, with
+such pathetic grace. There was a kind of social _furor_ to meet and to
+see the man who, notwithstanding his Transatlantic birth, had conquered
+all the witchery of British speech, who knew its possible delicacies of
+expression, and who graced it with a humor that reminded of Goldsmith.
+
+No American author had ever dreamed of such ovation before: an ovation
+not due to any incisive thought, not due to any novelty of his
+subject-matter,--but due to the fact that a man born overseas had
+suddenly appeared among British writers, who could lay hold upon their
+own resources of sentiment, and inwrap it in language which charmed them
+by its grace and provoked them by its purity.
+
+Mr. Murray entered upon the publication of the "Sketch-Book" in 1820,
+Mr. Irving being at that time thirty-seven years of age. Of his pleasant
+intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, of his junketings in Paris, of his
+meeting with Tom Moore, of his unfortunate enlistment in a
+steamboat-enterprise upon the Seine, there is full and most lively
+account in the "Life and Letters" before us. "Bracebridge Hall,"
+despatched from Paris in 1822, is received with the same favor which had
+attended the publication of the "Sketch-Book"; and the pecuniary returns
+are so liberal that he can lie upon his oars for a while, and (what
+pleases him more) can effectually aid his brother Peter, who was a party
+to the unfortunate steamboat-scheme.
+
+After this comes a merry whirl through Europe. The Rhine, Heidelberg,
+Munich, Vienna, we visit again in his sparkling letters, dated forty odd
+years ago. His reputation, and the good offices of French and English
+friends, open an easy path for him; everywhere he finds hospitality and
+acquaintances, and everywhere, by that frank, genial manner of his, he
+transmutes even chance acquaintances into confidential friends. The
+winter of 1822-3 is passed in the delightful city of Dresden. He meets
+with a warm welcome at the little Saxon court; he has the _entree_ of a
+pleasant English household, where he becomes fairly domesticated. Mrs.
+Foster, its accomplished mistress, is a lady of fortune, who has two
+"lovely daughters." Mr. Irving, in concert with two or three
+gentlemen-friends, organizes certain home-theatricals, in which the
+Misses Foster engage with ready zeal and a charming grace. There are
+Italian readings, and country-excursions, to all of which Mr. Irving is
+a delighted party. He hardly knows how to tear himself away from scenes
+so enchanting. To Miss Foster he writes, on the occasion of a little
+foray into Bohemia,--"I am almost wishing myself back already. I ought
+to be off like your bird, but I feel I shall not be able to keep clear
+of the cage." Mrs. Foster, with a womanly curiosity, is eager to know
+how a man so susceptible as Mr. Irving, and so domestically inclined,
+should have reached the mature age of forty as a bachelor. Mr. Irving
+amiably gratifies her curiosity by detailing to her the story of his
+early and unfortunate attachment, in the shape of the memorandum to
+which we have already alluded. He closes this confidential disclosure by
+saying,--"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was
+not long since.... My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims
+upon my thoughts, and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
+I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for."
+
+We have dwelt upon this little episode, not because it has any essential
+importance in itself, but because it has been the subject of a most
+unseemly interpolation in the British reprint of the biography. Mr.
+Bentley, "Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty," was, it appears, the
+purchaser, at a small sum, of the advance-sheets of the book; but, in
+order to secure English copyright, he conceived the idea of introducing
+extraneous matter of British origin. In prosecution of this design, he
+found as _collaborateurs_ the two Misses Foster above alluded to, who
+are now wives of clergymen of the Church of England. Mrs. Fuller, the
+elder of the sisters, and the special favorite of the author, gives upon
+the whole a modest and pleasant account of their association with Mr.
+Irving, and closes with a few lines which, she says, he wrote in her
+scrap-book in 1832. "He declared it was impossible for him to be less in
+a writing-mood." And thereupon follow the well-known lines entitled
+"Echo and Silence." They certainly do not prove very much for the
+writing-mood of Mr. Irving,--whatever they may prove for Sir Egerton
+Brydges. The contribution of the younger sister, Mrs. Flora Dawson, is
+in a somewhat exaggerated and melodramatic vein, in the course of which
+she takes occasion to expend a great deal of pity upon "poor Irving,"
+who is made to appear in the character of a rejected suitor for the hand
+of her sister. It is true that the testimony of Mr. Irving's biographer,
+and of his private papers, is largely against this absurdly romantic
+construction; but, although it had been perfectly authentic, it is
+almost incredible that a lady of delicacy should make such blazon of the
+affair, for the sake of securing a copyright to "Her Majesty's Publisher
+in Ordinary." We are sorry that Mrs. Dawson has not made a better
+_debut_ in literature. As for Mr. Bentley, we can characterize his
+conduct in the matter only by the word--disgraceful. In the whole
+history of griping literary piracies (of which Americans must bear their
+share) we can recall no one which shows so bad a taste, and so bad a
+faith, as this of Mr. Bentley, the "Publisher in Ordinary to Her
+Majesty."
+
+In the year 1824 we find Mr. Irving at work in Paris chambers upon the
+"Tales of a Traveller"; then follow three or four joyous and workful
+years in Spain, between Madrid, Seville, and the Alhambra. We have all
+tasted the fruit of that pleasant sojourn; "Columbus" is on every
+library-shelf; and we remember a certain dog's-eared copy of the
+"Conquest of Granada" which once upon a time set all the boys of a
+certain school agog with a martial furor. How we shook our javelins at
+some bewildered cow blundering into the play-ground! What piratical
+forays we made upon the neighbors' orchards, after the manner of the
+brave old Muley Aben Hassan! And as for the Alhambra, the tinkle of the
+water in the marble basins of its court is lingering on our ears even
+yet.
+
+In Spain, as elsewhere, Mr. Irving makes a circle of friends about him
+whom it is hard to leave; but it must be. Accusing comrades at home say
+he has deserted his country; he turns his face Westward at last, and,
+full of honors, sails for New York once more, in the year 1832, at the
+ripe age of forty-nine. There never was a warmer welcome given to a
+returning citizen. A feast is made for him, at which all the magnates of
+the city of Manhattan assist; and the author's sensibility is so touched
+that he can make only stammering acknowledgments,--at which the cheers
+and the plaudits are heartier than ever.
+
+After this comes the opening of that idyllic life at Sunnyside,--the
+building of the gables, the gilding of the weather-cocks, the planting
+of the ivies. "Astoria" and "Bonneville" and the "Tour on the Prairies"
+keep his hand active and his brain in play. Near and dear relatives
+relieve his bachelor home of all loneliness. Nine years or more have
+passed after his return, when he is surprised--and not a little
+shocked--by his appointment, at the instance of Mr. Webster, as Minister
+to Madrid.
+
+He cannot resist the memories of the Alhambra, of Seville, of the
+Guadalquivir. Many pleasant associations are revived in England, in
+France, and not a few in the now revolutionary Spain. But it is plain to
+see that the official visit is not so enjoyable as the old untrammelled
+life in the Peninsula. No matter how light the duties, routine is a
+harness that galls him. We can almost hear his cheer of thanksgiving as
+he breaks away from it, and comes once more to his cherished home of
+Sunnyside. He is not an old man yet, though he counts well into the
+sixties. He contrives new additions to his cottage; he dashes off the
+charming "Life of Goldsmith" at a heat. His older books come pouring
+from the press, and are met with the cordial welcome of new ones.
+
+His brothers, to whom he had been so fondly knit, are all gone save one;
+Brevoort is gone; Kemble is just above him, at his forge, under the lee
+of the Highlands. The river by quiet Tarrytown is strung up and down
+with new "gentlemen's places."
+
+He puts himself resolutely at work upon the "Life of Washington."
+Frequently recurring illness, and a little shakiness in his step, warn
+him that his time is nearly up. He knows it. There is only one more task
+to make good. We hear of him at Mount Vernon, at Arlington, at Saratoga.
+Volume by volume the work comes forward. The public welcome it,--for
+they love the author, and they love the subject. Three volumes,--four
+volumes; and there are rumors that the old gentleman is failing. But
+whoever finds admission to that delightful home of Sunnyside meets the
+old smile, the old cheer. Seventy years have shaken the frame, but have
+not shaken the heartiness of the man. The jest leaps from his eye before
+his lip can clothe it, as it did twenty years before. There is a
+friendly pat for his little terrier, and a friendly word for his
+gardener, as in the old days.
+
+The fifth volume is in progress; but there is a cough that distresses
+him sorely. He pushes on, however, through his task. The step is growing
+feebler and the cough more annoying. It is the year 1859, and the
+seventy-seventh of his age, when, upon a certain November evening, with
+one little sharp cry of pain, he falls upon his chamber-floor--dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are men whose works we admire, but for whose lives we care
+nothing. Mr. Irving was not one of them. There is such a manly
+heartiness in him that we crave close contact: we cannot know him too
+well. Surely, this sympathy of readers, spontaneous, inevitable, will
+keep his name always green. There may come greater purists,--though they
+must con the language well; writers of more dramatic power we have now,
+possibly a quainter humor,--but one more tender, that puts us in such
+immediate sympathy with the author, hardly in our day, or in any day,
+shall we see again.
+
+It is plain enough that Mr. Irving depended largely on his
+friendships,--that, unconsciously, his courage for meeting and
+conquering whatever of difficulty lay in his path was fed very much by
+the encouraging words of those he loved and respected. His were no
+brawny shoulders to push their way, no matter what points were galled by
+contact,--no self-asserting, irresistible press of purpose, which is
+careless of opinion. Throughout, we see in his kindly nature a longing
+for sympathy: if from those intellectually strong, so much the better;
+if from dear friends, better yet; if from casual acquaintances, still it
+is good and serviceable to him, and helps him to keep his poise.
+
+He is a man, too, who clearly shuns controversy, who does not like to
+take blows or to give blows, and whose intellectual life and development
+find shape and color from this dread of the combative. Not that he is
+without a quiet power and exercise of satire,--not that follies which
+strike his attention do not get a thrust from his fine rapier; but they
+are such follies, for the most part, as everybody condemns. By reason of
+this quality in him, he avoids strongly controverted points in history;
+or, if his course lies over them, he gives a fairly adjusted average of
+opinion; he is not in mood for trenchant assertions of this or that
+belief. This same quality, again, makes him shun political life. He has
+a horror of its wordy wars, its flood of objurgation. Not that he is
+without opinions, calmly formed, and firmly held; but the entertainment
+of kindred belief he does not make the measure of his friendships. His
+character counted on the side of all charity, of forbearance, against
+harsh judgments; it was largely and Christianly catholic, as well in
+things political as literary. He never made haste to condemn.
+
+There is a rashness in criminating this retirement from every-day
+political conflicts which is, to say the least, very short-sighted.
+Extreme radicalism spurns the comparative inactivity, and says, "Lo, a
+sluggard!" Extreme conservatism spurns it, and says, "Lo, a coward!" It
+is only too true that cowards and sluggards both may take shelter under
+a shield of indifference; but it is equally true that any reasonably
+acute mind, if only charitably disposed, can readily distinguish between
+an inactivity which springs from craven or sluggish propensity, and that
+other which belongs to constitutional temperament, and which, while
+passing calm and dispassionate judgment upon excesses of opinion of
+either party, contributes insensibly to moderate the violence of both.
+
+But whatever may have been Mr. Irving's reluctance to ally himself
+intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special
+measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken
+utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country.
+There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he
+had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge
+he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so
+grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the
+sneers he flings at the country of others. It was not in Mr. Irving's
+nature to sneer at even an enemy; it was not his way of making conquest.
+He recognized fully the advantages of a foreign life (at his date) in
+following up that career of belles-lettres study which he had marked out
+for himself. The free _entree_ of European libraries and galleries, and
+familiar association with a class of cultivated men of leisure, (in
+countries where such a class exists,) offered opportunity for refining
+his taste, for enlarging his stock of available material, and for
+stimulating his mental activity, of which he was not slow to perceive
+the value, and of which he has given ample account.
+
+There is much that is interesting in the Life before us in regard to Mr.
+Irving's habit of work. He was, like most men of extreme sensitiveness,
+moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions,
+with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his
+labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon
+these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale
+manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted;
+he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless
+blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months
+during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then it passes
+suddenly, like a cloud, and the air (as at Seville) wooes him to his
+charmingest fancies.
+
+We do not propose a critical estimate of the books of Mr. Irving. We
+have neither space nor present temper for this. The world has indorsed
+his great popularity with the heart, as much as with the brain. There
+are those who have objected that the last subject of his labor--the
+"Life of Washington"--was little suited to his imaginative tone of mind,
+and should have been worked up with a larger and more philosophic grasp
+of thought. It may well be that at some future time we shall have a more
+profound estimate of the relations which our great Leader held to his
+cause and to his time; but, however profound and just such a work may
+be, we feel quite safe in predicting that it will never supplant the
+graceful labor of Mr. Irving in the hearts of the American people.
+Precisely what was wanted Mr. Irving has given: such charming, faithful,
+truthful picture of the great hero of our Revolution as should carry
+knowledge of him, of the battles he fought, of his large, self-denying,
+unswerving patriotism, of the purity of his life, into every household.
+No man could have done this work better; nor do we think any other will
+ever do it as well.
+
+And there is his "Sketch-Book,"--in blue and gold, in green and gold, in
+red and gold;--in what colors, and in what language, does it not appear?
+Yet the themes are of the simplest: a broken heart; a rural funeral; a
+Christmas among the hollies; an hour in the Abbey of Westminster: what
+is there new, or to care greatly for, in these things? Yet he touched
+them, and all the world are touched by them. Your critic says there is
+no serious insight, no deep probing; a pretty wind blows over,--that is
+all.
+
+Yes, that is all; but how many are there who can set such sweet currents
+of wind aflow?
+
+Only a bruised daisy, only a wounded hare, only Halloween,--and Burns,
+with all his fresh, healthy, hearty manhood, and only a peasant's pen,
+touches them in such way that his touch is making the nerves of men and
+women vibrate, where-ever our Saxon speech is uttered.
+
+There is many a light thing that we cherish,--with which we will not
+easily part. That souvenir of some dear, dead one we do not value by its
+weight in gold; that sweet story of the Vicar we do not measure by its
+breadth of logic. And no American, no matter how late born he may be,
+but, if he wander in the Catskills, shall hear the rumble of the Dutch
+revellers at their bowling in the gorges of the mountains,--not one but
+shall read, and reading shall love, the story of Rip Van Winkle.
+
+It was only a quiet old gentleman of six-and-seventy who was buried
+awhile ago from his home upon the Hudson: yet the village-shops were all
+closed; the streets, the houses, the station, were hung in black;
+thousands from the city thirty miles away thronged the high-road leading
+to the little church where prayers were to be said.
+
+How shall we explain this? The author is dead, indeed, whose writings
+were admired by all; but there is something worthier to be said than
+this:--At the little church lay the body of the man whom all men loved.
+
+
+
+
+THE RIM.
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St.
+George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who,
+perceiving that Eloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was
+satisfactory; and Eloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of
+her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others
+with the result of bad government; their association with the
+Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was
+broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden was
+light, that there was a strong hand behind them that knew how to pull
+them up or put them in the dust, and they learned so much respect and
+even love for that hand as never to presume on the fact that it would
+not perhaps choose to exert its full power; work was well done; there
+was no further trespassing on other precincts; the world was in perfect
+order, so far as St. George's administration of it extended. He was,
+moreover, a man of distinction; serving, young as he was, four terms in
+Congress from a distant district, he was already spoken of again as the
+candidate of the immediate vicinity; his advice was sought in a hundred
+matters about which he knew nothing at all,--and always given, in spite
+of the last-mentioned circumstance; he had a careless, easy way of
+taking the life out of a man's mouth, so to speak, and disposing of it
+for that man's advantage as he himself pleased, so that the man felt
+under an infinite obligation; he had, too, an air with him of such
+superiority over the ills of life, such undoubted kingliness, that every
+one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George
+in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand
+friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength
+to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of
+all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a
+master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to
+follow. But Mr. Erne's supremacy had merely been a matter of birth and
+of kindly feeling; Mr. St. George's was, first, because he choose to
+have it, and secondly, because nobody was able to refuse it. Marlboro's
+masterliness was quite another thing, affected no clusters of men, and
+was felt only by those whom he owned, body and soul.
+
+In the mean time, the family seldom saw Mr. St. George, and when they
+did, he was so stately that they would have been quite willing to shut
+their eyes. They forgot, however, that, when you insist on being
+yourself an iceberg, you really cool the air about you. Once, indeed, or
+twice, there had been brief, but notable exceptions in his conduct.
+
+A period of heavy rains had just elapsed, and Eloise, weary of
+confinement, had gone on the first clear day strolling round the place,
+as secure as in a drawing-room, since there was not one of her father's
+people but adored her.
+
+"You are going out, Miss Changarnier?" Mr. St. George had remarked at
+the door; and, on being answered, he had added in a soliloquy, as if not
+deigning a second address for a second rebuff,--"It will be quite
+impossible to go far, for the freshet has swollen the brooks into
+rivers."
+
+Eloise, however, took no notice of the information, and went on her way,
+strolled farther than she had intended, and forded a brook because Mr.
+St. George had said she could not. Then she sat down under a branching
+tree that dropped its leaves about her and into the brook, and began to
+read the "Romaunt of the Rose": at least, I fancy that was the book she
+had. While she remained, the brook swirling ever louder between the
+pauses, the sunset ran red in the sky and warned her to hasten home. But
+she disregarded the warning till purple shadows fell softly on the page,
+and stars and moon stole out to peer above her shoulder and see what it
+was that so entranced the maiden. Rising hurriedly, she moved away; and
+only when she had crossed two or three of the stepping-stones did she
+perceive, on looking down, that, while she had been reading, the water
+had risen above the next ones with a depth that the failing light
+forbade her to see. Standing there, and bending dizzily forward to guess
+the strength of the dark stream now so loudly and rapidly rushing by,
+there came a noise like a bursting water-spout; suddenly her waist was
+seized, and she was swept back to the shore. The next instant, with a
+seething sound, a great uprooted oak tore along the very spot on which
+she had stood.
+
+"Seeking danger for the pleasure of escape?" said a cool voice in her
+ear, as her feet were planted on dry land. "A little excitement spices
+our still life so well!"
+
+"Mr. St. George! how dare you?" cried Eloise, freeing herself.
+
+"What would you have had me do? Should I have stood here, letting I dare
+not wait upon I would, like the cat i' the adage, while the oak caught
+and rushed you off to sea? Too big a broomstick for such a little
+witch!"
+
+"You should not have been here at all, Sir!"
+
+"There shall be thanks in all the churches, next Sunday, that I was."
+
+"At least, Sir, I can spare further aid."
+
+"Play Undine and the Knight on the island? It wouldn't be at all
+safe,--it wouldn't be proper, you know," said Mr. St. George, raising
+his eyebrows. "The dam that shuts up the irrigating waters broke an hour
+ago," added he, in the tone of another person. "I sent servants to find
+you, in every direction, and happened this way myself."
+
+Eloise was a little sobered.
+
+"I am much obliged to you, Sir," she said.
+
+"So it seems," he replied, dryly. "I shall be forced to offend you
+again," he continued, "as further delay will render the stream entirely
+impassable."
+
+And before she could utter a syllable of deprecation, she had swung a
+brief moment in the air, and was upon the other side, up which Mr. St.
+George, in his high seven-league boots, clambered so soon as he had set
+her down. Instead of venturing any new display of indignation, as St.
+George expected, Eloise walked on with him quietly a moment, and then,
+looking up, said,--
+
+"You are very kind, and I am very ungracious."
+
+Mr. St. George did not deny her assertion, only he glanced down at her
+from his height a second with an inexplicable expression, and
+immediately after the house became visible bowed low and left her.
+
+"There's been such a tantrum, Miss," said the quadroon Hazel, combing
+out Eloise's hair that night, "and Massa St. George's horse waited two
+mortal hours to take him to Blue Bluffs. You ought to have heard him
+swear! He galloped off at last like mad."
+
+And as Eloise gave no response, unless the cloud on her face spoke for
+her in the glass, the familiar girl added,--
+
+"Not at you, Miss, not swearing at you,--oh, no, indeed!--but at all of
+us, to think we'd let you go alone."
+
+"Mr. St. George is too solicitous. That will do, Hazel. Have you spoken
+to your master about buying Vane?"
+
+"Laws, Miss, I never feels as if he was any master of mine, leastwise
+excep' one can't help minding him. 'S different from ole Massa,--we
+minded ole Massa for lub,--but I dunno if it's the music, when Massa St.
+George speaks, that makes you do what he says, when you just don't mean
+to,--as if you couldn't help it, and didn't want to help it?" suggested
+Hazel.
+
+"Mr. St. George," said Eloise, "is very good to his people; they ought
+to wish to obey him."
+
+"Yes, Miss. On'y he a'n't no business _here_."
+
+"Don't let me hear you speak so again, Hazel," said Eloise, facing the
+suddenly cringing girl. "Now you can go."
+
+But Hazel lingered still, over one and another odd trifle, and at length
+glancing up from where she stooped, with a scarlet on her young tawny
+cheek, she added, in a low voice,--
+
+"You'll speak to Massa St. George now for me, won't you, Miss?"
+
+"What? About Vane? You would do better yourself. Yes."
+
+Two or three days passed away after this little promise to Hazel, before
+Eloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather
+courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She
+was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past
+conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered
+slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order
+still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well
+have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.
+
+It was one afternoon that Eloise sat at the drawing-room window, having
+recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a
+place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect,
+just then,--her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along
+the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid
+down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her
+appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.
+
+"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.
+
+Eloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek.
+Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her
+heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she
+recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent
+portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved
+Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other,
+"I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George
+had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a
+hesitating voice came sliding towards him,--
+
+"Mr. St. George"----
+
+"I beg your pardon,--did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.
+
+"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Eloise.
+
+She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort,
+then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.
+
+"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid,
+who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger,
+and I became attached to her"----
+
+And before Eloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's
+riding-whip,--that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the
+appropriation of everything about her.
+
+"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."
+
+"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only
+seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,--just, you know, as I might
+have been"----
+
+Mr. St. George smiled so perceptibly that Eloise added, throwing back
+her head again,--
+
+"Just as I _am_, Sir! But she has behaved very nicely for
+several----Why, this is Mrs. Arles's whip! the one her husband gave her.
+I knew it by the ivory vine-stem twining the ebony; and there are her
+initials in the lovely gold chasing. I used to want it to play with,
+when I was a little girl,--and she wouldn't let me have it, of course.
+Pretty initials!"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. St. George, coldly.
+
+Eloise put it down. And then she stared at him forgetfully, and,
+unthinkingly, with great disappointed eyes. Thereat Mr. St. George
+laughed.
+
+"Don't Russian women present the knout to their bridegrooms?" asked
+Eloise then, mischievously.
+
+But before he could have replied, she resumed,--
+
+"Well, Sir, Hazel is very pretty"----
+
+"It is Hazel, then? Would you like her to be made more distinctly yours,
+Miss Eloise?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no, Sir, thank you. That isn't it at all. Hazel is in love."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"She is in love with Vane, a boy of Mr. Marlboro's: you may have seen
+him; he is here a good deal,--by stealth: and they want to be married.
+But Mr. Marlboro' is their terror, he may put an end to everything, and
+they are afraid, and--and--could you buy Vane, Mr. St. George?"
+
+"I could, Miss Changarnier."
+
+"And you will, then?" cried Eloise, springing up.
+
+"If Mr. Marlboro' will sell him."
+
+"Won't he?"
+
+"It is a pride of the Marlboro's that there never was a hand sold off
+the place."
+
+"Oh, I had forgotten. They would tell too shocking stories."
+
+"Not here. Not unless they were sold off the Cuban plantation, where the
+vicious ones are transported."
+
+"But perhaps he would give him to you."
+
+"Miss Eloise, he would give him to _you_."
+
+"Me? I have never seen him."
+
+"That is of no consequence. He has seen you."
+
+"I wonder where. Do you really suppose that Mr. Marlboro' would give
+Vane to me?"
+
+"Miss Eloise, I will see what I can do about it first."
+
+"How kind you are! Thank you!"
+
+And Eloise was about to go.
+
+"One moment, if you please," said the other.
+
+And Mr. St. George remained in meditation. When he spoke, it was not in
+too assured a tone.
+
+"I am quite aware," said he, "that you consider me in the light of an
+enemy. Perhaps it is a magnanimity that would be pleasant to you, should
+you in turn grant that enemy a favor."
+
+"I should like to be able to serve you, Sir."
+
+"Well, then,--I spoke very unwisely a few moments since,--promise me
+now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not
+ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much
+under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"
+
+And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.
+
+"A whole promise is rash," said Eloise, laughing. "Half a one I give
+you."
+
+"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned
+abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would
+know it too.
+
+It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one
+chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a
+fire upon the hearth, and Eloise sitting on the floor before it with her
+box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite
+her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went
+soaring up the chimney.
+
+"In pursuit of an _ignis-fatuus_?" asked he, stooping over her an
+instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a
+certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress,
+that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the
+cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.
+
+"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get
+the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,--but there 'a no lustre,
+no flicker,--I can't find out the secret of painting flame."
+
+"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George,
+unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.
+
+And Eloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and
+went to bed.
+
+So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a
+cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but
+Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on
+with her tatting and contrivances.
+
+Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each
+other with less frozen chill than St. George and Eloise did on the
+succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during
+which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Eloise silently cast
+up her accounts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter,
+Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,--
+
+"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests
+at noon, for several weeks. That is the list. I rely on Miss
+Changarnier's assistance." And he handed her a paper, and went out.
+
+"It will be useless for you to keep your room now," said Mrs. Arles to
+Eloise, on Wednesday morning. "It isn't like Mr. St. George's bachelor
+parties with Marlboro' and Montgomery and Mavoisie, when I like to see
+you keep to yourself as you do. These are all old friends."
+
+"I shall still have my work to do," said Eloise; and she went into the
+cabinet and sharpened her pens with a _vim_.
+
+It would doubtless have relieved Mr. St. George of much annoyance and
+perplexity, if Eloise would have assumed her old place in welcoming the
+guests; but that was not set down in her part, and Eloise rightly felt
+that it would be a preposterous thing for her to do. And though, when
+she heard their voices in the hall, she longed just to open the door and
+give one glance at Laura Murray sweeping by, or draw Lottie Humphreys in
+through the crack and indulge in one quick squeeze, she heroically bent
+herself upon the debit and credit beneath her eye, and tried to forget
+all about it,--succeeding only in remembering who had lived and who had
+died since the last time that hall had rung with their voices.
+
+It was past noon when Eloise, having finished her task, and having
+remained for a long time with her arms upon the desk and her hands upon
+her eyes, suddenly glanced up and saw a gentleman entering the cabinet,
+where no gentleman but one was ever allowed to enter. He was in search
+of a book; and scanning the shelves, his eye fell on her.
+
+He hesitated for a single atom of time, then stepped rapidly forward,
+and said,--
+
+"Miss Changarnier, I am quite sure."
+
+"Allow me," said quickly another voice at his shoulder, "to present to
+Miss Changarnier Mr. Marlboro'." For Mr. St. George had entered just in
+time.
+
+Mr. Marlboro' was a slight man, hardly to be called tall. He wore black,
+of course, the coat fastened on the breast and letting out just a
+glimpse of ruffled linen and glancing jewel below, while the lofty brow,
+set in its fair curling hair, and the peaked beard curling and waving
+about the throat, gave him the appearance of a Vandyck stepped from the
+frame. He had the further peculiarity of eyes, dark hazel eyes, that
+would have glowed like fever, if they were not perpetually wrapped in
+dream. There was a certain air of careful breeding about him, different
+from Earl St. George Erne's high-bred bearing, inasmuch as he insisted
+upon his pedigree and St. George forgot his. Too fiery a Southerner to
+seek the advantages of Northern colleges, he had educated himself in
+England, and had contracted while at Oxford the habit of eating opium.
+Returning home at his majority, and remaining long enough to establish
+his own ideas, which were peculiarly despotic, upon his
+property,--through many subsequent travels, tasting in each an
+experience of all the folly and madness the great capitals of the world
+afford, through all his life, indeed, this habit was the only thing
+Marlboro' had not mastered. One other thing, albeit, there was, of which
+Marlboro' was the slave, and that was the Marlboro' temper.
+
+Eloise returned his salutation cordially, and with a certain naughty
+pleasure, since Mr. St. George was looking on, and since that person,
+constituting himself her grim guardian, had in a manner warned her of
+the other. Then she displayed her pretty little ink-stained hands, and
+ran away.
+
+Mr. Marlboro' looked after her, and then turned to survey St. George.
+
+"Who would not be the Abelard to such an Eloise?" he said.
+
+There was no answer. St. George was filling a pipe, and whistling the
+while a melancholy old tune.
+
+"I'll tell you what, St. George"----
+
+Here he paused, and thrummed on the book in time to the tune.
+
+"You were about to impart some information?"
+
+"Has your little nun taken the black veil?"
+
+"It is no nun of my shriving."
+
+"Are you King Ahasuerus himself, to have lived so long in the house with
+Miss Changarnier, may I ask, and to have thrown no handkerchief?"
+
+"There is some confusion in your rhetoric. But it is not I who am
+tyrant,--it is she who stands for that;--I am only Mordecai the Jew
+sitting in the king's gate. As so many Jews do to-day," muttered St.
+George,--"ay, and on their thrones, too. I am afraid we are neither of
+us very well up in our Biblical history. She is the Grand
+Unapproachable."
+
+"_Tant mieux._ My way is all the clearer."
+
+"Your way to what?"
+
+"To the altar!"
+
+"Yes, you should have married long ago, Marlboro'," said Mr. St. George,
+the pipe being lighted, the face looming out of azure wreaths, and the
+heels taking an altitude.
+
+"I came home," said Marlboro', "to marry Eloise Changarnier."
+
+"That is exactly what I intend to do myself."
+
+"You!"
+
+Mr. Marlboro's eyes glistened like a topaz in the sun; but just then a
+new guest arriving demanded Mr. St. George's attention.
+
+Meantime Eloise had found a feminine conclave assembled in her room, all
+having prepared their own toilets, and ready to inspect the preparation
+of hers; and as the work proceeded, Lottie Humphreys added herself to
+the group, in grand _tenue_, and pushed Hazel aside, that she might bind
+up Eloise's already braided hair, and indulge herself in the interim
+with sundry fervent ejaculations.
+
+"Isn't he splendid?" whispered Lottie, while Laura compared bracelets
+with Emma Houghton. "Oh, there, isn't he splendid? It's like the king
+coming down from his throne, when he speaks to you; it puts my heart in
+a flutter. How do you dare ask him to pass the butter? Now just tell
+_me_. Are you engaged to him? Tell me truly, only shake your head, yes
+or no. No? I don't believe a word you say. Mean to be? Then, I
+declare----Suppose now, only just suppose, suppose he'd look at me?"
+
+"Oh, what a silly little goose you are, Lottie Humphreys! And you've put
+geraniums in my hair, when I meant to wear those beautiful blue
+poison-bells!"
+
+"I never saw any one so dark as you are wear so much blue."
+
+"But it's becoming to me, isn't it?" said Eloise, turning with her
+smile, as radiant for Lottie as for Marlboro'.
+
+"St. George," said Marlboro', with a beaming face bent over his
+shoulder, as he took Eloise out to dinner, "my intention was the
+earlier; it will succeed!"
+
+"As being the eldest born and heir to the succession. Does the good
+general expose his campaign?"
+
+"There we are quits. It is precisely as a good general that I exposed
+it."
+
+"But did the Levites unveil the sacred ark?" said Mr. St. George,
+severely.
+
+"We are talking freemasonry, Miss Changarnier," said Marlboro', and they
+moved on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether she would or not, Eloise found herself in exactly the same
+position in the house as before her adopted father's death,--partly
+because almost all the company, being old friends, recognized no
+difference, partly because Mr. St. George silently chose it should be
+so. She soon forgot herself entirely in the pleasure of it, and was
+unconsciously, even towards Mr. St. George, so sweet and genial, so
+blithe and bewitching, that his scanning glance would suddenly have to
+fall, since an expression, he felt, entered it that he dared not have
+her see. There was always a certain disarray about the costume of
+Eloise; one tress of her hair was always drooping too low, or one thrust
+back behind the beautiful temple and tiny ear, or a bracelet was half
+undone, or a mantle dropping off,--trifles that only gave one the desire
+to help her; she constantly wore, too, a scarf or shawl, or something of
+the kind, and the drapery lent her a kind of tender womanliness, which
+only such things do; then, too, she garnished her hair with flowers
+always half falling away, somewhat faded with the warmth, and emitting
+strong, rich fragrances in dying. When she laughed, and the brilliant
+little teeth sparkled a contrast with the dark smooth skin, when she
+thought, and her eyes glowed like tear-washed stars, Mr. St. George was
+wont to turn abruptly away from the vision, unwilling to be so
+controlled. But of that Eloise never dreamed.
+
+As for Marlboro', on the other hand, he was the moth in the candle. Of
+Mr. Marlboro's devotion Eloise was quite aware,--and whereas, playing
+with it the least bit in the world, she had at first enjoyed it, it grew
+to irk her sadly; she used to beg her friends, in all manner of pretty
+ways, to take him off her hands, and would resort from her own rooms to
+theirs, assisting at their awful rites, and endeavoring to get them up
+as charmingly as possible, that they might lure away her trouble. It was
+in vain that Marlboro' tried to reopen the subject of their mute warfare
+with St. George. St. George would not condescend, neither would he sully
+Eloise's name by bandying it about with another lover. If Marlboro'
+begged him to toss up for chances, St. George answered that he never
+threw up a chance; when he went further and offered to stake success or
+loss, St. George told him he had cast his last die; when he would have
+spoken her name to him directly, St. George withered him with flamy
+eyes, and let his manner become too rigid for one to dare more with him.
+But the ladies had already caught the spirit of the thing, and made
+little situations of it among themselves. Then when St. George became
+impregnable to his attacks, Marlboro' pulled his blonde moustache
+savagely, and grew sullen, and fortunately Eloise did not try to dispel
+the cloud. Nevertheless, Marlboro' fancied that he perceived victory
+hovering nearer to St. George than himself, and a rivalry begun in
+good-humor was likely to take a different cast. In his pique, Marlboro'
+bade his host farewell, and returned to Blue Bluffs; but it was idle
+riding, for every day found him again at The Rim, like the old riddle,--
+
+    "All saddled, all bridled, all fit for a fight,"
+
+and constant as the magnet to its poles.
+
+It was still the steps of Eloise that Marlboro' haunted. Yesterday, he
+brought songs to teach her, and among them the chant to which long ago
+they had once listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow,
+he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery
+shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes;
+to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose
+essence told all his philosophy:--"The great error in government," he
+said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government,
+individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this
+error is a triple-headed monster: centralization, consolidation, union."
+
+Mr. St. George heard him, and paused a moment before them, one evening,
+as Marlboro' thus harangued Eloise.
+
+"Consolidation? Centralization?" said he. "The very things we all
+oppose."
+
+"Nullification is a good solvent."
+
+"A ghost that is laid. There's a redder phantom than that on the
+horizon, man!"
+
+"What are you talking about, politics or marriage?"
+
+"God forbid that I should soil a lady's ears with the first!" said Mr.
+St. George, bowing to Eloise; "and as to the last,--I'll none of it!"
+
+And after Mr. Marlboro' had gone that night, as Eloise was about to
+ascend to her own rooms, Mr. St. George came along again, and, lightly
+taking the candle, held up the tiny flame before her face.
+
+"What has that _contrabandista_ been saying to you?" demanded Mr. St.
+George.
+
+Eloise looked ignorantly up.
+
+"Gilding hell? Do not believe him! Never believe anything any one says,
+when you know he is in love with you! Slavery is a curse! a curse that
+we inherit for the sins of those drunken Cavaliers, our forefathers! Let
+us make the best of it!"
+
+"Ah, Mr. St. George," said she, gayly, "this from you, for whom the
+disciples claim Calhoun's mantle? For what, then, do you contend?"
+
+"For the right of being a free man myself! for the right of enduring
+the dictation of no man in Maine or Louisiana! for the right to do as I
+have the mind!" exclaimed Mr. St. George, in a ponderous and suppressed
+under-voice that rang through her head half-way up-stairs.
+
+Long before, Mr. St. George had very courteously begged Eloise to take a
+vacation during the stay of their friends, but she had so peremptorily
+and utterly refused to do so that it ended by his spending the long
+morning with her in the cabinet, either over certain neglected arrears,
+or while she wrote letters under his royal dictation, and Hazel sewed a
+laborious seam between them, as always. Here, at length, after
+sufficient tantalization by its means, Marlboro' venturously intruded
+himself every day. Too familiar for interruption, he took another seat,
+and watched her swift hand's graceful progress. If her pen delayed, she
+found another awaiting her,--her posture wearied, a footstool was rolled
+towards her feet,--her side cramped, behold, a cushion,--she looked for
+fresh paper, it fell before her: all somewhat slavish service, and which
+Hazel could have rendered as well. Used to slaves, would she have
+preferred a master? Whether Miss Changarnier relished these abject
+kindnesses better than Mr. St. George's imperious exactions was
+precisely the thing that puzzled the two gentlemen.
+
+Meanwhile, during all this gay season, if Eloise had thought of once
+looking about her, which she never did, she would have seen, that, in
+whatever group she was, there, too, was Mr. St. George,--that, if they
+rode three abreast down the great park-avenues, though she laughed with
+Evan Murray, it was to Mr. St. George's horse that her bridle was
+secured,--and that, when she sang, it was St. George who jested and
+smiled and lightly talked the while,--not that her music was not sweet,
+but that its spell was too strong for him to endure beneath his mask.
+Yet Eloise drew no deductions; if at first she noticed that it was he
+who laid the shawl on her shoulders, if she remembered, that, when he
+fastened her dropping bracelet, biting his lip and looking down, he held
+the wrist an instant with a clasp that left its whitened pressure there,
+she remembered, too, that he never spoke to her, were it avoidable, that
+he failed in small politenesses of the footstool or the fan, and that,
+if once he had looked at her in an instant's intentness of singular
+expression, and let a smile well up and flood his eyes and lips and
+face, in a heart-beat it had faded, and he was standing with folded arms
+and looking sternly away beyond her, while she caught herself still
+sitting there and bending forward and smiling up at him like a flower
+beneath the sun;--to atone for her remissness, she was frowning and cool
+and curt to Earl St. George for days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was about this time, that, one night, when Hazel passed the tea,
+Eloise's eye, wandering a moment, suddenly woke from a little apathy and
+observed that there was no widow's cap on Mrs. Arles's hair, that it had
+refined away through various shades of lace till at last even the
+delicate cobweb on the back of the head was gone and the glossy locks
+lay bare, that the sables had become simply black gauze over a steely
+shine of silk, that the little Andalusian foot lay relieved on a white
+embroidered cushion, that its owner was glancing up and smiling at a
+gentleman who bent above her, and that that gentleman was Mr. St.
+George. When this change had taken place, and whether it had been abrupt
+or gradual, her careless eye could not tell; and, forgetting her own
+part momentarily in order to take in the whole of the drama in which
+they were all acting, Eloise spilled her tea and made some work for
+Hazel. As the girl rectified her mishap, it flashed on Eloise that she
+had done nothing more about her suit; she noticed, too, how pale Hazel
+was, and how subdued and still in all her movements; she remembered that
+probably Vane had found it impossible to see her and to elude his
+ever-present master; and she thereupon availed herself of his first
+disengaged moment to stand at Mr. St. George's side, and ask him if he
+had ever thought again of a request she had once made him.
+
+"I was thinking of it at this moment," he replied, looking at her with
+something like sunshine suffusing the brown depth of his eyes; "but the
+truth is, I am not on such terms with Marlboro' that I may demand a
+favor."
+
+"Then _I_ shall."
+
+"On your peril!" he cried, with hasty rigor.
+
+But Eloise escaped, trailing one end of her scarf behind, looking back
+at him, laughing, and shaking her threatening fan as he stepped after
+her. And then Mr. St. George resumed his haughty silence.
+
+Eloise went down the hall after Hazel. She found her in the empty
+dining-room, having just set down the salver; the last light, that,
+stealing in, illumined all the paintings of clusters of fruit and
+bunches of flowers upon the white panelling, had yet a little ray to
+spare for the girl where she crouched with her sobs, her apron flung
+above her head; and when Eloise laid her hand gently on her shoulder,
+she sprang as if one had struck her.
+
+"Oh, Miss 'Loise! Miss 'Loise! I'm in such trouble!" she gasped.
+
+It did not take long for the little story to find the air. Vane and
+Hazel, secure of Eloise's efforts, had married. It was one of the
+immutable Blue Bluffs laws that they had broken: there were no marriages
+allowed off the place there. Vane was expiating his offence no one knew
+where, and there were even rumors that he had already been sent away to
+the Cuban plantation of the Marlboro's, whither all refractory slaves
+were wont to journey.
+
+Eloise went slowly back to the drawing-room, then out upon the piazza,
+and with her went that bending grace that accompanied her least motion,
+and always reminded you of a flower swaying on its stem. Mr. Marlboro'
+leaned there, listening to Miss Murray's singing within. Eloise went and
+took her place beside him, while his face brightened. He had been eating
+opium again, and his eyes were full of dreams. From where they stood
+upon the piazza they could see the creek winding, a strip of silvery
+redness, along the coast, and far in the distance where it met the sea,
+a film upon the sky, rose the dim castellated height of Blue Bluffs,
+like an azure mist.
+
+"There is something there that I want," said Eloise, archly, looking at
+the Bluffs.
+
+"There? you shall not wish twice."
+
+Then Hazel approaching, as by signal, offered Mr. Marlboro' a cup, which
+he declined without gesture or glance, while there gleamed in her eye a
+subtle look that told how easy it would have been to brew poison for
+this man who had such an ungodly power over her fate.
+
+"That is my little maid," said Eloise. "I have lent her to Mrs. Arles
+awhile, though. Is she not pretty,--Hazel?"
+
+"That is Hazel, then? A very witch-hazel!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you want Vane?"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Marlboro'."
+
+"I did not know she was your maid. But the offence of Vane, if
+overlooked, would be a breach of discipline entailing too hazardous
+effects. Authority should never relax. What creeps through the iron
+fingers once can creep again. The gentle dews distilling through the
+pores of the granite congeal in the first frost and rend the rock. I
+would have difficulty, Miss Eloise, in pardoning such an offence to you,
+yourself. Ah, yes, that would be impossible, by Heaven!"
+
+Eloise laughed in her charming way, and said,--
+
+"But, Mr. Marlboro', would it not be an admirable lesson to your people,
+if Vane were sold?"
+
+"A lesson to teach them all to go and do likewise, eh, Marlboro'?" said
+St. George, passing, with Miss Humphreys on his arm.
+
+"I have never sold, I never sell, a slave," replied Marlboro', in his
+placid tone; but St. George was out of hearing. "Yet, Miss
+Eloise,--if--if you will accept him"----
+
+"Mr. Marlboro'! Indeed? Truly indeed? How happy you make me!"
+
+"And you can make me as happy,--happier, by the infinity of heaven over
+earth!"
+
+"But ought I to accept such a gift?" asked Eloise, oblivious of his last
+speech. "But can I?--may I?"--as St. George's warning stole into her
+memory.
+
+"Most certainly you can! most certainly you shall! he is yours!" And
+before Eloise could pour forth one of her multitudinous thanks, he had
+moved away.
+
+Marlboro's, however, was not that noble nature that spurns to beg at the
+moment when it grants. Directly, he had wheeled about, and with an eager
+air was again beside her.
+
+"And, Eloise," he said, "if in response I might have one smile, one
+hope"----
+
+Thoughtlessly enough, Eloise turned her smiling face upon him, and gave
+him her hand.
+
+"And you give it to me at last, this hand, to crown my life!" he
+said,--for to his excited brain the trifling deed seemed the weighty
+event, and when he looked up Eloise still was smiling. Only for a
+second, though, for her processes of thought were not instantaneous,
+while to him it was one of Mahomet's moments holding an eternity, and
+she smiled while she was thinking, thinking simply of her little
+handmaiden's pleasure. She tried to release her hand. But Mr. Marlboro'
+did not know that his grasp upon it was that of a vice, for under an
+artificial stimulus every action is as intense as the fired fancy
+itself. And as she found it impossible to free it without visible
+violence, other thoughts visited Eloise. Why should she not give it to
+him? Who else cared for it? What object had her lonely life? Speak
+sweetly as they might, what one of her old gallants forgot her loss of
+wealth? Here was a man to make happy, here was a heart to rest upon,
+here was a slave of his own passions to set free. Why should she
+continue to live with Mr. St. George for her haughty master, when here
+was this man at her feet? Why, but that suddenly the conviction smote
+her that she loved the one and despised the other, that she adored the
+master and despised the slave? And she snatched away her hand.
+
+Just then Mr. St. George was coming down the piazza again, on his
+promenade, his head bent low as he spoke to the clinging little lady on
+his arm. Passing Eloise, as he raised his face, their eyes met. She was
+doing, he thought, the very thing that he had disadvised, and, as if to
+warn her afresh, he looked long, a derisive smile curling his proud lip.
+That was enough. "He knows it!" exclaimed Eloise to herself. "He
+believes it! He thinks I love him! He never shall be sure of it!" And
+turning once more, her face hung down and away, she laid her hand in
+Marlboro's, without a word or a glance. He bent low over it in the
+shadow, pressing it with his fervent lips, murmuring, "Mine! mine at
+last! my own!" And St. George saw the whole.
+
+Just then a little sail crept in sight from where they stood, winding
+down the creek at the foot of the lawn.
+
+"Oh, how delightful to be on the water to-night!" cried Laura Murray.
+
+"You have but to command," said Mr. St. George, with a certain gayety
+that seemed struck out like sparks against the flinty fact of the late
+occurrence,--and half the party trooped down the turf to the shore. The
+boats were afloat and laden before one knew it. Mr. Marlboro' and Eloise
+were just one instant too late. Laura Murray shook a triumphant
+handkerchief at them, and St. George feathered his oar, pausing a moment
+as if he would return, and then gave a great sweep and his boat fairly
+leaped over the water.
+
+Mr. Marlboro' did not hesitate. There was the sail they had first seen,
+now on the point of being lowered beneath the alder-bushes by the young
+hunters who had sought shore for the night. Gold slipped from one hand
+to another, a word, a name, and a promise. Eloise was on board,
+expecting Mrs. Arles and Mrs. Houghton to follow. Marlboro' sprang upon
+the end, and drew in the rope behind him, waving the other ladies a
+farewell; the sails were stretched again, the rudder shipped, and wing
+and wing they went skimming down the channel, past the little fleet of
+wherries, ploughing the shallow current into foam and spray on their
+wild career.
+
+"Marlboro' is mad!" said St. George, with a whitening cheek.
+
+Marlboro', standing up, one arm about the mast, and catching the slant
+beam of the late-rising moon on his face, that shone awfully rapt and
+intent, saluted them with an ironical cheer, and dashed on. Eloise held
+the tiller for the moment, still pulsating with her late emotions, not
+above a trifling play of vanity, welcoming the exhilaration of a race,
+where she might half forget her trouble, and pleased with a vague
+anticipation of some intervention that might recall the word which even
+in these five dragging moments had already begun to corrode and eat into
+her heart like a rusting fetter. The oarsmen in the wherries bent their
+muscles to the strife, the boats danced over the tiny crests, the ladies
+sang their breeziest sea-songs to cheer them at the work. The sail-boat
+rounded a curve and was almost out of sight.
+
+"Oars never caught sails yet," muttered St. George, and he put his boat
+to the shore. "There, Murray, try your lazy mettle, and take my oar. As
+for me, I'm off,"--and he sprang upon the bank, sending the boat
+spinning off into the current again from his foot. In ten minutes a
+horseman went galloping by on the high-road skirting the shore, with a
+pace like that of the Spectre of the Storm.
+
+"Now, Mr. Marlboro'," said Eloise, "shall we not turn back, victorious?"
+
+"Turn?" said Marlboro', shaking loose another fold of the linen. "I
+never turn! Look your last on the tiny tribe,--we shall see them no
+more!"
+
+Eloise sprang to her feet. He caught her hand and replaced her; his face
+was so white that it shone, there was a wild glitter in his eye, and the
+smile that brooded over her had something in it absolutely terrific.
+
+"We have gone far enough," said Eloise, resolutely. "I wish to rejoin my
+friends."
+
+"You are with me!" said Marlboro', proudly.
+
+She was afraid to say another word, for to oppose him now in his
+exultant rage might only work the mood to frenzy. The creek had widened
+almost to a river,--the sea was close at hand, with its great tumbling
+surf. She looked at the horizon and the hill for help, but none came;
+destruction was before them, and on they flew.
+
+Marlboro' stood now, and steadied the tiller with his foot.
+
+"This is motion!" said he. "We fly upon the wings of the wind! The
+viewless wind comes roaring out of the black region of the East, it
+fills the high heaven, it roars on to the uttermost undulation of the
+atmosphere, and we are a part of it! We are only a mote upon its breath,
+a dust-atom driven before it, Eloise,--and yet one great happiness is
+greater than it, drowns it in a vaster flood of viewless power, can
+whisper to it calm!"
+
+How should Eloise contradict him? With such rude awakening, he might
+only snatch her in his arms and plunge down to death. Perhaps he half
+divined the fear.
+
+"Yes, Eloise," he said. "They are both here, life and death, at our
+beck! I can take you to my heart, one instant the tides divide, then
+they close above us, and you are mine for ever and ever and
+only,--sealed mine beneath all this crystal sphere of the waters! We
+hear the gentle lapping of the ripples on the shore, we hear the tones
+of evening-bells swim out and melt above us, we hear the oar shake off
+its shower of tinkling drops,--up the jewel-strewn deeps of heaven the
+planets hang out their golden lamps to light our slumbers! Heart to
+heart and lip to lip, we are at rest, we are at peace, nothing comes
+between us, our souls have the eternities in which to mingle!"
+
+He saw Eloise shudder, and turned from his dream, blazing full upon her.
+"Life, then, is best!" he cried. "But life together and alone, life
+where we count out its throbs in some far purple island of the main,
+prolonged who knows how far?--love shall make for us perpetual youth,
+there shall no gloom enter our Eden, perfect solitude and perfect bliss!
+Alone, we two in our pride and our joy can defy the powers of any other
+heaven, we shall become gods ourselves! Up helm and away! Life is best!"
+
+
+
+
+THE NEVA.
+
+
+        I walk, as in a dream,
+        Beside the sweeping stream,
+    Wrapped in the summer midnight's amber haze:
+        Serene the temples stand,
+        And sleep, on either hand,
+    The palace-fronts along the granite quays.
+
+        Where golden domes, remote,
+        Above the sea-mist float,
+    The river-arms, dividing, hurry forth;
+        And Peter's fortress-spire,
+        A slender lance of fire,
+    Still sparkles back the splendor of the North.
+
+        The pillared angel soars
+        Above the silent shores;
+    Dark from his rock the horseman hangs in air;
+        And down the watery line
+        The exiled Sphinxes pine
+    For Karnak's morning in the mellow glare.
+
+        I hear, amid the hush,
+        The restless current's rush,
+    The Neva murmuring through his crystal zone:
+        A voice portentous, deep,
+        To charm a monarch's sleep
+    With dreams of power resistless as his own.
+
+        Strong from the stormy Lake,
+        Pure from the springs that break
+    In Valdai vales the forest's mossy floor,
+        Greener than beryl-stone
+        From fir woods vast and lone,
+    In one full stream the braided currents pour.
+
+        "Build up your granite piles
+        Around my trembling isles,"
+    I hear the River's scornful Genius say:
+        "Raise for eternal time
+        Your palaces sublime,
+    And flash your golden turrets in the day!
+
+        "But in my waters cold
+        A mystery I hold,--
+    Of empires and of dynasties the fate:
+        I bend my haughty will,
+        Unchanged, unconquered still,
+    And smile to note your triumph: mine can wait.
+
+        "Your fetters I allow,
+        As a strong man may bow
+    His sportive neck to meet a child's command,
+        And curb the conscious power
+        That in one awful hour
+    Could whelm your halls and temples where they stand.
+
+        "When infant Rurik first
+        His Norseland mother nursed,
+    My willing flood the future chieftain bore:
+        To Alexander's fame
+        I lent my ancient name,
+    What time my waves ran red with Pagan gore.
+
+        "Then Peter came. I laughed
+        To feel his little craft
+    Borne on my bosom round the marshy isles:
+        His daring dream to aid,
+        My chafing floods I laid,
+    And saw my shores transfixed with arrowy piles.
+
+        "I wait the far-off day
+        When other dreams shall sway
+    The House of Empire builded by my side,--
+        Dreams that already soar
+        From yonder palace-door,
+    And cast their wavering colors on my tide,--
+
+        "Dreams where white temples rise
+        Below the purple skies,
+    By waters blue, which winter never frets,--
+        Where trees of dusky green
+        From terraced gardens lean,
+    And shoot on high the reedy minarets.
+
+        "Shadows of mountain-peaks
+        Vex my unshadowed creeks;
+    Dark woods o'erhang my silvery birchen bowers;
+        And islands, bald and high,
+        Break my clear round of sky,
+    And ghostly odors blow from distant flowers.
+
+        "Then, ere the cold winds chase
+        These visions from my face,
+    I see the starry phantom of a crown,
+        Beside whose blazing gold
+        This cheating pomp is cold,
+    A moment hover, as the veil drops down.
+
+        "Build on! That day shall see
+        My streams forever free.
+    Swift as the wind, and silent as the snow,
+        The frost shall split each wall:
+        Your domes shall crack and fall:
+    My bolts of ice shall strike your barriers low!"
+
+        On palace, temple, spire,
+        The morn's descending fire
+    In thousand sparkles o'er the city fell:
+        Life's rising murmur drowned
+        The Neva where he wound
+    Between his isles: he keeps his secret well.
+
+
+
+
+ROBSON.
+
+
+In the whole of London there is not a dirtier, narrower, and more
+disreputable thoroughfare than Wych Street. It runs from that lowest
+part of Drury Lane where Nell Gwyn once had her lodgings, and stood at
+her door in very primitive costume to see the milkmaids go a-Maying, and
+parallel to Holywell Street and the Strand, into the church-yard of St.
+Clements Danes. No good, it was long supposed, could ever come out of
+Wych Street. The place had borne an evil name for centuries. Up a
+horrible little court branching northward from it good old George
+Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and
+prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter;
+and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his
+name. When the pavement of the Strand is under repair, Wych Street
+becomes, perforce, the principal channel of communication between the
+east and the west end; and Theodore Hook used to say that he never
+passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up
+by a hearse and a coal-wagon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord
+Mayor's carriage in the rear. Wych Street is among the highways we
+English are ashamed to show to foreigners. We have threatened to pull it
+down bodily, any time these two hundred years, and a portion of the
+southern side, on which the old Lyons Inn abutted, has indeed been
+razed, preparatory to the erection of a grand metropolitan hotel on the
+American system; but the funds appear not to be forthcoming; the scheme
+languishes; and, on the other side of the street, another legal
+hostelry, New Inn, still flourishes in weedy dampness, immovable in the
+strength of vested interests. Many more years must, I am afraid, elapse
+before we get rid of Wych Street. It is full of quaint old Tudor houses,
+with tall gables, carved porches, and lattice-casements; but the
+picturesque appearance of these tenements compensates but ill for their
+being mainly dens of vice and depravity, inhabited by the vilest
+offscourings of the enormous city. Next to _Napoli senza sole_, Wych
+Street, Drury Lane, is, morally and physically, about the shadiest
+street I know.
+
+In Wych Street stands, nevertheless, an oasis in the midst of a desert,
+a pretty and commodious little theatre, called the Olympic. The
+entertainments here provided have earned, for brilliance and elegance,
+so well-deserved a repute, that the Olympic Theatre has become one of
+the most favorite resorts of the British aristocracy. The Brahminical
+classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste, when they come
+hither. On four or five nights in every week during the season, Drury
+Lane is rendered well-nigh impassable by splendid equipages which have
+conveyed dukes and marquises and members of Parliament to the Olympic.
+Frequently, but prior to the lamented death of Prince Albert, you might
+observe, if you passed through Wych Street in the forenoon, a little
+platform, covered with faded red cloth, and shaded by a dingy, striped
+awning, extending from one of the entrance-doors of the Olympic to the
+edge of the sidewalk. The initiated became at once aware that Her Most
+Gracious Majesty intended to visit the Olympic Theatre that very
+evening. The Queen of England goes to theatres no more; but the Prince
+of Wales and his pretty young wife, the stout, good-tempered Duke of
+Cambridge, and his sister, the bonny Princess Mary, are still constant
+visitors to Wych Street. So gorgeous is often the assemblage in this
+murkiest of streets, that you are reminded of the days when the French
+_noblesse_, in all the pride of hoops and hair-powder, deigned to flock
+to the lowly wine-shop of Ramponneau.
+
+My business, however, is less with the Olympic Theatre, as it at present
+exists, than with its immediate predecessor. About fifteen years ago,
+there stood in Wych Street a queer, low-browed little building with a
+rough wooden portico before it,--not unlike such a portico as I have
+recently seen in front of a dilapidated inn at Culpepper, Virginia,--and
+with little blinking windows, very much resembling the port-holes of a
+man-of-war. According to tradition, the place had, indeed, a kind of
+naval origin. Old King George III., who, when he was not mad, or
+meddling with politics, was really a good-natured kind of man, once made
+Philip Astley, the riding-master, and proprietor of the circus in South
+Lambeth, a present of a dismantled seventy-four gun-ship captured from
+the French. With these timbers, some lath and plaster, a few bricks, and
+a little money, Astley ran up a theatre dedicated to the performance of
+interludes and _burlettas_,--that is, of pieces in which the dialogue
+was not spoken, but sung, in order to avoid interference with the
+patent-rights of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. In our days, this edifice
+was known as the Olympic. When I knew this theatre first, it had fallen
+into a state of seemingly hopeless decadence. Nobody succeeded there. To
+lease the Olympic Theatre was to court bankruptcy and invite collapse.
+The charming Vestris had been its tenant for a while. There Liston and
+Wrench had delighted the town with their most excellent fooling. There
+many of Planche's most sparkling burlesques had been produced. There a
+perfect boudoir of a green-room had been fitted up by Bartolozzi's
+beautiful and witty daughter; and there Hook and Jerrold, Haynes Bayley
+and A' Beckett had uttered their wittiest sayings. But the destiny of
+the Olympic was indomitable. There was nae luck about the house; and
+Eliza Vestris went bankrupt at last. Management after management tried
+its fortunes in the doomed little house, but without success. Desperate
+adventurers seized upon it as a last resource, or chose it as a place
+wherein to consummate their ruin. The Olympic was contiguous to the
+Insolvent Debtors' Court, in Portugal Street, and from the paint-pots of
+the Olympic scene-room to the whitewash of the commercial tribunal there
+was but one step.
+
+It must have been in 1848 that the famous comedian, William Farren,
+having realized a handsome fortune as an actor, essayed to lose a
+considerable portion of his wealth by becoming a manager. He succeeded
+in the last-named enterprise quite as completely as he had done in the
+other: I mean, that he lost a large sum of money in the Olympic Theatre.
+He played all kinds of pieces: among others, he gave the public two very
+humorous burlesques, founded on Shakspeare's plays of "Macbeth" and "The
+Merchant of Venice." The authors were two clever young Oxford men: Frank
+Talfourd, the son of the poet-Judge,--father and son are, alas! both
+dead,--and William Hale, the son of the well-known Archdeacon and Master
+of the Charter-House. Shakspearian burlesques were no novelty to the
+town. We had had enough and to spare of them. W. J. Hammond, the
+original _Sam Weller_ in the dramatized version of "Pickwick," had made
+people laugh in "Macbeth Travestie" and "Othello according to Act of
+Parliament." The Olympic burlesques were slightly funnier, and not
+nearly so coarse as their forerunners; but they were still of no
+striking salience. Poorly mounted, feebly played,--save in one
+particular,--they drew but thin houses. Gradually, however, you began to
+hear at clubs and in critical coteries--at the Albion and the Garrick
+and the Cafe de l'Europe, at Evans's and at Kilpack's, at the Reunion in
+Maiden Lane and at Rules's oyster-room, where poor Albert Smith used to
+reign supreme--rumors about a new actor. The new man was playing
+_Macbeth_ and _Shylock_ in Talfourd and Hale's parodies. He was a little
+stunted fellow, not very well-favored, not very young. Nobody--among the
+bodies who were anybody--had ever heard of him before. Whence he came,
+or what he was, none knew; but everybody came at last to care. For this
+little stunted creature, with his hoarse voice and nervous gestures and
+grotesque delivery, his snarls, his leers, his hunchings of the
+shoulders, his contortions of the limbs, his gleaming of the eyes, and
+his grindings of the teeth, was a genius. He became town-talk. He
+speedily grew famous. He has been an English, I might almost say a
+European, I might almost say a worldwide celebrity ever since; and his
+name was FREDERICK ROBSON.
+
+Eventually it was known, when the town grew inquisitive, and the critics
+were compelled to ferret out his antecedents, that the new actor had
+already attained middle age,--that he had been vegetating for years in
+that obscurest and most miserable of all dramatic positions, the low
+comedian of a country-theatre,--that he had come timidly to London and
+accepted at a low salary the post of buffoon at a half-theatre
+half-saloon in the City Road, called indifferently the "Grecian" and the
+"Eagle," where he had danced and tumbled, and sung comic songs, and
+delivered the dismal waggeries set down for him, without any marked
+success, and almost without notice. He was a quiet, unassuming little
+man, this Robson, seemingly without vanity and without ambition. He had
+a wife and family to maintain, and drew his twenty-five or thirty
+shillings weekly with perfect patience and resignation.
+
+A weary period, however, elapsed between his appearance at the Olympic
+and his realization of financial success. The critics and the
+connoisseurs talked about him a long time before the public could be
+persuaded to go and see him, or the manager to raise his salary. That
+doomed house with the wooden portico was in the way. At last the
+wretched remnant of the French seventy-four caught fire and was burned
+to the ground. Its ill-luck was consistent to the last. A poor actor,
+named Bender, had engaged the Olympic for a benefit. He was to pay
+twenty pounds for the use of the house. He had just sold nineteen
+pounds' worth of tickets, and trusted to the casual receipts at the door
+for his profits. At a few minutes before six o'clock, having to play in
+the first piece, he proceeded to the theatre, and entered his
+dressing-room. By half-past six the whole house was in a blaze. Bender,
+half undressed, had only time to save himself; and his coat, with the
+nineteen pounds in the pocket, fell a prey to the flames. After this,
+will you tell me that there is not such a thing as ill-luck?
+
+The Olympic arose "like a phoenix from its ashes." To use language
+less poetical, a wealthy tradesman--a cheesemonger, I think--found the
+capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and
+almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as
+evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was
+in the old or the new Olympic--but I think it was in the new one--that
+the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager.
+He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious
+manner. He was a man about town, a _viveur_, a dandy; and it turned out
+one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe
+Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and
+that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was
+tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being
+a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his
+defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts
+was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor
+wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing
+criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was
+troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens;
+and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged
+himself in the jail.
+
+It was during the management of Alfred Wigan at the New Olympic that
+Frederick Robson began to be heard of again. An old, and not a very
+clever farce, by one of the Brothers Mayhew, entitled "The Wandering
+Minstrel," had been revived. In this farce, Robson was engaged to play
+the part of _Jem Baggs_, an itinerant vocalist and flageolet-player,
+who, in tattered attire, roams about from town to town, making the air
+hideous with his performances. The part was a paltry one, and Robson,
+who had been engaged mainly at the instance of the manager's wife, a
+very shrewd and appreciative lady, who persisted in declaring that the
+ex-low-comedian of the Grecian had "something in him," eked it out by
+singing an absurd ditty called "Vilikins and his Dinah." The words and
+the air of "Vilikins" were, if not literally as old as the hills,
+considerably older than the age of Queen Elizabeth. The story told in
+the ballad, of a father's cruelty, a daughter's anguish, a sweetheart's
+despair, and the ultimate suicide of both the lovers, is, albeit couched
+in uncouth and grotesque language, as pathetic as the tragedy of "Romeo
+and Juliet." Robson gave every stanza a nonsensical refrain of "Right
+tooral lol looral, right tooral lol lay." At times, when his audience
+was convulsed with merriment, he would come to a halt, and gravely
+observe, "This is not a comic song"; but London, was soon unanimous that
+such exquisite comicality had not been heard for many a long year.
+"Vilikins and his Dinah" created a _furore_. My countrymen are always
+going mad about something; and Englishmen and Englishwomen all agreed to
+go crazy about "Vilikins." "Right tooral lol looral" was on every lip.
+Robson's portrait as _Jem Baggs_ was in every shop-window. A newspaper
+began an editorial with the first line in "Vilikins,"--
+
+    "It's of a liquor-merchant who in London did dwell."
+
+A Judge of Assize absolutely fined the High Sheriff of a county one
+hundred pounds for the mingled contempt shown in neglecting to provide
+him with an escort of javelin-men and introducing the irrepressible
+"Right tooral lol looral" into a speech delivered at the opening of
+circuit. Nor was the song all that was wonderful in _Jem Baggs_. His
+"make-up" was superb. The comic genius of Robson asserted itself in an
+inimitable lagging gait, an unequalled snivel, a coat and pantaloons
+every patch on and every rent in which were artistic, and a hat
+inconceivably battered, crunched, and bulged out of normal, and into
+preternatural shape.
+
+New triumphs awaited him. In the burlesque of "The Yellow Dwarf," he
+showed a mastery of the grotesque which approached the terrible. Years
+before, in _Macbeth_, he had personated a red-headed, fire-eating,
+whiskey-drinking Scotchman,--and in _Shylock_, a servile, fawning,
+obsequious, yet, when emergency arose, a passionate and vindictive Jew.
+In the _Yellow Dwarf_ he was the jaundiced embodiment of a spirit of
+Oriental evil: crafty, malevolent, greedy, insatiate,--full of mockery,
+mimicry, lubricity, and spite,--an Afrit, a Djinn, a Ghoul, a spawn of
+Sheitan. How that monstrous orange-tawny head grinned and wagged! How
+those flaps of ears were projected forwards, like unto those of a dog!
+How balefully those atrabilious eyes glistened! You laughed, and yet you
+shuddered. He spoke in mere doggerel and slang. He sang trumpery songs
+to negro melodies. He danced the Lancashire clog-hornpipe; he rattled
+out puns and conundrums; yet did he contrive to infuse into all this
+mummery and buffoonery, into this salmagundi of the incongruous and the
+_outre_, an unmistakably tragic element,--an element of depth and
+strength and passion, and almost of sublimity. The mountebank became
+inspired. The Jack Pudding suddenly drew the _cothurnus_ over his clogs.
+You were awe-stricken by the intensity, the vehemence, he threw into the
+mean balderdash of the burlesque-monger. These qualities were even more
+apparent in his subsequent personation of _Medea_, in Robert Brough's
+parody of the Franco-Italian tragedy. The love, the hate, the scorn, of
+the abandoned wife of _Jason_, the diabolic loathing in which she holds
+_Creuesa_, the tigerish affection with which she regards the children
+whom she is afterwards to slay,--all these were portrayed by Robson,
+through the medium, be it always remembered, of doggerel and slang, with
+astonishing force and vigor. The original _Medea_, the great Ristori
+herself, came to see Robson, and was delighted with and amazed at him.
+She scarcely understood two words of English, but the actor's genius
+struck her home through the bull's-hide target of an unknown tongue.
+_"Uomo straordinario!"_ she went away saying.
+
+I have anticipated the order of his successes, but at this distance of
+time and places I can keep no chronological count of them. Robson has
+always alternated the serio-comic burlesque with pure farce, and after
+_Jem Baggs_ his brightest hits have been in the deaf ostler in "Boots at
+the Swan" and the discharged criminal in "Retained for the Defence." In
+the burlesque of "Masaniello," he had an opportunity--which some thought
+would prove a magnificent one to him--of showing the grotesque side of
+insanity; but, for some reason or other, the part seemed distasteful to
+him. It may have been repugnant to his eminently sensitive spirit to
+exhibit the ludicrous aspect of the most dreadful of human infirmities.
+_A peste, fame, bello, et dementia libera nos, Domine!_ Perhaps the
+piece itself was weak. At all events, "Masaniello" had but a brief run.
+A drunken man, a jealous man, a deaf man, a fool, a vagabond, a demon, a
+tyrant, Robson could marvellously depict: in the crazy Neapolitan
+fisherman he either failed or was unwilling to excel. I had been for a
+long period extremely solicitous to see Robson undertake the part of
+_Sir Giles Overreach_ in "A New Way to pay Old Debts." You know that
+_Sir Giles_, after the discovery of the obliterated deed, goes stark
+staring mad. I should have wished to see him assume Edmund Kean's own
+character in the real play itself; but Robson was nervous of venturing
+on a purely "legitimate" _role_. I was half persuaded to write a
+burlesque on "A New Way to pay Old Debts," and Robson had promised to do
+his very best with _Sir Giles_; but a feeling, half of laziness, and
+half of reverence for the fine old drama, came over me, and I never got
+farther than the first scene.
+
+By this time some of the foremost dramatists in London thought they
+could discern in Robson latent characteristics of a nature far more
+elevated than those which his previous performances had brought into
+play. It was decided by those who had a right to render an authoritative
+verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic
+drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious
+mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the
+melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in
+so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written
+expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy
+Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," and "The Chimney-Corner." When I say
+written, I mean, of course, translated. Our foremost dramatists have not
+yet ceased to borrow from the French; but, like the gypsies, they so
+skilfully mutilate the children they have stolen, that the theft becomes
+almost impossible to detect. Not one person in five hundred, for
+instance, would discover at first sight that a play so apparently
+English in conception and structure as the "Ticket-of-Leave Man" is, in
+reality, a translation from the French.
+
+The success achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended,
+and was genuine. In _Daddy Hardacre_, a skilful adaptation of the usurer
+in Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than
+ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless _Overreach_, foiled at
+last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of
+the document by which he thought to satisfy his lust of gain. Moliere's
+_Avare_ I thought he would have acted wonderfully; Ben Jonson's
+_Volpone_, in "The Fox," he would surely have understood, and powerfully
+rendered. In the devoted father of "The Porter's Knot" he was likewise
+most excellent: quiet, unaffected, unobtrusive, never forcing sentiment
+upon you, never obtaining tears by false pretences, but throughout
+solid, sterling, natural, admirable. I came at last, however, to the
+conviction, that, marked as was the distinction gained by this good
+actor in parts such as these, and as the lighthouse-keeper--the
+character originally sustained in private by Charles Dickens--in Wilkie
+Collins's play, domestic drama was not his _forte_; or, rather, that it
+was not his _fortissimo_. In fantastic burlesque, in the comic-terrible,
+he was unrivalled and inimitable. In the domestic drama he could hardly
+be surpassed, but he might be approached. Webster, Emery, Addison, could
+play _Daddy Hardacre_, or the father in "The Porter's Knot"; but none
+but himself could at once awe and convulse in _Medea_ and _the Yellow
+Dwarf_. These domestic dramas interested, however, as much by their
+subject as by the excellence of his acting. Moreover, the public are apt
+sometimes to grow weary of burlesques,--their eternal grimacing and
+word-torturing and negro-singing and dancing. Themes for parody become
+exhausted, and, without long surcease, would not bear repetition. You
+may grow puns, like tobacco, until the soil is utterly worn out. The
+burlesque-writers, too, exhibited signs of weariness and feebleness.
+Planche retired into the Heralds' College. The cleverest of the Broughs
+died. His surviving brother was stupid. Talfourd went to the law before
+he found an early grave. Hale went to India. The younger generation were
+scarcely fit to write pantomimes, and it was not always Christmas.
+Besides, Robson had become a manager, and thought, perhaps, that
+weightier parts became him. In copartnership with Mr. Emden, he had
+succeeded Alfred Wigan as lessee of the Olympic, and there I hope he has
+realized a fortune. But whenever his brief vacations occurred, and
+actor-like he proceeded to turn them into gold by devoting to
+performances in country-theatres those days and nights which should
+properly have been given to rest and peace, he proved faithful to his
+old loves, and _Jem Baggs_ and _Boots at the Swan_, _Medea_ and _the
+Yellow Dwarf_, continued to be his favorite parts.
+
+The popularity attained in England by this most remarkable of modern
+actors has never, since the public were first aware of his qualities,
+decreased. Robson is always sure to draw. The nights of his playing, or
+of his non-playing, at the Olympic, are as sure a gauge of the receipts
+as the rising and falling of the mercury in the thermometer are of the
+variations of the temperature. A month's absence of Robson from London
+always brought about an alarming depletion in the Olympic treasury.
+Unhappily, these absences have of late years become more frequent, and
+more and more prolonged. The health of the great tragi-comedian has
+gradually failed him. I have been for a long period without news from
+him; but I much fear that the heyday of his health and strength is past.
+The errors which made Edmund Kean, in the prime of life, a shattered
+wreck, cannot be brought home to Frederick Robson. Rumors, the wildest
+and the wickedest, have been circulated about him, as about every other
+public man; but, to the best of my knowledge and belief, they are wholly
+destitute of foundation. _Don Basilio_, in Beaumarchais's play, might
+have added some very pregnant advice to his memorable counsel,
+"_Calomniez, calomniez, il en resultera toujours quelque chose_." He
+should have taught the world--if the world wants teaching--_how_ to
+calumniate. The following recipe will be found, I think, infallible. If
+your enemy be a man of studious and retired habits, hint that he has
+gone mad; if you see him alone at a theatre or at church, report that he
+is separated from his wife; _and in any case, declare that he drinks_.
+He can't disprove it. If he drinks water out-of-doors, he may drink like
+a fish at home. If he walks straight on the street, he may reel in the
+parlor.
+
+Thus, scores of times, the gossip-mongers of English provincial
+papers--the legion of "our own correspondents," who are a nuisance and a
+curse to reputable society, wherever that society is to be found--have
+attributed the vacillating health and the intermittent retirements from
+the stage of the great actor to an over-fondness for brandy-and-water.
+The sorrowful secret of all this is, I apprehend, that poor Robson has
+for years been overworking himself,--and that latterly prosperity has
+laid as heavy a tax upon his time and energy as necessity imposed upon
+them when he was young. Dame Fortune, whether she smile, or whether she
+frown, never ceases to be a despot. Over Dives and over Lazarus she
+equally tyrannizes. In wealth and in poverty does she exact the pound of
+flesh or the pound of soul. There are seasons in a man's life when
+Fortune with a radiant savageness cries out to him, "Confound you! you
+_shall_ make fifty thousand a year"; and she drives him onward to the
+goal quite as remorselessly as ever slave-owner drove negro into a
+rice-ground. The whip that is made of golden wire hurts quite as much, I
+opine, as the cowhide. And when, at last, the fortunate man cries out,
+"I am rich, I have enough, _Sat me lusistis, ludite nunc alios_, I will
+work and fret myself no more, I will retire on my dividends, and sit me
+down under my own fig-tree,"--Fortune dismisses him with a sneer:
+"Retire, if you like!" cries the implacable, "but take hypochondria and
+_ennui_, take gout and the palsy, with you."
+
+I should be infinitely rejoiced to hear, when I go back, that Robson is
+once more a hale and valid man. It is the tritest of platitudes to say
+that he could ill be spared by the English stage. We never _can_ spare a
+good actor. As well can we spare a good book or a good picture. But
+there would be much cause for gratulation, if Robson were spared, ere
+his powers definitively decline, to visit the United States. The
+American people ought to see Robson. They have had our tragedians, good,
+bad, and indifferent. They have filled the pockets of William Macready
+and of Charles Kean with dollars. They have heard our men-singers and
+our women-singers,--the birds that can sing, and the birds that can't
+sing, but _will_ sing. The most notable of our drolls, Buckstone and
+Keeley, have been here, and have received a cordial welcome. But Robson
+has hitherto been lacking on this side the Atlantic. That he would be
+thoroughly appreciated by the theatrical public of America I cannot for
+one instant doubt. It is given to England to produce eccentrics, but for
+other nations to understand them better than the English do. The Germans
+are better critics of the satire of Hogarth, the French of the humor of
+Sterne, and the Americans of the philosophy of Shakspeare, than we to
+whose country those illustrious belong. In Boston, in New York, in
+Philadelphia, crowded and enthusiastic audiences would, I venture to
+foretell, hang on the utterances of Robson, and expound to their own
+entire satisfaction his most eloquent by-play, his subtlest gestures. It
+would be idle, in the endeavor to give him something like a palpable
+aspect to people who have never seen him, to compare him with other
+great actors yet extant, or who have gone before. In his bursts of
+passion, in his vehement soliloquies, in the soul-harrowing force of his
+simulated invective, he is said to resemble Edmund Kean; but how are you
+to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the
+image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and
+Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is
+perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism in his
+instance.
+
+Let me add, in conclusion, that Robson, off the stage, is one of the
+mildest, modestest, most unassuming of men. Painfully nervous he always
+was. I remember, a dozen years since, and when I was personally
+unacquainted with him, writing in some London newspaper a eulogistic
+criticism on one of his performances. I learned from friends that he had
+read the article, and had expressed himself as deeply grateful to me for
+it. I just knew him by sight; but for months afterwards, if I met him in
+the street, he used to blush crimson, and made as sudden a retreat round
+the nearest corner as was possible. He said afterwards that he hadn't
+the courage to thank me. I brought him to bay at last, and came to know
+him very well; and then I discovered how the nervousness, the
+bashfulness, the _mauvaise honte_, which made him so shy and retiring in
+private, stood him in wonderful stead on the stage. The nervous man
+became the fretful and capricious tyrant of mock tragedy; the bashful
+man warmed at the foot-lights with passion and power. The manner which
+in society was a drawback and a defect became in the pursuit of his art
+a charm and an excellence. What new parts may be created for Robson, and
+how he will acquit himself in them, I cannot presume to prophesy; but it
+is certain that he has already done enough to win for himself in the
+temple of dramatic fame a niche all the more to be envied, as its form
+and pattern must be, like its occupant, unprecedented and original.
+
+
+
+
+THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY, IN SCOTLAND.
+
+
+There are phenomena in Nature which give the clue to so many of its
+mysteries that their correct interpretation leads at once to the
+broadest generalizations and to the rapid advance of science in new
+directions. The explanation of one very local and limited problem may
+clear up many collateral ones, since its solution includes the answer to
+a whole set of kindred inquiries. The "parallel roads" of Glen Roy offer
+such a problem. For half a century they have been the subject of patient
+investigation and the boldest speculation. To them natural philosophers
+have returned again and again to test their theories, and until they are
+fully understood no steady or permanent advance can be made in the
+various views which they have suggested to different observers. The
+theory of the formation of lakes by barriers, presented by McCulloch and
+Sir T. Lauder-Dick, that of continental upheavals and subsidences,
+advocated by Sir Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, that of inundations
+by great floods, maintained by Professor H. D. Rogers and Sir George
+Mackenzie, that of glacial action, brought forward by myself, have been
+duly discussed with reference to this difficult case; all have found
+their advocates, all have met with warm opposition, and the matter still
+remains a mooted point; but the one of all these theories which shall
+stand the test of time and repeated examination and be eventually
+accepted will explain many a problem besides the one it was meant to
+solve, and lead to farther progress in other directions.
+
+I propose here to reconsider the facts of the case, and to present anew
+my own explanation of them, now more than twenty years old, but which I
+have never had an opportunity of publishing in detail under a popular
+form, though it appeared in the scientific journals of the day.
+
+Before considering, however, the phenomena of Glen Roy, or the special
+glacial areas scattered over Scotland and the other British Isles, let
+us see what general evidence we have that glaciers ever existed at all
+in that realm. The reader will pardon me, if, at the risk of repetition,
+I sum up here the indications which, from our knowledge of glaciers as
+they at present exist, must be admitted, wherever they are found, as
+proof of their former existence. Such a summary may serve also as a
+guide to those who would look for glacial traces where they have not
+hitherto been sought.
+
+In the first place, we have to consider the singular abrasion of the
+surfaces over which the glacier has moved, quite unlike that produced by
+the action of water. We have seen that such surfaces, wherever the
+glacier-marks have not been erased by some subsequent action, have
+several unfailing characteristics: they are highly polished, and they
+are also marked with scratches or fine _striae_, with grooves and deeper
+furrows. Where best preserved, the smooth surfaces are shining; they
+have a lustre like stone or marble artificially polished by the combined
+friction and pressure of some harder material than itself until all its
+inequalities have been completely levelled and its surface has become
+glossy. Any marble mantel-piece may serve as an example of this kind of
+glacier-worn surface.
+
+The levelling and abrading action of water on rock has an entirely
+different character. Tides or currents driven powerfully and constantly
+against a rocky shore, and bringing with them hard materials, may
+produce blunt, smooth surfaces, such as the repeated blows of a hammer
+on stone would cause; but they never bring it to a high polish, because,
+the grinding materials not being held steadily down, in firm, permanent
+contact with the rocky surfaces against which they move, as is the case
+with the glacier, but, on the contrary, dashed to and fro, they strike
+and rebound, making a succession of blows, but never a continuous,
+uninterrupted pressure and friction. The same is true of all the marks
+made on rocky shores against which loose materials are driven by
+water-currents. They are separate, disconnected, fragmentary; whereas
+the lines drawn by the hard materials set in the glacier, whether light
+and fine or strong and deep, are continuous, often unbroken for long
+distances, and rectilinear. Indeed, we have seen[A] that we have beneath
+every glacier a complete apparatus adapted to all the results described
+above. In the softer fragments ground to the finest powder under the
+incumbent mass we have a polishing paste; in the hard materials set in
+that paste, whether pebbles, or angular rocky fragments of different
+sizes, or grains of sand, we have the various graving instruments by
+which the finer or coarser lines are drawn. Not only are these lines
+frequently uninterrupted for a distance of many yards, but they are also
+parallel, except when some change takes place in the thickness of the
+ice, which may slightly modify the trend of the mass, or where lines in
+a variety of directions are produced by the intermittent action of
+separate glaciers running successively at different angles over the same
+surfaces. The deeper grooves sometimes present a succession of short
+staccato touches, just as when one presses the finger vertically along
+some surface where the resistance is sufficient to interrupt the action
+without actually stopping it,--a kind of grating motion, showing how
+firmly the instrument which produced it must have been held in the
+moving mass. No currents or sudden freshets carrying hard materials with
+them, even moving along straight paths down hill-sides or
+mountain-slopes, have ever been known to draw any such lines. They could
+be made only by some instrument held fast as in a vice by the moving
+power. Something of the kind is occasionally produced by the drag of a
+wheel grating over rocks covered with loose materials.
+
+It has been said that grounded ice or icebergs floating along a rocky
+shore might produce similar marks; but they will chiefly be at the level
+of high-water mark, and, if grounded, they will trend in various
+directions, owing to the rocking or rotating movement of the iceberg. It
+has also been urged, that, without admitting any general glacier-period,
+icebergs and floating ice from more northern latitudes might account for
+the extensive transportation of the loose materials scattered in a
+continuous sheet over a large portion of the globe. There can be no
+doubt that an immense amount of _debris_ of all sorts is carried to
+great distances by floating ice; where their presence is due to this
+cause, however, they are everywhere stranded along the shore or dropped
+to the sea-bottom. Large boulders are frequently left by the ice along
+the New-England coast, and we shall trace them hereafter among the
+sand-dunes of Cape Cod. But before it can be admitted that the
+drift-phenomena, and the polished and engraved surfaces with which they
+are everywhere intimately associated, are owing to floating ice or
+icebergs, it must be shown that all these appearances have been produced
+by some agency moving from the sea-board towards the land, and extending
+up to the very summits of the mountains, or else that all the countries
+exhibiting glacial phenomena have been sunk below the ocean to the
+greatest height at which glacier-marks are found, and have since
+gradually emerged to their present level. Now, though geologists are
+lavish of immersions when something is to be accounted for which they
+cannot otherwise explain, and a fresh baptism of old Mother Earth is
+made to wash away many obstacles to scientific theories, yet the common
+sense of the world will hardly admit the latter assumption without
+positive proof, and all the evidence of the kind we have, at the period
+under consideration, indicates only a comparatively slight change of
+relative level between sea and land within a narrow belt along the
+shores; and even this is shown to be posterior, not anterior, to the
+glacial phenomena. As to the supposition that the motion proceeded from
+the sea towards the land, all the facts are against it, since the whole
+trend of these phenomena is from inland centres toward the shore,
+instead of being from the coast upward.
+
+Certainly, no one familiar with the facts could suppose that floating
+ice or icebergs had abraded, polished, and furrowed the bottom of narrow
+valleys as we find them worn, polished, and grooved by glaciers. And it
+must be remembered that this is a theory founded not upon hypothesis,
+but upon the closest comparison. I have not become acquainted with these
+marks in regions where glaciers no longer exist, and made a theory to
+explain their presence. I have, on the contrary, studied them where they
+are in process of formation. I have seen the glacier engrave its lines,
+plough its grooves and furrows in the solid rock, and polish the
+surfaces over which it moved, and was familiar with all this when I
+found afterwards appearances corresponding exactly to those which I had
+investigated in the home of the present glaciers. I could therefore say,
+and I think with some reason, that "this also is the work of the glacier
+acting in ancient times as it now acts in Switzerland."
+
+There is another character of glacial action distinguishing it from any
+abrasions caused by water, even if freighted with a large amount of
+loose materials. On any surface over which water flows we shall find
+that the softer materials have yielded first and most completely. Hard
+dikes will be left standing out, while softer rocks around them are worn
+away,--furrows will be eaten into more deeply,--fissures will be
+widened,--clay-slates will be wasted,--while hard sandstone or limestone
+and granite will show greater resistance. Not so with surfaces over
+which the levelling plough of the glacier has passed. Wherever softer
+and harder rocks alternate, they are brought to one outline; where dikes
+intersect softer rock, they are cut to one level with it; where rents or
+fissures traverse the rock, they do not seem to have been widened or
+scooped out more deeply, but their edges are simply abraded on one line
+with the adjoining surfaces. Whatever be the inequality in the hardness
+of the materials of which the rock consists, even in the case of
+pudding-stone, the surface is abraded so evenly as to leave the
+impression that a rigid rasp has moved over all the undulations of the
+land, advancing in one and the same direction and levelling all before
+it.
+
+Among the inequalities of the glacier-worn surfaces which deserve
+especial notice, are the so-called "_roches moutonnees_." They are
+knolls of a peculiar appearance, frequent in the Alps, and first noticed
+by the illustrious De Saussure, who designated them by that name,
+because, where they are numerous and seen from a distance, they resemble
+the rounded backs of a flock of sheep resting on the ground. These
+knolls are the result of the prolonged abrasion of masses of rocks
+separated by deep indentations wide enough to be filled up by large
+glaciers, overtopping the summits of the intervening prominences, and
+passing over them like a river, or like tide-currents flowing over a
+submerged ledge of rock. It is evident that water rushing over such
+sunken hills or ledges, adapting itself readily to all the inequalities
+over which it flows, and forming eddies against the obstacles in its
+course, will scoop out tortuous furrows upon the bottom, and hollow out
+rounded cavities against the walls, acting especially along preexisting
+fissures and upon the softer parts of the rock,--while the glacier,
+moving as a solid mass, and carrying on its under side its gigantic file
+set in a fine paste, will in course of time abrade uniformly the angles
+against which it strikes, equalize the depressions between the prominent
+masses, and round them off until they present those smooth bulging
+knolls known as the "_roches moutonnees_" in the Alps, and so
+characteristic everywhere of glacier-action. A comparison of any
+tide-worn hummock with such a glacier-worn mound will convince the
+observer that its smooth and evenly rounded surface was never produced
+by water.
+
+Besides their peculiar form, the _roches moutonnees_ present all the
+characteristic features of glacier-action in their polished surfaces
+accompanied with the straight lines, grooves, and furrows above
+described. But there are two circumstances connected with these knolls
+deserving special notice. They frequently present the glacial marks only
+on one side, while the opposite side has all the irregularities and
+roughness of a hill-slope not acted upon by ice. It is evident that the
+polished side was the one turned towards the advancing glacier, the side
+against which the ice pressed in its onward movement,--while it passed
+over the other side, the lee side as we may call it, without coming in
+immediate contact with it, bridging the depression, and touching bottom
+again a little farther on. As an additional evidence of this fact, we
+frequently find on the lee side of such knolls accumulations of the
+loose materials which the glacier carries with it. It is only, however,
+when the knolls are quite high, and abrupt enough to allow any rigid
+substance to bridge over the space in its descent from the summit to the
+surface below, that we find these conditions; when the knolls are low
+and slope gently downward in every direction, they present the
+characteristic glacier-surfaces equally on all sides. This circumstance
+should be borne in mind by all who investigate the traces of
+glacier-action; for this inequality in the surfaces presented by the
+opposite sides of any obstacle in the path of the ice is often an
+important means of determining the direction of its motion.
+
+The other characteristic peculiarity of these _roches moutonnees_
+consists in the direction of the glacier-scratches, which ascend the
+slope to its summit in a direct line on one side, while they deviate to
+the right and left on the other sides of the knoll, more or less
+obliquely according to its steepness. Occasionally, large boulders may
+be found perched on the very summit of such prominences. Their position
+is inexplicable by the supposition of currents as the cause of their
+transportation. Any current strong enough to carry a boulder to such a
+height would of course sweep it on with it. This phenomenon finds,
+however, an easy explanation in the glacial theory. The thickness of
+such a sheet of ice is of course less above such a hill or mound than
+over the lower levels adjoining it. Not only will the ice melt,
+therefore, more readily at this spot, but, as ice is transparent to
+heat, the summit of the prominence will become warmed by the rays of the
+sun, and will itself facilitate the melting of the ice above it. On the
+breaking up of the ice, therefore, such a spot will be the first to
+yield, and allow the boulders carried on the back of the glacier to fall
+into the hollow thus formed, where they will rest upon the projecting
+rock left uncovered. This is no theoretical explanation; there are such
+cases in Switzerland, where holes in the ice are formed immediately
+above the summit of hills or prominences over which the glacier passes,
+and into which it drops its burdens. Of course, where the ice is
+constantly renewed over such a spot by the onward progress of the
+glacier, these materials may be carried off again; but if we suppose
+such a case to occur at the breaking up of the glacier-period, when the
+ice was disappearing forever from such a spot, it is easy to account for
+the poising of these large boulders on prominent peaks or ledges.
+
+The appearances about the _roches moutonnees_, especially the straight
+scratches and grooves on the side up which the ice ascended, have led to
+a mistaken view of the mode in which large boulders are transported by
+ice. It has been supposed, by those who, while they accepted the glacial
+theory, were not wholly conversant with the mode of action of glaciers,
+that, in passing through the bottom of a valley, for instance, the
+glacier would take up large boulders, and, carrying them along with it,
+would push them up such a slope and deposit them on its summit. It is
+true that large boulders may sometimes be found in front of glaciers
+among the materials of their terminal moraines, and may, upon any
+advance of the glacier, be pushed forward by it. But I know of no
+example of erratic boulders being carried to considerable distances and
+raised from lower to higher levels by this means. All the angular
+boulders perched upon prominent rocks must have fallen upon the surface
+of the glacier in the upper part of its course, where rocky ledges rise
+above its surface and send down their broken fragments. The surface of
+any boulder carried under the ice, or pushed along for any distance at
+its terminus, would show the friction and pressure to which it had been
+subjected. In this connection it should be remembered that in the case
+of large glaciers low hills form no obstacle to their onward progress,
+especially when the glacier is thick enough to cover them completely,
+and even to rise far above them. The _roches moutonnees_ about the
+Grimsel show that hills many hundred feet high have been passed over by
+the great glacier of the Aar, when it descended as far as Meyringen,
+without having seemingly influenced its onward progress.
+
+But in enumerating the evidences of glacier-action, we have to remember
+not only the effects produced upon the surface of the ground by the ice
+itself, but also the deposits it has left behind it. The loose materials
+scattered over the face of the earth may point as distinctly to the
+source of their distribution as does the character of the rocky surfaces
+on which they rest indicate the different causes of abrasion. In
+characteristic localities the loose materials deposited by glaciers may
+readily be recognized at first sight, and distinguished from water-worn
+pebbles; nor is it difficult to distinguish both from loose materials
+resulting from the decomposition of rocks on the spot,--the latter
+always agreeing with the rocks on which they rest, while the
+decomposition to which they owe their separation from the solid rock is
+often still going on. Such _debris_ are found everywhere about
+disintegrating rocks, and they constantly mingle with the loose
+fragments brought from a distance by various agencies. They are found
+upon and among the glacier-worn pebbles, especially where the latter
+have themselves been disturbed since their accumulation. They are also
+found among water-worn pebbles, wherever the rocky beds of our rivers or
+the rocky bluffs of our sea-shores crumble down. In investigating the
+character of loose materials transported from greater or less distances,
+either by the agency of glaciers or by water-currents, it is important
+at the very outset to discriminate between these deposits of older date
+and the local accessions mingling with them.
+
+Occasionally we may have also to distinguish between all these deposits
+and the _debris_ brought down by land-slides, or by sudden freshets
+transporting to a distance a vast amount of loose materials which are
+neither ice-worn nor water-worn. At Rossberg, for instance, in the
+Canton of Schwitz, the land-slide which buried the village of Goldau
+under a terrific avalanche, and filled a part of the Lake of Lauertz,
+spread an immense number of huge boulders across the valley, some of
+which even rolled up the opposite side to a considerable height. Many of
+these boulders might easily be mistaken for erratic boulders, were not
+the aggregate of these loose materials traceable to the hills from which
+they descended. In this case water had no part in loosening or bringing
+down this mass of fragments. They simply rolled from the declivity, and
+stopped when they had exhausted the momentum imparted to them by their
+weight. In the case of the _debacle_ of Bagnes, above Martigny, in a
+valley leading to the St. Bernard, the circumstances were very
+different. A glacier, advancing beyond its usual limits and rising
+against the opposite mountain-slope, dammed up the waters of the torrent
+and caused a lake to be formed. The obstruction gave way in the course
+of time, and the waters of the lake rushed out, carrying along with
+them huge boulders and a mass of loose materials of all sorts, and
+scattering them over the plain below. Such an accumulation of _debris_
+differs from the pebbles and loose fragments found in river-beds. The
+comparatively short distance over which they are carried, and the
+suddenness of the transportation, allow no time for the abrasion which
+produces the smooth surfaces of water-worn pebbles or the polished and
+scratched surfaces of glacier-worn ones. In the latter case, we have
+seen that the pebbles, being so set in the ice as to expose only one
+side, may be only partially polished, while others, more loosely held
+and turning in their sockets, may receive the same high polish on every
+side. In such a case the lines will intersect one another, in
+consequence of the different position in which the stone has been held
+at different times. No such appearances exist in the water-worn pebbles:
+their blunt surfaces, smoothed and rounded uniformly by the action of
+the water in which they have been rolled or tossed about, present
+everywhere the same aspect.
+
+The correlation between these different loose materials and the position
+in which they are found helps us also to detect their origin. The loose
+materials bearing glacier-marks are always found resting upon surfaces
+which have been worn, abraded, and engraved in the same manner, while
+the water-worn pebbles are everywhere found resting upon rocks the
+abrasion of which may be traced to water. It is true that in some
+localities, as, for instance, in the gravel-pit of Mount Auburn, near
+Cambridge, large masses of glacier-worn pebbles alternate with
+beach-shingle; but it is easy to show that there was here a glacier
+advancing into the sea, crowding its front moraine and the materials
+carried under it over and into the shingle washed up by the waves upon
+the beach. Not infrequently, also, river-pebbles may be found among
+glacial materials. This is especially the case where, after the
+disappearance of large glaciers, rivers have occupied their beds.
+Examples of this kind may be seen in all the valleys of the Alps.
+
+But, besides the special character of the individual fragments, the true
+origin of any accumulation of glacier-_debris_, commonly called drift,
+may be detected by the total absence of stratification, so essential a
+feature in all water-deposits. This absence of stratification throughout
+its mass is, after all, the great and important characteristic of the
+drift; and though I have alluded to it before, I reiterate it here, as
+that which distinguishes it from all like accumulations under water. I
+may be pardoned for dwelling upon this point, because the great
+controversy among geologists respecting the nature and origin of the
+sheet of loose materials scattered over a great part of the globe turns
+upon it. The _debris_ of which the drift consists are thrown together
+pell-mell, without any arrangement according to size or weight, larger
+and smaller fragments being mixed so indiscriminately that the heaviest
+materials may be on the very summit of the mass, and the lightest at the
+bottom in immediate contact with the underlying rock, or the larger
+pieces may stand at any level in the mass of finer ones. Impalpable
+powder, coarse sand, rounded, polished, and scratched fragments of every
+size are mixed together in a homogeneous paste, in which the larger
+materials are imbedded, to use a homely, but expressive comparison, like
+raisins and currants in a pudding. The adhesive paste holding all these
+fragments together is, no doubt, the result of the friction to which the
+whole was subjected under the glacier, and which has worked some of the
+softer materials into a kind of cement.
+
+The mode of aggregation of water-worn materials is very different.
+Examine the shingle along our beaches: we find it so distributed as to
+show that the fading tide-wave has carried the lighter materials farther
+than the heavier ones, and the successive deposits exhibit an imperfect
+cross-stratification resulting from changes in the height of the tide
+and the direction of the wind. Moreover, in any materials collected
+under water we find the heavier ones at the bottom, the lighter on the
+top. It is true that large angular boulders may occasionally be found
+resting upon beach-shingle, but their presence in such a connection is
+easily explained. They may have been dropped there by floating icebergs,
+or have fallen from crumbling drift-cliffs.
+
+I should add, in speaking of drift-materials, that, while we find the
+large angular boulders resting above them, we occasionally find boulders
+of unusual size mingled with them; but, when this is the case, such
+massive fragments are more or less rounded, polished, and marked in the
+same way as the smaller pebbles, or as the surfaces over which the
+glacier has passed. This is important to remember, because, when we
+examine the drift in countries where the ice, during the glacier-period,
+overtopped nearly all the mountains, so that few fragments could fall
+from them upon its surface, we find scarcely any angular boulders, while
+the drift is interspersed with larger fragments of this character,
+carried under the ice, instead of on its back. Another distinction
+between water-worn deposits and drift consists in the fact that the
+former are washed clean, while the latter always retains the mud
+gathered during its journey and spread throughout its mass.
+
+In summing up the glacial evidences, I must not omit the moraines,
+though I have described them so fully in a previous article that I need
+not do more than allude to them here; but any argument for the glacial
+theory which did not include these characteristic walls erected by
+glaciers would be most imperfect. We need hardly discuss the theory of
+currents with reference to the formation of terminal moraines, extending
+across the valleys from side to side. Any current powerful enough to
+bring the boulders and _debris_ of all sorts of which these walls are
+composed to the places where they are found would certainly not build
+them up with such regularity, but would sweep them away or scatter them
+along the bottom of the valley. That this is actually the case is seen
+in the lower course of the valley of the Rhone, where there are no
+transverse moraines, while they are frequent and undisturbed in the
+upper part of the valley. This is no doubt owing to the fact, that, when
+the main glacier had already retreated considerably up the valley, the
+lateral glaciers from the chains of the Combin and the Diablerets still
+reached the valley of the Rhone at a lower point, and barred the outlet
+of the waters from the glaciers above. A lake was thus formed, which,
+when the lower glaciers retreated up the lateral valleys, swept away all
+the lower transverse moraines, and formed the flat bottom of Martigny.
+In this case, the moraines were totally obliterated; but there are many
+other instances in which the materials have been only broken up and
+scattered over a wider surface by currents. In such remodelled moraines,
+the glacier-mud has, of course, been more or less washed away. We have
+here a blending of the action of water with that of the glacier; and,
+indeed, how could it be otherwise, when the colossal glaciers of past
+ages gradually disappeared or retreated to the mountain-heights? The
+wasting ice must have occasioned immense freshets, the action of which
+we shall trace hereafter, when examining the formation of our
+drift-ponds, of our river-beds and estuaries, as well as the
+river-terraces standing far above the present water-level.
+
+And now, if it be asked how much of this evidence for the former
+existence of glaciers is to be found in Great Britain, I answer, that
+there is not a valley in Switzerland where all these traces are found in
+greater perfection than in the valleys of the Scotch Highlands, or of
+the mountains of Ireland and Wales, or of the lake-region in England.
+Not a link is wanting to the chain. Polished surfaces, traversed by
+striae, grooves, and furrows, with a sheet of drift resting immediately
+upon them, extend throughout the realm,--the _roches moutonnees_
+raise their rounded backs from the ground there as in
+Switzerland,--transverse moraines bar their valleys and lateral ones
+border them, and the boulders from the hill-sides are scattered over the
+plains as thickly as between the Alps and the Jura, and are here and
+there perched upon the summits of isolated hills. This being the case,
+let us examine a little more closely the local phenomena connected with
+the ancient extension of glaciers in this region, and especially the
+parallel roads of Glen Roy.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+    G. R. Glen Roy.
+    M. Moeldhu Hill.
+    S. Spean River.
+    G. S. Glen Spean.
+    L. Loch Laggan.
+    T. Loch Treig.
+    G. Glen Gloy.
+    L. O. Loch Lochy.
+    A. Loch Arkeig.
+    E. Loch Eil.
+    N. Ben Nevis.
+    1,2,3. The three parallel roads.]
+
+Among the Grampian Hills, a little to the northeast of Ben Nevis, lies
+the valley of Glen Roy, a winding valley trending in a northeasterly
+direction, and some ten miles in length. Across the mouth of this
+valley, at right angles with it, runs the valley of Glen Spean, trending
+from east to west, Glen Roy thus opening directly at its southern
+extremity into Glen Spean. Around the walls of the Glen Roy valley run
+three terraces, one above the other, at different heights, like so many
+roads artificially cut in the sides of the valley, and indeed they go by
+the name of the "parallel roads." These three terraces, though in a less
+perfect state of preservation, are repeated for a short distance at
+exactly the same levels on the southern wall of the valley of Glen
+Spean, just opposite the opening of the Glen Roy valley; that is, they
+make the whole circuit of Glen Roy, stop abruptly, on both sides, at its
+southern extremity, and reappear again on the opposite wall of Glen
+Spean. I should add, however, that all three do not come to this sudden
+termination; for the lowest of these terraces turns eastward into the
+valley of Glen Spean, following the whole curve of the eastern half of
+the valley, while, of the two upper terraces, there is no trace
+whatever, nor is there any indication that either of the three ever
+existed in the western half of the valley. When I first visited the
+region, these phenomena had already been the subject of earnest
+discussion among English geologists. The commonly accepted explanation
+of the facts was that these terraces marked ancient sea-levels at a time
+when the ocean penetrated much farther into the interior, and Glen Roy
+and the adjoining valleys were as many fiords or estuaries. And though
+the present elevation of the locality made such an interpretation
+improbable at first sight, the first or highest of the terraces being
+eleven hundred and forty-four feet above the present sea-level, the
+second eighty-two feet below the first, and the third and lowest two
+hundred and twelve feet below the second, or eight hundred odd feet
+above the level of the sea, it was thought that the oscillations of the
+land, its alternate subsidences and upheavals, proved by the modern
+results of geology to have been so great and so frequent, might account
+even for so remarkable a change. There are, however, other objections to
+this theory not so easily explained away. There are no traces of organic
+life upon these terraces. If they were ancient sea-beaches, we should
+expect to find upon them the remains of marine animals, shells,
+crustacea, and the like. All the explanations given to lessen the
+significance of this absence of organic remains are futile. Again, why
+should the lower terrace alone be continued into the eastern end of the
+valley of Glen Spean, while there are no terraces at all in its western
+part, since both must have been as fully open to the sea as Glen Roy
+valley itself? This seemed the more inexplicable since all the terraces
+exist on the valley-wall opposite the outlet of Glen Roy, showing that
+this sheet of water, wherever it came from, filled the valley itself and
+the space between it and the southern wall of Glen Spean, but failed to
+spread, on either side of that space, into the eastern and western
+extension of Glen Spean. It is evident, that, at the time the water
+filled Glen Roy, some obstruction blocked the valley of Glen Spean, both
+to the east and west, leaving, however, that space in the centre free
+into which Glen Roy opens, while, by the time the water had sunk to the
+level of the lowest terrace, one of these barriers, that to the east,
+must have been removed, for the lowest terrace, as I have said, is
+continuous throughout the eastern part of Glen Spean.[B]
+
+Prepossessed as I was with the idea of glacial agency in times anterior
+to ours, these phenomena appeared to me under a new aspect. I found the
+bottom of Glen Spean so worn by glacial action as to leave no doubt in
+my mind that it must have been the bed of a great glacier, and Dr.
+Buckland fully concurred with me in this impression. Indeed, the face of
+the country throughout that region presents not only the glacier-marks
+in great perfection, but other evidences of the ancient presence of
+glaciers. There are moraines at the lower end of Glen Spean, remodelled,
+it is true, by the action of currents, but still retaining enough of
+their ancient character to be easily recognized; and some of the finest
+examples of the _roches moutonnees_ I have seen in Scotland are to be
+found at the entrance of the valley of Loch Treig, a lateral valley
+opening into Glen Spean on its southern side, and, as we shall see
+hereafter, intimately connected with the history of the parallel roads
+of Glen Roy. These _roches moutonnees_ may very fairly be compared with
+those of the Grimsel, and exhibit all the characteristic features of the
+Alpine ones. One of them, lying on the western side of the valley where
+it opens into Glen Spean, is crossed by a trap-dike. The general surface
+of the hill, consisting of rather soft mica, has been slightly worn down
+by atmospheric agencies, so that the dike stands out some three-quarters
+of an inch above it. On the dike, however, the glacier-marks extend for
+its whole length in great perfection, while they have entirely
+disappeared from the surrounding surfaces, so as to leave the dike thus
+standing out in full relief. This is an instructive case, showing how
+little disintegration has gone on since the drift-period. All the
+currents that have swept over it, all the rains that have beaten upon
+it, have not worn away one inch from the original surface of the hill. I
+have observed many other _roches moutonnees_ in Scotland, especially
+about the neighborhood of Loch Awe, Loch Fyne, and Loch Etive. In fact,
+they may be found in almost all the glens of Scotland, in the
+lake-region of England, and in the valleys of Wales and Ireland.
+
+Following the glacial indications wherever we could find them in the
+country about Glen Roy, it became evident to me that the whole western
+range of the Grampian Hills had once been a great centre of glaciers,
+that they had come down toward Glen Spean through all the valleys on the
+mountain-slopes to the north and south of it, so that this valley had
+become, as it were, the great drainage-bed for the masses of ice thus
+poured into it laterally, and moving down the valley from east to west
+as one immense glacier. It is natural to suppose, that, at the
+breaking-up of the great sheet of ice which, if my view of the case is
+correct, must have covered the whole country at this time, the ice would
+yield more readily in a valley like that of Glen Roy, lying open to the
+south and receiving the full force of the sun, than in those on the
+opposite side of Glen Spean, opening to the north. At all events, it is
+evident that at some time posterior to this universal glacial period,
+when the ice began to retreat, Glen Roy became the basin of a glacial
+lake such as we now find in the Alps of Switzerland, where occasionally
+a closed valley becomes a trough, as it were, into which the water from
+the surrounding hills is drained. In such a lake no animals are found,
+such as exist in any other sheet of fresh water, and this would account
+for the absence of any organic remains on the terraces of Glen Roy. But
+at first sight it seemed that this theory was open in one respect to the
+same objection as the other. What prevented this sheet of water from
+spreading east and west in Glen Spean? If it not only filled Glen Roy,
+but extended to the southern side of Glen Spean immediately opposite
+the opening of Glen Roy, what prevented it from filling the whole of
+that valley also? In endeavoring to answer this question, I found the
+solution of the mystery.
+
+The bed of Glen Spean, through its whole extent from east to west, is
+marked, as I have said, by glacial action, in rectilinear scratches and
+furrows. This westward track of the main glacier is crossed transversely
+near the centre of the valley by two other glacier-tracks cutting it at
+right angles. Upon tracing these cross-tracks carefully, I became
+satisfied, that, after the surrounding ice had begun to yield, after the
+masses of ice which descended from the northern and southern slopes of
+the mountains into Glen Spean had begun to retreat, and to form local
+limited glaciers, two of those lateral glaciers, one coming down from
+Ben Nevis on the southwest, the other from Loch Treig on the southeast,
+extended farther than the others and stretched across Glen Spean.[C]
+These two glaciers for a long time formed barriers across the western
+and eastern extension of this valley, damming back the waters which
+filled Glen Roy and the central part of Glen Spean.
+
+Evidently the glacier descending from Loch Treig was the first to yield,
+for, by the time the Glen Roy lake had sunk to the level of the lowest
+terrace, the entrance to the eastern extension of the valley must have
+been free, otherwise the water could not have spread throughout that
+basin as we find it did; but it would seem that by the time the western
+barrier, or the glacier from Ben Nevis, was removed, the sheet of water
+was too far reduced to have left permanent marks of its outflow into the
+Great Glen, except by disturbing and remodelling the large moraines of
+the older Glen Spean glacier. There are faint indications of other
+terraces in Glen Roy, even at a higher level than the uppermost parallel
+road, owing their origin probably to the short duration of a higher
+level of the glacier-lake, when the great general glacier had not yet
+been lowered to a more permanent level determined by a limited
+circumscription within the walls of the valleys. There are other
+terraces in neighboring valleys at still different levels,--in Glen
+Gloy, for instance, where the one horizontal road was no doubt formed in
+consequence of the damming of the valley by a glacier from Loch Arkeig.
+Mr. Darwin has seen another in Glen Kinfillen, which I would explain by
+the presence of a glacier in the Great Glen, the marks of which are
+particularly distinct about the eastern end of Glen Garry.
+
+The evidence of the ancient presence of glaciers is no less striking in
+other parts of the Scotch Highlands. Between the southeastern range of
+the Grampian Hills, in Forfarshire and Perthshire, and the opposite
+ridge of Sidlaw Hills, stretches the broad valley of Strathmore. At the
+time when Glen Spean received the masses of ice from the slopes of the
+western Grampian range, the glaciers descended from the valleys on the
+southern slope of the southeastern range and from those on the northern
+slope of Sidlaw Hills into the capacious bed of the valley which divides
+them. The glacial phenomena of this region present a striking
+resemblance in their general relations to those of the Alps and the
+Jura. The Grampian range on the northern side of Strathmore valley
+occupies the same position in reference to that of the Sidlaw Hills
+opposite, as does the range of the Alps to that of the Jura, while the
+intervening valley may be compared to the plain of Switzerland. As from
+the Bernese Oberland and from the valleys of the Reuss and Limmath
+gigantic glaciers came down and stretched across the plain of
+Switzerland to the Jura, scattering their erratic boulders over its
+summit and upon its slopes at the time of their greater extension, and,
+as they withdrew into the higher Alpine valleys, leaving them along
+their retreating track at the foot of the Jura and over the whole plain,
+so did the glaciers from Glen Prossen and parallel valleys on the
+Grampian Mountains extend across the valley of Strathmore, dropping
+their boulders not only on the slopes and along the base of the Sidlaw
+Hills, but scattering them in their retreat throughout the valley, until
+they were themselves reduced to isolated glaciers in the higher valleys.
+At the same time other glaciers came down from the heights of
+Schihallion on the west, and, descending through the valley of the Tay,
+joined the great masses of ice in the valley of Strathmore, thus
+combining with the eastern ice-field, just as the glacier from Mont
+Blanc and the valley of the Rhone formerly combined in the western part
+of Switzerland with those of the Bernese Oberland. The relations are
+identical, though the geographical position is reversed,--the higher
+range, or the Grampian Hills, lying to the north in Scotland, and the
+lower one, or the Sidlaw Hills, to the south, while in Switzerland, on
+the contrary, the higher range lies to the south and the lower to the
+north. I have alluded especially to Glen Prossen because the glacial
+marks in that valley are remarkably distinct, the whole bed of the
+valley being scratched, polished, and furrowed by the great rasp which
+has moved over it, while the concentric moraines at its lower extremity
+are very striking. But these signs, so perfectly preserved in Glen
+Prossen, recur with greater or less intensity in all the corresponding
+valleys, leaving no doubt that the same phenomena existed over the whole
+region.
+
+Among the localities of Scotland where the indications of glacial action
+are most marked is the region about Stirling. Near Stirling Castle the
+polished surfaces of the rocks with their distinct grooves and scratches
+show us the path followed by the ice as it moved down in a northeasterly
+direction toward the Frith of Forth from the mountains on the northwest.
+To the west of Edinburgh, also, there is a broad glacier-track, showing
+that here also the ice was ploughing its way eastward to find an outlet
+on the shore.
+
+The western slope of the great Scotch range is no less remarkable for
+its glacier-traces. The heads of Loch Long, Loch Fyne, Loch Awe, and
+Loch Leven everywhere show upon their margins the most distinct glacial
+polish and furrows, while from the trend of these marks and the
+distribution of the moraines, especially about Ben Cruachan, it is
+obvious that in this part of the country the glaciers moved westward and
+southward. About Aberdeen, on the contrary, they moved eastward, while
+in the vicinity of Elgin they advanced toward the north.
+
+It thus appears that the whole range of the Grampians formed a great
+centre for the distribution of glaciers, and that a colossal ice-field
+spread itself over the whole country, extending in every direction
+toward the lower lands and the sea-shore. As the glaciers which now
+descend through all the valleys of the Alps, along their northern as
+well as their southern slopes, and in their eastern as well as their
+western prolongation, though limited, in our days, within the
+valley-walls, nevertheless once covered the plain of Switzerland and
+that of Northern Italy, so did the ice-fields of the Grampians during
+the greatest extension of the Scotch glaciers spread over the whole
+country. They also were, in course of time, reduced to local glaciers,
+circumscribed within the higher valleys of the more mountainous parts of
+the country, until they totally disappeared, as those of Switzerland
+would also have done, had it not been for the greater elevation of that
+country above the level of the sea. Scotland nowhere rises above the
+present level of perpetual snow, while in Switzerland the whole Alpine
+range has an altitude favorable to the preservation of glaciers. In the
+range of the Jura, however, which had at one time its local glaciers
+also, but which nowhere now rises above the line of perpetual snow, they
+have disappeared as completely as in the Grampian Hills.
+
+It would lead me too far, were I to give here a special account of all
+the investigations I made in 1840 upon the distribution of glaciers in
+Great Britain. I will therefore only point out a few of the more
+distinct areas of distribution. The region surrounding Ben Wyvis formed
+such a centre of dispersion from which glaciers radiated, and we have
+another in the Pentland Hills about Edinburgh. In Northumberland, the
+Cheviot Hills present a glacial centre of the same kind, and in the
+Westmoreland Hills we have still another. In the last-named locality,
+the glacial tracks can be followed in various directions, some of them
+descending toward the northwest from the heights of Helvellyn, others
+moving southward toward Ambleside. In Wales the same kind of glacial
+distribution has been observed; but, as Professor Ramsay has treated
+this subject in full, I would refer my readers to his masterly work for
+a further account of the ancient Welch glaciers. In Ireland I had also
+opportunities of making extensive local investigations of glacial
+action. I observed the centres of distribution in the neighborhood of
+Belfast, in the County of Wicklow, and in Cavan.
+
+But nowhere are these phenomena more striking than in Fermanagh County
+about the neighborhood of Enniskillen, and more especially in the
+immediate vicinity of Florence Court, the seat of the Earl of
+Enniskillen. On the northern slope of Ben Calcagh are five valleys lying
+parallel with each other and opening into the valley of Loch Nilly,
+which runs from east to west at the base of the mountain. A road now
+passes through this valley, and, where it crosses the mouth of either of
+the five valleys rising towards the mountain-slope, it cuts alternately
+through the two horns of a crescent-shaped wall which bars the lower end
+of every one of them. These crescent-shaped mounds are so many terminal
+moraines, built up by the five glaciers formerly descending through
+these lateral valleys into the valley of Loch Nilly. They bore the same
+relation to each other as the glaciers de Tour and d'Argentiere, the
+Glacier des Bois with the Mer de Glace, the Glacier des Bossons and the
+Glacier de Taconet, now bear to each other in the valley of Chamouni;
+and were it not for the smaller dimensions of the whole, any one
+familiar with the tracks of ancient glaciers might easily fancy himself
+crossing the ancient moraines at the foot of the northern slope of the
+range of Mont Blanc, through which the Arve has cut its channel, the
+valley of Chamouni standing in the same relation to Mont Blanc as the
+valley of Loch Nilly does to Ben Calcagh.
+
+I have dwelt thus at length on the glaciers of Great Britain because
+they have been the subject of my personal investigations. But the Scotch
+Highlands and the mountains of Wales and Ireland are but a few of the
+many centres of glacial distribution in Europe. From the Scandinavian
+Alps glaciers descended also to the shores of the Northern Ocean and the
+Baltic Sea. There is not a fiord of the Norway shore that does not bear
+upon its sides the tracks of the great masses of ice which once forced
+their way through it, and thus found an outlet into the sea, as in
+Scotland. Indeed, under the water, as far as it is possible to follow
+them through the transparent medium, I have noticed in Great Britain and
+in the United States the same traces of glacial action as higher up, so
+that these ancient glaciers must have extended not only to the
+sea-shore, but into the ocean, as they do now in Greenland. Nor is this
+all. Scandinavian boulders, scattered upon English soil and over the
+plains of Northern Germany, tell us that not only the Baltic Sea, but
+the German Ocean also, was bridged across by ice, on which these masses
+of rock were transported. In short, over the whole of Northern Europe,
+from the Arctic Ocean to the northern borders of its southern
+promontories, we find all the usual indications of glacial action,
+showing that a continuous sheet of ice once spread over nearly the whole
+continent, while from all the mountain-ranges descended those more
+limited glacial tracks terminating frequently in transverse moraines
+across the valleys, showing, that, as the general ice-sheet broke up and
+contracted into local glaciers, every cluster or chain of hills became a
+centre of glacial dispersion, such as the Alps are now, such as the
+Jura, the Highlands of Scotland, the mountains of Wales and Ireland, the
+Alps of Scandinavia, the Hartz, the Black Forest, the Vosges, and many
+others have been in ancient times.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the next article we shall consider the glacial phenomena as they
+exist in America.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] See January No., p. 61.
+
+[B] Having enumerated the characteristic features of the glacial
+phenomena in the preceding pages, I throw into this note some
+explanation which may render my views of the parallel roads more
+intelligible, not to interrupt again the exposition with details. It
+would be desirable, however, that the reader should first make himself
+thoroughly familiar with the localities concerned, before proceeding any
+farther. I would therefore state here, that, in the wood-cut opposite,
+G. R. indicates the valley of Glen Roy, with the three parallel roads
+marked 1, 2, 3. Glen Spean is designated by G. S., and the river flowing
+at its bottom by S. Loch Laggan, out of which the River Spean rises, is
+marked L. G. indicates Glen Gloy, a little valley to the northwest of
+Glen Roy, with a single terrace. Loch Treig is designated by T., Loch
+Lochy by L. O., Loch Arkeig by A., and Moeldhu Hill by M., while E.
+indicates Loch Eil. The Great Glen of Scotland, through which the
+Caledonian Canal runs, extends in the direction of L. O. and E. The
+position of Ben Nevis is designated by N. The dotted area between N. and
+M. marks the place occupied by the great glacier of Ben Nevis, when it
+extended as far as Moeldhu; while the close continuous lines in front of
+Loch Treig indicate the direction of the glacial scratches left across
+Glen Spean by the glacier of Loch Treig, when it extended as far as the
+eastern termination of the two upper terraces. It ought to be
+remembered, in this connection, that the bottom of the valley of the
+Spean, as well as that of Glen Roy, is occupied by loose materials,
+partly drift, that is, materials acted upon by glaciers, and partly
+decomposed fragments of rocks brought down by the torrents, greatly
+impeding the observation of the polished surfaces. The river-bed is cut
+through this deposit, and here and there through the underlying rock.
+Besides the parallel roads, there are also peculiar accumulations of
+loose materials in Glen Roy and Glen Spean, more particularly connected
+with the lowest terrace, which Mr. Darwin and Professor Jamieson have
+shown to be little deltas formed during the existence of the lake of
+Glen Roy at the bottom of the gullies intersecting the shelves of the
+upper roads. The outlet for the water at the period during which the
+second terrace was formed, not known when I visited Glen Roy, has been
+discovered by Mr. Milne-Holme, and also observed by Professor Jamieson.
+During the formation of the upper terrace, the waters escaped through
+the westernmost tributary of the River Spey, in the direction of the
+northeast corner of the wood-cut, and during that of the lowest terrace,
+at the eastern end of Loch Laggan, also through the valley of the Spey.
+The state of preservation of the parallel roads is such as to prove that
+no disturbance of any importance can have taken place in the country
+since they were formed. Far from believing, therefore, that these
+remarkable shelves are ancient sea-beaches, I am prepared to maintain,
+that, had the area occupied by them been submerged only for a few days,
+under an ocean rising and falling for several feet with every tide, no
+vestige would have been left of their former existence.
+
+[C] The wood-cut on p. 730 is a reproduction of the little map
+accompanying a paper of mine upon "The Glacial Theory and its Recent
+Progress," printed in the "Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal" for
+October, 1842. I might have greatly improved the topography, and
+represented more accurately the details of the phenomenon, by availing
+myself of the much larger and very minute map recently published by
+Professor Thomas F. Jamieson, of Aberdeen; but I thought it advisable to
+leave my first sketch as I presented it twenty-two years ago, in order
+to show that Sir Charles Lyell is mistaken in ascribing (see "Antiquity
+of Man," pp. 260, 261) the discovery of the glacier of Loch Treig to
+Professor Jamieson. A comparison of his statements with mine will show
+that the solution of the problem offered by him is identical with that
+proposed by me, as he himself candidly admits ("Quarterly Journal of the
+Geological Society" for August, 1863, p. 239). I have only one fault to
+find with his observations, and, as I have never revisited the locality
+since, this remark may satisfy him that my examination of its features
+was not so hurried as he supposes. Professor Jamieson confounds the
+effects of two distinct glaciers moving in different valleys as the
+action of one and the same glacier. In my paper, it is true, I made no
+allusion to the great glacier of Glen Spean, the existence of which I
+had recognized along the river from Loch Laggan nearly to the Caledonian
+Canal. I publish my observations upon this great central glacier for the
+first time in the present article, having omitted them in my
+contributions upon this subject to the scientific periodicals of the day
+simply because I thought best not to complicate my exposition of the
+facts concerning the parallel roads by considerations foreign to their
+origin, convinced as I was, from the manner in which the glacial theory
+was then received, that they would not be understood, and still less
+admitted. But now that all the geologists of Great Britain seem to have
+given their adhesion to it, I may be permitted to state that I already
+knew then, what Professor Jamieson has overlooked in his latest paper,
+that a separate glacier had occupied the valley of the Spean _prior_ to
+the formation of the parallel roads, and that at that time the glacier
+of Loch Treig was only a lateral tributary of the same, just as the
+glacier of the Thierberg is a tributary of the glacier of the Aar. It
+was not until the Glen Spean glacier had retreated to the hills east of
+Loch Laggan that the glacier of Loch Treig could form a barrier across
+Glen Spean, and thus dam the waters in Glen Roy which produced the
+parallel roads. The marks left by the great Glen Spean glacier in the
+valley are mistaken by Professor Jamieson for indications, that, in its
+greatest extension, the glacier of Loch Treig not only advanced across
+Glen Spean, but divided into two branches, one moving westward down Glen
+Spean, the other eastward up Glen Spean, as far as Loch Laggan. Any one
+sufficiently familiar with existing glaciers to compare their action
+with the phenomena referred to above will at once see the impossibility
+of such a course for any glacier coming down from Loch Treig. At the
+time the Grampians had become a separate centre of glacial action a
+great glacier must have moved down, towards the Caledonian Canal,
+through Glen Spean, receiving as tributaries lateral glaciers not only
+from Loch Treig and Glen Roy, but also from all the other minor lateral
+valleys emptying into Glen Spean, the largest of which must have come
+from the range of Ben Nevis,--just as the great glacier of the valley of
+the Rhone once received as tributaries all the glaciers coming down into
+that valley from the southern slope of the Bernese Oberland, and from
+the northern slope of the Valesian Alps, and at one time also from the
+eastern slopes of the range of Mont Blanc. And when the large glacier
+occupying the lower, and therefore warmer, level gradually disappeared
+and retreated far away to levels where it could maintain itself against
+the effect of a returning milder climate, the opening spring of our era,
+as we may call it, the lateral glaciers, arising from the nearer high
+grounds, could extend across the valleys, but not before.
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE CLIFF.
+
+
+    "Still ailing, Wind? Wilt be appeased or no?
+      Which needs the other's office, thou or I?
+    Dost want to be disburthened of a woe,
+      And can, in truth, my voice untie
+    Its links, and let it go?
+
+    "Art thou a dumb, wronged thing that would be righted,
+      Intrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
+    No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith, requited
+      With falsehood,--love, at last aware
+    Of scorn,--hopes, early blighted,--
+
+    "We have them; but I know not any tone
+      So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow:
+    Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
+      If they knew any way to borrow
+    A pathos like thy own?
+
+    "Which sigh wouldst mock, of all the sighs? The one
+      So long escaping from lips starved and blue,
+    That lasts while on her pallet-bed the nun
+      Stretches her length; her foot comes through
+    The straw she shivers on,--
+
+    "You had not thought she was so tall; and spent,
+      Her shrunk lids open; her lean fingers shut
+    Close, close; their sharp and livid nails indent
+      The clammy palm; then all is mute:
+    That way, the spirit went.
+
+    "Or wouldst thou rather that I understand
+      Thy will to help me?--like the dog I found
+    Once, pacing sad this solitary strand,
+      Who would not take my food, poor hound,
+    But whined and licked my hand."
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    All this, and more, comes from some young man's pride
+      Of power to see, in failure and mistake,
+    Relinquishment, disgrace, on every side,
+      Merely examples for his sake,
+    Helps to his path untried:
+
+    Instances he must--simply recognize?
+      Oh, more than so!--must, with a learner's zeal,
+    Make doubly prominent, twice emphasize,
+      By added touches that reveal
+    The god in babe's disguise.
+
+    Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest,
+      Himself the undefeated that shall be!
+    Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test,--
+      His triumph in eternity
+    Too plainly manifest!
+
+    Whence judge if he learn forthwith what the wind
+      Means in its moaning,--by the happy, prompt,
+    Instinctive way of youth, I mean,--for kind
+      Calm years, exacting their accompt
+    Of pain, mature the mind:
+
+    And some midsummer morning, at the lull
+      Just about daybreak, as he looks across
+    A sparkling foreign country, wonderful
+      To the sea's edge for gloom and gloss
+    Next minute must annul,--
+
+    Then, when the wind begins among the vines,
+      So low, so low, what shall it mean but this?
+    "Here is the change beginning, here the lines
+      Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
+    The limit time assigns."
+
+    Nothing can be as it has been before;
+      Better, so call it, only not the same.
+    To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
+      And keep it changeless! such our claim;
+    So answered,--Never more!
+
+    Simple? Why, this is the old woe o' the world,
+      Tune to whose rise and fall we live and die.
+    Rise through it, then! Rejoice that man is hurled
+      From change to change unceasingly,
+    His soul's wings never furled!
+
+    That's a new question; still remains the fact,
+      Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
+    We moan in acquiescence: there's life's pact,
+      Perhaps probation,--do _I_ know?
+    God does: endure His act!
+
+    Only, for man, how bitter not to grave
+      On his soul's hands' palms one fair, good, wise thing
+    Just as he grasped it! For himself, death's wave;
+      While time first washes--ah, the sting!--
+    O'er all he'd sink to save.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN WEEKS IN THE GREAT YO-SEMITE.
+
+
+It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller
+paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores
+the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no
+snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no
+aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his
+patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only
+change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean.
+Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless
+intervals of amber weather, and that _soi-disant_ summer is one entire
+amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no
+inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San
+Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth
+of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the
+poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,--a single flat doing service
+for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes-of-hand, the
+Almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons
+with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All The Year Round.
+
+Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits are produced! Fruit
+enough metaphorical: for the scientific man or artist who cannot make
+hay while such a sun shines from April to November must be a slothful
+laborer indeed. But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is
+lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his
+study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his
+breakfast,--who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time
+to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons,
+figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds?
+
+Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Occidental Hotel. Its
+comfort is like that of a royal home. There is nothing inn-ish about it.
+Remembering the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained to say
+that I have never, even in New York, seen its equal for elegance of
+appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of _cuisine_.
+Having come to this extreme of civilization from the extreme of
+barbarism, we found that it actually needed an exertion to leap from the
+lap of luxury, after a fortnight's pleasaunce, and take to the woods
+again in flannel and corduroys.
+
+But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the heavenly climate, the
+paradisiacal fruits, and the royal hotel of San Francisco, were the old
+friends whom we found, and the new ones we made there. With but one
+exception, (and that an express-company, not a man,) we were received by
+all our San-Francisco acquaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a
+welcome and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was honorable to
+them. Need I say whose brotherly hands were among the very first
+outstretched to us, in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by
+whose radiant face and golden speech we were most lovingly detained
+evening after evening and far into the night? A few days ago when we
+read that dreadful message, "_Starr King is dead_," the lightning that
+carried it seemed to end in our hearts. We withered under it; California
+had lost its soul for us; at noon or in dreams that balmy land would
+nevermore be the paradise it once was to us. The last hand that pressed
+our own, when we sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the same
+that had been first to give us our California welcome. Just before the
+lines were cast off, Starr King stood at the door of our state-room, and
+said,--
+
+"I could not bear to have you go away without one more good-bye. Here
+are the _cartes-de-visite_ I promised. They look hard-worked, but they
+look like me. Good bye! God bless you! I hope to make a visit to the
+East next summer, and then we will get together somewhere by the sea.
+Good bye!"
+
+He went down the ladder. When the steamer glided off, his bright face
+sent benedictions after us as far as we could see; and then, for the
+last time on earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded from
+our sight,--but, oh! never from our hearts, either in the here or the
+hereafter. "We shall see him, but not now." We shall be together with
+him "in the summer, by the sea"; but that summer shall have other glory
+than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.
+
+King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. We little knew that we
+were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily
+intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously
+disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work
+for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.
+
+If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of
+Eden,--into a region which out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the
+valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the
+Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of
+comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from
+his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine
+cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a
+couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh
+scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be
+compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.
+
+We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months
+before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across
+the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's
+window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in
+Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,--I,
+let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to
+believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very
+prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.
+
+No Saratoga affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and
+curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the
+San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on")
+her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the
+Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous
+system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her
+"skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood
+once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three
+or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp
+there,--though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her
+life.
+
+Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry
+day since my return I was riding in a train on the New-York Central,
+when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of
+beeves, accosted me with the question,--"Friend, yeou've travelled
+consid'able, and believe in the religion of Natur', don't ye?" "Why so?"
+I responded. "_Them boots_," replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a
+pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite.
+Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had,--and it is not difficult
+to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were
+armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had
+come with us across the continent; our ammunition we got in San
+Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth
+transportation: our necessaries we left to be purchased at that
+jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our
+pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like
+ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits,
+sardines, and apple-butter,--in the latter, a jug of sirup for the
+inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our
+narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him
+and starvation; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to
+stick!
+
+The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite
+(and he must be rather of the Count-Devereux than the Foppington-Flutter
+school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good
+saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California.
+Everybody rides there; if you wish to create a sensation with your
+horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not
+well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun
+to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franciscan Boulevards) with its
+cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging
+through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by
+Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat
+in the next Congress. The nation of beggars-on-horseback which first
+colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of
+conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even
+less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and
+Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly
+in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that
+Americans who never sat even so little as an Atlantic-State's pony, on
+coming here presently take to the saddle with all their hearts. In most
+of the smaller Californian towns, a very serviceable half- or
+quarter-breed saddle-horse is to be had for forty dollars,--the "breed"
+portion of his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the remaining
+fraction being native or Mustang stock. This animal, if need be, will
+live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule,--travel all day
+long on an easy "lope," never offering to stop till fatigue makes him
+fall,--and, if you let him, will take you through _chaparrals_, and up
+and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would
+break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts,
+supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with
+saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in
+gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York
+market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and
+fifty dollars.
+
+It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started,
+but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there
+be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a
+good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on
+which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be
+imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend
+nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted
+to the rider's form as an old "_incroyable's_" pair of pantaloons. There
+is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower
+lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a
+broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward
+in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,--thus
+affording capital relief both to one's self and one's horse, and
+bringing in both from a fifty-miles' march comparatively unjaded.
+
+The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like
+an Omega upside-down (U)[Transcriber's note: upside down Omega], left
+unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a
+half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the
+toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances.
+Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly
+ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of
+the rider's leg. The surcingle, or, _Californice_, the _cinch_, is a
+broad strip of hair-cloth with a padded ring at either end through which
+you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings
+under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than
+our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your
+girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.
+
+The only particular in which I could not commend and adopt the native
+practice was the Mexican bit. It is a dreadful instrument of torture,
+putting immense leverage in the rider's hands, and enabling him at will
+to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces; indeed, the horse on which it
+is used is guided entirely by pressure on the opposite side of the neck
+from that in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of drawing his
+head around would so lift the bit as to drive him frantic. There are
+very few horses of any breed, even the Mustang, that _never_ stumble;
+and as I prefer lifting my horse to letting him break his knees or neck,
+I want a bridle I can pull upon without tearing his mouth. So, in spite
+of its handsome appearance and the very manageable single white cord
+into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed the Mexican head-gear,
+and took the ordinary Eastern snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed
+our accoutrement,--whips being here unknown.
+
+I may as well make a word-map of our route before going farther.
+Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship themselves and their horses from San
+Francisco by steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Joaquin, the
+most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada
+water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State,--a series,
+indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the
+Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region,
+that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying
+the northern portion of the State,--resembling in its physical features,
+much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated
+trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is
+almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which
+debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,--and that rises east of
+the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is
+one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach
+the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good
+United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to
+the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or
+would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You
+will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving
+the San Joaquin at Stockton _en route_ for Mariposa,--the Stanislaus,
+the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to
+Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between
+fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains,
+somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges
+of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small
+settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you
+come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish _plaza_, and Yankee notions sold
+around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to
+Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize";
+besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in
+Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our
+extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their
+first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to
+neither of which each other's society or their own new trade was
+congenial.
+
+I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole
+road is interesting,--especially to one making a specialty of owls. The
+only game within easy reach is the dove and the California
+ground-squirrel,--a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray,
+barring the former's subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the
+road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when
+the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the
+river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of
+the Sierra,--or ought to be: many cattle died along the San Joaquin last
+summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the
+refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water
+on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that
+I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we
+forded it at Roberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior
+to the finest white-oaks of the East, but surpassed in beauty every
+tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as
+exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a New-England meadow, and wept
+at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,--possessing,
+moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal _embonpoint_,
+unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we
+lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a
+desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of
+color from our artists' hands.
+
+At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade
+of pack-animals, transferred our wagon-load to their backs, (the average
+mule-pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,)
+roped it there in the most approved _muletero_-fashion, and started into
+the wilderness.
+
+Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who
+with myself had formed the original overland-party, we numbered two
+young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in
+California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Duesseldorf
+friend,--also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally,
+Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco.
+
+To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former,
+perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as
+will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in
+return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after
+looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and
+finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold
+dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for
+the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair,
+serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then
+it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been
+General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of
+Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went
+into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him,
+marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing
+which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the
+matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance,
+whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by
+some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional
+greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our _pis-aller_,--we
+finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to
+help pack our mules or care for them and the horses.
+
+The boy we obtained near Mariposa. He was an independent squire to the
+man of whom we got the extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of
+trustee and _prochein amy_ to an orphan family of mules. At fifteen
+years and in jackets, he was one of the keenest speculators in fire-arms
+I ever saw; could swap horses or play poker with anybody; and, take him
+for all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall never look upon
+his like again.
+
+Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five pack-beasts by as
+many tow-lines, we struck up into the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills,
+commencing our climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole
+distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve of these we pursued a
+road in some degree practicable to carts, and leading to one of those
+inevitable steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his first
+swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing the saw-mill in the very
+act of astonishing the wilderness with a dinner-whistle, we struck a
+trail and fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was almost a
+continuous alternation of descent and climb over outlying ridges of the
+Sierra. Our raw-recruited mules, and the elementary condition of our
+intellects in the science of professional packing, spun out this portion
+of our journey to three days,--though allowance is to be made for the
+fact of our stopping at noon of the second day and not resuming our
+trail till the morning of the third. This interim we spent in visiting
+the Big Trees, which are situated four or five miles off the Yo-Semite
+track.
+
+"Clark's," where tourists stop for this purpose, is just half-way
+between Mariposa and the great Valley. "Clark" himself is one of the
+best-informed men, one of the very best guides, I ever met in the
+Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, stalwart old
+grizzly-hunter and miner of the '49 days, wears a noble full beard hued
+like his favorite game, but no head-covering of any kind since he
+recovered from a fever which left his head intolerant of even a slouch.
+He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in the winter, and in summer
+occupies a hermitage built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty
+valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest
+poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild-strawberry
+sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.
+
+Before reaching Clark's we had been astonished at the dimensions of the
+ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through
+forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and
+trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very
+largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.
+
+But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as
+thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain
+forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the
+literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants.
+People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to
+realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted
+proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the
+look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves,
+and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that,
+though I always thought I _had_ believed travellers in their recitals on
+this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no
+such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the
+friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.
+
+Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty-two
+trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in
+circumference; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet;
+fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and
+sixty; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and
+eighty; two between eighty and ninety; two between ninety and one
+hundred; two are just one hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This
+last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet.
+I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,--for it is
+prostrate,--and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark.
+I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the
+measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet,--its
+circumference one hundred and two feet _plus_ a fraction. Of course the
+thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in
+depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.
+
+To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount
+to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house.
+You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of
+the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope _up_ from your roof-peak.
+Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end,
+our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one
+hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation
+had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of
+trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried
+throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and
+finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included
+in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still
+living, and all have the bark upon them still, while _the_ tree is to
+some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live
+wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,--over one hundred and
+twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle
+of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these
+largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings
+were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some
+of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when
+Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the
+Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a
+reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these
+marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though
+with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and
+how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them
+half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque,
+the rest of us _izing_ away at something scientific,--Botany,
+Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to
+do here or in the Valley,--the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada
+granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our
+artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing
+picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt
+frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a
+cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt
+for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's,
+your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an
+average timber-tree as a large man against _Sequoia gigantea_. What our
+artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees'
+color,--a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety
+to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical
+figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned
+almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy
+fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a
+plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by
+fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.
+
+Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped
+down intensely cold through the granite chasms,--all of them fed from
+the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque,--most of them good
+trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving
+Clark's, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which
+flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of
+tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us
+quite _apropos_ at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one
+side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily
+furnished us with frogs enough for an _entree_. Between two and three in
+the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were
+now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall
+the Yo-Semite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy,
+save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.
+
+Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again
+into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or
+the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from
+before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our
+trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name
+unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied
+in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the
+hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless;
+but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This
+was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with an
+odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of
+our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail
+turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."
+
+That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous
+expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to
+be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe
+as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just
+been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my
+vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged
+translation of any Scripture of Nature.
+
+We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in
+height,--a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance
+baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green
+_spiculae_--they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun
+on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first
+gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.
+
+There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we
+could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it
+splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians
+have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and
+five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.
+
+I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly,
+for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the
+tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the
+serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,--broadly burning, rather
+than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From
+that sun, clear back to the first _avant-courier_ trace of purple
+twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim--yes, as if it were the very
+butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven--ran that wall, always
+sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel
+might climb or sparrow fly,--so broad that it was just faint-lined like
+the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,--so
+lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines
+and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on
+the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first
+astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and
+seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to
+examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice
+surpassed our immediate _vis-a-vis_ in height.
+
+First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the
+Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that
+might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second
+Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there
+the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway
+and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no
+more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a
+pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built
+on its grand flat top. And, oh! the gorgeous masses of light and shadow
+which the falling sun cast on it,--the shadows like great waves, the
+lights like their spumy tops and flying mist,--thrown up from the
+heaving breast of a golden sea! In California at this season the dome of
+heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be done for the
+bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken
+winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly
+four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the
+Valley's tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish _alias_,--some
+Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "_El Capitan_" the idea
+of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.
+
+Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the
+sky-line, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere
+of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to
+hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous
+To-coy-ae, better known through Watkins's photographs as the Great North
+Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is
+certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose
+here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far
+more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.
+
+We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own
+wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand-point
+to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its
+least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which
+topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of
+a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same
+plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the
+opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories,
+and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an
+angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were
+standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper
+edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory
+of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the
+North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer
+mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as
+elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked
+semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller
+Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing
+to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered _glacis_ of
+detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life
+save the palaeozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus
+from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a
+Yo-Semite crag _inorganic_, as I used to speak of everything not
+strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that
+utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the
+_debris_ at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and _exuviae_ of a
+stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were
+going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us
+because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before
+Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in
+the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived
+long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but
+one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads
+at a time,--if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of
+some one small being in the fenceless _vivarium_ of the Universe? Let
+not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly
+upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we
+bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.
+
+I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the
+native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful
+Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few
+short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave.
+Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was
+its fostering god,--the former a radiant maiden, the latter an
+ever-young immortal,--
+
+    "amorous as the month of May."
+
+Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula
+spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer,
+kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley-tribes began to
+starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened,
+and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to
+prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her
+nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to
+the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty
+cone split from heaven to earth,--its frontal half falling down to dam
+the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful
+Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches,--its other segment
+remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the
+_in-memoriam_ title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to
+save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony
+Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he
+had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan,--where a lively faith
+and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.
+
+Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the
+doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,--in
+the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact,
+and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by
+time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and
+passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his
+own way; but a fact with its facets cut--otherwise a poem--is
+unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody
+tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal
+translation; poems circulate virgin and _verbatim_. In some future
+article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River,
+and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by
+the lantern of Indian legend.
+
+Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as
+seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass
+turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,--chrysoprase beautiful
+enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic
+heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of
+green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the
+westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great
+mountain-ranges,--into a field of perfect light, misty by its own
+excess,--into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the
+phoenix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some
+rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a
+dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man
+or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for
+ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on
+rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy
+dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the
+crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's
+self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a
+sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new
+cycle,--spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and
+hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth
+below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the
+shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the
+middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset
+wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.
+
+To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from
+possessing it. Only the _silleros_ of the Andes, our mules, horses, and
+selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking
+was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most
+circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their
+impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the
+mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a
+green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.
+
+Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,--calling it "Camp Rosalie,"
+after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs
+and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow,
+with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in
+ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got
+together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring
+fire,--made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a
+three-forked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks,--selected a
+cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and
+as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant _baldacchini_ for
+the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep
+on evergreen-strewings.
+
+During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to
+rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold
+Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the
+game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks
+and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the
+testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from
+picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the
+sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the
+gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a
+gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of
+injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.
+
+Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists
+began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a
+living landscape, _color_-studies on the spot; and though I am not here
+to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks'
+camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for
+future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the
+feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided
+orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or
+the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting
+specimens of all kinds,--_Agassizing_, so to speak.
+
+I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of
+sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish,--to that
+select minority of _illuminati_ who go trouting for intellectual
+culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a _Sonata_ of
+Beethoven's,--who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the
+divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola
+in the cast of a fly,--who call three little troutlings "_a splendid
+day's sport, me boy_!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have
+been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to
+them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier
+curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to
+the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or
+fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon,--and those the dull,
+black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots,--I gave over
+bothering the unambitious burghers of the flood with invitations to a
+rise in life, and took to the meadows with a butterfly-net.
+
+My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) should chase the
+butterfly on horseback. You are liable to put your net over your horse's
+head instead of the butterfly. The butterfly keeps rather ahead of the
+horse. You may throw your horse when you mean to throw the net. The idea
+is a romantic one; it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when
+court-butterflies _were_ said to have been netted from the saddle,--but
+it carries you nowhere else in particular, unless perhaps into a small
+branch of the Merced, where you don't want to go. Then, too, if you slip
+down and leave your horse standing while you steal on a giant _Papilio_
+which is sucking the deer-weed in _such_ a sweet spot for a cast, your
+horse (perhaps he has heard of the French general who said, "Asses and
+_savans_ to the centre!") may discover that he also is a sage, and
+retire to botanize while you are butterflying,--a contingency which
+entails your wading the Merced after him five several times, and finally
+going back to camp in wet disgust to procure another horse and a lariat.
+An experience faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon convinced
+me that the great arm of the service in butterfly-warfare is infantry.
+After I had turned myself into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to
+success. Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of its groves and
+meadows is sucked by some of the largest, the most magnificent, and most
+widely varied butterflies in the world.
+
+At noon those of us who came back to camp had a substantial dinner out
+of our abundant stores, reinforced occasionally with grouse, quail, or
+pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined _a la
+fourchette_, in their workshop,--something in a pail being carried out
+to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness,
+and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the
+lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, "Death on the
+Pail-Horse." At evening, when the artists returned, half an hour was
+passed in a "private view" of their day's studies; then came another
+dinner, called a supper; then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and
+brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the genial way to
+bed-time.
+
+In his charming "Peculiar," Epes Sargent has given us an episode called
+the "Story of Estelle." It is the greatest of compliments to him that I
+could get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore the name of
+one of the most audacious and _picaresque_ mortals I ever knew,--our
+hired man, who sold us--our----But hear my episode: it is
+
+
+THE STORY OF VANCE.
+
+Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with the Secesh uncle. I will be
+brief. Our stores began to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a
+horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of purchases, and eighty
+golden dollars, bidding him good-speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was
+to return laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, and oil,
+on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. Seven days glided by, and
+the material for more slapjacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our
+bag-bottoms.
+
+One morning I determined to save the party from starvation, and with a
+fresh supply of the currency set out for Mariposa. At Clark's I learned
+that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned
+his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest
+of the sunlight in a _siesta_. When he arose, his animals were
+undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse to go in
+search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen him since.
+
+Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I resumed my way toward
+the settlements. Coming by the steam saw-mill, I recognized Vance's
+steed grazing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, and led
+him in triumph to Mariposa. There I arrived at eight in the evening of
+the day I left the Valley,--having performed fifty miles of the hardest
+mountain-trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve
+hours, making allowance for our halt and noon-feed at Clark's. If ever a
+California horse was tried, it was mine on that occasion; and he came
+into Mariposa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled or jaded
+in the least.
+
+Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory had carried him home to
+his old stable,--also the remaining events in Vance's brief, but
+brilliant career. That ornament of the Utah and Yo-Semite expeditions
+had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse,--lost our eighty golden dollars
+at a single session of bluff,--departed gayly for Coulterville, where he
+sold Clark's horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and
+bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire
+purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving
+title,)--and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his
+pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of
+California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the
+days of Gil Blas!
+
+Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own animals to waste time
+in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our
+commissariat needed,--nooned at Clark's, on my way back, the third day
+after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my
+rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon
+they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three
+days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen
+people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover-bread; but, after
+such an experience as our party's, I venture to say they would have
+regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the
+Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell
+within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same
+enthusiasm shared our artists, _savans_, and gentlemen, embracing the
+shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized
+that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, "A
+slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation"?
+
+Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a
+position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful
+grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced
+margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream,
+and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice
+opposite. This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian,
+"Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited
+with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early
+period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without
+break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the
+headlong flood from cataract to rapids for about four hundred feet; but
+the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen
+hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be
+imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst
+of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from
+the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the
+grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.
+
+While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit "Po-ho-no," or "The
+Bridal Veil," which was passed on the southern side in our way to the
+second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was a good,
+so is Po-ho-no an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is
+scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been
+carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water
+forever rushing down a _canon_ through which the stream breaks from its
+feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers
+his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-no; while the
+very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of
+the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap
+of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet
+perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the
+Valley-cataracts to the Yo-Semite itself, and having a width of fifty
+feet. Its name of "The Bridal Veil" is one of the few successes in
+fantastic nomenclature; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy
+sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free
+of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth
+at her granite wedding,--no commemorator of any fifty-years' bagatelle
+like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her
+nuptials.
+
+On either side of Po-ho-no the sky-line of the precipice is
+magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown
+of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly
+bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is
+Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three
+hundred feet. A little farther are "Eleachas," or "The Three Brothers,"
+flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior
+bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of
+thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.
+
+One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the shore of Lake
+Ah-wi-yah,--a crystal pond of several acres in extent, fed by the north
+fork of the Valley-stream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow
+strait between the North and South Domes. By this tranquil water we
+pitched our third camp, and when the rising sun began to shine through
+the mighty cleft before us, the play of color and _chiaroscuro_ on its
+rugged walls was something for which an artist apt to oversleep himself
+might well have sat up all the night. No such precaution was needed by
+ourselves. Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out by
+dawn; for the studies were grander, the grouse and quail plentier, and
+the butterflies more gorgeous than we found in any other portion of the
+Valley. After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the river more
+enchanting at every step. I was obliged to penetrate in this direction
+entirely on foot,--clambering between squared blocks of granite
+dislodged from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of which might
+have been excavated into a commodious church, and discovering, for the
+pains cost by a reconnoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest
+shady stretches of singing water and some of the finest minor waterfalls
+in our American scenery.
+
+Our last camp was pitched among the crags and forests behind the South
+Dome,--where the Middle Fork descends through two successive waterfalls,
+which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass Cho-looke, while the
+loftiest is nearly as high as Po-ho-no. About three miles west of the
+Domes, the south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep _canon_
+leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through this _canon_ comes the
+Middle Fork, and along its banks lies our course to the great
+"Pi-wi-ack" (senselessly Englished as "Vernal") and the Nevada Falls.
+For three miles from our camp opposite the Yo-Semite Fall the _canon_ is
+threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we
+dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our
+own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than
+the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to
+squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent
+danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles; in others we became
+quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main
+precipice had made but slight compromise. But for our light marching
+order,--our only dress being knee-boots, hunting-shirt, and
+trowsers,--it would have been next to impossible to reach our goal at
+all.
+
+But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the
+end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is
+brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our
+slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down
+which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge;
+an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across the mighty caldron
+at the base of the fall; and straight before us in one unbroken leap
+came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite shelf nearly four hundred feet in
+height and sixty feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterprising
+speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five
+cents' toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders
+against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it
+still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so
+close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its
+rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to
+the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect
+breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the
+_canon_ to the very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves need not
+have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat
+rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we
+had just climbed.
+
+Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite
+cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about
+forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a
+crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest
+_manzanita_ may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here
+and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues
+upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one
+side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other,--creating thus
+the very typical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining barrenness
+of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome
+which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any
+metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the
+Alleghany chain.
+
+Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream's
+immediate margin,--getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork
+of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls
+which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,--we came at
+last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.
+
+This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most
+beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the
+surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great
+height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its
+exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest
+portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt
+by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants
+sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the
+fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over
+this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a
+half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.
+
+At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a _cul-de-sac_ of Nature's
+grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us
+in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite _barathrum_,
+whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the
+crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous
+series of Yo-Semite _effects_; eight hundred feet above us, could we
+climb there, we should find the silent causes of power. There lie the
+broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow-peaks;
+thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the
+eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us
+as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came.
+Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the
+battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun,
+towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting
+snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cutting the sky
+at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,--of
+holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way
+have we toiled since then,--and we know better now. Have we endured all
+these pains only to learn still deeper Life's saddest lesson,--"Climb
+forever, and there is still an Inaccessible"?
+
+Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature's topmost
+treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye answers us ere we turn back from the
+Yo-Semite's last precipice toward the haunts of men:--
+
+"Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down to you!"
+
+
+
+
+HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
+
+BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.
+
+
+VI.
+
+"My dear Chris," said my wife, "isn't it time to be writing the next
+'House and Home Paper'?"
+
+I was lying back in my study-chair, with my heels luxuriously propped on
+an ottoman, reading for the two-hundredth time Hawthorne's "Mosses from
+an Old Manse," or his "Twice-Told Tales," I forget which,--I only know
+that these books constitute my cloud-land, where I love to sail away in
+dreamy quietude, forgetting the war, the price of coal and flour, the
+rates of exchange, and the rise and fall of gold. What do all these
+things matter, as seen from those enchanted gardens in Padua where the
+weird Rappaccini tends his enchanted plants, and his gorgeous daughter
+fills us with the light and magic of her presence, and saddens us with
+the shadowy allegoric mystery of her preternatural destiny? But my wife
+represents the positive forces of time, place, and number in our family,
+and, having also a chronological head, she knows the day of the month,
+and therefore gently reminded me that by inevitable dates the time drew
+near for preparing my--which is it now, May or June number?
+
+"Well, my dear, you are right," I said, as by an exertion I came
+head-uppermost, and laid down the fascinating volume. "Let me see, what
+was I to write about?"
+
+"Why, you remember you were to answer that letter from the lady who does
+her own work."
+
+"Enough!" said I, seizing the pen with alacrity; "you have hit the exact
+phrase:--
+
+"'The _lady_ who _does her own work_.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+America is the only country where such a title is possible,--the only
+country where there is a class of women who may be described as _ladies_
+who do their own work. By a lady we mean a woman of education,
+cultivation, and refinement, of liberal tastes and ideas, who, without
+any very material additions or changes, would be recognized as a lady in
+any circle of the Old World or the New.
+
+What I have said is, that the existence of such a class is a fact
+peculiar to American society, a clear, plain result of the new
+principles involved in the doctrine of universal equality.
+
+When the colonists first came to this country, of however mixed
+ingredients their ranks might have been composed, and however imbued
+with the spirit of feudal and aristocratic ideas, the discipline of the
+wilderness soon brought them to a democratic level; the gentleman felled
+the wood for his log-cabin side by side with the ploughman, and thews
+and sinews rose in the market. "A man was deemed honorable in proportion
+as he lifted his hand upon the high trees of the forest." So in the
+interior domestic circle. Mistress and maid, living in a log-cabin
+together, became companions, and sometimes the maid, as the more
+accomplished and stronger, took precedence of the mistress. It became
+natural and unavoidable that children should begin to work as early as
+they were capable of it. The result was a generation of intelligent
+people brought up to labor from necessity, but turning on the problem of
+labor the acuteness of a disciplined brain. The mistress, outdone in
+sinews and muscles by her maid, kept her superiority by skill and
+contrivance. If she could not lift a pail of water, she could invent
+methods which made lifting the pail unnecessary,--if she could not take
+a hundred steps without weariness, she could make twenty answer the
+purpose of a hundred.
+
+Slavery, it is true, was to some extent introduced into New England, but
+it never suited the genius of the people, never struck deep root, or
+spread so as to choke the good seed of self-helpfulness. Many were
+opposed to it from conscientious principle,--many from far-sighted
+thrift, and from a love of thoroughness and well-doing which despised
+the rude, unskilled work of barbarians. People, having once felt the
+thorough neatness and beauty of execution which came of free, educated,
+and thoughtful labor, could not tolerate the clumsiness of slavery. Thus
+it came to pass that for many years the rural population of New England,
+as a general rule, did their own work, both out doors and in. If there
+were a black man or black woman or bound girl, they were emphatically
+only the _helps_, following humbly the steps of master and mistress, and
+used by them as instruments of lightening certain portions of their
+toil. The master and mistress with their children were the head workers.
+
+Great merriment has been excited in the Old Country, because years ago
+the first English travellers found that the class of persons by them
+denominated servants were in America denominated _help_ or helpers. But
+the term was the very best exponent of the state of society. There were
+few servants, in the European sense of the word; there was a society of
+educated workers, where all were practically equal, and where, if there
+was a deficiency in one family and an excess in another, a _helper_, not
+a servant, was hired. Mrs. Browne, who has six sons and no daughters,
+enters into agreement with Mrs. Jones, who has six daughters and no
+sons. She borrows a daughter, and pays her good wages to help in her
+domestic toil, and sends a son to help the labors of Mr. Jones. These
+two young people go into the families in which they are to be employed
+in all respects as equals and companions, and so the work of the
+community is equalized. Hence arose, and for many years continued, a
+state of society more nearly solving than any other ever did the problem
+of combining the highest culture of the mind with the highest culture of
+the muscles and the physical faculties.
+
+Then were to be seen families of daughters, handsome, strong females,
+rising each day to their in-door work with cheerful alertness,--one to
+sweep the room, another to make the fire, while a third prepared the
+breakfast for the father and brothers who were going out to manly labor;
+and they chatted meanwhile of books, studies, embroidery, discussed the
+last new poem, or some historical topic started by graver reading, or
+perhaps a rural ball that was to come off the next week. They spun with
+the book tied to the distaff; they wove; they did all manner of fine
+needle-work; they made lace, painted flowers, and, in short, in the
+boundless consciousness of activity, invention, and perfect health, set
+themselves to any work they had ever read or thought of. A bride in
+those days was married with sheets and table-cloths of her own weaving,
+with counterpanes and toilet-covers wrought in divers embroidery by her
+own and her sisters' hands. The amount of fancy-work done in our days by
+girls who have nothing else to do will not equal what was done by these,
+who performed besides, among them, the whole work of the family.
+
+For many years these habits of life characterized the majority of our
+rural towns. They still exist among a class respectable in numbers and
+position, though perhaps not as happy in perfect self-satisfaction and a
+conviction of the dignity and desirableness of its lot as in former
+days. Human nature is above all things--lazy. Every one confesses in the
+abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind
+is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they
+can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than
+circumstances drive him to do. Even I would not write this article, were
+not the publication-day hard on my heels. I should read Hawthorne and
+Emerson and Holmes, and dream in my arm-chair, and project in the clouds
+those lovely unwritten stories that curl and veer and change like
+mist-wreaths in the sun. So, also, however dignified, however
+invigorating, however really desirable are habits of life involving
+daily physical toil, there is a constant evil demon at every one's
+elbow, seducing him to evade it, or to bear its weight with sullen,
+discontented murmurs.
+
+I will venture to say that there are at least, to speak very moderately,
+a hundred houses where these humble lines will be read and discussed,
+where there are no servants except the ladies of the household. I will
+venture to say, also, that these households, many of them, are not
+inferior in the air of cultivation and refined elegance to many which
+are conducted by the ministration of domestics. I will venture to
+assert, furthermore, that these same ladies who live thus find quite as
+much time for reading, letter-writing, drawing, embroidery, and
+fancy-work, as the women of families otherwise arranged. I am quite
+certain that they would be found on an average to be in the enjoyment of
+better health, and more of that sense of capability and vitality which
+gives one confidence in one's ability to look into life and meet it with
+cheerful courage, than three-quarters of the women who keep
+servants,--and that on the whole their domestic establishment is
+regulated more exactly to their mind, their food prepared and served
+more to their taste. And yet, with all this, I will _not_ venture to
+assert that they are satisfied with this way of living, and that they
+would not change it forthwith, if they could. They have a secret feeling
+all the while that they are being abused, that they are working harder
+than they ought to, and that women who live in their houses like
+boarders, who have only to speak and it is done, are the truly enviable
+ones. One after another of their associates, as opportunity offers and
+means increase, desert the ranks, and commit their domestic affairs to
+the hands of hired servants. Self-respect takes the alarm. Is it
+altogether genteel to live as we do? To be sure, we are accustomed to
+it; we have it all systematized and arranged; the work of our own hands
+suits us better than any we can hire; in fact, when we do hire, we are
+discontented and uncomfortable,--for who will do for us what we will do
+for ourselves? But when we have company! there's the rub, to get out all
+our best things and put them back,--to cook the meals and wash the
+dishes ingloriously,--and to make all appear as if we didn't do it, and
+had servants like other people.
+
+There, after all, is the rub. A want of hardy self-belief and
+self-respect,--an unwillingness to face with dignity the actual facts
+and necessities of our situation in life,--this, after all, is the worst
+and most dangerous feature of the case. It is the same sort of pride
+which makes Smilax think he must hire a waiter in white gloves, and get
+up a circuitous dinner-party on English principles, to entertain a
+friend from England. Because the friend in England lives in such and
+such a style, he must make believe for a day that he lives so too, when
+in fact it is a whirlwind in his domestic establishment equal to a
+removal or a fire, and threatens the total extinction of Mrs. Smilax.
+Now there are two principles of hospitality that people are very apt to
+overlook. One is, that their guests like to be made at home, and treated
+with confidence; and another is, that people are always interested in
+the details of a way of life that is new to them. The Englishman comes
+to America as weary of his old, easy, family-coach life as you can be of
+yours; he wants to see something new under the sun,--something American;
+and forthwith we all bestir ourselves to give him something as near as
+we can fancy exactly like what he is already tired of. So city-people
+come to the country, not to sit in the best parlor, and to see the
+nearest imitation of city-life, but to lie on the hay-mow, to swing in
+the barn, to form intimacy with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to
+eat baked potatoes exactly on the critical moment when they are done,
+from the oven of the cooking-stove,--and we remark, _en passant_, that
+nobody has ever truly eaten a baked potato, unless he has seized it at
+that precise and fortunate moment.
+
+I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three happy
+women together. You are all so well that you know not how it feels to be
+sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in bed, if you
+could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest,
+neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so
+that really for the greater part of the time in your house there seems
+to a looker-on to be nothing to do. You rise in the morning and despatch
+your husband, father, and brothers to the farm or wood-lot; you go
+sociably about chatting with each other, while you skim the milk, make
+the butter, turn the cheeses. The forenoon is long; it's ten to one that
+all the so-called morning work is over, and you have leisure for an
+hour's sewing or reading before it is time to start the
+dinner-preparations. By two o'clock your house-work is done, and you
+have the long afternoon for books, needle-work, or drawing,--for perhaps
+there is among you one with a gift at her pencil. Perhaps one of you
+reads aloud while the others sew, and you manage in that way to keep up
+with a great deal of reading. I see on your book-shelves Prescott,
+Macaulay, Irving, besides the lighter fry of poems and novels, and, if I
+mistake not, the friendly covers of the "Atlantic." When you have
+company, you invite Mrs. Smith or Brown or Jones to tea; you have no
+trouble; they come early, with their knitting or sewing; your particular
+crony sits with you by your polished stove while you watch the baking of
+those light biscuits and tea-rusks for which you are so famous, and Mrs.
+Somebody-else chats with your sister, who is spreading the table with
+your best china in the best room. When tea is over, there is plenty of
+volunteering to help you wash your pretty India teacups, and get them
+back into the cupboard. There is no special fatigue or exertion in all
+this, though you have taken down the best things and put them back,
+because you have done all without anxiety or effort, among those who
+would do precisely the same, if you were their visitors.
+
+But now comes down pretty Mrs. Simmons and her pretty daughter to spend
+a week with you, and forthwith you are troubled. Your youngest, Fanny,
+visited them in New York last fall, and tells you of their cook and
+chambermaid, and the servant in white gloves that waits on table. You
+say in your soul, "What shall we do? they never can be contented to live
+as we do; how shall we manage?" And now you long for servants.
+
+This is the very time that you should know that Mrs. Simmons is tired to
+death of her fine establishment, and weighed down with the task of
+keeping the peace among her servants. She is a quiet soul, dearly loving
+her ease, and hating strife; and yet last week she had five quarrels to
+settle between her invaluable cook and the other members of her staff,
+because invaluable cook, on the strength of knowing how to get up
+state-dinners and to manage all sorts of mysteries which her mistress
+knows nothing about, asserts the usual right of spoiled favorites to
+insult all her neighbors with impunity, and rule with a rod of iron over
+the whole house. Anything that is not in the least like her own home and
+ways of living will be a blessed relief and change to Mrs. Simmons. Your
+clean, quiet house, your delicate cookery, your cheerful morning tasks,
+if you will let her follow you about, and sit and talk with you while
+you are at your work, will all seem a pleasant contrast to her own life.
+Of course, if it came to the case of offering to change lots in life,
+she would not do it; but very likely she _thinks_ she would, and sighs
+over and pities herself, and thinks sentimentally how fortunate you are,
+how snugly and securely you live, and wishes she were as untrammelled
+and independent as you. And she is more than half right; for, with her
+helpless habits, her utter ignorance of the simplest facts concerning
+the reciprocal relations of milk, eggs, butter, saleratus, soda, and
+yeast, she is completely the victim and slave of the person she pretends
+to rule.
+
+Only imagine some of the frequent scenes and rehearsals in her family.
+After many trials, she at last engages a seamstress who promises to
+prove a perfect treasure,--neat, dapper, nimble, skilful, and spirited.
+The very soul of Mrs. Simmons rejoices in heaven. Illusive bliss! The
+new-comer proves to be no favorite with Madam Cook, and the domestic
+fates evolve the catastrophe, as follows. First, low murmur of distant
+thunder in the kitchen; then a day or two of sulky silence, in which the
+atmosphere seems heavy with an approaching storm. At last comes the
+climax. The parlor-door flies open during breakfast. Enter seamstress,
+in tears, followed by Mrs. Cook with a face swollen and red with wrath,
+who tersely introduces the subject-matter of the drama in a voice
+trembling with rage.
+
+"Would you be plased, Ma'am, to suit yersilf with another cook? Me week
+will be up next Tuesday, and I want to be going."
+
+"Why, Bridget, what's the matter?"
+
+"Matter enough, Ma'am! I niver could live with them Cork girls in a
+house, nor I won't; them as likes the Cork girls is welcome for all me;
+but it's not for the likes of me to live with them, and she been in the
+kitchen a-upsettin' of me gravies with her flat-irons and things."
+
+Here bursts in the seamstress with a whirlwind of denial, and the
+altercation wages fast and furious, and poor, little, delicate Mrs.
+Simmons stands like a kitten in a thunder-storm in the midst of a
+regular Irish row.
+
+Cook, of course, is sure of her victory. She knows that a great dinner
+is to come off Wednesday, and that her mistress has not the smallest
+idea how to manage it, and that, therefore, whatever happens, she must
+be conciliated.
+
+Swelling with secret indignation at the tyrant, poor Mrs. Simmons
+dismisses her seamstress with longing looks. She suited her mistress
+exactly, but she didn't suit cook!
+
+Now, if Mrs. Simmons had been brought up in early life with the
+experience that _you_ have, she would be mistress in her own house. She
+would quietly say to Madam Cook, "If my family-arrangements do not suit
+you, you can leave. I can see to the dinner myself." And she _could_ do
+it. Her well-trained muscles would not break down under a little extra
+work; her skill, adroitness, and perfect familiarity with everything
+that is to be done would enable her at once to make cooks of any bright
+girls of good capacity who might still be in her establishment; and,
+above all, she would feel herself mistress in her own house. This is
+what would come of an experience in doing her own work as you do. She
+who can at once put her own trained hand to the machine in any spot
+where a hand is needed never comes to be the slave of a coarse, vulgar
+Irish-woman.
+
+So, also, in forming a judgment of what is to be expected of servants in
+a given time, and what ought to be expected of a given amount of
+provisions, poor Mrs. Simmons is absolutely at sea. If even for one six
+months in her life she had been a practical cook, and had really had the
+charge of the larder, she would not now be haunted, as she constantly
+is, by an indefinite apprehension of an immense wastefulness, perhaps of
+the disappearance of provisions through secret channels of relationship
+and favoritism. She certainly could not be made to believe in the
+absolute necessity of so many pounds of sugar, quarts of milk, and
+dozens of eggs, not to mention spices and wine, as are daily required
+for the accomplishment of Madam Cook's purposes. But though now she does
+suspect and apprehend, she cannot speak with certainty. She cannot say,
+"_I_ have made these things. I know exactly what they require. I have
+done this and that myself, and know it can be done, and done well, in a
+certain time." It is said that women who have been accustomed to doing
+their own work become hard mistresses. They are certainly more sure of
+the ground they stand on,--they are less open to imposition,--they can
+speak and act in their own houses more as those "having authority," and
+therefore are less afraid to exact what is justly their due, and less
+willing to endure impertinence and unfaithfulness. Their general error
+lies in expecting that any servant ever will do as well for them as they
+will do for themselves, and that an untrained, undisciplined human being
+ever _can_ do house-work, or any other work, with the neatness and
+perfection that a person of trained intelligence can. It has been
+remarked in our armies that the men of cultivation, though bred in
+delicate and refined spheres, can bear up under the hardships of
+camp-life better and longer than rough laborers. The reason is, that an
+educated mind knows how to use and save its body, to work it and spare
+it, as an uneducated mind cannot; and so the college-bred youth brings
+himself safely through fatigues which kill the unreflective laborer.
+Cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of
+their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head
+save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and
+arrangement, they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less
+expense of time and strength than others. The old New-England motto,
+_Get your work done up in the forenoon_, applied to an amount of work
+which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to sunset.
+
+A lady living in one of our obscure New-England towns, where there were
+no servants to be hired, at last by sending to a distant city succeeded
+in procuring a raw Irish maid-of-all-work, a creature of immense bone
+and muscle, but of heavy, unawakened brain. In one fortnight she
+established such a reign of Chaos and old Night in the kitchen and
+through the house, that her mistress, a delicate woman, incumbered with
+the care of young children, began seriously to think that she made more
+work each day than she performed, and dismissed her. What was now to be
+done? Fortunately, the daughter of a neighboring farmer was going to be
+married in six months, and wanted a little ready money for her
+_trousseau_. The lady was informed that Miss So-and-so would come to
+her, not as a servant, but as hired "help." She was fain to accept any
+help with gladness. Forthwith came into the family-circle a tall,
+well-dressed young person, grave, unobtrusive, self-respecting, yet not
+in the least presuming, who sat at the family-table and observed all its
+decorums with the modest self-possession of a lady. The new-comer took a
+survey of the labors of a family of ten members, including four or five
+young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system,
+matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking,
+cleaning, rose early, moved deftly, and in a single day the slatternly
+and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often
+strikes one in New-England farm-houses. The work seemed to be all gone.
+Everything was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and stayed in
+place; the floors, when cleaned, remained clean; the work was always
+done, and not doing; and every afternoon the young lady sat neatly
+dressed in her own apartment, either quietly writing letters to her
+betrothed, or sewing on her bridal outfit. Such is the result of
+employing those who have been brought up to do their own work. That
+tall, fine-looking girl, for aught we know, may yet be mistress of a
+fine house on Fifth Avenue; and if she is, she will, we fear, prove
+rather an exacting mistress to Irish Biddy and Bridget; but _she_ will
+never be threatened by her cook and chambermaid, after the first one or
+two have tried the experiment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having written thus far on my article, I laid it aside till evening,
+when, as usual, I was saluted by the inquiry, "Has papa been writing
+anything to-day?" and then followed loud petitions to hear it; and so I
+read as far, reader, as you have.
+
+"Well, papa," said Jennie, "what are you meaning to make out there? Do
+you really think it would be best for us all to try to go back to that
+old style of living you describe? After all, you have shown only the
+dark side of an establishment with servants, and the bright side of the
+other way of living. Mamma does not have such trouble with her servants;
+matters have always gone smoothly in our family; and if we are not such
+wonderful girls as those you describe, yet we may make pretty good
+housekeepers on the modern system, after all."
+
+"You don't know all the troubles your mamma has had in your day," said
+my wife. "I have often, in the course of my family-history, seen the day
+when I have heartily wished for the strength and ability to manage my
+household matters as my grandmother of notable memory managed hers. But
+I fear that those remarkable women of the olden times are like the
+ancient painted glass,--the art of making them is lost; my mother was
+less than her mother, and I am less than my mother."
+
+"And Marianne and I come out entirely at the little end of the horn,"
+said Jennie, laughing; "yet I wash the breakfast-cups and dust the
+parlors, and have always fancied myself a notable housekeeper."
+
+"It is just as I told you," I said. "Human nature is always the same.
+Nobody ever is or does more than circumstances force him to be and do.
+Those remarkable women of old were made by circumstances. There were,
+comparatively speaking, no servants to be had, and so children were
+trained to habits of industry and mechanical adroitness from the cradle,
+and every household process was reduced to the very minimum of labor.
+Every step required in a process was counted, every movement calculated;
+and she who took ten steps, when one would do, lost her reputation for
+'faculty.' Certainly such an early drill was of use in developing the
+health and the bodily powers, as well as in giving precision to the
+practical mental faculties. All household economies were arranged with
+equal niceness in those thoughtful minds. A trained housekeeper knew
+just how many sticks of hickory of a certain size were required to heat
+her oven, and how many of each different kind of wood. She knew by a
+sort of intuition just what kinds of food would yield the most palatable
+nutriment with the least outlay of accessories in cooking. She knew to a
+minute the time when each article must go into and be withdrawn from her
+oven; and if she could only lie in her chamber and direct, she could
+guide an intelligent child through the processes with mathematical
+certainty. It is impossible, however, that anything but early training
+and long experience can produce these results, and it is earnestly to be
+wished that the grandmothers of New England had only written down their
+experiences for our children; they would have been a mine of maxims and
+traditions, better than any other traditions of the elders which we know
+of."
+
+"One thing I know," said Marianne,--"and that is, I wish I had been
+brought up so, and knew all that I should, and had all the strength and
+adroitness that those women had. I should not dread to begin
+housekeeping, as I now do. I should feel myself independent. I should
+feel that I knew how to direct my servants, and what it was reasonable
+and proper to expect of them; and then, as you say, I shouldn't be
+dependent on all their whims and caprices of temper. I dread those
+household storms, of all things."
+
+Silently pondering these anxieties of the young expectant housekeeper, I
+resumed my pen, and concluded my paper as follows.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
+superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to
+a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of
+liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They
+are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder
+is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic
+blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the
+measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements.
+But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
+interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
+interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
+whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
+the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
+strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
+knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to keep
+her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of looking at
+all these things which makes them particularly hard and distasteful to
+her. She does not escape being obliged to do house-work at intervals,
+but she does it in a weak, blundering, confused way, that makes it twice
+as hard and disagreeable as it need be.
+
+Now what I have to say is, that, if every young woman learned to do
+house-work and cultivated her practical faculties in early life, she
+would, in the first place, be much more likely to keep her servants,
+and, in the second place, if she lost them temporarily, would avoid all
+that wear and tear of the nervous system which comes from constant
+ill-success in those departments on which family health and temper
+mainly depend. This is one of the peculiarities of our American life
+which require a peculiar training. Why not face it sensibly?
+
+The second thing I have to say is, that our land is now full of
+motorpathic institutions to which women are sent at great expense to
+have hired operators stretch and exercise their inactive muscles. They
+lie for hours to have their feet twigged, their arms flexed, and all the
+different muscles of the body worked for them, because they are so
+flaccid and torpid that the powers of life do not go on. Would it not be
+quite as cheerful and less expensive a process, if young girls from
+early life developed the muscles in sweeping, dusting, ironing, rubbing
+furniture, and all the multiplied domestic processes which our
+grandmothers knew of? A woman who did all these, and diversified the
+intervals with spinning on the great and little wheel, never came to
+need the gymnastics of Dio Lewis or of the Swedish motorpathist, which
+really are a necessity now. Does it not seem poor economy to pay
+servants for letting our muscles grow feeble, and then to pay operators
+to exercise them for us? I will venture to say that our grandmothers in
+a week went over every movement that any gymnast has invented, and went
+over them to some productive purpose too.
+
+Lastly, my paper will not have been in vain, if those ladies who have
+learned and practise the invaluable accomplishment of doing their own
+work will know their own happiness and dignity, and properly value their
+great acquisition, even though it may have been forced upon them by
+circumstances.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKSPEARE.
+
+APRIL 23, 1864.
+
+
+    "Who claims our Shakspeare from that realm unknown,
+      Beyond the storm-vexed islands of the deep,
+    Where Genoa's deckless caravels were blown?
+      Her twofold Saint's-day let our England keep;
+    Shall warring aliens share her holy task?"
+          The Old-World echoes ask.
+
+    O land of Shakspeare! ours with all thy past,
+      Till these last years that make the sea so wide,
+    Think not the jar of battle's trumpet-blast
+      Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride
+    In every noble word thy sons bequeathed
+          The air our fathers breathed!
+
+    War-wasted, haggard, panting from the strife,
+      We turn to other days and far-off lands,
+    Live o'er in dreams the Poet's faded life,
+      Come with fresh lilies in our fevered hands
+    To wreathe his bust, and scatter purple flowers,--
+          Not his the need, but ours!
+
+    We call those poets who are first to mark
+      Through earth's dull mist the coming of the dawn,--
+    Who see in twilight's gloom the first pale spark,
+      While others only note that day is gone;
+    For him the Lord of light the curtain rent
+          That veils the firmament.
+
+    The greatest for its greatness is half known,
+      Stretching beyond our narrow quadrant-lines,--
+    As in that world of Nature all outgrown
+      Where Calaveras lifts his awful pines,
+    And cast from Mariposa's mountain-wall
+          Nevada's cataracts fall.
+
+    Yet heaven's remotest orb is partly ours,
+      Throbbing its radiance like a beating heart;
+    In the wide compass of angelic powers
+      The instinct of the blindworm has its part;
+    So in God's kingliest creature we behold
+          The flower our buds infold.
+
+    With no vain praise we mock the stone-carved name
+      Stamped once on dust that moved with pulse and breath,
+    As thinking to enlarge that amplest fame
+      Whose undimmed glories gild the night of death:
+    We praise not star or sun; in these we see
+          Thee, Father, only Thee!
+
+    Thy gifts are beauty, wisdom, power, and love:
+      We read, we reverence on this human soul,--
+    Earth's clearest mirror of the light above,--
+      Plain as the record on Thy prophet's scroll,
+    When o'er his page the effluent splendors poured,
+          Thine own, "Thus saith the Lord!"
+
+    This player was a prophet from on high,
+      Thine own elected. Statesman, poet, sage,
+    For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by,--
+      Sidney's fair youth, and Raleigh's ripened age,
+    Spenser's chaste soul, and his imperial mind
+          Who taught and shamed mankind.
+
+    Therefore we bid our hearts' _Te Deum_ rise,
+      Nor fear to make Thy worship less divine,
+    And hear the shouted choral shake the skies,
+      Counting all glory, power, and wisdom Thine,--
+    For Thy great gift Thy greater name adore,
+         And praise Thee evermore!
+
+    In this dread hour of Nature's utmost need,
+      Thanks for these unstained drops of freshening dew!
+    Oh, while our martyrs fall, our heroes bleed,
+      Keep us to every sweet remembrance true,
+    Till from this blood-red sunset springs new-born
+          Our Nation's second morn!
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO USE VICTORY.
+
+
+The policy of the nation, since the war began, has been eminently the
+Anglo-Saxon policy. That is to say, we have not adapted our actions to
+any preconceived theory, nor to any central idea. From the President
+downward, every one has done as well as he could in every single day,
+doubtful, and perhaps indifferent, as to what he should do the next day.
+This is the method dear to the Anglo-Saxon mind. The English writers
+acknowledge this; they call it the "practical system," and make an
+especial boast that it is the method of their theology, their
+philosophy, their physical science, their manufactures, and their trade.
+In the language of philosophy, it directs us "to do the duty that comes
+next us"; in a figure drawn from the card-table, it bids us "follow our
+hand." The only branch of the Keltic race which adopts it expresses it
+in the warlike direction, "When you see a head, hit it."
+
+We have no objection to make to this so-called practical system in the
+present case, if it only be broadly and generously adopted. If it reduce
+us to a war of posts, to hand-to-mouth finance, and to that wretched
+bureau-administration which thinks the day's work is done when the day's
+letters have been opened, docketed, and answered, it becomes, it is
+true, a very unpractical system, and soon reduces a great state to be a
+very little one. But if the men who direct any country will, in good
+faith, enlarge their view every day, from their impressions of yesterday
+to the new realities of to-day,--if they will rise at once to the new
+demands of to-day, and meet those demands under the new light of
+to-day,--all the better is it, undoubtedly, if they are not hampered by
+traditionary theories, if they are even indifferent as to the
+consistency of their record, and are, thus, as able as they are willing
+to work out God's present will with all their power. For it must be that
+the present light of noonday will guide us better at noonday than any
+prophecies which we could make at midnight or at dawn.
+
+The country, at this moment, demands this broad and generous use of its
+great present advantages. In three years of sacrifice we have won
+extraordinary victories. We have driven back the beach-line of rebellion
+so that its territory is now two islands, both together of not half the
+size of the continent which it boasted when it began. We have seen such
+demonstrations of loyalty and the love of liberty that we dare say that
+this is to be one free nation, as we never dared say it before the war
+began. We are on the edge, as we firmly believe, of yet greater
+victories, both in the field and in the conscience of the nation. The
+especial demand, then, made on our statesmen, and on that intelligent
+people which, as it appears, leads the statesmen, instead of being led
+by them, is, "How shall we use our victories?" We have no longer the
+right to say that the difficult questions will settle themselves. We
+must not say that Providence will take care of them. We must not say
+that we are trying experiments. The time for all this has gone by. We
+have won victories. We are going to win more. We must show we know how
+to use them.
+
+As our armies advance, for instance, very considerable regions of
+territory come, for the time, under the military government of the
+United States. If we painted a map of the country, giving to the Loyal
+States each its individual chosen color, and to the Rebel States their
+favorite Red or Black, we should find that the latter were surrounded by
+a strip of that circumambient and eternal Blue which indicates the love
+and the strength of the National Government. The strip is here broad,
+and there narrow. It is broad in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It
+stretches up in a narrow line along the Sea Islands and the Atlantic
+coast. What do we mean to do with this strip, while it is in the special
+charge of the nation? Do we mean to leave it to the chapter of
+accidents, as we have done? A few charitable organizations have kept the
+Sea Islands along, so that they are a range of flourishing plantations,
+as they used to be. A masterly inactivity, on the other hand, leaves the
+northern counties of Virginia, this summer, within the very sight of the
+Capitol, to be the desert and disgrace which they were when they were
+the scenes of actual war. A handful of banditti rides through them when
+it chooses, and even insults the communications of our largest army. The
+people of that State are permitted to point at this desolation, and to
+say that such are the consequences of Federal victories. For another
+instance, take the "Four-Million question." These four million negroes,
+from whose position the war has sprung, are now almost all set free, in
+law. A very large number of them--possibly a quarter part of them--are
+free in fact. One hundred and thirty thousand of them are in the
+national army. With regard to these men the question is not, "What are
+you going to do with them when the war is done?" but, "What will you do
+with them to-day and to-morrow?" Your duty is to use victory in the
+moment of victory. You are not to wait for its last ramification before
+you lead in peace and plenty, which ought to follow close in its first
+footsteps.
+
+To an observing and sensitive nation it seems as if all these questions,
+and many others like them, were not yet fully regarded. Yet they are now
+the questions of the hour, because they are a part of the great central
+question, "How will you break down the armed power of the Rebel States?"
+To maintain the conquered belt between us and our "wayward sisters" as a
+land of plenty, and not as a desert,--to establish on system the blacks
+whose masters desert them, or who take refuge within our lines,--and
+also to maintain in that border-strip a resident peasantry, armed and
+loyal,--these are not matters of sentiment, which may be postponed to a
+more convenient season, but they are essential to the stiff, steady, and
+successful prosecution of our campaigns. It is not, therefore, simply
+for charity Boards of Education to discuss such subjects. It is for the
+Government to determine its policy, and for the people, who make that
+Government, to compel it so to determine. The Government may not shake
+off questions of confiscated lands, pay of negro troops, superintendence
+of fugitives, and the like, as if they were the unimportant details of a
+halcyon future. Because this is the moment of impending victory, because
+that victory should be used on the instant, the Government is bound to
+attend to such provisions now. It is said, that, when General McClellan
+landed below Yorktown, now two years ago, the Washington Post-Office had
+made the complete arrangements for resuming the mail-service to
+Richmond. Undoubtedly the Post-Office Department was right in such
+foresight. At the present moment, it is equally right for the Government
+to be prepared for the immediate use of the victories for which, as we
+write, we are all hoping.
+
+The experiments which we have had to try, in the care and treatment of
+liberated blacks, have been tried under very different conditions. When
+the masters on the Sea Islands escaped from their slaves, leaving but
+one white man behind them, in the midst of fifteen thousand negroes,
+those negroes were, in general, in their old familiar homes. They had,
+indeed, trusted themselves to the tender mercies of the "Yankees"
+because they would not abandon home. The islands on which they lived
+were easily protected, and, thanks to the generous foresight of those
+who early had the charge of them, a body of humane and intelligent
+superintendents soon appeared, to watch over all their interests. In the
+District of Columbia, on the other hand, the blacks whom the war first
+liberated had themselves fled from their masters. They found themselves
+in cities where every condition of life was different from their old
+home. It was hardly to be expected that in one of these cases the
+results should be as cheerful or as favorable as in the other. Nor was
+it to be supposed that the policy to be pursued, in two such cases,
+should be in outward form the same.
+
+But the country has, on the whole, in the various different conditions
+of these questions, had the advantage of great administrative ability.
+General Butler, General Banks, and General Saxton are three men who may
+well be satisfied with their military record, if it shall bear the test
+of time as well as their administrative successes in this department bid
+fair to do. We can be reconciled, in a measure, to gross failure and
+want of system in other places, when we observe the successes which have
+been wrought out for the blacks, in different ways, under the policy of
+these three statesmen. For we believe that in that policy the principles
+are to be found by which the Government ought at once to direct all its
+policy in the use of its victories. We believe those principles are most
+adequately stated in General Butler's General Order No. 46, issued at
+Fort Monroe on the fifth of December last. For General Banks has had his
+hands tied, from the beginning, by the unfortunate exemption from the
+Emancipation Proclamation of the first two districts in Louisiana.
+Considering the difficulties by which he was thus entangled, we have
+never seen but he used to the best his opportunities. General Saxton's
+island-district has been so small, and in a measure so peculiar, that it
+may be urged that the result learned there would not be applicable on
+the mainland, on a large scale. But General Butler has had all the
+negroes of the sea-board of Virginia and North Carolina to look after.
+He has given us a census of them,--and we have already official returns
+of their _status_. There seems no reason why what has been done there
+may not be done anywhere.
+
+In General Butler's department, there were, in the beginning of April,
+sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and forty-seven negroes. Of these,
+eight thousand three hundred and forty-four were soldiers, who had
+voluntarily enlisted into the service of the United States. These men
+enlisted with no bounty but what the General so well named as the "great
+boon awarded to each of them, the result of the war,--Freedom for
+himself and his race forever." They enlisted, knowing that at that time
+the Government promised them but ten dollars a month. In view of these
+facts, we consider the proportion of soldiers, nearly one in eight,
+extraordinary,--though we are aware that the number includes many who
+had not lived in those counties, who came into our lines with the
+purpose of enlisting. These simple figures involve the first feature of
+the true policy in the "Four-Million question." The war offers the
+negroes this priceless bounty. Let them fight for it. Let us enlist
+them, to the last man we can persuade to serve.
+
+"If you do that," says Brazen-Face, "you have left on your hands a horde
+of starving imbeciles, women, and orphans, to support, from whom you
+have cruelly separated their able-bodied men." No, Brazen-Face, we have
+no such thing. In the month of March the Government had to supply
+rations in the district we have named to only seven thousand eight
+hundred and fifty persons who were members of the families of these
+soldiers,--the cost being about one dollar a month for each of them. Now
+the State of Massachusetts, dear Brazen-Face, supplies "State-aid" to
+the families of its soldiers; and for this support, in this very city of
+yours, it pays on the average five times as much in proportion as the
+United States has to pay for the families of these colored soldiers.
+Nay, you may even take all the persons relieved by Government in General
+Butler's district,--the number is sixteen thousand seven hundred and
+sixteen,--count them all as the families of soldiers, which not one-half
+of them are, and the whole support which they all receive from
+Government is not half as much as the families of the same number of
+soldiers are costing the State of Massachusetts. So much for the expense
+of this system. There is no money-bounty, and the "family-aid" is but
+one-fifth of that we pay in the case of our own brothers. The figures in
+General Saxton's district are as gratifying. We have not the Louisiana
+statistics at hand. And we have not learned that anybody has attempted
+any statistics in the District of Columbia, or on the Mississippi River.
+But this illustration, in two districts where the enlistment of colored
+troops has been pushed to the very edge of its development, is enough to
+make out another point in the policy of victory, which is, that the
+colored soldier is the cheapest soldier whom we have in our lines,
+though we pay him, as of course we should do, full pay.
+
+How is this cheapness of administration gained? The answer is in the
+second great principle which belongs to the policy of using our
+victories. Change the homes of the people as little as possible. The
+families of negroes in the Virginia district are put upon separate farms
+as far as possible,--on land, and for crops, as nearly as possible, the
+same as they were used to. These people are conservative. They are fond
+of home. They are used to work; and they can take care of themselves.
+Every inducement is given them, therefore, to establish themselves.
+Farms of eight or ten acres each from abandoned property are allotted
+them. Where the Government employs any of them, it employs them only at
+the same rate as the soldier is paid,--so that, if the negro can earn
+more than that, he does so, and is urged, as well as permitted to do
+so. He is not bound to the soil, except by merely temporary agreement.
+What follows is that he uses the gift of freedom to his own best
+advantage. "Political freedom," says the philosophical General, "rightly
+defined, is liberty to work." The negroes in his command show that they
+understand the definition. And this is the reason why, as we have
+explained, the "family-relief" costs but one-fifth what it does here in
+Boston.
+
+"But," says Grunnio, at this point, "how will you protect your ten-acre
+farms from invidious neighbors, from wandering guerrillas?" We will
+advise them, dear grumbler, to protect themselves. That is one of the
+responsibilities which freemen have to take as the price of freedom. In
+the department of Norfolk, where seventeen thousand blacks are
+supporting themselves on scattered farms, we believe not a pig has been
+stolen nor a fence broken down on their little plantations by semi-loyal
+neighbors, who had, perhaps, none too much sympathy, at the first, with
+their prosperity. These amiable neighbors were taught, from the first,
+that the rights of the colored farmers were just the same as their own,
+and that they would be very apt to retaliate in kind for injuries. Of
+such a system one result is that no guerrilla-warfare has yet been known
+in the counties of Virginia where such a peasantry is establishing
+itself. It is near our posts, it is true,--not nearer, however, than
+some of the regions where Mosby has won his laurels. We believe that
+this system deserves to be pressed much farther. We can see that the
+farmers on such farms may have to be supplied in part with arms for
+their defence. They may have to be taught to use them. Without providing
+depots of supplies for an enemy, however, we believe there might be a
+regular system of establishing the negro in his own home, on or near the
+plantation where he was born, which would give us from the beginning the
+advantages of a settled country, instead of a desert in the regions in
+the rear of our lines.
+
+These three suggestions are enough to determine a general policy which
+shall give us, in all instances, the immediate use of our victories. Let
+us enlist all the able-bodied men we can from the negroes. Let us
+establish the rest as near their old homes as we can,--not in
+poor-houses or phalansteries, but on their own farms. Let us appoint for
+each proper district a small staff of officers sufficient to see that
+their rights are respected by their neighbors, and that they have means
+to defend themselves against reckless or unorganized aggression. There
+seems to be no need of sending them as fugitives to our rear. There
+seems to be no need of leaving the country we pass a desert. There seems
+to be no need of waiting a year or two before we find for them their
+places. God has found for them their places. Let them stay where they
+were born. We have made them freemen. Let them understand that they must
+maintain their freedom.
+
+More simply stated, such a policy amounts merely to this: "Treat them as
+you would treat white people."
+
+"What would you do with the blacks?" said a Commission of Inquiry to an
+intelligent jurist who had made some very brilliant decisions at New
+Orleans.
+
+"I would not do anything with them," was his very happy and suggestive
+reply.
+
+He would let them alone. If we could free ourselves of the notion that
+we must huddle them together, or that we must carry them to some strange
+land,--in short, that they have no rights of home and fireside,--we
+should find that we had a much smaller problem to deal with. Keep them
+where you find them, unless they will go on and fight with you. Whether
+they go or stay, let them understand that they are your friends and you
+are theirs, and that they must defend themselves, if they expect you to
+defend them.
+
+The education and the civilization will follow. "The church and the
+school," as John Adams says, "belong with the town and the militia." The
+statistics of General Butler's department begin to show that a larger
+proportion of blacks are at school there than of whites. As we write
+these words, we receive General Banks's Order No. 38, issued March 22,
+providing for a board of education, and a tax upon property to establish
+schools for black and for white children. We have no fears that such
+results will be slow, if the enfranchised peasantry, one million or four
+million, have the right to work on their own land, or to accept the
+highest wage that offers,--if they find they are not arbitrarily removed
+from their old homes,--and if the protection of those homes is, in the
+first instance, intrusted to themselves.
+
+These are the first-fruits of freedom for them. For us they are the
+legitimate use of victory. It only remains that we shall mildly, but
+firmly, instruct all officers of the Government that it is time for some
+policy to be adopted which shall involve such uses of victory. The
+country will be encouraged, the moment it sees that the freedmen are
+finding their proper places in the new civilization. The country expects
+its rulers not to wait for chapters of accidents or for volunteer boards
+to work out such policy, but themselves to provide the system of
+administration, and the intelligent men who shall promptly and skilfully
+avail themselves of every victory.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_History of the Romans under the Empire._ By CHARLES MERIVALE,
+B. D., late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. From the Fourth
+London Edition. With a Copious Analytical Index. New York: D. Appleton &
+Co. 8vo. Vols. I. & II.
+
+People of the last century had a very easy time with their Roman
+history, and any gentleman could pick up enough of it "in course of his
+morning's reading" to answer the demands of a lifetime. Men read and
+believed. They had no more doubt of the existence of Romulus and Remus
+than of the existence of Fairfax and Cromwell. As to the story of those
+dropped children being nursed by a she-wolf, had it not been established
+that wolves did sometimes suckle humanity's young? and why should it be
+supposed that no lupine nursery had ever existed at the foot of the
+Palatine Hill? After swallowing the wolf-story, everything else was
+easy; and the history of the Roman Kings was as gravely received as the
+history of the Roman Emperors. The Brutus who upset the Tarquins was as
+much an historical character as the Brutus who assassinated Caesar and
+killed himself. Tullia had lived and sinned, just like Messallina. The
+Horatii were of flesh and blood, like the Triumvirs. So was it with
+regard to the Empire. The same short work that was made with Regal Rome
+and the early Republican period was applied to the Imperial age. Julius
+Caesar was the destroyer of Roman liberty, and Pompeius was the unlucky
+champion of his country's constitution. With few exceptions, the
+Emperors were the greatest moral monsters that ever had lived and
+reigned. It is true that two or three critical writers had so handled
+historical subjects as to create some doubts as to the exact correctness
+of the popular view of Roman history; but those doubts were monopolized
+by a few scholars, and by no means tended to shake the faith which even
+the educated classes had in the vulgar view of the actions of the mighty
+conquering race of antiquity.
+
+But all has been changed. For half a century, learned men have been
+busily employed in pulling down the edifice of Roman history, until they
+have unsettled everybody's faith in that history. No one now pretends,
+seriously, to believe anything that is told of the Romans farther back
+than the time of Pyrrhus. Clouds and darkness rest over the earlier
+centuries, and defy penetration. What Sir Thomas Browne says of Egypt is
+not inapplicable to early Rome. History mumbleth something to the
+inquirer, "but what it is he heareth not." Not even the story of Curtius
+now finds believers. He must have been a contractor, who made an
+enormous fortune at the time of the secession of the plebs, and ruined
+himself by the operation. So far as relates to early Roman history, want
+of faith is very natural; for what documents have we to go upon in
+making up an opinion concerning it? None to speak of. But it is strange,
+at the first thought, that there should be any difficulty in making up a
+judgment concerning the history of the last century or two of the
+Republic, and of the Imperial period. Of those times much that was then
+written still survives, and many of the works that were familiar to the
+Romans are even more familiar to the moderns. Yet there is a wide
+difference of sentiment as to the character of the Roman Revolution, and
+the objects and the actions of the eminent men who figured in that
+Revolution are yet in dispute; and the contention is almost as fierce,
+at times, as it was in the days of Pharsalia and Philippi. There are
+Pompeians and Caesarians now, as there were nineteen centuries ago, only
+that the pen with them is indeed mightier than the sword. Caesar's case
+has been reviewed, and the current of opinion is now setting strongly in
+his favor. Instead of being looked upon as a mere vulgar usurper, who
+differed from other usurpers only in having a greater stage, and talents
+proportioned to that stage, he is held up as the man of his times, and
+as the only man who could fulfil the demands of the crisis that existed
+after the death of Sulla. According to Mr. Merivale, who is a very
+moderate Caesarian, Caesar was "the true captain and lawgiver and prophet
+of the age" in which he lived. When such an assertion can be made by an
+English gentleman of well-balanced mind, we may form some idea of the
+intensity of that Caesarism which prevails in fiercer minds, and which is
+intended to have an effect on contemporary rule. For the controversy
+which exists relative to the merits of Romans "dead, and turned to
+clay," is not merely critical and scholastic, but is enlivened by its
+direct bearing upon living men and contending parties. Caesarism means
+Napoleonism. The Bonaparte family is the Julian family of to-day.
+Napoleon I. stood for the great Julius, and Napoleon III. is the modern
+(and very Gallic) Caesar Augustus, the avenger of his ill-used uncle, and
+the crusher of the Junii and the Crassi, and all the rest of the
+aristocrats, who overthrew him, and caused his early death. It is not
+necessary to point out the utter absurdity of this attempt to justify
+modern despotism by referring to the action of men who lived and acted
+in the greatest of ancient revolutions; and those men who admire Julius
+Caesar, but who are not disposed to see in his conduct a justification of
+the conduct of living men, object to the French Imperial view of his
+career. Mommsen, whose admiration of Caesar is as ardent as his knowledge
+of Roman history is great, speaks with well-deserved scorn of the
+efforts that are made to defend contemporary usurpation by
+misrepresentation of the history of antiquity. One of his remarks is
+curious, read in connection with that history which daily appears in our
+journals. Writing before our civil war began, he declared, that, if ever
+the slaveholding aristocracy of the Southern States of America should
+bring matters to such a pass as their counterparts in the Rome of Sulla,
+Caesarism would be pronounced legitimate there also by the spirit of
+history,--an observation that derived new interest from the report that
+General Lee was to be made Dictator of the Confederacy, and Mr. Davis
+allowed to go into that retirement which is so much admired and so
+little sought by all politicians. Mommsen, after the remark above
+quoted, proceeds to say, that, whenever Caesarism "appears under other
+social conditions, it is at once a usurpation and a caricature. History,
+however, will not consent to curtail the honor due to the true Caesar,
+because her decision, in the presence of false Caesars, may give occasion
+to simplicity to play the fool and to villany to play the rogue. She,
+too, is a Bible, and if she can as little prevent herself from being
+misunderstood by the fool and quoted by the Devil, she ought as little
+to be prejudiced by either." Strong words, but very natural as coming
+from a learned German who finds his own theory turned to account by the
+supporters of a house which Germany once helped to overthrow, and which
+she would gladly aid in overthrowing again. Perhaps Dr. Mommsen will
+soon have an opportunity to speak more at length of French Caesarism, for
+the first two volumes of Napoleon III.'s "Life of Julius Caesar" are
+announced as nearly ready for publication, and their appearance cannot
+fail to be the signal for a battle royal, as few scholars, we presume,
+will be content to take historical law from an Emperor. The modern
+master of forty legions will not be as fortunate as Hadrian in finding
+philosophers disinclined to question his authority in letters; and he
+may fare even worse at their hands than he fared at those of Mr.
+Kinglake. The republic of letters is not to be mastered by a _coup
+d'etat_.
+
+The opponents of Caesarism have not been silent, and it would be neither
+uninteresting nor unprofitable, did time permit, to show how well they
+have disposed of most of the arguments of their foes. The question is
+not the old one, whether the party of Caesar or that of Pompeius was the
+better one, for at bottom the two were very much the same, the struggle
+being for supremacy over the whole Roman dominion; and it is certain
+that there would have been no essential change of political procedure,
+had the decision at Pharsalia been reversed. On that field Caesar was the
+nominal champion of the liberal faction, and Pompeius was the nominal
+champion of the _optimates_. Had Caesar lost the day, the plebeian
+Pompeian house would have furnished an imperial line, instead of that
+line proceeding from the patrician Julii. Pompeius would have been as
+little inclined to abandon the fruits of his victory to the aristocrats
+as Caesar showed himself to set up the rule of the Forum-populace, to
+whose support he owed so much. It was to free himself from the weight of
+his equals that Pompeius selected the East for the seat of war, when
+there were so many strong military reasons why he should have proceeded
+to the West, to Romanized Spain, where he had veteran legions that might
+under his lead have been found the equals of Caesar's small, but most
+efficient army. He wished to get out of the Republican atmosphere, and
+into a country where "the one-man power" was the recognized idea of
+rule. He acted as a politician, not as a soldier, when he sailed from
+Brundisium to the East, and the nobility were not blind to the fact, and
+were not long in getting their revenge; for it was through their
+political influence that Pompeius was forced to deliver battle at
+Pharsalia, when there were strong military reasons for refusing to
+fight. That they were involved in their chief's fall was only in
+accordance with the usual course of things, there being nothing to equal
+the besotted blindness of faction, as our current history but too
+clearly proves.
+
+As between Caesar and Pompeius, therefore, it is natural and just that
+modern liberals should sympathize with the former, and contemplate his
+triumph with pleasure, as he was by far the abler and better man, and
+did not stain his success by bloodshed and plunder, things which the
+Pompeians had promised themselves on a scale that would have astonished
+Marius and Sulla, and which the Triumvirs never thought of equalling.
+But when we are asked to behold as the result of the Roman Revolution
+the deliverance of the provincials, and that as of purpose on the part
+of the victor, we are inclined, in return, to ask of the Caesarians
+whether they think mankind are such fools as not to be able to read and
+to understand the Imperial history. That Caesar's success was beneficial
+to Rome's subjects we do not dispute; but that the change he effected
+was of the sweeping character claimed for it, or that Caesar ever thought
+of being the reformer that his admirers declare him to have been, are
+things yet to be proved. The change that came from the substitution of
+the Imperial polity for the Republican was the result of circumstances,
+and it was of slow growth. Imperialism was an Octavian, not a Julian
+creation, as any reader will be able to understand who goes through the
+closing chapters of Mr. Merivale's third volume. The first Caesar's
+imperial career was too short, and too full of hard military work, to
+admit of much being done by him of a political character; nor would it
+have been possible for him, had he been a much younger man, and had he
+lived for years, to accomplish what was effected by Augustus. The
+terrible crisis that followed his death, and which lasted until the
+decision of "the world's debate" at Actium gave a master to the Roman
+world, prepared the way for the work that was done by his grand-nephew
+and adopted son. The severe discipline which the Romans went through
+between the day of Munda and that of Actium made them more acquiescent
+in despotism than they would have been found, if Julius Caesar's mild
+sway had been continued through that interval. It has been said that the
+Triumvirate converted Caesar's sword into daggers, and the expression is
+by no means too strong, as the world has never witnessed such another
+reign of terror as followed from the union of Octavius, Antonius, and
+Lepidus. If that union was formed for the purpose of reconciling men to
+despotic rule, it must be allowed the merit that belongs to a perfect
+invention. Without it the Roman Empire might never have had an
+existence.
+
+Mr. Merivale's work may be considered as forming the text-book of
+moderate Caesarism. An Englishman, he cannot be an advocate of despotism;
+but he sees that the time had come for a change, and that under Caesar's
+direction the change could be better made than under that of Pompeius or
+his party. This is something very different from blind advocacy of
+Caesarism; and we can follow him through his clear and vigorous narrative
+of the events of the Revolution with general acquiescence in his views.
+His first and second volumes, which are immediately under consideration,
+may be said to form the history of the career of Caesar, and to present
+the best account of that career which has been published in our
+language. Introductory matter apart, his book opens with the appearance
+of the first Emperor on the political stage, and the second volume
+closes at the date of his assassination. His various political actions,
+his achievements in Gaul and Britain, his marvellous exploits in Italy,
+Spain, Macedonia, Greece, and Africa in the Civil War, and the character
+of his legislation, are here told and set forth in a manner that comes
+very near to perfection. There is a vividness in the narrative, and a
+bringing-out of individual portraits, that make the work read like a
+history of contemporary events. Nor does the author's just admiration of
+Caesar's extraordinary intellect and wonderful deeds cause him to be
+unjust to the eminent men on the other side, though as a rule he deals
+severely with those Romans whom the world admires, when treating of the
+effects of their conduct. It has been objected to his history, that he
+speaks with freedom of Cicero's conduct on many occasions, but we think
+that he has not exceeded the bounds of just criticism when considering
+the course of the Roman orator; and in his third volume, when summing up
+his character, he employs the most generous and lofty language in
+speaking of him. "After all the severe judgments we are compelled to
+pass on his conduct," he says, "we must acknowledge that there remains a
+residue of what is amiable in his character and noble in his teaching
+beyond all ancient example. Cicero lived and died in faith. He has made
+converts to the belief in virtue, and had disciples in the wisdom of
+love. There have been dark periods in the history of man, when the
+feeble ray of religious instruction paled before the torch of his
+generous philanthropy. The praise which the great critic pronounced upon
+his excellence in oratory may be justly extended to the qualities of his
+heart; and even in our enlightened days it may be held no mean advance
+in virtue to venerate the master of Roman philosophy." An intelligent
+admirer of the most illustrious victim of the Triumvirate will consider
+these words something far better than anything that can be found in
+Middleton's "lying legend in honor of St. Tully." It may be observed
+that admiration of Cicero and sympathy with the Roman aristocratical
+party mostly go together; and yet the Roman aristocracy disliked Cicero,
+and their writers treated him harshly, while he received kind treatment
+from writers on the other side. Livy, whom Augustus himself called the
+_Pompeian_, says of Cicero that "he bore none of his calamities as a man
+should, except his death"; and "Lucan denounces his perverse impolicy."
+Mr. Merivale, in a note, observes that it can hardly be accidental that
+Tacitus, in his historical works, never mentions him, and adds, "The
+most glowing tribute to Cicero's merits is the well-known passage in
+Juvenal, and this is written in the spirit of a Marian, or
+anti-oligarch." Velleius, who is generally spoken of as a sort of
+literary flunky of the Caesars, warmly panegyrizes Cicero. Had the
+Pompeians triumphed, Cicero would not have found Italy the safe place
+that it was to him under Caesar's rule. He would have fared as badly at
+their hands as he did at those of the Clodian rabble, and Pompeius might
+have been to him what Antonius became after Caesar's death.
+
+The portrait which Mr. Merivale has drawn of Cato does not meet with the
+approval of those persons who admire old Roman virtue, of which Cato
+was the impersonation; but they would find it difficult to show that he
+has done that stubborn Stoic any injustice. Cato modelled himself on his
+great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, a mean fellow, who sold his old
+slaves in order that they might not become a charge upon him; but, as
+our author remarks, the character of the Censor had been simple and true
+to Nature, while that of his descendant was a system of elaborate,
+though unconscious affectations. Cato behaved as absurdly as an American
+would behave who should attempt to imitate his great-grandfather, the
+old gentleman having died a loyal subject of George II. He was an honest
+man, according to the Roman standard of honesty, which allowed a great
+margin for the worst villany, provided it were done for the public good,
+or what was supposed to be the public good. Like some politicians of our
+time, he thought, that, when he had made it appear that a certain course
+would be in accordance with ancient precedent, it should be
+adopted,--making no allowance for the thousand disturbing causes which
+the practical politician knows must be found on any path that may be
+selected. Of all the men whose conduct brought about the Civil War, he
+was the most virtuous, and he had the sagacity to oppose a resort to
+arms; though how he succeeded in reconciling his aversion to war with
+his support of a policy that led directly to its existence is one of the
+mysteries of those days. The Pompeians found him a bore, and, had they
+been victorious, would have saved him the trouble of killing himself, by
+cutting off his head. Cato was one of the very few persons for whom
+Caesar felt a strong dislike; but he would not have harmed him, had he
+got his own consent to live. From Cato he had experienced no such insult
+as he had met with from M. Marcellus, and Marcellus received permission
+to return to Rome; but Cato was of an unmalleable nature, and preferred,
+to an ignoble silence in Italy, the noble silence of the grave. He died
+"after the high Roman fashion." Suicide might be called the natural
+death of a Roman leader of that age, and nothing but the violence of
+enemies could dispute the title with it. Cato, Brutus, Cassius,
+Antonius, and others fell by their own hands, or by the hands of persons
+who acted by their orders. Caesar, Pompeius, Cicero, and Crassus were
+murdered. Nothing serves more to show how much Augustus differed from
+most Romans of his century than the fact that he died in his bed at
+extreme old age.
+
+That Mr. Merivale's Caesarism does not prevent him from doing justice to
+the opponents of Caesar is proved by his portrait of Q. Lutatius Catulus,
+the best leader of the _optimates_, and whom he pronounces to have been
+the most moderate and disinterested of all the great men of his
+day,--"indeed," he adds, "there is perhaps no character in the history
+of the Commonwealth which commanded more general esteem, or obtained
+more blameless distinction in political life." Yet Catulus was one of
+those men with whom Caesar came earliest in collision, each as the
+representative of his party on vital points of difference. Our
+historian's estimate of the life, labors, purposes, and character of
+Pompeius is singularly correct, when we consider the temptation that he
+has to underrate the man with whom Caesar has stood in direct opposition
+for nineteen centuries. There are few more emphatic passages in the
+historical literature of our language than the account which is given in
+Vol. II. ch. 18, of the last days and death of Pompeius, and which is
+followed by a most judicious summing-up of his history and position as a
+Roman leader. The historian's mind appears to be strongly affected by
+the fate of the Pompeian house, as much so as was the imagination of the
+Romans, which it seems to have haunted. This is in part due, we presume,
+to the free use which he has made of Lucan's "Pharsalia," a work of
+great value to those who would understand how the grand contest for
+supremacy was viewed by the beaten party in after times. That poem is
+the funeral wail of the Roman aristocracy, and it embodies the ideas and
+traditions of the vanquished as they existed far down into the Imperial
+age. It testifies to the original vitality of the aristocratical
+faction, when we find a youthful contemporary of Nero dedicating his
+genius to its service more than a century after the contest had been
+decided on the battlefield. Whether Lucan was a patriot, or a selfish,
+but disappointed courtier, we may feel certain that he never could have
+written in the Pompeian spirit, if that spirit was not still dominant
+in the minds of a large number of those men and women who formed the
+most cultivated portion of Roman society. To a critical historian, such
+as Mr. Merivale is, his poem must be very useful, though it would be
+dangerous authority in unskilful hands.
+
+The leading merit of this history is that it supplies a want, and
+supplies it effectually. Opening about sixty years before the beginning
+of the Christian era, it terminates with the death of M. Aurelius
+Antoninus, the point where Gibbon's work begins. We still need a work
+beginning with the close of the Second Punic War and ending with the
+death of Sulla, to connect Merivale with Arnold; but Mr. George Long is
+about to supply the want, at least in part. The first two volumes, as we
+have said, end at the date of Caesar's death. The third and fourth
+embrace the long period in which Augustus was the principal character,
+and when the Roman Empire was formed. The fifth and sixth cover the
+reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, and
+Vitellius, and a portion of the reign of Vespasian. The seventh and last
+volume is devoted to the first Flavian house,--Vespasian, Titus, and
+Domitian,--and to those "five good Emperors"--Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
+and the Antonines--whose reigns are renowned in the history of monarchy
+for their excellence. The materials of the work are, for the most part,
+ample, and they have been well employed by the historian, a man of
+extensive scholarship and of critical sagacity. Whether we subscribe to
+his opinions or not, there can be no doubt of his having presented a
+brilliant picture of the civilized world during about two and a half
+eventful centuries. His is the only readable work that we have which
+affords a continuous narrative of the history of Rome from the
+appearance of Caesar to the appearance of Commodus. Had it no other claim
+upon us, this alone would justify us in recommending it to the closest
+attention of all who desire to become acquainted with the facts that
+make up the sum of Roman Imperial history. But it has other claims to
+the consideration of readers. It makes Roman Imperial history thoroughly
+intelligible, because events are philosophically treated, and their
+bearing upon each other is rendered clear. It is written with vivacity,
+force, and elegance. The style is the style of a gentleman, and the
+sentiments are those of a Christian scholar. There is not a paragraph in
+it which we could wish to see omitted, or essentially changed. It has
+won for its author a place in the list of first-rate English historians,
+and he is to be ranked with Macaulay, Grote, Hallam, Froude, Kinglake,
+and others of those great writers who have done so much to illustrate
+the English name and to advance the cause of humanity. Being familiar
+with the work from the time that the first and second volumes were
+published in England, in 1850, we have always desired that it should be
+placed before the American reading public, confident that here its high
+merits would secure for it a great and deserved popularity; and it is
+with a sense of personal gratification that we have seen its publication
+begun in New York, in a form that pleases the eye and gratifies good
+taste.
+
+
+_Church Pastorals_: Hymns and Tunes for Public and Social Worship.
+Collected and Arranged by NEHEMIAH ADAMS, D. D. Boston: Ticknor
+& Fields.
+
+The Rev. Dr. Bushnell, in August, 1852, delivered an address upon
+"Religious Music" before the Beethoven Society of Yale College at the
+opening of their new organ. In the peroration of this address, after
+remarking upon the great assistance which Christian feeling receives in
+the praise of God from "things without life giving sound," he goes on to
+say,--"Let me suggest, also, in this connection, the very great
+importance of the cultivation of religious music. Every family should be
+trained in it; every Sunday or common school should have it as one of
+its exercises. The Moravians have it as a kind of ordinance of grace for
+the children: not without reason; for the powers of feeling and
+imagination, and the sense of spiritual realities, are developed as much
+by a training of childhood in religious music as by any other means. We
+complain that choirs and organs take the music to themselves in our
+churches, and that nothing is left to the people but to hear their
+undistinguishable piping, which no one else can join or follow or
+interpret. This must always be the complaint, till the congregations
+themselves have exercise enough in singing to make the performance
+theirs. As soon as they are able to throw in masses of sound that are
+not barbarous, but Christian, and have a right enjoyment of their
+feeling in it, they will have the tunes and the style of the exercise in
+their own way,--not before.... The more sorrowful is it, that, in our
+present defect of culture, there are so many voices which are more
+incapable of the right distinctions of sound than things without life,
+and which, when they attempt to sing, contribute more to the feeling of
+woe than of praise."
+
+These words are as true to-day as when they were uttered twelve years
+ago. Congregations which do not desire, or cannot afford, to resign the
+musical portion of their service to professional singers, have something
+more to do than to complain that the music is bad, or that they do not
+like paid vocalists to troll out psalmody for them. They must go to work
+and make their own music,--real music; for in these days unharmonious
+sounds are almost as much out of place in the worship of God as an
+uncatholic spirit and an heretical doctrine. The truth of this principle
+many societies admit, and some, like the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's, have
+already put it into practice; the majority, however, wait for help to
+free themselves from the customs which have kept them listeners when
+they should be creators of vocal praise. The great obstacle to
+congregational singing has been that the range of tunes already familiar
+was very limited, while the providing a whole society with the
+paraphernalia of music-books involved great expense to small purpose,
+since a large portion of the tunes contained in these books are
+unavailable for such use, being prepared with a view to the wants of
+thoroughly trained singers; besides which, the reference to two books,
+one for the words and the other for the music, is to many persons
+perplexing, and to all inconvenient.
+
+"Church Pastorals" is an attempt to overcome this obstacle, and to
+extend that help which is wanted. Other attempts have been made before,
+but we regard this as the most successful, and consider that Dr. Adams
+has prepared the best hymn-and-tune-book that has yet been issued, as we
+propose briefly to illustrate by a recapitulation of his plan and his
+manner of executing it.
+
+The hymns, which are nine hundred and eighty-eight in number, are
+selected from the great mass of hymn-writers; although Watts and the
+Wesleys furnish the foundation, and the materials of the superstructure
+are largely drawn from Doddridge, Cowper, Toplady, Montgomery, and
+others of kindred spirit, yet many beautiful things have been added from
+the later religious poetry, which are no less fervid in feeling, while
+less pronounced in doctrinal expression. These hymns are arranged in
+judicious general divisions, which are again analytically separated into
+special topics placed in logical sequence. After the hymns follow
+thirty-eight doxologies, the editor having added to the short list of
+common ones others which are fine enough to become standard at once.
+
+But it is less as a hymn- than as a tune-book that "Church Pastorals"
+merits the notice of societies and individuals who are truly interested
+in religious music, and we pass at once to our remarks upon this portion
+of the work. The compiler, although holding himself personally
+responsible for every selection, has availed himself of the advice and
+assistance of persons professionally eminent in sacred music, one of
+whom placed at his disposal a library which is unique in this country,
+containing works of which few Americans have owned or seen duplicates,
+such as rare "Choral-Buecher" of German cathedrals, and curious
+collections of English ecclesiastical compositions, a partial list of
+which is included in the volume, for the benefit of those who are
+curious in such matters, or wish to know how far Dr. Adams's researches
+have led him. To ascertain how many new melodies of the purest
+devotional character have been derived from these rich sources a careful
+examination is necessary, as also to comprehend with what skill the
+harmony has been preserved or adapted, in order to secure the two
+desirable results,--absolute freshness and beauty of treatment, and
+practicability for ordinary use; but a casual inspection will give
+sufficient indication of the spirit in which the work was undertaken,
+and of the faithfulness with which it has been completed.
+
+While originality has been properly sought, the old, familiar elements
+have not been neglected, and those simple songs which were upon the lips
+of our parents and grandparents, and are yet dear to us from association
+and intrinsic worth, are set in among the newer strains. The first
+lines only are given of such as need merely to be recalled to the memory
+of any who ever sing; but of others, equally prized, but less likely to
+be remembered, the full score is given.
+
+The doxologies are for the most part set to noble chorals of such
+strong, straightforward character that they cannot fail to become
+friends and intimates at once. In them, as in all the tunes, the compass
+of ordinary voices has been considered; and although nothing has been
+left undone which could give beauty to melody or scholarly variousness
+to harmony, the whole has been brought within the range of all singers.
+
+A novel and peculiar feature of the book is its "Stanzas to be sung
+_impromptu_." Occasions often arise at social meetings or special
+services, when it becomes desirable to sing a portion, or even the
+whole, of some homely, hearty hymn, but, while "the spirit moves," the
+opportunity is lost in the search for the words or the fit air, or in an
+attempt to "set the tune." To meet this want, Dr. Adams has brought
+together a variety of such stanzas, suited to all times and places, and,
+coupled with each, the first line of a familiar melody, that the
+propitious moment may be enjoyed and improved.
+
+It will of course be understood that the tune appointed for each hymn is
+printed directly above it, all four parts being given at length, the two
+trebles printed in a not unusual way upon one staff, the tenor and bass
+having each separate lines. Therefore no difficulty in singing the hymns
+can be felt even by the inexperienced, especially as one stanza is
+printed with the notes to show the exact adaptation.
+
+In fine, "Church Pastorals" is a work worthy of an extended circulation
+and capable of great usefulness. It can serve every purpose of public
+worship, for it embraces all services of the Sabbath congregation or the
+week-day gathering, and it touches upon all thoughts and feelings of
+religious assemblies; it is not above the tastes and abilities of an
+earnest congregation, nor beneath the notice and use of the independent
+choir. More than this, it has a particular value for the home and the
+fireside. Every household knows some quiet hour when the family-voices
+seek to join in the happy harmony of some unpretending hymn, and when
+the only limit to such grateful music is the failure of memory or the
+meagreness of the library, which furnishes only the hymns, or, giving
+the tunes, supplies only a part of the words,--for few families possess
+both sorts of books in plenty for their convenient use. This volume
+offers all,--the hymn, solemn, hopeful, sad, or jubilant, and united to
+it a tune, perhaps remembered from recollection's earliest days, perhaps
+unknown and untried, but suiting well the spirit of the words, and ready
+at an instant's desire to express the sentiment or emotion that rises
+for utterance. If "Church Pastorals" had no other merit, this alone
+would make it worth possessing by all who love and ever practise sacred
+music.
+
+A thorough and elaborate index includes in one ingenious list all
+references, whether to hymns, tunes, or metres; and the inaccuracies
+which will creep into even as handsome typography as this are
+unimportant, and rectified as quickly as observed. The size is
+convenient, and the shape comely.
+
+
+_Illustrations of Progress_: A Series of Discussions by HERBERT
+SPENCER. With a Notice of Spencer's "New System of Philosophy." New
+York: D. Appleton & Co.
+
+Mr. Herbert Spencer is already a power in the world. Yet it is not the
+vulgar apprehension of power which is associated with notoriety that we
+claim for him. He holds no position of civil authority, neither
+do his works compete with Miss Braddon's poorest novel in the
+circulating-libraries. But he has already influenced the silent life of
+a few thinking men whose belief marks the point to which the
+civilization of the age must struggle to rise. In America, we may even
+now confess our obligations to the writings of Mr. Spencer, for here
+sooner than elsewhere the mass feel as utility what a few recognize as
+truth. The reader acquainted with the admirable papers upon Education,
+which have been republished and extensively circulated in this country,
+has recognized their author's fresh and vigorous spirit, his power of
+separating the essential from the accidental, as well as his success in
+grasping the main features of a subject divested of frivolous and
+subordinate details. That he possesses a thinking faculty of rare
+comprehensiveness, as well as acuteness, will be allowed by all who will
+study his other works now in course of republication in New York.
+
+Mr. Spencer is at present engaged in an heroic attempt to construct a
+sufficing system of philosophy, which shall include Biology, Psychology,
+Sociology, and Morality. The great interest to mankind of the discussion
+proposed, as well as Mr. Spencer's claims to be intrusted with it, are
+set forth with singular clearness and felicity in the essay which
+introduces the present volume. Whatever success the latest discoveries
+in science render possible to solid intellectual force assisted by the
+keenest instruments of logic will doubtless be attained. As far as the
+frontiers of knowledge where the intellect may go, there is no living
+man whose guidance may more safely be trusted. Mr. Spencer represents
+the scientific spirit of the age. He makes note of all that comes within
+the range of sensuous experience, and declares whatever may be derived
+therefrom by a careful induction. As a philosopher he does not go
+farther. Yet beyond this the heart of humanity must ever penetrate. Let
+it be true, as it doubtless is, that, when the understanding by process
+of logic seeks to demonstrate the Cause of All, it finds a barren
+abstraction destitute of personality. It is no less true that God
+reveals Himself to the human feeling without intermediate agency. For
+the religious _sentiment_ Mr. Spencer finds an indestructible
+foundation. While maintaining that man can grasp and know only the
+finite, he yet holds that science does not fill the whole region of
+mental activity. Man may realize in consciousness what he may not grasp
+in thought.
+
+Of the other doctrines of Mr. Spencer we attempt no exposition. His
+attitude towards theology is to us more satisfactory than that of any
+recent thinker of the first class. But whatever his conclusions, every
+true man will respect and encourage that rectitude of mind which follows
+the issues of its reasoning at any cost. It was not the philosopher in
+his brain, but the fool _in his heart_, who said, "There is no God." It
+is of little matter what inappropriate name narrow people may have
+chosen for Mr. Spencer. Here is a conscientious investigator who finds
+duty everywhere, who labors to give men truths which shall elevate and
+reform their lives; but he believes that the hope of humanity was
+potentially shut in an egg, and never in an ark. And there is the
+"reader upon the sofa,"--church-member he may be,--who tosses aside
+"Vanity Fair" with the reflection that a gossiping of London snobs is
+human life, and that the best thing to be done is to pay pew-rates and
+lie still and gird at it. Which of these two, think you, is the modern
+representative of King David's "fool"?
+
+We would not be charged with the superfluity of commending to scholars
+the writings of Mr. Spencer. They have long ago found them out. It is to
+the mass of working men and women who make time for a solid book or two
+in the course of the year that we submit their claims. While those who
+have the leisure and training to realize Mr. Spencer's system as a
+developed unity must necessarily be few, no reader of tolerable
+intelligence can fail to find much of interest and suggestion in its
+several parts. With a common allowance for the abstruse nature of the
+subjects of which he treats, Mr. Spencer may be called a _popular_
+writer. His philosophical terminology will not be found troublesome in
+those of his writings which will first attract the reader. The "Social
+Statics," the "Essays," and the treatise on "Education" are very
+clearly, as well as most gracefully, written. And after these have been
+mastered, most readers will not be repelled by the less easy reading of
+the "Principles of Psychology," and the "New System of Philosophy." All
+these works are rich in materials for forming intelligent opinions, even
+where we are unable to agree with those put forward by the author. Much
+may be learnt from them in departments in which our common educational
+system is very deficient. The active citizen may derive from them
+accurate, systematized information concerning his highest duties to
+society, and the principles on which they are based. He may gain clearer
+notions of the value and bearing of evidence, and be better able to
+distinguish between facts and inferences. He may find common things
+suggestive of wiser thought--nay, we will venture to say, of truer
+emotion--than before. For Mr. Spencer is not of that school of
+"philosophy" which teaches the hopelessness of human effort, and, by
+implication, the abandonment of moral dignity. From profound
+generalizations upon society, he rises to make the duty of the
+individual most solemn and imperative. Above all, he has this best
+prerogative of really great thinkers,--he is able to change sentiments
+to convictions.
+
+If we have not particularized the claims of the single volume whose
+title is at the head of our notice, it is because all that Mr. Spencer
+has written moves towards one end and is equally worthy of attention.
+The essays here given are selected from two series, the first published
+in 1857, the second in 1863. The present arrangement has been chosen by
+the author as more suitable to develop the general purpose which governs
+his work. While the doctrine of Evolution is more or less illustrated in
+each of these papers, the variety of subjects discussed must touch at
+some point the taste and pursuit of any reader. From "Manners and
+Fashion" to "The Nebular Hypothesis" is a sweep bold enough to include
+most prominent topics with which we are concerned. Indeed, we can recall
+no modern volume of the same size which so thoroughly credits its author
+with that faculty of looking about him which Pope thought it was man's
+business to exercise. There are the current phrases, "seeing life," and
+"knowing the world," which generally used to signify groping in the
+dirtiest corners of the one and fattening lazily upon the other; but if
+it were possible to rescue such expressions from their vulgar
+associations, we think that a candid reader would apply the best
+conceptions they suggested to the writer of the discussions here
+collected. The world as it is to-day is seen by Mr. Spencer as by few
+living men. The sciences, which taken singly too often seem only good to
+expel the false, have been summoned together to declare the true. Not
+Nature alone, but Humanity, which is greater than Nature, must be
+interrogated for answers that shall satisfy the ripest reason of the
+age. By the rare gifts of comparison which turn to account his wide
+observations, Mr. Spencer has already established principles which,
+however compelled for a time to compromise with prejudices and vested
+interests, will become the recognized basis of an improved society.
+
+Our only interest in recommending this author to our countrymen comes
+from the conviction that he is peculiarly capable of impressing for good
+the present condition of our national character. By giving us fuller
+realizations of liberty and justice his writings will tend to increase
+our self-reliance in the great emergency of civilization to which we
+have been summoned. "Our Progressive Independence," so brilliantly
+illustrated by Dr. Holmes, emancipating us from foreign fine-writing,
+leaves us free to welcome the true manhood and mature wisdom of Europe.
+In the time of our old prosperity, amusing a leisure evening over
+Kingsley or Ruskin, we were tempted to exclaim, with Sir Peter Teazle,
+"There's nothing half so noble as a man of sentiment!" But in these
+latter days we have seen "Mr. Gradgrind" step from Dickens's wretched
+caricature to bring his "facts" to the great cause of humanity, while
+"Joseph Surface" reserved his "sentiments" for the bloody business by
+which Slavery sought to subject all things to herself. We have seen the
+belles-lettres literature of England more deeply disgraced than when it
+smirked before the harlots of the second Charles, or chanted a
+blasphemous benediction over George IV. But the thought and science of
+the Old World it is still our privilege to recognize. And it can hardly
+be necessary to say that the sympathies of Mr. Spencer, like those of
+Mill and Cochin, have been with the government and loyal people of the
+United States. And so we take especial pleasure in mentioning that a
+considerable interest in the American copyright of his writings has been
+secured to the author, and also, despite the facilities of reading-clubs
+and circulating-libraries, that they are emphatically _books to own_.
+
+
+_Poems._ By FREDERICK GODDARD TUCKERMAN. Boston: Ticknor and
+Fields.
+
+These poems show by internal evidence that they are the productions of a
+man of refined organization and delicate sensibility to beauty, who has
+lived much in solitude and tasted of the cup of sorrow. Of decided
+originality in intellectual construction it cannot be said that they
+give emphatic proof: the poet, as Schiller has said, is the child of his
+age, and Mr. Tuckerman's poetry not unfrequently shows that he has been
+a diligent student of those masters in his art who have best caught and
+reproduced the spirit of the times in which we dwell. It has one quality
+to a high degree,--and that is, a minute knowledge of the peculiarities
+of the natural world as it appears in New England. In his long woodland
+walks, he has kept open an eye of observation as practised as that of
+the naturalist. The trees, the shrubs, the flowers of New England are
+known to him as they are to few. He is tempted to draw too largely upon
+this source of interest: in other words, there is too much of
+description in his volume. Life is hardly long enough for such elaborate
+painting. We may admire the skill of the delineation, but we cannot
+pause sufficiently before the canvas to do full justice to the painter.
+Those poems in which Mr. Tuckerman expresses the emotions of bereavement
+and sorrow are those which have the highest merit in point of thought
+and expression. They are full of tenderness and sensibility; but the
+poet should bear in mind that strings which vibrate such music should be
+sparingly struck.
+
+It may be somewhat paradoxical to say so, but it appears to us that the
+poetry of Mr. Tuckerman would be improved, if it had more of prose in
+it. It does not address itself to common emotions and every-day
+sympathies. His flour is bolted too fine. One must almost be a poet
+himself to enter into full communion with him. In intellectual
+productions the refining process should not be carried too far: beyond a
+certain point, what is gained in delicacy is lost in manliness and
+power.
+
+
+_Possibilities of Creation; or, What the World might have been._ A Book
+of Fancies. London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.
+
+The author describes his work as a treatise of the Bridgewater class. We
+should rather describe it as a _reductio ad absurdum_ in Natural
+Philosophy. A great deal of humor, ingenuity, and information are
+brought into play to turn the world upside-down, for the very laudable
+purpose of demonstrating that it is better to be right side up,--a
+method of demonstration curious and interesting enough, if comprised in
+a single essay, but rather long-drawn-out, when spread over four hundred
+pages. Suppose, for instance, is the writer's mode of argument, a
+malicious demon let loose, with power to set the earth topsy-turvy, on
+condition of keeping it still an earth. With what exultation does he
+bestride the Himalayas to watch the convulsions which he causes! How
+does he kick his heels against the mountain-flanks, in ecstasy at seeing
+men bleached and blistered with the chlorine or nauseated with the
+sulphuretted hydrogen which he has substituted for our wholesome and
+pleasant air! Or what should we do, if potato-roots had happened to be
+moistened with gin instead of water? What if men, instead of standing
+god-like erect, had been great balls of flesh, rolling along the ground
+as best they could,--if Young's poetical figure had been a practical
+truth, and this globe were the Bedlam of the universe,--if the fixity of
+Nature had been shattered, and we sat down at our feasts to find the
+soup bitter as strychnine, the wine changed into vinegar, and mild ale
+fiery as vitriol? What if wrinkles and gray hairs came in the twinkling
+of an eye,--if children were born with matured minds,--if no one were
+capable of anger,--and men started at the same point to arrive at the
+same conclusions? In short,--
+
+    "If all the world was apple-pie,
+      And all the sea was ink,
+    And all the trees were bread and cheese,
+      What should we have for drink?"
+
+To all which startling inquiries we are fain to say, that, if Merrie
+England sits under her present squally skies in such a frame of bliss
+that she must have recourse to her imagination, when she wishes to
+contemplate a nice little _imbroglio_, she must be awarded the palm for
+being what Mark Tapley would call "jolly under creditable
+circumstances." For ourselves, we frankly confess that we find quite
+trouble enough in steering among the realities of creation, without
+caring to venture far out among its possibilities.
+
+
+
+
+RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS
+
+RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
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+Cudjo's Cave. By J. T. Trowbridge, Author of "Neighbor Jackwood," etc.
+Boston. J. E. Tilton & Co. 12mo. pp. 504. $1.50.
+
+Sadlier's Catholic Almanac and Ordo for the Year of our Lord 1864. With
+Full Returns of the Various Dioceses in the United States and British
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+Ireland. New York. D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 12mo. paper. pp. 330. 50 cts.
+
+The Natural History of Secession; or, Despotism and Democracy at
+Necessary, Eternal, Exterminating War. By Thomas Shepard Goodwin, A. M.
+New York. John Bradburn. 12mo. pp. 328. $1.25.
+
+Squadron Tactics under Steam. [By Authority of the Navy Department.] By
+Foxhall A. Parker, Commander United States Navy. New York. D. Van
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+
+Father Mathew: A Biography. By John Francis Maguire, M. P., Author of
+"Rome: its Ruler and its Institutions." New York. D. & J. Sadlier & Co.
+12mo. pp. xxi., 557. $1.50.
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+Eliza Woodson; or, The Early Days of one of the World's Workers. A Story
+of American Life. New York. A. J. Davis & Co. 12mo. pp. 425. $1.25.
+
+Letters to a Lady. By Wilhelm von Humboldt. From the German, with an
+Introduction by Charles Godfrey Leland. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo.
+pp. 257. $1.00.
+
+Four American Poems, metrically translated into German. By Charles
+Theodore Eben. Philadelphia. F. Leypoldt. 16mo. paper. pp. 51. 25 cts.
+
+The Art of Conversation; with Directions for Self-Education. New York.
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+Historical Memoir of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Compiled from
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+States Army. New York. Sheldon & Co. 8vo. pp. 480. $2.50.
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+
+Mount Vernon, and other Poems. By Harvey Rice. New York. D. Appleton &
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+Leander Starr. New York. John Bradburn. 12mo. pp. 281. $1.25.
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+Massachusetts Volunteers. Boston. Walker, Wise, & Co. 16mo. pp. xii.,
+244. $1.25.
+
+Life of William Hickling Prescott. By George Ticknor. Boston. Ticknor &
+Fields. 4to. pp. x., 491. $7.50.
+
+Tales of a Wayside Inn. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston. Ticknor &
+Fields. 12mo. pp. viii., 225. $1.25.
+
+A Woman's Ransom. By Frederick William Robinson, Author of
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+viii., 412. $1.50.
+
+Sunshine: A New Name for a Popular Lecture on Health. By Mrs. Dall,
+Author of "Woman's Right to Labor," etc. Boston. Walker, Wise, & Co.
+16mo. paper. pp. 64. 35 cts.
+
+The Wife's Secret. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson
+& Brothers. 12mo. pp. 480. $1.50.
+
+Lyrics of a Day; or, Newspaper Poetry. By a Volunteer in the United
+States Service. New York. G. W. Carleton. 16mo. pp. xii., 160. 75 cts.
+
+Work and Play; or, Literary Varieties. By Horace Bushnell. New York.
+Charles Scribner. 12mo. pp. 464. $1.50.
+
+The School-Girl's Garland. A Selection of Poetry. In Four Parts. By Mrs.
+C. M. Kirkland. Second Series. Parts Third and Fourth. New York. Charles
+Scribner. 16mo. pp. 360. $1.25.
+
+England's Liability for Indemnity: Remarks on the Letter of
+"Historicus," dated November 4th, 1863; printed in the London "Times,"
+November 7th; and reprinted in the "Boston Daily Advertiser," November
+25th. By Charles G. Loring. Boston. W. V. Spencer. 8vo. paper. pp.
+viii., 46. 25 cts.
+
+Satan's Devices and the Believer's Victory. By Rev. William L. Parsons,
+A. M. Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 312. $1.25.
+
+Hints to Riflemen. By H. W. S. Cleveland. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
+12mo. pp. 260. $1.25.
+
+Illustrations of Universal Progress; A Series of Discussions. By Herbert
+Spencer, Author of "The Principles of Psychology," etc. With a Notice of
+Spencer's "New System of Philosophy." New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo.
+pp. xxxi., 446. $1.75.
+
+The National Almanac and Annual Record for the Year 1864. Philadelphia.
+G. W. Childs. 12mo. pp. 641. $1.50.
+
+Annual of Scientific Discovery; or, Year-Book of Facts in Science and
+Art for 1864. Exhibiting the most Important Discoveries and Improvements
+in Mechanics, Useful Arts, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Astronomy,
+Geology, Zooelogy, Botany, Mineralogy, Meteorology, Geography,
+Antiquities, etc. Together with Notes on the Progress of Science during
+the Year 1863; a List of Recent Scientific Publications; Obituaries of
+Eminent Scientific Men, etc. Edited by David A. Wells, A. M., M. D.
+Boston. Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 351. $1.50.
+
+The Red Track. A Tale of Life in Mexico. By Gustave Aimard.
+Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson & Brothers. 8vo. paper. pp. 157. 50 cts.
+
+Dangerfield's Rest; or, Before the Storm. A Novel of American Life and
+Manners, New York. Sheldon & Co. 12mo. pp. 392. $1.50.
+
+The Philanthropic Results of the War in America. Collected from Official
+and other Authentic Sources. By an American Citizen. New York. Sheldon &
+Co. 18mo. pp. 160. 50 cts.
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+A Treatise on Military Surveying, Theoretical and Practical. Including a
+Description of Surveying Instruments. By G. H. Mendell, Captain of
+Engineers. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 12mo. pp. 193. $2.00.
+
+The Blennerhassett Papers. Embodying the Private Journal of Harman
+Blennerhassett, and the hitherto Unpublished Correspondence of Burr,
+Alston, Comfort Tyler, Devereaux, Dayton, Adair, Miro, Emmett, Theodosia
+Burr Alston, Mrs. Blennerhassett, and others, their Contemporaries;
+developing the Purposes and Aims of those engaged in the Attempted
+Wilkinson and Burr Revolution; embracing also the First Account of the
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+William H. Safford. Cincinnati. Moore, Wilstach, & Baldwin, 8vo. pp.
+665. $3.00.
+
+Church Essays. By George Cumming McWhorter, Author of "A Popular
+Hand-Book of the New Testament." New York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp.
+175. $1.00.
+
+My Cave-Life in Vicksburg. With Letters of Trial and Travel. By a Lady.
+New York. D. Appleton & Co. 16mo. pp. 196. $1.00.
+
+Field Tactics for Infantry: comprising the Battalion Movements and
+Brigade Evolutions Useful in the Field, on the March, and in the
+Presence of the Enemy. By Brigadier-General William H. Morris. New York.
+D. Van Nostrand. 18mo. pp. 146. 75 cts.
+
+Christian Memorials of the War; or, Scenes and Incidents Illustrative of
+Religious Faith and Principle, Patriotism and Bravery, in our Army. With
+Historical Notes. By Horatio B. Hackett, Professor of Biblical
+Literature and Interpretation in Newton Theological Institute. Boston.
+Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 252. $1.50.
+
+Family Pride. By the Author of "Pique." Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &
+Brothers. 12mo. pp. 396. $1.50.
+
+America and her Commentators. With a Critical Sketch of Travel in the
+United States. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York. C. Scribner. 8vo. pp.
+viii., 460. $2.50.
+
+Synonymes of the New Testament. By Richard Chevenix Trench, D. D. Second
+Part. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp. iv., 214. $1.00.
+
+The Management of Steel, including Forging, Hardening, Tempering,
+Annealing, Shrinking, and Expansion; also the Case-Hardening of Iron. By
+George Ede, employed in the Royal Gun Factories Department, Woolwich
+Arsenal. First American, from Second London Edition. New York. D.
+Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 41. 50 cts.
+
+Thoughts for the Christian Life. By Rev. James Drummond. With an
+Introduction by Rev. J. G. Holland. New York. C. Scribner. 12mo. pp.
+xxi., 371. $1.50.
+
+History of the Romans under the Empire. By Charles Merivale, B. D., late
+Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. From the Fourth London Edition.
+With a Copious Analytical Index. Vol. III. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
+12mo. pp. 431. $2.00.
+
+The Federalist. A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States. A
+Collection of Essays, by Alexander Hamilton, Jay, and Madison. Also, The
+Continentalist and other Papers, by Hamilton. Edited by John C.
+Hamilton, Author of "The History of the Republic of the United States."
+Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott & Co. 8vo. pp. clxvi., 660, vi. $3.50.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No.
+80, June, 1864, by Various
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