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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107,
+September, 1866, 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 18, No. 107, September, 1866
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2007 [EBook #23743]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 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, Science, Art, and Politics._
+
+VOL. XVIII.--SEPTEMBER, 1866.--NO. CVII.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND
+FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
+to the end of the article.
+
+
+
+
+THE SURGEON'S ASSISTANT.
+
+
+I.
+
+The sickness of the nation not being unto death, we now begin to number
+its advantages. They will not all be numbered by this generation; and as
+for story-tellers, essayists, letter-writers, historians, and
+philosophers, if their "genius" flags in half a century with such
+material as hearts, homes, and battle-fields beyond counting afford
+them, they deserve to be drummed out of their respective regiments, and
+banished into the dominion of silence and darkness, forever to sit on
+the borders of unfathomable ink-pools, minus pen and paper, with
+fool's-caps on their heads.
+
+I know of a place which you may call Dalton, if it must have a name. At
+the beginning of our war,--for which some true spirits thank Almighty
+God,--a family as wretched as Satan wandering up and down the earth
+could wish to find lived there, close beside the borders of a lake which
+the Indians once called--but why should not your fancy build the lowly
+cottage on whatsoever green and sloping bank it will? Fair as you please
+the outside world may be,--waters pure as those of Lake St. Sacrament,
+with islands on their bosom like those of Horicon, and shores
+beautifully wooded as those of Lake George,--but what delight will you
+find in all the heavenly mansions, if love be not there?
+
+"I'll enlist," said the master of this mansion of misery in the midst of
+the garden of delight, one day.
+
+"I would," replied his wife.
+
+They spoke with equal vigor, but neither believed in the other. The
+instant the man dropped the book he had been reading, he was like Samson
+with his hair shorn, for his wife couldn't tell one letter from another;
+and when she saw him sit down on the stone wall which surrounded their
+potato-field, overgrown with weeds, she marched out boldly to the corner
+of the wood-shed, where never any wood was, and attacked him thus:--
+
+"S'pose you show fight awhile in that potato-patch afore you go to fight
+Ribils. Gov'ment don't need you any more than I do. May be it'll find
+out getting ain't gaining!"
+
+She had no answer. The man was thinking, when she interrupted him, as
+she was always doing, that, if he could secure the State and town
+bounty, that would be some provision for the woman and child. As for
+himself, he was indifferent as to where he was sent, or how soon. But if
+he went away, they might look for him to come again. Gabriel's trumpet,
+he thought, would be a more welcome sound than his wife's voice.
+
+He enlisted. The bounties paid him were left in the hands of a trusty
+neighbor, and were to be appropriated to the supply of his family's
+needs; and he went away along with a boat-load of recruits,--his own man
+no longer. Even his wife noticed the change in him, from the morning
+when he put on his uniform and began to obey orders, for she had time to
+notice. Several days elapsed after enlistment before the company's ranks
+were complete, and the captain would not report at head-quarters, he
+said, until his own townsfolk had supplied the number requisite.
+
+_Even_ his wife noticed the change, I said; for, contrary to what is
+usual and expected, she was not the first to perceive that the slow and
+heavy step had now a spring in it, and that there was a light in his
+clouded eyes. She supposed the new clothes made the difference.
+
+Nearly a year had passed away, and this woman was leaning over the rail
+fence which surrounded a barren field, and listening, while she leaned,
+to the story of Ezra Cramer, just home from the war. She listened well,
+even eagerly, to what he had to tell, and seemed moved by the account in
+ways various as pride and indignation.
+
+"I wish I had him here!" she said, when he had come to the end of his
+story,--the story of her husband's promotion.
+
+Ezra looked at her, and thought of the pretty girl she used to be, and
+wondered how it happened that such a one could grow into a woman like
+this. The vindictiveness of her voice accorded well with her
+person,--expressed it. Where were her red cheeks? What had become of her
+brown hair? She was once a free one at joking with, and rallying the
+young men about; but now how like a virago she looked! and her tongue
+was sharp as a two-edged sword.
+
+Ezra was sorry that he had taken the trouble to ascertain in the village
+where Nancy Elkins lived. Poor fellow! While enduring the hardships of
+the past year, his imagination had transformed all the Dalton women into
+angels, and the circuit of that small hamlet had become to his loving
+thought as the circuit of Paradise.
+
+Some degree of comprehension seemed to break upon him while he stood
+gazing upon her, and he said: "O well, Miss Nancy, he's got his hands
+full, and besides he didn't know I was coming home so quick. I didn't
+know it myself till the last minute. He would 'a' sent some
+message,--course he would!"
+
+"I guess there ain't anything to hender his _writing_ home to his
+folks," she answered, unappeased and unconvinced. "Other people hear
+from the war. There's Mynders always a-writing and sending money to the
+old folks, and that's the difference."
+
+"We've been slow to get our pay down where we was," said Ezra. "It's
+been a trouble to me all the while, having nothing to show for the time
+I was taking from father."
+
+The woman looked at the young fellow who had spoken so seriously, and
+her eyes and her voice softened.
+
+"Nobody would mind about your not sending money hum, Ezra. They'd know
+_you_ was all right. Such a hard-working set as you belong to! You're
+looking as if you wondered what I was doing here 'n this lot. I'm living
+in that shanty! Like as not I'll have its pictur' taken, and sent to my
+man. Old Uncle Torry said we might have it for the summer; and I expect
+the town was glad enough to turn me and my girl out anywhere. They won't
+do a thing towards fixing the old hut up. Say 't ain't worth it. We
+can't stay there in cold weather. Roof leaks like a sieve. If he don't
+send me some money pretty quick, I'll list myself, and serve long enough
+to find _him_ out, see 'f I don't."
+
+At this threat, the soldier, who knew something about WAR, straightened
+himself, and with a cheery laugh limped off towards the road. "I'll see
+ye ag'in, Miss Nancy, afore you start," said he, looking back and
+nodding gayly at her. Things weren't so bad as they seemed about her, he
+guessed. He was going home, and his heart was soft. Happiness is very
+kind; but let it do its best it cannot come very near to misery.
+
+Nancy stood and watched the young man as he went, commenting thus:
+"Well, _he_'s made a good deal out of 'listing, any way." His pale face
+and his hurt did not make him sacred in her sight.
+
+She was speaking to herself, and not to her little daughter, who, when
+she saw her mother talking to a soldier, ran up to hear the
+conversation. A change that was wonderful to see had passed over the
+child's face, when she heard that her father had been promoted from the
+ranks. The bald fact, unilluminated by a single particular, seemed to
+satisfy her. She hadn't a question to ask. Her first thought was to run
+down to the village and tell Miss Ellen Holmes, who told _her_, not long
+ago, so proud and wonderful a story about her brother's promotion.
+
+If it were not for this Jenny, my story would be short. Is it not for
+the future we live? For the children the world goes on.
+
+Does this little girl--she might be styled a beauty by a true catholic
+taste, but oh! I fear that the Boston Convention "ORTHODOX," lately
+convened to settle all great questions concerning the past, present, and
+future, would never recognize her, on any showing, as a babe of
+grace!--does she, as she runs down the hill and along the crooked street
+of Dalton, look anything like a messenger of Heaven to your eyes? Must,
+the angels show their wings before they shall have recognition?
+
+Going past the blacksmith's shop she was hailed by the blacksmith's
+self, with the blacksmith's own authority. "See here, Jenny!" At the
+call, she stood at bay like a fair little fawn in the woods.
+
+"I'm writing a letter to my boy," he continued. "Step in here. Did you
+know Ezra Cramer had come back?"
+
+"I saw him just now," she answered. "He told us about father." She said
+it with a pride that made her young face shine.
+
+"So! what about him, I wonder?" asked the blacksmith.
+
+And that he really did wonder, Jenny could not doubt. She heard more in
+his words than she liked to hear, and answered with a tremulous voice,
+in spite of pride, "O, he's been promoted."
+
+"The deuse! what's _he_ permoted to?"
+
+"I don't know," she said, and for the first time she wondered.
+
+"Where is he, though?" asked the blacksmith.
+
+"I don't know,--in the war."
+
+"That's 'cute. Well, see here, sis, we'll find that out,--you and me
+will." The angry voice of the blacksmith became tender. "You sit down
+there and write him a letter. My son, he'll find out if your pa is
+alive. As for Ezra, he don't know any more 'n he did when he went away;
+but, poor fellow, he's been mostually in the hospertal, instead of
+fighting Ribils, so p'r'aps he ain't to blame. You write to yer pa, and
+I'll wage you get an answer back, and he'll tell you all about his
+permotion quick enough."
+
+Jenny stood looking at the blacksmith for a moment, with mouth and eyes
+wide open, so much astonished by the proposition as not to know what
+answer should be made to it. She had never written a line in her life,
+except in her old copy-book. If her hand could be made to express what
+she was thinking of, it would be the greatest work and wonder in the
+world. But then, it never could!
+
+That decisive _never_ seemed to settle the point. She turned forthwith
+to the blacksmith, smiling very seriously. At the same time she took
+three decided steps, which led her into his dingy shop, as awed as
+though she were about to have some wonderful exhibition there. But she
+must be her own astrologer.
+
+The blacksmith, elated by his own success that morning in the very
+difficult business of letter-writing, was mightily pleased to have under
+direction this little disciple in the work of love, and forthwith laid
+his strong hands on the bench and brought it out into the light, setting
+it down with a force that said something for the earnestness of his
+purpose in regard to Miss Jenny.
+
+When he wrote his own letter, he did it in retirement and solitude,
+having sought out the darkest corner of his shop for the purpose. A
+mighty man in the shoeing of horses and the handling of hammers, he
+shrank from exposing his incompetence in the management of a miserable
+pen, even to the daylight and himself.
+
+His big account-book placed against his forge, with a small sheet of
+paper spread thereon, his pen in Jenny's hands, and the inkstand near
+by, there was nothing for him to do but to go away and let her do her
+work.
+
+"Give him a tall letter!" said he. "And you must be spry about it. He'll
+be glad to hear from his little girl, I reckon. See, the stage 'll be
+along by four o'clock, and now it's----"--he stepped to the door and
+looked out on the tall pine-tree across the road,--that was his
+sun-dial,--"it's just two o'clock now, Jenny. Work away!" So saying, he
+went off as tired, after the exertion he had made, as if he had shod all
+the Dalton horses since daybreak.
+
+She had just two hours for doing the greatest piece of work she had done
+in her short life. And consciously it was the greatest work. Every
+stroke of that pen, every straight line and curve and capital, seemed to
+require as much deliberation as the building of a house; and how her
+brain worked! Fly to and fro, O swallows, from your homes beneath the
+eaves of the blacksmith's old stone shop in the shade of the
+far-spreading walnut,--stretch forth your importunate necks and lift
+aloft your greedy voices, O young ones in the nests!--the little girl
+who has so often stood to watch you is sitting in the shadow within
+there, blind and deaf to you, and unaware of everything in the great
+world except the promotion of her father "in the war," and the letter he
+will be sure to get, because the blacksmith is going to send it along
+with _his_ letter to his son.
+
+She was doing her work well. Any one who had ever seen the girl before
+must have asked with wonder what had happened to her,--it was so evident
+that something had happened which stirred heart and soul to the depths.
+
+So, even so, unconsciously, love sometimes works out the work of a
+lifetime, touches the key-note of an anthem of everlasting praise,--does
+it with as little ostentation as the son of science draws yellow gold
+from the quartz rock which tells no tale on the face of it concerning
+its "hid treasure." So, wisely and without ostentation, work the true
+agents, the apostles of liberty in this world.
+
+"O dear papa! my dear papa!" she wrote, "Ezra has come home, and he says
+you are promoted! But he couldn't tell for what it was, or where you
+were, or anything. And O, it seems as if I couldn't wait a minute, I
+want to hear so all about it." When she had written thus far the spirit
+of the mother seemed to stir in the child. She sat and mused for a
+moment. Her eyes flashed. Her right hand moved nervously. Strange that
+her father had not sent some word by Ezra; but then he didn't know, of
+course, that Ezra was coming. Ay! that was a lucky thought. What she had
+written seemed to imply some blame. So, with many a blot and erasure,
+her loving belief that all was right must make itself evident.
+
+At the end of the two hours she found herself at the bottom of the page
+the blacksmith had spread before her. Twice he had come into the shop
+and assured himself that the work was going on, and smiled to see the
+progress she was making. The third time he came he was under
+considerable excitement.
+
+"Ready!" he shouted. "The stage 'll be along now in ten minutes."
+
+She did not answer, she was so busy, and so _hard_ at work, signing her
+name to the sheet that was covered with what looked like hieroglyphics.
+
+When she had made the last emphatic pen-stroke, she turned towards him,
+flushed and smiling. "There!" she said.
+
+He looked over her shoulder.
+
+"Good!" said he. "But you haven't writ his name out. Give me the pen
+here, quick!" Then he took the quill and wrote her father's name up in
+one blank corner, and dried the ink with a little sand, and put the note
+into the envelope containing his own, and the great work was done.
+
+Do you know how great a work, you dingy old Dalton blacksmith?
+
+Do _you_ know, fair child,--who must fight till the day of your death
+with alien, opposite forces, because the blood-vessels of Nancy Elkins,
+as they sail through the grand canals of the city of your life, so often
+hang out piratical banners, and bear down on better craft as they near
+the dangerous places, or put out, like wreckers after a storm, seeking
+for treasure the owners somehow lost the power to hold?
+
+In a few minutes after the letter was inscribed and sealed, the stage
+came rattling along, and Jenny stood by and saw the blacksmith give it
+to the driver, and heard him say: "Now be kerful about that ere letter.
+It's got two inside. One's my boy's, as ye'll see by the facing on it;
+t' other's this little girl's. She's been writin' to her pa. So be
+kerful."
+
+They stood together watching the stage till it was out of sight, then
+the blacksmith nodded at Jenny as if they had done a good day's work,
+and proceeded to light his pipe. That was not her way of celebrating the
+event. She remembered now that she had promised a little girl, Miss
+Ellen Holmes indeed, that she would some time show her where the
+red-caps and fairy-cups grew, and there was yet time, before sunset, for
+a long walk in the woods.
+
+The little town-bred lady happened to come along just then, while Jenny
+stood hesitating whether to go home first and tell her mother of this
+great thing she had done. The question was therefore settled; and now
+let them go seeking red-caps. Good luck attend the children! Jenny will
+be sure to say something about promotions before they separate. She will
+say that something with a genuine human pride; and the end of the hunt
+for red-caps may be, conspicuously, success in finding them; but still
+more to the purpose, it will be the child's establishment on a better
+basis--a securer basis of equality--than she has occupied before. She
+forgets about Dalton and poverty. She thinks about camps and honor. She
+has something to claim of all the world. She is the citizen of a great
+nation. She bears the name of one who is fighting for the Union, who
+_has_ fought, and fought so well that those in authority have beckoned
+him up higher. Why, it is as though a crown were placed on her dear
+father's head.
+
+
+II.
+
+Going out of quiet and beautiful green Dalton, and into the hospital of
+Frere's Landing, 't is a wonderful change we make.
+
+The silence of one place is as remarkable as the silence of the other,
+perhaps. That of the hospital does not resemble that of the hamlet,
+however. At times it grows oppressive and appalling, being the silence
+of anguish or of death. A stranger reaching Dalton in the night might
+wonder in the morning if there were in reality any passage out of it,
+for there the lake, on one of whose western slopes is the
+"neighborhood," seems locked in completely by the hills, and an ascent
+towards heaven is apparently the only way of egress. Yet there's
+another way; for I am not writing this true story among celestial
+altitudes for you. I returned from Dalton by a mundane road.
+
+Out of Frere's Hospital, however, _its_ silence and seclusion, many a
+stranger never found his way except by the high mountains of
+transfiguration, in the chariots of fire, driven by the horsemen of
+Heaven, covered with whose glory they departed.
+
+Through the wards of this well-ordered hospital a lady passed one night,
+and, entering a small apartment separated from the others, advanced with
+noiseless step to a bedside, and there sat down. You may guess if her
+heart was beating fast, and whether it was with difficulty that she kept
+her gray eyes clear of tears. There were about her traces of long and
+hurried journeying.
+
+Under no limitations of caution had she passed so noiselessly through
+the wards. Involuntary was that noiselessness,--involuntary also the
+surprise with which one and another of the more wakeful patients turned
+to follow her, with hopeless, weary eyes, as she passed on. Now and then
+some feeble effort was made to attract her attention and arrest her
+progress, but she went, absorbed beyond observation by the errand that
+constrained her steps and thoughts.
+
+When she reached the door of the apartment to which the surgeon had
+directed her, she seemed for an instant to hesitate; then she pushed the
+door open and passed into the room. The next instant she sank into a
+chair by the bedside of a man who was lying there asleep. It seemed as
+if the silent room had a profounder stillness added to it since she
+entered.
+
+It was Colonel Ames whom she saw lying on the cot before her with a
+bandage round his forehead, so evidently asleep. He was smiling in a
+dream. He was not going to give up the ghost, it seemed, though he had
+given up so much--how much!--with that passion of giving which possessed
+this nation, North and South, during four awful, glorious years. _He_
+had given up the splendor and the beauty of this world. All its radiance
+was blotted out in that moment of fury and of death when the shot struck
+him, and left him blind upon the field.
+
+Never on earth would it be said to him, "Receive thy sight." The lady
+knew this who sat down by his bedside to wait for his awaking. The
+surgeon had told her this, when at last, after having searched for her
+brother long among the dead, she came to Frere's Hospital and found him
+alive.
+
+She sat so close beside him it seemed that he could not remain a moment
+unconscious of her immediate presence after waking. Her hand lay just
+where his hand, moving when he wakened, must touch it. She had rightly
+calculated the chances; he did touch it, and started and said: "Who's
+here? Doctor!" Then with a firmer grasp he seized the unresisting
+fingers, and exclaimed, "My God, am I dreaming? it ought to be Lizzie's
+hand."
+
+"The doctor told me I should find you here, and might come," she
+answered; and, disguised as the voice was by the feeling that tore her
+heart, the Colonel, poor young fellow, listening as if for life, knew
+it, and said, "O Lizzie, my child, I don't know about this,--why
+couldn't you wait?"
+
+"I waited and waited forever," she answered. "You're not sorry that I've
+found you out after such a hunt? Of course you'll make believe, but
+then--you needn't; I'm here, any way!"
+
+Just then the surgeon came in. The Colonel knew his step, and said,
+"Doctor, look here; is this Lizzie?"
+
+"I believe you're right," said the doctor. "She said she had a hero for
+a brother, and I have no doubt about that myself."
+
+"O Dan, we had given you up! Though I knew all the time we shouldn't. I
+could not believe--"
+
+"Must come to that Lizzie,--do it over again; for what you have here
+isn't your old Dan."
+
+"My old Dan!" she exclaimed, and then there was a little break in the
+conversation the two heroes were endeavoring to maintain.
+
+Meanwhile the surgeon had seated himself on the edge of the bed waiting
+the moment when there should be a positive need of him. He saw when it
+arrived.
+
+"Colonel," said he, in his hearty, cheery voice, which alone had lifted
+many a poor fellow from the slough of misery, and put new heart and soul
+in him, since his ministrations began in the hospital,--"Colonel, your
+aids are in waiting."
+
+The soldier smiled; his face flushed. "My aids can wait," said he.
+
+"That is a fine thing to say. Here he has been bothering me, madam, not
+to say browbeating me, and I've been moving heaven and earth for my
+part, and at last have secured the aids, and now hear him dismiss them!"
+
+"Bring them round here," said the patient suddenly.
+
+The surgeon quietly lifted from the floor a pair of crutches, and placed
+them in his patient's hands.
+
+"How many years must I rely on my aids?" he asked quietly.
+
+"Perhaps three months. By that time you will be as good as ever."
+
+A change passed over the young man's face at this. Whatever the emotion
+so expressed, it had otherwise no demonstration. He turned now abruptly
+toward his sister, and said: "They can wait. I've got another kind of
+aid now. Come, Lizzie, say something."
+
+A sudden radiance flashed across his face when he ceased to speak, and
+waited for that voice.
+
+"I shall be round again in an hour," said the surgeon.
+
+He could well be spared. The brother and sister had now neither eye nor
+thought except for each other.
+
+The surgeon's face changed as he closed the door. Every one of their
+faces changed. As for the gentleman whose duty took him now from ward to
+ward, from one sick-bed to another, it was only by an effort that he
+gave his cheerful words and courageous looks to the men who had found
+day after day a tonic in his presence.
+
+The brother and sister clasped each other's hands. Few were the words
+they spoke. He was looking forward to the years before him, endeavoring
+to steady himself, in a moment of weakness, by the remembrance of past
+months of active service.
+
+She was thinking of the days when she walked with her hero out of
+delightsomeness and ease into danger and anxiety, all for the nation's
+succor, in the nation's time of need. Some had deemed it a needless
+sacrifice. Of old, when sacrifice was to be offered, it was not the
+worthless and the worst men dared or cared to bring. The spotless, the
+pure, the beautiful, these were no vain oblations. These two said in
+solemn conference, "We will make an offering of our all." And their all
+they offered. See how much had been accepted!
+
+Having offered, having sacrificed, it was not in either of these to
+repent the doing, or despise the honor that was put upon them. No going
+back for them! No looking back! No secret repining! The Colonel had done
+his work. As for the Colonel's sister, there was no place on earth where
+she would not find work to do.
+
+And here in this hospital, in her brother's room, she found a sphere.
+Going and coming through the various wards, singing hymns of heavenly
+love and purest patriotism, scattering comforts with ministering hands,
+which found brothers on all those beds of languishing, how many learned
+to look for her appearing, and to bless her when she came! But
+concerning her work there, and that of other women, some of whom will go
+crippled to the grave from their service,--soldiers and veterans of the
+army of the Union,--enough has everywhere been said.
+
+Among all these patients there was one, a sick man, to whom her coming
+and her going, her speech and her silence, became most notable events.
+Living within the influence of such manner and degree of social life as
+her presence in the hospital established, he was like a returned exile,
+who, yet under ban, felt all the awkwardness, constraint, and danger of
+his position. This man, who discovered in himself merely helplessness,
+was not accounted helpless, but the helper of many. He was, in short,
+the surgeon of the hospital.
+
+One day the Colonel said to him, "You don't like to have my sister here.
+Are the hired nurses making a row?"
+
+The surgeon's face betrayed so much interest in this subject, and so
+much embarrassment, it seemed probable he would come out with an
+absolute "Yes"; but his speech contradicted him, for he said with
+indifference, "Where did you get that pretty notion?"
+
+"Out of you, and nowhere else. What puzzles me, though, is, she seems to
+think she is doing some good here. And didn't you say you'd no objection
+to her visiting the wards?"
+
+"I should think it a positive loss if she were called or sent away from
+the hospital," said the surgeon, speaking now seriously enough. "She is
+of the greatest service, out of this room as well as in it."
+
+"Why do I feel then as if something had happened,--something
+disagreeable? We don't have such good times as we used to have when you
+sat here and told stories, and let me run on like a school-boy."
+
+"You have better company, that's all. I'm not such a fool that I can't
+see it. You have better times, lad,--if I don't."
+
+"Then all you did for me before she came was for pity's sake! Who's in
+the ditch now, getting all the favor you used to show to me?"
+
+The voice and manner with which these words were spoken produced an
+effect not readily yielded to, though the surgeon was perfectly aware
+that his emotion was unperceived and unguessed by the man on the bed
+there, who was investigating a difficulty which had puzzled him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So we have come to _this_ point. Away down at Frere's Landing, amid
+scenes of anguish, tribulation, and death, where elect souls did
+minister, there was found ministration by these elect souls in their own
+behalf.
+
+They had gained a "Landing-Place" that was sacred ground, and if
+Philosophy and Science would also stand there they must put their shoes
+from off their feet, for the ground was holy. Priests whose right it was
+to stand within the veil were servants there; and day by day, as they
+discerned each other's work, it was not required of them always to dwell
+upon the nature of sacrifice.
+
+Each, in such work as now was occupying the doctor and Miss Ames, had
+need of the other's strengthening sympathy, day by day, and of all the
+consolations of friendship, such as royal souls are permitted to bestow
+on one another.
+
+With the surgeon, not a young man in anything except happiness, it was
+as if there were broad openings, not _rents_, in the heavy leaden skies.
+Pure, bright lights shone along the horizon, warmth overspread the cold.
+
+With her, perpetual and sufficient are the compensations of love. To him
+who plants of this it is returned out of earth, and out of heaven, in
+good measure, pressed down, and running over. Nay, let us not argue.
+
+The sick man lying on his cot, the convalescent guided by her to balcony
+or garden, the crippled and the dying, had all to give her of their
+hearts' best bloom. And if it proved that there was one among these who,
+to her apprehension, walked in white, like an angel, of whom she asked
+no thanks, no praise, only aid and sympathy, what mortal should look
+surprise? The constant, the pure, the alive through all generations, the
+Alive Forever, will not. And the rest may apologize for overhearing a
+story not intended for their ears.
+
+It happened one evening that the surgeon and Miss Ames met outside the
+hospital doors, near the old sea-wall. They were walking in no haste,
+watching, it seemed, the flight of the brave little sea-birds, as they
+made their way now above and now among the breakers. After the
+heart-trying labors of the day, an hour like this was full of balm to
+those who were now entered on its rest. But it was not secure from
+invasion. Even now a voice was shouting to the surgeon, and he heard it,
+though he walked on as if he were determined not to hear. He had taken
+to himself this hour; he had earned it, he needed it; surely the world
+could go on for one hour without him!
+
+But the importunity of the call was not to be resisted. So, because the
+irresistible must be met, the surgeon stood still and looked around. A
+poor little fellow was making toward him with all speed.
+
+"Mail for you, sir," he said, as he came nearer, and he gave a package
+of newspapers, and one little letter, into the surgeon's hands.
+
+So Miss Ames and he sat down on the stone wall to scan those newspapers,
+and the surgeon opened his note.
+
+Obviously a scrawl from some poor fellow who had obtained a discharge on
+account of sickness, and gone home. It was not rare for the surgeon to
+receive such missives from the men who had been under his charge.
+Wonderful was the influence he gained over the majority of his patients.
+Wonderful? No. The man of meanest talents, who gives himself body and
+spirit to a noble work, can no more fail of his great reward, than the
+seasons of their glory. Never man on this Landing thought meanly of the
+hospital surgeon's skill, or questioned his right to rank among the
+ablest of his tribe,--no man, and certainly not the woman who was making
+a hero out of him, to her heart's great content.
+
+While Miss Ames looked at the papers, he proceeded, without much
+interest in the business, to open and read his note.
+
+One glance down the blurred and blotted page served to arrest his
+attention, in a way that letters could not always do. Here was not a cup
+of cold water to sip and put aside. He glanced at Miss Ames. She was
+absorbed in a report of "the situation," getting items of renown out of
+one column and another, which should ease many an aching body, smooth
+many a sick man's pillow, ere the night-lamps were lighted in the wards.
+
+If she had chanced to look up at him just then, while he, with scared,
+astonished eyes, was glancing at her, it is impossible to say what words
+might have escaped him, or what might have forever been prevented
+utterance. But she was not looking. What heavenly angel turned her eyes
+away?
+
+And now, before him whose prerogative was Victory, what vision did
+arise? An apocalyptic vision: blackness of darkness forever, and side by
+side with chaos, fair fields of living green, through which a young girl
+walked towards a womanhood as fair as hers who sat beside him.
+Unconscious of wrong that child, and yet how deeply, how variously
+wronged! If he had meditated a great robbery, he could not have quailed
+in the light of the discovered enormity as he did now before the vision
+of his Janet.
+
+Years upon years of struggle and of conquest could hardly give to the
+surgeon of Frere's a more notable victory, one which could fill his soul
+with a serener sense of triumph, than this hour gave, when he sat on the
+old stone wall that guarded shore from sea, with the child's letter in
+his hands, which had not miscarried, but had moved straight,
+straight--do not Divine providences always?--as an arrow to its mark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out of the secret place of strength he came, and he held that letter
+open towards Miss Ames.
+
+"Here's something to be thought of," said he, endeavoring to speak in a
+natural and easy tone of voice. "I don't know that I could ask for
+better counsel than yours. My little girl has written me a letter. I
+didn't know that she could write. See what work she has made of it. But
+what sort of parents can she have, do you think, twelve years old, and
+writing a thing like that?"
+
+Miss Ames laid aside, or rather, to speak correctly, she _dropped_ the
+newspapers. There was nothing in all their printed columns to compare
+with this item of intelligence,--that the surgeon had a living wife and
+a living daughter. She took the letter he was holding towards her, and
+said, "Indeed, Doctor," quite as naturally as he had spoken. But she did
+not look at him. She read the letter,--every misspelled word of
+it,--then she said: "Perhaps it doesn't say much for the parents. But
+something--I should think a great deal--for the child. Strange you
+didn't tell me about her before. But I like to have her introduce
+herself."
+
+"You do!"
+
+"Promotion, eh!" she was looking the scrawl over again.
+
+The word, as she pronounced it, was not an interrogation. Miss Ames
+seemed to be musing, yet with no activity of curiosity, on the one idea
+which had evidently possessed the child's mind in writing.
+
+There was silence for a moment after this ejaculation; then the surgeon
+spoke.
+
+"I enlisted as a private," said he, speaking with a difficulty that
+might not have been manifest to any ordinary hearer. "My daughter did
+not know that I had a profession; but my diploma satisfied the
+Department when my promotion was spoken of. When I became a live man in
+the service, I wished to serve where I could bring the most to pass, and
+it was not in camp, or on the field,--except as a healer." He looked at
+his watch as he uttered these last words, and arose as if his hour of
+rest had expired; but then, instead of taking one step forward, he
+turned and looked at Miss Ames, and she seemed to hear him saying, "Is
+this a time for flight?"
+
+He answered that question, for he had asked it of himself, by sitting
+down again.
+
+"I _ought_ to take a few minutes to myself," he said, with grave
+deliberation, "I shall have no time like this to speak of my child,--for
+her, I mean"; and if, while he spoke thus, he lacked perfect composure,
+the hour was his, and he knew it. "More than a dozen years ago," he
+continued, "I went to Dalton. I was sick and dying, as I thought.
+Janet's mother nursed me through a fever, and was the means of saving my
+life. I married her. I was grateful for the care she had taken of me;
+and while regaining my strength, during that September and October, I
+fell into the mistake of thinking that it was she who made the world
+seem beautiful to me again, and life worth keeping. But you have seen
+enough since you have been in this hospital to understand that this war
+has been salvation to a good many men, as it will prove to the nation. I
+enlisted as much as anything to get away from--where I was. The Devil
+himself couldn't hold me there any longer. He had managed things long
+enough. The child is capable of love, you see. Can you help us? I don't
+know, but I think you were sent from above to do it, somehow. I see--I
+must live for Janet. When I think that she might live in the same world
+where you do, that I have no right to surround her with any other
+conditions--does God take me for a robber? No! for he managed to get
+this letter to me when--" He stopped speaking,--it seemed as if he were
+about to look at his watch again; but instead of that, he said "Good
+evening" to Miss Ames, and bowed, and walked back towards the hospital.
+
+His assistant gathered up the newspapers, and then sat down again and
+looked out towards the sea. The tide was coming in. She sat awhile and
+watched the great waves lift aloft the graceful branches of green and
+purple sea-weed, and saw the stormy petrels going to and fro, and
+listened to the ocean's roar. She was sounding deeper depths than those
+awful caverns which were hidden by the green and shining water from her
+eyes.
+
+If Janet Saunders, child of Nancy Elkins, at that moment felt a thrill
+of joy, and broke forth into singing, would you deem the fact
+inconsequent, not to be classed among the wonders of telegraphic
+achievement?
+
+I think her little cold, pinched, meagre life--nay, _lot_--was
+brightened consciously on that great day of being,--that the sun felt
+warmer, and the skies looked fairer than they ever had before. The
+destiny which had seemed to be in the hands or charge of no one on earth
+was in the hands of two as capable as any in this world for services of
+love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now what was to be done by Dr. Saunders? Every man and woman sees
+the "situation." For the present, of course, he was sufficiently
+occupied; he was in the service of his country. But when these urgent
+demands on his time, patience, and humanity, which were now incessant,
+should no longer be made, because the country had need of him no
+longer,--what then? Men mustered out of service generally went home;
+family and neighborhood claimed them. What family, what neighborhood,
+claimed him? His very soul abhorred the thought of Dalton, where he had
+died to life; where he had buried his manhood. The very thought that the
+neighbors would not be able to recognize him was a thought which made
+him say to himself they never _should_ recognize him. He would _not_ be
+identified as the poor creature who went out of Dalton with one hope,
+and only one,--that the first day's engagement might see him lying among
+the unnamed and unknown dead. But if the neighbors and his wife exposed
+to him relations which he swore he would not degrade himself so far as
+to resume, what was to become of his daughter? That was more easily
+managed. He could send her away from home to school, if he could find a
+lady in the land who would compassionate that neglected little girl, and
+teach her, and train her, and be a mother to her.
+
+Miss Ames knew such a one. Let the little girl be sent to Charlestown to
+Miss Hall, Miss Ames's dear friend, and no better training than she
+would have in her school could be found for her throughout the land.
+Miss Ames gave this advice the day she went away from Frere's, for she
+had decided, for her brother, that he never would recover his strength
+until he was removed to a cooler climate. So they were going on a
+government transport, which would sail for Charlestown direct. This
+little business in regard to Janet Saunders could be managed by her
+immediately on arrival home. And so the surgeon wrote a letter, which he
+sent by his assistant, to Miss Hall, and another to the minister of
+Dalton, and another still to Janet and her mother. And all these
+concerned little Jenny; and all this grew out of the letter written in
+the blacksmith's shop, and the doctor's recovered integrity.
+
+But the question yet remained, What could be done for Nancy? If
+education in that direction were possible,--to what purpose? That she
+might become his equal when the strength of his hope that he had done
+with her was lying merely in this, that they were unequal? But
+hope,--what had he to do with hope, especially with such a hope as this?
+What had he to do with hope, who had come forth from Dalton as from a
+pit of despair? There were no foes like those of his own household; he
+was hoping that for all time he had rid himself of them. That would have
+been desertion, in point of fact. Well; but all that a man hath will he
+give for his life. He was safely distant from that place of disaster and
+death; but he must recognize his home duties, at least by the
+maintenance of his family. Yes, that he would do. He began to consider
+how much was due to him for services rendered to the government,--for
+the first time to consider.
+
+So, long before winter came, Nancy Saunders found herself on intimate
+terms with the minister and his wife,--for the minister had received his
+letters from the surgeon, and promptly accepted his commission, securing
+comfortable winter quarters for Nancy, and escorting Janet to
+Charlestown, after his wife had aided the doctor's wife in preparing the
+child for boarding-school. All these changes and transactions excited
+talk in Dalton. Every kind of rumor went abroad that you can imagine;
+and it was currently believed at last that the doctor had made a fortune
+by some army contract. So well persuaded of this fact was his wife,
+that, as time wore on, she began to think, and to say, that, if such was
+the case, she didn't know why she should be kept on short allowance, and
+to inquire among the neighbors the easiest and the shortest route from
+Dalton to Frere's Landing. Nobody seemed able to answer the question so
+well as Ezra Cramer; and he assured her that she would lose her head
+before she got half through the army lines which stretched between her
+and the hospital. But then Ezra was a born know-nothing, said
+Nancy,--that everybody knew.
+
+Walking up and down the sea-wall, night after night, during the hour of
+rest he appropriated to himself,--knowing that these things were
+accomplished, for in due time letters came informing him of the
+fulfilment of his wishes,--the surgeon had ample leisure for considering
+and reconsidering this case. It was one that would not stay disposed of.
+What adjournments were made! what exceptions were taken! and what
+appeals to higher courts were constantly being made!
+
+As often as a scrawl came from Colonel Ames reporting progress, and the
+plans he and his sister were making, the deeds they were doing, the
+grand-jury was sworn and the surgeon arraigned before it; the chief
+justice came into court, and all the witnesses, and the accusation was
+read. Then the counsel for the defendant and the counsel for the
+plaintiff appeared. But, with every new trial of the case, new charges
+and new specifications were brought forward and made, and it was equal
+to being in chancery. If the war lasted through a generation, it was
+likely that the surgeon's suit would last as long.
+
+This was as notable a divorce case as ever was made public.
+
+On the plaintiff's behalf the argument ran thus: Here was a man, a
+gentleman by birth, education, and profession, legally united to a woman
+low-born, low-bred, and so ignorant that she could neither read nor
+write. He had come to the neighborhood where she lived, to the door of
+the very house she occupied, sick in body and in mind. Disappointments
+and ill-health had reduced him to the shadow of himself in person, and
+his mind, of course, shared his body's disaffection.
+
+A sick person, as all experience in practice has proved over and over
+again, is hardly to be called a responsible being. Invalids love and
+hate without reason,--which is contrary, he said, as he stood in the
+presence of the court,--contrary to what is done among persons in sound
+health.
+
+Under the shelter of her uncle's roof he had lain for weeks, sick of a
+fever. He was saved alive, but so as by fire. This girl waited on him
+through that time as a servant. He was thrown chiefly on her hands,--no
+other person could be spared to wait on the poor stranger. She comforted
+him. Her ways were not refined and gentle as if she had been taught
+refinement and tenderness by precept or example. She had strong
+good-sense. So far as she understood his orders, she obeyed them. When
+he could not give any, she made use of her own judgment, and sought
+first of all his comfort. She was kind. In her rough honesty and
+unwearied attention he found cause for gratitude.
+
+Rising for the first time from his bed of sickness, he would have fallen
+if she had not lifted him and laid him back upon his bed. When he became
+strong enough to stand, but not without support, she gave him that
+support. She assisted him from the little room, and the little house
+when the walls became intolerable to him, and it happened to be in the
+early morning of a day so magnificent that it seemed another could never
+be made like it. He could not forget how the world looked that morning;
+how the waters shone; how the islands stood about; how the surrounding
+hills were arrayed in purple glory; how the birds sang. This land to
+which he was a stranger, which he had seen before only on that night
+when he came in the dark to her uncle's door, looked like Paradise to
+him; he gazed and gazed, and silent tears ran down his pale face through
+the furrows of his wasted cheeks. She saw them shining in his beard, and
+said something to soothe him in a comforting way, as any woman would
+have spoken who saw any creature in weakness and pain. The manner or the
+word, whatever it was, expressed a superiority of health, if of no other
+kind, and he was in no condition to investigate either its quality or
+its degree.
+
+When, with voice feeble and broken as a sick child's, he thanked her for
+all she had done, and she answered that it was nothing but a pleasure,
+and he need not thank her, he did not forthwith forget that she had
+watched day and night over him for nearly two months; that many a time
+weariness so overpowered her that she sat and slept in the broad
+daylight, and looked paler than when he lay like a dead weight on her
+hands.
+
+He remembered in court, and could not deny it, that when, believing that
+this was destiny as it was also pleasure, he asked the girl to marry
+him, she answered, "No,"--as if she did not trust what he said, that she
+was necessary to his happiness. She told him that he did not belong in
+Dalton, and that he would not be happy there with her and her people. He
+answered that all he desired to know was whether she loved him. By and
+by he was able to gather from the answers she gave, as well as failed to
+give, all he desired to know, and they were married.
+
+And, since he was beginning life anew, it was shown in court, nothing of
+the old life should enter into this of Dalton. He buried his profession
+in the past, and undertook other labors,--labors like those of Uncle
+Elkins; he would abide on that level where he found himself on his
+recovery, and make no effort to lift his wife to that he had renounced.
+She was a child of Nature. He would learn life anew of her; but he
+failed of success in all his undertakings. Shall a man attempt to
+extenuate his failures? It seemed new to him; he acknowledged it in open
+court, that from the day of his entrance into Dalton to the day he left
+it, he was under some enchantment there. And if an insane man is not to
+be held responsible in law for his offences, he had the amplest title to
+a quitclaim deed from that which had grown out of the Dalton experience.
+
+So the lower courts disposed of the case. He was free. But after a time
+the suit was carried up before superior powers, and thus the advocate
+for the defendant showed cause on the new trial.
+
+She was living among the people of whom she had been born. In person she
+was attractive as any girl to be found on all the lake or hillside; a
+rosy-cheeked, fair-faced, fair-haired blue-eyed girl, with a frank voice
+and easy address. She had a "Hail fellow! well met!" for every man,
+woman, and child of the vicinity. She had lovers, all the way up from
+her childhood, rustic admirers, and one who looked at her from a not far
+distance, who dressed himself in his best and went to her uncle's house
+on Sundays and other holidays, and who was courting Nancy after his
+fashion, with all plans for their future marked out fully in his
+mind,--and these would have fulfilment if his suit were only successful;
+and in regard to that he had no fears or doubts.
+
+Until this stranger came to Uncle Elkins's house! During his long
+sickness the young lover was helpful in many ways to Nancy. But he
+began to be suspicious by and by of the results of this much waiting. At
+last, before he was himself ready to do it, he asked Nancy to be his
+wife; but he was too late. She had "given her word" to the poor fellow
+whom she had lured back from Death's door.
+
+The court was admonished to take cognizance of this fact, that, if Nancy
+had married the man in whom her heart had been interested up to the time
+when the stranger came, she would have married in her own sphere, a man
+of her own rank, and would have loved him as he did her, with an equal
+love; they would have lived out their lives, animating them with
+skirmishes and small warfare, and winning victories over each other,
+which would have proved disastrous as defeats to neither.
+
+It would have been no high crime to such a man that Nancy was ignorant
+up and down through the range of knowledge; he would not have turned
+away in disgust from his endeavors to teach her, if she took it into her
+head to learn, though she dropped and regained the ambition through
+every winter of her life. He would have plodded on in his accustomed
+ways, would have protected his wife and child from starvation and cold,
+without imagining that a husband and father could retire from his
+position as such, or abrogate his duties. No vague expectations in
+regard to herself, no bitter disappointment in regard to him, would have
+attended her. The very changes in her character, which had made her not
+to be endured,--how far was he whose name she bore responsible for them?
+She had been accustomed to thrift and labor, she saw in him idleness and
+waste of power and life. She had exhausted the resources readiest to her
+hand in vain, and had only then given up her expectation.
+
+It was not be denied that it was humiliation and wrath to live with her;
+but her husband had sought her,--she had not sought him! If he could
+plead for himself the force and constraint of circumstances, should not
+the same defence be set up for her? And what might not patience, and
+better management, and gentler and more noble demeanor towards her, have
+done for her? Was _he_ the same man he was when he went away from
+Dalton? Was he the same man in Dalton that he had been in his youth? Was
+it not out of the pit that he himself had been digged? It became evident
+that the arguments for the defendant were producing a result in court.
+The judge on his throne, as well as the grand-jury, listened to the
+argument in favor of the woman. And at last the case was decided; for
+the judge charged the jury, that, if it could be shown that there was
+mere incompatibility, it was the business of the superior mind to make
+straight a highway for the Lord across those lives. Let every valley be
+exalted, every hill be brought low.
+
+Dr. Saunders _acquiesced_ in this verdict, and wrote a letter to his
+wife. He knew she could not read it, but he knew also that she could
+procure it to be read to her. He filled it with accounts of his
+situation, occupation, expectation; and he sent her money. He said that,
+if he could get a furlough, he might run up North for a few days, as
+other men went home who could get leave of absence, to see that those
+whom he had left behind him were doing well; and they would both perhaps
+be able to go and see their daughter Jenny, or else they might have her
+home for a holiday. He wrote a letter saying these things and others,
+and any wife might have been proud to receive such from her husband, "in
+the war."
+
+And when he had sent it, he looked for no answer. This was a kind of
+giving which must look for no return. And yet an answer was sent him. He
+did not receive it, however, it was sent at so late a date; he was then
+on his way to Dalton.
+
+When the whistle of the miniature boat which plied the lake sent a
+warning along the hillside that a passenger was on board who wished to
+land, or that mail was to be sent ashore, a small boat was rowed from
+the Point by a lad who was lingering about, waiting to know if any such
+signal were to come, and one passenger stood at the head of the ladder,
+waiting for him to come alongside. This was Dr. Saunders, who, having
+been rowed ashore, walked three miles down the road, and up along the
+mountain, to the Dalton neighborhood.
+
+The first man whom he met as he walked on was the blacksmith, who had
+been instrumental in getting Jenny's letter written. He was sitting in
+front of his shop, alone. There was nothing about this man who was
+walking into Dalton to excite a suspicion in the mind of the shrewdest
+old inhabitant who should meet him that his personality was familiar to
+Dalton eyes. He might safely ask what questions he would, and pursue his
+way if he chose to do it. Nobody would recognize him.
+
+The doctor lingered as he went past the shop; but the blacksmith did not
+speak, and he walked on; and he passed others, his old neighbors, as he
+went. This was hardly pleasant, though it might be the thing he desired.
+
+He walked on until he came to the red farm-gate of Farmer Elkins,
+Nancy's uncle. There he stopped. Under the chestnut-trees, before the
+door, the farmer sat. The doctor walked in, and towards him like a man
+at home, and said, "Good evening, Uncle."
+
+The wrinkled old farmer looked up from his drowse. He had hardly heard
+the words spoken; but the voice that spoke had in it a tone that was
+familiar, were it not for the cheeriness of it; and--but no! one glance
+at the figure before him assured him of anything rather than Saunders!
+Yet the old man, either because of his vague expectation or because of
+the confusion of his half-awake condition, said something audibly, of
+which the name of Nancy, and her name alone, was intelligible.
+
+"Well, where _is_ Nancy," said the other, laying his hand on the
+farmer's shoulder in a manner calculated to dissipate his dream.
+
+The old man looked at the doctor with serious, suspicious eyes, scanned
+him from head to foot, and there was a dash of anger, of unbelief, of
+awe, and of deference in the spirit with which he said, "If you're
+Saunders, I'm glad you've come, but you might 'a' come sooner."
+
+"You're right, and you're wrong, Uncle. I'm Saunders, true enough. But I
+couldn't come before,--this is my first furlough."
+
+"Did you get the letter?"
+
+"No, what letter? Who wrote to me?"
+
+The judge and the jury looked down from the awful circle, in the midst
+of which stood Saunders, and surveyed the little hard-faced,
+yellow-haired farmer, with eyes which seemed intent on searching him
+through all his shadowy ambiguity. If only he would make such answer as
+any other man in all the land might expect,--thought the
+prisoner,--"Why, your wife, of course." The doctor was prepared to
+believe in a miracle. Since he went away his wife might have been
+spurred on by the ambition to rival her daughter, who was being
+educated. She perhaps had learned to write, and in her pride had written
+to her husband!
+
+The answer Elkins gave was the only one of which the doctor's mind had
+taken no thought.
+
+"Nancy died a month ago." There the old man paused. But as the doctor
+made no answer, merely stood looking at him, he went on. "She got your
+letter first, though, Nancy did. I think, if anything could a-hindered
+her dying, that would. She came out here to read your letter," (he did
+not say to hear it read, and Saunders noticed that,) "and my folks, she
+found, was busy, and nobody was round to talk it over with her, so
+nothing could stop her, but she put right in and worked till night, and
+on top o' that she would go back to the village, and it was raining, and
+so dark you could scurce see the road; but she'd made up her mind to go
+South and find you, and so we couldn't persuade her to stop over night.
+But the next day, when she come back to tell us when she was going to
+start for Dixie, she was took down right here, that suddin. There's been
+a good deal of that sickness round here sense, and fatalish, most
+always. But I tell 'em it took the smartest of the lot off first, when
+it took Nancy."
+
+The doctor stood there when the teller of this story had stopped
+speaking. He was not looking at _him_,--of that the old man was certain.
+He seemed to be looking nowhere, and to see nothing that was near or
+visible.
+
+"Come into the house and take something," said Uncle Elkins, for he
+began to be alarmed.
+
+"Was Janet here?" asked the doctor, as if he had not heard the
+invitation.
+
+"We had to send for her. Nancy was calling for her all the time," said
+Farmer Elkins, as if he doubted how far this story ought to be
+continued, for he did not understand the man before him. He only knew
+that once he had fallen down on his door-step, and lain helpless beneath
+his roof hard on to two months; and he watched him now as if he
+anticipated some renewal of that old attack,--and there was no Nancy now
+to nurse, and watch, and slave herself to death for him; for that was
+the way folk in the house were talking about Nancy and her husband in
+these days.
+
+"Did she get here in time? Who went after her?"
+
+"The minister went. We had 'em here a fortnight,--well on to 't."
+
+"What, the minister, too?"
+
+"No, I mean the young woman who come from Charlestown with Jenny. Her
+name was--" He paused long, endeavoring to recall that name. It trembled
+on the doctor's lips, but he did not utter it. At last said Farmer
+Elkins, "There! it was Miss Amey,--Amey? Yes. She took the little girl
+back hum with her. It was right in there, in the room where you had that
+spell of fever of yourn. She got you well through that! Ef anything
+could 'a' brought her through that turn, your letter would. It came
+across my mind once that, as she'd saved _your_ life, may be you was
+going to save hern by that are letter! And she was so determined to get
+to your hospital!"
+
+"Thank God she got the letter, any way!" exclaimed the doctor.
+
+At that the old man walked into the house to set its best cheer before
+Nancy's husband, who looked so much like a mourner as he stood there
+under the trees, with the bitter recollections of the past overwhelming
+every other thought and feeling of the present.
+
+Because it seemed to him that he could not sleep under old Elkins's roof
+that night, he remained there and slept there,--in the room where his
+fever ran its course,--in the room where Nancy died.
+
+Because this story of the last months of her life was as gall and
+wormwood to him, he refused it not, but went over it with his wife's
+relations, and helped them spread a decent pall, according to the custom
+of mourners; over what had been.
+
+Was he endeavoring to deceive himself and others into the belief that he
+was a mourning man? He was but accepting the varied humiliations of
+death; for they do not all pertain to the surrendering life. He was not
+thinking at all of his loss through her, nor of his gain by her. He was
+thinking, as he stood above the grave of fifteen years, how high
+Disgrace and Misery had heaped the mound. So bitterly he was thinking of
+the past, it was without desire that he at last arose and faced the
+future.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he went to Charlestown--for a man on furlough had no time to
+lose--and saw his Janet in the Colonel's house,--Miss Ames took Janet
+home with her after that death and funeral,--when he saw how fair and
+beautiful a promise of girlhood was budding on the poor neglected
+branch, he said to his assistant, "Will you keep this child with you
+until the war is over? I am afraid to touch her, or interfere with her
+destiny. It has been so easy for me to mar, so hard to mend."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Ames kept the child; the war ended. The surgeon then, like other
+men, returned home; his regiments were disbanded, and now, one duty, to
+mankind and the ages, well discharged, another, less conspicuous, but as
+urgent, claimed him. There was Janet, and Janet's mother,--she who had
+risen, not from the grave indeed, but from the midst of dangers,
+sacredly to guard and guide the child.
+
+On his way to them he asked himself this question, "How many times must
+a man be born before he is fit to live?"
+
+He did not answer that question; neither can I.
+
+He informed his assistant of the court's decision in reference to the
+plea of "incompatibility," and she said that the justice of the sentence
+was not to be controverted with success by any counsellor on earth; but
+the reader may smile, and say that it was not difficult to come to this
+decision under the circumstances.
+
+We will not argue that point. I had only the story to tell, and have
+told it.
+
+
+
+
+ON TRANSLATING THE DIVINA COMMEDIA.
+
+THIRD SONNET.
+
+
+    I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
+        With forms of Saints and holy men who died,
+        Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
+        And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
+    Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
+        With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
+        And Beatrice, again at Dante's side,
+        No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
+    And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
+        Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
+        And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
+    And the melodious bells among the spires
+        O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
+        Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN'S WORK IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
+
+              "King Arthur's sword, Excalibur,
+    Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake.
+    Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps
+    Upon the hidden bases of the hills."
+
+
+Sir Bedivere's heart misgave him twice ere he could obey the dying
+commands of King Arthur, and fling away so precious a relic. The lonely
+maiden's industry has been equalled by many of her mortal sisters,
+sitting, not indeed "upon the hidden bases of the hills," but in all the
+varied human habitations built above them since the days of King Arthur.
+
+The richness, beauty, and skill displayed in the needle-work of the
+Middle Ages demonstrate the perfection that art had attained; while
+church inventories, wills, and costumes represented in the miniatures of
+illuminated manuscripts and elsewhere, amaze us by the quantity as well
+as the quality of this department of woman's work. Though regal robes
+and heavy church vestments were sometimes wrought by monks, yet to
+woman's taste and skill the greater share of the result must be
+attributed, the professional hands being those of nuns and their pupils
+in convents. The life of woman in those days was extremely monotonous.
+For the mass of the people, there hardly existed any means of
+locomotion, the swampy state of the land in England and on the Continent
+allowing few roads to be made, except such as were traversed by
+pack-horses. Ladies of rank who wished to journey were borne on litters
+carried upon men's shoulders, and, until the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, few representations of carriages appear. Such a conveyance is
+depicted in an illustration of the Romance of the Rose, where Venus,
+attired in the fashionable costume of the fifteenth century, is seated
+in a _chare_, by courtesy a chariot, but in fact a clumsy covered wagon
+without springs. Six doves are perched upon the shafts, and fastened by
+mediæval harness. The goddess of course possessed superhuman powers for
+guiding this extraordinary equipage, but to mere mortals it must have
+been a slow coach, and a horribly uncomfortable conveyance even when
+horses were substituted for doves. An ordinance of Philip le Bel, in
+1294, forbids any wheel carriages to be used by the wives of citizens,
+as too great a luxury. As the date of the coach which Venus guides is
+two hundred years later, it is difficult to imagine what style of
+equipage belonged to those ladies over whom Philip le Bel tyrannized.
+
+With so little means of going about, our sisters of the Middle Ages were
+perforce domestic; no wonder they excelled in needle-work. To women of
+any culture it was almost the only tangible form of creative art they
+could command, and the love of the beautiful implanted in their souls
+must find some expression. The great pattern-book of nature, filled with
+graceful forms, in ever-varied arrangement, and illuminated by delicate
+tints or gorgeous hues, suggested the beauty they endeavored to
+represent. Whether religious devotion, human affection, or a taste for
+dress prompted them, the needle was the instrument to effect their
+purpose. The monogram of the blessed Mary's name, intertwined with pure
+white lilies on the deep blue ground, was designed and embroidered with
+holy reverence, and laid on the altar of the Lady-chapel by the
+trembling hand of one whose sorrows had there found solace, or by
+another in token of gratitude for joys which were heightened by a
+conviction of celestial sympathy. The pennon of the knight--a silken
+streamer affixed to the top of the lance--bore his crest, or an
+emblematic allusion to some event in his career, embroidered, it was
+supposed, by the hand of his lady-love. A yet more sacred gift was the
+scarf worn across the shoulder, an indispensable appendage to a knight
+fully equipped. The emotions of the human soul send an electric current
+through the ages, and women who during four years of war toiled to aid
+our soldiers in the great struggle of the nineteenth century felt their
+hearts beat in unison with hers who gave, with tears and prayers, pennon
+and scarf to the knightly and beloved hero seven hundred years ago.
+
+Not only were the appointments of the warriors adorned by needle-work,
+but the ladies must have found ample scope for industry and taste in
+their own toilets. The Anglo-Saxon women as far back as the eighth
+century excelled in needle-work, although, judging from the
+representations which have come down to us, their dress was much less
+ornamented than that of the gentlemen. During the eighth, ninth, and
+tenth centuries there were few changes in fashion. A purple gown or
+robe, with long yellow sleeves, and coverchief wrapt round the head and
+neck, frequently appears, the edges of the long gown and sleeves being
+slightly ornamented by the needle. How the ladies dressed their hair in
+those days is more difficult to decide, as the coverchief conceals it.
+Crisping-needles to curl and plat the hair, and golden hair-cauls, are
+mentioned in Saxon writings, and give us reason to suppose that the
+locks of the fair damsels were not neglected. In the eleventh century
+the embroidery upon the long gowns becomes more elaborate, and other
+changes of the mode appear.
+
+From the report of an ancient Spanish ballad, the art of needle-work and
+taste in dress must have attained great perfection in that country while
+our Anglo-Saxon sisters were wearing their plain long gowns. The fair
+Sybilla is described as changing her dress seven times in one evening,
+on the arrival of that successful and victorious knight, Prince Baldwin.
+First, she dazzles him in blue and silver, with a rich turban; then
+appears in purple satin, fringed and looped with gold, with white
+feathers in her hair; next, in green silk and emeralds; anon, in pale
+straw-color, with a tuft of flowers; next, in pink and silver, with
+varied plumes, white, carnation, and blue; then, in brown, with a
+splendid crescent. As the fortunate Prince beholds each transformation,
+he is bewildered (as well he may be) to choose which array becomes her
+best; but when
+
+    "Lastly in white she comes, and loosely
+      Down in ringlets floats her hair,
+    'O,' exclaimed the Prince, 'what beauty!
+      Ne'er was princess half so fair.'"
+
+Simplicity and natural grace carried the day after all, as they
+generally do with men of true taste. "Woman is fine for her own
+satisfaction alone," says that nice observer of human nature, Jane
+Austen. "Man only knows man's insensibility to a new gown." We hope,
+however, that the dressmakers and tirewomen of the fair Sybilla, who had
+expended so much time and invention, were handsomely rewarded by the
+Prince, since they must have been most accomplished needle-women and
+handmaids to have got up their young lady in so many costumes and in
+such rapid succession.
+
+A very odd fashion appears in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
+of embroidering heraldic devices on the long gowns of the ladies of
+rank. In one of the illuminations of a famous psalter, executed for Sir
+Geoffery Loutterell, who died in 1345, that nobleman is represented
+armed at all points, receiving from the ladies of his family his tilting
+helmet, shield, and _pavon_. His coat of arms is repeated on every part
+of his own dress, and is embroidered on that of his wife, who wears also
+the crest of her own family.
+
+Marie de Hainault, wife of the first Duke of Bourbon, 1354, appears in a
+corsage and train of ermine, with a very fierce-looking lion rampant
+embroidered twice on her long gown. Her jewels are magnificent. Anne,
+Dauphine d'Auvergne, wife of Louis, second Duke of Bourbon, married in
+1371, displays an heraldic dolphin of very sinister aspect upon one side
+of her corsage, and on the skirt of her long gown,--which, divided in
+the centre, seems to be composed of two different stuffs, that opposite
+to the dolphin being powdered with _fleurs de lis_. Her circlet of
+jewels is very elegant, and is worn just above her brow, while the hair
+is braided close to the face. An attendant lady wears neither train nor
+jewels, but her dress is likewise formed of different material, divided
+like that of the Dauphine. Six little parrots are emblazoned on the
+right side, one on her sleeve, two on her corsage, and three on her
+skirt. The fashion of embroidering armorial bearings on ladies' dresses
+must have given needle-women a vast deal of work. It died out in the
+fifteenth century.
+
+It was the custom in feudal times for knightly families to send their
+daughters to the castles of their suzerain lords, to be trained to weave
+and embroider. The young ladies on their return home instructed the more
+intelligent of their female servants in these arts. Ladies of rank in
+all countries prided themselves upon the number of these attendants, and
+were in the habit of passing the morning surrounded by their workwomen,
+singing the _chansons à toile_, as ballads composed for these hours were
+called.
+
+Estienne Jodelle, a French poet, 1573, addressed a fair lady whose
+cunning fingers plied the needle in words thus translated:--
+
+    "I saw thee weave a web with care,
+    Where at thy touch fresh roses grew,
+    And marvelled they were formed so fair,
+    And that thy heart such nature knew.
+    Alas! how idle my surprise,
+    Since naught so plain can be:
+    Thy cheek their richest hue supplies,
+    And in thy breath their perfume lies;
+    Their grace and beauty all are drawn from thee."
+
+If needle-work had its poetry, it had also its reckonings. Old
+account-books bear many entries of heavy payments for working materials
+used by industrious queens and indefatigable ladies of rank. Good
+authorities state that, before the sixth century, all silk materials
+were brought to Europe by the Seres, ancestors of the ancient
+Bokharians, whence it derived its name of Serica. In 551, silk-worms
+were introduced by two monks into Constantinople, but the Greeks
+monopolized the manufacture until 1130, when Roger, king of Sicily,
+returning from a crusade, collected some Greek manufacturers, and
+established them at Palermo, whence the trade was disseminated over
+Italy.
+
+In the thirteenth century, Bruges was the great mart for silk. The
+stuffs then known were velvet, satin (called samite), and taffeta,--all
+of which were stitched with gold or silver thread. The expense of
+working materials was therefore very great, and royal ladies
+condescended to superintend sewing-schools.
+
+Editha, consort of Edward the Confessor, was a highly accomplished lady,
+who sometimes intercepted the master of Westminster School and his
+scholars in their walks, questioning them in Latin. She was also skilled
+in all feminine works, embroidering the robes of her royal husband with
+her own hands.
+
+Of all the fair ones, however, who have wrought for the service of a
+king, since the manufacture of Excalibur, let the name of Matilda of
+Flanders, wife of William the Conqueror, stand at the head of the
+record, in spite of historians' doubts. Matilda, born about the year
+1031, was carefully educated. She had beauty, learning, industry; and
+the Bayeux tapestry connected with her name still exists, a monument of
+her achievements in the art of needle-work. It is, as everybody knows, a
+pictured chronicle of the conquest of England,--a wife's tribute to the
+glory of her husband.
+
+As a specimen of ancient stitchery and feminine industry, this work is
+extremely curious. The tapestry is two hundred and twenty-two feet in
+length and twenty in width. It is worked in different-colored worsteds
+on white cloth, now brown with age. The attempts to represent the human
+figure are very rude, and it is merely given in outline. Matilda
+evidently had very few colors at her disposal, as the horses are
+depicted of any hue,--blue, green, or yellow; the arabesque patterns
+introduced are rich and varied.
+
+During the French Revolution, this tapestry was demanded by the
+insurgents to cover their guns; but a priest succeeded in concealing it
+until the storm had passed. Bonaparte knew its value. He caused it to be
+brought to Paris and displayed, after which he restored the precious
+relic to Bayeux.
+
+We have many records of royal ladies who practised and patronized
+needle-work. Anne of Brittany, first wife of Louis XII. of France,
+caused three hundred girls, daughters of the nobility, to be instructed
+in that art under her personal supervision. Her daughter Claude pursued
+the same laudable plan. Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, and mother of
+Henry IV. of France, a woman of vigorous mind, was skilled also in the
+handicraft of the needle, and wrought a set of hangings called "The
+Prison Opened," meaning that she had broken the bonds of the Pope.
+
+The practice of teaching needle-work continued long at the French court,
+and it was there that Mary of Scotland learned the art in which she so
+much excelled. When cast into prison, she beguiled the time, and soothed
+the repentant anxieties of her mind, with the companionship of her
+needle. The specimens of her work yet existing are principally
+bed-trimmings, hangings, and coverlets, composed of dark satin, upon
+which flowers, separately embroidered, are transferred.
+
+The romances and lays of chivalry contain many descriptions of the
+ornamental needle-work of those early days. In one of the ancient
+ballads, a knight, after describing a fair damsel whom he had rescued
+and carried to his castle, adds that she "knewe how to sewe and marke
+all manner of silken worke," and no doubt he made her repair many of his
+mantles and scarfs frayed and torn by time and tourney.
+
+The beautiful Elaine covered the shield of Sir Launcelot with a case of
+silk, upon which devices were braided by her fair hands, and added, from
+her own design,
+
+    "A border fantasy of branch and flower,
+    And yellow-throated nestling in the nest."
+
+When he went to the tourney she gave him a red sleeve "broidered with
+great pearls," which he bound upon his helmet. It is recorded that, in a
+tournament at the court of Burgundy in 1445, one of the knights received
+from his lady a sleeve of delicate dove-color, which he fastened on his
+left arm. These sleeves were made of a different material from the
+dress, and generally of a richer fabric elaborately ornamented; so they
+were considered valuable enough to form a separate legacy in wills of
+those centuries. Maddalena Doni, in her portrait, painted by Raphael,
+which hangs in the Pitti Palace at Florence, wears a pair of these rich,
+heavy sleeves, fastened slightly at the shoulder, and worn over a
+shorter sleeve belonging to her dress. Thus we see how it was that a
+lady could disengage her sleeve at the right moment, and give it to the
+fortunate knight.
+
+The art of adorning linen was practised from the earliest times. Threads
+were drawn and fashioned with the needle, or the ends of the cloth
+unravelled and plaited into geometrical patterns. St. Cuthbert's curious
+grave-clothes, as described by an eyewitness to his disinterment in the
+twelfth century, were ornamented with cut-work, which was used
+principally for ecclesiastical purposes, and was looked upon in England
+till the dissolution of the monasteries as a church secret. The
+open-work embroidery, which went under the general name of cut-work, is
+the origin of lace.
+
+The history of lace by Mrs. Bury Palliser, recently published in London,
+is worthy of the exquisite fabric of which it treats. The author has
+woven valuable facts, historical associations, and curious anecdotes
+into the web of her narrative, with an industry and skill rivalling the
+work of her mediæval sisters. The illustrations of this beautiful volume
+are taken from rare specimens of ancient and modern lace, so perfectly
+executed as quite to deceive the eye, and almost the touch.
+
+Italy and Flanders dispute the invention of point or needle-made lace.
+The Italians probably derived the art of needle-work from the Greeks who
+took refuge in Italy during the troubles of the Lower Empire. Its origin
+was undoubtedly Byzantine, as the places which were in constant
+intercourse with the Greek Empire were the cities where point-lace was
+earliest made. The traditions of the Low Countries also ascribe it to an
+Eastern origin, assigning the introduction of lace-making to the
+Crusaders on their return from the Holy Land. A modern writer, Francis
+North, asserts that the Italians learned embroidery from the Saracens,
+as Spaniards learned the same art from the Moors, and, in proof of his
+theory, states that the word _embroider_ is derived from the Arabic, and
+does not belong to any European language. In the opinion of some
+authorities, the English word _lace_ comes from the Latin word _licina_,
+signifying the hem or fringe of a garment; others suppose it derived
+from the word _laces_, which appears in Anglo-Norman statutes, meaning
+braids which were used to unite different parts of the dress. In England
+the earliest lace was called _passament_, from the fact that the threads
+were passed over each other in its formation; and it is not until the
+reign of Richard III. that the word _lace_ appears in royal accounts.
+The French term _dentelle_ is also of modern date, and was not used
+until fashion caused _passament_ to be made with a toothed edge, when
+the designation _passament dentelé_ appears.
+
+But whatever the origin of the name, lace-making and embroidery have
+employed many fingers, and worn out many eyes, and even created
+revolutions. In England, until the time of Henry VIII., shirts,
+handkerchiefs, sheets, and pillow-cases were embroidered in silks of
+different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy
+produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine
+poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a
+collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits
+of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings;
+but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by nuns for the
+service of the Church, and the term _nuns' work_ has been the
+designation of lace in many places to a very modern date. Venice was
+famed for point, Genoa for pillow laces. English Parliamentary records
+have statutes on the subject of Venice laces; at the coronation of
+Richard III., fringes of Venice and mantle laces of gold and white silk
+appear.
+
+    "To know the age and pedigrees
+    Of points of Flanders and Venise,"
+
+depends much upon the ancient pattern-books yet in existence. Parchment
+patterns, drawn and pricked for pillow lace, bearing the date of 1577,
+were lately found covering old law-books, in Albisola, a town near
+Savona, which was a place celebrated for its laces, as we infer from the
+fact that it was long the custom of the daughters of the nobles to
+select these laces for their wedding shawls and veils. There is a pretty
+tradition at Venice, handed down among the inhabitants of the Lagoons,
+which says that a sailor brought home to his betrothed a branch of the
+delicate coralline known as "mermaids' lace." The girl, a worker in
+points, attracted by the grace of the coral, imitated it with her
+needle, and after much toil produced the exquisite fabric which, as
+Venice point, soon became the mode in all Europe. Lace-making in Italy
+formed the occupation of many women of the higher classes, who wished to
+add to their incomes. Each lady had a number of workers, to whom she
+supplied patterns, pricked by herself, paying her workwomen at the end
+of every week, each day being notched on a tally.
+
+In the convent of Gesù Bambino, at Rome, curious specimens of old
+Spanish conventual work--parchment patterns with lace in progress--have
+been found. They belonged to Spanish nuns, who long ago taught the art
+of lace-making to novices. Like all point lace, this appears to be
+executed in separate pieces, given out by the nuns, and then joined
+together by a skilful hand. We see the pattern traced, the work partly
+finished, and the very thread left, as when "Sister Felice Vittoria"
+laid down her work, centuries ago. Mrs. Palliser received from Rome
+photographs of these valuable relics, engravings from which she has
+inserted in her history of lace. Aloe-thread was then used for
+lace-making, as it is now in Florence for sewing straw-plait. Spanish
+point has been as celebrated as that of Flanders or Italy. Some
+traditions aver that Spain taught the art to Flanders. Spain had no
+cause to import laces: they were extensively made at home, and were less
+known than the manufacture of other countries, because very little was
+exported. The numberless images of the Madonna and patron saints dressed
+and undressed daily, together with the albs of the priests and
+decorations of the altars, caused an immense consumption for
+ecclesiastical uses. Thread lace was manufactured in Spain in 1492, and
+in the Cathedral of Granada is a lace alb presented to the church by
+Ferdinand and Isabella,--one of the few relics of ecclesiastical
+grandeur preserved in the country. Cardinal Wiseman, in a letter to Mrs.
+Palliser, states that he had himself officiated in this vestment, which
+was valued at ten thousand crowns. The fine church lace of Spain was
+little known in Europe until the revolution of 1830, when splendid
+specimens were suddenly thrown into the market,--not merely the heavy
+lace known as Spanish point, but pieces of the most exquisite
+description, which could only have been made, says Mrs. Palliser, by
+those whose time was not money.
+
+Among the Saxon Hartz Mountains is the old town of Annaburg, and beneath
+a lime-tree in its ancient burial-ground stands a simple monument with
+this inscription:--
+
+"Here lies Barbara Uttman, died on the 14th of January, 1576, whose
+invention of lace in the year 1561 made her the benefactress of the
+Hartz Mountains.
+
+    'An active mind, a skilful hand,
+    Bring blessings down on Fatherland.'"
+
+Barbara was born in 1514. Her parents, burghers of Nuremberg, removed to
+the Hartz Mountains for the purpose of working a mine in that
+neighborhood. It is said that Barbara learned the art of lace-making
+from a native of Brabant, a Protestant, whom the cruelties of the Duke
+of Alva had driven from her country. Barbara, observing the mountain
+girls making nets for the miners to wear over their hair, took great
+interest in the improvement of their work, and succeeded in teaching
+them a fine knitted _tricot_, and afterwards a lace ground. In 1561,
+having procured aid from Flanders, she set up a work-shop in Annaburg
+for lace-making. This branch of industry spread beyond Bavaria, giving
+employment to thirty thousand persons, and producing a revenue of one
+million thalers.
+
+Italy and Flanders dispute the invention of lace, but it was probably
+introduced into both countries about the same time. The Emperor Charles
+V. commanded lace-making to be taught in schools and convents. A
+specimen of the manufacture of his day may be seen in his cap, now
+preserved in the museum at Hôtel Cluny, Paris. It is of fine linen, with
+the Emperor's arms embroidered in relief, with designs in lace, of
+exquisite workmanship. The old Flemish laces are of great beauty and
+world-wide fame.
+
+Many passages in the history of lace show how severely the manufacture
+of this beautiful fabric has strained the nerves of eye and brain. The
+fishermen's wives on the Scottish coast apostrophize the fish they sell,
+after their husbands' perilous voyages, and sing,
+
+    "Call them lives o' men."
+
+Not more fatal to life are the blasts from ocean winds than the tasks
+of laborious lace-makers; and this thought cannot but mingle with our
+admiration for the skill displayed in this branch of woman's endless
+toil and endeavor to supply her own wants and aid those who are dear to
+her, in the present as well as in the past centuries.
+
+In the British Museum there is a curious manuscript of the fourteenth
+century, afterwards translated "into our maternall englisshe by me
+William Caxton, and emprynted at Westminstre the last day of Januer, the
+first yere of the regne of King Richard the thyrd," called "the booke
+which the Knight of the Towere made for the enseygnement and teching of
+his doughtres."
+
+The Knight of the Tower was Geoffory Landry, surnamed De la Tour, of a
+noble family of Anjou. In the month of April, 1371, he was one day
+reflecting beneath the shade of some trees on various passages in his
+life, and upon the memory of his wife, whose early death had caused him
+sorrow, when his three daughters walked into the garden. The sight of
+these motherless girls naturally turned his thoughts to the condition of
+woman in society, and he resolved to write a treatise, enforced by
+examples of both good and evil, for their instruction. The state of
+society which the "evil" examples portray might well cause a father's
+heart to tremble.
+
+The education of young ladies, as we have before stated, was in that age
+usually assigned to convents or to families of higher rank. It consisted
+of instruction in needle-work, confectionery, surgery, and the rudiments
+of church music. Men were strongly opposed to any high degree of mental
+culture for women; and although the Knight of the Tower thinks it good
+for women to be taught to read their Bibles, yet the pen is too
+dangerous an instrument to trust to their hands. The art of writing he
+disapproves,--"Better women can naught of it." Religious observances he
+strictly recommends; but we shudder at some of the stories which even
+this well-meaning father relates as illustrations of the efficacy of
+religious austerities. Extravagance in dress prevailed at that time
+among men and women to such a degree that Parliament was appealed to on
+the subject in 1363. From the Knight's exhortations on the subject, this
+mania seems to have affected the women alarmingly, and the examples
+given of the passion for dress appear to surpass what is acknowledged in
+our day. Yet the vast increase of materials, as well as the extended
+interests and objects opened to woman now, renders the extravagance of
+dress in the Middle Ages far less reprehensible.
+
+The record of woman's work in the Middle Ages includes far more than the
+account of what her needle accomplished. The position of the mistress of
+a family in those centuries was no sinecure. When we look up at castles
+perched on rocks, or walk through the echoing apartments of baronial
+halls, we know that woman must have worked there with brain and fingers.
+The household and its dependencies, in such mansions, consisted of more
+than a score of persons, and provisions must be laid in during the
+autumn for many months. As we glance at the enormous fireplaces and
+ovens in the kitchens of those castles and halls, and remember the
+weight of the armor men wore, we can readily imagine that no trifling
+supply of brawn and beef was needed for their meals; and the sight of a
+husband frowning out of one of those old helmets because the dinner was
+scanty, must have been a fearful trial to feminine nerves. The title of
+"Lady" means the "Giver of bread" in Saxon, and the lady of the castle
+dispensed food to many beyond her own household.
+
+The task of preparing the raiment of the family devolved upon the women;
+for there were no travelling dealers except for the richest and most
+expensive articles. Wool, the produce of the flock, was carded and spun;
+flax was grown, and woven into coarse linen; and both materials were
+prepared and fashioned into garments at home. Glimpses of domestic life
+come down to us through early legends and records, some of which modern
+genius has melodized. Authentic history and romantic story often show us
+that women of all ranks were little better, in fact, than household
+drudges to these splendid knights and courtly old barons. The fair Enid
+sang a charming song as she turned her wheel; but when Geraint arrived,
+she not only assisted her mother to receive him, but, by her father's
+order, led the knight's charger to the stall, and gave him corn. If she
+also relieved the noble animal of his heavy saddle and horse-furniture,
+gave him water as well as corn, and shook down the dry furze for his
+bed, she must have had the courage and skill of a feminine Rarey; and we
+fear her dress of faded silk came out of the stable in a very
+dilapidated condition. After the horse was cared for, Enid put her wits
+and hands to work to prepare the evening meal, and spread it before her
+father and his guest. The knight, indeed, condescended to think her
+"sweet and serviceable"!
+
+The women of those days are often described only as they appeared at
+festivals and tournaments,--Ladies of Beauty, to whom knights lowered
+their lances, and of whom troubadours sang. They had their amusements
+and their triumphs, doubtless; but they also had their work, domestic,
+industrial, and sanitary. They knew how to bind up wounds and care for
+the sick, and we read many records of their knowledge in this
+department. Elaine, when she found Sir Launcelot terribly wounded in the
+cave, so skilfully aided him that, when the old hermit came who was
+learned in all the simples and science of the times, he told the knight
+that "her fine care had saved his life,"--a pleasing assurance that
+there were medical men in those days, as well as in our own, who
+expressed no unwillingness to allow a woman credit for success in their
+own profession.
+
+Illuminated books sometimes show us pictures of women of the humbler
+ranks of life at their work. On the border of a fine manuscript of the
+time of Edward IV. there is the figure of a woman employed with her
+distaff, her head and neck enveloped in a coverchief. The figure rises
+out of a flower. In a manuscript of 1316, a country-woman is engaged in
+churning, dressed in a comfortable gown and apron, the gown tidily
+pinned up, and her head and neck in a coverchief. The churn is of
+considerable height, and of very clumsy construction. A blind beggar
+approaches her, led by his dog, who holds apparently a cup in his mouth
+to receive donations. In another part of the same volume is a beautiful
+damsel with her hair spread over her shoulders, while her maid arranges
+her tresses with a comb of ivory set in gold. The young lady holds a
+small mirror, probably of polished steel, in her hand. Specimens of
+these curious combs and mirrors yet exist in collections. A century
+later we see a pretty laundress, holding in her hands a number of
+delicately woven napkins, which look as if they might have come out of
+the elaborately carved napkin press of the same period in the collection
+of Sir Samuel Myrick at Goodrich Court.
+
+Although the Knight of the Tower disapproved of young ladies being
+taught to write, there were women whose employment writing seems to have
+been; but these were nuns safely shut up from the risk of
+_billets-doux_. In Dr. Maitland's Essays on the Dark Ages, he quotes
+from the biography of Diemudis, a devout nun of the eleventh century, a
+list of the volumes which she prepared with her own hand, written in
+beautiful and legible characters, to the praise of God, and of the holy
+Apostles Peter and Paul, the patrons of the monastery, which was that of
+Wessobrunn in Bavaria. The list comprises thirty-one works, many of them
+in three or four volumes; and although Diemudis is not supposed to have
+been an authoress, she is certainly worthy of having her name handed
+down through eight centuries in witness of woman's indefatigable work in
+the scriptorium. One missal prepared by Diemudis was given to the
+Bishop of Treves, another to the Bishop of Augsburg, and one Bible in
+two volumes is mentioned, which was exchanged by the monastery for an
+estate.
+
+We can picture to ourselves Diemudis in her conventual dress, seated in
+the scriptorium, with her materials for chirography. The sun, as it
+streams through the window, throws a golden light over the vellum page,
+suggesting the rich hue of the gilded nimbus, while in the convent
+garden she sees the white lily or the modest violet, which, typical of
+the Madonna, she transfers to her illuminated borders. Thus has God ever
+interwoven truth and love with their correspondences of beauty and
+development in the natural world, which were open to the eyes of
+Diemudis eight hundred years ago, perhaps as clearly as to our own in
+these latter days. That women of even an earlier century than that of
+Diemudis were permitted to read, if not to write, is proved by the
+description of a private library, given in the letters of C. S. Sidonius
+Apollinaris, and quoted in Edwards's "History of Libraries." This
+book-collection was the property of a gentleman of the fifth century,
+residing at his castle of Prusiana. It was divided into three
+departments, the first of which was expressly intended for the ladies of
+the family, and contained books of piety and devotion. The second
+department was for men, and is rather ungallantly stated to have been of
+a higher order; yet, as the third department was intended for the whole
+family, and contained such works as Augustine, Origen, Varro,
+Prudentius, and Horace, the literary tastes of the ladies should have
+been satisfied. We are also told that it was the custom at the castle of
+Prusiana to discuss at dinner the books read in the morning,--which
+would tend to a belief that conversation at the dinner-tables of the
+fifth century might be quite as edifying as at those of the nineteenth.
+
+A few feminine names connected with the literature of the Middle Ages
+have come down to us. The lays of Marie de France are among the
+manuscripts in the British Museum. Marie's personal history, as well as
+the period when she flourished, is uncertain. Her style is extremely
+obscure; but in her Preface she seems aware of this defect, yet defends
+it by the example of the ancients. She considers it the duty of all
+persons to employ their talents; and as her gifts were intellectual, she
+cast her thoughts in various directions ere she determined upon her
+peculiar mission. She had intended translating from the Latin a good
+history, but some one else unluckily anticipated her; and she finally
+settled herself down to poetry, and to the translation of numerous lays
+she had treasured in her memory, as these would be new to many of her
+readers. Like other literary ladies, she complains of envy and
+persecution, but she perseveres through all difficulties, and dedicates
+her book "to the King."
+
+Marie was born in France. Some authorities suppose she wrote in England
+during the reign of Henry III., and that the patron she names was
+William Langue-espée, who died in 1226; others, that this _plus
+vaillant_ patron was William, Count of Flanders, who accompanied St.
+Louis on his first crusade in 1248, and was killed at a tournament in
+1251. A later surmise is that the book was dedicated to Stephen, French
+being his native language. Among the manuscripts of the Bibliothèque
+Royale at Paris, is Marie's translation of the fables which Henry
+Beauclerc translated from Latin into English, and which Marie renders
+into French. A proof that Marie's poems are extremely ancient is deduced
+from the names in one of these fables applied to the wolf and the fox.
+She uses other names than those of Ysengrin and Renard, which were
+introduced as early as the reign of Coeur de Lion, and it would seem
+that she could not have failed to notice these remarkable names, had
+they existed in her time. A complete collection of the works of Marie de
+France was published in Paris in 1820, by M. de Roquefort, who speaks
+of her in the following terms: "She possessed that penetration which
+distinguishes at first sight the different passions of mankind, which
+seizes upon the different forms they assume, and, remarking the objects
+of their notice, discovers at the same time the means by which they are
+attained." If this be a true statement, the acuteness of feminine
+observation has gained but little in the progress of the centuries, and
+her literary sisters of the present era can hardly hope to eclipse the
+penetration of Marie de France.
+
+The Countesses de Die, supposed to be mother and daughter, were both
+poetesses. The elder lady was beloved by Rabaud d'Orange, who died in
+1173, and the younger is celebrated by William Adhémar, a distinguished
+troubadour. He was visited on his death-bed by both these ladies, who
+afterwards erected a monument to his memory. The younger countess
+retired to a convent, and died soon after Adhémar.
+
+In the Harleian Collection is a fine manuscript containing the writings
+of Christine de Pisan, a distinguished woman of the fourteenth century.
+Her father, Thomas de Pisan, a celebrated _savant_ of Bologna, had
+married a daughter of a member of the Grand Council of Venice. So
+renowned was Thomas de Pisan that the kings of Hungary and France
+determined to win him away from Bologna. Charles V. of France, surnamed
+the Wise, was successful, and Thomas de Pisan went to Paris in 1368; his
+transfer to the French court making a great sensation among learned and
+scientific circles of that day. Charles loaded him with wealth and
+honors, and chose him Astrologer Royal. According to the history, as
+told by Louisa Stuart Costello, in her "Specimens of the Early Poetry of
+France," Christine was but five years old when she accompanied her
+parents to Paris, where she received every advantage of education, and,
+inheriting her father's literary tastes, early became learned in
+languages and science. Her personal charms, together with her father's
+high favor at court, attracted many admirers. She married Stephen
+Castel, a young gentleman of Picardy, to whom she was tenderly attached,
+and whose character she has drawn in most favorable colors. A few years
+passed happily, but, alas! changes came. The king died, the pension and
+offices bestowed upon Thomas de Pisan were suspended, and the Astrologer
+Royal soon followed his patron beyond the stars. Castel was also
+deprived of his preferments; and though he maintained his wife and
+family for a time, he was cut off by death at thirty-four years of age.
+
+Christine had need of all her energies to meet such a succession of
+calamities, following close on so brilliant a career. Devoting herself
+anew to study, she determined to improve her talents for composition,
+and to make her literary attainments a means of support for her
+children. The illustrations in the manuscript volume of her works
+picture to us several scenes in Christine's life. In one, the artist has
+sliced off the side of a house to allow us to see Christine in her
+study, giving us also the exterior, roof, and dormer-windows, with
+points finished by gilt balls. The room is very small, with a crimson
+and white tapestry hanging. Christine wears what may be called the
+regulation color for literary ladies,--blue, with the extraordinary
+two-peaked head-dress of the period, put on in a decidedly strong-minded
+manner. At her feet sits a white dog, small, but wise-looking, with a
+collar of gold bells round his neck. Before Christine stands a plain
+table, covered with green cloth; her book, bound in crimson and gold, in
+which she is writing, lies before her.
+
+Christine's style of holding the implements,--one in each hand,--and the
+case of materials for her work which lies beside her, are according to
+representations of the _miniatori caligrafi_ at their labors; and, as
+the art of caligraphy was well known at Bologna, so learned a man as
+Thomas de Pisan must have been acquainted with it, and would have caused
+his talented daughter to be instructed in so rare an accomplishment. It
+is not therefore unreasonable to believe that, in the beautiful volume
+now in the British Museum, the work of Christine's hand, as well as the
+result of her genius, is preserved. The next picture shows us Christine
+presenting her book to Charles VII. of France, who is dressed in a black
+robe edged with ermine; he wears a golden belt, order, and crown. The
+king is seated beneath a canopy, blue, powdered with _fleurs de lis_.
+Four courtiers stand beside him, dressed in robes of different
+colors,--one in pink, and wearing a large white hat of Quaker-like
+fashion. Christine has put on a white robe over her blue dress, perhaps
+as a sign of mourning,--she being then a widow. A white veil depends
+from the peaks of her head-dress. She kneels before the king, and
+presents her book.
+
+Another and more elaborate picture represents the repetition of the same
+ceremony before Isabelle of Bavaria, queen of Charles VI. We are here
+admitted into the private royal apartments of the fourteenth century.
+The hangings of the apartment consist of strips, upon which are
+alternately emblazoned the armorial devices of France and Bavaria. A
+couch or bed, with a square canopy covered with red and blue, having the
+royal arms embroidered in the centre, stands on one side of the room.
+The queen is seated upon a lounge of modern shape, covered to correspond
+with the couch. She is dressed in a splendid robe of purple and gold,
+with long sleeves sweeping the ground, lined with ermine; upon her head
+arises a structure of stuffed rolls, heavy in material and covered with
+jewels, which shoots up into two high peaks above her forehead. Six
+ladies are in waiting, two in black and gold, with the same enormous
+head-gears. They sit on the edge of her Majesty's sofa, while four
+ladies of inferior rank and plainer garments are contented with low
+benches. Christine reappears in her blue dress, and white-veiled, peaked
+cap. She kneels before the queen, on a square carpet with a
+geometrical-patterned border, and presents her book. A white Italian
+hound lies at the foot of the couch, while beside Isabelle sits a small
+white dog, resembling the one we saw in Christine's study. As we can
+hardly suppose Christine would bring her pet on so solemn an
+occasion,--far less allow him to jump up beside the queen,--and as this
+little animal wears no gold bells, we are led to suppose that little
+white dogs were in fashion in the fourteenth century.
+
+We cannot say that the portrait of Isabelle gives us any idea of her
+splendid beauty; but "handsome is that handsome does," and as Isabelle's
+work was a very bad one in the Middle Ages, we will say no more about
+her.
+
+Christine was but twenty-five years of age when she became a widow, and
+her personal charms captivated the heart of no less a personage than the
+Earl of Salisbury, who came ambassador from England to demand the hand
+of the very youthful princess, Isabelle, for his master.
+
+They exchanged verses; and although Salisbury spoke by no means
+mysteriously, the sage Christine affected to view his declarations only
+in the light of complimentary speeches from a gallant knight. The Earl
+considered himself as rejected, bade adieu to love, and renounced
+marriage. To Christine he made a very singular proposal for a rejected
+lover,--that of taking with him to England her eldest son, promising to
+devote himself to his education and preferment. The offer was too
+valuable to be declined by a poor widow, whose pen was her only means of
+supporting her family. That such a proof of devotion argued a tenderer
+feeling than that of knightly gallantry must have been apparent to
+Christine; but for reasons best understood by herself,--and shall we not
+believe with a heart yet true to her husband's memory?--she merely
+acknowledged the kindness shown to her son; and the Earl and his
+adopted boy left France together. When Richard II. was deposed, Henry
+Bolingbroke struck off the head of the Earl of Salisbury. Among the
+papers of the murdered man the lays of Christine were found by King
+Henry, who was so much struck with their purity and beauty, that he
+wrote to the fair authoress of her son's safety, under his protection,
+and invited her to his court.
+
+This invitation was at once a compliment and an insult, for the hand
+that sent it was stained with the blood of her friend. Christine,
+however, had worldly wisdom enough to send a respectful, though firm
+refusal, to a crowned head, a successful soldier, and one, moreover, who
+held her son in his power. Feminine tact must have guided her pen, for
+Henry was not offended, and twice despatched a herald to renew the
+invitation to his court. She steadily declined to leave France, but
+managed the affair so admirably that she at last obtained the return of
+her son from England.
+
+Like her father, Thomas de Pisan, Christine seems to have been sought as
+an ornament of their courts by several rulers. Henry Bolingbroke could
+not gain her for England, and the Duke of Milan in vain urged her to
+reside in that city. Seldom has a literary lady in any age received such
+tempting invitations; yet Christine refused to leave France, although
+her own fortunes were anything but certain. The Duke of Burgundy took
+her son under his protection, and urged Christine to write the history
+of her patron, Charles V. of France. This was a work grateful to her
+feelings, and she had commenced the memoir when the death of the Duke
+deprived her of his patronage, and threw her son again upon her care,
+involving her in many anxieties. But Christine bore herself through all
+her trials with firmness and prudence, and her latter days were more
+tranquil. She took a deep interest in the affairs of her adopted
+country, and welcomed in her writings the appearance of the Maid of
+Orleans. We believe, however, that she was spared the pain of witnessing
+the last act in that drama of history, where an innocent victim was
+given up by French perfidy to English cruelty.
+
+The deeds of Joan of Arc need no recital here. A daughter of France in
+the nineteenth century had a soul pure enough to reflect the image of
+the Maid of Orleans, and with a skilful hand she embodied the vision in
+marble. The statue of Joan of Arc, modelled by the Princess Marie,
+adorns--or rather sanctifies--the halls of Versailles.
+
+Of woman's work as an artist in the early centuries we have a curious
+illustration in a manuscript belonging to the Bibliothèque Royale at
+Paris, which exhibits a female figure painting the statue of the
+Madonna. The artist holds in her left hand a palette, which is the
+earliest notice of the use of that implement with which antiquarians are
+acquainted. The fashion of painting figures cut in wood was once much
+practised, and we see here the representation of a female artist of very
+ancient date. Painting, music, and dancing come under the designation of
+accomplishments; yet to obtain distinction in any of these branches
+implies a vast amount of work. An illustration of Lygate's Pilgrim shows
+us a young lady playing upon a species of organ with one hand; in the
+other she holds to her lips a mellow horn, through which she pours her
+breath, if not her soul; lying beside her is a stringed instrument
+called a sawtry. Such varied musical acquirements certainly argue both
+industry and devotion to art. Charlemagne's daughters were distinguished
+for their skill in dancing; and we read of many instances in the Middle
+Ages of women excelling in these fine arts.
+
+The period of time generally denominated the Middle Ages commences with
+the fifth century, and ends with the fifteenth. We have in several
+instances ventured to extend the limits as far as a part of the
+sixteenth century, and therefore include among female artists the name
+of Sofonisba Anguisciola, who was born about 1540. She was a noble lady
+of Cremona, whose fame spread early throughout Italy. In 1559, Philip
+II. of Spain invited her to his court at Madrid, where on her arrival
+she was treated with great distinction. Her chief study was portraiture,
+and her pictures became objects of great value to kings and popes.
+
+Her royal patrons of Spain married their artist to a noble Sicilian,
+giving her a dowry of twelve thousand ducats and a pension of one
+thousand ducats, beside rich presents in tapestries and jewels. She went
+with her husband to Palermo, where they resided several years. On the
+death of her husband the king and queen of Spain urged her to return to
+their court; but she excused herself on account of her wish to visit
+Cremona. Embarking on board a galley for this purpose, bound to Genoa,
+she was entertained with such gallantry by the captain, Orazio
+Lomellini, one of the merchant princes of that city, that the heart of
+the distinguished artist was won, and she gave him her hand on their
+arrival at Genoa.
+
+History does not tell us whether she ever revisited Cremona, but she
+dwelt in Genoa during the remainder of her long life, pursuing her art
+with great success. On her second marriage, her faithful friends in the
+royal family of Spain added four hundred crowns to her pension. The
+Empress of Germany visited Sofonisba on the way to Spain, and accepted
+from her hand a little picture. Sofonisba became blind in her old age,
+but lost no other faculty. Vandyck was her guest when at Genoa, and said
+that he had learned more of his art from one blind old woman than from
+any other teacher. A medal was struck in her honor at Bologna. The
+Academy of Fine Arts at Edinburgh contains a noble picture by Vandyck,
+painted in his Italian manner. It represents individuals of the
+Lomellini family, and was probably in progress when he visited this
+illustrious woman, who had become a member of that house.
+
+Stirling in his "Artists of Spain" states that few of Sofonisba's
+pictures are now known to exist, and that the beautiful portrait of
+herself, probably the one mentioned by Vasari in the wardrobe of the
+Cardinal di Monte at Rome, or that noticed by Soprani in the palace of
+Giovanni Lomellini at Genoa, is now in the possession of Earl Spencer at
+Althorp. The engraving from this picture, in Dibdin's _Ædes
+Althorpianæ_, lies before us. We think the better of kings and queens
+who prized a woman with eyes so clear, and an expression of such honesty
+and truth. The original is said to be masterly in its drawing and
+execution. Sofonisba is represented in a simple black dress, and wears
+no jewels. She touches the keys of a harpsichord with her beautiful
+hands; a duenna-like figure of an old woman stands behind the
+instrument, apparently listening to the melody.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whatever of skill or fame women have acquired through the ages in other
+departments, the nursery has ever been an undisputed sphere for woman's
+work. Nor have we reason to think that, in the centuries we have been
+considering, she was not faithful to this her especial province. The
+cradle of Henry V., yet in existence, is one of the best specimens of
+nursery furniture in the fourteenth century which have come down to us.
+Beautifully carved foliage fills the space between the uprights and
+stays and stand of the cradle, which is not upon rockers, but apparently
+swings like the modern crib. On each of these uprights is perched a
+dove, carefully carved, whose quiet influences had not much effect on
+the infant dreams of Prince Hal.
+
+Henry was born at Monmouth, 1388, and sent to Courtfield, about seven
+miles distant, where the air was considered more salubrious. There he
+was nursed under the superintendence of Lady Montacute, and in that
+place this cradle was preserved for many years. It was sold by a steward
+of the Montacute property, and, after passing through several hands,
+was in the possession of a gentleman near Bristol when engraved for
+Shaw's "Ancient Furniture," in 1836.
+
+In the Douce Collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, there is
+figured in a manuscript of the fifteenth century a cradle, with the baby
+very nicely tucked up in it. The cradle resembles those of modern date,
+and is upon rockers. Another illustration of the same period shows us a
+cradle of similar form, the "cradle, baby, and all" carried on the head
+of the nursery-maid,--a caryatid style of baby-tending which we cannot
+suppose to have been universal. The inventories of household furniture
+belonging to Reginald de la Pole, after enumerating some bed-hangings of
+costly stuff, describe: "Item, a pane" (piece of cloth which we now call
+counterpane) "and head-shete for y'e cradell, of same sute, bothe furred
+with mynever,"--giving us a comfortable idea of the nursery
+establishment in the De la Pole family. The recent discovery in England
+of that which tradition avers to be the tomb of Canute's little
+daughter, speaks of another phase in nursery experience. The relics,
+both of the cradle and the grave, bear their own record of the joys,
+cares, and sorrows of the nursery in vanished years, and bring near to
+every mother's heart the baby that was rocked in the one, and the grief
+which came when that little form was given to the solemn keeping of the
+other.
+
+A miniature in an early manuscript, called "The Birth of St. Edmund,"
+gives us a picture of a bedroom and baby in the fifteenth century. St.
+Edmund himself was born five hundred years previous to that date; but as
+saints and sinners look very much alike when they are an hour old, we
+can imagine that, as far as the baby is concerned, it may be considered
+a portrait. A pretty young woman, in a long white gown, whose cap looks
+like magnified butterflies' wings turned upside down, sits on a low seat
+before the blazing wood-fire burning on great andirons in a wide
+fireplace, which, instead of a mantelpiece, has three niches for
+ornamental vases. She holds the baby very nicely, and, having warmed his
+feet, has wrapt him in a long white garment, so that we see only his
+little head in a plain night-cap, surrounded indeed by the gilded nimbus
+of his saintship, which we hope was not of tangible substance, as it
+would have been an appendage very inconvenient to all parties concerned.
+The mother reposes in a bed with high posts and long curtains. She must
+have been a woman of strong nerves to have borne the sight of such
+stupendous head-gears as those in which her attendants are nid-nodding
+over herself and baby, or to have supported the weight of that which she
+wears by way of night-cap. One nurse raises the lady, while another,
+who, from her showy dress, appears to be the head of the department,
+offers a tall, elegant, but very inconveniently-shaped goblet, which
+contains, we presume, mediæval gruel. The room has a very comfortable
+aspect, from which we judge that some babies in those times were
+carefully attended.
+
+Many centuries ago, a young woman sat one day among the boys to whom she
+had come, as their father's bride, from a foreign land, to take the name
+and place of their mother. She showed to them a beautiful volume of
+Saxon poems, one of her wedding-gifts,--perhaps offered by the artists
+of the court of Charles le Chauve, of whose skill such magnificent
+specimens yet exist. As the attention of the boys was arrested by the
+brilliant external decorations, Judith, with that quick instinct for the
+extension of knowledge which showed her a true descendant of
+Charlemagne, promised that the book should be given to him who first
+learned to read it. Young Alfred won the prize, and became Alfred the
+Great.
+
+We are brought near to the presence of a woman of the Middle Ages when
+we stand beside the monument of Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I.,
+in Westminster Abbey. The figure is lifelike and beautiful, with flowing
+drapery folded simply around it. The countenance, with its delicate
+features, wears a look of sweetness and dignity as fresh to-day as when
+sculptured seven hundred years ago. The hair, confined by a coronet,
+falls on each side of her face in ringlets; one hand lies by her side,
+and once held a sceptre; the other is brought gracefully upward; the
+slender fingers, with trusting touch, are laid upon a cross suspended
+from her neck.
+
+Historians have done their best, or their worst, to throw doubt upon the
+story of Eleanor's sucking the poison with her lips from the arm of her
+husband when a dastardly assassin of those days struck at the life of
+Edward. But such a tradition, whether actually a fact or not, is a
+tribute to the affection and strength of Eleanor's character; and all
+historians agree that she instilled no poison into the life of king or
+country. As a wife, a mother, and a queen, Eleanor of Castile stands
+high on the record of the women of the Middle Ages.
+
+Coming from Westminster Abbey, in the spring of 1856, we stood one day
+at a window in the Strand, and watched a multitude which no man could
+number, pulsing through that great artery of the mighty heart of London.
+It was the day of the great Peace celebration, and a holiday. Hour after
+hour the mighty host swept on, in undiminished numbers. The place where
+we stood was Charing Cross, and our thoughts went back seven hundred
+years, when Edward, following the mortal remains of his beloved Eleanor,
+erected on this spot, then a country suburb of London, the last of that
+line of crosses which marked those places where the mournful procession
+paused on its way from Hereby to Westminster. It was the cross of the
+dear queen, _la chère reine_, which time and changes of language have
+since corrupted into Charing Cross. Through this pathway crowds have
+trodden for many centuries, and few remember that its name is linked
+with the queenly dead or with a kingly sorrow. Thus it is, as we hasten
+on through the busy thoroughfares of life from age to age, even as one
+of our own poets hath said,--
+
+    "We pass, and heed each other not."
+
+In these pages we have made some record of woman's work in past
+centuries, and also caught glimpses of duties, loves, hopes, fears, and
+sorrows not unlike our own. A wider sphere is now accorded, and a deeper
+responsibility devolves upon woman to fill it wisely and well. We should
+never forget that, as far as they were faithful to the duties appointed
+to them, they elevated their sex to a higher and nobler position, and
+therein performed the best work of the women of the Middle Ages.
+
+
+
+
+PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Concord, _Thursday, Sept. 1, 1842._--Mr. Thoreau dined with us
+yesterday.... He is a keen and delicate observer of nature,--a genuine
+observer,--which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an
+original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as
+her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed
+to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has
+strange stories to tell of adventures and friendly passages with these
+lower brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they
+grow, whether in garden or wild wood, are his familiar friends. He is
+also on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of
+storms. It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the
+memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so
+well; and, strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without
+picking up an arrow-point, spear-head, or other relic of the red man, as
+if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth.
+
+With all this he has more than a tincture of literature,--a deep and
+true taste for poetry, especially for the elder poets, and he is a good
+writer,--at least he has written a good article, a rambling disquisition
+on Natural History, in the last Dial, which, he says, was chiefly made
+up from journals of his own observations. Methinks this article gives a
+very fair image of his mind and character,--so true, innate, and literal
+in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as letter of what he sees,
+even as a lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving
+the wild beauty of the whole scene. Then there are in the article
+passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his
+thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse,
+as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them. There is a
+basis of good sense and of moral truth, too, throughout the article,
+which also is a reflection of his character; for he is not unwise to
+think and feel, and I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know.
+
+After dinner, (at which we cut the first watermelon and muskmelon that
+our garden has grown,) Mr. Thoreau and I walked up the bank of the
+river, and at a certain point he shouted for his boat. Forthwith a young
+man paddled it across, and Mr. Thoreau and I voyaged farther up the
+stream, which soon became more beautiful than any picture, with its dark
+and quiet sheet of water, half shaded, half sunny, between high and
+wooded banks. The late rains have swollen the stream so much that many
+trees are standing up to their knees, as it were, in the water, and
+boughs, which lately swung high in air, now dip and drink deep of the
+passing wave. As to the poor cardinals which glowed upon the bank a few
+days since, I could see only a few of their scarlet hats, peeping above
+the tide. Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two
+paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to
+require no physical effort to guide it. He said that, when some Indians
+visited Concord a few years ago, he found that he had acquired, without
+a teacher, their precise method of propelling and steering a canoe.
+Nevertheless he was desirous of selling the boat of which he was so fit
+a pilot, and which was built by his own hands; so I agreed to take it,
+and accordingly became possessor of the Musketaquid. I wish I could
+acquire the aquatic skill of the original owner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Sept. 2._--Yesterday afternoon Mr. Thoreau arrived with the boat. The
+adjacent meadow being overflowed by the rise of the stream, he had rowed
+directly to the foot of the orchard, and landed at the bars, after
+floating over forty or fifty yards of water where people were lately
+making hay. I entered the boat with him, in order to have the benefit of
+a lesson in rowing and paddling.... I managed, indeed, to propel the
+boat by rowing with two oars, but the use of the single paddle is quite
+beyond my present skill. Mr. Thoreau had assured me that it was only
+necessary to will the boat to go in any particular direction, and she
+would immediately take that course, as if imbued with the spirit of the
+steersman. It may be so with him, but it is certainly not so with me.
+The boat seemed to be bewitched, and turned its head to every point of
+the compass except the right one. He then took the paddle himself, and
+though I could observe nothing peculiar in his management of it, the
+Musketaquid immediately became as docile as a trained steed. I suspect
+that she has not yet transferred her affections from her old master to
+her new one. By and by, when we are better acquainted, she will grow
+more tractable.... We propose to change her name from Musketaquid (the
+Indian name of the Concord River, meaning the river of meadows) to the
+Pond-Lily, which will be very beautiful and appropriate, as, during the
+summer season, she will bring home many a cargo of pond-lilies from
+along the river's weedy shore. It is not very likely that I shall make
+such long voyages in her as Mr. Thoreau has made. He once followed our
+river down to the Merrimack, and thence, I believe, to Newburyport, in
+this little craft.
+
+In the evening, ---- ---- called to see us, wishing to talk with me
+about a Boston periodical, of which he had heard that I was to be
+editor, and to which he desired to contribute. He is an odd and clever
+young man, with nothing very peculiar about him,--some originality and
+self-inspiration in his character, but none, or very little, in his
+intellect. Nevertheless, the lad himself seems to feel as if he were a
+genius. I like him well enough, however; but, after all, these originals
+in a small way, after one has seen a few of them, become more dull and
+commonplace than even those who keep the ordinary pathway of life. They
+have a rule and a routine, which they follow with as little variety as
+other people do their rule and routine, and when once we have fathomed
+their mystery, nothing can be more wearisome. An innate perception and
+reflection of truth give the only sort of originality that does not
+finally grow intolerable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Sept. 4._--I made a voyage in the Pond-Lily all by myself yesterday
+morning, and was much encouraged by my success in causing the boat to go
+whither I would. I have always liked to be afloat, but I think I have
+never adequately conceived of the enjoyment till now, when I begin to
+feel a power over that which supports me. I suppose I must have felt
+something like this sense of triumph when I first learned to swim; but I
+have forgotten it. O that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put
+myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with
+all congenial elements.
+
+We had a thunder-storm last evening; and to-day has been a cool, breezy
+autumnal day, such as my soul and body love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Sept. 18._--How the summer-time flits away, even while it seems to be
+loitering onward, arm in arm with autumn! Of late I have walked but
+little over the hills and through the woods, my leisure being chiefly
+occupied with my boat, which I have now learned to manage with tolerable
+skill. Yesterday afternoon I made a voyage alone up the North Branch of
+Concord River. There was a strong west wind blowing dead against me,
+which, together with the current, increased by the height of the water,
+made the first part of the passage pretty toilsome. The black river was
+all dimpled over with little eddies and whirlpools; and the breeze,
+moreover, caused the billows to beat against the bow of the boat, with a
+sound like the flapping of a bird's wing. The water-weeds, where they
+were discernible through the tawny water, were straight outstretched by
+the force of the current, looking as if they were forced to hold on to
+their roots with all their might. If for a moment I desisted from
+paddling, the head of the boat was swept round by the combined might of
+wind and tide. However, I toiled onward stoutly, and, entering the North
+Branch, soon found myself floating quietly along a tranquil stream,
+sheltered from the breeze by the woods and a lofty hill. The current,
+likewise, lingered along so gently that it was merely a pleasure to
+propel the boat against it. I never could have conceived that there was
+so beautiful a river-scene in Concord as this of the North Branch. The
+stream flows through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood,
+which, as if but half satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle, and
+unobtrusive as it is, seems to crowd upon it, and barely to allow it
+passage; for the trees are rooted on the very verge of the water, and
+dip their pendent branches into it. On one side there is a high bank,
+forming the side of a hill, the Indian name of which I have forgotten,
+though Mr. Thoreau told it to me; and here, in some instances, the trees
+stand leaning over the river, stretching out their arms as if about to
+plunge in headlong. On the other side, the bank is almost on a level
+with the water; and there the quiet congregation of trees stood with
+feet in the flood, and fringed with foliage down to its very surface.
+Vines here and there twine themselves about bushes or aspens or
+alder-trees, and hang their clusters (though scanty and infrequent this
+season) so that I can reach them from my boat. I scarcely remember a
+scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the
+river through this wood. Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not
+have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. I have never
+elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful
+reflection is than what we call reality. The sky, and the clustering
+foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way
+through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the quiet
+depth of the prevailing tints,--all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful
+when beheld in upper air. But on gazing downward, there they were, the
+same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which
+satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half
+convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing
+which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate, the
+disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul.
+
+There were many tokens of autumn in this beautiful picture. Two or three
+of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many colors,--the
+real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning. These
+stood on low, marshy spots, where a frost has probably touched them
+already. Others were of a light, fresh green, resembling the hues of
+spring, though this, likewise, is a token of decay. The great mass of
+the foliage, however, appears unchanged; but ever and anon down came a
+yellow leaf, half flitting upon the air, half falling through it, and
+finally settling upon the water. A multitude of these were floating here
+and there along the river, many of them curling upward, so as to form
+little boats, fit for fairies to voyage in. They looked strangely
+pretty, with yet a melancholy prettiness, as they floated along. The
+general aspect of the river, however, differed but little from that of
+summer,--at least the difference defies expression. It is more in the
+character of the rich yellow sunlight than in aught else. The water of
+the stream has now a thrill of autumnal coolness; yet whenever a broad
+gleam fell across it, through an interstice of the foliage, multitudes
+of insects were darting to and fro upon its surface. The sunshine, thus
+falling across the dark river, has a most beautiful effect. It burnishes
+it, as it were, and yet leaves it as dark as ever.
+
+On my return, I suffered the boat to float almost of its own will down
+the stream, and caught fish enough for this morning's breakfast. But,
+partly from a qualm of conscience, I finally put them all into the water
+again, and saw them swim away as if nothing had happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Monday, October 10, 1842._--A long while, indeed, since my last date.
+But the weather has been generally sunny and pleasant, though often very
+cold; and I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal
+sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the
+daylight hours in the open air. My chief amusement has been boating up
+and down the river. A week or two ago (September 27 and 28) I went on a
+pedestrian excursion with Mr. Emerson, and was gone two days and one
+night, it being the first and only night that I have spent away from
+home. We were that night at the village of Harvard, and the next morning
+walked three miles farther, to the Shaker village, where we breakfasted.
+Mr. Emerson had a theological discussion with two of the Shaker
+brethren; but the particulars of it have faded from my memory; and all
+the other adventures of the tour have now so lost their freshness that I
+cannot adequately recall them. Wherefore let them rest untold. I
+recollect nothing so well as the aspect of some fringed gentians, which
+we saw growing by the roadside, and which were so beautiful that I
+longed to turn back and pluck them. After an arduous journey, we arrived
+safe home in the afternoon of the second day,--the first time that I
+ever came home in my life; for I never had a home before. On Saturday of
+the same week, my friend D. R---- came to see us, and stayed till
+Tuesday morning. On Wednesday there was a cattle-show in the village, of
+which I would give a description, if it had possessed any picturesque
+points. The foregoing are the chief outward events of our life.
+
+In the mean time autumn has been advancing, and is said to be a month
+earlier than usual. We had frosts, sufficient to kill the bean and
+squash vines, more than a fortnight ago; but there has since been some
+of the most delicious Indian-summer weather that I ever
+experienced,--mild, sweet, perfect days, in which the warm sunshine
+seemed to embrace the earth and all earth's children with love and
+tenderness. Generally, however, the bright days have been vexed with
+winds from the northwest, somewhat too keen and high for comfort. These
+winds have strewn our avenue with withered leaves, although the trees
+still retain some density of foliage, which is now embrowned or
+otherwise variegated by autumn. Our apples, too, have been falling,
+falling, falling; and we have picked the fairest of them from the dewy
+grass, and put them in our store-room and elsewhere. On Thursday, John
+Flint began to gather those which remained on the trees; and I suppose
+they will amount to nearly twenty barrels, or perhaps more. As usual
+when I have anything to sell, apples are very low indeed in price, and
+will not fetch me more than a dollar a barrel. I have sold my share of
+the potato-field for twenty dollars and ten bushels of potatoes for my
+own use. This may suffice for the economical history of our recent life.
+
+_12 o'clock_, A. M.--Just now I heard a sharp tapping at the window of
+my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of Rabelais), behold!
+the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance! He was
+probably attempting to get a fly, which was on the pane of glass against
+which he rapped; and on my first motion the feathered visitor took wing.
+This incident had a curious effect on me. It impressed me as if the bird
+had been a spiritual visitant, so strange was it that this little wild
+thing should seem to ask our hospitality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_November 8._--I am sorry that our journal has fallen so into neglect;
+but I see no chance of amendment. All my scribbling propensities will be
+far more than gratified in writing nonsense for the press; so that any
+gratuitous labor of the pen becomes peculiarly distasteful. Since the
+last date, we have paid a visit of nine days to Boston and Salem, whence
+we returned a week ago yesterday. Thus we lost above a week of delicious
+autumnal weather, which should have been spent in the woods or upon the
+river. Ever since our return, however, until to-day, there has been a
+succession of genuine Indian-summer days, with gentle winds or none at
+all, and a misty atmosphere, which idealizes all nature, and a mild,
+beneficent sunshine, inviting one to lie down in a nook and forget all
+earthly care. To-day the sky is dark and lowering, and occasionally lets
+fall a few sullen tears. I suppose we must bid farewell to Indian summer
+now, and expect no more love and tenderness from Mother Nature till next
+spring be well advanced. She has already made herself as unlovely in
+outward aspect as can well be. We took a walk to Sleepy Hollow
+yesterday, and beheld scarcely a green thing, except the everlasting
+verdure of the family of pines, which, indeed, are trees to thank God
+for at this season. A range of young birches had retained a pretty
+liberal coloring of yellow or tawny leaves, which became very cheerful
+in the sunshine. There were one or two oak-trees whose foliage still
+retained a deep, dusky red, which looked rich and warm; but most of the
+oaks had reached the last stage of autumnal decay,--the dusky brown hue.
+Millions of their leaves strew the woods, and rustle underneath the
+foot; but enough remain upon the boughs to make a melancholy harping
+when the wind sweeps over them. We found some fringed gentians in the
+meadow, most of them blighted and withered; but a few were quite
+perfect. The other day, since our return from Salem, I found a violet;
+yet it was so cold that day, that a large pool of water, under the
+shadow of some trees, had remained frozen from morning till afternoon.
+The ice was so thick as not to be broken by some sticks and small stones
+which I threw upon it. But ice and snow too will soon be no
+extraordinary matters with us.
+
+During the last week we have had three stoves put up, and henceforth no
+light of a cheerful fire will gladden us at eventide. Stoves are
+detestable in every respect, except that they keep us perfectly
+comfortable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Thursday, November 24._--This is Thanksgiving Day, a good old festival,
+and we have kept it with our hearts, and, besides, have made good cheer
+upon our turkey and pudding, and pies and custards, although none sat at
+our board but our two selves. There was a new and livelier sense, I
+think, that we have at last found a home, and that a new family has been
+gathered since the last Thanksgiving Day. There have been many bright,
+cold days latterly, so cold that it has required a pretty rapid pace to
+keep one's self warm a-walking. Day before yesterday I saw a party of
+boys skating on a pond of water that has overflowed a neighboring
+meadow. Running water has not yet frozen. Vegetation has quite come to a
+stand, except in a few sheltered spots. In a deep ditch we found a tall
+plant of the freshest and healthiest green, which looked as if it must
+have grown within the last few weeks. We wander among the wood-paths,
+which are very pleasant in the sunshine of the afternoons, the trees
+looking rich and warm,--such of them, I mean, as have retained their
+russet leaves; and where the leaves are strewn along the paths, or
+heaped plentifully in some hollow of the hills, the effect is not
+without a charm. To-day the morning rose with rain, which has since
+changed to snow and sleet; and now the landscape is as dreary as can
+well be imagined,--white, with the brownness of the soil and withered
+grass everywhere peeping out. The swollen river, of a leaden hue, drags
+itself sullenly along; and this may be termed the first winter's day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Friday, March 31, 1843._--The first month of spring is already gone;
+and still the snow lies deep on hill and valley, and the river is still
+frozen from bank to bank, although a late rain has caused pools of water
+to stand on the surface of the ice, and the meadows are overflowed into
+broad lakes. Such a protracted winter has not been known for twenty
+years, at least. I have almost forgotten the wood-paths and shady places
+which I used to know so well last summer; and my views are so much
+confined to the interior of our mansion, that sometimes, looking out of
+the window, I am surprised to catch a glimpse of houses at no great
+distance which had quite passed out of my recollection. From present
+appearances, another month may scarcely suffice to wash away all the
+snow from the open country; and in the woods and hollows it may linger
+yet longer. The winter will not have been a day less than five months
+long; and it would not be unfair to call it seven. A great space,
+indeed, to miss the smile of Nature, in a single year of human life.
+Even out of the midst of happiness I have sometimes sighed and groaned;
+for I love the sunshine and the green woods, and the sparkling blue
+water; and it seems as if the picture of our inward bliss should be set
+in a beautiful frame of outward nature.... As to the daily course of our
+life, I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging from
+two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I
+might have written more, if it had seemed worth while; but I was content
+to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants,
+having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away
+with the necessity of writing for bread. Those prospects have not yet
+had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, because an office
+would inevitably remove us from our present happy home,--at least from
+an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us
+wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so
+that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance,
+not a trouble.
+
+Every day, I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the
+post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return
+home, generally without having spoken a word to a human being.... In the
+way of exercise I saw and split wood, and, physically, I never was in a
+better condition than now. This is chiefly owing, doubtless, to a
+satisfied heart, in aid of which comes the exercise above mentioned, and
+about a fair proportion of intellectual labor.
+
+On the 9th of this month, we left home again on a visit to Boston and
+Salem. I alone went to Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for
+nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth
+flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had
+caught hold of a reality which never could be taken from me. It was good
+thus to get apart from my happiness, for the sake of contemplating it.
+On the 21st, I returned to Boston, and went out to Cambridge to dine
+with Longfellow, whom I had not seen since his return from Europe. The
+next day we came back to our old house, which had been deserted all this
+time; for our servant had gone with us to Boston.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Friday, April 7._--My wife has gone to Boston to see her sister M----,
+who is to be married in two or three weeks, and then immediately to
+visit Europe for six months.... I betook myself to sawing and splitting
+wood; there being an inward unquietness which demanded active exercise,
+and I sawed, I think, more briskly than ever before. When I re-entered
+the house, it was with somewhat of a desolate feeling; yet not without
+an intermingled pleasure, as being the more conscious that all
+separation was temporary, and scarcely real, even for the little time
+that it may last. After my solitary dinner, I lay down, with the Dial in
+my hand, and attempted to sleep; but sleep would not come.... So I
+arose, and began this record in the journal, almost at the commencement
+of which I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. Thoreau, who came to
+return a book, and to announce his purpose of going to reside at Staten
+Island, as private tutor in the family of Mr. Emerson's brother. We had
+some conversation upon this subject, and upon the spiritual advantages
+of change of place, and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other
+kindred or concatenated subjects. I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau's own
+account, that he is going away, as he is out of health and may be
+benefited by his removal; but, on my account, I should like to have him
+remain here, he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold
+intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree;
+and with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation
+in him too....
+
+I had a purpose, if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole
+term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being;
+but now my Pythagorean vow has been broken, within three or four hours
+after her departure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Saturday, April 8._--After journalizing yesterday afternoon, I went out
+and sawed and split wood till tea-time, then studied German,
+(translating Lenore,) with an occasional glance at a beautiful sunset,
+which I could not enjoy sufficiently by myself to induce me to lay aside
+the book. After lamp-light, finished Lenore, and drowsed over Voltaire's
+Candide, occasionally refreshing myself with a tune from Mr. Thoreau's
+musical box, which he had left in my keeping. The evening was but a dull
+one.
+
+I retired soon after nine, and felt some apprehension that the old
+Doctor's ghost would take this opportunity to visit me; but I rather
+think his former visitations have not been intended for me, and that I
+am not sufficiently spiritual for ghostly communication. At all events,
+I met with no disturbance of the kind, and slept soundly enough till six
+o'clock or thereabouts. The forenoon was spent with the pen in my hand,
+and sometimes I had the glimmering of an idea, and endeavored to
+materialize it in words; but on the whole my mind was idly vagrant, and
+refused to work to any systematic purpose. Between eleven and twelve I
+went to the post-office, but found no letter; then spent above an hour
+reading at the Athenæum. On my way home, I encountered Mr. Flint, for
+the first time these many weeks, although he is our next neighbor in one
+direction. I inquired if he could sell us some potatoes, and he promised
+to send half a bushel for trial. Also, he encouraged me to hope that he
+might buy a barrel of our apples. After my encounter with Mr. Flint, I
+returned to our lonely old abbey, opened the door without the usual
+heart-spring, ascended to my study, and began to read a tale of Tieck.
+Slow work, and dull work too! Anon, Molly, the cook, rang the bell for
+dinner,--a sumptuous banquet of stewed veal and macaroni, to which I sat
+down in solitary state. My appetite served me sufficiently to eat with,
+but not for enjoyment. Nothing has a zest in my present widowed state.
+[Thus far I had written, when Mr. Emerson called.] After dinner, I lay
+down on the couch, with the Dial in my hand as a soporific, and had a
+short nap; then began to journalize.
+
+Mr. Emerson came, with a sunbeam in his face; and we had as good a talk
+as I ever remember to have had with him. He spoke of Margaret Fuller,
+who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last
+meeting. [There rings the tea-bell.] Then we discoursed of Ellery
+Channing, a volume of whose poems is to be immediately published, with
+revisions by Mr. Emerson himself and Mr. Sam G. Ward.... He calls them
+"poetry for poets." Next Mr. Thoreau was discussed, and his approaching
+departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well.... We talked of
+Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the
+great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed
+and its history written; also of C. N----, who, it appears, is passing
+through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or
+none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of
+his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various
+other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five
+and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took his leave. I then went out to chop
+wood, my allotted space for which had been very much abridged by his
+visit; but I was not sorry. I went on with the journal for a few minutes
+before tea, and have finished the present record in the setting sunshine
+and gathering dusk....
+
+
+
+
+UNIVERSITY REFORM.
+
+AN ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD, AT THEIR TRIENNIAL FESTIVAL, JULY
+19, 1866.
+
+
+We meet to-day under auspices how different from those which attended
+our last triennial assembling! We were then in the midst of a civil war,
+without sight of the end, though not without hope of final success to
+the cause of national integrity. The three days' agony at Gettysburg had
+issued in the triumph of the loyal arms, repelling the threatened
+invasion of the North. The surrender of Vicksburg had just reopened the
+trade of the Mississippi. The capture of Port Hudson was yet fresh in
+our ears, when suddenly tidings of armed resistance to conscription in
+the city of New York gave ominous note of danger lurking at the very
+heart of the Union. In the shadow of that omen, we celebrated our
+academic festival of 1863.
+
+The shadow passed. With varying fortunes, but unvarying purpose, the
+loyal States pursued the contest. And when, in the autumn of 1864, by a
+solemn act of self-interrogation, they had certified their will and
+their power to maintain that contest to the end of disunion, and when a
+popular election expressing that intent had overcome the land like a
+summer-cloud without a bolt in its bosom, the victory was sown with the
+ballot which Grant and Sherman reaped with the sword.
+
+Secession collapsed. Its last and most illustrious victim, borne to his
+rest through territories draped in mourning, through sobbing
+commonwealths, through populations of uncovered heads, revealed to all
+time the spirit that was in it and the spirit that subdued it. And
+to-day, as we meet our Reverend Mother in this scene of old affections,
+the stupendous struggle has already receded into the shadow-land of
+History. The war is a thing of the past. If hatred still rankles, open
+hostilities have ceased. If rumblings of the recent tempest still mutter
+along the track of its former desolation, the storm is over. The
+conflict is ended. No more conscription of husbands, sons, and brothers
+for the weary work of destruction; no more the forced march by day, the
+bivouac at night, and to-morrow the delirium of carnage. No more anxious
+waiting in distant homes for tidings from the front, and breathless
+conning of the death-list to know if the loved ones are among the slain.
+No more the fresh grief-agony over the unreturning brave. All that is
+past,--
+
+    "For the terrible work is done,
+    And the good fight is won
+        For God and for Fatherland."
+
+The sword has returned to its sheath. The symbol-flags that shed their
+starry pomp on the field of death hang idly drooping in the halls of
+state. And before new armies in hostile encounter on American soil shall
+unfurl new banners to the breeze, may every thread and thrum of their
+texture ravel and rot and resolve itself into dust!
+
+Another and nearer interest distinguishes this occasion and suggests its
+appropriate theme,--our Alma Mater.
+
+The General Court of Massachusetts, which has hitherto elected the Board
+of Overseers of Harvard College, after so many years of fitful and
+experimental legislation, has finally enacted, that "the places of the
+successive classes in the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, and the
+vacancies in such classes, shall hereafter be annually supplied by
+ballot of such persons as have received from the College a degree of
+Bachelor of Arts, or Master of Arts, or any honorary degree, voting on
+Commencement-day in the city of Cambridge; such election to be first
+held in the year 1866."
+
+This act initiates a radical change in the organization of this
+University. It establishes for one of its legislative Houses a new
+electorate. The State hereby discharges itself of all active
+participation in the conduct of the College, and devolves on the body of
+the Alumni responsibilities assumed in former enactments extending
+through a period of more than two hundred years. The wisdom or justice
+of this measure I am not inclined to discuss. Certainly there is nothing
+in the history of past relations between the Commonwealth and the
+University that should make us regret the change. That history has not
+been one of mere benefactions on one side, and pure indebtedness on the
+other. Whatever the University may owe to the State, the balance of
+obligation falls heavily on the other side. In the days of Provincial
+rule the Colony of Massachusetts Bay appears to have exhausted its zeal
+for collegiate education in the much-lauded promissory act by which the
+General Court, in 1636, "agree to give four hundred pounds towards a
+school or college, whereof two hundred pounds shall be paid next year."
+The promise was not fulfilled, and the record of those years leaves it
+doubtful whether legislative action alone would during that or the next
+generation have accomplished the work, had not a graduate of Emanuel
+College in English Cambridge, who seems providentially enough to have
+dropped on these shores, where he lived but a year, for that express
+purpose, supplied the requisite funds.
+
+The College once started and got under way, the fathers of the Province
+assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax
+and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected
+the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who
+sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole
+course of its history, on account of certain scruples about infant
+baptism, of which, in the language of the time, "it was not hard to
+discover that they came from the Evil One," and for which poor Dunster
+was indicted by the grand-jury, sentenced to a public admonition, and
+laid under bonds for good behavior.
+
+They starved the second President for eighteen years on a salary payable
+in Indian corn; and in answer to his earnest prayer for relief, alleging
+instant necessity, the sacrifice of personal property, and the custom of
+English universities, a committee of the General Court reported that
+"they conceive the country to have done honorably toward the petitioner,
+and that his parity with English colleges is not pertinent."
+
+The third President, by their connivance and co-operation, was
+sacrificed to the machinations of the students, egged on, it is thought,
+by members of the Corporation, and died, "as was said, with a broken
+heart."
+
+Meanwhile, through neglect of the Province to provide for its support,
+the material fortunes of the College, in the course of thirty years, had
+fallen into such decay that extinction was inevitable, had not the
+people of another Colony come to the rescue. The town of Portsmouth, in
+New Hampshire, hearing, says their address, "the loud groans of the
+sinking College,... and hoping that their example might provoke ... the
+General Court vigorously to act for the diverting of the omen of
+calamity which its destruction would be to New England," pledged
+themselves to an annual contribution of sixty pounds for seven years.
+This act of chivalrous generosity fairly shamed our lagging Commonwealth
+into measures for the resuscitation of an institution especially
+committed to its care.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this business is that the Province all
+this while was drawing, not only moral support, but pecuniary aid, from
+the College. "It is manifest," says Quincy,[A] "that the treasury of
+the Colony, having been the recipient of many of the early donations to
+the College, was not a little aided by the convenience which these
+available funds afforded to its pecuniary necessities. Some of these
+funds, although received in 1647, were not paid over to the treasury of
+the College until 1713; then, indeed, the College received an allowance
+of simple interest for the delay. With regard, therefore, to the annual
+allowance of £100, whereby," during the first seventy years, "they
+enabled the President of the College simply to exist, it is proper to
+observe, that there was not probably one year in the whole seventy in
+which, by moneys collected from friends of the institution in foreign
+countries, by donations of its friends in this country, by moneys
+brought by students from other Colonies, and above all by furnishing the
+means of education at home, and thus preventing the outgoing of domestic
+wealth for education abroad, the College did not remunerate the Colony
+for that poor annual stipend five hundred fold."
+
+The patronage extended to the College after the Revolution was not more
+cordial and not more adequate than the meagre succors of Colonial
+legislation. The first Governor of independent Massachusetts, from the
+height of his impregnable popularity, for more than twelve years defied
+the repeated attempts of the Corporation, backed by the Overseers, to
+obtain the balance of his account as former Treasurer of the College,
+and died its debtor in a sum exceeding a thousand pounds. The debt was
+finally paid by his heirs, but not without a loss of some hundreds of
+dollars to the College.
+
+At the commencement of hostilities between the Colonies and the mother
+country, the Revolutionary authorities had taken possession of these
+grounds. Reversing the old order, "Cedant arma togæ," they drove out the
+_togæ_ and brought in the arms. The books went one way, the boys
+another,--the books to Andover, the boys to Concord. The dawn of
+American liberty was not an "Aurora musis amica." The Muse of History
+alone remained with Brigadier Putnam and General Ward. The College was
+turned into a camp,--a measure abundantly justified by public necessity,
+but causing much damage to the buildings occupied as barracks by the
+Continentals. This damage was nominally allowed by the General Court,
+but was reckoned in the currency of that day, whereby the College
+received but a quarter of the cost.
+
+In 1786, the State saw fit to discontinue the small pittance which till
+then had been annually granted toward the support of the President; and
+from that time to this, with the exception of the proceeds of a
+bank-tax, granted for ten years in 1814, and the recent large
+appropriation from the School Fund for the use of the Museum of Natural
+History, the College has received no substantial aid from the State. The
+State has, during the last ten years, expended two millions of dollars
+in a vain attempt to bore a hole through one of her hills: in the whole
+two hundred and thirty years of our academic history she has not
+expended a quarter of that sum in filling up this hole in her
+educational system.
+
+I intend no disrespect to the noble Commonwealth of which no native can
+be insensible to the glory of his birthright. No State has done more for
+popular education than the State of Massachusetts. But for reasons
+satisfactory, no doubt, to themselves, her successive legislators have
+not seen fit to extend to her colleges the fostering care bestowed on
+her schools. And certainly, if one or the other must be neglected, we
+shall all agree in saying, Let the schools be cherished, and let the
+colleges take care of themselves. Let due provision be made for popular
+instruction in the rudiments of knowledge, which are also rudiments of
+good citizenship; let every citizen be taxed for that prime exigency,
+and let literature and science find patrons where they can. Literature
+and science will find patrons, and here in Massachusetts have always
+found them. If the legislators of the State have been sparing of their
+benefactions, the wealthy sons of the State have been prodigal of
+theirs. In no country has the private patronage of science been more
+liberal and prompt than in Massachusetts. Seldom, in the history of
+science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than this
+University is now experiencing, in the mission of one of her professors
+on an enterprise of scientific exploration, started and maintained by a
+private citizen of Boston. When our Agassiz shall return to us
+reinforced with the lore of the Andes, and replenished with the spoils
+of the Amazon,--_tot millia squamigeræ gentis_,--the discoveries he
+shall add to science, and the treasures he shall add to his Museum,
+whilst they splendidly illustrate his own qualifications for such a
+mission, will forever attest the liberality of a son of Massachusetts.
+
+The rich men of the State have not been wanting to literature and
+science. They have not been wanting to this University. Let their names
+be held in everlasting remembrance. When the Memorial Hall, which your
+committee have in charge, shall stand complete, let its mural records
+present, together with the names of those who have deserved well of the
+country by their patriotism, the names of those who have deserved well
+of the College by their benefactions. Let these fautors of science, the
+heroes of peace, have their place side by side with the heroes of war.
+
+Individuals have done their part, but slow is the growth of institutions
+which depend on individual charity for their support. As an illustration
+of what may be done by public patronage, when States are in earnest with
+their universities, and as strangely contrasting the sluggish fortunes
+of our own _Alma_, look at the State University of Michigan. Here is an
+institution but twenty-five years old, already numbering thirty-two
+professors and over twelve hundred students, having public buildings
+equal in extent to those which two centuries have given to Cambridge,
+and all the apparatus of a well-constituted, thoroughly furnished
+university. All this within twenty-five years! The State itself which
+has generated this wonderful growth had no place in the Union until
+after Harvard had celebrated her two hundredth birthday. In twenty-five
+years, in a country five hundred miles from the seaboard,--a country
+which fifty years ago was known only to the fur trade,--a University has
+sprung up, to which students flock from all parts of the land, and which
+offers to thousands, free of expense, the best education this continent
+affords. Such is the difference between public and private patronage,
+between individual effort and the action of a State.
+
+A proof of the broad intent and oecumenical consciousness of this
+infant College appears in the fact that its Medical Department, which
+alone numbers ten professors and five hundred students, allows the
+option of one of four languages in the thesis required for the medical
+degree. It is the only seminary in the country whose liberal scope and
+cosmopolitan outlook satisfy the idea of a great university. Compared
+with this, our other colleges are all provincial; and unless the State
+of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest
+with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan
+bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with
+this precocious child of the West.
+
+Meanwhile, Alumni, the State has devolved upon us, as electors of the
+Board of Overseers, an important trust. This trust conveys no right of
+immediate jurisdiction, but it may become the channel of an influence
+which shall make itself felt in the conduct of this University. It
+invites us to take counsel concerning her wants and her weal. I
+therefore pursue the theme which this crisis in our history suggests.
+
+Of existing universities the greater part are the product of an age
+whose intellectual fashion differed as widely from the present as it did
+from that of Greek and Roman antiquity. Our own must be reckoned with
+that majority, dating, as it does, from a period antecedent, not only to
+all other American colleges, but to some of the most eminent of other
+lands. Half of the better known and most influential of German
+universities are of later origin than ours. The University of Göttingen,
+once the most flourishing in Germany, is younger than Harvard by a
+hundred years. Halle is younger, and Erlangen, and Munich with its vast
+library, and Bonn, and Berlin, by nearly two hundred years.
+
+When this College was founded, two of the main forces of the
+intellectual world of our time had scarcely come into play,--modern
+literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry,
+nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. In
+astronomy, the Copernican system was just struggling into notice, and
+far from being universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest
+author of note in the library bequeathed by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon
+rejected the Copernican system. English literature had had its great
+Elizabethan age; but little of the genius of that literature had
+penetrated the Puritan mind. It is doubtful if a copy of Shakespeare had
+found its way to these shores in 1636. Milton's star was just climbing
+its native horizon, invisible as yet to the Western world.
+
+The College was founded for the special and avowed purpose of training
+young men for the service of the Church. All its studies were arranged
+with reference to that object: endless expositions of Scripture,
+catechetical divinity, "commonplacing" of sermons,--already, one
+fancies, sufficiently commonplace,--Chaldee, Syriac, Hebrew without
+points, and other Semitic exasperations. Latin, as the language of
+theology, was indispensable, and within certain limits was practically
+better understood, perhaps, in Cambridge of the seventeenth century,
+than in Cambridge of the nineteenth. It was the language of official
+intercourse. Indeed, the use of the English was forbidden to the
+students within the College walls. _Scholares vernacula lingua intra
+Collegii limites nullo prætextu utuntor_, was the law,--a law which
+Cotton Mather complains was so neglected in his day "as to render our
+scholars very unfit for a conversation with strangers." But the purpose
+for which chiefly the study of Latin is now pursued--acquaintance with
+the Roman classics--was no recognized object of Puritan learning. Cicero
+appears to have been for a long time the only classic of whom the
+students were supposed to have any knowledge. The reading of Virgil was
+a daring innovation of the eighteenth century. The only Greek required
+was that of the New Testament and the Greek Catechism. The whole rich
+domain of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Theokritos, was as
+much an unexplored territory as the Baghavad-Gita or the Mababharata.
+Logic and metaphysic and scholastic disputations occupied a prominent
+place. As late as 1726, the books most conspicuous in Tutor Flynt's
+official report of the College exercises, next to Cicero and Virgil, are
+such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense
+obsoleteness,--Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's
+Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a
+curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have
+recommended in irony to the student who sought his counsel.
+
+With the multiplication of religious sects, with the progress of secular
+culture, with the mental emancipation which followed the great
+convulsions of the eighteenth century, the maintenance of the
+ecclesiastical type originally impressed on the College ceased to be
+practicable,--ceased to be desirable. The preparation of young men for
+the service of the Church is still a recognized part of the general
+scheme of University education, but is only one in the multiplicity of
+objects which that scheme embraces, and can never again have the
+prominence once assigned to it. This secularization, however it might
+seem to compromise the design of the founders of the College, was
+inevitable,--a wise and needful concession to the exigencies of the
+altered time. Nor is there, in a larger view, any real contravention
+here of the purpose of the founders. The secularization of the College
+is no violation of its motto, "_Christo et Ecclesiæ_." For, as I
+interpret those sacred ideas, the cause of Christ and the Church is
+advanced by whatever liberalizes and enriches and enlarges the mind. All
+study, scientifically pursued, is at bottom a study of theology; for all
+scientific study is the study of Law; and "of Law nothing less can be
+acknowledged than that her seat is in the bosom of God."
+
+But something more than secularization of the course of study is
+required to satisfy the idea of a university. What is a university? Dr.
+Newman answers this question with the ancient designation of a _Studium
+Generale_,--a school of universal learning. "Such a university," he
+says, "is in its essence a place for the communication and circulation
+of thought by means of personal intercourse over a wide tract of
+country."[B] Accepting this definition, can we say that Harvard College,
+as at present constituted, is a University? Must we not rather describe
+it as a place where boys are made to recite lessons from text-books, and
+to write compulsory exercises, and are marked according to their
+proficiency and fidelity in these performances, with a view to a
+somewhat protracted exhibition of themselves at the close of their
+college course, which, according to a pleasant academic fiction, is
+termed their "Commencement"? This description applies only, it is true,
+to what is called the Undergraduate Department. But that department
+stands for the College, constitutes the College, in the public
+estimation. The professional schools which have gathered about it are
+scarcely regarded as a part of the College. They are incidental
+appendages, of which, indeed, one has its seat in another city. The
+College proper is simply a more advanced school for boys, not differing
+essentially in principle and theory from the public schools in all our
+towns. In this, as in those, the principle is coercion. Hold your
+subject fast with one hand, and pour knowledge into him with the other.
+The professors are task-masters and police-officers, the President the
+chief of the College police.
+
+Now, considering the great advance of our higher town schools, which
+carry their pupils as far as the College carried them fifty years ago,
+and which might, if necessary, have classes still more advanced of such
+as are destined for the university, I venture to suggest that the time
+has come when this whole system of coercion might, with safety and
+profit, be done away. Abolish, I would say, your whole system of marks,
+and college rank, and compulsory tasks. I anticipate an objection drawn
+from the real or supposed danger of abandoning to their own devices and
+optional employment boys of the average age of college students. In
+answer, I say, advance that average by fixing a limit of admissible age.
+Advance the qualifications for admission; make them equal to the studies
+of the Freshman year, and reduce the college career from four years to
+three; or else make the Freshman year a year of probation, and its
+closing examination the condition of full matriculation. Only give the
+young men, when once a sufficient foundation has been laid, and the
+rudiments acquired, the freedom of a true University,--freedom to select
+their own studies and their own teachers from such material, and such
+_personnel_, as the place supplies. It is to be expected that a portion
+will abuse this liberty, and waste their years. They do it at their
+peril. At the peril, among other disadvantages, of losing their degree,
+which should be conditioned on satisfactory proof that the student has
+not wholly misspent his time.
+
+An indispensable condition of intellectual growth is liberty. That
+liberty the present system denies. More and more it is straitened by
+imposed tasks. And this I conceive to be the reason why, with increased
+requirements, the College turns out a decreasing proportion of
+first-class men. If the theory of college rank were correct, the highest
+marks should indicate the men who are to be hereafter most conspicuous,
+and leaders in the various walks of life. This is not the case,--not so
+much so now as in former years. Of the present chief lights of American
+literature and science, how many, if graduates of Harvard, took the
+first honors of the University here? Or, to put the question in another
+form, Of those who took the first honors at Harvard, within the last
+thirty years, how many are now conspicuous among the great lights of
+American literature and science?
+
+Carlyle, in his recent talk to the students at Edinburgh, remarks that,
+"since the time of Bentley, you cannot name anybody that has gained a
+great name for scholarship among the English, or constituted a point of
+revolution in the pursuits of men, in that way." The reason perhaps is,
+that the system of the English universities, though allowing greater
+liberty than ours, is still a struggle for college honors, in which
+renown, not learning for the sake of learning, is the aim. The seeming
+proficiency achieved through the influence of such motives--knowledge
+acquired for the nonce, not assimilated--is often delusive, and is apt
+to vanish when the stimulus is withdrawn. The students themselves have
+recorded their judgment of the value of this sort of learning in the
+word "cramming," a phrase which originated in one of the English
+universities.
+
+The rudiments of knowledge may be instilled by compulsory tasks; but to
+form the scholar, to really educate the man, there should intervene
+between the years of compulsory study and the active duties of life a
+season of comparative leisure. By leisure I mean, not cessation of
+activity, but self-determined activity,--command of one's time for
+voluntary study.
+
+There are two things which unless a university can give, it fails of its
+legitimate end. One is opportunity, the other inspiration. But
+opportunity is marred, not made, and inspiration quenched, not kindled,
+by coercion. Few, I suspect, in recent years, have had the love of
+knowledge awakened by their college life at Harvard,--more often
+quenched by the rivalries and penalties with which learning here is
+associated. Give the student, first of all, opportunity; place before
+him the best apparatus of instruction; tempt him with the best of
+teachers and books; lead him to the fountains of intellectual life. His
+use of those fountains must depend on himself. There is a homely proverb
+touching the impossibility of compelling a horse to drink, which applies
+to human animals and intellectual draughts as well. The student has been
+defined by a German pedagogue as an animal that cannot be forced, but
+must be persuaded. If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also
+the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its
+work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two
+conditions--opportunity and inspiration--will be a success, will draw to
+itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of
+all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the
+land.
+
+Nothing so fatal to inspiration as excessive legislation. It creates two
+parties, the governors and the governed, with efforts and interests
+mutually opposed; the governors seeking to establish an artificial
+order, the governed bent on maintaining their natural liberty. I need
+not ask you, Alumni, if these two parties exist at Cambridge. They have
+always existed within the memory of "the oldest graduate."
+
+Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond
+the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic
+jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no penalty
+but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against
+positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of
+civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern
+himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and
+familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and
+personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the
+most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be
+placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and
+fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German
+Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the
+last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which
+seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the
+ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,[C] as well as the
+mediæval and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it
+when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors,
+should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands.
+This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German
+universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of
+oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American
+colleges, and altogether incredible were it not sufficiently vouched by
+contemporary writers, and by the acts of the various governments which
+labored to suppress it. A certain German worthy writes to his son, who
+is about to enter the university: "You think, perhaps, that in the
+universities they sup pure wisdom by spoonfuls,... but when you are
+arrived there, you will find that you must be made a fool of for the
+first year.... Consent to be a fool for this one year; let yourself be
+plagued and abused; and when an old veteran steps up to you and tweaks
+your nose, let it not appear singular; endure it, harden yourself to it.
+_Olim meminisse juvabit._"[D] The universities legislated against this
+barbarism; all the governments of Germany conspired to crush it; but in
+spite of all their efforts, which were only partially successful, traces
+of it still lingered in the early years of this century. It was not
+completely abolished until, in 1818, there was formed at Jena by
+delegates from fourteen universities a voluntary association of students
+on a moral basis, known as "The General German Burschenschaft," the
+first principle in whose constitution was, "Unity, freedom, and equality
+of all students among themselves,--equality of all rights and
+duties,"--and whose second principle was "Christian German education of
+every mental and bodily faculty for the service of the Fatherland."
+This, according to Raumer, was the end of Pennalism in Germany. What the
+governments, with their stringent enactments and formidable penalties,
+failed to accomplish, was accomplished at last by a voluntary
+association of students, organizing that sense of honor which, in youth
+and societies of youth, if rightly touched, is never appealed to in
+vain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The question has been newly agitated in these days, whether knowledge of
+Greek and Latin is a necessary part of polite education, and whether it
+should constitute one of the requirements of the academic course. It has
+seemed to me that those who take the affirmative in this discussion give
+undue weight to the literary argument, and not enough to the
+glossological. The literary argument fails to establish the supreme
+importance of a knowledge of these languages as a part of polite
+education. The place which the Greek and Latin authors have come to
+occupy in the estimation of European scholars is due, not entirely to
+their intrinsic merits, great as those merits unquestionably are, but in
+part to traditional prepossessions. When after a millennial occultation
+the classics, and especially, with the fall of the Palæologi, the Greek
+classics burst upon Western Europe, there was no literature with which
+to compare them. The Jewish Scriptures were not regarded as literature
+by readers of the Vulgate. Dante, it is true, had given to the world his
+immortal vision, and Boccaccio, its first expounder, had shown the
+capabilities of Italian prose. But the light of Florentine culture was
+even for Italy a partial illumination. On the whole, we may say that
+modern literature did not exist, and the Oriental had not yet come to
+light. What wonder that the classics were received with boundless
+enthusiasm! It was through the influence of that enthusiasm that the
+study of Greek was introduced into schools and universities with the
+close of the fifteenth century. It was through that influence that
+Latin, still a living language in the clerical world, was perpetuated,
+instead of becoming an obsolete ecclesiasticism. The language of Livy
+and Ovid derived fresh impulse from the reappearing stars of secular
+Rome.
+
+It is in vain to deny that those literatures have lost something of the
+relative value they once possessed, and which made it a literary
+necessity to study Greek and Latin for their sakes. The literary
+necessity is in a measure superseded by translations, which, though they
+may fail to communicate the aroma and the verbal felicities of the
+original, reproduce its form and substance. It is furthermore superseded
+by the rise of new literatures, and by introduction to those of other
+and elder lands. The Greeks were masters of literary form, but other
+nations have surpassed them in some particulars. There is but one Iliad,
+and but one Odyssee; but also there is but one Job, but one Sakoontalà,
+but one Hafiz-Nameh, but one Gulistan, but one Divina Commedia, but one
+Don Quixote, but one Faust. If the argument for the study of Greek and
+Latin is grounded on the value of the literary treasures contained in
+those tongues, the same argument applies to the Hebrew, to the Sanscrit,
+to the Persian, to say nothing of the modern languages, to which the
+College assigns a subordinate place.
+
+But, above all, the literary importance of Greek and Latin for the
+British and American scholar is greatly qualified by the richness and
+superiority of the English literature which has come into being since
+the Græcomania of the time of the Tudors, when court ladies of a
+morning, by way of amusement, read Plato's Dialogues in the original. If
+literary edification is the object intended in the study of those
+languages, that end is more easily and more effectually accomplished by
+a thorough acquaintance with English literature, than by the very
+imperfect knowledge which college exercises give of the classics.
+Tugging at the Chained Prometheus, with the aid of grammar and lexicon,
+may be good intellectual discipline, but how many of the subjects of
+that discipline ever divine the secret of Æschylus's wonderful creation,
+or receive any other impression from it than the feeling perhaps that
+the worthy Titan's sense of constraint could hardly have been more
+galling than their own.
+
+Give them Shakespeare's Tempest to read, and with no other pony than
+their own good will, though they may not penetrate the deeper meaning of
+that composition, they will gain more ideas, more nourishment from it,
+than they will from compulsory study of the whole trio of Greek
+tragedians. And if this be their first introduction to the great
+magician, they will say, with Miranda,
+
+            "O, wonder!
+    How many goodly creatures are there here!
+    ... O brave new world,
+    That has such people in it!"
+
+The literary argument for enforced study of Greek and Latin in our day
+has not much weight. What I call the glossological argument has more.
+Every well-educated person should have a thorough understanding of his
+own language, and no one can thoroughly understand the English without
+some knowledge of languages which touch it so nearly as the Latin and
+the Greek. Some knowledge of those languages should constitute, I think,
+a condition of matriculation. But the further prosecution of them should
+not be obligatory on the student once matriculated, though every
+encouragement be given and every facility afforded to those whose genius
+leans in that direction. The College should make ample provision for the
+study of ancient languages, and also for the study of the mathematics,
+but should not enforce those studies on minds that have no vocation for
+such pursuits. There is now and then a born philologer, one who studies
+language for its own sake,--studies it perhaps in the spirit of "the
+scholar who regretted that he had not concentrated his life on the
+dative case." There are also exceptional natures that delight in
+mathematics, minds whose young affections run to angles and logarithms,
+and with whom the computation of values is itself the chief value in
+life. The College should accommodate either bias, to the top of its
+bent, but should not enforce either with compulsory twist. It should not
+insist on making every alumnus a linguist or a mathematician. If mastery
+of dead languages is not an indispensable part of polite education,
+mathematical learning is still less so. Excessive requirements in that
+department have not even the excuse of intellectual discipline. More
+important than mathematics to the general scholar is the knowledge of
+history, in which American scholars are so commonly deficient. More
+important is the knowledge of modern languages and of English
+literature. More important the knowledge of Nature and Art. May the
+science of sciences never want representatives as able as the learned
+gentlemen who now preside over that department in the mathematical and
+presidential chairs. Happy will it be for the University if they can
+inspire a love for the science in the pupils committed to their charge.
+But where inspiration fails, coercion can never supply its place. If the
+mathematics shall continue to reign at Harvard, may their empire become
+a law of liberty.
+
+I have ventured, fellow-graduates, to throw out these hints of
+University Reform, well aware of the opposition such views must
+encounter in deep-rooted prejudice and fixed routine; aware also of the
+rashness of attempting, within the limits of such an occasion, to
+grapple with such a theme; but strong in my conviction of the pressing
+need of a more emancipated scheme of instruction and discipline, based
+on the facts of the present and the real wants of American life. It is
+time that the oldest college in the land should lay off the _prætexta_
+of its long minority, and take its place among the universities,
+properly so called, of modern time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One thing more I have to say while standing in this presence. The
+College has a duty beyond its literary and scientific functions,--a duty
+to the nation,--a patriotic, I do not scruple to say a political duty.
+
+Time was when universities were joint estates of the realms they
+enlightened. The University of Paris was, in its best days, an
+association possessing authority second only to that of the Church. The
+faithful ally of the sovereigns of France against the ambition of the
+nobles and against the usurpations of Papal Rome, she bore the proud
+title of "The eldest Daughter of the King,"--_La Fille aînée du Roi_.
+She upheld the Oriflamme against the feudal gonfalons, and was largely
+instrumental in establishing the central power of the crown.[E] In the
+terrible struggle of Philip the Fair with Boniface VIII., she furnished
+the legal weapons of the contest. She furnished, in her Chancellor
+Gerson, the leading spirit of the Council of Constance. In the Council
+of Bâle she obtained for France the "Pragmatic Sanction." Her voice was
+consulted on the question of the Salic Law; unhappily, also in the trial
+of Jeanne d'Arc; and when Louis XI. concluded a treaty of peace with
+Maximilian of Austria, the University of Paris was the guaranty on the
+part of France.
+
+Universities are no longer political bodies, but they may be still
+political powers,--centres and sources of political influence. Our own
+College in the time of the Revolution was a manifest power on the side
+of liberty, the political as well as academic mother of Otis and the
+Adamses. In 1768, "when the patronage of American manufactures was the
+test of patriotism," the Senior Class voted unanimously to take their
+degrees apparelled in the coarse cloths of American manufacture. In
+1776, the Overseers required of the professors a satisfactory account of
+their political faith. So much was then thought of the influence on
+young minds of the right or wrong views of political questions
+entertained by their instructors. The fathers were right. When the life
+of the nation is concerned,--in the struggle with foreign or domestic
+foes,--there is a right and a wrong in politics which casuistry may seek
+to confuse, but which sound moral sentiment cannot mistake, and which
+those who have schools of learning in charge should be held to respect.
+Better the College should be disbanded than be a nursery of treason.
+Better these halls even now should be levelled with the ground, than
+that any influence should prevail in them unfriendly to American
+nationality. No amount of intellectual acquirements can atone for
+defective patriotism. Intellectual supremacy alone will not avert the
+downfall of states. The subtlest intellect of Greece, the sage who could
+plan an ideal republic of austere virtue and perfect proportions, could
+not preserve his own; but the love of country inspired by Lycurgus kept
+the descendants of the Dorians free two thousand years after the
+disgrace of Chæronea had sealed the fate of the rest of Greece.
+
+In my college days it was the fashion with some to think lightly of our
+American birthright, to talk disparagingly of republics, and to sigh for
+the dispositions and pomps of royalty.
+
+    "Sad fancies did we then affect
+    In luxury of disrespect
+    To our own prodigal excess
+    Of too familiar happiness."
+
+All such nonsense, if it had not already yielded to riper reason, would
+ere this have been washed out of us by the blood of a hundred thousand
+martyrs. The events of recent years have enkindled, let us hope, quite
+other sentiments in the youth of this generation. May those sentiments
+find ample nutriment within these precincts evermore.
+
+Soon after the conquest of American independence, Governor Hancock, in
+his speech at the inauguration of President Willard, eulogized the
+College as having "been in some sense the parent and nurse of the late
+happy Revolution in this Commonwealth." Parent and nurse of American
+nationality,--such was the praise accorded to Harvard by one of the
+foremost patriots of the Revolution! Never may she cease to deserve that
+praise! Never may the Mother refuse to acknowledge the seed herself has
+propagated! Never may her seed be repelled by the Mother's altered mind!
+
+    "Mutatam ignorent subito ne semina matrem."
+
+When Protagoras came to Athens to teach in the university as
+self-appointed professor, or sophist, according to the fashion of that
+time, it was not to instruct Athenian youth in music or geometry or
+astronomy, but to teach them the art of being good citizens,--[Greek:
+Tên politikên technên, kai poiein andras agathous politas.] That was his
+profession. With which, as we read, Hippocrates was so well pleased,
+that he called up Socrates in the middle of the night to inform him of
+the happy arrival. We have no professorship at Cambridge founded for the
+express purpose of making good citizens. In the absence of such, may all
+the professorships work together for that end. The youth intrusted to
+their tutelage are soon to take part, if not as legislators, at least
+as freemen, in the government of our common land. May the dignity and
+duty and exceeding privilege of an American citizen be impressed upon
+their minds by all the influences that rule this place! Trust me,
+Alumni, the country will thank the University more for the loyalty her
+influences shall foster, than for all the knowledge her schools may
+impart. Learning is the costly ornament of states, but patriotism is the
+life of a nation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] The History of Harvard University, by Josiah Quincy, LL. D., Vol. I.
+pp. 42, 43. All the facts relating to the history of the College are
+taken from this work.
+
+[B] The Office and Work of Universities, by John Henry Newman.
+
+[C] St. Augustine records his connection, when a student at Carthage,
+with the "Eversores" (Destructives), an association which flourished at
+that university.
+
+[D] Raumer's "History of German Universities." Translated by Frederic B.
+Perkins.
+
+[E] "C'est ainsi que peu à peu ils [that is, "les lettres"] parvinrent à
+sapper les fondements du pouvoir féodal et à élever l'étendard royal là
+où flottait la bannière du baron."--_Histoire de l'Université_, par M.
+Eugene Dubarle, Vol. I. p. 135.
+
+
+
+
+THE VOICE.
+
+
+    A saintly Voice fell on my ear,
+    Out of the dewy atmosphere:--
+    "O hush, dear Bird of Night, be mute,--
+    Be still, O throbbing heart and lute!"
+    The Night-Bird shook the sparkling dew
+    Upon me as he ruffed and flew:
+    My heart was still, almost as soon,
+    My lute as silent as the moon:
+    I hushed my heart, and held my breath,
+    And would have died the death of death,
+    To hear--but just once more--to hear
+    That Voice within the atmosphere.
+
+    Again The Voice fell on my ear,
+    Out of the dewy atmosphere!--
+    The same words, but half heard at first,--
+    I listened with a quenchless thirst;
+    And drank as of that heavenly balm,
+    The Silence that succeeds a psalm:
+    My soul to ecstasy was stirred:--
+    It was a Voice that I had heard
+    A thousand blissful times before;
+    But deemed that I should hear no more
+    Till I should have a spirit's ear,
+    And breathe another atmosphere!
+
+    Then there was Silence in my ear,
+    And Silence in the atmosphere,
+    And silent moonshine on the mart,
+    And Peace and Silence in my heart:
+    But suddenly a dark Doubt said,
+    "The fancy of a fevered head!"
+    A wild, quick whirlwind of desire
+    Then wrapt me as in folds of fire.
+    I ran the strange words o'er and o'er,
+    And listened breathlessly once more:
+    And lo, the third time I did hear
+    The same words in the atmosphere!
+
+    They fell and died upon my ear,
+    As dew dies on the atmosphere;
+    And then an intense yearning thrilled
+    My Soul, that all might be fulfilled:
+    "Where art thou, Blessed Spirit, where?--
+    Whose Voice is dew upon the air!"
+    I looked, around me, and above,
+    And cried aloud: "Where art thou, Love?
+    O let me see thy living eye,
+    And clasp thy living hand, or die!"--
+    Again upon the atmosphere
+    The self-same words fell: "_I Am Here._"
+
+    "Here? Thou art here, Love!"--"_I Am Here._"
+    The echo died upon my ear!
+    I looked around me--everywhere,--
+    But ah! there was no mortal there!
+    The moonlight was upon the mart,
+    And awe and wonder in my heart.
+    I saw no form!--I only felt
+    Heaven's Peace upon me as I knelt,
+    And knew a Soul Beatified
+    Was at that moment by my side:--
+    And there was Silence in my ear,
+    And Silence in the atmosphere!
+
+
+
+
+LIFE ASSURANCE.
+
+
+One of the subjects which for some time has commanded the public
+attention is that of Life Assurance: the means by which a man may,
+through a moderate annual expenditure, make provision for his family
+when death shall have deprived them of his protection.
+
+The number of companies organized for this purpose, their annual
+increase, the assiduity with which their agents press their respective
+claims, the books, pamphlets, and circulars which are disseminated, and
+the large space occupied by their announcements in the issues of the
+press, all unite in creating a spirit of inquiry on this interesting
+subject. We propose in this article to submit a few statements, the
+collection of which has been greatly furthered by recourse to the
+treatises of Babbage, Park, Duer, Ellis, Angell, Bunyon, Blayney, and
+other writers on insurance.
+
+In the early history of insurance, objection was continually made that
+it was of the nature of a wager, and consequently not only unlawful, but
+_contra bonos mores_; yet the courts of law in England from the first
+drew a distinction between a wager and a contract founded on the
+principle of indemnity, which principle runs through and underlies the
+whole subject of insurance. Lord Mansfield denominated insurance "a
+contract upon speculation," and it has universally been considered as a
+contract of indemnity against loss or damage arising from some uncertain
+and future events.
+
+Insurance may be defined generally as "a contract by which one of the
+parties binds himself to the other to pay him a sum of money, or
+otherwise indemnify him, in the case of the happening of a fortuitous
+event provided for in a general or special manner in the contract, in
+consideration of the sum of money which the latter party pays or binds
+himself to pay"; or, in the words of an eminent English judge, "It is a
+contract to protect men against uncertain events which in any wise may
+be a disadvantage to them."
+
+The contract securing this indemnity is called a policy, from the
+Italian _polizza d' assicurazione_, or _di sicurtà_, which signifies a
+memorandum in writing, or bill of security. The sum paid for the
+indemnity is called a premium, or price; the party taking upon himself
+the risk being termed the underwriter, because his name is written at
+the bottom of the policy, while the person protected by the instrument
+is called the assured. Says one, "The premium paid by the latter and the
+peril assumed by the former are two correlatives inseparable from each
+other, and the union constitutes the essence of the contract."
+
+Some writers, Mr. Babbage among others, use the words "assurance" and
+"insurance" as having distinct meanings; but with all underwriters at
+this day they are considered synonymous.
+
+Insurance in the first instance was exclusively maritime, and great
+efforts have been made to prove its antiquity. Some have endeavored, by
+appeals to Livy, Suetonius, Ulpian, and Cicero, to show that insurance
+was in use in ancient Rome, and that it was invented at Rhodes a
+thousand years before the Christian era; while others claim that it
+existed at Tyre, Carthage, Corinth, Athens, and Alexandria.
+
+There is little doubt, however, that it was first practised by the
+Lombards, and was introduced into England by a Lombard colony, which in
+the thirteenth century settled in London, and controlled entirely the
+foreign trade of the kingdom. After the great fire in London, in 1666,
+the protection hitherto afforded by insurance to ships only was extended
+to goods and houses; and insurance as a contract of indemnity was
+subsequently extended to human life.
+
+It is a singular fact that the subject of effecting insurance on lives
+was largely and excitingly discussed on the continent of Europe before
+it had attracted the slightest attention in England; yet at this day it
+prevails throughout Great Britain, while upon the Continent it is
+comparatively unknown; its operations there being chiefly confined to
+France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.
+
+In Holland, as early as 1681, Van Hadden and De Witt produced elaborate
+works upon the subject, while no publication appeared in England until
+twenty years after. These writers were followed by Struyck, in 1740, and
+by Kirseboon, in 1743; while Parcieux, father and son, St. Cyran, and
+Duvillard, in France, with Euler, Suchmilch, and Wargentin, in Germany,
+were with great ability pressing the subject upon the notice of their
+countrymen. But these efforts led to no practical results, and it was
+reserved for England at a later day to illustrate the principles of life
+assurance, and enable the public to enjoy extensively its privileges.
+
+Policies of life assurance were issued in England before any companies
+were organized to prosecute the business. Like marine policies, they
+were subscribed by one or more individuals; and the first case we find
+is that of a ship captain, in 1641, whose life had been insured by two
+persons who had become his bail. The policy was subscribed by individual
+underwriters, and an able author observes that the case singularly
+illustrates the connection which probably once existed between life and
+maritime insurance, and shows how naturally the latter may have sprung
+from the former.
+
+No business, with the exception, perhaps, of the express system and of
+photography, has grown in the United States so rapidly as that of life
+assurance. There is scarcely a State that has not one or more companies
+organized for the prosecution of this business. There are six chartered
+under the laws of Massachusetts, and twenty-six of those organized in
+other States are doing business in this Commonwealth, These companies
+had in force, November 1, 1865, 211,537 policies, assuring the sum of
+$563,396,862.30. In 1830 the New York Life and Trust Company was the
+only life assurance company in New York. At the close of the year 1865
+there were eighteen companies chartered under the laws of that State.
+They had 101,780 policies in force, assuring the sum of $289,846,316.50,
+while their gross combined assets reach the sum of $32,296,832.03.
+
+An insurance upon life is defined as "a contract by which the
+underwriter, for a certain sum proportioned to the age, health,
+profession, and other circumstances of the person whose life is the
+object of insurance, engages that that person shall not die within the
+time limited in the policy; or if he do, that he will pay a sum of money
+to him in whose favor the policy was granted."
+
+A person desiring to effect an insurance on his life usually procures
+from the office in which he proposes to insure a blank form, containing
+a series of interrogatories, all of which must be answered in writing by
+the applicant. To these answers must be appended the certificate of his
+usual medical attendant as to his present and general state of health,
+with a like certificate from an intimate personal friend. The party is
+then subjected to an examination by the medical examiner of the company,
+and, if the application is in all respects satisfactory, a policy is
+issued.
+
+On the death of the party assured, and due proof being made thereof, the
+company must pay the full sum insured. The time fixed for this payment
+varies with different companies. Some agree to pay at thirty, some at
+sixty, and some at ninety days after the proofs of death have been
+received and duly approved.
+
+The peculiarity of life assurance companies is, that they are required
+to pay the entire sum assured on the happening of a single event, making
+the loss a total one; but in fire and marine policies there is a
+distinction made between total and partial loss.
+
+A clause is usually inserted declaring the policy void in case the
+assured should fall in a duel, die by the hands of justice, or by his
+own hand, or while engaged in the violation of any public law. An
+interesting case in point is reported in the English books. On the 25th
+of November, 1824, Henry Fauntleroy, a celebrated banker in London, was
+executed for forgery. The Amicable Society of London, the first company
+established in England, had written a policy on his life, upon which all
+the premiums had been paid. The rules of the company declared that in
+such cases the policy was vitiated, but the clause was not inserted in
+the instrument. The company resisted payment, but a decision was given
+sustaining the validity of the contract, which was, however, reversed,
+on an appeal being made to the House of Lords.
+
+This clause, declaring a policy void in case the assured commits
+suicide, has given rise to much litigation. Some companies use the word
+"suicide," while others insert the words "shall die by his own hand";
+but the courts of law in various adjudications have considered the
+expressions as amounting to the same thing. The word "suicide" is not to
+be found in any English author anterior to the reign of Charles II.
+Lexicographers trace it to the Latin word _suicidum_, though that word
+does not appear in the older Latin dictionaries. It is really derived
+from two Latin words, _se_ and _cædere_,--to slay one's self. The great
+commentator on English law, Sir William Blackstone, defines suicide to
+be "the act of designedly destroying one's own life. To constitute
+suicide, the person must be of years of discretion and of sound mind."
+
+In a case submitted to the Supreme Court of the State of New York,
+Chief-Justice Nelson settled the whole question. A life company
+resisted payment of the amount specified in their policy, on the ground
+that the assured had committed suicide by drowning himself in the Hudson
+River. To this it was replied, that, when he so drowned himself, he was
+of unsound mind, and wholly unconscious of the act.
+
+Judge Nelson, after stating the question to be whether the act of
+self-destruction by a man in a fit of insanity can be deemed a death by
+his own hand within the meaning of the policy, decided that it could not
+be so considered. That the terms "commit suicide," and "die by his own
+hand," as used indiscriminately by different companies, express the same
+idea, and are so understood by writers in this branch of law. That
+self-destruction by a man bereft of reason can with no more propriety be
+ascribed to the act of his own hand, than to the deadly instrument that
+may have been used for the purpose. That the drowning was no more the
+act of the assured, in the sense of the law, than if he had been
+impelled by irresistible physical power; and that the company could be
+no more exempt from payment, than if his death had been occasioned by
+any uncontrollable means. That suicide involved the deliberate
+termination of one's existence while in the full possession of the
+mental faculties. That self-slaughter by an insane man or a lunatic was
+not suicide within the meaning of the law.
+
+This opinion of Judge Nelson was subsequently affirmed by the Court of
+Appeals.
+
+The whole current of legal decisions, the suggestions thrown out by
+learned judges, and the growing opinion that no sane man would be guilty
+of self-slaughter, have induced several new companies to exclude this
+proviso from their policies, while many older ones have revised their
+policies and eliminated the obnoxious clause. It is not that any man
+contemplates the commission of suicide; but every one feels that, if
+there should be laid upon him that most fearful of all afflictions,
+insanity, or if, when suffering from disease, he should, in the frenzy
+of delirium, put an end to his existence, every principle of equity
+demands that the faithful payments of years should not be lost to his
+family.
+
+Another important principle, which has involved much discussion, is,
+that "the party insuring upon a life must have an interest in the life
+insured." Great latitude has been given in the construction of the law
+as to this point; the declaration of a real, subsisting interest being
+all that is required by the underwriters. In fact, the offices are
+constantly taking insurances where the interest is upon a contingency
+which may very shortly be determined, and if the parties choose to
+continue the policy, _bona fide_, after the interest ceases, they never
+meet with any difficulty in recovering. So also offices frequently grant
+policies upon interests so slender that, although it may be difficult to
+deny some kind of interest, it is such as a court of law would scarcely
+recognize. This practice of paying upon policies without raising the
+question of interest is so general, that it has even been allowed in
+courts of law.
+
+The great advantages derived from life assurance are proved by its rapid
+progress, both in Great Britain and the United States, after its
+principles had once been fully explained. As already stated, the first
+society for the general assurance of life was the Amicable, founded in
+1706; but, most unreasonably, its rates of premium were made uniform for
+all ages assured; nor was any fixed amount guaranteed in case of death.
+Hence very little was done; and it was not until 1780 that the business
+of life assurance may be said to have fairly begun. Since then,
+companies have been formed from time to time, so that at present there
+are in Great Britain some two hundred in active operation, and the
+amount assured upon life is estimated at more than £200,000,000.
+
+In America, the first life-assurance company open to all was the
+Pennsylvania, established in 1812. And though many others, devoted in
+whole or in part to this object, were formed in the interim, so little
+pains was taken to inform the public upon the system, that in 1842 the
+amount assured probably did not exceed $5,000,000. But, in a Christian
+country, all material enterprises go swiftly forward, and of late years
+the progress of life assurance has equalled that of railroads and
+telegraphs; so that there are in the United States at least fifty
+companies, which are disbursing in claims, chiefly to widows and
+orphans, about five millions of dollars annually.
+
+With this large extension of business, the fundamental principles of
+life assurance are now universally agreed on; but, in carrying them out,
+there are differences deserving attention.
+
+Life-assurance companies may be divided into three classes,--the stock,
+the mutual, and the mixed. In the stock company, the management is in
+the hands of the stockholders, or their agents, with whom the applicant
+for insurance contracts to pay so much while living, in consideration of
+a certain sum to be paid to his representatives at his death; and here
+his connection with it ceases; the profits of the business being divided
+among the stockholders. In the mutual company the assured themselves
+receive all the surplus premium or profit. The law of the State of New
+York passed in 1849 requires that all life-insurance companies organized
+in the State shall have a capital of at least one hundred thousand
+dollars. Mutual life-insurance companies organized in that State since
+1849 pay only seven per cent on their capital, which their stock by
+investment may produce. In the mixed companies there are various
+combinations of the principles peculiar to the other two. They differ
+from the mutual companies only in the fact that, besides paying the
+stockholders legal interest, they receive a portion of the profits of
+the business, which in some cases in this country has caused the capital
+stock to appreciate in value over three hundred per cent, and in England
+over five hundred per cent.
+
+To decide which of these is most advantageous to the assured, we must
+consider the subject of premiums, and understand whence companies derive
+their surplus, or, as it is sometimes called, the profits. This is
+easily explained. As the liability to death increases with age, the
+proper annual premium for assurance would increase with each year of
+life. But as it is important not to burden age too heavily, and as it is
+simpler to pay a uniform sum every year, a mean rate is taken,--one too
+little for old age, but greater than is absolutely necessary to cover
+the risk in the first years of the assurance. Hence the company receives
+at first more than it has to pay, and thus accumulates funds to provide
+for the time when its payments will naturally be in excess of its
+receipts. Now these funds may be invested so as of themselves to produce
+an income, and the increase thence derived may, by the magical power of
+compound interest, reaching through a long series of years, become very
+large. In forming rates of premium, regard is had to this; but, to gain
+security in a contract which may extend far into the future, it is
+prudent to base the calculations on so low a rate of interest that there
+can be a certainty of obtaining it. The rate adopted is usually three
+per cent in England, and four or five per cent in this country. But, in
+point of fact, the American companies now obtain on secure investments
+six or seven per cent.
+
+Again, in order to cover expenses and provide against possible
+contingencies, it is common to add to the rates obtained by calculation
+from correct tables of mortality a certain percentage, called _loading_,
+which is usually found more than is necessary, and forms a second source
+of profit.
+
+Again, most tables of mortality are derived from the experience of whole
+communities, while all companies now subject applicants to a medical
+examination, and reject those found diseased; it being possible to
+discover, through the progress of medical science, even incipient signs
+of disease. Hence one would expect that among these selected lives the
+rates of mortality would be less than by ordinary statistics; and this
+is confirmed by the published experience of many companies. Here we find
+a third source of profit.
+
+In these three ways, and others incidental to the business, it happens
+that all corporations managed with ordinary prudence accumulate a much
+larger capital than is needed for future losses. The advocates of the
+stock plan contend that, by a low rate of premium, they furnish their
+assured with a full equivalent for that division of profits which is the
+special boast of other companies. In a corporation purely mutual, the
+whole surplus is periodically applied to the benefit of the assured,
+either by a dividend in cash, or by equitable additions to the amount
+assured without increase of premium, or by deducting from future
+premiums, while the amount assured remains the same. The advantages of
+the latter system must be evident to every one.
+
+It is of course important in all companies, whether mutual or not, that
+the officers should be men of integrity, sagacity, and financial
+experience, as well as that due precautions should be taken in the care
+and investment of the company's fund; and it is now proved by experience
+in this country, that, when a company is thus managed, so regular are
+the rates of mortality, so efficient the safeguards derived from the
+selection of lives, the assumption of low rates of interest, and the
+loading of premiums, that no company, when once well established, has
+ever met with disaster. On the other hand, there has been a rapid
+accretion of funds, in some instances to the amount of many millions of
+dollars. The characteristics of a good company are security and
+assurance at cost. It should sell, not policies merely, but assurance;
+and it should not make a profit for the capitalist out of the widow and
+orphan.
+
+The policies issued by life companies vary in their form and nature. The
+ordinary one is called the life policy, by which the company contracts
+to pay, on the death of the assured, the sum named in the policy, to the
+person in whose behalf the assurance is made.
+
+In mutual (cash) companies, when the premium has been paid in full for
+about sixteen years, judging from past experience, the policy-holder may
+expect that his annual dividend on policy and additions will exceed the
+annual premium, thus obviating the necessity of further payments to the
+company, while his policy annually increases in amount for the remainder
+of life. But, on the contrary, when the dividends have been anticipated,
+as in the note system, by giving a note for part of the premium, the
+policy-holder insuring in this way, although he may at first receive a
+larger policy than he has the ability to pay for in cash, may lose the
+chief benefit of life insurance. For should he become unable, either by
+age, disease, or loss of property, to continue the payment of his
+premiums, his policy must lapse, because there is no accumulation of
+profits to his credit on which it can be continued.
+
+In other forms of life policies, called "Non-forfeitable," premiums are
+made payable in "one," "five," or "ten" annual payments. In all cash
+companies, and in some of the note companies, after the specified number
+of premiums have been paid, the policy-holder draws an annual dividend
+in cash.
+
+A further advantage arising from this plan is, that the policy-holder,
+at any time after two annual payments have been made, is always entitled
+to a "paid-up" policy for as many "fifths" or "tenths" of the sum
+assured as he shall have paid annual premiums. For example: a
+"five-annual-payment policy" for $10,000, on which three premiums had
+been paid, would entitle the holder to a "paid-up policy" for $6,000; a
+"ten-annual-payment policy" for $10,000, on which three payments had
+been made, would entitle the holder to $3,000; and so on for any number
+of payments and for any amount, in accordance with the face of the
+policy.
+
+Another form is denominated the Endowment Policy, in which the amount
+assured is payable when the party attains a certain age, or at death,
+should he die before reaching that age. This policy is rapidly gaining
+favor, as it provides for the man himself in old age, or for his family
+in case of his death. It is also fast becoming a favorite form of
+investment. We can show instances where the policy-holders have received
+a _surplus_ above all they have paid to the company, with compound
+interest at six per cent, and no charge whatever for expenses or cost of
+insurance meanwhile.
+
+The Term Policy, as its name implies, is issued for a term of one or
+more years.
+
+Policies are also issued on joint lives, payable at the death of the
+first of two or more parties named in the policy; and on survivorship,
+payable to a party named in case he survives another.
+
+Some companies require all premiums to be paid in cash, while others
+take the note of the assured in part payment. These are denominated cash
+and note companies, and much difference of opinion exists as to their
+comparative merits.
+
+The latter is at first sight an attractive system, and its advocates
+present many specious arguments in its favor. The friends of cash
+payments, however, contend that the note system is detrimental and
+delusive, from the fact that these notes are liable to assessment, and,
+in case of death, to be deducted from the amount assured; also that the
+notes accumulate as the years roll on, the interest growing annually
+larger, and the total cash payment consequently heavier, while the
+actual amount of assurance, that is, the difference between its nominal
+amount and the sum of the notes, steadily lessens; and thus a provision
+for one's family gradually changes into a burden upon one's self.
+
+But whatever differences of opinion may exist as to the comparative
+value of various systems, few will deny the advantages which life
+assurance has conferred upon the public, especially in America, whose
+middle classes, ambitiously living up to their income, are rich mostly
+in their labor and their homesteads,--in their earnings rather than
+their savings; and whose wealthy classes are rich chiefly through the
+giddy uncertainties of speculation,--magnificent to-day, in ruins
+to-morrow. In a country like this, no one can estimate the amount of
+comfort secured by investment in life assurance. It is the one measure
+of thrift which remains to atone for our extravagance in living and
+recklessness in trade.
+
+Henry Ward Beecher spoke wisely when he advised all men to seek life
+assurance. He says:--
+
+"It is every man's duty to provide for his family. That provision must
+include its future contingent condition. That provision, in so far as it
+is material, men ordinarily seek to secure by their own accumulations
+and investments. But all these are uncertain. The man that is rich
+to-day, by causes beyond his reach is poor to-morrow. A war in China, a
+revolution in Europe, a rebellion in America, overrule ten thousand
+fortunes in every commercial community.
+
+"But _in life assurance there are no risks or contingencies_. Other
+investments may fail. A house may burn down. Banks may break; and their
+stock be worthless. Bonds and mortgages may be seized for debt, and all
+property or evidences of property may fall into the bottomless gulf of
+bankruptcy. But money secured to your family by life assurance will go
+to them without fail or interruption, provided you have used due
+discretion in the selection of a sound and honorable assurance company.
+Of two courses, one of which _may_ leave your family destitute, and the
+other of which _assures_ them a comfortable support at your decease, can
+there be a doubt which is to be chosen? Can there be a doubt about
+duty?"
+
+
+
+
+A DISTINGUISHED CHARACTER.
+
+
+In order to prevent conjectures which might not be entirely pleasant to
+one or two persons whom I have in my mind, I prefer to state, at once
+and frankly, that I, Dionysius Green, am the author of this article. It
+requires some courage to make this avowal, I am well aware; and I am
+prepared to experience a rapid diminution of my present rather extensive
+popularity. One result I certainly foresee, namely, a great falling-off
+in the number of applications for autographs ("accompanied with a
+sentiment"), which I daily receive; possibly, also, fewer invitations to
+lecture before literary societies next winter. Fortunately, my recent
+marriage enables me to dispense with a large portion of my popularity,
+without great inconvenience; or, rather, I am relieved from the very
+laborious necessity of maintaining it in the face of so many aggressive
+rivalries.
+
+The day may arrive, therefore, when I shall cease to be a Distinguished
+Character. Since I have admitted this much, I may as well confess that
+my reputation--enviable as it may be considered by the public--is of
+that kind which seems to be meant to run for a certain length of time,
+at the expiration whereof it must be wound up again. I was fortunate
+enough to discover this secret betimes, and I have since then known
+several amiable and worthy persons to slip out of sight, from the lack
+of it. There was Mr. ----, for example, whose comic articles shook the
+fat sides of the nation for one summer, and whose pseudonyme was in
+everybody's mouth. Alas! what he took for perpetual motion was but an
+eight-day clock, and I need not call your attention to the present dead
+and leaden stillness of its pendulum.
+
+Although my earliest notoriety was achieved in very much the same
+way,--that is, by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no
+doubt remember,--I soon perceived the unstable character of my
+reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in
+inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in
+literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. They tickle the
+palates of the multitude for a while, but they don't wear like the plain
+old beverages. I saw very plainly, that much more was to be gained, in
+the long run, by planting myself--not with a sudden and startling jump,
+but by a graceful, cautious pirouette--upon a basis of the Moral and the
+Didactic. I should thus reach a class of slow, but very tough stomachs,
+which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to
+offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever:
+they always mistake their mental gripings for the process of digestion.
+Why, bless your souls! I have known Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy" to
+fill one of them to repletion, for the space of ten years!
+
+I owe this resolution to my natural acuteness of perception, but my
+success in carrying it into execution was partly the result of luck. The
+field, now occupied by such a crowd, (I name no names,) was at that time
+nearly clear; and I managed to shift my costume before the public fairly
+knew what I was about. I found, indeed, that a combination of the two
+styles enabled me to retain much of my old audience while acquiring the
+new. It was like singing a hymn of serious admonition to a lively,
+rattling tune. One is diverted: there is a present sense of fun, while a
+gentle feeling of the grave truths inculcated lingers in one's mind
+afterwards. The pious can find no fault with the matter, nor the profane
+with the manner. Instead of approaching the moral consciousness of
+one's readers with stern, lugubrious countenance, and ponderous or
+lamentable voice, you make your appearance with a smile and a joke,
+punch the reader playfully in the ribs, and say, as it were, "Ha! ha!
+I've a good thing to tell you!" Although I have many imitators, some of
+whom have attained an excellence in the art which may be considered
+classic, yet I may fairly claim to have originated this branch of
+literature, and, while it retains its present unbounded popularity, my
+name cannot wholly perish.
+
+Nevertheless, greatness has its drawbacks. I appeal to all distinguished
+authors, from Tupper to Weenie Willows, to confirm the truth of this
+assertion. I have sometimes, especially of late, doubted seriously
+whether it is a good thing to be distinguished. Alas! my dear young
+gentleman and lady, whose albums would be so dismally incomplete without
+my autograph ("accompanied with a sentiment"), would that you could
+taste the bitter with the sweet,--the honey and aloes of an American
+author's life! At first, it is exceedingly pleasant. You are like a
+newly-hatched chicken, or a pup at the end of his nine-days' blindness.
+You are petted, and stroked, and called sweet names, and fed with
+dainties, and carried in the arms of the gentlemen, and cuddled in the
+laps of the ladies. But when you get to be a big dog or a full-grown
+game-cock, take care! If people would but fancy that you still wore your
+down or silken skin, they might continue to be delighted with every
+gambol of your fancy. But they suspect pin-feathers and bristles,
+whether the latter grow or not; and, after doing their best to spoil
+you, they suddenly demand the utmost propriety of behavior. However, let
+me not anticipate. I can still call myself, without the charge of
+self-flattery, a Distinguished Character; at least I am told so, every
+day, each person who makes the remark supposing that it is an entirely
+original and most acceptable compliment. While this distinction lasts,
+(for I find that I lose it in proportion as I gain in sound knowledge
+and independent common-sense,) I should like to describe, for the
+contemplation of future ages, some of the penalties attached to
+popularity at present.
+
+I was weak enough, I admit, to be immensely delighted with the first
+which I experienced,--not foreseeing whitherward they led. The timid,
+enthusiastic notes of girls of fifteen, with the words "sweet" and
+"exquisite," duly underscored, the letters of aspiring boys, enclosing
+specimens of their composition, and the touching pleas of individuals of
+both sexes, in reduced circumstances, were so many evidences of success,
+which I hugged to my bosom. Reducing the matter to statistics, I have
+since ascertained that about one in ten of these letters is dictated
+either by honest sympathy, the warm, uncritical recognition of youth
+(which I don't suppose any author would diminish, if he could), or the
+craving for encouragement, under unpropitious circumstances of growth.
+But how was I, in the beginning, to guess at the motives of the writers?
+They offered sugar-plums, which I swallowed without a suspicion of the
+drastic ingredients so many of them contained. Good Mrs. Sigourney kept
+a journal of her experiences in this line. I wish I had done the same.
+
+The young lady correspondent, I find, in most cases replies to your
+reply, proposing a permanent correspondence. The young gentleman, who
+desires, above all things, your "_candid opinion_ of the poems
+enclosed,--be sure and point out the _faults_, and how they can be
+_improved_"--is highly indignant when you take him at his word, and do
+so. You receive a letter of defence and explanation, showing that what
+you consider to be faults are not such. Moreover, his friends have
+assured him that the poem which you advise him to omit is one of his
+finest things! The distressed aspirant for literary fame, who only
+requests that you shall read and correct his or her manuscript, procure
+a publisher, and prefix a commendatory notice, signed with your name,
+to the work, writes that he or she is at last undeceived in regard to
+the character of authors. "I thank you, Mr. Green, for the _lesson_! The
+remembrance of _your_ former struggles is _happily_ effaced in your
+present success. It is hard for a heart throbbing with warmth to be
+chilled, and a guileless confidence in human brotherhood to be crushed
+forever! I will strive to bury my disappointed hopes in my own darkened
+bosom; and that you may be saved from the experience which you have
+prepared for another, is the wish of, _Sir_, yours, ----."
+
+For a day or two I went about with a horrible feeling of dread and
+remorse. I opened the morning paper with trembling hands, and only
+breathed freely when I found no item headed "Suicide" in the columns. A
+year afterwards, chance threw me in the way of my broken-hearted victim.
+I declare to you I never saw a better specimen of gross animal health.
+She--no, he (on second thoughts, I won't say which)--was at an evening
+party, laughing boisterously, with a plate of chicken-salad in one hand
+and a glass of champagne in the other.
+
+One of my first admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me
+with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years
+before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of
+poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by
+writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,--the
+few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the
+result of excitement,--and why should he apply to me? O, there was a
+great deal of poetry in my prose, he said. My didactic paper called
+"Wait for the Wagon!" showed such a knowledge of metaphor! I looked over
+the innumerable leaves, here and there venturing the remark that "rain"
+and "shame" were not good rhymes, and that my friend's blank verse had
+now and then lines of four and six feet. "Poetic license, sir!" was the
+reply. "I thought you were aware that poets are bound to no rules!"
+
+What could I do with such a man? What, indeed, but to return him the
+manuscript with that combined gentleness and grace which I have
+endeavored to cultivate in my demeanor, and to suggest, in the tenderest
+way, that he should be content to write, and not publish? He got up,
+stiffened his backbone, placed his conventional hat hard upon his head,
+gave a look of mingled mortification and wrath, and hurried away without
+saying a word. That man, I assure you, will be my secret enemy to the
+day of his death. He is no doubt a literary authority in a small circle
+of equal calibre. When my name is mentioned, he will sneer down my
+rising fame, and his sneer will control the sale of half a dozen copies
+of my last volume.
+
+This is a business view of the subject, I grant; but then _I_ have
+always followed literature with an eye to business. The position of a
+popular writer is much more independent than that of a teacher or a
+clergyman, for which reason I prefer it. The same amount of intellect,
+made available in a different way, will produce material results just as
+satisfactory. Compensation, however, is the law of the world; hence I
+must pay for my independence; and this adventure with the old gentleman
+is one of the many forms in which the payment is made.
+
+When the applications for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I
+gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon
+an oracular sentence from one of my most popular papers. After a while
+my replies degenerated to "Sincerely, Your Friend, Dionysius Green," and
+finally, (daily blessings come at last to be disregarded,) no
+application was favored, which did not enclose a postage-stamp. When
+some school-boy requested an autograph, "accompanied with a sentiment,"
+and forwarded slips of paper on behalf of "two other boys," I sometimes
+lost my patience, and left the letters unanswered for a month at a
+time. There was a man in Tennessee, just before the war, who had a
+printed circular, with a blank for the author's name; and I know of one
+author who replied to him with a printed note, and a printed address on
+the envelope, not a word of manuscript about it!
+
+Next in frequency are the applications for private literary
+contributions,--such as epithalamia, obituaries, addresses for lovers,
+and the like. One mourning father wished me to write an article about
+the death of his little girl, aged four months, assuring me that "her
+intellect was the astonishment of all who knew her." A young lady wished
+for something that would "overwhelm with remorse the heart of a
+gentleman who had broken off an engagement without any cause." A young
+gentleman, about to graduate, offered five dollars for an oration on
+"The Past and Probable Future History of the Human Race," long enough to
+occupy twenty minutes in speaking, and "to be made very fine and
+flowery." (I had a mind to punish this youth by complying with his
+request, to the very letter!) It is difficult to say what people won't
+write about, when they write to a Distinguished Character.
+
+There is a third class of correspondents, whose requests used to
+astonish me profoundly, until I surmised that their object was to
+procure an autograph in a roundabout way. One wants to know who is the
+publisher of your book; one, whether you can give the post-office
+address of Gordon Cumming or Thomas Carlyle; one, which is the best
+Latin Grammar; one, whether you know the author of that exquisite poem,
+"The Isle of Tears"; and one, perhaps, whether Fanny Forrester was the
+grandmother of Fanny Fern. And when you consider that what letters I get
+are not a tithe of what older and more widely known authors receive, you
+may form some idea of the immense number of persons engaged in this sort
+of correspondence.
+
+But I have not yet come to the worst. So long as you live at home,
+whether it's in the city or country, (the city would be preferable, if
+you could keep your name out of the Directory,) the number of applicants
+in person is limited; and as for the letters, we know that the
+post-office department is very badly managed, and a great many epistles
+never reach their destination. Besides, it's astonishing how soon and
+how easily an author acquires the reputation of being unapproachable. If
+he don't pour out his heart, in unlimited torrents and cascades of
+feeling, to a curious stranger, the latter goes away with the report
+that the author, personally, is "icy, reserved, uncommunicative; in the
+man, one sees nothing of his works; it is difficult to believe that that
+cold, forbidding brow conceived, those rigid, unsmiling lips uttered,
+and that dry, bloodless hand wrote, the fervid passion of"--such or such
+a book. When I read a description of myself, written in that style, I
+was furious; but I afterwards noticed that the number of my visitors
+fell off very rapidly.
+
+Most of us American authors, however, now go to the people, instead of
+waiting for them to come to us. And this is what I mean by coming to the
+worst. Four or five years ago, I determined to talk as well as write.
+Everybody was doing it, and well paid; nothing seemed to be requisite
+except a little distinction, which I had already acquired by my comic
+and didactic writings. There was Mr. E---- declaiming philosophy; Drs.
+B---- and C---- occupying secular pulpits; Mr. C---- inculcating loftier
+politics; Mr. T---- talking about all sorts of countries and people; Mr.
+W---- reading his essays in public; and a great many more, whom you all
+know. Why should I not also "pursue the triumph and partake the gale"? I
+found that the lecture was in most cases an essay, written in short,
+pointed sentences, and pleasantly delivered. The audience must laugh
+occasionally, and yet receive an impression strong enough to last until
+next morning. The style which, as I said before, I claim to have
+invented, was the very thing! I noticed, further, that there was a
+great deal in the title of the lecture. It must be alliterative,
+antithetical, or, still better, paradoxical. There was profound skill in
+Artemus Ward's "Babes in the Wood." Such titles as "Doubts and Duties,"
+"Mystery and Muffins," "Here, There, and Nowhere," "The Elegance of
+Evil," "Sunshine and Shrapnel," "The Coming Cloud," "The Averted Agony,"
+and "Peeps at Peccadillos," will explain my meaning. The latter, in
+fact, was the actual title of my first lecture, which I gave with such
+signal success,--eighty-five times in one winter.
+
+The crowds that everywhere thronged to hear me gave me a new and
+delicious experience of popularity. How grand it was to be escorted by
+the president of the society down the central aisle, amid the rustling
+sound of turning heads, and audible whispers of "There he is! there he
+is!" And always, when the name of Dionysius Green was announced, the
+applause which followed! Then the hush of expectation, the faint smile
+and murmur coming with my first unexpected flash of humor
+(_unexpectedness_ is one of my strong points), the broad laugh breaking
+out just where I intended it, and finally the solemn peroration, which
+showed that I possessed depth and earnestness as well as brilliancy!
+Well, I must say that the applauses and the fees were honestly earned. I
+did my best, and the audiences must have been satisfied, or the
+societies wouldn't have invited me over and over again to the same
+place.
+
+If my literary style was so admirably adapted to this new vocation, it
+was, on the other hand, a source of great annoyance. Only a small class
+was sufficiently enlightened to comprehend my true aim in inculcating
+moral lessons under a partly humorous guise. All the rest,
+unfortunately, took me to be either one thing or the other. While some
+invited me to family prayer-meetings, as the most cheering and welcome
+relief after the fatigue of speaking, the rougher characters of the
+place would claim me (on the strength of my earlier writings) as one of
+themselves, would slap me on the back, call me familiarly "Dionysius,"
+and insist on my drinking with them. Others, again, occupied a middle or
+doubtful ground; they did not consider that my personal views were
+strictly defined, and wanted to be enlightened on this or that point of
+faith. They gave me a deal of trouble. Singularly enough, all these
+classes began their attacks with the same phrase, "O, we have a right to
+ask it of you: you're a Distinguished Character, you know!"
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that I am of rather a frail constitution:
+so many persons have seen me, that the public is generally aware of the
+fact. A lecture of an hour and a quarter quite exhausts my nervous
+energy. Moreover, it gives me a vigorous appetite, and my two
+overpowering desires, after speaking, are, first to eat, and then to
+sleep. But it frequently happens that I am carried, perforce, to the
+house of some good but ascetic gentleman, who gives me a glass of cold
+water, talks until midnight, and then delivers me, more dead than alive,
+to my bed. I am so sensitive in regard to the relation of guest and host
+that I can do naught but submit. Astræa, I am told, always asks for what
+she wants, and does what she feels inclined to do,--indeed, why
+shouldn't she?--but I am cast in a more timid mould.
+
+There are some small country places which I visit where I have other
+sufferings to undergo. Being a Distinguished Character, it would be a
+neglect and a slight if I were left alone for two minutes. And the
+people seem to think that the most delightful topic of conversation
+which they can select is--myself. How weary of myself I become! I have
+wished, a thousand times, that my popular work, "The Tin Trumpet," had
+never been written. I cannot blame the people, because there are ----
+and ----, who like nothing better than to be talked about to their
+faces, and to take the principal part in the conversation. Of course the
+people think, in regard to lecturers, _ex uno disce omnes_.
+
+In travelling by rail, the same thing happens over and over. When I
+leave a town in the morning, some one is sure to enter the car and greet
+me in a loud voice: "How are you, Mr. Green? What a fine lecture you
+gave us last night!" Then the other travellers turn and look at me,
+listen to catch my words, and tell the new-comers at every station,
+until I'm afraid to take a nap for fear of snoring, afraid to read lest
+somebody should be scandalized at my novel, or to lunch lest I should be
+reported as a drunkard for taking a sip of sherry (the physician
+prescribes it) from a pocket-flask. At such times I envy the fellow in
+homespun on the seat in front of me, who loafs, yawns, eats, and drinks
+as he pleases, and nobody gives him a second glance.
+
+When I am not recognized, I sometimes meet with another experience,
+which was a little annoying until I became accustomed to it. I am the
+subject of very unembarrassed conversation, and hear things said of me
+that sometimes flatter and sometimes sting. It is true that I have
+learned many curious and unsuspected facts concerning my birth,
+parentage, history, and opinions; but, on the other hand, I am
+humiliated by the knowledge of what texture a great deal of my
+reputation is made. Sometimes I am even confounded with Graves, whom, as
+an author, I detest; my "Tin Trumpet" being ascribed to him, and his
+"Drippings from the Living Rock" being admired as mine! At such times,
+it is very difficult to preserve my incognito. I have wondered that
+nobody ever reads the truth in my indignant face.
+
+As a consequence of all these trials, I sometimes become impatient,
+inaccessible to compliment, and--since the truth must be told--a little
+ill-tempered. My temperament, as my family and friends know, is of an
+unusually genial and amiable quality, and I never snub an innocent but
+indiscreet admirer without afterwards repenting of my rudeness. I have
+often, indeed, a double motive for repentance; for those snubs carry
+their operation far beyond their recipients, and come back to me
+sometimes, after months or even years, in "Book Notices," or other
+newspaper articles. Thus the serene path of literature, which the
+aspiring youth imagines to be so fair and sunny, overspread with the
+mellowest ideal tints, becomes rough and cloudy. No doubt I am to blame:
+possibly I am rightly treated: I "belong to the public," I am told with
+endless congratulatory iteration, and therefore I ought not to feel the
+difference between the public's original humoring of my moods, and my
+present enforced humoring of its moods. But I _do_ feel it, somehow. I
+have of late entertained the suspicion, that I am not wholly the
+creation of popular favor. "The public," I am sure, never furnished me
+with my comic or my lively-serious vein of writing. If either of those
+veins had not been found good, they would not have encouraged me to work
+them. I declare, boldly, that I give an ample return for what I get, and
+when I satisfy curiosity or yield to unreasonable demands upon my
+patience and good-humor, it is "to boot."
+
+Nevertheless, it is a generous public, on the whole, and gives trouble
+only through thoughtlessness, not malice. It delights in its favorites,
+because imagining that they so intensely enjoy its favor. And don't we,
+after all? (I say _we_ purposely, and my publisher will tell you why.)
+Now that I have written away my vexation, I recognize very clearly that
+my object in writing this article is apology rather than complaint. All
+whom I have ever rudely treated will now comprehend the unfortunate
+circumstances under which the act occurred. If some one should visit me
+to-morrow, I have no doubt he will write: "Mr. Dionysius Green is all,
+and more than all, one would anticipate from reading his charming works.
+Benevolence beams from his brow, fancy sparkles from his eyes, and
+genial sympathy with all mankind sits enthroned upon his lips. It was a
+rare pleasure to me to listen to his conversation, and I could but wish
+that the many thousands of his admirers might enjoy the privilege of an
+interview with so Distinguished a Character!"
+
+
+
+
+THE BOBOLINKS.
+
+
+    When Nature had made all her birds,
+      And had no cares to think on,
+    She gave a rippling laugh--and out
+      There flew a Bobolinkon.
+
+    She laughed again,--out flew a mate.
+      A breeze of Eden bore them
+    Across the fields of Paradise,
+      The sunrise reddening o'er them.
+
+    Incarnate sport and holiday,
+      They flew and sang forever;
+    Their souls through June were all in tune,
+      Their wings were weary never.
+
+    The blithest song of breezy farms,
+      Quaintest of field-note flavors,
+    Exhaustless fount of trembling trills
+      And demisemiquavers.
+
+    Their tribe, still drunk with air and light
+      And perfume of the meadow,
+    Go reeling up and down the sky,
+      In sunshine and in shadow.
+
+    One springs from out the dew-wet grass,
+      Another follows after;
+    The morn is thrilling with their songs
+      And peals of fairy laughter.
+
+    From out the marshes and the brook,
+      They set the tall reeds swinging,
+    And meet and frolic in the air,
+      Half prattling and half singing.
+
+    When morning winds sweep meadow lands
+      In green and russet billows,
+    And toss the lonely elm-tree's boughs,
+      And silver all the willows,
+
+    I see you buffeting the breeze,
+      Or with its motion swaying,
+    Your notes half drowned against the wind,
+      Or down the current playing.
+
+    When far away o'er grassy flats,
+      Where the thick wood commences,
+    The white-sleeved mowers look like specks
+      Beyond the zigzag fences,
+
+    And noon is hot, and barn-roofs gleam
+      White in the pale-blue distance,
+    I hear the saucy minstrels still
+      In chattering persistence.
+
+    When Eve her domes of opal fire
+      Piles round the blue horizon,
+    Or thunder rolls from hill to hill
+      A Kyrie Eleison,--
+
+    Still, merriest of the merry birds,
+      Your sparkle is unfading,--
+    Pied harlequins of June, no end
+      Of song and masquerading.
+
+    What cadences of bubbling mirth
+      Too quick for bar or rhythm!
+    What ecstasies, too full to keep
+      Coherent measure with them!
+
+    O could I share, without champagne
+      Or muscadel, your frolic,
+    The glad delirium of your joy,
+      Your fun un-apostolic,
+
+    Your drunken jargon through the fields,
+      Your bobolinkish gabble,
+    Your fine anacreontic glee,
+      Your tipsy reveller's babble!
+
+    Nay,--let me not profane such joy
+      With similes of folly,--
+    No wine of earth could waken songs
+      So delicately jolly!
+
+    O boundless self-contentment, voiced
+      In flying air-born bubbles!
+    O joy that mocks our sad unrest,
+      And drowns our earth-born troubles!
+
+    Hope springs with you: I dread no more
+      Despondency and dullness;
+    For Good Supreme can never fail
+      That gives such perfect fullness.
+
+    The Life that floods the happy fields
+      With song and light and color
+    Will shape our lives to richer states,
+      And heap our measures fuller.
+
+
+
+
+GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+She recoiled with a violent shudder at first; and hid her face with one
+hand. Then she gradually stole a horror-stricken side-glance.
+
+She had not looked at it a moment, when she uttered a loud cry, and
+pointed at its feet with quivering hand.
+
+"THE SHOES! THE SHOES!--IT IS NOT MY GRIFFITH."
+
+With this she fell into violent hysterics, and was carried out of the
+room at Houseman's earnest entreaty.
+
+As soon as she was gone, Mr. Houseman, being freed from his fear that
+his client would commit herself irretrievably, recovered a show of
+composure, and his wits went keenly to work.
+
+"On behalf of the accused," said he, "I admit the suicide of some person
+unknown, wearing heavy hobnailed shoes; probably one of the lower order
+of people."
+
+This adroit remark produced some little effect, notwithstanding the
+strong feeling against the accused.
+
+The coroner inquired if there were any bodily marks by which the remains
+could be identified.
+
+"My master had a long black mole on his forehead," suggested Caroline
+Ryder.
+
+"'Tis here!" cried a juryman, bending over the remains.
+
+And now they all gathered in great excitement round the _corpus
+delicti_; and there, sure enough, was a long black mole.
+
+Then was there a buzz of pity for Griffith Gaunt, followed by a stern
+murmur of execration.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the coroner solemnly, "behold in this the finger of
+Heaven. The poor gentleman may well have put off his boots, since, it
+seems, he left his horse; but he could not take from his forehead his
+natal sign; and that, by God's will, hath strangely escaped mutilation,
+and revealed a most foul deed. We must now do our duty, gentlemen,
+without respect of persons."
+
+A warrant was then issued for the apprehension of Thomas Leicester. And,
+that same night, Mrs. Gaunt left Hernshaw in her own chariot between two
+constables, and escorted by armed yeomen.
+
+Her proud head was bowed almost to her knees, and her streaming eyes
+hidden in her lovely hands. For why? A mob accompanied her for miles,
+shouting, "Murderess!--Bloody Papist!--Hast done to death the kindliest
+gentleman in Cumberland. We'll all come to see thee hanged.--Fair face
+but foul heart!"--and groaning, hissing, and cursing, and indeed only
+kept from violence by the escort.
+
+And so they took that poor proud lady and lodged her in Carlisle jail.
+
+She was _enceinte_ into the bargain. By the man she was to be hanged for
+murdering.
+
+
+CHAPTER XL.
+
+The county was against her, with some few exceptions. Sir George Neville
+and Mr. Houseman stood stoutly by her.
+
+Sir George's influence and money obtained her certain comforts in jail;
+and, in that day, the law of England was so far respected in a jail that
+untried prisoners were not thrown into cells, nor impeded, as they now
+are, in preparing their defence.
+
+Her two stanch friends visited her every day, and tried to keep her
+heart up.
+
+But they could not do it. She was in a state of dejection bordering upon
+lethargy.
+
+"If he is dead," said she, "what matters it? If, by God's mercy, he is
+alive still, he will not let me die for want of a word from him.
+Impatience hath been my bane. Now, I say, God's will be done. I am
+weary of the world."
+
+Houseman tried every argument to rouse her out of this desperate frame
+of mind; but in vain.
+
+It ran its course, and then, behold, it passed away like a cloud, and
+there came a keen desire to live and defeat her accusers.
+
+She made Houseman write out all the evidence against her; and she
+studied it by day, and thought of it by night, and often surprised both
+her friends by the acuteness of her remarks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Atkins discontinued his advertisements. It was Houseman, who now
+filled every paper with notices informing Griffith Gaunt of his
+accession to fortune, and entreating him for that, and other weighty
+reasons, to communicate in confidence with his old friend, John
+Houseman, attorney at law.
+
+Houseman was too wary to invite him to appear and save his wife; for, in
+that case, he feared the Crown would use his advertisements as evidence
+at the trial, should Griffith not appear.
+
+The fact is, Houseman relied more upon certain _lacunæ_ in the evidence,
+and the absence of all marks of violence, than upon any hope that
+Griffith might be alive.
+
+The assizes drew near, and no fresh light broke in upon this mysterious
+case.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt lay in her bed at night, and thought and thought.
+
+Now the female understanding has sometimes remarkable power under such
+circumstances. By degrees Truth flashes across it, like lightning in the
+dark.
+
+After many such nightly meditations, Mrs. Gaunt sent one day for Sir
+George Neville and Mr. Houseman, and addressed them as follows:--"I
+believe he is alive, and that I can guess where he is at this moment."
+
+Both the gentlemen started, and looked amazed.
+
+"Yes, sirs; so sure as we sit here, he is now at a little inn in
+Lancashire, called the 'Packhorse,' with a woman he calls his wife."
+And, with this, her face was scarlet, and her eyes flashed their old
+fire.
+
+She exacted a solemn promise of secrecy from them, and then she told
+them all she had learned from Thomas Leicester.
+
+"And so now," said she, "I believe you can save my life, if you think it
+is worth saving." And with this, she began to cry bitterly.
+
+But Houseman, the practical, had no patience with the pangs of love
+betrayed, and jealousy, and such small deer, in a client whose life was
+at stake. "Great Heaven! madam," said he, roughly: "why did you not tell
+me this before?"
+
+"Because I am not a man--to go and tell everything, all at once," sobbed
+Mrs. Gaunt. "Besides, I wanted to shield his good name, whose dear life
+they pretend I have taken."
+
+As soon as she recovered her composure, she begged Sir George Neville to
+ride to the "Packhorse" for her. Sir George assented eagerly, but asked
+how he was to find it. "I have thought of that, too," said she. "His
+black horse has been to and fro. Ride that horse into Lancashire, and
+give him his head: ten to one but he takes you to the place, or where
+you may hear of it. If not, go to Lancaster, and ask about the
+'Packhorse.' He wrote to me from Lancaster: see." And she showed him the
+letter.
+
+Sir George embraced with ardor this opportunity of serving her. "I'll be
+at Hernshaw in one hour," said he, "and ride the black horse south at
+once."
+
+"Excuse me," said Houseman; "but would it not be better for me to go? As
+a lawyer, I may be more able to cope with her."
+
+"Nay," said Mrs. Gaunt, "Sir George is young and handsome. If he manages
+well, she will tell him more than she will you. All I beg of him is to
+drop the chevalier for this once, and see women with a woman's eyes and
+not a man's,--see them as they are. Do not go telling a creature of
+this kind that she has had my money, as well as my husband, and ought to
+pity me lying here in prison. Keep me out of her sight as much as you
+can. Whether Griffith hath deceived her or not, you will never raise in
+her any feeling but love for him, and hatred for his lawful wife. Dress
+like a yeoman; go quietly, and lodge in the house a day or two; begin by
+flattering her; and then get from her when she saw him last, or heard
+from him. But indeed I fear you will surprise him with her."
+
+"Fear?" exclaimed Sir George.
+
+"Well, hope, then," said the lady; and a tear trickled down her face in
+a moment. "But if you do, promise me, on your honor as a gentleman, not
+to affront him. For I know you think him a villain."
+
+"A d----d villain, saving your presence."
+
+"Well, sir, you have said it to me. Now promise me to say naught to
+_him_, but just this: 'Rose Gaunt's mother, she lies in Carlisle jail,
+to be tried for her life for murdering you. She begs of you not to let
+her die publicly upon the scaffold; but quietly at home, of her broken
+heart.'"
+
+"Write it," said Sir George, with the tears in his eyes, "that I may
+just put it in his hand; for I can never utter your sweet words to such
+a monster as he is."
+
+Armed with this appeal, and several minute instructions, which it is
+needless to particularize here, that stanch friend rode into Lancashire.
+
+And next day the black horse justified his mistress's sagacity, and his
+own.
+
+He seemed all along to know where he was going, and late in the
+afternoon he turned off the road on to a piece of green: and Sir George,
+with beating heart, saw right before him the sign of the "Packhorse,"
+and, on coming nearer, the words
+
+    THOMAS LEICESTER.
+
+He dismounted at the door, and asked if he could have a bed.
+
+Mrs. Vint said yes; and supper into the bargain, if he liked.
+
+He ordered a substantial supper directly.
+
+Mrs. Vint saw at once it was a good customer, and showed him into the
+parlor.
+
+He sat down by the fire. But the moment she retired, he got up and made
+a circuit of the house, looking quietly into every window, to see if he
+could catch a glance of Griffith Gaunt.
+
+There were no signs of him; and Sir George returned to his parlor
+heavy-hearted. One hope, the greatest of all, had been defeated
+directly. Still, it was just possible that Griffith might be away on
+temporary business.
+
+In this faint hope Sir George strolled about till his supper was ready
+for him.
+
+When he had eaten his supper, he rang the bell, and, taking advantage of
+a common custom, insisted on the landlord, Thomas Leicester, taking a
+glass with him.
+
+"Thomas Leicester!" said the girl. "He is not at home. But I'll send
+Master Vint."
+
+Old Vint came in, and readily accepted an invitation to drink his
+guest's health.
+
+Sir George found him loquacious, and soon extracted from him that his
+daughter Mercy was Leicester's wife, that Leicester was gone on a
+journey, and that Mercy was in care for him. "Leastways," said he, "she
+is very dull, and cries at times when her mother speaks of him; but she
+is too close to say much."
+
+All this puzzled Sir George Neville sorely.
+
+But greater surprises were in store.
+
+The next morning, after breakfast, the servant came and told him Dame
+Leicester desired to see him.
+
+He started at that, but put on nonchalance, and said he was at her
+service.
+
+He was ushered into another parlor, and there he found a grave, comely
+young woman, seated working, with a child on the floor beside her. She
+rose quietly; he bowed low and respectfully; she blushed faintly; but,
+with every appearance of self-possession, courtesied to him; then eyed
+him point-blank a single moment, and requested him to be seated.
+
+"I hear, sir," said she, "you did ask my father many questions last
+night. May I ask you one?"
+
+Sir George colored, but bowed assent.
+
+"From whom had you the black horse you ride?"
+
+Now, if Sir George had not been a veracious man, he would have been
+caught directly. But, although he saw at once the oversight he had
+committed, he replied, "I had him of a lady in Cumberland, one Mistress
+Gaunt."
+
+Mercy Vint trembled. "No doubt," said she, softly. "Excuse my question:
+you shall understand that the horse is well known here."
+
+"Madam," said Sir George, "if you admire the horse, he is at your
+service for twenty pounds, though indeed he is worth more."
+
+"I thank you, sir," said Mercy; "I have no desire for the horse
+whatever. And be pleased to excuse my curiosity: you must think me
+impertinent."
+
+"Nay, madam," said Sir George, "I consider nothing impertinent that hath
+procured me the pleasure of an interview with you."
+
+He then, as directed by Mrs. Gaunt, proceeded to flatter the mother and
+the child, and exerted those powers of pleasing which had made him
+irresistible in society.
+
+Here, however, he found they went a very little way. Mercy did not even
+smile. She cast out of her dove-like eyes a gentle, humble, reproachful
+glance, as much as to say, "What! do I seem so vain a creature as to
+believe all this?"
+
+Sir George himself had tact and sensibility; and by and by became
+discontented with the part he was playing, under those meek, honest
+eyes.
+
+There was a pause; and, as her sex have a wonderful art of reading the
+face, Mercy looked at him steadily, and said, "_Yes_, sir, 'tis best to
+be straightforward, especially with women-folk."
+
+Before he could recover this little facer, she said, quietly, "What is
+your name?"
+
+"George Neville."
+
+"Well, George Neville," said Mercy, very slowly and softly, "when you
+have a mind to tell me what you came here for, and who sent you, you
+will find me in this little room. I seldom leave it now. I beg you to
+speak your errand to none but me." And she sighed deeply.
+
+Sir George bowed low, and retired to collect his wits. He had come here
+strongly prepossessed against Mercy. But, instead of a vulgar, shallow
+woman, whom he was to surprise into confession, he encountered a
+soft-eyed Puritan, all unpretending dignity, grace, propriety, and
+sagacity.
+
+"Flatter her!" said he, to himself. "I might as well flatter an iceberg.
+Outwit her! I feel like a child beside her."
+
+He strolled about in a brown study, not knowing what to do.
+
+She had given him a fair opening. She had invited him to tell the truth.
+But he was afraid to take her at her word; and yet what was the use to
+persist in what his own eyes told him was the wrong course?
+
+Whilst he hesitated, and debated within himself, a trifling incident
+turned the scale.
+
+A poor woman came begging, with her child, and was received rather
+roughly by Harry Vint. "Pass on, good woman," said he, "we want no
+tramps here."
+
+Then a window was opened on the ground floor, and Mercy beckoned the
+woman. Sir George flattened himself against the wall, and listened to
+the two talking.
+
+Mercy examined the woman gently, but shrewdly, and elicited a tale of
+genuine distress. Sir George then saw her hand out to the woman some
+warm flannel for herself, a piece of stuff for the child, a large piece
+of bread, and a sixpence.
+
+He also caught sight of Mercy's dove-like eyes as she bestowed her alms,
+and they were lit with an inward lustre.
+
+"She cannot be an ill woman," said Sir George. "I'll e'en go by my own
+eyes and judgment. After all, Mrs. Gaunt has never seen her, and I
+have."
+
+He went and knocked at Mercy's door.
+
+"Come in," said a mild voice.
+
+Neville entered, and said, abruptly, and with great emotion, "Madam, I
+see you can feel for the unhappy; so I take my own way now, and appeal
+to your pity. I _have_ come to speak to you on the saddest business."
+
+"You come from _him_," said Mercy, closing her lips tight; but her bosom
+heaved. Her heart and her judgment grappled like wrestlers that moment.
+
+"Nay, madam," said Sir George, "I come from _her_."
+
+Mercy knew in a moment who "her" must be.
+
+She looked scared, and drew back with manifest signs of repulsion.
+
+The movement did not escape Sir George: it alarmed him. He remembered
+what Mrs. Gaunt had said,--that this woman would be sure to hate Gaunt's
+lawful wife. But it was too late to go back. He did the next best thing,
+he rushed on.
+
+He threw himself on his knees before Mercy Vint.
+
+"O madam," he cried, piteously, "do not set your heart against the most
+unhappy lady in England. If you did but know her, her nobleness, her
+misery! Before you steel yourself against me, her friend, let me ask you
+one question. Do you know where Mrs. Gaunt is at this moment?"
+
+Mercy answered coldly, "How should I know where she is?"
+
+"Well, then, she lies in Carlisle jail."
+
+"She--lies--in Carlisle jail?" repeated Mercy, looking all confused.
+
+"They accuse her of murdering her husband."
+
+Mercy uttered a scream, and, catching her child up off the floor, began
+to rock herself and moan over it.
+
+"No, no, no," cried Sir George, "she is innocent, she is innocent."
+
+"What is that to _me_?" cried Mercy, wildly. "He is murdered, he is
+dead, and my child an orphan." And so she went on moaning and rocking
+herself.
+
+"But I tell you he is not dead at all," cried Sir George. "'Tis all a
+mistake. When did you see him last?"
+
+"More than six weeks ago."
+
+"I mean, when did you hear from him last?"
+
+"Never, since that day."
+
+Sir George groaned aloud at this intelligence.
+
+And Mercy, who heard him groan, was heart-broken. She accused herself of
+Griffith's death. "'T was I who drove him from me," she said. "'T was I
+who bade him go back to his lawful wife; and the wretch hated him. I
+sent him to his death." Her grief was wild, and deep. She could not hear
+Sir George's arguments.
+
+But presently she said, sternly, "What does that woman say for herself?"
+
+"Madam," said Sir George, dejectedly, "Heaven knows you are in no
+condition to fathom a mystery that hath puzzled wiser heads than yours
+or mine; and I am little able to lay the tale before you fairly; for
+your grief, it moves me deeply, and I could curse myself for putting the
+matter to you so bluntly and so uncouthly. Permit me to retire a while
+and compose my own spirits for the task I have undertaken too rashly."
+
+"Nay, George Neville," said Mercy, "stay you there. Only give me a
+moment to draw my breath."
+
+She struggled hard for a little composure, and, after a shower of tears,
+she hung her head over the chair like a crushed thing, but made him a
+sign of attention.
+
+Sir George told the story as fairly as he could; only of course his bias
+was in favor of Mrs. Gaunt; but as Mercy's bias was against her, this
+brought the thing nearly square.
+
+When he came to the finding of the body, Mercy was seized with a deadly
+faintness; and though she did not become insensible, yet she was in no
+condition to judge, or even to comprehend.
+
+Sir George was moved with pity, and would have called for help; but she
+shook her head. So then he sprinkled water on her face, and slapped her
+hand; and a beautifully moulded hand it was.
+
+When she got a little better she sobbed faintly, and sobbing thanked
+him, and begged him to go on.
+
+"My mind is stronger than my heart," she said. "I'll hear it all, though
+it kill me where I sit."
+
+Sir George went on, and, to avoid repetition, I must ask the reader to
+understand that he left out nothing whatever which has been hitherto
+related in these pages; and, in fact, told her one or two little things
+that I have omitted.
+
+When he had done, she sat quite still a minute or two, pale as a statue.
+
+Then she turned to Neville, and said, solemnly, "You wish to know the
+truth in this dark matter: for dark it is in very sooth."
+
+Neville was much impressed by her manner, and answered, respectfully,
+Yes, he desired to know,--by all means.
+
+"Then take my hand," said Mercy, "and kneel down with me."
+
+Sir George looked surprised, but obeyed, and kneeled down beside her,
+with his hand in hers.
+
+There was a long pause, and then took place a transformation.
+
+The dove-like eyes were lifted to heaven and gleamed like opals with an
+inward and celestial light; the comely face shone with a higher beauty,
+and the rich voice rose in ardent supplication.
+
+"Thou God, to whom all hearts be known, and no secrets hid from thine
+eye, look down now on thy servant in sore trouble, that putteth her
+trust in thee. Give wisdom to the simple this day, and understanding to
+the lowly. Thou that didst reveal to babes and sucklings the great
+things that were hidden from the wise, O show us the truth in this dark
+matter: enlighten us by thy spirit, for His dear sake who suffered more
+sorrows than I suffer now. Amen. Amen."
+
+Then she looked at Neville; and he said "Amen," with all his heart, and
+the tears in his eyes.
+
+He had never heard real live prayer before. Here the little hand gripped
+his hard, as she wrestled; and the heart seemed to rise out of the bosom
+and fly to Heaven on the sublime and thrilling voice.
+
+They rose, and she sat down; but it seemed as if her eyes once raised to
+Heaven in prayer could not come down again: they remained fixed and
+angelic, and her lips still moved in supplication.
+
+Sir George Neville, though a loose liver, was no scoffer. He was smitten
+with reverence for this inspired countenance, and retired, bowing low
+and obsequiously.
+
+He took a long walk, and thought it all over. One thing was clear, and
+consoling. He felt sure he had done wisely to disobey Mrs. Gaunt's
+instructions, and make a friend of Mercy, instead of trying to set his
+wits against hers. Ere he returned to the "Packhorse" he had determined
+to take another step in the right direction. He did not like to agitate
+her with another interview, so soon. But he wrote her a little letter.
+
+     "MADAM,--When I came here, I did not know you; and therefore I
+     feared to trust you too far. But, now I do know you for the
+     best woman in England, I take the open way with you.
+
+     "Know that Mrs. Gaunt said the man would be here with you; and
+     she charged me with a few written lines to him. She would be
+     angry if she knew that I had shown them to any other. Yet I
+     take on me to show them to you; for I believe you are wiser
+     than any of us, if the truth were known. I do therefore entreat
+     you to read these lines, and tell me whether you think the hand
+     that wrote them can have shed the blood of him to whom they are
+     writ.
+
+    "I am, madam, with profound respect,
+
+        "Your grateful and very humble servant,
+
+            "GEORGE NEVILLE."
+
+He very soon received a line in reply, written in a clear and beautiful
+handwriting.
+
+     "Mercy Vint sends you her duty; and she will speak to you at
+     nine of the clock to-morrow morning. Pray for light."
+
+At the appointed time, Sir George found her working with her needle. His
+letter lay on a table before her.
+
+She rose and courtesied to him, and called the servant to take away the
+child for a while. She went with her to the door and kissed the bairn
+several times at parting, as if he was going away for good. "I'm loath
+to let him go," said she to Neville; "but it weakens a mother's mind to
+have her babe in the room,--takes her attention off each moment. Pray
+you be seated. Well, sir, I have read these lines of Mistress Gaunt, and
+wept over them. Methinks I had not done so, were they cunningly devised.
+Also I lay all night, and thought."
+
+"That is just what she does."
+
+"No doubt, sir; and the upshot is, I don't _feel_ as if he was dead.
+Thank God."
+
+"That is something," said Neville. But he could not help thinking it was
+very little; especially to produce in a court of justice.
+
+"And now," said she, thoughtfully, "you say that the real Thomas
+Leicester was seen thereabouts as well as my Thomas Leicester. Then
+answer me one little question. What had the real Thomas Leicester on his
+feet that night?"
+
+"Nay, I know not," was the half-careless reply.
+
+"Bethink you. 'Tis a question that must have been often put in your
+hearing."
+
+"Begging your pardon, it was never put at all; nor do I see--"
+
+"What, not at the inquest?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That is very strange. What, so many wise heads have bent over this
+riddle, and not one to ask how was yon pedler shod!"
+
+"Madam," said Sir George, "our minds were fixed upon the fate of Gaunt.
+Many did ask how was the pedler armed, but none how was he shod."
+
+"Hath he been seen since?"
+
+"Not he; and that hath an ugly look; for the constables are out after
+him with hue and cry; but he is not to be found."
+
+"Then," said Mercy, "I must e'en answer my own question. I do know how
+that pedler was shod. WITH HOBNAILED SHOES."
+
+Sir George bounded from his chair. One great ray of daylight broke in
+upon him.
+
+"Ay," said Mercy, "she was right. Women do see clearer in some things
+than men. The pair went from my house to hers. He you call Griffith
+Gaunt had on a new pair of boots; and by the same token 't was I did pay
+for them, and there is the receipt in that cupboard: he you call Thomas
+Leicester went hence in hobnailed shoes. I think the body they found was
+the body of Thomas Leicester, the pedler. May God have mercy on his poor
+unprepared soul."
+
+Sir George uttered a joyful exclamation. But the next moment he had a
+doubt. "Ay, but," said he, "you forget the mole! 'T was on that they
+built."
+
+"I forget naught," said Mercy, calmly. "The pedler had a black mole over
+his left temple. He showed it me in this very room. You have found the
+body of Thomas Leicester, and Griffith Gaunt is hiding from the law that
+he hath broken. He is afeared of her and her friends, if he shows his
+face in Cumberland; he is afeared of my folk, if he be seen in
+Lancashire. Ah, Thomas, as if I would let them harm thee."
+
+Sir George Neville walked to and fro in grand excitement. "O blessed day
+that I came hither! Madam, you are an angel. You will save an innocent,
+broken-hearted lady from death and dishonor. Your good heart and rare
+wit have read in a moment the dark riddle that hath puzzled a county."
+
+"George," said Mercy, gravely, "you have gotten the wrong end of the
+stick. The wise in their own conceit are blinded. In Cumberland, where
+all this befell, they went not to God for light, as you and I did,
+George."
+
+In saying this, she gave him her hand to celebrate their success.
+
+He kissed it devoutly, and owned afterward that it was the proudest
+moment of his life, when that sweet Puritan gave him her neat hand so
+cordially, with a pressure so gentle yet frank.
+
+And now came the question how they were to make a Cumberland jury see
+this matter as they saw it.
+
+He asked her would she come to the trial as a witness?
+
+At that she drew back with manifest repugnance.
+
+"My shame would be public. I must tell who I am; and what. A ruined
+woman."
+
+"Say rather an injured saint. You have nothing to be ashamed of. All
+good men would feel for you."
+
+Mercy shook her head. "Ay, but the women. Shame is shame with us. Right
+or wrong goes for little. Nay, I hope to do better for you than that. I
+must find _him_, and send him to deliver her. 'Tis his only chance of
+happiness."
+
+She then asked him if he would draw up an advertisement of quite a
+different kind from those he had described to her.
+
+He assented, and between them they concocted the following:--
+
+     "If Thomas Leicester, who went from the 'Packhorse' two months
+     ago, will come thither at once, Mercy will be much beholden to
+     him, and tell him strange things that have befallen."
+
+Sir George then, at her request, rode over to Lancaster, and inserted
+the above in the county paper, and also in a small sheet that was issued
+in the city three times a week. He had also handbills to the same effect
+printed, and sent into Cumberland and Westmoreland. Finally, he sent a
+copy to his man of business in London, with orders to insert it in all
+the journals.
+
+Then he returned to the "Packhorse," and told Mercy what he had done.
+
+The next day he bade her farewell, and away for Carlisle. It was a two
+days' journey. He reached Carlisle in the evening, and went all glowing
+to Mrs. Gaunt. "Madam," said he, "be of good cheer. I bless the day I
+went to see her; she is an angel of wit and goodness."
+
+He then related to her, in glowing terms, most that had passed between
+Mercy and him. But, to his surprise, Mrs. Gaunt wore a cold, forbidding
+air.
+
+"This is all very well," said she. "But 't will avail me little unless
+_he_ comes before the judge and clears me; and she will never let him do
+that."
+
+"Ay, that she will,--if she can find him."
+
+"If she can find him? How simple you are!"
+
+"Nay, madam, not so simple but I can tell a good woman from a bad one,
+and a true from a false."
+
+"What! when you are in love with her? Not if you were the wisest of your
+sex."
+
+"In love with her?" cried Sir George; and colored high.
+
+"Ay," said the lady. "Think you I cannot tell? Don't deceive yourself.
+You have gone and fallen in love with her. At your years! Not that 'tis
+any business of mine."
+
+"Well, madam," said Sir George, stiffly, "say what you please on that
+score; but at least welcome my good news."
+
+Mrs. Gaunt begged him to excuse her petulance, and thanked him kindly
+for all he had just done. But the next moment she rose from her chair in
+great agitation, and burst out, "I'd as lief die as owe anything to that
+woman."
+
+Sir George remonstrated. "Why hate her? She does not hate you."
+
+"O, yes, she does. 'Tis not in nature she should do any other."
+
+"Her acts prove the contrary."
+
+"Her acts! She has _done_ nothing, but make fair promises; and that has
+blinded you. Women of this sort are very cunning, and never show their
+real characters to a man. No more; prithee mention not her name to me.
+It makes me ill. I know he is with her at this moment Ah, let me die,
+and be forgotten, since I am no more beloved."
+
+The voice was sad and weary now, and the tears ran fast.
+
+Poor Sir George was moved and melted, and set himself to flatter and
+console this impracticable lady, who hated her best friend in this sore
+strait, for being what she was herself, a woman; and was much less
+annoyed at being hanged than at not being loved.
+
+When she was a little calmer, he left her, and rode off to Houseman.
+That worthy was delighted.
+
+"Get her to swear to those hobnailed shoes," said he, "and we shall
+shake them." He then let Sir George know that he had obtained private
+information which he would use in cross-examining a principal witness
+for the crown. "However," he added, "do not deceive yourself, nothing
+can make the prisoner really safe but the appearance of Griffith Gaunt.
+He has such strong motives for coming to light. He is heir to a fortune,
+and his wife is accused of murdering him. The jury will never believe he
+is alive till they see him. That man's prolonged disappearance is
+hideous. It turns my blood cold when I think of it."
+
+"Do not despair on that score," said Neville. "I believe our good angel
+will produce him."
+
+Three days only before the assizes, came the long-expected letter from
+Mercy Vint. Sir George tore it open, but bitter was his disappointment.
+The letter merely said that Griffith had not appeared in answer to her
+advertisements, and she was sore grieved and perplexed.
+
+There were two postscripts, each on a little piece of paper.
+
+First postscript, in a tremulous hand, "Pray."
+
+Second postscript, in a firm hand, "Drain the water."
+
+Houseman shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "Drain the water? Let the
+crown do that. We should but fish up more trouble. And prayers quo' she!
+'Tis not prayers we want, but evidence."
+
+He sent his clerk off to travel post night and day, and subpoena
+Mercy, and bring her back with him to the trial. She was to have every
+comfort on the road, and be treated like a duchess.
+
+The evening before the assizes, Mrs. Gaunt's apartments were Mr.
+Houseman's head-quarters, and messages were coming and going all day, on
+matters connected with the defence.
+
+Just at sunset, up rattled a post-chaise, and the clerk got out and came
+haggard and bloodshot before his employer. "The witness has disappeared,
+sir. Left home last Tuesday, with her child, and has never been seen nor
+heard of since."
+
+Here was a terrible blow. They all paled under it: it seriously
+diminished the chances of an acquittal.
+
+But Mrs. Gaunt bore it nobly. She seemed to rise under it.
+
+She turned to Sir George Neville, with a sweet smile. "The noble heart
+sees base things noble. No wonder then an artful woman deluded _you_. He
+has left England with her, and condemned me to the gallows, in cold
+blood. So be it. I shall defend myself."
+
+She then sat down with Mr. Houseman, and went through the written case
+he had prepared for her, and showed him notes she had taken of full a
+hundred criminal trials great and small.
+
+While they were putting their heads together, Sir George sat in a brown
+study, and uttered not a word. Presently he got up a little brusquely,
+and said, "I'm going to Hernshaw."
+
+"What, at this time of night? What to do?"
+
+"To obey my orders. To drain the mere."
+
+"And who could have ordered you to drain my mere?"
+
+"Mercy Vint."
+
+Sir George uttered this in a very curious way, half ashamed, half
+resolute, and retired before Mrs. Gaunt could vent in speech the
+surprise and indignation that fired her eye.
+
+Houseman implored her not to heed Sir George and his vagaries, but to
+bend her whole mind on those approved modes of defence with which he had
+supplied her.
+
+Being now alone with her, he no longer concealed his great anxiety.
+
+"We have lost an invaluable witness in that woman," said he. "I was mad
+to think she would come."
+
+Mrs. Gaunt shivered with repugnance. "I would not have her come, for all
+the world," said she. "For Heaven's sake never mention her name to me. I
+want help from none but friends. Send Mrs. Houseman to me in the
+morning; and do not distress yourself so. I shall defend myself far
+better than you think. I have not studied a hundred trials for naught."
+
+Thus the prisoner cheered up her attorney, and soon after insisted on
+his going home to bed; for she saw he was worn out by his exertions.
+
+And now she was alone.
+
+All was silent.
+
+A few short hours, and she was to be tried for her life: tried, not by
+the All-wise Judge, but by fallible men, and under a system most
+unfavorable to the accused.
+
+Worse than all this, she was a Papist; and, as ill-luck would have it,
+since her imprisonment an alarm had been raised that the Pretender
+meditated another invasion. This report had set jurists very much
+against all the Romanists in the country, and had already perverted
+justice in one or two cases, especially in the North.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt knew all this, and trembled at the peril to come.
+
+She spent the early part of the night in studying her defence. Then she
+laid it quite aside, and prayed long and fervently. Towards morning she
+fell asleep from exhaustion.
+
+When she awoke, Mrs. Houseman was sitting by her bedside, looking at
+her, and crying.
+
+They were soon clasped in each other's arms, condoling.
+
+But presently Houseman came, and took his wife away rather angrily.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt was prevailed on to eat a little toast and drink a glass of
+wine, and then she sat waiting her dreadful summons.
+
+She waited and waited, until she became impatient to face her danger.
+
+But there were two petty larcenies on before her. She had to wait.
+
+At last, about noon, came a message to say that the grand jury had found
+a true bill against her.
+
+"Then may God forgive them!" said she.
+
+Soon afterwards she was informed her time drew very near.
+
+She made her toilet carefully, and passed with her attendant into a
+small room under the court.
+
+Here she had to endure another chilling wait, and in a sombre room.
+
+Presently she heard a voice above her cry out, "The King _versus_
+Catharine Gaunt."
+
+Then she was beckoned to.
+
+She mounted some steps, badly lighted, and found herself in the glare of
+day, and greedy eyes, in the felon's dock.
+
+In a matter entirely strange, we seldom know beforehand what we can do,
+and how we shall carry ourselves. Mrs. Gaunt no sooner set her foot in
+that dock, and saw the awful front of Justice face to face, than her
+tremors abated, and all her powers awoke, and she thrilled with love of
+life, and bristled with all those fine arts of defence that Nature lends
+to superior women.
+
+She entered on that defence before she spoke a word; for she attacked
+the prejudices of the court, by deportment.
+
+She courtesied reverently to the Judge, and contrived to make her
+reverence seem a willing homage, unmixed with fear.
+
+She cast her eyes round and saw the court thronged with ladies and
+gentlemen she knew. In a moment she read in their eyes that only two or
+three were on her side. She bowed to those only; and they returned her
+courtesy. This gave an impression (a false one) that the gentry
+sympathized with her.
+
+After a little murmur of functionaries, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to
+the prisoner, and said, in a loud voice, "Catharine Gaunt, hold up thy
+hand."
+
+She held up her hand, and he recited the indictment, which charged that,
+not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being moved by the
+instigation of the Devil, she had on the fifteenth of October, in the
+tenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, aided and abetted one
+Thomas Leicester in an assault upon one Griffith Gaunt, Esq., and him,
+the said Griffith Gaunt, did with force and arms assassinate and do to
+death, against the peace of our said Lord the King, his crown and
+dignity.
+
+After reading the indictment, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to the
+prisoner: "How sayest thou, Catharine Gaunt; art thou guilty of the
+felony and murder whereof thou standest indicted,--or not guilty?"
+
+"I am not guilty."
+
+"Culprit, how wilt thou be tried?"
+
+"Culprit I am none, but only accused. I will be tried by God and my
+country."
+
+"God send thee a good deliverance."
+
+Mr. Whitworth, the junior counsel for the crown, then rose to open the
+case; but the prisoner, with a pale face, but most courteous demeanor,
+begged his leave to make a previous motion to the court. Mr. Whitworth
+bowed, and sat down. "My Lord," said she, "I have first a favor to ask;
+and that favor, methinks, you will grant, since it is but justice,
+impartial justice. My accuser, I hear, has two counsel; both learned and
+able. I am but a woman, and no match for their skill Therefore I beg
+your Lordship to allow me counsel on my defence, to matter of fact as
+well as of law. I know this is not usual; but it is just, and I am
+informed it has sometimes been granted in trials of life and death, and
+that your Lordship hath the _power_, if you have the _will_, to do me so
+much justice."
+
+The Judge looked towards Mr. Serjeant Wiltshire, who was the leader on
+the other side. He rose instantly and replied to this purpose: "The
+prisoner is misinformed. The truth is, that from time immemorial, and
+down to the other day, a person indicted for a capital offence was never
+allowed counsel at all, except to matters of law, and these must be
+started by himself. By recent practice the rule hath been so far relaxed
+that counsel have sometimes been permitted to examine and cross-examine
+witnesses for a prisoner; but never to make observations on the
+evidence, nor to draw inferences from it to the point in issue."
+
+_Mrs. Gaunt._ So, then, if I be sued for a small sum of money, I may
+have skilled orators to defend me against their like. But if I be sued
+for my life and honor, I may not oppose skill to skill, but must stand
+here a child against you that are masters. 'Tis a monstrous iniquity,
+and you yourself, sir, will not deny it.
+
+_Serjeant Wiltshire._ Madam, permit me. Whether it be a hardship to deny
+full counsel to prisoners in criminal cases, I shall not pretend to say;
+but if it be, 'tis a hardship of the law's making, and not of mine nor
+of my lord's; and none have suffered by it (at least in our day) but
+those who had broken the law.
+
+The Serjeant then stopped a minute, and whispered with his junior. After
+which he turned to the Judge. "My Lord, we that are of counsel for the
+crown desire to do nothing that is hard where a person's life is at
+stake. We yield to the prisoner any indulgence for which your Lordship
+can find a precedent in your reading; but no more: and so we leave the
+matter to you."
+
+_The Clerk of Arraigns._ Crier, proclaim silence.
+
+_The Crier._ Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! His Majesty's Justices do strictly charge
+all manner of persons to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.
+
+_The Judge._ Prisoner, what my Brother Wiltshire says, the law is clear
+in. There is no precedent for what you ask, and the contrary practice
+stares us in the face for centuries. What seems to you a partial
+practice, and, to be frank, some learned persons are of your mind, must
+be set against this,--that in capital cases the burden of proof lies on
+the crown, and not on the accused. Also it is my duty to give you all
+the assistance I can, and that I shall do. Thus then it is: you can be
+allowed counsel to examine your own witnesses, and cross-examine the
+witnesses for the crown, and speak to points of law, to be started by
+yourself,--but no further.
+
+He then asked her what gentleman there present he should assign to her
+for counsel.
+
+Her reply to this inquiry took the whole court by surprise, and made her
+solicitor, Houseman, very miserable. "None, my Lord," said she.
+"Half-justice is injustice; and I will lend it no color. I will not set
+able men to fight for me with their hands tied, against men as able
+whose hands be free. Counsel, on terms so partial, I will have none. My
+counsel shall be three, and no more,--Yourself, my Lord, my Innocence,
+and the Lord God Omniscient."
+
+These words, grandly uttered, caused a dead silence in the court, but
+only for a few moments. It was broken by the loud mechanical voice of
+the crier, who proclaimed silence, and then called the names of the jury
+that were to try this cause.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt listened keenly to the names,--familiar and bourgeois names,
+that now seemed regal; for they who owned them held her life in their
+hands.
+
+Each juryman was sworn in the grand old form, now slightly curtailed.
+
+"Joseph King, look upon the prisoner.--You shall well and truly try, and
+true deliverance make, between our Sovereign Lord the King and the
+prisoner at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, and a true verdict
+give, according to the evidence. So help you God."
+
+Mr. Whitworth, for the crown, then opened the case, but did little more
+than translate the indictment into more rational language.
+
+He sat down, and Serjeant Wiltshire addressed the court somewhat after
+this fashion:--
+
+     "May it please your Lordship, and you, gentlemen of the jury,
+     this is a case of great expectation and importance. The
+     prisoner at the bar, a gentlewoman by birth and education, and,
+     as you must have already perceived, by breeding also, stands
+     indicted for no less a crime than murder.
+
+     "I need not paint to you the heinousness of this crime: you
+     have but to consult your own breasts. Who ever saw the ghastly
+     corpse of the victim weltering in its blood, and did not feel
+     his own blood run cold through his veins? Has the murderer
+     fled? With what eagerness do we pursue! with what zeal
+     apprehend! with what joy do we bring him to justice! Even the
+     dreadful sentence of death does not shock us, when pronounced
+     upon him. We hear it with solemn satisfaction; and acknowledge
+     the justice of the Divine sentence, 'Whoso sheddeth man's
+     blood, by man shall his blood be shed.'
+
+     "But if this be the case in every common murder, what shall be
+     thought of her who has murdered her husband,--the man in whose
+     arms she has lain, and whom she has sworn at God's altar to
+     love and cherish? Such a murderer is a robber as well as an
+     assassin; for she robs her own children of their father, that
+     tender parent, who can never be replaced in this world.
+
+     "Gentlemen, it will, I fear, be proved that the prisoner at the
+     bar hath been guilty of murder in this high degree; and, though
+     I will endeavor rather to extenuate than to aggravate, yet I
+     trust [_sic_] I have such a history to open as will shock the
+     ears of all who hear me.
+
+     "Mr. Griffith Gaunt, the unfortunate deceased, was a man of
+     descent and worship. As to his character, it was inoffensive.
+     He was known as a worthy, kindly gentleman, deeply attached to
+     her who now stands accused of his murder. They lived happily
+     together for some years; but, unfortunately, there was a thorn
+     in the rose of their wedded life: he was of the Church of
+     England; she was, and is, a Roman Catholic. This led to
+     disputes; and no wonder, since this same unhappy difference
+     hath more than once embroiled a nation, let alone a single
+     family.
+
+     "Well, gentlemen, about a year ago there was a more violent
+     quarrel than usual between the deceased and the prisoner at the
+     bar; and the deceased left his home for several months.
+
+     "He returned upon a certain day in this year, and a
+     reconciliation, real or apparent, took place. He left home
+     again soon afterwards, but only for a short period. On the 15th
+     of last October he suddenly returned for good, as he intended;
+     and here begins the tragedy, to which what I have hitherto
+     related was but the prologue.
+
+     "Scarce an hour before he came, one Thomas Leicester entered
+     the house. Now this Thomas Leicester was a creature of the
+     prisoner's. He had been her gamekeeper, and was now a pedler.
+     It was the prisoner who set him up as a pedler, and purchased
+     the wares to start him in his trade.
+
+     "Gentlemen, this pedler, as I shall prove, was concealed in the
+     house when the deceased arrived. One Caroline Ryder, who is the
+     prisoner's gentlewoman, was the person who first informed her
+     of Leicester's arrival, and it seems she was much moved: Mrs.
+     Ryder will tell you she fell into hysterics. But, soon after,
+     her husband's arrival was announced, and then the passion was
+     of a very different kind. So violent was her rage against this
+     unhappy man that, for once, she forgot all prudence, and
+     threatened his life before a witness. Yes, gentlemen, we shall
+     prove that this gentlewoman, who in appearance and manners
+     might grace a court, was so transported out of her usual self
+     that she held up a knife,--a knife, gentlemen,--and vowed to
+     put it into her husband's heart. And this was no mere temporary
+     ebullition of wrath. We shall see presently that, long after
+     she had had time to cool, she repeated this menace to the
+     unfortunate man's face. The first threat, however, was uttered
+     in her own bedroom, before her confidential servant, Caroline
+     Ryder aforesaid. But now the scene shifts. She has, to all
+     appearance, recovered herself, and sits smiling at the head of
+     her table; for, you must know, she entertained company that
+     night,--persons of the highest standing in the county.
+
+     "Presently her husband, all unconscious of the terrible
+     sentiments she entertained towards him, and the fearful purpose
+     she had announced, enters the room, makes obeisance to his
+     guests, and goes to take his wife's hand.
+
+     "What does she? She draws back with so strange a look, and such
+     forbidding words, that the company were disconcerted.
+     Consternation fell on all present; and erelong they made their
+     excuses, and left the house. Thus the prisoner was left alone
+     with her husband; but, meantime, curiosity had been excited by
+     her strange conduct, and some of the servants, with foreboding
+     hearts, listened at the door of the dining-room. What did they
+     hear, gentlemen? A furious quarrel, in which, however, the
+     deceased was comparatively passive, and the prisoner again
+     threatened his life, with vehemence. Her passion, it is clear,
+     had not cooled.
+
+     "Now it may fairly be alleged, on behalf of the prisoner, that
+     the witnesses for the crown were on one side of the door, the
+     prisoner and the deceased on the other, and that such evidence
+     should be received with caution. I grant this--where it is not
+     sustained by other circumstances, or by direct proofs. Let us
+     then give the prisoner the benefit of this doubt, and let us
+     inquire how the deceased himself understood her,--he, who not
+     only heard the words, and the accents, but saw the looks,
+     whatever they were, that accompanied them.
+
+     "Gentlemen, he was a man of known courage and resolution; yet
+     he was found, after this terrible interview, much cowed and
+     dejected. He spoke to Mrs. Ryder of his death as an event not
+     far distant, and so went to his bedroom in a melancholy and
+     foreboding state. And where was that bedroom? He was thrust, by
+     his wife's orders, into a small chamber, and not allowed to
+     enter hers,--he, the master of the house, her husband, and her
+     lord.
+
+     "But his interpretation of the prisoner's words did not end
+     there. He left us a further comment by his actions next
+     ensuing. He dared not--(I beg pardon, this is my inference:
+     receive it as such)--he _did_ not, remain in that house a
+     single night. He at all events bolted his chamber door inside;
+     and in the very dead of night, notwithstanding the fatigues of
+     the day's journey, (for he had ridden some distance,) he let
+     himself out by the window, and reached the ground safely,
+     though it was a height of fourteen feet,--a leap, gentlemen,
+     that few of us would venture to take. But what will not men
+     risk when destruction is at their heels? He did not wait even
+     to saddle his horse, but fled on foot. Unhappy man, he fled
+     from danger, and met his death.
+
+     "From the hour when he went up to bed, none of the inmates of
+     the house ever saw Griffith Gaunt alive; but one Thomas Hayes,
+     a laborer, saw him walking in a certain direction at one
+     o'clock that morning; and behind him, gentlemen, there walked
+     another man.
+
+     "Who was that other man?
+
+     "When I have told you (and this is an essential feature of the
+     case) how the prisoner was employed during the time that her
+     husband lay quaking in his little room, waiting an opportunity
+     to escape,--when I have told you this, I fear you will divine
+     who it was that followed the deceased, and for what purpose.
+
+     "Gentlemen, when the prisoner had threatened her husband in
+     person, as I have described, she retired to her own room, but
+     not to sleep. She ordered her maid, Mrs. Ryder, to bring Thomas
+     Leicester to her chamber. Yes, gentlemen, she received this
+     pedler, at midnight, in her bedchamber.
+
+     "Now, an act so strange as this admits, I think, but of two
+     interpretations. Either she had a guilty amour with this
+     fellow, or she had some extraordinary need of his services. Her
+     whole character, by consent of the witnesses, renders it very
+     improbable that she would descend to a low amour. Moreover, she
+     acted too publicly in the matter. The man, as we know, was her
+     tool, her creature: she had bought his wares for him, and set
+     him up as a pedler. She openly summoned him to her presence,
+     and kept him there about half an hour.
+
+     "He went from her, and very soon after is seen, by Thomas
+     Hayes, following Griffith Gaunt, at one o'clock in the
+     morning,--that Griffith Gaunt who after that hour was never
+     seen alive.
+
+     "Gentlemen, up to this point, the evidence is clear, connected,
+     and cogent; but it rarely happens in cases of murder that any
+     human eye sees the very blow struck. The penalty is too severe
+     for such an act to be done in the presence of an eyewitness;
+     and not one murderer in ten could be convicted without the help
+     of circumstantial evidence.
+
+     "The next link, however, is taken up by an ear-witness; and, in
+     some cases, the ear is even better evidence than the eye,--for
+     instance, as to the discharge of firearms,--for, by the eye
+     alone, we could not positively tell whether a pistol had gone
+     off or had but flashed in the pan. Well, then, gentlemen, a few
+     minutes after Mr. Gaunt was last seen alive,--which was by
+     Thomas Hayes,--Mrs. Ryder, who had retired to her bedroom,
+     heard the said Gaunt distinctly cry for help; she also heard a
+     pistol-shot discharged. This took place by the side of a lake
+     or large pond near the house, called the mere. Mrs. Ryder
+     alarmed the house, and she and the other servants proceeded to
+     her master's room. They found it bolted from the inside. They
+     broke it open. Mr. Gaunt had escaped by the window, as I have
+     already told you.
+
+     "Presently in comes the prisoner from out of doors. This was at
+     one o'clock in the morning. Now she appears to have seen at
+     once that she must explain her being abroad at that time, so
+     she told Mrs. Ryder she had been out--praying."
+
+(Here some people laughed harshly, but were threatened severely, and
+silenced.)
+
+     "Is that credible? Do people go out of doors at one o'clock in
+     the morning, to pray? Nay, but I fear it was to do an act that
+     years of prayer and penitence cannot efface.
+
+     "From that moment Mr. Gaunt was seen no more among living men.
+     And what made his disappearance the more mysterious was that he
+     had actually at this time just inherited largely from his
+     namesake, Mr. Gaunt of Biggleswade; and his own interest, and
+     that of the other legatees, required his immediate presence.
+     Mr. Atkins, the testator's solicitor, advertised for this
+     unfortunate gentleman; but he did not appear to claim his
+     fortune. Then plain men began to put this and that together,
+     and cried out, 'Foul play!'
+
+     "Justice was set in motion at last, but was embarrassed by the
+     circumstance that the body of the deceased could not be found.
+
+     "At last, Mr. Atkins, the solicitor, being unable to get the
+     estate I have mentioned administered, for want of proof of
+     Griffith Gaunt's decease, entered heartily in this affair, on
+     mere civil grounds. He asked the prisoner, before several
+     witnesses, if she would permit him to drag that piece of water
+     by the side of which Mr. Gaunt was heard to cry for help and,
+     after that seen no more.
+
+     "The prisoner did not reply, but Mr. Houseman, her solicitor, a
+     very worthy man, who has, I believe, or had, up to that moment,
+     a sincere conviction of her innocence, answered for her, and
+     told Mr. Atkins he was welcome to drag it or drain it. Then the
+     prisoner said nothing. She fainted away.
+
+     "After this, you may imagine with what expectation the water
+     was dragged. Gentlemen, after hours of fruitless labor, a body
+     was found.
+
+     "But here an unforeseen circumstance befriended the prisoner.
+     It seems that piece of water swarms with enormous pike and
+     other ravenous fish. These had so horribly mutilated the
+     deceased, that neither form nor feature remained to swear by;
+     and, as the law wisely and humanely demands that in these cases
+     a body shall be identified beyond doubt, justice bade fair to
+     be baffled again. But lo! as often happens in cases of murder,
+     Providence interposed and pointed with unerring finger to a
+     slight, but infallible mark. The deceased gentleman was known
+     to have a large mole over his left temple. It had been noticed
+     by his servants and his neighbors. Well, gentlemen, the greedy
+     fish had spared this mole,--spared it, perhaps, by His command,
+     who bade the whale swallow Jonah, yet not destroy him. There it
+     was, clear and infallible. It was examined by several
+     witnesses, it was recognized. It completed that chain of
+     evidence, some of it direct, some of it circumstantial, which I
+     have laid before you very briefly, and every part of which I
+     shall now support by credible witnesses."
+
+He called thirteen witnesses, including Mr. Atkins, Thomas Hayes, Jane
+Banister, Caroline Ryder, and others; and their evidence in chief bore
+out every positive statement the counsel had made.
+
+In cross-examining these witnesses, Mrs. Gaunt took a line that
+agreeably surprised the court. It was not for nothing she had studied a
+hundred trials, with a woman's observation and patient docility. She had
+found out how badly people plead their own causes, and had noticed the
+reasons: one of which is that they say too much, and stray from the
+point. The line she took, with one exception, was keen brevity.
+
+She cross-examined Thomas Hayes as follows.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.
+
+IX.
+
+
+HOW SHALL WE BE AMUSED?
+
+"One, two, three, four,--this makes the fifth accident on the Fourth of
+July, in the two papers I have just read," said Jenny.
+
+"A very moderate allowance," said Theophilus Thoro, "if you consider the
+Fourth as a great national saturnalia, in which every boy in the land
+has the privilege of doing whatever is right in his own eyes."
+
+"The poor boys!" said Mrs. Crowfield. "All the troubles of the world are
+laid at their door."
+
+"Well," said Jenny, "they did burn the city of Portland, it appears. The
+fire arose from fire-crackers, thrown by boys among the shavings of a
+carpenter's shop,--so says the paper."
+
+"And," said Rudolph, "we surgeons expect a harvest of business from the
+Fourth, as surely as from a battle. Certain to be woundings, fractures,
+possibly amputations, following the proceedings of our glorious
+festival."
+
+"Why cannot we Americans learn to amuse ourselves peaceably, like other
+nations?" said Bob Stephens. "In France and Italy, the greatest national
+festivals pass off without fatal accident, or danger to any one. The
+fact is, in our country we have not learned _how to be amused_.
+Amusement has been made of so small account in our philosophy of life,
+that we are raw and unpractised in being amused. Our diversions,
+compared with those of the politer nations of Europe, are coarse and
+savage,--and consist mainly in making disagreeable noises and disturbing
+the peace of the community by rude uproar. The only idea an American boy
+associates with the Fourth of July is that of gunpowder in some form,
+and a wild liberty to fire off pistols in all miscellaneous directions,
+and to throw fire-crackers under the heels of horses, and into crowds of
+women and children, for the fun of seeing the stir and commotion thus
+produced. Now take a young Parisian boy and give him a fête, and he
+conducts himself with greater gentleness and good breeding, because he
+is part of a community in which the art of amusement has been refined
+and perfected, so that he has a thousand resources beyond the very
+obvious one of making a great banging and disturbance.
+
+"Yes," continued Bob Stephens, "the fact is, that our grim old Puritan
+fathers set their feet down resolutely on all forms of amusement; they
+would have stopped the lambs from wagging their tails, and shot the
+birds for singing, if they could have had their way; and in consequence
+of it, what a barren, cold, flowerless life is our New England
+existence! Life is all, as Mantalini said, one 'demd horrid grind.'
+'Nothing here but working and going to church,' said the German
+emigrants,--and they were about right. A French traveller, in the year
+1837, says that attending the Thursday-evening lectures and church
+prayer-meetings was the only recreation of the young people of Boston;
+and we can remember the time when this really was no exaggeration. Think
+of that, with all the seriousness of our Boston east winds to give it
+force, and fancy the provision for amusement in our society! The
+consequence is, that boys who have the longing for amusement strongest
+within them, and plenty of combativeness to back it, are the standing
+terror of good society, and our Fourth of July is a day of fear to all
+invalids and persons of delicate nervous organization, and of real,
+appreciable danger of life and limb to every one."
+
+"Well, Robert," said my wife, "though I agree with you as to the actual
+state of society in this respect, I must enter my protest against your
+slur on the memory of our Pilgrim fathers."
+
+"Yes," said Theophilus Thoro, "the New-Englanders are the only people, I
+believe, who take delight in vilifying their ancestry. Every young
+hopeful in our day makes a target of his grandfather's gravestone, and
+fires away, with great self-applause. People in general seem to like to
+show that they are well-born, and come of good stock; but the young
+New-Englanders, many of them, appear to take pleasure in insisting that
+they came of a race of narrow-minded, persecuting bigots.
+
+"It is true, that our Puritan fathers saw not everything. They made a
+state where there were no amusements, but where people could go to bed
+and leave their house doors wide open all night, without a shadow of
+fear or danger, as was for years the custom in all our country villages.
+The fact is, that the simple early New England life, before we began to
+import foreigners, realized a state of society in whose possibility
+Europe would scarcely believe. If our fathers had few amusements, they
+needed few. Life was too really and solidly comfortable and happy to
+need much amusement.
+
+"Look over the countries where people are most sedulously amused by
+their rulers and governors. Are they not the countries where the people
+are most oppressed, most unhappy in their circumstances, and therefore
+in greatest need of amusement? It is the slave who dances and sings, and
+why? Because he owns nothing, and _can_ own nothing, and may as well
+dance and forget the fact. But give the slave a farm of his own, a wife
+of his own, and children of his own, with a school-house and a vote, and
+ten to one he dances no more. He needs no _amusement_, because he is
+_happy_.
+
+"The legislators of Europe wished nothing more than to bring up a people
+who would be content with amusements, and not ask after their rights or
+think too closely how they were governed. 'Gild the dome of the
+Invalides,' was Napoleon's scornful prescription, when he heard the
+Parisian population were discontented. They gilded it, and the people
+forgot to talk about anything else. They were a childish race, educated
+from the cradle on spectacle and show, and by the sight of their eyes
+could they be governed. The people of Boston, in 1776, could not have
+been managed in this way, chiefly because they were brought up in the
+strict schools of the fathers."
+
+"But don't you think," said Jenny, "that something might be added and
+amended in the state of society our fathers established here in New
+England? Without becoming frivolous, there might be more attention paid
+to rational amusement."
+
+"Certainly," said my wife, "the State and the Church both might take a
+lesson from the providence of foreign governments, and make liberty, to
+say the least, as attractive as despotism. It is a very unwise mother
+that does not provide her children with play-things."
+
+"And yet," said Bob, "the only thing that the Church has yet done is to
+forbid and to frown. We have abundance of tracts against dancing,
+whist-playing, ninepins, billiards, operas, theatres,--in short,
+anything that young people would be apt to like. The General Assembly of
+the Presbyterian Church refused to testify against slavery, because of
+political diffidence, but made up for it by ordering a more stringent
+crusade against dancing. The theatre and opera grow up and exist among
+us like plants on the windy side of a hill, blown all awry by a constant
+blast of conscientious rebuke. There is really no amusement young people
+are fond of, which they do not pursue, in a sort of defiance of the
+frown of the peculiarly religious world. With all the telling of what
+the young shall _not_ do, there has been very little telling what they
+shall do.
+
+"The whole department of amusements--certainly one of the most important
+in education--has been by the Church made a sort of outlaws' ground, to
+be taken possession of and held by all sorts of spiritual ragamuffins;
+and then the faults and short-comings resulting from this arrangement
+have been held up and insisted on as reasons why no Christian should
+ever venture into it.
+
+"If the Church would set herself to amuse her young folks, instead of
+discussing doctrines and metaphysical hair-splitting, she would prove
+herself a true mother, and not a hard-visaged step-dame. Let her keep
+this department, so powerful and so difficult to manage, in what are
+morally the strongest hands, instead of giving it up to the weakest.
+
+"I think, if the different churches of a city, for example, would rent a
+building where there should be a billiard-table, one or two
+ninepin-alleys, a reading-room, a garden and grounds for ball-playing or
+innocent lounging, that they would do more to keep their young people
+from the ways of sin than a Sunday school could. Nay, more: I would go
+further. I would have a portion of the building fitted up with scenery
+and a stage, for the getting up of tableaux or dramatic performances,
+and thus give scope for the exercise of that histrionic talent of which
+there is so much lying unemployed in society.
+
+"Young people do not like amusements any better for the wickedness
+connected with them. The spectacle of a sweet little child singing
+hymns, and repeating prayers, of a pious old Uncle Tom dying for his
+religion, has filled theatres night after night, and proved that there
+really is no need of indecent or improper plays to draw full houses.
+
+"The things that draw young people to places of amusement are not at
+first gross things. Take the most notorious public place in Paris,--the
+Jardin Mabille, for instance,--and the things which give it its first
+charm are all innocent and artistic. Exquisite beds of lilies, roses,
+gillyflowers, lighted with jets of gas so artfully as to make every
+flower translucent as a gem; fountains where the gas-light streams out
+from behind misty wreaths of falling water and calla-blossoms; sofas of
+velvet turf, canopied with fragrant honeysuckle; dim bowers overarched
+with lilacs and roses; a dancing ground under trees whose branches bend
+with a fruitage of many-colored lamps; enchanting music and graceful
+motion; in all these there is not only no sin, but they are really
+beautiful and desirable; and if they were only used on the side and in
+the service of virtue and religion, if they were contrived and kept up
+by the guardians and instructors of youth, instead of by those whose
+interest it is to demoralize and destroy, young people would have no
+temptation to stray into the haunts of vice.
+
+"In Prussia, under the reign of Frederick William II., when one good,
+hard-handed man governed the whole country like a strict schoolmaster,
+the public amusements for the people were made such as to present a
+model for all states. The theatres were strictly supervised, and actors
+obliged to conform to the rules of decorum and morality. The plays and
+performances were under the immediate supervision of men of grave
+morals, who allowed nothing corrupting to appear; and the effect of this
+administration and restraint is to be seen in Berlin even to this day.
+The public gardens are full of charming little resorts, where, every
+afternoon, for a very moderate sum, one can have either a concert of
+good music, or a very fair dramatic or operatic performance. Here whole
+families may be seen enjoying together a wholesome and refreshing
+entertainment,--the mother and aunts with their knitting, the baby, the
+children of all ages, and the father,--their faces radiant with that
+mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be
+characteristic of the nation. When I saw these things, and thought of
+our own outcast, unprovided boys and young men, haunting the streets
+and alleys of cities, in places far from the companionship of mothers
+and sisters, I felt as if it would be better for a nation to be brought
+up by a good strict schoolmaster king than to try to be a republic."
+
+"Yes," said I, "but the difficulty is to _get_ the good schoolmaster
+king. For one good shepherd, there are twenty who use the sheep only for
+their flesh and their wool. Republics can do all that kings
+can,--witness our late army and Sanitary Commission. Once fix the idea
+thoroughly in the public mind that there ought to be as regular and
+careful provision for public amusement as there is for going to church
+and Sunday school, and it will be done. Central Park in New York is a
+beginning in the right direction, and Brooklyn is following the example
+of her sister city. There is, moreover, an indication of the proper
+spirit in the increased efforts that are made to beautify Sunday-school
+rooms, and make them interesting, and to have Sunday-school fêtes and
+picnics,--the most harmless and commendable way of celebrating the
+Fourth of July. Why should saloons and bar-rooms be made attractive by
+fine paintings, choice music, flowers, and fountains, and Sunday-school
+rooms be four bare walls? There are churches whose broad aisles
+represent ten and twenty millions of dollars, and whose sons and
+daughters are daily drawn to circuses, operas, theatres, because they
+have tastes and feelings, in themselves perfectly laudable and innocent,
+for the gratification of which no provision is made in any other place."
+
+"I know one church," said Rudolph, "whose Sunday-school room is as
+beautifully adorned as any haunt of sin. There is a fountain in the
+centre, which plays into a basin surrounded with shells and flowers; it
+has a small organ to lead the children's voices, and the walls are hung
+with oil-paintings and engravings from the best masters. The festivals
+of the Sabbath school, which are from time to time held in this place,
+educate the taste of the children, as well as amuse them; and, above
+all, they have through life the advantage of associating with their
+early religious education all those ideas of taste, elegance, and
+artistic culture which too often come through polluted channels.
+
+"When the _amusement_ of the young shall become the care of the
+experienced and the wise, and the floods of wealth that are now rolling
+over and over, in silent investments, shall be put into the form of
+innocent and refined pleasures for the children and youth of the state,
+our national festivals may become days to be desired, and not dreaded.
+
+"On the Fourth of July, our city fathers do in a certain dim wise
+perceive that the public owes some attempt at amusement to its children,
+and they vote large sums, principally expended in bell-ringing, cannons,
+and fireworks. The sidewalks are witness to the number who fall victims
+to the temptations held out by grog-shops and saloons; and the papers,
+for weeks after, are crowded with accounts of accidents. Now, a yearly
+sum expended to keep up, and keep pure, places of amusement which hold
+out no temptation to vice, but which excel all vicious places in real
+beauty and attractiveness, would greatly lessen the sum needed to be
+expended on any one particular day, and would refine and prepare our
+people to keep holidays and festivals appropriately."
+
+"For my part," said Mrs. Crowfield, "I am grieved at the opprobrium
+which falls on the race of _boys_. Why should the most critical era in
+the life of those who are to be men, and to _govern_ society, be passed
+in a sort of outlawry,--a rude warfare with all existing institutions?
+The years between ten and twenty are full of the nervous excitability
+which marks the growth and maturing of the manly nature. The boy feels
+wild impulses, which ought to be vented in legitimate and healthful
+exercise. He wants to run, shout, wrestle, ride, row, skate; and all
+these together are often not sufficient to relieve the need he feels of
+throwing off the excitability that burns within.
+
+"For the wants of this period what safe provision is made by the Church,
+or by the State, or any of the boy's lawful educators? In all the
+Prussian schools amusements are as much a part of the regular
+school-system as grammar or geography. The teacher is with the boys on
+the play-ground, and plays as heartily as any of them. The boy has his
+physical wants anticipated. He is not left to fight his way, blindly
+stumbling, against society, but goes forward in a safe path, which his
+elders and betters have marked out for him.
+
+"In our country, the boy's career is often a series of skirmishes with
+society. He wants to skate, and contrives ingeniously to dam the course
+of a brook, and flood a meadow which makes a splendid skating-ground.
+Great is the joy for a season, and great the skating. But the water
+floods the neighboring cellars. The boys are cursed through all the
+moods and tenses,--boys are such a plague! The dam is torn down with
+emphasis and execration. The boys, however, lie in wait some cold night,
+between twelve and one, and build it up again; and thus goes on the
+battle. The boys care not whose cellar they flood, because nobody cares
+for their amusement. They understand themselves to be outlaws, and take
+an outlaw's advantage.
+
+"Again, the boys have their sleds; and sliding down hill is splendid
+fun. But they trip up some grave citizen, who sprains his shoulder. What
+is the result? Not the provision of a safe, good place, where boys _may_
+slide down hill without danger to any one, but an edict forbidding all
+sliding, under penalty of fine.
+
+"Boys want to swim: it is best they should swim; and if city fathers,
+foreseeing and caring for this want, should think it worth while to mark
+off some good place, and have it under such police surveillance as to
+enforce decency of language and demeanor, they would prevent a great
+deal that now is disagreeable in the unguided efforts of boys to enjoy
+this luxury.
+
+"It would be _cheaper_ in the end, even if one had to build
+sliding-piles, as they do in Russia, or to build skating-rinks, as they
+do in Montreal,--it would be cheaper for every city, town, and village
+to provide legitimate amusement for boys, under proper superintendence,
+than to leave them, as they are now left, to fight their way against
+society.
+
+"In the boys' academies of our country, what provision is made for
+amusement? There are stringent rules, and any number of them, to prevent
+boys making any noise that may disturb the neighbors; and generally the
+teacher thinks that, if he keeps the boys _still_, and sees that they
+get their lessons, his duty is done. But a hundred boys ought not to be
+kept still. There ought to be noise and motion among them, in order that
+they may healthily survive the great changes which Nature is working
+within them. If they become silent, averse to movement, fond of indoor
+lounging and warm rooms, they are going in far worse ways than any
+amount of outward lawlessness could bring them to.
+
+"Smoking and yellow-covered novels are worse than any amount of
+hullabaloo; and the quietest boy is often a poor, ignorant victim, whose
+life is being drained out of him before it is well begun. If mothers
+could only see the _series of books_ that are sold behind counters to
+boarding-school boys, whom nobody warns and nobody cares for,--if they
+could see the poison, going from pillow to pillow, in books pretending
+to make clear the great, sacred mysteries of our nature, but trailing
+them over with the filth of utter corruption! These horrible works are
+the inward and secret channel of hell, into which a boy is thrust by the
+pressure of strict outward rules, forbidding that physical and
+out-of-door exercise and motion to which he ought rather to be
+encouraged, and even driven.
+
+"It is melancholy to see that, while parents, teachers, and churches
+make no provision for boys in the way of amusement, the world, the
+flesh, and the Devil are incessantly busy and active in giving it to
+them. There are ninepin-alleys, with cigars and a bar. There are
+billiard-saloons, with a bar, and, alas! with the occasional company of
+girls who are still beautiful, but who have lost the innocence of
+womanhood, while yet retaining many of its charms. There are theatres,
+with a bar, and with the society of lost women. The boy comes to one and
+all of these places, seeking only what is natural and proper he should
+have,--what should be given him under the eye and by the care of the
+Church, the school. He comes for exercise and amusement,--he gets these,
+and a ticket to destruction besides,--and whose fault is it?"
+
+"These are the aspects of public life," said I, "which make me feel that
+we never shall have a perfect state till women vote and bear rule
+equally with men. State housekeeping has been, hitherto, like what any
+housekeeping would be, conducted by the voice and knowledge of man
+alone.
+
+"If women had an equal voice in the management of our public money, I
+have faith to believe that thousands which are now wasted in mere
+political charlatanism would go to provide for the rearing of the
+children of the state, male and female. My wife has spoken for the boys;
+I speak for the girls also. What is provided for their physical
+development and amusement? Hot, gas-lighted theatric and operatic
+performances, beginning at eight, and ending at midnight; hot, crowded
+parties and balls; dancing with dresses tightly laced over the laboring
+lungs,--these are almost the whole story. I bless the advent of croquet
+and skating. And yet the latter exercise, pursued as it generally is, is
+a most terrible exposure. There is no kindly parental provision for the
+poor, thoughtless, delicate young creature,--not even the shelter of a
+dressing-room with a fire, at which she may warm her numb fingers and
+put on her skates when she arrives on the ground, and to which she may
+retreat in intervals of fatigue; so she catches cold, and perhaps sows
+the seed which with air-tight stoves and other appliances of hot-house
+culture may ripen into consumption.
+
+"What provision is there for the amusement of all the shop girls,
+seamstresses, factory girls, that crowd our cities? What for the
+thousands of young clerks and operatives? Not long since, in a
+respectable old town in New England, the body of a beautiful girl was
+drawn from the river in which she had drowned herself,--a young girl
+only fifteen, who came to the city, far from home and parents, and fell
+a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation.
+Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the
+ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable.
+
+"Let those who have homes and every appliance to make life pass
+agreeably, and who yet yawn over an unoccupied evening, fancy a lively
+young girl all day cooped up at sewing in a close, ill-ventilated room.
+Evening comes, and she has three times the desire for amusement and
+three times the need of it that her fashionable sister has. And where
+can she go? To the theatre, perhaps, with some young man as thoughtless
+as herself, and more depraved; then to the bar for a glass of wine, and
+another; and then, with a head swimming and turning, who shall say where
+else she may be led? Past midnight and no one to look after her,--and
+one night ruins her utterly and for life, and she as yet only a child!
+
+"John Newton had a very wise saying: 'Here is a man trying to fill a
+bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better than
+to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I would
+say on the subject of amusements."
+
+
+
+
+AN ITALIAN RAIN-STORM.
+
+
+The coast-road between Nice and Genoa,--known throughout the world for
+its unrivalled beauty of scenery, the altitudes to which it climbs, and
+the depths to which it dives,--now on the olive-clad heights, now close
+down upon the shore shaded by palm or carob-trees, now stretching inland
+amid orange-grounds and vineyards, now rounding some precipitous point
+that hangs hundreds of feet over the Mediterranean,--is generally seen
+with all the advantage of an unclouded sky above, and a sea as blue
+beneath.
+
+It was the fortune of a certain party of four to behold it under the
+unusual aspect of bad weather. They set out in the diligence one winter
+evening, expecting to arrive at Genoa by the same time next day,
+according to ordinary course. But no one unaccustomed to the effect of
+rain, continuous rain, in mountainous districts, can conceive the
+wonders worked by a long succession of wet days. The arrival was
+retarded six hours, and the four found themselves in _Genova la superba_
+somewhere about midnight. However, this was only the commencement of the
+pouring visitation; and the roads had been rendered merely so "heavy" as
+to make the horses contumacious when dragging the ponderous vehicle up
+hill, which contumacy had occasioned the delay in question. Despite the
+hopes entertained that the weather would clear, the rain set in; and
+during no interval did it hold up, with the exception of a short period,
+which permitted one gentleman of the party of four to visit on business
+two bachelor brothers, manufacturers in Genoa. The residence of these
+brothers being in rather an out-of-the-way quarter of the city, and
+being very peculiar in itself, the gentleman advised the rest of his
+party to accompany him on this visit.
+
+The four, only too glad to find themselves able to get out of doors, set
+forth on foot through the steep and narrow streets of Genoa, which make
+driving in a carriage a fatigue, and walking a feat of great excitement,
+especially when mud prevails. Trucks, ponderously laden with bales
+of goods, and pushed along at a reckless rate of speed by
+mahogany-complexioned men; dashing coaches, impelled by drivers
+hallooing when close upon you with distracting loudness and abruptness;
+mules coming onward with the blundering obtuseness peculiar to their
+tribe, or with their heads fastened to doorways, and their flanks
+extending across the street, affording just space enough for the
+passenger to slide behind their heels; a busy, jostling crowd of people
+hurrying to and fro, with no definite current, but streaming over any
+portion of the undistinguishable carriage-way and foot-way,--all combine
+to make Genoese pedestrianism a work only less onerous than driving.
+
+Choosing the minor trouble, our party trusted to their own legs; and,
+after picking their way through sludge and mire, along murky alleys that
+branched off into wharves and quays, and up slippery by-ways that looked
+like paved staircases without regular steps, the four emerged upon an
+open space in front of a noble church. Leaving this on their left hand,
+they turned short into a place that wore something the appearance of a
+stable-yard,--with this difference, that there were neither steeds nor
+stabling to be seen; but instead there were blank walls, enclosing a
+kind of court adjoining a huge old mansion, and beyond there was a steep
+descent leading down to the sea-side.
+
+On ringing a bell that hung beside a gate in the wall enclosure, the
+door opened apparently of itself, and a dismal scream ensued. The scream
+proceeded from a sea-gull, peering out of a kind of pen formed by a
+wooden paling in one corner of a grass-grown patch, half cabbage-garden,
+half excavated earth and rock; and the mysterious opening of the door
+was explained by a connecting cord pulled by some unseen hand within a
+smaller house that stood near to the huge old mansion. From the house
+appeared, advancing towards us, the two bachelor brothers, who welcomed
+our friend and his three companions with grave Italian courtesy.
+Understanding the curiosity the four felt to see their premises, they
+did the honors of their place, with a minuteness as politely considerate
+towards the strangers as it was gratifying to the interest felt by them.
+
+First the visitors were led by the bachelor brothers to see the huge old
+mansion, which they called the _Palazzo_. Let no one who has seen an
+ordinary Genoese palace, magnificent with gilding, enriched by priceless
+pictures, supplied with choice books, and adorned with gorgeous
+furniture, figure to himself any such combination in the _palazzo_ in
+question. This was a vast pile of building, that would make five
+moderate-sized dwelling-houses, one in the roof, and the other four in
+the habitable portion of the edifice. A general air of ramshackledness
+pervaded the exterior, while the interior presented an effect of
+interminable ranges of white-washed walls, divided off into numberless
+apartments of various sizes, from a saloon on the _piano nobile_, or
+principal floor, measuring more than forty feet long, to small square
+attic rooms that were little more than cupboards. But this attic story
+was not all composed of chambers thus dimensioned. Among its apartments
+were rooms that might have accommodated a banqueting assemblage, had
+diners been so inclined; while among the accommodations comprised in
+this garret range was a kitchen, with spacious dressers, stoves,
+closets, and a well of water some hundred and odd feet deep. It was
+impossible for the imagination to refrain from picturing the troops of
+ghosts which doubtless occupied these upper chambers of the old
+_palazzo_, and held nightly vigil, undisturbed, amid the silence and
+solitude of their neglected spaces. Through one of the dwarf windows
+that pierced at intervals all sides of the mansion, just beneath the
+lofty roof, and which gave light to the attic story, we were directed to
+look by the emphatic words of the elder bachelor brother,--"Ma, veda che
+vista c' è!"
+
+The view thence was indeed well worthy his praise; and he himself formed
+an appropriate companion-picture to the scene. Bluish-gray eyes, a
+fairer complexion than usually belongs to men of his clime and country,
+a look of penetration, combined with an expression of quiet content,
+were surmounted by a steeple-crowned hat that might have become a Dutch
+burgomaster, or one of Teniers's land-proprietors, rather than a denizen
+of a southern city. Yet the association which his face, figure, and
+costume had with some of George Cruikshank's illustrations of German
+tales afforded pictorial harmony with the range of ghostly rooms we were
+viewing. He "marshalled us the way that we should go," by leading us
+down a steep flight of steps, which landed us on the _piano nobile_.
+This, for the present, was tenanted by a set of weavers, to whom the
+principal floor of the _palazzo_ had been let for a short term. They had
+proved but turbulent occupants, being in a constant state of
+refractoriness against their landlords, the bachelor brothers, who
+seemed to be somewhat in awe of them. On the present occasion, for
+instance, the brothers apologized for being unable to show us the grand
+saloon, as the weavers (whom we could hear, while he spoke, singing in a
+loud, uproarious, insurgent kind of way, that might well have drawn
+three souls out of one of their own craft, and evidently made the souls
+of their two landlords quail) did not like to be disturbed.
+
+Their contumacious voices, mingled with the clamor of their looms, died
+off in the distance, while we proceeded down the back staircase to the
+ground-floor. We at first fancied that this apparently surreptitious
+proceeding was perhaps traceable to the awe entertained by the bachelor
+brothers for their unruly tenants; but we were relieved from the sense
+of acting in a style bordering on poltroonery, by finding that the
+principal staircase had been boarded up to preserve its marble steps and
+sides from injury. On arriving at the foot we found ourselves in a
+spacious hall, opposite the approach to the grand staircase, which
+looked like an archway built for giants, toweringly defined above the
+scaffold-planks by which it was barricaded. Many doors opened from this
+hall, to each of which, in turn, one of the bachelor brothers applied
+successive keys from a ponderous bunch that he held in his hand. These
+doors led to vast suites of apartments, all unfurnished, like the upper
+rooms, with the exception of one suite, which the brothers had lent to a
+friend of theirs, and which was sparely supplied with some old Italian
+furniture, of so antique a fashion that each article might have been a
+family heirloom ever since the times of that famous Genoese gentleman,
+Christopher Columbus. One peculiarity the four remarked, which spoke
+volumes for the geniality of the climate: in all this huge rambling
+edifice they saw only one room which could boast of a fireplace. The
+sun's warmth evidently supplied all the heat necessary, and--as might be
+conjectured from its other peculiarities as well as this--anything like
+what the English call "the joys and comforts of the domestic hearth"
+seemed an impossible attainment in this dreary old _palazzo_. The social
+amenities must wither in its desolate atmosphere, and dwindle to chill
+shadows, like the ghosts that haunt the attic story.
+
+To complete the air of saddening vacancy that clung like a damp to the
+really arid white walls, when the brothers led us down a wide staircase
+to the vaulted space beneath the basement, we came upon some hundreds of
+small bird-cages, containing each a miserable linnet, titmouse, or
+finch, condemned to chirp out its wretched existence in this airless
+underground region. In reply to our pitying exclamation, we were told
+that the bachelors' friend who occupied the corner apartment on the
+ground-floor was a great sportsman, and devotedly fond of _la caccia_;
+that these unhappy little prisoners were employed by him in the season
+as decoy-birds; that they were kept in these dungeons during the other
+months of the year; and that they were BLINDED to make them sing better
+and be more serviceable at the period when he needed them. As we looked
+shudderingly at these forlorn little creatures, and expressed our
+commiseration at their fate, the younger brother stepped forward, and,
+examining one of the cages, in which sat hunched up in one corner a
+stiff lump of feathers, coolly announced that "this goldfinch" was dead.
+
+It was with a feeling of relief that we left the death-released bird,
+and the vaults beneath the old _palazzo_, to return once more to the
+fresh air and the breathing-space of the broad earth and sky. Our next
+visit was to the bachelor brothers' factory, which was for the
+fabrication of wax candles. Adjoining this was a terrace-plot of ground,
+dotted over with what looked like Liliputian tombstones. We were
+beginning to wonder whether this were a cemetery for the dead
+birds,--speculating on the probability that these might be the
+monumental tributes placed over their graves by the sportsman friend of
+the two brothers,--when the elder informed us that this was the place
+they used for bleaching the wax, and that the square stones we saw were
+the supports on which rested the large flat stands whereon it was laid
+to whiten in the sun. From this terrace-plot of ground,--which projected
+in a narrowish green ledge, skirted by a low ivy-grown wall, over the
+sea,--we beheld a prospect of almost matchless beauty. Before us
+stretched a wide expanse of Mediterranean waters; to the extreme left
+was just visible the bold rocky point of Porto Fino; to the right
+extended westward a grand line of picturesque coast, including the
+headlands of Capo di Noli and Capo delle Mele; and near at hand lay the
+harbor of Genoa, with its shipping, its amphitheatre of palaces,
+surmounted by the high ground above, and crowned by the fortressed
+summits beyond.
+
+We were roused from the absorbing admiration which this majestic sea and
+land view had excited, by one of the four asking whether there were any
+access to the _palazzo_ from this terrace. Whereupon the brothers showed
+us a winding turret staircase, which led by a subterranean passage into
+one of the lower vaulted rooms. Nothing more like a place in a wonderful
+story-book ever met us in real life; and while we were lost in a dream
+of romantic imaginings, one of the brothers was engaged in giving a
+prosaic relation of how the old _palazzo_ had come into their family by
+a lawsuit, which terminated in their favor, and left them possessors of
+this unexpected property. During the narrative a brood of adolescent
+chickens had come near to where we stood listening on the green plot,
+and eyed us with expectant looks, as if accustomed to be fed or noticed.
+The elder brother indulged the foremost among the poultry group--a white
+bantam cock of courageous character--by giving him his foot to assault.
+Valiantly the little fellow flew at, and spurred, and pecked the boot
+and trousers; again and again he returned to the charge, while the
+blue-gray eyes beamed smilingly down from beneath the steeple-crowned
+hat, as the old man humored the bird's pugnacious spirit.
+
+Presently a shy little girl of some ten or twelve years came peering out
+at the strangers from beneath a row of evergreen oaks that ornamented
+the back of the dwelling-house overlooking the terrace. There she stood
+at the foot of the ilexes, shading her eyes with one hand, (for the sun
+coyly gleamed through the rain-clouds at that moment,) while the other
+was employed in restraining the lumbering fondness of two large
+bull-dogs, that gambolled heavily round her. She was introduced to us as
+the daughter of the younger of the two brothers; who proved after all to
+be no bachelor, but a widower. One ponderous brindled brute poked his
+black muzzle against the child with such a weight of affection that we
+expected to see her overturned on the sward; but she seemed to have
+complete control over her canine favorites, and to live with them and a
+large macaw she had up stairs in her own room (we afterwards found it
+perched there, when taken to see the upper floor of the bachelor
+residence), as her familiars and sole associates,--like some enchanted
+princess in a fairy-tale.
+
+On entering the house from the terrace, we found ourselves in its
+kitchen, which strongly resembled a cavern made habitable. It was hewn
+out of the rock on which the dwelling stood; and it only required the
+presence of the black man and the old woman who figure in Gil Blas's
+story to give, to the life, the cooking-department of the robbers' cave
+there. As we ascended a rude stone staircase that led from it, we heard
+the lowing of cows; and, turning, we saw two of these animals
+comfortably stalled in a side recess, not far from the rocky ledge on
+which the culinary apparatus for dressing the food of the establishment
+was deposited. Mounting into the parlor, we discovered a good-sized
+apartment, its windows looking out through the foliage of the ilexes
+over the sea, skirted by the extensive coast view. Behind was the
+dining-room; on each side were the brothers' bedrooms; and leading from
+a small entrance-hall at the back was a large billiard-room. This opened
+on a small garden nook, in which were orange-trees and camellias, full
+of bud and blossom,--from which some of the flowers were gathered for us
+by the Italian brethren, on our taking leave and thanking them for the
+unusual treat we had had in going over their curious abode.
+
+The transient gleam of sunshine that had shone forth while we were
+there was the only intermission vouchsafed by the rain, which afterwards
+poured down with a steady vehemence and pertinacity seldom seen on the
+Ligurian Riviera. The effects of this rare continuance of wet weather
+were soon made impressively perceptible to the four as they emerged upon
+the open road, after passing the Lighthouse of Genoa and the long
+straggling suburbs of San Pier d'Arena, Pegli, and Voltri. The horses
+splashed through channels of water which filled the spongy ruts,
+smoking, and toiling, and plunging on; while the whoops and yells of the
+postilion urging them forward, together with the loud smacks of his
+whip, made a savage din. This was farther increased as we crashed along
+a ledge road, cut in a cliff overhanging the sea;--the waves tearing up
+from beneath with a whelming roar; the rocks jutting forth in points,
+every one of which was a streaming water-spout; the rain pelting, the
+wind rushing, the side-currents pouring and dashing. These latter,
+ordinarily but small rills, carrying off the drainage of the land by
+gentle course, were now swollen to rough cataracts, leaping with furious
+rapidity from crag to crag in deluges of turbid water, discolored to a
+dingy yellow-brown by the heaps of earth and stone which they dislodged
+and brought down with them, and hurled hither and thither over the
+precipitous projections, and occasionally flung athwart the highway. At
+one spot, where a heap of such stones--large, flat slabs--had been
+tossed upon the road, and a few of their companions were in the very act
+of plunging down after them, our postilion drew up to guide his cattle
+among those already fallen; and, raising his voice above the thunder of
+the sea-waves, rain, wind, and waters, shouted out in broad Genoese to
+the falling ones, "Halloo, you there, up above! Stop a bit, will you?
+Wait a moment, you up there!" Then, driving on carefully till he had
+steered by the largest of the fragments that lay prostrate, he turned
+back his head, shook his whip at it, and apostrophised it with, "Ah, you
+big pig! I've passed you, for this time!"
+
+The first change of horses took place at a village close down on the
+sea-shore, where some fishermen were busily employed hauling up the last
+of a row of boats that lay upon the beach. Every available hand, not
+occupied in aiding the conductor and postilion to unharness the
+diligence horses and put to the fresh team, was enlisted in the service
+of the boat-hauling. Young gentlemen out for an evening's amusement,
+attired in sacks or tarpaulins thrown over their shoulders, while their
+nether garments were rolled up tightly into a neat twist that encircled
+the top of each thigh, were frisking about a line of men with
+weather-beaten countenances and blown hair, who tugged bare-legged at
+the sides of the fishing-boat, half in the water and half out.
+Occasionally one of these young gentry, feeling perhaps that he had
+aided sufficiently in the general work, betook himself to a doorway
+near, dripping and shaking himself, and looking out through the sheeted
+rain at his companions, who were still in the excitement of whisking
+round the heaving and tugging fishermen, while the waves rose high, the
+spray dashed up in mist over their grizzled heads and beards, and the
+wind whistled sharply amid the deeper tumult of the sea and torrent
+waters. To heighten the grim wildness of the scene, the shades of
+evening were closing round, and by the time the four travellers were off
+again and proceeding on their way, darkness was fast setting in.
+
+Nightfall found them toiling up a steep ascent that diverges inland for
+a few miles, winding round the estate of some inflexible proprietor,
+upon whom nothing can prevail to permit the high-road to take its
+passage through his land, there bordering the sea-side. Up the ascent we
+labored, and down the descent we lunged, the wheels lodging in deep mire
+at every moment, and threatening to abide in the deeper holes and
+furrows which the water-courses (forced from their due channels by
+overflowing and by obstructive fallen masses) had cut and dug into the
+road as they strayed swiftly over it.
+
+By the time the next stage was reached, the conductor consulted the four
+on the advisability of stopping to sleep, instead of proceeding on such
+a tempestuous night, the like of which, for perilous effects, he said he
+had but once before encountered during the whole of the sixteen years he
+had been in office on this road. The three _coupé_ passengers,
+consisting of two ladies--sisters--and a ruddy-faced, cheerful gentleman
+in a velvet travelling-cap, who made it a principle, like Falstaff, to
+take things easily, and "not to sweat extraordinarily," warmly approved
+the conductor's proposal as a sensible one; and even the alert gentleman
+in the _banquette_ agreed that it would be more prudent to remain at the
+first good inn the diligence came to. This, the conductor replied, was
+at Savona, one stage farther, as the place they now were at was a mere
+boat-building hamlet, that scarcely boasted an inn at all,--certainly
+not "good beds." A group of eager, bronzed faces were visible by
+lamp-light, assembled round the conductor, listening to him as he held
+this conference with his coach-passengers; and at its close the
+bronze-faced crowd broke into a rapid outburst of Genoese dialect, which
+was interrupted by our conductor's making his way through them all, and
+disappearing round the corner of the small _piazza_ wherein the
+diligence stood to have its horses changed. After some moments'
+pause,--not in the rain, or wind, or sea-waves, for they kept pouring
+and rushing and roaring on,--but in the hurly-burly of rapid talk, which
+ceased, owing to the talkers' hurrying off in pursuit of the vanished
+conductor, he returned, saying, "Andiamo a Savona." It soon proved that
+he had been to ascertain the feasibility of what the group of
+bronze-faced men had proposed, namely, that they would undertake to
+convey the diligence (without its horses, its "outsides," and its
+"insides") bodily over a high, steep, slippery mule-bridge, which
+crossed a torrent near at hand, now swollen to an unfordable depth and
+swiftness. The four beheld this impassable stream, boiling and surging
+and sweeping on to mingle itself with the madly leaping sea-waves out
+there in the dim night-gloom to the left, as they descended from the
+diligence and prepared to go on foot across something that looked like a
+rudely-constructed imitation of the Rialto Bridge at Venice, seen
+through a haze of darkness, slanting rain, faintly-beaming coach-lamps,
+pushing and heaving men, panting led horses, passengers muffled up and
+umbrellaed, conductor leading and directing. Then came the reharnessing
+of the horses, the reassembling of the passengers, the remounting of the
+"insides," the reclambering to his seat of the alert _banquette_
+"outside" (after a hearty interchange of those few brief, smiling words
+with his _coupé_ companions which, between English friends, say so much
+in so little utterance at periods of mutual anxiety and interest), the
+payment of the agreed-for sum by the conductor to the bronze-faced
+pushers and heavers, amid a violent renewal of the storm of Genoese
+jargon, terminated by an authoritative word from the payer as he swung
+himself up into his place by a leathern strap dangling from the
+coach-side, a smart crack of the postilion's whip, a forward plunge of
+the struggling horses, an onward jerk of the diligence, and the final
+procedure into the wet and dark and roar of the wild night.
+
+The gas and stir of Savona came as welcome tokens of repose to the
+toilsome journey; and the four alighted at one of the hotels there with
+an inexpressible sense of relief. His fellow-travellers were warned,
+however, by the alert gentleman, that they must hold themselves in
+readiness to start before dawn next morning, as the conductor wished to
+avail himself of the first peep of daylight in passing several torrents
+on the road which lay beyond Savona. Velvet-cap assented with a grunt;
+one of the sisters--all briskness at night, but fit for nothing of a
+morning--proposed not to go to bed at all; while the other--quite used
+up at night, but "up to everything" of a morning--undertook to call the
+whole party in time for departure.
+
+This she did,--ordering coffee, seeing that some was swallowed by the
+sister who had been unwillingly roused from the sleep she had willingly
+offered to forego overnight, collecting cloaks, baskets, and
+travelling-rugs, and altogether looking so wakeful and ready that she
+wellnigh drove her drowsy sister to desperation.
+
+The preannounced torrents proved as swollen as were expected; so that
+the passengers had to unpack themselves from the heaps of wrappings
+stowed snugly round their feet and knees, and issue forth into the keen
+morning air, armed with difficultly-put-up umbrellas, to traverse
+certain wooden foot-bridges, in the midst of which they could not help
+halting to watch the lightened diligence dragged splashingly through the
+deep and rapid streams, expecting, at every lunge it made into the
+water-dug gullies, to see it turn helplessly over on its side in the
+very midst of them. Nevertheless, no such accident occurred; and the
+four jogged on, along soaking, soppy, drenched roads, that seemed never
+to have known dust or drought. At one saturated village, they saw a
+dripping procession of people under crimson umbrellas, shouldering two
+rude coffins of deal boards, which were borne to the door of a church
+that stood by the wayside,--where the train waited in a kind of moist
+dejection to be admitted, and to look dispiritedly after the passing
+diligence. The alert gentleman heard from what the conductor gathered
+from an old woman wrapped in a many-colored gaudy-patterned scarf of
+chintz, which, wet through, covered her head and shoulders clingingly,
+that this was the funeral of a poor peasant-man and his wife, who had
+both died suddenly and both on the same day. The old woman held up her
+brown, shrivelled hands, and gesticulated pityingly with them in the
+pouring rain, as she mumbled her hurried tale of sorrow; while the
+postilion involuntarily slackened pace, that her words might be heard
+where he and the conductor sat.
+
+The horses were suffered to creep on at their own snail pace, while the
+influence of the funeral scene lasted; but soon the long lash was plied
+vivaciously again, and we came to another torrent, more deep, more
+rapid, more swollen than any previous one. Fortunately for us, a day or
+two before there had been a postilion nearly drowned in attempting to
+drive through this impassable ford; and still more fortunately for us,
+this postilion chanced to have a relation who was a servant in the
+household of Count Cavour, then prime-minister to King Victor Emanuel.
+"Papa Camillo's" servant's kinsman's life being endangered, an order had
+come from Turin only a few hours before our diligence arrived at the
+bank of the dangerous stream,--now swollen into a swift, broad
+river,--decreeing that the new road and bridge, lately in course of
+construction on this spot, should be opened immediately for passage to
+and fro. The road was more like a stone-quarry than a carriageable
+public highway, so encumbered was it with granite fragments, heaped
+ready for top-dressing and finishing; and the bridge led on to a raised
+embankment, coming to a sudden fissure, where the old coach-road crossed
+it. Still, our conductor, finding that some few carts and one diligence
+had actually passed over the ground, set himself to the work of getting
+ours also across. First, the insides and outsides were abstracted from
+the coach,--which they had by this time come to regard as quite an
+extraneous part of their travelling, not so much a "conveyance" as
+something to be conveyed,--and the four took their way over the stones,
+amused at this new and most unexpected obstacle to their progress.
+Hastening across the fissure, they went and placed themselves (always
+under umbrellas) beside a troop of little vagabond boys,--who had come
+to see the fun, and had secured good front places on the opposite
+bank,--to view the diligence brought down the sharp declivity of the
+embankment to the old road below. The spectators beheld the jolting
+vehicle come slowly and gratingly along, like a sturdy recusant, holding
+back, until the straining horses had tugged it by main force to the
+brink of the fissure. Here the animals stopped, snorted, eyed the sheer
+descent with twitching ears and quivering skins, as though they said in
+equine language, "We're surely not required to drag it down _this_!"
+They were soon relieved from their doubt, by being taken out of the
+traces, patted, and gently led down the embankment, leaving their
+burdensome charge behind. There it stuck, helplessly alone,--even more
+thoroughly belying its own name than diligences usually do,--perched on
+the edge of a declivity of the height of a tall house, stock still,
+top-heavy with piled luggage, deserted by its passengers, abandoned of
+its friend in the velvet cap, a motionless and apparently objectless
+coach. How it was to be dislodged and conveyed down the "vast abrupt"
+became matter of conjecture to the four, when presently some men came to
+the spot with a large coil of cable-cord, which they proceeded to pass
+through the two hindmost side-windows of the diligence, threading it
+like a bead on a string; and then they gradually lowered the lumbering
+coach down the side of the descent, amid the _evvivas_ of the vagabond
+boys, led by an enthusiastic "_Bravissimo!_" from Velvet-cap.
+
+This incident occupied much time; and though the travellers made some
+progress during the afternoon, the gray shades of twilight were
+gathering over and deepening the gloom of the already gray sky and gray
+landscape,--deadened to that color from their naturally brilliant hues
+by the prevailing wet,--as the travellers stopped to change horses again
+at the entrance of the town of Oneglia. Here, while the conductor ran
+into a house to make purchase of a loaf about half a yard in length and
+a corpulent bottle of wine, the four saw another funeral train
+approaching. This time it was still more dreary, being attended by a
+show of processional pomp, inexpressibly forlorn and squalid. The coffin
+was palled with a square of rusty black velvet, whence all the pile had
+long been worn, and which the soaking rain now helped age to embrown and
+make flabby; a standard cross was borne by an ecclesiastical official,
+who had on a quadrangular cap surmounted by a centre tuft; two priests
+followed, sheltered by umbrellas, their sacerdotal garments dabbled and
+draggled with mud, and showing thick-shod feet beneath the dingy serge
+and lawn that flapped above them, as they came along at a smart pace,
+suggestive of anything but solemnity. As little of that effect was there
+in the burial-hymn which they bawled, rather than chanted, in a
+careless, off-hand style, until they reached the end of the street and
+of the town, when the bawlers suddenly ceased, took an abrupt leave of
+the coffin and its bearers, fairly turned on their heels, accompanied by
+the official holy standard-bearer, and went back at a brisk trot,
+having, it seems, fulfilled the functions required of them. Obsequies
+more heartless in their manner of performance, it was never the fate of
+the four to behold. The impression left by this sight assorted well with
+the deep and settled murkiness that dwelt like a thick veil on all
+around. Even the cheery tones of Velvet-cap's voice lost their
+elasticity, and the sprightliness of the sister's spirits, that
+invariably rose with the coming on of night, failed under the depressing
+influence of that rain-hastened funeral and that "set-in" rainy evening.
+As for the sister whose spirits fell with the fall of day, she was fast
+lapsing into a melancholy condition of silence and utter "giving-up."
+
+Rattling over the pavement of the long, straggling town,--plashing
+along a few miles of level road,--struggling up hill,--rattling through
+another pavemented town,--striking into the country again,--we came to
+another long ascent. As we toiled to the top, a postilion, having the
+care of five return horses, joined company with ours, the two men
+walking up hill together, while their beasts paced slowly on, with
+drooping heads and smoking sides. Now and then, when the road was less
+steep, and levelled into trotting-ground, the postilions climbed to
+their seats,--ours on his rightful box-seat, the other on an impromptu
+one, which he made for himself upon a sack of corn slung beneath the
+front windows of the _coupé_,--and while our horses fell into an easy
+jog, we could see the return ones go on before at a swagging run, with
+their loosened harness tossing and hanging from them as they took their
+own course, now on one side of the way, now on the other, according to
+the promptings of their unreined fancy.
+
+Suddenly, at a turn of the road, we came upon an undistinguishable
+something, which, when our eyes could pierce through and beyond the
+immediate light afforded by our diligence-lamp, we discovered to be
+another diligence leaning heavily over a ditch, while its conductor and
+postilion were at their horses' heads, endeavoring to make them
+extricate it from its awkward position. This, however, was a feat beyond
+the poor beasts' strength; and our conductor, after a few "Sacramentos"
+at this new delay, got down and ran to see what could be done to help
+them out of the scrape. It had been occasioned partly by the
+carelessness of the conductor, who, unlike ours, (for the latter was a
+man of good sense and judgment, self-possessed, and perfectly attentive
+to the duties of his office,) had neglected to light the diligence-lamp,
+and partly by the obstinacy of a drunken postilion, who insisted on
+keeping too close to the ditch side of the road, while he instinctively
+avoided the precipice side. Nearly two mortal hours was our diligence
+detained, during which time our cattle were taken from their traces and
+harnessed to those of the half-overturned coach, in various attempts to
+dislodge it. The first resulted in a further locking of the wheel
+against a projecting point of rock, and an additional bundling sideways
+of the leaning diligence; the second was made by attaching the horses to
+the back of it, while the men set their strength to the wheels,
+endeavoring to push them round by main force in aid of the straining
+team. The weight of the heavily-loaded coach resisted their efforts to
+move it; and then the passengers were requested to descend. Out into the
+rain and mud and darkness they came, warned by our conductor, in his
+prompt, thoughtful way, to beware of stumbling over the precipitous
+cliff, which dropped straight from the roadside there, hundreds of feet
+down, into the sea. We could hear the dash of the waves far below, as
+our conductor's voice sounded out clear and peremptory, uttering
+the timely reminder; we could hear the words of two French
+_commis-voyageurs_, coming from the ditch-sunk diligence, making some
+facetious remark, one to the other, about their present adventure being
+very much like some of Alexandre Dumas's _Impressions de Voyage_; we
+could hear the cries and calls of the men refastening the horses, and
+preparing to push anew at the wheels; we could distinguish a domestic
+party dismounting from the back portion of the other diligence,
+consisting of a father and mother with their baby and the _bonne_; we
+could see the little white cap covered up carefully with a handkerchief
+by the young mother, while the father held an umbrella over their heads,
+and conducted them to the counterpart portion of our diligence, where
+the family took refuge during the fresh attempts to drag theirs forth.
+
+Then there came a tap against our _coupé_ window, and an unmistakably
+British accent was heard to say: "Anglais? Anglais?" Tap--tap--tap. "Any
+English here?"
+
+Velvet-cap let the window down, and answered in his cheerfullest tone,
+"Yes."
+
+This reply seemed to rejoice the heart of the inquirer, who immediately
+rejoined, "Oh!--Well, I really wished to know if there were any one here
+who could understand me. These fellows don't comprehend one word that I
+say; and I can't speak one word of their jabber. Just listen to them!
+What a confounded row they keep up! Parcel of stupid brutes! If I could
+only have made myself understood, I could have told them how to get it
+out in a minute. Confounded thing this, ain't it? Kept last night, too,
+by something of the same kind of accident; and I couldn't get those
+stupid fellows to make out what I meant, and give me my carpet-bag."
+
+Polite condolences from Velvet-cap.
+
+"I say, are these your Italian skies? Is Nice no better than this? By
+George, I didn't come here for this, though!"
+
+Assurances of the unusually bad weather this season from Velvet-cap.
+
+"No, but just hark! what a confounded row and jabber those fellows keep
+up."
+
+A simultaneous "Ee-ye-ho! ee-yuch-yuch!" came from the striving men at
+this moment, and our British acquaintance, with a hasty "Good night!"
+hurried off to see the result. It was this time a successful one; the
+leaning diligence was plucked out, restored to an upright position, and
+its passengers were reassembled. Once more on its way, our conductor
+returned to his own coach; and, with the help of our postilion,
+reharnessed our horses. But the difficulty now was to start them. Tired
+with their unexpected task of having to tug at another and a stuck-fast
+diligence,--made startlish with having to stand in the rain and chill
+night air, in the open road, while the debates were going on as to the
+best method of attaching them to the sunken vehicle,--when once put back
+into their own traces, they took to rearing and kicking instead of
+proceeding. It is by no means amusing to sit in a diligence behind five
+plunging horses, on a cliff-road,--one edge of which overhangs the sea,
+and the other consists of a deep ditch or water-way, beneath a sheer
+upright rock,--"when rain and wind beat dark December"; and even after
+whip and whoop had succeeded in prevailing on the rearers and kickers to
+"take the road" again, that road proved so unprecedentedly bad as almost
+to render futile the struggles of the poor beasts. They did their best;
+they strained their haunches, they bent their heads forward, they
+actually made leaps of motion, in trying to lug the clogged wheels on
+through the sludge and clammy soil; but this was a _mauvais pas_, where
+the _cantonniers'_ good offices in road-mending had been lately
+neglected, and it seemed almost an impossibility to get through with our
+tired cattle. However, the thing was achieved, and the town of San Remo
+at length reached.
+
+Here, with a change of horses, it was now our turn to have a drunken
+postilion; whom our conductor, after seizing him by the collar with both
+hands, permitted to mount to his high seat and gather up the reins,
+there being no other driver to be had. Smacking his long whip with an
+energy that made the night-echoes resound far and wide, galloping his
+horses up hill at a rate that swayed the coach to and fro and threatened
+speedy upsetting, screaming and raving like a wild Indian uttering his
+battle-cry, our charioteer pursued his headlong course, until brought to
+a stop by something that suddenly obstructed his career.
+
+A voice before us shouted out, "We must all go back to San Remo!"
+
+A silence ensued; and then our conductor got down, running forward to
+see what was the matter. The three in the _coupé_ saw their alert friend
+of the _banquette_ descend; which caused Velvet-cap to bestir himself,
+and let down the window. Not obtaining any satisfactory information by
+looking out into the darkness and confusion, he opened the door also,
+and called to some one to help him forth. Whereupon he found himself in
+the arms of the maudlin postilion; who, taking him doubtless for some
+foreign lady passenger in great alarm, hugged him affectionately,
+stuttering out, "N'ayez pas peur! Point de danger! point de danger!"
+
+"Get off with you, will you?" was the ejaculation from Velvet-cap, as he
+pushed away the man, and went in search of his alert friend.
+
+The latter soon came running back to the coach-side, bidding the sisters
+get out quickly and come and look at what was well worth seeing.
+
+It was indeed! There lay a gigantic mass of earth, stones, and trees,
+among which were several large blocks of solid rock, hurled across the
+road, showing a jagged outline against the night-sky, like an
+interposing mountain-barrier but just recently dropped in their path.
+The whole had fallen not an hour ago; and it was matter of
+congratulation to the four, that it had not done so at the very moment
+their diligence passed beneath.
+
+There was nothing to be done but what the voice (which proved to be that
+of the conductor belonging to the other diligence) had proposed, namely,
+to go back to San Remo.
+
+Here the travellers of both diligences soon arrived; the four, as they
+passed to their rooms, hearing the British accent on the landing, in
+disconsolate appeal to a waiter: "Oh!--look here,--sack, you know, sack,
+sack!"
+
+"Oui, monsieur; votre sac de nuit. Il est en bas,--en bas, sur la
+diligence. On le montera bientôt."
+
+The lady whose spirits rose at night was flitting about, brisk as a bee,
+getting morsels of bread and dipping them into wine to revive her
+sister; who, worn out with fatigue and exhaustion, sat in a collapsed
+and speechless state on a sofa.
+
+Next morning, however, she was herself again, and able to note the owner
+of the British accent, who had certainly obtained his desired
+carpet-bag, since there he was, at the _coupé_ window, brushed and
+beaming, addressing Velvet-cap with, "Excuse me, as an Englishman; but,
+could you oblige me with change for a napoleon? I want it to pay my bill
+with. They could get some from the next shop, if these jabbering fellows
+would but understand, and go and try."
+
+The morning-animated sister was now also able to observe upon the more
+promising aspect of the weather, which was evidently clearing up; for it
+not only did not rain, but showed streaks of brightness over the sea, in
+lines between the hitherto unbroken gray clouds. She adverted to the
+pleasant look of the cap-lifting _cantonniers_, as they stood drawn up
+and nodding encouragement at the diligence, near the mass of earth which
+had fallen overnight; and which they, by dint of several hours' hard
+work from long before dawn, had sufficiently dug away to admit of
+present passage. She said how comforting the sight of their honest
+weather-lined faces was, bright with the touch of morning and early
+good-humor.
+
+This brought a muttered rejoinder from the other sister; who, huddled up
+in one corner, still half asleep, remarked that the faces of the
+_cantonniers_ were surely far more comforting when visible by the light
+of the diligence-lamp, coming to bring succor amid darkness and danger.
+
+"But it is precisely because they are never to be seen during the
+darkness, when danger is increased by there rarely being help at hand,
+that I dread and dislike night," returned Morning-lover.
+
+"How oppressive the scent of those truffles is, the first thing after
+breakfast!" exclaimed Night-favorer.
+
+"I had not yet perceived it," replied Morning-lover. "Last evening,
+indeed, after a whole day's haunting with it, the smell of that hamper
+of truffles which the conductor took up at Finale was almost
+insupportable; but now, in the fresh morning air, it is anything but
+disagreeable. I shall never hereafter encounter the scent of truffles
+without being forcibly reminded of all the incidents of this journey.
+That smell seems absolutely interwoven with images of torrent-crossing,
+cliff-falling, pouring rain, and roaring waves."
+
+The talk fell upon associations of sense with events and places; sounds,
+sights, and scents, intimately connected with and vividly recalling
+certain occurrences of our lives. We had missed the glimpse of the baby
+face and little white cap from the back of the diligence that preceded
+us during the first portion of the day, owing to our coach having been
+delayed at Ventimiglia by some peculiar arrangement which required the
+team that had dragged us up a steep ascent to stop and bait,--merely
+resting instead of changing, before we went on again.
+
+The Pont St. Louis, with the picturesque ravine it crosses, had been
+passed, and the pretty town of Mentone was full in view, when we caught
+sight of the other diligence, some way on the road before us, brought
+once more to a stand-still, while a crowd of persons surrounded it, and
+its passengers were to be seen, in the distance, descending, with the
+baby cap among them. At this instant, an excited French official darted
+out from a doorway by the side of the road near us, raising his arms
+distractedly, and throwing his sentences up at the conductor, who
+understood him to say that there was no going on; that a whole garden
+had come tumbling down across the road just at the entrance to Mentone,
+and prevented passing.
+
+We drove on to the spot, and found it was indeed so; the grounds of a
+villa, skirting the highway on a terrace-ledge, had been loosened by the
+many days' rain, and had fallen during the forenoon, a heap of
+ruins,--shrubs, plants, garden-walls, flowers, borders, railings,--one
+mass of obstruction.
+
+With a glance at the _coupé_ passengers, another French official (the
+newly-appointed frontier custom-house being close at hand) stepped
+forward to suggest that the "insides" could be accommodated, during the
+interim required for the _cantonniers_ to do their work, at a
+lately-built hotel he pointed to; but the four agreed to spend the time
+in walking round by the path above the obstruction, so as to see its
+whole extent.
+
+The wet, percolating and penetrating through the softer soil, gradually
+accumulates a weight of water behind and beneath the harder and rockier
+portions, which dislodges them from their places, pushes them forward,
+and finally topples them over headlong. This is generally prevented
+where terrace-walls are built up, by leaving holes here and there in the
+structure, which allow the wet to drain through innocuously; but if, as
+in the present instance, this caution be neglected, many days'
+successive rain is almost sure to produce the disaster in question. It
+had a woful look,--all those garden elegances cast there, flung out upon
+the high-road, like discarded rubbish; pots of selected flowers,
+favorite seats, well-worn paths, carefully-tended beds, trailing
+climbers, torn and snapped branches, all lying to be shovelled away as
+fast as the road-menders could ply their pickaxes and spades.
+
+At length this task was accomplished; the diligences were hauled over
+the broken ground (their contents being also "hauled over" at the
+custom-house); the passengers (after the important ceremonial of handing
+their passports for inspection, and having them handed back by
+personages who kept their countenances wonderfully) were in again and
+off again.
+
+But one more torrent to cross,--where the foremost coach had nearly been
+overset, and where the occupants of the hindmost one, profiting by
+example, got out and walked over the footbridge, in time to behold the
+owner of the British accent wave his hat triumphantly from the _coupé_
+with a hearty (English) "Huzza!" as the vehicle recovered, by a violent
+lurch to the left, from an equally violent one to the right, issuing
+scathless from the last flood that lay in the way,--and then both
+diligences began at a leisurely pace to crawl up a long ascent of road,
+bordered on each side by olive-grounds;--until the view opened to a
+fine stretch of prospect, now colored and vivified by a glance of the
+afternoon sun,--the diminutive peninsular kingdom of Monaco, lying down
+in the very sea, bright, and green, and fairy-like; the bold barren crag
+of the Turbia rock frowning sternly in front, with its antique Roman
+tower and modern Italian church; the rocky heights above to the right,
+with their foreground of olive-trees, vine-trellises, and orange-groves,
+interspersed with country-houses; while through all wound the
+ever-climbing road, a white thread in the distance, with the telegraphic
+poles, dwindled to pin-like dimensions, indicating its numberless turns
+and bends.
+
+As the sun sank over the far western lines of the Estrelle Mountains,
+and the sky faded into grayish purple, succeeded by an ever-deepening
+suffusion of black, unpierced by a single star, the high reach of road
+above Villafranca Bay was passed; and, on our turning the corner of the
+last intervening upland, full in view came the many lights of Nice, with
+its castled rock, its minarets and cupolas, its stretch of sea, its look
+of sheltered repose;--all most welcome to sight, after our sensational
+journey on the Cornice Road in a great rain.
+
+
+
+
+INCIDENTS OF THE PORTLAND FIRE.
+
+
+Never had Portland looked more beautiful than when the sunrise-gun
+boomed across the waters, announcing the ninetieth anniversary of our
+independence. The sun, which on another day should look down on the
+city's desolation, rose unclouded over the houses, that stood forth from
+the foliage of the embowering elms, or nestled in their shadow; over the
+quaintness of the old-fashioned churches and the beauty of the more
+modern temples; over the stately public edifices, and the streets
+everywhere decked with flags and thronged with crowds of happy,
+well-dressed people. Of course, the popular satisfaction expressed
+itself in the report of pistols, guns, and fire-crackers; and all
+through the day the usual amusements went on, and in the afternoon
+almost everybody was on the street.
+
+A few minutes before five o'clock, when the festivity was at its
+wildest, the alarm of fire rang out. Every circumstance was favorable
+for a conflagration,--the people scattered, the city dry and heated by a
+July sun, and a high southwesterly wind blowing. It needed only the
+exciting cause in the shape of a fire-cracker, and lo! half the city was
+doomed.
+
+My youngest brother, at the first sound of the bell, came and begged me
+to take him to the fire; so I went, to please him. Poor child! I little
+thought that by twelve o'clock at night there would be no place at home
+to lay the little head.
+
+We found the fire near Brown's sugar-house, where there was a large
+crowd already assembled. But, though the smoke and masses of flame were
+rising only from one house, the wind was blowing a perfect gale; and a
+foreboding of the calamity impending seemed to possess the spectators.
+There was none of the usual noise, and men appeared to look at the
+burning house with a feeling of awe. We did not stop there at all; and
+some idea of the rapid progress of the fire may be gathered from the
+fact, that about four squares distant, where, on the way up, we could
+see one fire, on our return we saw three,--two lighted by sparks from
+the first. We slowly retraced our way, and met people on every side
+quickening their steps in the direction of the fire.
+
+About seven o'clock, mother and I thought it would be wise to pack up
+our silver and valuables; for it seemed as if we were directly in the
+path of the conflagration. Down Fore Street, and from Fore to Free, it
+was rushing on. The southwestern heavens were entirely shut from our
+view by the flames and smoke; cinders, ashes, and blazing embers were
+falling like rain down Middle Street, and across to Congress, as far as
+the eye could see. The scene was terrible; but it was soon surpassed in
+fearfulness, for the work of desolation was not half completed. The
+Irish population were the chief sufferers up to this hour. It was
+heart-rending to see the women rushing hither and thither, trying to
+save their few possessions. Here, a poor creature was dragging a
+mattress, followed by several little crying children, her face the
+picture of despair; there, another, with her family, stood over the
+remnants of her scanty stock. A poor woman, who was in the habit of
+working for us, lived near the corner of Cross and Fore Streets. She had
+five children and a sick husband to care for. Almost all her energies
+were bent in getting them to a place of safety; and the few little
+things which she succeeded in rescuing from the flames were afterwards
+stolen from her by some one of the many wretches who gathered the spoils
+that awful night.
+
+It soon became evident that we must decide upon some plan of action, in
+case it should come to the worst. We had two married sisters,--one
+living in India Street, the other at the west end of the city. As the
+former had no family, and was alone, even her husband being away, and as
+the latter had three children, and a house full of company, we decided
+that, if we must move, it should be to India Street. We sent off one
+team, and my youngest brother with it, before the fire was anywhere near
+us; and then, while my two little sisters assisted mother in getting
+things together, I worked with my brother and cousin, hanging wet
+blankets against the walls, pouring water on the roof, and taking other
+precautionary measures. But all was useless. On came the fire with a
+steady sweep. We saw that it was idle to combat it longer, and turned
+all our energies to saving what we could. Our home was to be ours no
+longer. The dear old roof-tree, under which had assembled so many loved
+ones, now gone forever,--where the eyes of all our home circle first saw
+the light of life,--where three of that number closed theirs in
+death,--the centre of the hopes and joys of a lifetime,--was to be
+abandoned to the flames. It was like tearing our heart-strings to leave
+it so; but there was no time for lingering. With streaming eyes and
+aching hearts we started out, taking what we could in our hands. There
+was by this time no vehicle to be obtained in which we could ride; and,
+supporting my mother, my sisters clinging to us in silent terror, we
+were borne along with the crowd down Middle Street to India. I cannot
+remember any incidents of that walk. The hurrying throng around me, the
+flying sparks, and the roar of the engines, seem like the confusion of a
+dream.
+
+Our sister, who met us at the door, felt perfectly secure, and had done
+nothing towards packing. I gave her an account of our proceedings,
+thinking each moment of some precious thing I might have brought away.
+We went to the front door, and looked out on the scene before us. The
+fire seemed to come on the wings of the wind. Middle Street was ablaze;
+Wood's marble hotel was in flames, together with the beautiful dwelling
+opposite. The fire leaped from house to house, and, if for a moment
+checked, it was but to rush on in wilder fury. Churches, one by one,
+were seized by the flame, and crumbled into ruin before it. No human
+power could arrest its fierce progress. In vain the firemen put forth a
+strength almost superhuman: their exertions seemed but to add to its
+fury. Explosion after explosion gave greater terror to the scene:
+buildings were successively blown up in the useless effort to bar its
+pathway; the fire leaped the chasm and sped on. Fugitives of every age
+and condition were hurrying through the streets, laden with everything
+imaginable,--especially looking-glasses, which seem the one important
+thing to be saved during a fire. My brother and cousin had not yet made
+their appearance, nor had we seen anything of my brother-in-law, from
+the other end of the city. But we knew they must be at their places of
+business, which were now in the heart of the burning district. Swiftly
+the destruction hurried towards us; and people were now seen bringing in
+their goods and seeking shelter on our premises. O what heart-broken
+faces surrounded us that fearful night! Friends, and people we had never
+seen, alike threw themselves on our kindness; and I must say that a
+spirit of humanity and good-will seemed everywhere prevalent among the
+citizens. We were now ourselves tortured by suspense. Could we escape,
+or should we again have to seek refuge from the flames? Surely the work
+of destruction would stop before it reached India Street? The hot breath
+of the maddening fire, and its lurid glare, were the only response. O,
+if the wind would only change! But a vane, glistening like gold in the
+firelight, steadfastly pointed to the southeast. For one moment it
+veered, and our hearts almost stood still with hope; but it swung back,
+and a feeling of despair settled upon us.
+
+Our house was full. One poor lady, with a little baby only a week old,
+lay on a sofa in one of the rooms; near her, bent over in a
+rocking-chair, sat an old woman who had not been out of her house for
+five years, with a look of hopeless bewilderment on her wrinkled face.
+But people were now beginning to move from our house. India Street was
+almost blocked up. Every kind of vehicle that went upon wheels, from a
+barouche to a wheelbarrow, passed by laden with furniture.
+
+At this moment my brother and brother-in-law approached, blackened
+almost beyond recognition. It was not until C---- spoke that I really
+knew him.
+
+"We must be calm and collected, and save what we can. John is trying to
+get a team to carry mother up to L----'s; the rest of us will have to go
+to the graveyard. But John may not be successful, so you stay here, and
+see if you can get any one to take mother: they may do it for you, when
+they wouldn't for a man."
+
+I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, clinging to the horse-post, and
+appealed in vain to wagons going by.
+
+"_Won't_ you take a lady and children away from here?"
+
+"I _can't_, ma'am, not if you was to give me twenty-five dollars,--not
+if you was to give me five hundred. I'm taking a load for a gentleman
+now."
+
+So it was in every case. Very many were worse off than we were,--had not
+even a man to help. One well-known citizen was appealed to for help, in
+the early part of the evening, by a poor woman,--a sort of dependant of
+his family. He took her and her daughter, with their effects, outside
+the city, and returned to find India Street on fire and no means of
+getting through the crowd to his house, which was burned, with all that
+was not saved by the exertions of his wife. They had visiting them a
+lady whose child lay dead in the house, awaiting burial. The mother took
+the little corpse in her arms and carried it herself up to the other end
+of the city!
+
+While I was making these vain attempts, John drove up in a light,
+open-topped buggy. We hurriedly got mother and E---- into it, and gave
+into their charge the jewelry and silver, and they drove away. I could
+not but tremble for their safety. The road seemed impassable, so dense
+was the struggling crowd. On every side the fire was raging. Looking up
+India Street it was one sheet of flame, and equally so before us. It
+looked like a world on fire, for we could see no smoke,--it was too near
+for that,--and the heat was terribly intense.
+
+There was no time to be lost. Both our servants and M----'s were away
+spending the Fourth, so we had to depend entirely on ourselves. Our
+back fence was soon torn down, and we all worked as we never had before.
+We saved a good deal, but not one half of what we brought from our house
+in the first place. We had thrown things out of the window, and C----
+and J---- worked hard dragging them out of the yard, until, scorched and
+almost suffocated, they were compelled to desist. The flames were upon
+us so quickly, it seemed incredible that they could have seized the
+house so soon after we thought we were in danger.
+
+"Thank God, we are all safe!" cried M----, sinking upon the ground in
+the graveyard, where we took refuge. She tried to look cheerful; but the
+sight before her--her house in flames--and the thought of her husband's
+absence overcame her, and she burst into tears. I laid the two little
+girls upon the grass; and, wearied out, they soon fell asleep. It was a
+strange scene in that quiet old cemetery, where the dead of more than a
+century had lain undisturbed in their graves. Where only the reverent
+tread of the mourner, or of some visitor carefully threading his way
+among the grassy mounds, was wont to be known, crowds of frantic people
+were hurrying across; while here and there were family groups clustered
+together, watching the destruction of their property.
+
+How long the remaining hours seemed! Would the daylight never come? The
+children slept on, and we four talked in low tones of the morrow.
+
+At length, faint, rosy lights began to streak the eastern horizon, and
+slowly the day dawned. The sun rose unclouded above the hills, sending
+down his beams upon the desolation which the night had wrought, lighting
+up the islands and the blue waters, flecked with sail-boats.
+
+Not less welcome to us, J---- now also appeared,--with a hay-cart, whose
+driver he had engaged to come and remove us. Our goods were put into it;
+we took our places among them, and, as soon as the tardy oxen could
+carry us, were safe in my sister's house, living over again in words
+that fearful night, and relating to each other some of those incidents
+of the fire which can never all be told. A little friend of ours, when
+leaving her home, took in her arms her doll, nearly as large as herself;
+obliged to flee a second time, her mother told her it was useless to try
+and save the doll, and she must leave it there. With many tears she laid
+it on the sofa, feeling, no doubt, as if she were leaving a human being
+to be burnt. The next day, a friend brought to her the identical dolly,
+which had been found in the graveyard! The little one's joy may be
+imagined.
+
+One of the women in the Irish quarter picked up her big pig in her arms
+and carried it to a place of safety, then returned to take care of her
+children and furniture. A woman went by our house in the early part of
+the evening bent nearly double beneath the weight of a trunk strapped
+upon her back. We saw women that night with loads under which almost any
+man would have staggered in ordinary circumstances.
+
+Before we were supposed to be in danger, I walked out with a young
+friend to see what progress the fire was making. At a corner we observed
+a woman with a child about eight years old, talking, in great agitation,
+to a lady, and evidently urging her to accede to some request. My
+companion suggested that we should see if we could aid her in any way.
+As we approached, the lady had taken the child by the hand, with the
+words, "What is your address?" which was given. We inquired if we could
+be of any service. "No, thank you," was the reply. "I asked that lady to
+take care of my daughter. I keep store on that street over there. My
+husband is out of town, and I don't know what I shall do!"--and,
+wringing her hands, she hurried away. I have wondered since what was the
+fate of the little girl thus intrusted to the care of strangers; for the
+lady went in the direction, afterwards swept by the fire.
+
+One family, whose house the flames did not reach until near two o'clock
+in the morning, behaved with great coolness. The head of the household
+lay ill. It was their first care to provide for him. Then they went
+deliberately about, gathering up their valuables, taking just what they
+wanted. They secured a wagon to carry away their things. Their house,
+meanwhile, had been full of refugees from the flames. One of the young
+ladies, going for the last time through the deserted rooms, found, on a
+sofa in the parlor, a sick woman, utterly unable to move. At first, she
+felt almost in despair at sight of this poor creature, so near meeting a
+fearful fate. But quickly recovering her presence of mind, she called in
+men from the street, and, by their united efforts, they carried her out,
+and forced a passing wagon to take her to a safe place. A young lady,
+who lived at a little distance from this family, was spending the night
+at the other end of the city. They sat up till half past twelve, and she
+was then in the act of retiring, never dreaming that her home was in
+danger, when a loaded wagon stopped at the door, and out stepped her
+sister and child. She went back in the same vehicle, and worked till
+twelve the next day, getting things out of the house, collecting and
+guarding them till they could be removed.
+
+There was, of course, the usual difference shown amongst people in such
+circumstances,--energy and coolness contrasted with imbecility and
+frantic excitement. A friend who moved three times, with her husband so
+ill that he had to be carried from place to place, never once forgot to
+administer his medicine at regular intervals,--with a steady hand
+pouring out the drops by the light of the fire.
+
+A gentleman was carrying some of his books, preceded by an assistant,
+who also had his arms full. The latter walked so rapidly that his
+employer could not keep up with him. He called upon him to slacken his
+pace; but, as no attention was paid to this, the gentleman dropped his
+books upon the ground, and, running forward, knocked him down,
+determined to be obeyed, fire or no fire.
+
+But all were not so cool. One man, seeing the flames advancing in the
+direction of his house, rushed thither to save his property. He worked
+with might and main, but, when the house was nearly emptied, became
+aware of the fact that it was his neighbor's. By this time his own
+dwelling was on fire, from which he saved scarcely anything. I know one
+person who passed through his hall perfectly empty-handed, while all
+around him were bundles and boxes, which were consumed in the fire;
+another walked out of his house with a package of envelopes in his hand,
+leaving, close by, an article worth thirty dollars.
+
+I must mention one of many instances of unselfishness that came under my
+observation. A gentleman was comfortably established in a house which he
+had recently bought and furnished, expecting there to enjoy the
+pleasures of a home. One half of the house he had rented; but the
+husband of the woman to whom it was let was not in town. Their dwelling
+shared the fate of those around them, being burnt. He first set to work
+to save his own things; but, struck by the forlorn condition of his
+tenant, he did his best to save her effects, even to the detriment of
+his own; for when they were examined, the greater portion of them was
+found to be hers. Time has not exhausted the truth and beauty of the
+saying, that "in the night the stars shine forth," and the stars did not
+pale even in the terrible light of the fire that consumed half a city.
+
+
+
+
+MY LITTLE BOY.
+
+
+There were nine of us, all told, when mother died; myself, the eldest,
+aged twenty, a plain and serious woman, well fitted by nature and
+circumstance to fill the place made vacant by death.
+
+I cannot remember when I was young. Indeed, when I hear other women
+recount the story of their early days, I think I had no childhood, for
+mine was like no other.
+
+Mother was married so young, that at the age when most women begin to
+think seriously of marriage she had around her a numerous brood, of
+which I was less the elder sister than the younger mother. She was
+delicate by nature, and peevish by reason of her burdens, and I think
+could never have been a self-reliant character; so she fretted and
+sighed through life, and when death came, unawares, she seemed not sorry
+for the refuge.
+
+She called me to her bed one day in a tone so cheerful that I wondered,
+and when I saw the calm and brightness in her face, hope made me glad,
+"Margaret," she said, "you have been a good daughter. I never did you
+justice until this illness opened my eyes. You have shamed me by your
+patience and your sacrifices so gently borne. You are more fit to be a
+mother than I ever was; and I leave the children to your care without a
+fear. It is not likely you will ever marry, and I die content, knowing
+that you will do your duty."
+
+After this came many sad days,--the parting, the silent form which death
+had made majestic, the funeral hymns, the tolling bell, the clods upon
+the coffin-lid; and when the sun shone out and the birds sang again, it
+seemed to me I had dreamed it all, and that the sun could not shine nor
+the birds sing above a grave on which the grass had not yet had time to
+grow. But I had not dreamed, nor had I time for dreaming. Mother was
+dead, and eight children claimed from me a mother's care,--the youngest
+a wailing babe but seven days old, whom I came to cherish and love as my
+little boy.
+
+When I had settled down, and grown accustomed to the vacuum which never
+could be filled for me, I thought a great deal upon mother's last words.
+I was proud of the trust she reposed in me, and I meant to be faithful
+to it. I wondered much why she had thought it likely I should never
+marry; for I was a woman with strong instincts, and, amid all the toil
+and care of my barren life, I had seen afar, through gleaming mists, the
+mountains of hope arise, and beyond the heat and dust and labor of duty
+caught glimpses of green ways made pleasant by quiet waters.
+
+I do not think my burden seemed heavier now that mother no longer helped
+me to bear it; for my sense of responsibility had been increased by her
+complaining spirit. Her discouraging views of life held in check the
+reins of my eager fancy: it seemed wrong to enjoy a happiness I could
+not share with her. Now I no longer felt this restraint; but, knowing
+that somehow she had missed this happiness for which I waited, the
+knowledge invested her memory with a tender pity, and tempered my
+pleasure with a feeling akin to pain.
+
+I was never idle. Behind the real work of life, my fancy wrought on,
+unknown and unsuspected by the world; my lamp of joy, fed by the sweet
+oil of hope, was ready for the lighting, and I was content to wait.
+
+My little boy throve bravely. Every morning I awoke him with a kiss;
+and, perhaps because each day seemed but a continuation of the other,
+time stood still for him. He was for me the incarnation of all
+loveliness. The fair face, and blond hair, and brown, brooding eyes,
+were beautiful as an angel's, and goodness set its seal on his
+perfections. He gave me no trouble: grief brings age, joy confirms
+youth, and I and my little boy grew young together. He was with me
+everywhere, lightening my labor with his prattling tongue, helping me
+with his sweet, hindering ways; and when the kisses had been many that
+had waked him many morns, he stood beside me, my little boy, hardly a
+hand's breadth lower than myself.
+
+The world had changed for all but him and me. My father had wandered off
+to foreign parts; sisters and brothers, one by one, had gone forth to
+conquer kingdoms and reign in their own right, and one young sister,
+just on the border-land of maiden fancies, (O friends, I write this line
+with tears!) turned from earth and crossed the border-land of heaven.
+
+But he and I remained alone in the old homestead, and walked together
+sweetly down the years.
+
+If I came upon disappointment, I had not sought it, neither did I fall
+by it; but that which was my future slid by me and became the past, so
+gently that I scarce remember where one ended or the other began; and
+though all other lovers failed me, one true remained, to whom I ever
+would be true. The future did not look less fair; nay, I deemed it more
+full of promise than ever. It was as though I had passed from my old
+stand-point of observation to a more easterly window; and the prospect
+was not the less enchanting that I looked upon it over the shoulder of
+my little boy. We talked much of it together; and though he had the
+nearer view, it was my practised vision that saw pathways of beauty not
+yet suspected by him.
+
+But we were still happy in the present, and did not speculate much upon
+the future. The rolling years brought him completeness, and to the
+graces of person were added the gifts of wisdom and knowledge. The down
+that shaded his cheek, like the down upon a ripe peach, had darkened and
+strengthened to the symbol of manhood, and his words had the clear ring
+of purpose. For there was a cloud upon the horizon which at first was no
+bigger than a man's hand, but it grew until it filled the land with
+darkness, and the fair prospect on which I had so loved to gaze was
+hidden behind the storm. My little boy and I looked into each other's
+faces, and he cried, "Margaret, I must go!"
+
+I did not say nay,--for the tears which were not in my eyes were in my
+voice, and to speak was to betray them,--but I turned about to make him
+ready.
+
+In these days my little boy's vision was finer than my own; and when we
+stood together, looking from our orient window, he saw keener and
+farther than I had ever done; for my eyes now looked through a veil of
+tears, while his, like the eagle's, penetrated the cloud to the sunshine
+behind it. He was full of the dream of glory; and his words, fraught
+with purpose and power, stirred me like a trumpet. I caught the
+inspiration that thrilled his soul; for we had walked so long together
+that all paths pursued by him must find me ever at his side.
+
+One day I was summoned to meet a visitor; and going, a tall figure in
+military dress gave me a military salute. It was my little boy, who,
+half abashed at his presumption, drew himself up, and sought refuge from
+shyness in valor. It was not a sight to make me smile, though I smiled
+to please my warrior, who, well pleased, displayed his art, to show how
+fields were won. Won! He had no thought of loss; for youth and hope
+dream not of defeat, and he talked of how the war was to be fought and
+ended, and all should be well.
+
+I kissed my little boy good night; and he slept peacefully, dreaming of
+fields of glory, as Jacob dreamed and saw a heavenly vision.
+
+He went; and then it seemed as if there had been with him one fair long
+summer day, and this was the evening thereof; and my heart was heavy
+within me.
+
+But many letters reached me from the distant field,--long and loving
+letters, full of hope, portraying all the poetry and beauty of
+camp-life, casting the grosser part aside; and to me at home, musing
+amid peaceful scenes, it seemed a great, triumphant march, which must
+crush, with its mere _display_ of power, all wicked foes. But the
+sacrifice of blood was needed for the remission of sin, and these
+holiday troops--heroes in all save the art of war--lost the day, and,
+returning, brought back with their thinned ranks my little boy unharmed.
+Unharmed, thank God! but bronzed and bearded like the pard, and
+tarnished with the wear and burnished with the use of war.
+
+How he talked and laughed, making light of danger, and, growing serious,
+said the fight had but begun,--the business of the nation must, for
+years, be war,--and that his strength and manhood, nay, his life if need
+be, should be given to his country. Then his words made me brave, and
+his looks made me proud. I blessed him with unfaltering lips; and above
+the hills of promise, which my little boy and I saw looking from our
+orient window, rose higher yet the mountains of truth, with the straight
+path of duty leading to the skies. But when he was gone
+again,--gone,--there fell a shadow of the coming night, and the evening
+and the morning were the second day.
+
+His frequent letters dissipated the sense of danger, and brought me
+great comfort. War is not a literary art, and letters from the "imminent
+deadly breach," made it seem less deadly. His self-abnegation filled me
+with wonder. "It is well that few should be lost, that many may be
+saved," he wrote. In what school had this tender youth learned heroism,
+I asked myself, as I read his noble words and trembled at his courage.
+
+My dreams and my gaze turned southward. No eastern beams lured me to
+that lookout so long endeared; for the eyes through which I once gazed
+looked through the smoke of battle, and hope and faith had fled with
+him, and left me but suspense.
+
+Now came hot work. The enemy pressed sorely, and men's--ay, and
+women's--souls were tried. Long days of silence passed, days of
+sickening doubt, and then came the news of _victory_,--victory bought
+with precious blood and heavy loss. Over the ghastly hospital lists I
+hung, fearing and dreading to meet the name of my little boy, taking
+hope, as the list shortened, from the despair of others, _and no
+mention_. Thank God, who giveth _us_ the victory!
+
+And later, when details come in, I see in "official report" my little
+boy's name mentioned for meritorious and gallant conduct, and
+recommended for promotion. Ah! the groans of the dying are lost in the
+shouts of the victor; and, forgetting the evil because of this good, a
+woman's heart cried, _Laus Deo_!
+
+After the battle, hardly fought and dearly purchased, my hero came home
+on furlough. War had developed him faster than the daily kisses of love
+had done; for my little boy--crowned with immortal youth for me--for all
+the world came from this rude embrace a man in stature and wisdom, a
+hero in valor and endurance, a leader beloved and revered.
+
+But for all this I tucked him in o' nights, and shut off harmful
+draughts from him who oft had lain upon the sod, and for covering had
+but the cloudy sky.
+
+These were blissful days,--marked in the past by white memories,--in
+which we talked of future plans, the future so near, yet to our vision
+so remote, and purposed this and that, not considering that Heaven
+disposes all things.
+
+And when he must be off, I kissed him lightly; for success brings
+security, and I was growing accustomed to these partings; but he drew me
+to his breast, struck by some pang of coming evil, and called me
+_mother_. Ah! then my heart yearned over my little boy, and I would fain
+have stayed his going; but, dashing the tears from his eyes, he hurried
+away, nor looked behind him once.
+
+All through the winter, which for him was summer, my heart lay lightly
+in its place, and I waited calmly the coming of the end. The struggle
+was almost over; the storm-cloud had rolled back, after deluging the
+land in blood; in this consecrated soil slavery was forever buried; the
+temple of freedom was reared in the name of all men, and the dove of
+peace sat brooding in its eaves.
+
+All this my little boy had said must come to pass before he sheathed his
+sword; and this had come to pass.
+
+He had marched "to the sea," my conquering hero, and was "coming up,"
+crowned with new laurels. I was waiting the fulness of time, lulled with
+the fulness of content. Sherman had gathered his hosts for another
+combat,--the last,--and then the work would be done, and well done. Thus
+wrote my little boy; and my heart echoed his words, "well done."
+
+This battle-day I worked out of doors from morning until night, seeking
+to bring order and beauty out of confusion and decay, striving to have
+all things ready when he came. My sleep was sweet that night, and I
+awoke with these words in my mind:--
+
+    "Lord, in the morning Thou shall hear
+      My voice ascending high."
+
+The sun streamed in through the eastern window, and all the hills beyond
+were bathed in glory; the earth was fair to look upon, and happiness,
+descending from the skies, nestled in my heart.
+
+I planted all this day, covering precious seed, thinking on their summer
+beauty; and, as the evening fell, I stood at the garden gate watching
+the way he must come for whose coming I longed with a longing that could
+not be uttered.
+
+As I looked, idly speculating on his speed, a horseman dashed up in mad
+haste, his steed spent and flecked with foam. Men do not ride so hot
+with good tidings,--what need to make such haste with evil?
+
+Still, no sense of loss, no shadow of the coming night. Peace covered my
+heart, and would not be scared away. Blind infatuation! that could not
+see.
+
+"Was it not then a victory?" I cried; for sadness and defeat were
+written in his face.
+
+"Nay, not that." The outstretched hand turned white with pity. "But
+this--"
+
+Too kind to speak the words, at sight of which I fell, struck by a bolt
+that, riving _his_ heart, through leagues of space had travelled
+straight to mine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Months later, when the long night had passed away, and the dawn brought
+patience and resignation, one who saw him fall, gloriously, told me the
+story. I could bear it then; for in my soul's eclipse I had beheld him
+walking on the heavenly hills, and knew that there he was waiting for
+me.
+
+He lies buried, at his own request, where he fell, on Southern soil.
+
+O pilgrim to those sacred shrines, if in your wandering ye come upon a
+nameless grave, marked by a sunken sword, tread lightly above the
+slumbers of my little boy!
+
+
+
+
+LAKE CHAMPLAIN.
+
+
+    Not thoughtless let us enter thy domain;
+      Well did the tribes of yore,
+    Who sought the ocean from the distant plain,
+      Call thee their country's door.[F]
+
+    And as the portals of a saintly pile
+      The wanderer's steps delay,
+    And, while he musing roams the lofty aisle,
+      Care's phantoms melt away
+
+    In the vast realm where tender memories brood
+      O'er sacred haunts of time,
+    That woo his spirit to a nobler mood
+      And more benignant clime,--
+
+    So in the fane of thy majestic hills
+      We meekly stand elate;
+    The baffled heart a tranquil rapture fills
+      Beside thy crystal gate:
+
+    For here the incense of the cloistered pines,
+      Stained windows of the sky,
+    The frescoed clouds and mountains' purple shrines,
+      Proclaim God's temple nigh.
+
+    Through wild ravines thy wayward currents glide,
+      Round bosky islands play;
+    Here tufted headlands meet the lucent tide,
+      There gleams the spacious bay;
+
+    Untracked for ages, save when crouching flew,
+      Through forest-hung defiles,
+    The dusky savage in his frail canoe,
+      To seek the thousand isles,
+
+    Or rally to the fragrant cedar's shade
+      The settler's crafty foe,
+    With toilsome march and midnight ambuscade
+      To lay his dwelling low.
+
+    Along the far horizon's opal wall
+      The dark blue summits rise,
+    And o'er them rifts of misty sunshine fall,
+      Or golden vapor lies.
+
+    And over all tradition's gracious spell
+      A fond allurement weaves;
+    Her low refrain the moaning tempest swells,
+      And thrills the whispering leaves.
+
+    To win this virgin land,--a kingly quest,--
+      Chivalric deeds were wrought;
+    Long by thy marge and on thy placid breast
+      The Gaul and Saxon fought.
+
+    What cheers of triumph in thy echoes sleep!
+      What brave blood dyed thy wave!
+    A grass-grown rampart crowns each rugged steep,
+      Each isle a hero's grave.
+
+    And gallant squadrons manned for border fray,
+      That rival standards bore,
+    Sprung from thy woods and on thy bosom lay,--
+      Stern warders of the shore.
+
+    How changed since he whose name thy waters bear,
+      The silent hills between,
+    Led by his swarthy guides to conflict there,
+      Entranced beheld the scene!
+
+    Fleets swiftly ply where lagged the lone batteau,
+      And quarries trench the gorge;
+    Where waned the council-fire, now steadfast glow
+      The pharos and the forge.
+
+    On Adirondack's lake-encircled crest
+      Old war-paths mark the soil,
+    Where idly bivouacks the summer guest,
+      And peaceful miners toil.
+
+    Where lurked the wigwam, cultured households throng;
+      Where rung the panther's yell
+    Is heard the low of kine, a blithesome song,
+      Or chime of village bell.
+
+    And when, to subjugate the peopled land,
+      Invaders crossed the sea,
+    Rushed from thy meadow-slopes a stalwart band,
+      To battle for the free.
+
+    Nor failed the pristine valor of the race
+      To guard the nation's life;
+    Thy hardy sons met treason face to face,
+      The foremost in the strife.
+
+    When locusts bloom and wild-rose scents the air,
+      When moonbeams fleck the stream,
+    And June's long twilights crimson shadows wear,
+      Here linger, gaze, and dream!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[F] One of the aboriginal names of Lake Champlain signifies the open
+door of the country.
+
+
+
+
+YESTERDAY.
+
+
+There is a gleam of ultramarine,--which, most of all tints, say the
+painters, possesses the quality of light in itself,--banished to the
+farthest horizon of the ocean, where it lies all day, a line of infinite
+richness, not to be drawn by Apelles, and in its compression of
+expanse--leagues of sloping sea and summer calm being written in that
+single line--suggestive of more depth than plummet or diver can ever
+reach. Such an enchantment of color deepens the farther and interior
+horizon with most men,--whether it is the atmosphere of one's own
+identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of
+time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams
+falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue
+to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and
+perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it
+slips over into other hemispheres, tangents with the illumined
+atmosphere beyond, it affords a finer filter for these blue rays, and
+thenceforth hoards in its heart the wealth and beauty of tint found in
+that line of ultramarine. Thus too, perhaps, in the eyes of these
+fortunate men, every year of their deepening past presents only a purer
+strain for such sunshine as is theirs, until it becomes indeed
+
+    "The light that never was, on sea or land."
+
+The child's conjecture of the future is one of some great, bright, busy
+thing beyond the hills or over the river. But the thought is not
+definite: having nothing to remember, he has nothing by which to model
+his idea.
+
+The man looks back at the past in much the same manner, to be
+sure,--always with something between,--if not the river or the hills, at
+least a breath of mist out of which rises the vision he invokes; but the
+vision has a shape, precise and clear.
+
+If it is sadness that he seeks, sadness comes, dark as the nun of the
+Penseroso, without a glimmer of the countless and daily trifles of
+fairer aspect that made her actual presence possible to suffer,--comes
+to flatter his memory with assurance of strength in having endured so
+much and yet survived, or to stab him with her phantom poniards freshly
+and fiercely as ever,--no diffused affair, but a positive shape of
+melancholy.
+
+But if the phase to be recalled is of a cheerful sort, how completely
+likewise does it assert its essence,--a sunbeam falling through that
+past from beginning to end. All the vexatious annoyances of the period
+that then seemed to counterbalance pleasure are lost to view, and only
+the rosy face of an experience that was happiness itself smiles upon
+him. What matter the myriad frets that then beset him in the flesh? They
+were superficial substance,--burrs that fell; he was happy in spite of
+them; he does not remember them; he sees nothing but the complete
+content; he in fact possesses his experience only in the ideal.
+
+It is the dropping out of detail that accomplishes this in one case and
+the other. In either, the point of view alone is fixed. The rest is
+variable, and depends, it may be, on the nature of that subtile and
+volatile ether through which each man gazes.
+
+That the latter, the brighter vision, predominates, is as true as that
+sunny days outnumber rainy ones. Though Argemone, rather than remember,
+may have blotted out her memory; or though Viviani, after fifty years of
+renowned practice in his profession, may be unable to look back at it
+without a shudder,--then endowed with youth, health, energy,
+ambition,--now lacking these, the recollection of the suffering he has
+seen overwhelming his sensitive nature blackly and heavily as clods of
+burial might do;--yet they are but those points of shadow that throw
+the fact into prominence. It has been said that pain, remembered, is
+delight. This is true only of physical pain. Mental agony ever remains
+agony; for it is the body that perishes and the affections of the body.
+Still, with most men the past is an illuminated region, forever throwing
+the present into the shade. In the Zend Avesta, a farsang is defined to
+be the space within which a long-sighted man can see a camel and
+distinguish whether it be white or black; but the milestones of the
+memory are even less arbitrary than this: no matter how far the glance
+flies, in those distances every man's camel is white. Thus the backward
+view is ever of
+
+        "Summits soft and fair,
+    Clad in colors of the air,
+    Which to those who journey near
+    Barren, brown, and rough appear."
+
+The maidens of to-day are not so beautiful as the maidens were when our
+young senses could drink in their beauty; the St. Michael pears have
+died out; the blight has got possession of the roses. When we married, a
+white one climbed up the house-side and thrust its snowy sprays in at
+the casement of the wedding-chamber. Find us such climbers now! A young
+girl once on the beach, watching her father's ship slip away on the
+wind, had her glance caught by a sparkle in the sand; and there lay a
+treasure at her feet, a heap of crimson crystals, a mine of jewels. What
+wealth! What possibilities! No more going to sea! No more watching ships
+out of sight! She gathered a double-handful of the splendid cubes as
+earnest, and ran back to the house with them. Such assurance having been
+displayed, there was no hesitation. The man-servant followed her swift
+guidance to the shore again, with shovel and sack and a train of the
+whole household,--but the tide had come in, and the place was not there.
+Day after day was search made for that mass of garnets, but always in
+vain. It was one of those deposits that Hugh Miller somewhere speaks of,
+as disclosed by one tide and hidden by another. But all her life long,
+though she wore jewels and scattered gold, no gem rivalled the blood-red
+lustre of that sudden sparkle in the sands; and no wealth equalled the
+fabulous dreams that were born of it. It was to her as precious and
+irreparable as to the poet the Lost Bower.
+
+          "I affirm that since I lost it
+            Never bower has seemed so fair;
+          Never garden-creeper crossed it,
+            With so deft and brave an air;
+    Never bird sang in the summer, as I saw and heard them there."
+
+This light of other days is unfailingly, by its owners, carried over to
+every child they meet. As if the caterpillar were in better estate than
+the butterfly, each boy is seeing his best days. Yet there is not a
+child in the world but is pursued by cares. His desk-mate's marbles
+oppress him more than will forcemeat-balls and turtle-soup when he
+becomes an alderman; there are lessons to learn, terrible threats of
+telling the teacher to brave, and many a smart to suffer. Childhood is
+beautiful in truth, but not therefore blest,--that is, for the little
+bodiless cherubs of the canvas. It was one of Origen's fancies that the
+coats of skins given to Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Paradise
+were their corporeal textures, and that in Eden they had neither flesh
+nor blood, bones nor nerves. The opening soul, that puts back petal
+after petal till the fructifying heart of it is bare to all the sweet
+influences of the universe, is something lovely for older eyes to
+see,--perhaps no lovelier than the lawful development of later lives to
+larger eyes than ours,--perhaps no lovelier than that we are to undergo.
+The first moment when the force of beauty strikes a child's perceptions
+would be an ineffable one, if he had anything to compare it with or
+measure it by; but as it is, even though it pierce him through and
+through with rapture, he is not aware of that rapture till after-years
+reproduce it for him and sweeten the sensation with full knowledge. The
+child is so dear to the parents, because it is their own beings bound
+together in one; the baby is so beautiful to all, because so sacred and
+mysterious. Where was this life a moment since? Whither will it fleet a
+moment hence? He may be a fiend or an archangel by and by, as he and
+Fate together please; but now his little skin is like a blush rose-leaf,
+and his little kisses are so tender and so dear! yet it is as an object
+of nature that he charms, not in his identity as a sufferer of either
+pain or pleasure. Childhood, by these blind worshippers of yesterday, is
+simply so vaunted and so valued because it is seen again in the ideal:
+the detail is lost in distance; the fair fact alone remains.
+
+But yesterday has its uses, of more value than its idolatries. Though
+too often with its aerial distances and borrowed hues it is a mere
+pleasure region, instead of that great reservoir from which we might
+draw fountains of inexhaustible treasure, yet, if we cultivated our
+present from our past, homage to it might be as much to the purpose at
+least as the Gheber's worship of the sun. The past is an atmosphere
+weighing over each man's life. The skilful farmer with his
+subsoil-plough lets down the wealthy air of the actual atmosphere into
+his furrows, deeper than it ever went before; the greedy loam sucks in
+the nitrogen there, and one day he finds his mould stored with ammonia,
+the great fertilizer, worth many a harvest. Are they numerous who thus
+enrich the present with the disengaged agents of the past, the chemic
+powers obtained from that superincumbent atmosphere ever elastically
+stretching over them? Let our farmer scatter pulverized marble upon his
+soil forever,--crude carbonate of lime,--and it remains unassimilated;
+but let him powder burnt bones there, and his crop uses it to golden
+advantage,--now merely the phosphate of lime, but material that has
+passed through the operations of animal life, of organism. With whatever
+manure he work his land, be it wood-ashes or guano or compost, he knows
+that that which has received the action of organic tissues fattens it
+the best; and so a wise man may fertilize to-day better with the facts
+of an experience that he has once lived through, than with any vague and
+unorganized dreams. But the fool has never lived;--life, said Bichat, is
+the totality of the functions;--his past has endured no more
+organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no
+use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a
+joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its
+sweet and beneficent capabilities;--as if it were likely that one moment
+of his existence could be of any more weight than another.
+
+The sentiment which a generation feels for another long antecedent to
+itself, is not utterly dissimilar from this. Its individuals being
+regarded with the veneration due to parents and due to the dead, it is
+forgotten that they were men, and men whose lessons were necessarily no
+wiser than those of the men among us; men, too, of no surpassing
+humility, since they presumed to prescribe inviolable laws to ages far
+wiser than themselves. Yet though the philosophy of the Greek and Roman
+were lost, would it need more than the years of a generation to replace
+what scarcely can exceed the introspection of a single experience? If
+their art were lost, does not the ideal of humanity remain the same so
+long as the nature of humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of
+antiquity, two alone deserve the name,--their arithmetic and their
+geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, and the
+others were exercises of wit and pleasure and superstition. It is true
+that the Egyptian excelled, that the Arabian delved somewhat into the
+secrets of nature; but who venerates those people, and who spends all
+that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting
+oxygen into his blood and lime into his bones? The sensuous Greek loved
+beauty; he did not care to puzzle his brain when he could please it
+instead. Euclid and Apollonius, indeed, carried the positive science of
+mathematics to great height, but physical science is the growth of
+comparative to-day; with habits of thought hampered by priesthoods and
+systems, the efforts of antiquity were like abortive shoots,--it is
+within the last four centuries that the strong stem has sprung up, and
+the plant has flowered. Neither do our youth study the classics for
+their science; and yet is not the pursuit of science nobler than all
+other pursuits, since it leads its followers into the mysteries of the
+creation and into the purposes of God? Small is the profit to be found
+in recital of the fancies of heathen ages or the warfares of savage
+tribes. But so far is the mere breath of the ancients exalted above this
+sacred search, that a university will turn out proficients who write
+Greek verses by the ream, but cannot spell their own speech; who can
+name you the winning athletes of the first Olympiad, but are unable to
+state the constituents of the gas that lights their page, and never
+dream, as the chemist does, that these "sunbeams absorbed by vegetation
+in the primordial ages of the earth, and buried in its depths as
+vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon
+system of slowly formed rocks has been piled above, come forth at last,
+at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the night of civilized
+man into day." They can paint to you the blush of Rhodope or Phryne,
+till you see the delicious color blend and mingle on the ivory of their
+tablets; but until, like Agassiz, we can all of us deduce the fish from
+the scale, and from that blush alone deduce the human race, we are no
+nearer the Divine intentions in the creation of man, for all such lore
+as that. An author has somewhere asked, What signify our telegraphs, our
+anæsthetics, our railways? What signifies our knowledge of the earth's
+structure, of the stars' courses? Are we any the more or less men? But
+certainly he is the more a man, he comes nearer to God's meaning in a
+man, who conquers matter, circumstance, time, and space. That one who
+sees the universe move round him understandingly, and fathoms in some
+degree the wonder and the beauty of the eternal laws, must be a
+pleasanter object to his Creator than any other who, merely employing
+pleasure, makes a fetich of his luxuries, his Aldines and Elzevirs, and,
+dying, goes into the unknown world no wiser concerning the ends and aims
+of this one than when he entered it. Rather than periods that decay and
+sin might bring again, should one remember the wonderful history of the
+natural world when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
+Rather should one read the record of the rain, it seems,--the story of
+the weather some morning, cycles since, with the way the wind was
+blowing written in the slanting drip of the rain-drops caught and
+petrified on the old red sandstone,--marks of the Maker as he passed,
+one day, a million years ago,--than decipher on the scroll of any
+palimpsest, under the light-headed visions of an anchorite, some
+half-erased ode of Anacreon.
+
+But, after all, this veneration for the ancients--who personally might
+be forgiven for their misfortune in having lived when the world was
+young, were not one so slavish before them--is only because again one
+looks at the ideal,--looks through that magical Claude Lorraine glass
+which makes even the commonest landscape picturesque. We forget the
+dirty days of straw-strewn floors, and see the leather hangings stamped
+with gold; we forget the fearful feet of sandal shoon, but see the dust
+of a Triumph rising in clouds of glory. We look at that past, feeling
+something like gods, too.
+
+    "The gods are happy:
+    They turn on all sides
+    Their shining eyes,
+    And see, below them,
+    The earth and men."
+
+We cannot consider those things happening remotely from us on the
+earth's surface, even now, without suffering them to partake somewhat of
+the property of by-gone days. It makes little difference whether the
+distance be that of meridians or of eras. When at sunrise we fancy some
+foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we
+are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and
+his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays,--so that even
+our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow
+air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of
+a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire,
+it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and
+night has already darkened down over the wide and awful
+ice-fields,--then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere
+phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment
+but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us
+only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past. It requires
+the comprehensive vision of the poet to catch the light of existing
+scenes as they shift along the globe, and harmonize them with the
+instant;--whether he view
+
+              "The Indian
+        Drifting, knife in hand,
+        His frail boat moored to
+        A floating isle thick matted
+    With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants,
+        And the dark cucumber.
+          He reaps and stows them,
+        Drifting,--drifting. Round him,
+        Round his green harvest-plot,
+        Flow the cool lake waves:
+        The mountains ring them";--
+
+or whether, far across the continent, he chance to see
+
+              "The ferry
+        On the broad, clay-laden
+    Lone Chorasmian stream: thereon,
+          With snort and strain,
+        Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
+        The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
+            To either bow
+        Firm harnessed by the mane:--a chief
+          With shout and shaken spear
+    Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern,
+        The cowering merchants, in long robes,
+        Sit pale beside their wealth
+        Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,
+            Of gold and ivory,
+        Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,
+            Jasper and chalcedony,
+        And milk-barred onyx-stones.
+        The loaded boat swings groaning
+            In the yellow eddies.
+            The gods behold them,"--
+
+the gods and the poets. But, except to these blest beholders, the
+inhabitants of the dead centuries are mere spectral shades; for it takes
+a poet's fancy to vitalize with warmth and breath again those things
+that, having apparently left no impress on their own generation, seem to
+have no more signification for this than the persons of the drama or the
+heroes of romance.
+
+Yet, in a far inferior way, every man is a poet to himself. In the
+microcosm of his own small round, every one has the power to vivify old
+incident, every one raises bawbles of the desk and drawer, not only into
+life, but into life they never had. With the flower whose leaves are
+shed about the box, we can bring back the brilliant morning of its
+blossoming, desire and hope and joyous youth once more; with the letter
+laid away beside it rises the dear hand that rested on the sheet, and
+moved along the leaf with every line it penned: each trinket has its
+pretty past, pleasant or painful to recall as it may be. There is no
+trifle, however vulgar, but, looking at its previous page, it has a side
+in the ideal. When one at the theatre saw so many ringlets arranged as
+"waterfalls," he laughed and said, they undoubtedly belonged to the
+"dead-heads." But Belinda, who wears a waterfall, and at night puts it
+into a box, considers the remark a profanity, and confesses that she
+never adorns herself with this addition but she thinks of that girl in
+France who cherished her long locks, and combed them out with care until
+her marriage-day, when she put on a fair white cap, and sold them for
+her dowry. There are more poetic locks of hair, it must be said;--the
+keepsake of two lovers; the lock of Keats's hair, too sacred to touch,
+lying in its precious salvatory. But that is the ideal of the past
+belonging to Belinda's waterfall, a trivial, common thing enough, yet
+one that has a right to its ideal, nevertheless, if we accept the
+ecstasies of a noted writer upon its magic material. "In spinning and
+weaving," says he, "the ideal that we pursue is the hair of a woman. How
+far are the softest wools, the finest cottons, from reaching it! At what
+an enormous distance from this hair all our progress leaves us, and will
+forever leave us! We drag behind and watch with envy this supreme
+perfection that every day Nature realizes in her play. This hair, fine,
+strong, resistant, vibrant in light sonority, and, with all that, soft,
+warm, luminous, and electric,--it is the flower of the human flower.
+There are idle disputes concerning the merit of its color. What matter?
+The lustrous black contains and promises the flame. The blond displays
+it with the splendors of the Fleece of Gold. The brown, chatoyant in the
+sun, appropriates the sun itself, mingles it with its mirages, floats,
+undulates, varies ceaselessly in its brook-like reflections, by moments
+smiles in the light or glooms in the shade, deceives always, and,
+whatever you say of it, gives you the lie charmingly.--The chief effort
+of human industry has combined all methods in order to exalt cotton.
+Rare accord of capital, machinery, arts of design, and finally chemical
+science, has produced those beautiful results to which England herself
+renders homage in buying them. Alas! all that cannot disguise the
+original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which has been so much
+adorned. If woman, who clothes herself with it in vanity, and believes
+herself more beautiful because of it, would but let her hair fall and
+unroll its waves over the indigent richness of our most brilliant
+cloths, what must become of them! how humiliated would the vestment
+be!--It is necessary to confess that one thing alone sustains itself
+beside a woman's hair. A single fabricator can strive there. This
+fabricator is an insect,--the modest silkworm."
+
+"A particular charm surrounds the works in silk," our author then goes
+on to say. "It ennobles all about it. In traversing our rudest
+districts, the valleys of the Ardèche, where all is rock, where the
+mulberry, the chestnut, seem to dispense with earth, to live on air and
+flint, where low houses of unmortared stone sadden the eyes with their
+gray tint, everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or
+three charming girls, with brown skin, with white teeth, who smiled at
+the passer-by and spun gold. The passer-by, whirled on by the coach,
+said to them under his breath: 'What a pity, innocent fays, that this
+gold may not be for you! Instead of disguising it with a useless color,
+instead of disfiguring it by art, what would it not gain by remaining
+itself and upon these beautiful spinners! How much better than any grand
+dames would this royal tissue become yourselves!'"
+
+Perhaps it was the dowry of one of these very maidens that Belinda
+wears; and all this would only go to show that to every meanest thing
+the past can lend a halo. When one person showed another the "entire
+costume of a Nubian woman, purchased as she wore it,"--a necklace of red
+beads, and two brass ear-rings simply, hanging on a nail,--how it
+brought up the whole scene, the wondrous ruins, the Nile, the lotos, and
+the palm-branch, the splendid sky soaring over all, the bronze-skinned
+creature shining in the sun! What a past the little glass bits had at
+their command, and what a more magnificent past hung yet behind them!
+Who would value a diamond, the product of any laboratory, were such a
+possibility, so much as that one which, by its own unknown and
+inscrutable process, defying philosopher and jeweller, has imprisoned
+the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set
+its crystals in the darkness of the earth,--a drop of dew eternalized?
+What tree of swift and sudden springing, that grows like a gourd in the
+night to never so stately a height, could equal in our eyes the gnarled
+and may be stunted trunk that has thrown the flickering shadows of its
+leaves over the dying pillows alike of father, child, and grandchild?
+The ring upon the finger is crusted thick with memories, and, looking at
+it, far more than in the present do you live in the past. Perhaps it is
+for this that we are so jealous of events: we fear to have our memories
+impinged upon by pain. The woman whose lover has deserted her mourns not
+the man she must despise, but the love that has dropped out of her past,
+proving hollow and worthless. But she to whom he remains faithful
+borrows perpetually store of old love to enrich the daily feast; she
+gilds and glorifies the blest to-day with the light of that love
+transfigured in the past. And so, in other shapes and experiences, it is
+with all of us indeed; since into this fairy-land all can fly for
+refuge, can pick again their roses and ignore their thorns, can
+
+              "Change
+    Torment with ease, and soonest recompense
+    Dole with delight,"
+
+Nor is this living in the past entirely the voluntary affair of pleasure
+and of memory. In another and more spiritual way it masters us. Never
+quite losing the vitality that once it had, with an elastic springiness
+it constantly rebounds, and the deed of yesterday reacts upon the deed
+of to-day. There is something solemn in the thought that thus the
+blemish or the grace of a day that long ago disappeared passes on with
+awfully increasing undulations into the demesne of the everlasting. And
+though the Judge of all may not cast each deed of other days and weigh
+them in the balance for us or against, yet what those deeds have made
+us, that we shall stand before him when,
+
+              "'Mid the dark, a gleam
+    Of yet another morning breaks;
+    And, like the hand which ends a dream,
+    Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
+    Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes!"
+
+Yesterday, in truth,--looking though it may like a shadow and the
+phantom of itself,--is the only substance that we possess, the one
+immutable fact. To-day is but the asymptote of to-morrow, that curve
+perpetually drawing near, but never reaching the straight line flying
+into infinity. To-morrow, the great future, belongs to the heaven where
+it tends. Were it otherwise, seeing the indestructible elements, and the
+two great central forces forever at their work, we might fancy
+ourselves, in one form or another, continual here on the round world.
+For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten
+seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's
+orbit,--swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to
+ellipse, vibrating like a mighty pendulum, the "horologe of eternity"
+itself, with tremendous oscillations, through the depths of space,--he
+taught us that the earth endures; and so that the clay with which we are
+clothed still makes a part of the great revolution. Yet, since the
+future is no possession of our own, but a dole and pittance, we know
+that the earth does not endure for us, but that when we shall have
+submitted to the conditions of eternal spirit, yesterday, to-morrow, and
+to-day must alike have ceased to exist, must have vanished like
+illusions; for eternity can be no mere duration of time, but rather some
+state of being past all our power of cognition.
+
+And though we are to inherit eternity, yet have authority now only over
+the period that we have passed, with what wealth then are the aged
+furnished! Sweet must it be to sit with folded hands and dream life over
+once again. How rich we are, how happy! How dear is the old hand in
+ours! Years have added up the sum of all the felicity that we have known
+together, and carried it over to to-day. Those that have left our arms
+and gone out into other homes are still our own; but little sunny heads
+besides cluster round the knees as once before they did. Not only have
+we age and wisdom, but youth and gayety as well. On what light and
+jocund scenes we look! on what deep and dearer bliss! We see the
+meaning of our sorrows now, and bless them that they came. With such
+firm feet we have walked in the lighted way that we gaze back upon, how
+can we fear the Valley of the Shadow? Ah! none but they, indeed, who
+have threescore years and ten hived away in the past, can see the high
+design of Heaven in their lives, and from the wrong side of the pattern
+picture out the right.
+
+    "So at the last shall come old age,
+    Decrepit, as befits that stage.
+    How else wouldst thou retire apart
+    With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
+    And gather all to the very least
+    Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
+    Let fall through eagerness to find
+    The crowning dainties yet behind?
+    Ponder on the entire past,
+    Laid together thus at last,
+    When the twilight helps to fuse
+    The first fresh with the faded hues,
+    And the outline of the whole,
+    As round Eve's shades their framework roll,
+    Grandly fronts for once thy soul!"
+
+
+
+
+THE JOHNSON PARTY.
+
+
+The President of the United States has so singular a combination of
+defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could
+have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation
+of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as
+unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well
+as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his
+will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of
+demagogue and autocrat, and converts the Presidential chair into a stump
+or a throne, according as the impulse seizes him to cajole or to
+command. Doubtless much of the evil developed in him is due to his
+misfortune in having been lifted by events to a position which he lacked
+the elevation and breadth of intelligence adequately to fill. He was
+cursed with the possession of a power and authority which no man of
+narrow mind, bitter prejudices, and inordinate self-estimation can
+exercise without depraving himself as well as injuring the nation.
+Egotistic to the point of mental disease, he resented the direct and
+manly opposition of statesmen to his opinions and moods as a personal
+affront, and descended to the last degree of littleness in a political
+leader,--that of betraying his party, in order to gratify his spite. He
+of course became the prey of intriguers and sycophants,--of persons who
+understand the art of managing minds which are at once arbitrary and
+weak, by allowing them to retain unity of will amid the most palpable
+inconsistencies of opinion, so that inconstancy to principle shall not
+weaken force of purpose, nor the emphasis be at all abated with which
+they may bless to-day what yesterday they cursed. Thus the abhorrer of
+traitors has now become their tool. Thus the denouncer of Copperheads
+has now sunk into dependence on their support. Thus the imposer of
+conditions of reconstruction has now become the foremost friend of the
+unconditioned return of the Rebel States. Thus the furious Union
+Republican, whose harangues against his political opponents almost
+scared his political friends by their violence, has now become the
+shameless betrayer of the people who trusted him. And in all these
+changes of base he has appeared supremely conscious, in his own mind, of
+playing an independent, a consistent, and especially a conscientious
+part.
+
+Indeed, Mr. Johnson's character would be imperfectly described if some
+attention were not paid to his conscience, the purity of which is a
+favorite subject of his own discourse, and the perversity of which is
+the wonder of the rest of mankind. As a public man, his real position is
+similar to that of a commander of an army, who should pass over to the
+ranks of the enemy he was commissioned to fight, and then plead his
+individual convictions of duty as a justification of his treachery. In
+truth, Mr. Johnson's conscience is, like his understanding, a mere form
+or expression of his will. The will of ordinary men is addressed through
+their understanding and conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and
+conscience can be addressed only through his will. He puts intellectual
+principles and the moral law in the possessive case, thinks he pays them
+a compliment and adds to their authority when he makes them the adjuncts
+of his petted pronoun "my"; and things to him are reasonable and right,
+not from any quality inherent in themselves, but because they are made
+so by his determinations. Indeed, he sees hardly anything as it is, but
+almost everything as colored by his own dominant egotism. Thus he is
+never weary of asserting that the people are on his side; yet his method
+of learning the wishes of the people is to scrutinize his own, and, when
+acting out his own passionate impulses, he ever insists that he is
+obeying public sentiment. Of all the wilful men who, by strange chance,
+have found themselves at the head of a constitutional government, he
+most resembles the last Stuart king of England, James II.; and the
+likeness is increased from the circumstance that the American James has,
+in his supple and plausible Secretary of State, one fully competent to
+play the part of Sunderland.
+
+The party which, under the ironical designation of the National Union
+Party, now proposes to take the policy and character of Mr. Johnson
+under its charge, is composed chiefly of Democrats defeated at the
+polls, and Democrats defeated on the field of battle. The few apostate
+Republicans, who have joined its ranks while seeming to lead its
+organization, are of small account. Its great strength is in its
+Southern supporters, and, if it comes into power, it must obey a Rebel
+direction. By the treachery of the President, it will have the executive
+patronage on its side,--for Mr. Johnson's "conscience" is of that
+peculiar kind which finds satisfaction in arraying the interest of
+others against their convictions; and having thus the power to purchase
+support, it will not fail of those means of dividing the North which
+come from corrupting it. The party under which the war for the Union was
+conducted is to be denounced and proscribed as the party of disunion,
+and we are to be edified by addresses on the indissoluble unity of the
+nation by Secessionists, who have hardly yet had time to wash from their
+hands the stains of Union blood. The leading proposition on which this
+conspiracy against the country is to be conducted is the monstrous
+absurdity, that the Rebel States have an inherent, "continuous,"
+unconditioned, constitutional _right_ to form a part of the Federal
+government, when they have once acknowledged the fact of the defeat of
+their inhabitants in an armed attempt to overthrow and subvert it,--a
+proposition which implies that victory paralyzes the powers of the
+victors, that ruin begins when success is assured, that the only effect
+of beating a Southern Rebel in the field is to exalt him into a maker of
+laws for his antagonist.
+
+In the minority Report of the Congressional Joint Committee on
+Reconstruction, which is designed to supply the new party with
+constitutional law, this theory of State Rights is most elaborately
+presented. The ground is taken, that during the Rebellion the States in
+which it prevailed were as "completely competent States of the United
+States as they were before the Rebellion, and were bound by all the
+obligations which the Constitution imposed, and entitled to all its
+privileges"; and that the Rebellion consisted merely in a series of
+"illegal acts of the citizens of such States." On this theory it is
+difficult to find where the guilt of rebellion lies. The States are
+innocent because the Rebellion was a rising of individuals; the
+individuals cannot be very criminal, for it is on their votes that the
+committee chiefly rely to build up the National Union Party. Again, we
+are informed that, in respect to the admission of representatives from
+"such States," Congress has no right or power to ask more than two
+questions. These are: "Have these States organized governments? Are
+these governments republican in form?" The committee proceed to say:
+"How they were formed, under what auspices they were formed, are
+inquiries with which Congress has no concern. The right of the people to
+form a government for themselves has never been questioned." On this
+principle, President Johnson's labors in organizing State governments
+were works of supererogation. At the close of active hostilities the
+Rebel States had organized, though disloyal, governments, as republican
+in form as they were before the war broke out. The only thing,
+therefore, they were required to do was to send their Senators and
+Representatives to Washington. Congress could not have rightfully
+refused to receive them, because all questions as to their being loyal
+or disloyal, and as to the changes which the war had wrought in the
+relations of the States they represented to the Union, were inquiries
+with which Congress had no concern! And here again we have the
+ever-recurring difficulty respecting the "individuals" who were alone
+guilty of the acts of rebellion. "The right of the people," we are
+assured, "to form a government for themselves, has never been
+questioned." But it happens that "the people" here indicated are the
+very individuals who were before pointed out as alone responsible for
+the Rebellion. In the exercise of their right "to form a government for
+themselves," they rebelled; and now, it seems, by the exercise of the
+same right, they can unconditionally return. There is no wrong anywhere:
+it is all "right." The people are first made criminals, in order to
+exculpate the States, and then the innocence of the States is used to
+exculpate the people. When we see such outrages on common sense gravely
+perpetrated by so eminent a lawyer as the one who drew up the
+committee's Report, one is almost inclined to define minds as of two
+kinds, the legal mind and the human mind, and to doubt if there is any
+possible connection in reason between the two. To the human mind it
+appears that the Federal government has spent thirty-five hundred
+millions of dollars, and sacrificed three hundred thousand lives, in a
+contest which the legal mind dissolves into a mere mist of unsubstantial
+phrases; and by skill in the trick of substituting words for things, and
+definitions for events, the legal mind proceeds to show that these words
+and definitions, though scrupulously shielded from any contact with
+realities, are sufficient to prevent the nation from taking ordinary
+precautions against the recurrence of calamities fresh in its bitter
+experience. The phrase "State Rights," translated from legal into human
+language, is found to mean, the power to commit wrongs on individuals
+whom States may desire to oppress, or the power to protect the
+inhabitants of States from the consequences of their own crimes. The
+minority of the committee, indeed, seem to have forgotten that there has
+been any real war, and bring to mind the converted Australian savage,
+whom the missionary could not make penitent for a murder committed the
+day before, because the trifling occurrence had altogether passed from
+his recollection.
+
+In fact, all attempts to discriminate between Rebels and Rebel States,
+to the advantage of the latter, are done in defiance of notorious facts.
+If the Rebellion had been merely a rising of individual citizens of
+States, it would have been an insurrection against the States, as well
+as against the Federal government, and might have been easily put down.
+In that case, there would have been no withdrawal of Southern Senators
+and Representatives from Congress, and therefore no question as to their
+inherent right to return. In Missouri and Kentucky, for example, there
+was civil war, waged by inhabitants of those States against their local
+governments, as well as against the United States; and nobody contends
+that the rights and privileges of those States were forfeited by the
+criminal acts of their citizens. But the real strength of the Rebellion
+consisted in this, that it was not a rebellion _against_ States, but a
+rebellion _by_ States. No loose assemblage of individuals, though
+numbering hundreds of thousands, could long have resisted the pressure
+of the Federal power and the power of the State governments. They would
+have had no means of subsistence except those derived from plunder and
+voluntary contributions, and they would have lacked the military
+organization by which mobs are transformed into formidable armies. But
+the Rebellion being one of States, being virtually decreed by the people
+of States assembled in convention, was sustained by the two tremendous
+governmental powers of taxation and conscription. The willing and the
+unwilling were thus equally placed at the disposition of a strong
+government. The population and wealth of the whole immense region of
+country in which the Rebellion prevailed were at the service of this
+government. So completely was it a rebellion of States, that the
+universal excuse of the minority of original Union men for entering
+heartily into the contest after it had once begun was, that they thought
+it their duty to abide by the decision, and share the fortunes, of their
+respective _States_. Nobody at the South believed at the time the war
+commenced, or during its progress, that his State possessed any
+"continuous" right to a participation in the privileges of the Federal
+Constitution, the obligations of which it had repudiated. When confident
+of success, the Southerner scornfully scouted the mere suspicion of
+entertaining such a degrading notion; when assured of defeat, his only
+thought was to "get his State back into the Union on the best terms that
+could be made." The idea of "conditions of readmission" was as firmly
+fixed in the Southern as in the Northern mind. If the politicians of the
+South now adopt the principle that the Rebel States have not, as States,
+ever altered their relations to the Union, they do it from policy,
+finding that its adoption will give them "better terms" than they ever
+dreamed of getting before the President of the United States taught them
+that it would be more politic to bully than to plead.
+
+In the last analysis, indeed, the theory of the minority of the
+Reconstruction Committee reduces the Rebel States to mere abstractions.
+It is plain that a State, in the concrete, is constituted by that
+portion of the inhabitants who form its legal people; and that, in
+passing back of its government and constitution, we reach a convention
+of the legal people as its ultimate expression. By such conventions the
+acts of secession were passed; and, as far as the people of the Rebel
+States could do it, they destroyed their States considered as organized
+communities forming a part of the United States. The claim of the United
+States to authority over the territory and inhabitants was of course not
+affected by these acts; but in what condition did they place the people?
+Plainly in the condition of rebels, engaged in an attempt to overturn
+the Constitution and government of the United States. As the whole force
+of the people in each of the Rebel communities was engaged in this work,
+the whole of the people were rebels and public enemies. Nothing was
+left, in each case, but an abstract State, without any external body,
+and as destitute of people having a right to enjoy the privileges of the
+Constitution as if the territory had been swept clean of population by a
+pestilence. It is, then, only this abstract State which has a right to
+representation in Congress. But how can there be a right to
+representation when there is nobody to be represented? All this may
+appear puerile, but the puerility is in the premises as well as in the
+logical deductions; and the premises are laid down as indisputable
+constitutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for
+the National Union Party.
+
+The doctrine of the unconditional right of the Rebel States to
+representation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question
+relates to the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly
+these conditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has
+passed both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever
+exacted of defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a
+distinctly "radical" idea in the whole amendment,--nothing that
+President Johnson has not himself, within a comparatively recent period,
+stamped with his high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage?
+No. Does it ordain impartial suffrage? No. Does it proscribe,
+disfranchise, or expatriate the recent armed enemies of the country, or
+confiscate their property? No. It simply ordains that the national debt
+shall be paid and the Rebel debt repudiated; that the civil rights of
+all persons shall be maintained; that Rebels who have added perjury to
+treason shall be disqualified for office; and that the Rebel States
+shall not have their political power in the Union increased by the
+presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights,
+but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on
+voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the
+last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection
+can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against
+Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South
+Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal voters
+in New York? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the South
+should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power in
+the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal
+to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined?
+
+Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid,
+and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below
+the requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still
+denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals,
+bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr
+of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union
+man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the
+Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize
+"conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to drive from power
+that radical party who are daily trampling under foot the Constitution,
+and fast converting a constitutional Republic into a consolidated
+despotism." The terms to which South Carolina is asked to submit, before
+she can be made the equal of Ohio or New York in the Union, are stated
+to be "too degrading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for
+a single instant." When we consider that this "radical party"
+constitutes nearly four fifths of the legal legislature of the nation,
+that it was the party which saved the country from dismemberment while
+Mr. Orr and his friends were notoriously engaged in "trampling the
+Constitution under foot," and that the man who denounces it owes his
+forfeited life to its clemency, the astounding insolence of the
+impeachment touches the sublime. Here is confessed treason inveighing
+against tried loyalty, in the name of the Constitution it has violated
+and the law it has broken! But why does Mr. Orr think the terms of South
+Carolina's restored relations to the Union "too degrading and
+humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant"? Is it
+because he wishes to have the Rebel debt paid? Is it because he desires
+to have the Federal debt repudiated? Is it because he thinks it
+intolerable that a negro should have civil rights? Is it because he
+resents the idea that breakers of oaths, like himself, should be
+disqualified from having another opportunity of forswearing themselves?
+Is it because he considers that a white Rebel freeman of South Carolina
+has a natural right to exercise double the political power of a white
+loyal freeman of Massachusetts? He must return an affirmative answer to
+all these questions in order to make it out that his State will be
+degraded and humiliated by ratifying the amendment; and the necessity of
+the measure is therefore proved by the motives known to prompt the
+attacks of its vilifiers.
+
+The insolence of Mr. Orr is not merely individual, but representative.
+It is the result of Mr. Johnson's attempt "to produce harmony between
+the two sections," by betraying the section to which he owed his
+election. Had it not been for his treachery, there would have been
+little difficulty in settling the terms of peace, so as to avoid all
+causes for future war; but, from the time he quarrelled with Congress,
+he has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the
+virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party. Every man at the South
+who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was
+prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his
+partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the
+representatives of the people by whom the Rebellion was put down. Among
+traitors and Copperheads the fear of punishment has been succeeded by
+the hope of revenge; elation is on faces which the downfall of Richmond
+overcast; and a return to the old times, when a united South ruled the
+country by means of a divided North, is confidently expected by the
+whole crew of political bullies and political sycophants whose profit is
+in the abasement of the nation. It is even said that, if the majority of
+the "Rump" Congress cannot be overcome by fair means, it will be by
+foul; and there are noisy partisans of the President who assert that he
+has in him a Cromwellian capacity for dealing with legislative
+assemblies whose notions of the public good clash with his own. In
+short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Congress, a _coup
+d'état_.
+
+Garret Davis, of Kentucky, was, we believe, the first to announce this
+executive remedy for the "radical" disease of the state, and it has
+since been often prescribed by Democratic politicians as a sovereign
+panacea. General McClernand, indeed, proposed a scheme, simpler even
+than that of executive recognition, by which the Southern Senators and
+Representatives might effect a lodgment in Congress. They should,
+according to him, have gone to Washington, entered the halls of
+legislation, and proceeded to occupy their seats, "peaceably if they
+could, forcibly if they must"; but the record of General McClernand, as
+a military man, was not such as to give to his advice on a question of
+carrying positions by assault a high degree of authority, and, there
+being some natural hesitation in following his counsel, the golden
+opportunity was lost. Mr. Montgomery Blair, who professes his
+willingness to act with any men, "Rebels or any one else," to put down
+the radicals, is never weary of talking to conservative conventions of
+"two Presidents and two Congresses." There can be no doubt that the
+project of a _coup d'état_ has become dangerously familiar to the
+"conservative" mind, and that the eminent legal gentlemen of the North
+who are publishing opinions affirming the right of the excluded Southern
+representatives to their seats are playing into the hands of the
+desperate gang of unscrupulous politicians who are determined to have
+the right established by force. It is computed that the gain, in the
+approaching elections, of twenty-five districts now represented by Union
+Republicans, will give the Johnson party, in the next Congress, a
+majority of the House of Representatives, should the Southern
+delegations be counted; and it is proposed that the Johnson members
+legally entitled to seats should combine with the Southern pretenders to
+seats, organize as the House of Representatives of the United States,
+and apply to the President for recognition. Should the President comply,
+he would be impeached by an unrecognized House before an "incomplete"
+Senate, and, if convicted, would deny the validity of the proceeding.
+The result would be civil war, in which the name of the Federal
+government would be on the side of the revolutionists. Such is the
+programme which is freely discussed by partisans of the President,
+considered to be high in his favor; and the scheme, it is contended, is
+the logical result of the position he has assumed as to the rights of
+the excluded States to representation. It is certain that the present
+Congress is as much the Congress of the United States as he is the
+President of the United States; but it is well known that he considers
+himself to represent the whole country, while he thinks that Congress
+only represents a portion of it; and he has in his character just that
+combination of qualities, and is placed in just those anomalous
+circumstances, which lead men to the commission of great political
+crimes. The mere hint of the possibility of his attempting a _coup
+d'état_ is received by some Republicans with a look of incredulous
+surprise; yet what has his administration been to such persons but a
+succession of surprises?
+
+But whatever view may be taken of the President's designs, there can be
+no doubt that the safety, peace, interest, and honor of the country
+depend on the success of the Union Republicans in the approaching
+elections. The loyal nation must see to it that the Fortieth Congress
+shall be as competent to override executive vetoes as the Thirty-Ninth,
+and be equally removed from the peril of being expelled for one more in
+harmony with Executive ideas. The same earnestness, energy, patriotism,
+and intelligence which gave success to the war, must now be exerted to
+reap its fruits and prevent its recurrence. The only danger is, that, in
+some representative districts, the people may be swindled by
+plausibilities and respectabilities; for when, in political contests,
+any great villany is contemplated, there are always found some eminently
+respectable men, with a fixed capital of certain eminently conservative
+phrases, innocently ready to furnish the wolves of politics with
+abundant supplies of sheep's clothing. These dignified dupes are more
+than usually active at the present time; and the gravity of their speech
+is as edifying as its emptiness. Immersed in words, and with no clear
+perception of things, they mistake conspiracy for conservatism. Their
+pet horror is the term "radical"; their ideal of heroic patriotism, the
+spectacle of a great nation which allows itself to be ruined with
+decorum, and dies rather than commit the slightest breach of
+constitutional etiquette. This insensibility to facts and blindness to
+the tendency of events, they call wisdom and moderation. Behind these
+political dummies are the real forces of the Johnson party, men of
+insolent spirit, resolute will, embittered temper, and unscrupulous
+purpose, who clearly know what they are after, and will hesitate at no
+"informality" in the attempt to obtain it. To give these persons
+political power will be to surrender the results of the war, by placing
+the government practically in the hands of those against whom the war
+was waged. No smooth words about "the equality of the States," "the
+necessity of conciliation," "the wickedness of sectional conflicts,"
+will alter the fact, that, in refusing to support Congress, the people
+would set a reward on treachery and place a bounty on treason. "The
+South," says a Mr. Hill of Georgia, in a letter favoring the
+Philadelphia Convention, "sought to save the Constitution out of the
+Union. She failed. Let her now bring her diminished and shattered, but
+united and earnest counsels and energies to save the Constitution in the
+Union." The sort of Constitution the South sought to save by warring
+against the government is the Constitution which she now proposes to
+save by administering it! Is this the tone of pardoned and penitent
+treason? Is this the spirit to build up a "National Union Party"? No;
+but it is the tone and spirit now fashionable in the defeated Rebel
+States, and will not be changed until the autumn elections shall have
+proved that they have as little to expect from the next Congress as from
+the present, and that they must give securities for their future conduct
+before they can be relieved from the penalties incurred by their past.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Armadale._ A Novel. By WILKIE COLLINS. New York: Harper and Brothers.
+
+Except for the fact that there is nothing at all automatic in his
+inventions, there seems to be no good reason why Mr. Collins should not
+make a perpetual motion. He has a surprising mechanical faculty, and
+great patience and skill in passing the figures he contrives through the
+programme arranged for them. Having read one of his novels, you feel as
+if you had been amused with a puppet-show of rare merit, and you would
+like to have the ingenious mechanician before the curtain. So much
+cleverness, however, seems to be thrown away on the entertainment of a
+single evening, and you sigh for its application to some work of more
+lasting usefulness; and the perpetual motion occurs to you as the thing
+worthiest such powers. Let it be a perpetual literary motion, if the
+public please. Given a remarkable dream and a beautiful bad woman to
+fulfil it; you have but to amplify the vision sufficiently, and your
+beautiful bad woman goes on fulfilling it forever in tens of thousands
+of volumes. As the brother of De Quincey said, when proposing to stand
+on the ceiling, head downwards, and be spun there like a whip-top, thus
+overcoming the attraction of gravitation by the mere rapidity of
+revolution, "If you can keep it up for an instant, you can keep it up
+all day." Alas! it is just at this point that the fatal defect of Mr.
+Collins's mechanism appears. But for the artisan's hand, the complicated
+work would not start at all, and we perceive that, if he lifted it for a
+moment from the crank, the painfully contrived dream would drop to
+pieces, and the beautiful bad woman would come to a jerky stand-still in
+the midst of her most atrocious development. A perpetual literary motion
+is therefore out of the question, so far as Mr. Collins is concerned;
+and we can merely examine his defective machinery, with many a regret
+that a plan so ingenious, and devices so labored and costly, should be
+of no better effect.
+
+We think, indeed, that all his stories are constructed upon a principle
+as false to art as it is false to life. In this world, we have first men
+and women, with certain well-known good and evil passions, and these
+passions are the causes of all the events that happen in the world. We
+doubt if it has occurred to any of our readers to see a set of
+circumstances, even of the most relentless and malignant description,
+grouping themselves about any human being without the agency of his own
+love or hate. Yet this is what happens very frequently in Mr. Collins's
+novels, impoverishing and enfeebling his characters in a surprising
+degree, and reducing them to the condition of juiceless puppets without
+proper will or motion. It is not that they are all wanting in
+verisimilitude. Even the entirely wicked Miss Gwilt is a conceivable
+character; but, being destined merely to fulfil Armadale's dream, she
+loses all freedom of action, and, we must say, takes most clumsy and
+hopeless and long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which
+one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found
+much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all
+her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a
+dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in
+art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's advantages should not marry both of
+them; and the author's overruling on this point is more creditable to
+his heart than to his head. These three people are the chief persons of
+the story, and their hands are tied from first to last They are not to
+act out their characters: they are to act out the plot; and the author's
+designs are accomplished in defiance of their several natures. Some of
+the minor persons are not so ruthlessly treated. The Pedgifts, father
+and son, are free agents, and they are admirably true to their instincts
+of upright, astute lawyers, who love best to employ their legal
+shrewdness in a good cause. Their joint triumph over Miss Gwilt is
+probable and natural, and would be a successful point in the book, if it
+were conceivable that she should expose herself to such a defeat by so
+much needless plotting with Mrs. Oldershaw. But to fill so large a
+stage, an immense deal of by-play was necessary, and great numbers of
+people are visibly dragged upon the scene. Some of these accomplish
+nothing in the drama. To what end have we so much of Mr. Brock? Others
+elaborately presented only contribute to the result in the most
+intricate and tedious way; and in Major Milroy's family there is no
+means of discovering that Miss Gwilt is an adventuress, but for Mrs.
+Milroy to become jealous of her and to open her letters.
+
+It cannot, of course, be denied that Mr. Collins's stories are
+interesting; for an infinite number of persons read them through. But it
+is the bare plot that interests, and the disposition of mankind to
+listen to story-telling is such that the idlest _conteur_ can entertain.
+We must demand of literary art, however, that it shall interest in
+people's fortunes by first interesting in people. Can any one of all Mr.
+Collins's readers declare that he sympathizes with the loves of Armadale
+and Neelie Milroy, or actually cares a straw what becomes of either of
+those insipid young persons? Neither is Midwinter one to take hold on
+like or dislike; and Miss Gwilt is interesting only as the capable but
+helpless spider out of which the plot of the story is spun. Pathos there
+is not in the book, and the humor is altogether too serious to laugh at.
+
+
+_Four Years in the Saddle._ By COLONEL HARRY GILMORE. New York: Harper
+and Brothers.
+
+It is sometimes difficult to believe, in reading this book, that it is
+not the production of Major Gahagan of the Ahmednuggar Irregulars, or
+Mr. Barry Lyndon of Castle Lyndon. Being merely a record of personal
+adventure, it does not suggest itself as part of the history of our late
+war, and, but for the recurrence of the familiar names of American
+persons and places, it might pass for the narrative of either of the
+distinguished characters mentioned.
+
+In dealing with events creditable to his own courage and gallantry,
+Colonel Gilmore has the unsparing frankness of Major Gahagan, and it
+must be allowed that there is a remarkable likeness in all the
+adventures of these remarkable men. It is true that Colonel Gilmore does
+not fire upon a file of twenty elephants so as to cut away all their
+trunks by a single shot; but he does kill eleven Yankees by the
+discharge of a cannon which he touches off with a live coal held between
+his thumb and finger. Being made prisoner, he is quite as defiant and
+outrageous as the Guj-puti under similar circumstances: at one time he
+can scarcely restrain himself from throwing into the sea the insolent
+captain of a Federal gunboat; at another time, when handcuffed by order
+of General Sheridan, he spends an hour in cursing his captors. The
+red-hair of the Lord of the White Elephants waved his followers to
+victory; Colonel Gilmore's "hat, with the long black plume upon it," is
+the signal of triumph to his marauders. Both, finally, are loved by the
+ladies, and are alike extravagant in their devotion to the sex. Colonel
+Gilmore, indeed, withholds no touch that can go to make him the hero of
+a dime novel; and there is not a more picturesque and dashing character
+in literature outside of the adventures of Claude Duval. Everywhere we
+behold him waving his steel (as he calls his sword); he wheels before
+our dazzled eyes like a meteor; he charges, and the foe fly like sheep
+before him. And no sooner is he come into town from killing a score or
+two of Yankees, than the ladies--who are all good Union women and have
+just taken the oath of allegiance--crowd to kiss and caress him; or, as
+he puts it in his own vivid language, he receives "a kiss from more than
+one pair of ruby lips, and gives many a hearty hug and kiss in return."
+In his wild way, he takes a pleasure in evoking the tender solicitude of
+the ladies for his safety,--eats a dish of strawberries in a house upon
+which the Yankees are charging to capture him, and remains for some
+minutes after the strawberries are eaten, while the ladies, proffering
+him his arms, are "dancing about, and positively screaming with
+excitement." At another time, when the bullets of the enemy are hissing
+about his ears, he puts on a pretty girl's slipper for her. "Such," he
+remarks, with a pensive air, "are some of the few happy scenes that
+brighten a soldier's life."
+
+Colonel Gilmore, who has the diffidence of Major Gahagan, has also the
+engaging artlessness which lends so great a charm to the personal
+narrative of Mr. Barry Lyndon. He does not reserve from the reader's
+knowledge such of his exploits as stealing the chaplain's whiskey, and
+drinking the peach-brandy of the simple old woman who supposed she was
+offering it to General Lee. "Place him where you may," says Colonel
+Gilmore, "and under no matter what adverse circumstances, you can always
+distinguish a gentleman." He has a great deal of fine feeling, and can
+scarcely restrain his tears at the burning of Chambersburg, after
+setting it on fire. Desiring a memento of a brother officer, he takes a
+small piece of the dead man's skull. It has been supposed that civilized
+soldiers, however brave and resolute, scarcely exulted in the
+remembrance of the lives they had taken; and it is thought to be one of
+the merciful features of modern warfare, that in the vast majority of
+cases the slayer and the slain are unknown to each other. Colonel
+Gilmore has none of the false tenderness which shrinks from a knowledge
+of homicide. On the contrary, he is careful to know when he has killed a
+man; and he recounts, with an exactness revolting to feebler nerves, the
+circumstances and the methods by which he put this or that enemy to
+death.
+
+We think we could hardly admire Colonel Gilmore if he had been of our
+side during the war, and had done to the Rebels the things he professes
+to have done to us. As it is, we trust he will forgive us, if we confess
+that we have not read his narrative with a tranquil stomach, and that we
+think it will impress his Northern readers as the history of a brigand
+who had the good luck to be also a traitor.
+
+
+
+
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+Professor of Zoölogy and Geology in the Lawrence Scientific School. New
+York. C. Scribner & Co. 8vo. pp. viii., 128. $2.50.
+
+History of the Life and Times of James Madison. By William C. Rives.
+Vol. II. Boston. Little, Brown, & Co. 8vo. pp. xxii., 657. $3.50.
+
+The Physiology of Man; designed to represent the Existing State of
+Physiological Science, as applied to the Functions of the Human Body. By
+Austin Flint, Jr., M. D., Professor of Physiology and Microscopy in the
+Bellevue Medical College, N. Y., and in the Long Island College
+Hospital; Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, etc. Introduction;
+the Blood; Circulation; Respiration. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.
+pp. 502, $4.50.
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+Poems. By Annie E. Clarke. Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott & Co. 16mo.
+pp. 146. $1.00.
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+The Living Forces of the Universe. The Temple and the Worshippers. By
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+Jealousy. By George Sand, Author of "Consuelo," &c. With a Biographical
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+18mo. pp. vi., 424, $1.75.
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+Constitution to the Revolt of the Southern States. By George Lunt. New
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+
+False Pride; or, Two Ways to Matrimony. A Companion to "Family Pride."
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+Letters of Life. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
+12mo. pp. 414. $2.50.
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+of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. New York. D. Appleton &
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+pp. x., 418. $2.25.
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+Introduction and additional Notes. In Two Volumes. Boston. American
+Unitarian Association. 12mo. pp. xcii., 271; iv., 413. $4.50.
+
+St. Martin's Eve. By Mrs. Henry Wood. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &
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+etc. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson & Bro. 12mo. pp. 437. $2.00.
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+8vo. pp. iv., 256. $2.50.
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No.
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107,
+September, 1866, 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 18, No. 107, September, 1866
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2007 [EBook #23743]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 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><i>A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics.</i></h2>
+
+<h3>VOL. XVIII.&mdash;SEPTEMBER, 1866.&mdash;NO. CVII.</h3>
+
+<p>Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by <span class="smcap">Ticknor and
+Fields</span>, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.</p>
+
+<p class="notes">Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
+to the end of the article. Table of Contents has been generated for the HTML version.</p>
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+<p>
+<a href="#THE_SURGEONS_ASSISTANT"><b>THE SURGEON'S ASSISTANT.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#ON_TRANSLATING_THE_DIVINA_COMMEDIA"><b>ON TRANSLATING THE DIVINA COMMEDIA.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#WOMANS_WORK_IN_THE_MIDDLE_AGES"><b>WOMAN'S WORK IN THE MIDDLE AGES.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#PASSAGES_FROM_HAWTHORNES_NOTE-BOOKS"><b>PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#UNIVERSITY_REFORM"><b>UNIVERSITY REFORM.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_VOICE"><b>THE VOICE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#LIFE_ASSURANCE"><b>LIFE ASSURANCE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#A_DISTINGUISHED_CHARACTER"><b>A DISTINGUISHED CHARACTER.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_BOBOLINKS"><b>THE BOBOLINKS.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#GRIFFITH_GAUNT_OR_JEALOUSY"><b>GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_CHIMNEY-CORNER_FOR_1866"><b>THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#AN_ITALIAN_RAIN-STORM"><b>AN ITALIAN RAIN-STORM.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#INCIDENTS_OF_THE_PORTLAND_FIRE"><b>INCIDENTS OF THE PORTLAND FIRE.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#MY_LITTLE_BOY"><b>MY LITTLE BOY.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#LAKE_CHAMPLAIN"><b>LAKE CHAMPLAIN.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#YESTERDAY"><b>YESTERDAY.</b></a><br />
+<a href="#THE_JOHNSON_PARTY"><b>THE JOHNSON PARTY.</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>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_SURGEONS_ASSISTANT" id="THE_SURGEONS_ASSISTANT"></a>THE SURGEON'S ASSISTANT.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I.</h3>
+
+<p>The sickness of the nation not being unto death, we now begin to number
+its advantages. They will not all be numbered by this generation; and as
+for story-tellers, essayists, letter-writers, historians, and
+philosophers, if their "genius" flags in half a century with such
+material as hearts, homes, and battle-fields beyond counting afford
+them, they deserve to be drummed out of their respective regiments, and
+banished into the dominion of silence and darkness, forever to sit on
+the borders of unfathomable ink-pools, minus pen and paper, with
+fool's-caps on their heads.</p>
+
+<p>I know of a place which you may call Dalton, if it must have a name. At
+the beginning of our war,&mdash;for which some true spirits thank Almighty
+God,&mdash;a family as wretched as Satan wandering up and down the earth
+could wish to find lived there, close beside the borders of a lake which
+the Indians once called&mdash;but why should not your fancy build the lowly
+cottage on whatsoever green and sloping bank it will? Fair as you please
+the outside world may be,&mdash;waters pure as those of Lake St. Sacrament,
+with islands on their bosom like those of Horicon, and shores
+beautifully wooded as those of Lake George,&mdash;but what delight will you
+find in all the heavenly mansions, if love be not there?</p>
+
+<p>"I'll enlist," said the master of this mansion of misery in the midst of
+the garden of delight, one day.</p>
+
+<p>"I would," replied his wife.</p>
+
+<p>They spoke with equal vigor, but neither believed in the other. The
+instant the man dropped the book he had been reading, he was like Samson
+with his hair shorn, for his wife couldn't tell one letter from another;
+and when she saw him sit down on the stone wall which surrounded their
+potato-field, overgrown with weeds, she marched out boldly to the corner
+of the wood-shed, where never any wood was, and attacked him thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"S'pose you show fight awhile in that potato-patch afore you go to fight
+Ribils. Gov'ment don't need you any more than I do. May be it'll find
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>out getting ain't gaining!"</p>
+
+<p>She had no answer. The man was thinking, when she interrupted him, as
+she was always doing, that, if he could secure the State and town
+bounty, that would be some provision for the woman and child. As for
+himself, he was indifferent as to where he was sent, or how soon. But if
+he went away, they might look for him to come again. Gabriel's trumpet,
+he thought, would be a more welcome sound than his wife's voice.</p>
+
+<p>He enlisted. The bounties paid him were left in the hands of a trusty
+neighbor, and were to be appropriated to the supply of his family's
+needs; and he went away along with a boat-load of recruits,&mdash;his own man
+no longer. Even his wife noticed the change in him, from the morning
+when he put on his uniform and began to obey orders, for she had time to
+notice. Several days elapsed after enlistment before the company's ranks
+were complete, and the captain would not report at head-quarters, he
+said, until his own townsfolk had supplied the number requisite.</p>
+
+<p><i>Even</i> his wife noticed the change, I said; for, contrary to what is
+usual and expected, she was not the first to perceive that the slow and
+heavy step had now a spring in it, and that there was a light in his
+clouded eyes. She supposed the new clothes made the difference.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly a year had passed away, and this woman was leaning over the rail
+fence which surrounded a barren field, and listening, while she leaned,
+to the story of Ezra Cramer, just home from the war. She listened well,
+even eagerly, to what he had to tell, and seemed moved by the account in
+ways various as pride and indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I had him here!" she said, when he had come to the end of his
+story,&mdash;the story of her husband's promotion.</p>
+
+<p>Ezra looked at her, and thought of the pretty girl she used to be, and
+wondered how it happened that such a one could grow into a woman like
+this. The vindictiveness of her voice accorded well with her
+person,&mdash;expressed it. Where were her red cheeks? What had become of her
+brown hair? She was once a free one at joking with, and rallying the
+young men about; but now how like a virago she looked! and her tongue
+was sharp as a two-edged sword.</p>
+
+<p>Ezra was sorry that he had taken the trouble to ascertain in the village
+where Nancy Elkins lived. Poor fellow! While enduring the hardships of
+the past year, his imagination had transformed all the Dalton women into
+angels, and the circuit of that small hamlet had become to his loving
+thought as the circuit of Paradise.</p>
+
+<p>Some degree of comprehension seemed to break upon him while he stood
+gazing upon her, and he said: "O well, Miss Nancy, he's got his hands
+full, and besides he didn't know I was coming home so quick. I didn't
+know it myself till the last minute. He would 'a' sent some
+message,&mdash;course he would!"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess there ain't anything to hender his <i>writing</i> home to his
+folks," she answered, unappeased and unconvinced. "Other people hear
+from the war. There's Mynders always a-writing and sending money to the
+old folks, and that's the difference."</p>
+
+<p>"We've been slow to get our pay down where we was," said Ezra. "It's
+been a trouble to me all the while, having nothing to show for the time
+I was taking from father."</p>
+
+<p>The woman looked at the young fellow who had spoken so seriously, and
+her eyes and her voice softened.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody would mind about your not sending money hum, Ezra. They'd know
+<i>you</i> was all right. Such a hard-working set as you belong to! You're
+looking as if you wondered what I was doing here 'n this lot. I'm living
+in that shanty! Like as not I'll have its pictur' taken, and sent to my
+man. Old Uncle Torry said we might have it for the summer; and I expect
+the town was glad enough to turn me and my girl out anywhere. They won't
+do a thing towards fixing the old hut up. Say 't ain't worth it. We
+can't stay there in cold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> weather. Roof leaks like a sieve. If he don't
+send me some money pretty quick, I'll list myself, and serve long enough
+to find <i>him</i> out, see 'f I don't."</p>
+
+<p>At this threat, the soldier, who knew something about <span class="smcap">war</span>, straightened
+himself, and with a cheery laugh limped off towards the road. "I'll see
+ye ag'in, Miss Nancy, afore you start," said he, looking back and
+nodding gayly at her. Things weren't so bad as they seemed about her, he
+guessed. He was going home, and his heart was soft. Happiness is very
+kind; but let it do its best it cannot come very near to misery.</p>
+
+<p>Nancy stood and watched the young man as he went, commenting thus:
+"Well, <i>he</i>'s made a good deal out of 'listing, any way." His pale face
+and his hurt did not make him sacred in her sight.</p>
+
+<p>She was speaking to herself, and not to her little daughter, who, when
+she saw her mother talking to a soldier, ran up to hear the
+conversation. A change that was wonderful to see had passed over the
+child's face, when she heard that her father had been promoted from the
+ranks. The bald fact, unilluminated by a single particular, seemed to
+satisfy her. She hadn't a question to ask. Her first thought was to run
+down to the village and tell Miss Ellen Holmes, who told <i>her</i>, not long
+ago, so proud and wonderful a story about her brother's promotion.</p>
+
+<p>If it were not for this Jenny, my story would be short. Is it not for
+the future we live? For the children the world goes on.</p>
+
+<p>Does this little girl&mdash;she might be styled a beauty by a true catholic
+taste, but oh! I fear that the Boston Convention "<span class="smcap">Orthodox</span>," lately
+convened to settle all great questions concerning the past, present, and
+future, would never recognize her, on any showing, as a babe of
+grace!&mdash;does she, as she runs down the hill and along the crooked street
+of Dalton, look anything like a messenger of Heaven to your eyes? Must,
+the angels show their wings before they shall have recognition?</p>
+
+<p>Going past the blacksmith's shop she was hailed by the blacksmith's
+self, with the blacksmith's own authority. "See here, Jenny!" At the
+call, she stood at bay like a fair little fawn in the woods.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm writing a letter to my boy," he continued. "Step in here. Did you
+know Ezra Cramer had come back?"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw him just now," she answered. "He told us about father." She said
+it with a pride that made her young face shine.</p>
+
+<p>"So! what about him, I wonder?" asked the blacksmith.</p>
+
+<p>And that he really did wonder, Jenny could not doubt. She heard more in
+his words than she liked to hear, and answered with a tremulous voice,
+in spite of pride, "O, he's been promoted."</p>
+
+<p>"The deuse! what's <i>he</i> permoted to?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," she said, and for the first time she wondered.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is he, though?" asked the blacksmith.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know,&mdash;in the war."</p>
+
+<p>"That's 'cute. Well, see here, sis, we'll find that out,&mdash;you and me
+will." The angry voice of the blacksmith became tender. "You sit down
+there and write him a letter. My son, he'll find out if your pa is
+alive. As for Ezra, he don't know any more 'n he did when he went away;
+but, poor fellow, he's been mostually in the hospertal, instead of
+fighting Ribils, so p'r'aps he ain't to blame. You write to yer pa, and
+I'll wage you get an answer back, and he'll tell you all about his
+permotion quick enough."</p>
+
+<p>Jenny stood looking at the blacksmith for a moment, with mouth and eyes
+wide open, so much astonished by the proposition as not to know what
+answer should be made to it. She had never written a line in her life,
+except in her old copy-book. If her hand could be made to express what
+she was thinking of, it would be the greatest work and wonder in the
+world. But then, it never could!</p>
+
+<p>That decisive <i>never</i> seemed to settle the point. She turned forthwith
+to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> blacksmith, smiling very seriously. At the same time she took
+three decided steps, which led her into his dingy shop, as awed as
+though she were about to have some wonderful exhibition there. But she
+must be her own astrologer.</p>
+
+<p>The blacksmith, elated by his own success that morning in the very
+difficult business of letter-writing, was mightily pleased to have under
+direction this little disciple in the work of love, and forthwith laid
+his strong hands on the bench and brought it out into the light, setting
+it down with a force that said something for the earnestness of his
+purpose in regard to Miss Jenny.</p>
+
+<p>When he wrote his own letter, he did it in retirement and solitude,
+having sought out the darkest corner of his shop for the purpose. A
+mighty man in the shoeing of horses and the handling of hammers, he
+shrank from exposing his incompetence in the management of a miserable
+pen, even to the daylight and himself.</p>
+
+<p>His big account-book placed against his forge, with a small sheet of
+paper spread thereon, his pen in Jenny's hands, and the inkstand near
+by, there was nothing for him to do but to go away and let her do her
+work.</p>
+
+<p>"Give him a tall letter!" said he. "And you must be spry about it. He'll
+be glad to hear from his little girl, I reckon. See, the stage 'll be
+along by four o'clock, and now it's&mdash;&mdash;"&mdash;he stepped to the door and
+looked out on the tall pine-tree across the road,&mdash;that was his
+sun-dial,&mdash;"it's just two o'clock now, Jenny. Work away!" So saying, he
+went off as tired, after the exertion he had made, as if he had shod all
+the Dalton horses since daybreak.</p>
+
+<p>She had just two hours for doing the greatest piece of work she had done
+in her short life. And consciously it was the greatest work. Every
+stroke of that pen, every straight line and curve and capital, seemed to
+require as much deliberation as the building of a house; and how her
+brain worked! Fly to and fro, O swallows, from your homes beneath the
+eaves of the blacksmith's old stone shop in the shade of the
+far-spreading walnut,&mdash;stretch forth your importunate necks and lift
+aloft your greedy voices, O young ones in the nests!&mdash;the little girl
+who has so often stood to watch you is sitting in the shadow within
+there, blind and deaf to you, and unaware of everything in the great
+world except the promotion of her father "in the war," and the letter he
+will be sure to get, because the blacksmith is going to send it along
+with <i>his</i> letter to his son.</p>
+
+<p>She was doing her work well. Any one who had ever seen the girl before
+must have asked with wonder what had happened to her,&mdash;it was so evident
+that something had happened which stirred heart and soul to the depths.</p>
+
+<p>So, even so, unconsciously, love sometimes works out the work of a
+lifetime, touches the key-note of an anthem of everlasting praise,&mdash;does
+it with as little ostentation as the son of science draws yellow gold
+from the quartz rock which tells no tale on the face of it concerning
+its "hid treasure." So, wisely and without ostentation, work the true
+agents, the apostles of liberty in this world.</p>
+
+<p>"O dear papa! my dear papa!" she wrote, "Ezra has come home, and he says
+you are promoted! But he couldn't tell for what it was, or where you
+were, or anything. And O, it seems as if I couldn't wait a minute, I
+want to hear so all about it." When she had written thus far the spirit
+of the mother seemed to stir in the child. She sat and mused for a
+moment. Her eyes flashed. Her right hand moved nervously. Strange that
+her father had not sent some word by Ezra; but then he didn't know, of
+course, that Ezra was coming. Ay! that was a lucky thought. What she had
+written seemed to imply some blame. So, with many a blot and erasure,
+her loving belief that all was right must make itself evident.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the two hours she found herself at the bottom of the page
+the blacksmith had spread before her. Twice he had come into the shop
+and assured himself that the work was going<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> on, and smiled to see the
+progress she was making. The third time he came he was under
+considerable excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Ready!" he shouted. "The stage 'll be along now in ten minutes."</p>
+
+<p>She did not answer, she was so busy, and so <i>hard</i> at work, signing her
+name to the sheet that was covered with what looked like hieroglyphics.</p>
+
+<p>When she had made the last emphatic pen-stroke, she turned towards him,
+flushed and smiling. "There!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>He looked over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" said he. "But you haven't writ his name out. Give me the pen
+here, quick!" Then he took the quill and wrote her father's name up in
+one blank corner, and dried the ink with a little sand, and put the note
+into the envelope containing his own, and the great work was done.</p>
+
+<p>Do you know how great a work, you dingy old Dalton blacksmith?</p>
+
+<p>Do <i>you</i> know, fair child,&mdash;who must fight till the day of your death
+with alien, opposite forces, because the blood-vessels of Nancy Elkins,
+as they sail through the grand canals of the city of your life, so often
+hang out piratical banners, and bear down on better craft as they near
+the dangerous places, or put out, like wreckers after a storm, seeking
+for treasure the owners somehow lost the power to hold?</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes after the letter was inscribed and sealed, the stage
+came rattling along, and Jenny stood by and saw the blacksmith give it
+to the driver, and heard him say: "Now be kerful about that ere letter.
+It's got two inside. One's my boy's, as ye'll see by the facing on it;
+t' other's this little girl's. She's been writin' to her pa. So be
+kerful."</p>
+
+<p>They stood together watching the stage till it was out of sight, then
+the blacksmith nodded at Jenny as if they had done a good day's work,
+and proceeded to light his pipe. That was not her way of celebrating the
+event. She remembered now that she had promised a little girl, Miss
+Ellen Holmes indeed, that she would some time show her where the
+red-caps and fairy-cups grew, and there was yet time, before sunset, for
+a long walk in the woods.</p>
+
+<p>The little town-bred lady happened to come along just then, while Jenny
+stood hesitating whether to go home first and tell her mother of this
+great thing she had done. The question was therefore settled; and now
+let them go seeking red-caps. Good luck attend the children! Jenny will
+be sure to say something about promotions before they separate. She will
+say that something with a genuine human pride; and the end of the hunt
+for red-caps may be, conspicuously, success in finding them; but still
+more to the purpose, it will be the child's establishment on a better
+basis&mdash;a securer basis of equality&mdash;than she has occupied before. She
+forgets about Dalton and poverty. She thinks about camps and honor. She
+has something to claim of all the world. She is the citizen of a great
+nation. She bears the name of one who is fighting for the Union, who
+<i>has</i> fought, and fought so well that those in authority have beckoned
+him up higher. Why, it is as though a crown were placed on her dear
+father's head.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II.</h3>
+
+<p>Going out of quiet and beautiful green Dalton, and into the hospital of
+Frere's Landing, 't is a wonderful change we make.</p>
+
+<p>The silence of one place is as remarkable as the silence of the other,
+perhaps. That of the hospital does not resemble that of the hamlet,
+however. At times it grows oppressive and appalling, being the silence
+of anguish or of death. A stranger reaching Dalton in the night might
+wonder in the morning if there were in reality any passage out of it,
+for there the lake, on one of whose western slopes is the
+"neighborhood," seems locked in completely by the hills, and an ascent
+towards heaven is apparently the only way of egress. Yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> there's
+another way; for I am not writing this true story among celestial
+altitudes for you. I returned from Dalton by a mundane road.</p>
+
+<p>Out of Frere's Hospital, however, <i>its</i> silence and seclusion, many a
+stranger never found his way except by the high mountains of
+transfiguration, in the chariots of fire, driven by the horsemen of
+Heaven, covered with whose glory they departed.</p>
+
+<p>Through the wards of this well-ordered hospital a lady passed one night,
+and, entering a small apartment separated from the others, advanced with
+noiseless step to a bedside, and there sat down. You may guess if her
+heart was beating fast, and whether it was with difficulty that she kept
+her gray eyes clear of tears. There were about her traces of long and
+hurried journeying.</p>
+
+<p>Under no limitations of caution had she passed so noiselessly through
+the wards. Involuntary was that noiselessness,&mdash;involuntary also the
+surprise with which one and another of the more wakeful patients turned
+to follow her, with hopeless, weary eyes, as she passed on. Now and then
+some feeble effort was made to attract her attention and arrest her
+progress, but she went, absorbed beyond observation by the errand that
+constrained her steps and thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>When she reached the door of the apartment to which the surgeon had
+directed her, she seemed for an instant to hesitate; then she pushed the
+door open and passed into the room. The next instant she sank into a
+chair by the bedside of a man who was lying there asleep. It seemed as
+if the silent room had a profounder stillness added to it since she
+entered.</p>
+
+<p>It was Colonel Ames whom she saw lying on the cot before her with a
+bandage round his forehead, so evidently asleep. He was smiling in a
+dream. He was not going to give up the ghost, it seemed, though he had
+given up so much&mdash;how much!&mdash;with that passion of giving which possessed
+this nation, North and South, during four awful, glorious years. <i>He</i>
+had given up the splendor and the beauty of this world. All its radiance
+was blotted out in that moment of fury and of death when the shot struck
+him, and left him blind upon the field.</p>
+
+<p>Never on earth would it be said to him, "Receive thy sight." The lady
+knew this who sat down by his bedside to wait for his awaking. The
+surgeon had told her this, when at last, after having searched for her
+brother long among the dead, she came to Frere's Hospital and found him
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>She sat so close beside him it seemed that he could not remain a moment
+unconscious of her immediate presence after waking. Her hand lay just
+where his hand, moving when he wakened, must touch it. She had rightly
+calculated the chances; he did touch it, and started and said: "Who's
+here? Doctor!" Then with a firmer grasp he seized the unresisting
+fingers, and exclaimed, "My God, am I dreaming? it ought to be Lizzie's
+hand."</p>
+
+<p>"The doctor told me I should find you here, and might come," she
+answered; and, disguised as the voice was by the feeling that tore her
+heart, the Colonel, poor young fellow, listening as if for life, knew
+it, and said, "O Lizzie, my child, I don't know about this,&mdash;why
+couldn't you wait?"</p>
+
+<p>"I waited and waited forever," she answered. "You're not sorry that I've
+found you out after such a hunt? Of course you'll make believe, but
+then&mdash;you needn't; I'm here, any way!"</p>
+
+<p>Just then the surgeon came in. The Colonel knew his step, and said,
+"Doctor, look here; is this Lizzie?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you're right," said the doctor. "She said she had a hero for
+a brother, and I have no doubt about that myself."</p>
+
+<p>"O Dan, we had given you up! Though I knew all the time we shouldn't. I
+could not believe&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Must come to that Lizzie,&mdash;do it over again; for what you have here
+isn't your old Dan."</p>
+
+<p>"My old Dan!" she exclaimed, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> then there was a little break in the
+conversation the two heroes were endeavoring to maintain.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the surgeon had seated himself on the edge of the bed waiting
+the moment when there should be a positive need of him. He saw when it
+arrived.</p>
+
+<p>"Colonel," said he, in his hearty, cheery voice, which alone had lifted
+many a poor fellow from the slough of misery, and put new heart and soul
+in him, since his ministrations began in the hospital,&mdash;"Colonel, your
+aids are in waiting."</p>
+
+<p>The soldier smiled; his face flushed. "My aids can wait," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"That is a fine thing to say. Here he has been bothering me, madam, not
+to say browbeating me, and I've been moving heaven and earth for my
+part, and at last have secured the aids, and now hear him dismiss them!"</p>
+
+<p>"Bring them round here," said the patient suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>The surgeon quietly lifted from the floor a pair of crutches, and placed
+them in his patient's hands.</p>
+
+<p>"How many years must I rely on my aids?" he asked quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps three months. By that time you will be as good as ever."</p>
+
+<p>A change passed over the young man's face at this. Whatever the emotion
+so expressed, it had otherwise no demonstration. He turned now abruptly
+toward his sister, and said: "They can wait. I've got another kind of
+aid now. Come, Lizzie, say something."</p>
+
+<p>A sudden radiance flashed across his face when he ceased to speak, and
+waited for that voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be round again in an hour," said the surgeon.</p>
+
+<p>He could well be spared. The brother and sister had now neither eye nor
+thought except for each other.</p>
+
+<p>The surgeon's face changed as he closed the door. Every one of their
+faces changed. As for the gentleman whose duty took him now from ward to
+ward, from one sick-bed to another, it was only by an effort that he
+gave his cheerful words and courageous looks to the men who had found
+day after day a tonic in his presence.</p>
+
+<p>The brother and sister clasped each other's hands. Few were the words
+they spoke. He was looking forward to the years before him, endeavoring
+to steady himself, in a moment of weakness, by the remembrance of past
+months of active service.</p>
+
+<p>She was thinking of the days when she walked with her hero out of
+delightsomeness and ease into danger and anxiety, all for the nation's
+succor, in the nation's time of need. Some had deemed it a needless
+sacrifice. Of old, when sacrifice was to be offered, it was not the
+worthless and the worst men dared or cared to bring. The spotless, the
+pure, the beautiful, these were no vain oblations. These two said in
+solemn conference, "We will make an offering of our all." And their all
+they offered. See how much had been accepted!</p>
+
+<p>Having offered, having sacrificed, it was not in either of these to
+repent the doing, or despise the honor that was put upon them. No going
+back for them! No looking back! No secret repining! The Colonel had done
+his work. As for the Colonel's sister, there was no place on earth where
+she would not find work to do.</p>
+
+<p>And here in this hospital, in her brother's room, she found a sphere.
+Going and coming through the various wards, singing hymns of heavenly
+love and purest patriotism, scattering comforts with ministering hands,
+which found brothers on all those beds of languishing, how many learned
+to look for her appearing, and to bless her when she came! But
+concerning her work there, and that of other women, some of whom will go
+crippled to the grave from their service,&mdash;soldiers and veterans of the
+army of the Union,&mdash;enough has everywhere been said.</p>
+
+<p>Among all these patients there was one, a sick man, to whom her coming
+and her going, her speech and her silence, became most notable events.
+Living within the influence of such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> manner and degree of social life as
+her presence in the hospital established, he was like a returned exile,
+who, yet under ban, felt all the awkwardness, constraint, and danger of
+his position. This man, who discovered in himself merely helplessness,
+was not accounted helpless, but the helper of many. He was, in short,
+the surgeon of the hospital.</p>
+
+<p>One day the Colonel said to him, "You don't like to have my sister here.
+Are the hired nurses making a row?"</p>
+
+<p>The surgeon's face betrayed so much interest in this subject, and so
+much embarrassment, it seemed probable he would come out with an
+absolute "Yes"; but his speech contradicted him, for he said with
+indifference, "Where did you get that pretty notion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Out of you, and nowhere else. What puzzles me, though, is, she seems to
+think she is doing some good here. And didn't you say you'd no objection
+to her visiting the wards?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should think it a positive loss if she were called or sent away from
+the hospital," said the surgeon, speaking now seriously enough. "She is
+of the greatest service, out of this room as well as in it."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do I feel then as if something had happened,&mdash;something
+disagreeable? We don't have such good times as we used to have when you
+sat here and told stories, and let me run on like a school-boy."</p>
+
+<p>"You have better company, that's all. I'm not such a fool that I can't
+see it. You have better times, lad,&mdash;if I don't."</p>
+
+<p>"Then all you did for me before she came was for pity's sake! Who's in
+the ditch now, getting all the favor you used to show to me?"</p>
+
+<p>The voice and manner with which these words were spoken produced an
+effect not readily yielded to, though the surgeon was perfectly aware
+that his emotion was unperceived and unguessed by the man on the bed
+there, who was investigating a difficulty which had puzzled him.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>So we have come to <i>this</i> point. Away down at Frere's Landing, amid
+scenes of anguish, tribulation, and death, where elect souls did
+minister, there was found ministration by these elect souls in their own
+behalf.</p>
+
+<p>They had gained a "Landing-Place" that was sacred ground, and if
+Philosophy and Science would also stand there they must put their shoes
+from off their feet, for the ground was holy. Priests whose right it was
+to stand within the veil were servants there; and day by day, as they
+discerned each other's work, it was not required of them always to dwell
+upon the nature of sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>Each, in such work as now was occupying the doctor and Miss Ames, had
+need of the other's strengthening sympathy, day by day, and of all the
+consolations of friendship, such as royal souls are permitted to bestow
+on one another.</p>
+
+<p>With the surgeon, not a young man in anything except happiness, it was
+as if there were broad openings, not <i>rents</i>, in the heavy leaden skies.
+Pure, bright lights shone along the horizon, warmth overspread the cold.</p>
+
+<p>With her, perpetual and sufficient are the compensations of love. To him
+who plants of this it is returned out of earth, and out of heaven, in
+good measure, pressed down, and running over. Nay, let us not argue.</p>
+
+<p>The sick man lying on his cot, the convalescent guided by her to balcony
+or garden, the crippled and the dying, had all to give her of their
+hearts' best bloom. And if it proved that there was one among these who,
+to her apprehension, walked in white, like an angel, of whom she asked
+no thanks, no praise, only aid and sympathy, what mortal should look
+surprise? The constant, the pure, the alive through all generations, the
+Alive Forever, will not. And the rest may apologize for overhearing a
+story not intended for their ears.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It happened one evening that the surgeon and Miss Ames met outside the
+hospital doors, near the old sea-wall. They were walking in no haste,
+watching, it seemed, the flight of the brave little sea-birds, as they
+made their way now above and now among the breakers. After the
+heart-trying labors of the day, an hour like this was full of balm to
+those who were now entered on its rest. But it was not secure from
+invasion. Even now a voice was shouting to the surgeon, and he heard it,
+though he walked on as if he were determined not to hear. He had taken
+to himself this hour; he had earned it, he needed it; surely the world
+could go on for one hour without him!</p>
+
+<p>But the importunity of the call was not to be resisted. So, because the
+irresistible must be met, the surgeon stood still and looked around. A
+poor little fellow was making toward him with all speed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mail for you, sir," he said, as he came nearer, and he gave a package
+of newspapers, and one little letter, into the surgeon's hands.</p>
+
+<p>So Miss Ames and he sat down on the stone wall to scan those newspapers,
+and the surgeon opened his note.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously a scrawl from some poor fellow who had obtained a discharge on
+account of sickness, and gone home. It was not rare for the surgeon to
+receive such missives from the men who had been under his charge.
+Wonderful was the influence he gained over the majority of his patients.
+Wonderful? No. The man of meanest talents, who gives himself body and
+spirit to a noble work, can no more fail of his great reward, than the
+seasons of their glory. Never man on this Landing thought meanly of the
+hospital surgeon's skill, or questioned his right to rank among the
+ablest of his tribe,&mdash;no man, and certainly not the woman who was making
+a hero out of him, to her heart's great content.</p>
+
+<p>While Miss Ames looked at the papers, he proceeded, without much
+interest in the business, to open and read his note.</p>
+
+<p>One glance down the blurred and blotted page served to arrest his
+attention, in a way that letters could not always do. Here was not a cup
+of cold water to sip and put aside. He glanced at Miss Ames. She was
+absorbed in a report of "the situation," getting items of renown out of
+one column and another, which should ease many an aching body, smooth
+many a sick man's pillow, ere the night-lamps were lighted in the wards.</p>
+
+<p>If she had chanced to look up at him just then, while he, with scared,
+astonished eyes, was glancing at her, it is impossible to say what words
+might have escaped him, or what might have forever been prevented
+utterance. But she was not looking. What heavenly angel turned her eyes
+away?</p>
+
+<p>And now, before him whose prerogative was Victory, what vision did
+arise? An apocalyptic vision: blackness of darkness forever, and side by
+side with chaos, fair fields of living green, through which a young girl
+walked towards a womanhood as fair as hers who sat beside him.
+Unconscious of wrong that child, and yet how deeply, how variously
+wronged! If he had meditated a great robbery, he could not have quailed
+in the light of the discovered enormity as he did now before the vision
+of his Janet.</p>
+
+<p>Years upon years of struggle and of conquest could hardly give to the
+surgeon of Frere's a more notable victory, one which could fill his soul
+with a serener sense of triumph, than this hour gave, when he sat on the
+old stone wall that guarded shore from sea, with the child's letter in
+his hands, which had not miscarried, but had moved straight,
+straight&mdash;do not Divine providences always?&mdash;as an arrow to its mark.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Out of the secret place of strength he came, and he held that letter
+open towards Miss Ames.</p>
+
+<p>"Here's something to be thought of," said he, endeavoring to speak in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+natural and easy tone of voice. "I don't know that I could ask for
+better counsel than yours. My little girl has written me a letter. I
+didn't know that she could write. See what work she has made of it. But
+what sort of parents can she have, do you think, twelve years old, and
+writing a thing like that?"</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ames laid aside, or rather, to speak correctly, she <i>dropped</i> the
+newspapers. There was nothing in all their printed columns to compare
+with this item of intelligence,&mdash;that the surgeon had a living wife and
+a living daughter. She took the letter he was holding towards her, and
+said, "Indeed, Doctor," quite as naturally as he had spoken. But she did
+not look at him. She read the letter,&mdash;every misspelled word of
+it,&mdash;then she said: "Perhaps it doesn't say much for the parents. But
+something&mdash;I should think a great deal&mdash;for the child. Strange you
+didn't tell me about her before. But I like to have her introduce
+herself."</p>
+
+<p>"You do!"</p>
+
+<p>"Promotion, eh!" she was looking the scrawl over again.</p>
+
+<p>The word, as she pronounced it, was not an interrogation. Miss Ames
+seemed to be musing, yet with no activity of curiosity, on the one idea
+which had evidently possessed the child's mind in writing.</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment after this ejaculation; then the surgeon
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I enlisted as a private," said he, speaking with a difficulty that
+might not have been manifest to any ordinary hearer. "My daughter did
+not know that I had a profession; but my diploma satisfied the
+Department when my promotion was spoken of. When I became a live man in
+the service, I wished to serve where I could bring the most to pass, and
+it was not in camp, or on the field,&mdash;except as a healer." He looked at
+his watch as he uttered these last words, and arose as if his hour of
+rest had expired; but then, instead of taking one step forward, he
+turned and looked at Miss Ames, and she seemed to hear him saying, "Is
+this a time for flight?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered that question, for he had asked it of himself, by sitting
+down again.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>ought</i> to take a few minutes to myself," he said, with grave
+deliberation, "I shall have no time like this to speak of my child,&mdash;for
+her, I mean"; and if, while he spoke thus, he lacked perfect composure,
+the hour was his, and he knew it. "More than a dozen years ago," he
+continued, "I went to Dalton. I was sick and dying, as I thought.
+Janet's mother nursed me through a fever, and was the means of saving my
+life. I married her. I was grateful for the care she had taken of me;
+and while regaining my strength, during that September and October, I
+fell into the mistake of thinking that it was she who made the world
+seem beautiful to me again, and life worth keeping. But you have seen
+enough since you have been in this hospital to understand that this war
+has been salvation to a good many men, as it will prove to the nation. I
+enlisted as much as anything to get away from&mdash;where I was. The Devil
+himself couldn't hold me there any longer. He had managed things long
+enough. The child is capable of love, you see. Can you help us? I don't
+know, but I think you were sent from above to do it, somehow. I see&mdash;I
+must live for Janet. When I think that she might live in the same world
+where you do, that I have no right to surround her with any other
+conditions&mdash;does God take me for a robber? No! for he managed to get
+this letter to me when&mdash;" He stopped speaking,&mdash;it seemed as if he were
+about to look at his watch again; but instead of that, he said "Good
+evening" to Miss Ames, and bowed, and walked back towards the hospital.</p>
+
+<p>His assistant gathered up the newspapers, and then sat down again and
+looked out towards the sea. The tide was coming in. She sat awhile and
+watched the great waves lift aloft the graceful branches of green and
+purple<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> sea-weed, and saw the stormy petrels going to and fro, and
+listened to the ocean's roar. She was sounding deeper depths than those
+awful caverns which were hidden by the green and shining water from her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>If Janet Saunders, child of Nancy Elkins, at that moment felt a thrill
+of joy, and broke forth into singing, would you deem the fact
+inconsequent, not to be classed among the wonders of telegraphic
+achievement?</p>
+
+<p>I think her little cold, pinched, meagre life&mdash;nay, <i>lot</i>&mdash;was
+brightened consciously on that great day of being,&mdash;that the sun felt
+warmer, and the skies looked fairer than they ever had before. The
+destiny which had seemed to be in the hands or charge of no one on earth
+was in the hands of two as capable as any in this world for services of
+love.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But now what was to be done by Dr. Saunders? Every man and woman sees
+the "situation." For the present, of course, he was sufficiently
+occupied; he was in the service of his country. But when these urgent
+demands on his time, patience, and humanity, which were now incessant,
+should no longer be made, because the country had need of him no
+longer,&mdash;what then? Men mustered out of service generally went home;
+family and neighborhood claimed them. What family, what neighborhood,
+claimed him? His very soul abhorred the thought of Dalton, where he had
+died to life; where he had buried his manhood. The very thought that the
+neighbors would not be able to recognize him was a thought which made
+him say to himself they never <i>should</i> recognize him. He would <i>not</i> be
+identified as the poor creature who went out of Dalton with one hope,
+and only one,&mdash;that the first day's engagement might see him lying among
+the unnamed and unknown dead. But if the neighbors and his wife exposed
+to him relations which he swore he would not degrade himself so far as
+to resume, what was to become of his daughter? That was more easily
+managed. He could send her away from home to school, if he could find a
+lady in the land who would compassionate that neglected little girl, and
+teach her, and train her, and be a mother to her.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Ames knew such a one. Let the little girl be sent to Charlestown to
+Miss Hall, Miss Ames's dear friend, and no better training than she
+would have in her school could be found for her throughout the land.
+Miss Ames gave this advice the day she went away from Frere's, for she
+had decided, for her brother, that he never would recover his strength
+until he was removed to a cooler climate. So they were going on a
+government transport, which would sail for Charlestown direct. This
+little business in regard to Janet Saunders could be managed by her
+immediately on arrival home. And so the surgeon wrote a letter, which he
+sent by his assistant, to Miss Hall, and another to the minister of
+Dalton, and another still to Janet and her mother. And all these
+concerned little Jenny; and all this grew out of the letter written in
+the blacksmith's shop, and the doctor's recovered integrity.</p>
+
+<p>But the question yet remained, What could be done for Nancy? If
+education in that direction were possible,&mdash;to what purpose? That she
+might become his equal when the strength of his hope that he had done
+with her was lying merely in this, that they were unequal? But
+hope,&mdash;what had he to do with hope, especially with such a hope as this?
+What had he to do with hope, who had come forth from Dalton as from a
+pit of despair? There were no foes like those of his own household; he
+was hoping that for all time he had rid himself of them. That would have
+been desertion, in point of fact. Well; but all that a man hath will he
+give for his life. He was safely distant from that place of disaster and
+death; but he must recognize his home duties, at least by the
+maintenance of his family. Yes, that he would do. He began to consider
+how much was due to him for services rendered to the government,&mdash;for
+the first time to consider.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So, long before winter came, Nancy Saunders found herself on intimate
+terms with the minister and his wife,&mdash;for the minister had received his
+letters from the surgeon, and promptly accepted his commission, securing
+comfortable winter quarters for Nancy, and escorting Janet to
+Charlestown, after his wife had aided the doctor's wife in preparing the
+child for boarding-school. All these changes and transactions excited
+talk in Dalton. Every kind of rumor went abroad that you can imagine;
+and it was currently believed at last that the doctor had made a fortune
+by some army contract. So well persuaded of this fact was his wife,
+that, as time wore on, she began to think, and to say, that, if such was
+the case, she didn't know why she should be kept on short allowance, and
+to inquire among the neighbors the easiest and the shortest route from
+Dalton to Frere's Landing. Nobody seemed able to answer the question so
+well as Ezra Cramer; and he assured her that she would lose her head
+before she got half through the army lines which stretched between her
+and the hospital. But then Ezra was a born know-nothing, said
+Nancy,&mdash;that everybody knew.</p>
+
+<p>Walking up and down the sea-wall, night after night, during the hour of
+rest he appropriated to himself,&mdash;knowing that these things were
+accomplished, for in due time letters came informing him of the
+fulfilment of his wishes,&mdash;the surgeon had ample leisure for considering
+and reconsidering this case. It was one that would not stay disposed of.
+What adjournments were made! what exceptions were taken! and what
+appeals to higher courts were constantly being made!</p>
+
+<p>As often as a scrawl came from Colonel Ames reporting progress, and the
+plans he and his sister were making, the deeds they were doing, the
+grand-jury was sworn and the surgeon arraigned before it; the chief
+justice came into court, and all the witnesses, and the accusation was
+read. Then the counsel for the defendant and the counsel for the
+plaintiff appeared. But, with every new trial of the case, new charges
+and new specifications were brought forward and made, and it was equal
+to being in chancery. If the war lasted through a generation, it was
+likely that the surgeon's suit would last as long.</p>
+
+<p>This was as notable a divorce case as ever was made public.</p>
+
+<p>On the plaintiff's behalf the argument ran thus: Here was a man, a
+gentleman by birth, education, and profession, legally united to a woman
+low-born, low-bred, and so ignorant that she could neither read nor
+write. He had come to the neighborhood where she lived, to the door of
+the very house she occupied, sick in body and in mind. Disappointments
+and ill-health had reduced him to the shadow of himself in person, and
+his mind, of course, shared his body's disaffection.</p>
+
+<p>A sick person, as all experience in practice has proved over and over
+again, is hardly to be called a responsible being. Invalids love and
+hate without reason,&mdash;which is contrary, he said, as he stood in the
+presence of the court,&mdash;contrary to what is done among persons in sound
+health.</p>
+
+<p>Under the shelter of her uncle's roof he had lain for weeks, sick of a
+fever. He was saved alive, but so as by fire. This girl waited on him
+through that time as a servant. He was thrown chiefly on her hands,&mdash;no
+other person could be spared to wait on the poor stranger. She comforted
+him. Her ways were not refined and gentle as if she had been taught
+refinement and tenderness by precept or example. She had strong
+good-sense. So far as she understood his orders, she obeyed them. When
+he could not give any, she made use of her own judgment, and sought
+first of all his comfort. She was kind. In her rough honesty and
+unwearied attention he found cause for gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>Rising for the first time from his bed of sickness, he would have fallen
+if she had not lifted him and laid him back upon his bed. When he became
+strong enough to stand, but not without support, she gave him that
+support. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> assisted him from the little room, and the little house
+when the walls became intolerable to him, and it happened to be in the
+early morning of a day so magnificent that it seemed another could never
+be made like it. He could not forget how the world looked that morning;
+how the waters shone; how the islands stood about; how the surrounding
+hills were arrayed in purple glory; how the birds sang. This land to
+which he was a stranger, which he had seen before only on that night
+when he came in the dark to her uncle's door, looked like Paradise to
+him; he gazed and gazed, and silent tears ran down his pale face through
+the furrows of his wasted cheeks. She saw them shining in his beard, and
+said something to soothe him in a comforting way, as any woman would
+have spoken who saw any creature in weakness and pain. The manner or the
+word, whatever it was, expressed a superiority of health, if of no other
+kind, and he was in no condition to investigate either its quality or
+its degree.</p>
+
+<p>When, with voice feeble and broken as a sick child's, he thanked her for
+all she had done, and she answered that it was nothing but a pleasure,
+and he need not thank her, he did not forthwith forget that she had
+watched day and night over him for nearly two months; that many a time
+weariness so overpowered her that she sat and slept in the broad
+daylight, and looked paler than when he lay like a dead weight on her
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>He remembered in court, and could not deny it, that when, believing that
+this was destiny as it was also pleasure, he asked the girl to marry
+him, she answered, "No,"&mdash;as if she did not trust what he said, that she
+was necessary to his happiness. She told him that he did not belong in
+Dalton, and that he would not be happy there with her and her people. He
+answered that all he desired to know was whether she loved him. By and
+by he was able to gather from the answers she gave, as well as failed to
+give, all he desired to know, and they were married.</p>
+
+<p>And, since he was beginning life anew, it was shown in court, nothing of
+the old life should enter into this of Dalton. He buried his profession
+in the past, and undertook other labors,&mdash;labors like those of Uncle
+Elkins; he would abide on that level where he found himself on his
+recovery, and make no effort to lift his wife to that he had renounced.
+She was a child of Nature. He would learn life anew of her; but he
+failed of success in all his undertakings. Shall a man attempt to
+extenuate his failures? It seemed new to him; he acknowledged it in open
+court, that from the day of his entrance into Dalton to the day he left
+it, he was under some enchantment there. And if an insane man is not to
+be held responsible in law for his offences, he had the amplest title to
+a quitclaim deed from that which had grown out of the Dalton experience.</p>
+
+<p>So the lower courts disposed of the case. He was free. But after a time
+the suit was carried up before superior powers, and thus the advocate
+for the defendant showed cause on the new trial.</p>
+
+<p>She was living among the people of whom she had been born. In person she
+was attractive as any girl to be found on all the lake or hillside; a
+rosy-cheeked, fair-faced, fair-haired blue-eyed girl, with a frank voice
+and easy address. She had a "Hail fellow! well met!" for every man,
+woman, and child of the vicinity. She had lovers, all the way up from
+her childhood, rustic admirers, and one who looked at her from a not far
+distance, who dressed himself in his best and went to her uncle's house
+on Sundays and other holidays, and who was courting Nancy after his
+fashion, with all plans for their future marked out fully in his
+mind,&mdash;and these would have fulfilment if his suit were only successful;
+and in regard to that he had no fears or doubts.</p>
+
+<p>Until this stranger came to Uncle Elkins's house! During his long
+sickness the young lover was helpful in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> many ways to Nancy. But he
+began to be suspicious by and by of the results of this much waiting. At
+last, before he was himself ready to do it, he asked Nancy to be his
+wife; but he was too late. She had "given her word" to the poor fellow
+whom she had lured back from Death's door.</p>
+
+<p>The court was admonished to take cognizance of this fact, that, if Nancy
+had married the man in whom her heart had been interested up to the time
+when the stranger came, she would have married in her own sphere, a man
+of her own rank, and would have loved him as he did her, with an equal
+love; they would have lived out their lives, animating them with
+skirmishes and small warfare, and winning victories over each other,
+which would have proved disastrous as defeats to neither.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been no high crime to such a man that Nancy was ignorant
+up and down through the range of knowledge; he would not have turned
+away in disgust from his endeavors to teach her, if she took it into her
+head to learn, though she dropped and regained the ambition through
+every winter of her life. He would have plodded on in his accustomed
+ways, would have protected his wife and child from starvation and cold,
+without imagining that a husband and father could retire from his
+position as such, or abrogate his duties. No vague expectations in
+regard to herself, no bitter disappointment in regard to him, would have
+attended her. The very changes in her character, which had made her not
+to be endured,&mdash;how far was he whose name she bore responsible for them?
+She had been accustomed to thrift and labor, she saw in him idleness and
+waste of power and life. She had exhausted the resources readiest to her
+hand in vain, and had only then given up her expectation.</p>
+
+<p>It was not be denied that it was humiliation and wrath to live with her;
+but her husband had sought her,&mdash;she had not sought him! If he could
+plead for himself the force and constraint of circumstances, should not
+the same defence be set up for her? And what might not patience, and
+better management, and gentler and more noble demeanor towards her, have
+done for her? Was <i>he</i> the same man he was when he went away from
+Dalton? Was he the same man in Dalton that he had been in his youth? Was
+it not out of the pit that he himself had been digged? It became evident
+that the arguments for the defendant were producing a result in court.
+The judge on his throne, as well as the grand-jury, listened to the
+argument in favor of the woman. And at last the case was decided; for
+the judge charged the jury, that, if it could be shown that there was
+mere incompatibility, it was the business of the superior mind to make
+straight a highway for the Lord across those lives. Let every valley be
+exalted, every hill be brought low.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Saunders <i>acquiesced</i> in this verdict, and wrote a letter to his
+wife. He knew she could not read it, but he knew also that she could
+procure it to be read to her. He filled it with accounts of his
+situation, occupation, expectation; and he sent her money. He said that,
+if he could get a furlough, he might run up North for a few days, as
+other men went home who could get leave of absence, to see that those
+whom he had left behind him were doing well; and they would both perhaps
+be able to go and see their daughter Jenny, or else they might have her
+home for a holiday. He wrote a letter saying these things and others,
+and any wife might have been proud to receive such from her husband, "in
+the war."</p>
+
+<p>And when he had sent it, he looked for no answer. This was a kind of
+giving which must look for no return. And yet an answer was sent him. He
+did not receive it, however, it was sent at so late a date; he was then
+on his way to Dalton.</p>
+
+<p>When the whistle of the miniature boat which plied the lake sent a
+warning along the hillside that a passenger was on board who wished to
+land, or that mail was to be sent ashore, a small boat was rowed from
+the Point by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> lad who was lingering about, waiting to know if any such
+signal were to come, and one passenger stood at the head of the ladder,
+waiting for him to come alongside. This was Dr. Saunders, who, having
+been rowed ashore, walked three miles down the road, and up along the
+mountain, to the Dalton neighborhood.</p>
+
+<p>The first man whom he met as he walked on was the blacksmith, who had
+been instrumental in getting Jenny's letter written. He was sitting in
+front of his shop, alone. There was nothing about this man who was
+walking into Dalton to excite a suspicion in the mind of the shrewdest
+old inhabitant who should meet him that his personality was familiar to
+Dalton eyes. He might safely ask what questions he would, and pursue his
+way if he chose to do it. Nobody would recognize him.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor lingered as he went past the shop; but the blacksmith did not
+speak, and he walked on; and he passed others, his old neighbors, as he
+went. This was hardly pleasant, though it might be the thing he desired.</p>
+
+<p>He walked on until he came to the red farm-gate of Farmer Elkins,
+Nancy's uncle. There he stopped. Under the chestnut-trees, before the
+door, the farmer sat. The doctor walked in, and towards him like a man
+at home, and said, "Good evening, Uncle."</p>
+
+<p>The wrinkled old farmer looked up from his drowse. He had hardly heard
+the words spoken; but the voice that spoke had in it a tone that was
+familiar, were it not for the cheeriness of it; and&mdash;but no! one glance
+at the figure before him assured him of anything rather than Saunders!
+Yet the old man, either because of his vague expectation or because of
+the confusion of his half-awake condition, said something audibly, of
+which the name of Nancy, and her name alone, was intelligible.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, where <i>is</i> Nancy," said the other, laying his hand on the
+farmer's shoulder in a manner calculated to dissipate his dream.</p>
+
+<p>The old man looked at the doctor with serious, suspicious eyes, scanned
+him from head to foot, and there was a dash of anger, of unbelief, of
+awe, and of deference in the spirit with which he said, "If you're
+Saunders, I'm glad you've come, but you might 'a' come sooner."</p>
+
+<p>"You're right, and you're wrong, Uncle. I'm Saunders, true enough. But I
+couldn't come before,&mdash;this is my first furlough."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you get the letter?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, what letter? Who wrote to me?"</p>
+
+<p>The judge and the jury looked down from the awful circle, in the midst
+of which stood Saunders, and surveyed the little hard-faced,
+yellow-haired farmer, with eyes which seemed intent on searching him
+through all his shadowy ambiguity. If only he would make such answer as
+any other man in all the land might expect,&mdash;thought the
+prisoner,&mdash;"Why, your wife, of course." The doctor was prepared to
+believe in a miracle. Since he went away his wife might have been
+spurred on by the ambition to rival her daughter, who was being
+educated. She perhaps had learned to write, and in her pride had written
+to her husband!</p>
+
+<p>The answer Elkins gave was the only one of which the doctor's mind had
+taken no thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Nancy died a month ago." There the old man paused. But as the doctor
+made no answer, merely stood looking at him, he went on. "She got your
+letter first, though, Nancy did. I think, if anything could a-hindered
+her dying, that would. She came out here to read your letter," (he did
+not say to hear it read, and Saunders noticed that,) "and my folks, she
+found, was busy, and nobody was round to talk it over with her, so
+nothing could stop her, but she put right in and worked till night, and
+on top o' that she would go back to the village, and it was raining, and
+so dark you could scurce see the road; but she'd made up her mind to go
+South and find you, and so we couldn't persuade her to stop over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> night.
+But the next day, when she come back to tell us when she was going to
+start for Dixie, she was took down right here, that suddin. There's been
+a good deal of that sickness round here sense, and fatalish, most
+always. But I tell 'em it took the smartest of the lot off first, when
+it took Nancy."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor stood there when the teller of this story had stopped
+speaking. He was not looking at <i>him</i>,&mdash;of that the old man was certain.
+He seemed to be looking nowhere, and to see nothing that was near or
+visible.</p>
+
+<p>"Come into the house and take something," said Uncle Elkins, for he
+began to be alarmed.</p>
+
+<p>"Was Janet here?" asked the doctor, as if he had not heard the
+invitation.</p>
+
+<p>"We had to send for her. Nancy was calling for her all the time," said
+Farmer Elkins, as if he doubted how far this story ought to be
+continued, for he did not understand the man before him. He only knew
+that once he had fallen down on his door-step, and lain helpless beneath
+his roof hard on to two months; and he watched him now as if he
+anticipated some renewal of that old attack,&mdash;and there was no Nancy now
+to nurse, and watch, and slave herself to death for him; for that was
+the way folk in the house were talking about Nancy and her husband in
+these days.</p>
+
+<p>"Did she get here in time? Who went after her?"</p>
+
+<p>"The minister went. We had 'em here a fortnight,&mdash;well on to 't."</p>
+
+<p>"What, the minister, too?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I mean the young woman who come from Charlestown with Jenny. Her
+name was&mdash;" He paused long, endeavoring to recall that name. It trembled
+on the doctor's lips, but he did not utter it. At last said Farmer
+Elkins, "There! it was Miss Amey,&mdash;Amey? Yes. She took the little girl
+back hum with her. It was right in there, in the room where you had that
+spell of fever of yourn. She got you well through that! Ef anything
+could 'a' brought her through that turn, your letter would. It came
+across my mind once that, as she'd saved <i>your</i> life, may be you was
+going to save hern by that are letter! And she was so determined to get
+to your hospital!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank God she got the letter, any way!" exclaimed the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>At that the old man walked into the house to set its best cheer before
+Nancy's husband, who looked so much like a mourner as he stood there
+under the trees, with the bitter recollections of the past overwhelming
+every other thought and feeling of the present.</p>
+
+<p>Because it seemed to him that he could not sleep under old Elkins's roof
+that night, he remained there and slept there,&mdash;in the room where his
+fever ran its course,&mdash;in the room where Nancy died.</p>
+
+<p>Because this story of the last months of her life was as gall and
+wormwood to him, he refused it not, but went over it with his wife's
+relations, and helped them spread a decent pall, according to the custom
+of mourners; over what had been.</p>
+
+<p>Was he endeavoring to deceive himself and others into the belief that he
+was a mourning man? He was but accepting the varied humiliations of
+death; for they do not all pertain to the surrendering life. He was not
+thinking at all of his loss through her, nor of his gain by her. He was
+thinking, as he stood above the grave of fifteen years, how high
+Disgrace and Misery had heaped the mound. So bitterly he was thinking of
+the past, it was without desire that he at last arose and faced the
+future.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When he went to Charlestown&mdash;for a man on furlough had no time to
+lose&mdash;and saw his Janet in the Colonel's house,&mdash;Miss Ames took Janet
+home with her after that death and funeral,&mdash;when he saw how fair and
+beautiful a promise of girlhood was budding on the poor neglected
+branch, he said to his assistant, "Will you keep this child with you
+until the war is over? I am afraid to touch her, or interfere with her
+destiny. It has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> been so easy for me to mar, so hard to mend."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Miss Ames kept the child; the war ended. The surgeon then, like other
+men, returned home; his regiments were disbanded, and now, one duty, to
+mankind and the ages, well discharged, another, less conspicuous, but as
+urgent, claimed him. There was Janet, and Janet's mother,&mdash;she who had
+risen, not from the grave indeed, but from the midst of dangers,
+sacredly to guard and guide the child.</p>
+
+<p>On his way to them he asked himself this question, "How many times must
+a man be born before he is fit to live?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer that question; neither can I.</p>
+
+<p>He informed his assistant of the court's decision in reference to the
+plea of "incompatibility," and she said that the justice of the sentence
+was not to be controverted with success by any counsellor on earth; but
+the reader may smile, and say that it was not difficult to come to this
+decision under the circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>We will not argue that point. I had only the story to tell, and have
+told it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="ON_TRANSLATING_THE_DIVINA_COMMEDIA" id="ON_TRANSLATING_THE_DIVINA_COMMEDIA"></a>ON TRANSLATING THE DIVINA COMMEDIA.</h2>
+
+<h3>THIRD SONNET.</h3>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">With forms of Saints and holy men who died,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Here martyred and hereafter glorified;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And the great Rose upon its leaves displays<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">With splendor upon splendor multiplied;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And Beatrice, again at Dante's side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the melodious bells among the spires<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Proclaim the elevation of the Host!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="WOMANS_WORK_IN_THE_MIDDLE_AGES" id="WOMANS_WORK_IN_THE_MIDDLE_AGES"></a>WOMAN'S WORK IN THE MIDDLE AGES.</h2>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"King Arthur's sword, Excalibur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the hidden bases of the hills."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Sir Bedivere's heart misgave him twice ere he could obey the dying
+commands of King Arthur, and fling away so precious a relic. The lonely
+maiden's industry has been equalled by many of her mortal sisters,
+sitting, not indeed "upon the hidden bases of the hills," but in all the
+varied human habitations built above them since the days of King Arthur.</p>
+
+<p>The richness, beauty, and skill displayed in the needle-work of the
+Middle Ages demonstrate the perfection that art had attained; while
+church inventories, wills, and costumes represented in the miniatures of
+illuminated manuscripts and elsewhere, amaze us by the quantity as well
+as the quality of this department of woman's work. Though regal robes
+and heavy church vestments were sometimes wrought by monks, yet to
+woman's taste and skill the greater share of the result must be
+attributed, the professional hands being those of nuns and their pupils
+in convents. The life of woman in those days was extremely monotonous.
+For the mass of the people, there hardly existed any means of
+locomotion, the swampy state of the land in England and on the Continent
+allowing few roads to be made, except such as were traversed by
+pack-horses. Ladies of rank who wished to journey were borne on litters
+carried upon men's shoulders, and, until the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, few representations of carriages appear. Such a conveyance is
+depicted in an illustration of the Romance of the Rose, where Venus,
+attired in the fashionable costume of the fifteenth century, is seated
+in a <i>chare</i>, by courtesy a chariot, but in fact a clumsy covered wagon
+without springs. Six doves are perched upon the shafts, and fastened by
+medi&aelig;val harness. The goddess of course possessed superhuman powers for
+guiding this extraordinary equipage, but to mere mortals it must have
+been a slow coach, and a horribly uncomfortable conveyance even when
+horses were substituted for doves. An ordinance of Philip le Bel, in
+1294, forbids any wheel carriages to be used by the wives of citizens,
+as too great a luxury. As the date of the coach which Venus guides is
+two hundred years later, it is difficult to imagine what style of
+equipage belonged to those ladies over whom Philip le Bel tyrannized.</p>
+
+<p>With so little means of going about, our sisters of the Middle Ages were
+perforce domestic; no wonder they excelled in needle-work. To women of
+any culture it was almost the only tangible form of creative art they
+could command, and the love of the beautiful implanted in their souls
+must find some expression. The great pattern-book of nature, filled with
+graceful forms, in ever-varied arrangement, and illuminated by delicate
+tints or gorgeous hues, suggested the beauty they endeavored to
+represent. Whether religious devotion, human affection, or a taste for
+dress prompted them, the needle was the instrument to effect their
+purpose. The monogram of the blessed Mary's name, intertwined with pure
+white lilies on the deep blue ground, was designed and embroidered with
+holy reverence, and laid on the altar of the Lady-chapel by the
+trembling hand of one whose sorrows had there found solace, or by
+another in token of gratitude for joys which were heightened by a
+conviction of celestial sympathy. The pennon of the knight&mdash;a silken
+streamer affixed to the top of the lance&mdash;bore his crest, or an
+emblematic allusion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> to some event in his career, embroidered, it was
+supposed, by the hand of his lady-love. A yet more sacred gift was the
+scarf worn across the shoulder, an indispensable appendage to a knight
+fully equipped. The emotions of the human soul send an electric current
+through the ages, and women who during four years of war toiled to aid
+our soldiers in the great struggle of the nineteenth century felt their
+hearts beat in unison with hers who gave, with tears and prayers, pennon
+and scarf to the knightly and beloved hero seven hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Not only were the appointments of the warriors adorned by needle-work,
+but the ladies must have found ample scope for industry and taste in
+their own toilets. The Anglo-Saxon women as far back as the eighth
+century excelled in needle-work, although, judging from the
+representations which have come down to us, their dress was much less
+ornamented than that of the gentlemen. During the eighth, ninth, and
+tenth centuries there were few changes in fashion. A purple gown or
+robe, with long yellow sleeves, and coverchief wrapt round the head and
+neck, frequently appears, the edges of the long gown and sleeves being
+slightly ornamented by the needle. How the ladies dressed their hair in
+those days is more difficult to decide, as the coverchief conceals it.
+Crisping-needles to curl and plat the hair, and golden hair-cauls, are
+mentioned in Saxon writings, and give us reason to suppose that the
+locks of the fair damsels were not neglected. In the eleventh century
+the embroidery upon the long gowns becomes more elaborate, and other
+changes of the mode appear.</p>
+
+<p>From the report of an ancient Spanish ballad, the art of needle-work and
+taste in dress must have attained great perfection in that country while
+our Anglo-Saxon sisters were wearing their plain long gowns. The fair
+Sybilla is described as changing her dress seven times in one evening,
+on the arrival of that successful and victorious knight, Prince Baldwin.
+First, she dazzles him in blue and silver, with a rich turban; then
+appears in purple satin, fringed and looped with gold, with white
+feathers in her hair; next, in green silk and emeralds; anon, in pale
+straw-color, with a tuft of flowers; next, in pink and silver, with
+varied plumes, white, carnation, and blue; then, in brown, with a
+splendid crescent. As the fortunate Prince beholds each transformation,
+he is bewildered (as well he may be) to choose which array becomes her
+best; but when</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Lastly in white she comes, and loosely<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Down in ringlets floats her hair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'O,' exclaimed the Prince, 'what beauty!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ne'er was princess half so fair.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Simplicity and natural grace carried the day after all, as they
+generally do with men of true taste. "Woman is fine for her own
+satisfaction alone," says that nice observer of human nature, Jane
+Austen. "Man only knows man's insensibility to a new gown." We hope,
+however, that the dressmakers and tirewomen of the fair Sybilla, who had
+expended so much time and invention, were handsomely rewarded by the
+Prince, since they must have been most accomplished needle-women and
+handmaids to have got up their young lady in so many costumes and in
+such rapid succession.</p>
+
+<p>A very odd fashion appears in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
+of embroidering heraldic devices on the long gowns of the ladies of
+rank. In one of the illuminations of a famous psalter, executed for Sir
+Geoffery Loutterell, who died in 1345, that nobleman is represented
+armed at all points, receiving from the ladies of his family his tilting
+helmet, shield, and <i>pavon</i>. His coat of arms is repeated on every part
+of his own dress, and is embroidered on that of his wife, who wears also
+the crest of her own family.</p>
+
+<p>Marie de Hainault, wife of the first Duke of Bourbon, 1354, appears in a
+corsage and train of ermine, with a very fierce-looking lion rampant
+embroidered twice on her long gown. Her jewels are magnificent. Anne,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+Dauphine d'Auvergne, wife of Louis, second Duke of Bourbon, married in
+1371, displays an heraldic dolphin of very sinister aspect upon one side
+of her corsage, and on the skirt of her long gown,&mdash;which, divided in
+the centre, seems to be composed of two different stuffs, that opposite
+to the dolphin being powdered with <i>fleurs de lis</i>. Her circlet of
+jewels is very elegant, and is worn just above her brow, while the hair
+is braided close to the face. An attendant lady wears neither train nor
+jewels, but her dress is likewise formed of different material, divided
+like that of the Dauphine. Six little parrots are emblazoned on the
+right side, one on her sleeve, two on her corsage, and three on her
+skirt. The fashion of embroidering armorial bearings on ladies' dresses
+must have given needle-women a vast deal of work. It died out in the
+fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>It was the custom in feudal times for knightly families to send their
+daughters to the castles of their suzerain lords, to be trained to weave
+and embroider. The young ladies on their return home instructed the more
+intelligent of their female servants in these arts. Ladies of rank in
+all countries prided themselves upon the number of these attendants, and
+were in the habit of passing the morning surrounded by their workwomen,
+singing the <i>chansons &agrave; toile</i>, as ballads composed for these hours were
+called.</p>
+
+<p>Estienne Jodelle, a French poet, 1573, addressed a fair lady whose
+cunning fingers plied the needle in words thus translated:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I saw thee weave a web with care,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where at thy touch fresh roses grew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And marvelled they were formed so fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And that thy heart such nature knew.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alas! how idle my surprise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since naught so plain can be:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy cheek their richest hue supplies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And in thy breath their perfume lies;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their grace and beauty all are drawn from thee."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If needle-work had its poetry, it had also its reckonings. Old
+account-books bear many entries of heavy payments for working materials
+used by industrious queens and indefatigable ladies of rank. Good
+authorities state that, before the sixth century, all silk materials
+were brought to Europe by the Seres, ancestors of the ancient
+Bokharians, whence it derived its name of Serica. In 551, silk-worms
+were introduced by two monks into Constantinople, but the Greeks
+monopolized the manufacture until 1130, when Roger, king of Sicily,
+returning from a crusade, collected some Greek manufacturers, and
+established them at Palermo, whence the trade was disseminated over
+Italy.</p>
+
+<p>In the thirteenth century, Bruges was the great mart for silk. The
+stuffs then known were velvet, satin (called samite), and taffeta,&mdash;all
+of which were stitched with gold or silver thread. The expense of
+working materials was therefore very great, and royal ladies
+condescended to superintend sewing-schools.</p>
+
+<p>Editha, consort of Edward the Confessor, was a highly accomplished lady,
+who sometimes intercepted the master of Westminster School and his
+scholars in their walks, questioning them in Latin. She was also skilled
+in all feminine works, embroidering the robes of her royal husband with
+her own hands.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the fair ones, however, who have wrought for the service of a
+king, since the manufacture of Excalibur, let the name of Matilda of
+Flanders, wife of William the Conqueror, stand at the head of the
+record, in spite of historians' doubts. Matilda, born about the year
+1031, was carefully educated. She had beauty, learning, industry; and
+the Bayeux tapestry connected with her name still exists, a monument of
+her achievements in the art of needle-work. It is, as everybody knows, a
+pictured chronicle of the conquest of England,&mdash;a wife's tribute to the
+glory of her husband.</p>
+
+<p>As a specimen of ancient stitchery and feminine industry, this work is
+extremely curious. The tapestry is two hundred and twenty-two feet in
+length and twenty in width. It is worked in different-colored worsteds
+on white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> cloth, now brown with age. The attempts to represent the human
+figure are very rude, and it is merely given in outline. Matilda
+evidently had very few colors at her disposal, as the horses are
+depicted of any hue,&mdash;blue, green, or yellow; the arabesque patterns
+introduced are rich and varied.</p>
+
+<p>During the French Revolution, this tapestry was demanded by the
+insurgents to cover their guns; but a priest succeeded in concealing it
+until the storm had passed. Bonaparte knew its value. He caused it to be
+brought to Paris and displayed, after which he restored the precious
+relic to Bayeux.</p>
+
+<p>We have many records of royal ladies who practised and patronized
+needle-work. Anne of Brittany, first wife of Louis XII. of France,
+caused three hundred girls, daughters of the nobility, to be instructed
+in that art under her personal supervision. Her daughter Claude pursued
+the same laudable plan. Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, and mother of
+Henry IV. of France, a woman of vigorous mind, was skilled also in the
+handicraft of the needle, and wrought a set of hangings called "The
+Prison Opened," meaning that she had broken the bonds of the Pope.</p>
+
+<p>The practice of teaching needle-work continued long at the French court,
+and it was there that Mary of Scotland learned the art in which she so
+much excelled. When cast into prison, she beguiled the time, and soothed
+the repentant anxieties of her mind, with the companionship of her
+needle. The specimens of her work yet existing are principally
+bed-trimmings, hangings, and coverlets, composed of dark satin, upon
+which flowers, separately embroidered, are transferred.</p>
+
+<p>The romances and lays of chivalry contain many descriptions of the
+ornamental needle-work of those early days. In one of the ancient
+ballads, a knight, after describing a fair damsel whom he had rescued
+and carried to his castle, adds that she "knewe how to sewe and marke
+all manner of silken worke," and no doubt he made her repair many of his
+mantles and scarfs frayed and torn by time and tourney.</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful Elaine covered the shield of Sir Launcelot with a case of
+silk, upon which devices were braided by her fair hands, and added, from
+her own design,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A border fantasy of branch and flower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yellow-throated nestling in the nest."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When he went to the tourney she gave him a red sleeve "broidered with
+great pearls," which he bound upon his helmet. It is recorded that, in a
+tournament at the court of Burgundy in 1445, one of the knights received
+from his lady a sleeve of delicate dove-color, which he fastened on his
+left arm. These sleeves were made of a different material from the
+dress, and generally of a richer fabric elaborately ornamented; so they
+were considered valuable enough to form a separate legacy in wills of
+those centuries. Maddalena Doni, in her portrait, painted by Raphael,
+which hangs in the Pitti Palace at Florence, wears a pair of these rich,
+heavy sleeves, fastened slightly at the shoulder, and worn over a
+shorter sleeve belonging to her dress. Thus we see how it was that a
+lady could disengage her sleeve at the right moment, and give it to the
+fortunate knight.</p>
+
+<p>The art of adorning linen was practised from the earliest times. Threads
+were drawn and fashioned with the needle, or the ends of the cloth
+unravelled and plaited into geometrical patterns. St. Cuthbert's curious
+grave-clothes, as described by an eyewitness to his disinterment in the
+twelfth century, were ornamented with cut-work, which was used
+principally for ecclesiastical purposes, and was looked upon in England
+till the dissolution of the monasteries as a church secret. The
+open-work embroidery, which went under the general name of cut-work, is
+the origin of lace.</p>
+
+<p>The history of lace by Mrs. Bury Palliser, recently published in London,
+is worthy of the exquisite fabric of which it treats. The author has
+woven valuable facts, historical associations, and curious anecdotes
+into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> web of her narrative, with an industry and skill rivalling the
+work of her medi&aelig;val sisters. The illustrations of this beautiful volume
+are taken from rare specimens of ancient and modern lace, so perfectly
+executed as quite to deceive the eye, and almost the touch.</p>
+
+<p>Italy and Flanders dispute the invention of point or needle-made lace.
+The Italians probably derived the art of needle-work from the Greeks who
+took refuge in Italy during the troubles of the Lower Empire. Its origin
+was undoubtedly Byzantine, as the places which were in constant
+intercourse with the Greek Empire were the cities where point-lace was
+earliest made. The traditions of the Low Countries also ascribe it to an
+Eastern origin, assigning the introduction of lace-making to the
+Crusaders on their return from the Holy Land. A modern writer, Francis
+North, asserts that the Italians learned embroidery from the Saracens,
+as Spaniards learned the same art from the Moors, and, in proof of his
+theory, states that the word <i>embroider</i> is derived from the Arabic, and
+does not belong to any European language. In the opinion of some
+authorities, the English word <i>lace</i> comes from the Latin word <i>licina</i>,
+signifying the hem or fringe of a garment; others suppose it derived
+from the word <i>laces</i>, which appears in Anglo-Norman statutes, meaning
+braids which were used to unite different parts of the dress. In England
+the earliest lace was called <i>passament</i>, from the fact that the threads
+were passed over each other in its formation; and it is not until the
+reign of Richard III. that the word <i>lace</i> appears in royal accounts.
+The French term <i>dentelle</i> is also of modern date, and was not used
+until fashion caused <i>passament</i> to be made with a toothed edge, when
+the designation <i>passament dentel&eacute;</i> appears.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever the origin of the name, lace-making and embroidery have
+employed many fingers, and worn out many eyes, and even created
+revolutions. In England, until the time of Henry VIII., shirts,
+handkerchiefs, sheets, and pillow-cases were embroidered in silks of
+different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy
+produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine
+poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a
+collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits
+of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings;
+but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by nuns for the
+service of the Church, and the term <i>nuns' work</i> has been the
+designation of lace in many places to a very modern date. Venice was
+famed for point, Genoa for pillow laces. English Parliamentary records
+have statutes on the subject of Venice laces; at the coronation of
+Richard III., fringes of Venice and mantle laces of gold and white silk
+appear.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To know the age and pedigrees<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of points of Flanders and Venise,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>depends much upon the ancient pattern-books yet in existence. Parchment
+patterns, drawn and pricked for pillow lace, bearing the date of 1577,
+were lately found covering old law-books, in Albisola, a town near
+Savona, which was a place celebrated for its laces, as we infer from the
+fact that it was long the custom of the daughters of the nobles to
+select these laces for their wedding shawls and veils. There is a pretty
+tradition at Venice, handed down among the inhabitants of the Lagoons,
+which says that a sailor brought home to his betrothed a branch of the
+delicate coralline known as "mermaids' lace." The girl, a worker in
+points, attracted by the grace of the coral, imitated it with her
+needle, and after much toil produced the exquisite fabric which, as
+Venice point, soon became the mode in all Europe. Lace-making in Italy
+formed the occupation of many women of the higher classes, who wished to
+add to their incomes. Each lady had a number of workers, to whom she
+supplied patterns, pricked by herself, paying her workwomen at the end
+of every week, each day being notched on a tally.</p>
+
+<p>In the convent of Ges&ugrave; Bambino, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> Rome, curious specimens of old
+Spanish conventual work&mdash;parchment patterns with lace in progress&mdash;have
+been found. They belonged to Spanish nuns, who long ago taught the art
+of lace-making to novices. Like all point lace, this appears to be
+executed in separate pieces, given out by the nuns, and then joined
+together by a skilful hand. We see the pattern traced, the work partly
+finished, and the very thread left, as when "Sister Felice Vittoria"
+laid down her work, centuries ago. Mrs. Palliser received from Rome
+photographs of these valuable relics, engravings from which she has
+inserted in her history of lace. Aloe-thread was then used for
+lace-making, as it is now in Florence for sewing straw-plait. Spanish
+point has been as celebrated as that of Flanders or Italy. Some
+traditions aver that Spain taught the art to Flanders. Spain had no
+cause to import laces: they were extensively made at home, and were less
+known than the manufacture of other countries, because very little was
+exported. The numberless images of the Madonna and patron saints dressed
+and undressed daily, together with the albs of the priests and
+decorations of the altars, caused an immense consumption for
+ecclesiastical uses. Thread lace was manufactured in Spain in 1492, and
+in the Cathedral of Granada is a lace alb presented to the church by
+Ferdinand and Isabella,&mdash;one of the few relics of ecclesiastical
+grandeur preserved in the country. Cardinal Wiseman, in a letter to Mrs.
+Palliser, states that he had himself officiated in this vestment, which
+was valued at ten thousand crowns. The fine church lace of Spain was
+little known in Europe until the revolution of 1830, when splendid
+specimens were suddenly thrown into the market,&mdash;not merely the heavy
+lace known as Spanish point, but pieces of the most exquisite
+description, which could only have been made, says Mrs. Palliser, by
+those whose time was not money.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Saxon Hartz Mountains is the old town of Annaburg, and beneath
+a lime-tree in its ancient burial-ground stands a simple monument with
+this inscription:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Here lies Barbara Uttman, died on the 14th of January, 1576, whose
+invention of lace in the year 1561 made her the benefactress of the
+Hartz Mountains.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'An active mind, a skilful hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring blessings down on Fatherland.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Barbara was born in 1514. Her parents, burghers of Nuremberg, removed to
+the Hartz Mountains for the purpose of working a mine in that
+neighborhood. It is said that Barbara learned the art of lace-making
+from a native of Brabant, a Protestant, whom the cruelties of the Duke
+of Alva had driven from her country. Barbara, observing the mountain
+girls making nets for the miners to wear over their hair, took great
+interest in the improvement of their work, and succeeded in teaching
+them a fine knitted <i>tricot</i>, and afterwards a lace ground. In 1561,
+having procured aid from Flanders, she set up a work-shop in Annaburg
+for lace-making. This branch of industry spread beyond Bavaria, giving
+employment to thirty thousand persons, and producing a revenue of one
+million thalers.</p>
+
+<p>Italy and Flanders dispute the invention of lace, but it was probably
+introduced into both countries about the same time. The Emperor Charles
+V. commanded lace-making to be taught in schools and convents. A
+specimen of the manufacture of his day may be seen in his cap, now
+preserved in the museum at H&ocirc;tel Cluny, Paris. It is of fine linen, with
+the Emperor's arms embroidered in relief, with designs in lace, of
+exquisite workmanship. The old Flemish laces are of great beauty and
+world-wide fame.</p>
+
+<p>Many passages in the history of lace show how severely the manufacture
+of this beautiful fabric has strained the nerves of eye and brain. The
+fishermen's wives on the Scottish coast apostrophize the fish they sell,
+after their husbands' perilous voyages, and sing,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Call them lives o' men."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Not more fatal to life are the blasts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> from ocean winds than the tasks
+of laborious lace-makers; and this thought cannot but mingle with our
+admiration for the skill displayed in this branch of woman's endless
+toil and endeavor to supply her own wants and aid those who are dear to
+her, in the present as well as in the past centuries.</p>
+
+<p>In the British Museum there is a curious manuscript of the fourteenth
+century, afterwards translated "into our maternall englisshe by me
+William Caxton, and emprynted at Westminstre the last day of Januer, the
+first yere of the regne of King Richard the thyrd," called "the booke
+which the Knight of the Towere made for the enseygnement and teching of
+his doughtres."</p>
+
+<p>The Knight of the Tower was Geoffory Landry, surnamed De la Tour, of a
+noble family of Anjou. In the month of April, 1371, he was one day
+reflecting beneath the shade of some trees on various passages in his
+life, and upon the memory of his wife, whose early death had caused him
+sorrow, when his three daughters walked into the garden. The sight of
+these motherless girls naturally turned his thoughts to the condition of
+woman in society, and he resolved to write a treatise, enforced by
+examples of both good and evil, for their instruction. The state of
+society which the "evil" examples portray might well cause a father's
+heart to tremble.</p>
+
+<p>The education of young ladies, as we have before stated, was in that age
+usually assigned to convents or to families of higher rank. It consisted
+of instruction in needle-work, confectionery, surgery, and the rudiments
+of church music. Men were strongly opposed to any high degree of mental
+culture for women; and although the Knight of the Tower thinks it good
+for women to be taught to read their Bibles, yet the pen is too
+dangerous an instrument to trust to their hands. The art of writing he
+disapproves,&mdash;"Better women can naught of it." Religious observances he
+strictly recommends; but we shudder at some of the stories which even
+this well-meaning father relates as illustrations of the efficacy of
+religious austerities. Extravagance in dress prevailed at that time
+among men and women to such a degree that Parliament was appealed to on
+the subject in 1363. From the Knight's exhortations on the subject, this
+mania seems to have affected the women alarmingly, and the examples
+given of the passion for dress appear to surpass what is acknowledged in
+our day. Yet the vast increase of materials, as well as the extended
+interests and objects opened to woman now, renders the extravagance of
+dress in the Middle Ages far less reprehensible.</p>
+
+<p>The record of woman's work in the Middle Ages includes far more than the
+account of what her needle accomplished. The position of the mistress of
+a family in those centuries was no sinecure. When we look up at castles
+perched on rocks, or walk through the echoing apartments of baronial
+halls, we know that woman must have worked there with brain and fingers.
+The household and its dependencies, in such mansions, consisted of more
+than a score of persons, and provisions must be laid in during the
+autumn for many months. As we glance at the enormous fireplaces and
+ovens in the kitchens of those castles and halls, and remember the
+weight of the armor men wore, we can readily imagine that no trifling
+supply of brawn and beef was needed for their meals; and the sight of a
+husband frowning out of one of those old helmets because the dinner was
+scanty, must have been a fearful trial to feminine nerves. The title of
+"Lady" means the "Giver of bread" in Saxon, and the lady of the castle
+dispensed food to many beyond her own household.</p>
+
+<p>The task of preparing the raiment of the family devolved upon the women;
+for there were no travelling dealers except for the richest and most
+expensive articles. Wool, the produce of the flock, was carded and spun;
+flax was grown, and woven into coarse linen; and both materials were
+prepared and fashioned into garments at home. Glimpses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> of domestic life
+come down to us through early legends and records, some of which modern
+genius has melodized. Authentic history and romantic story often show us
+that women of all ranks were little better, in fact, than household
+drudges to these splendid knights and courtly old barons. The fair Enid
+sang a charming song as she turned her wheel; but when Geraint arrived,
+she not only assisted her mother to receive him, but, by her father's
+order, led the knight's charger to the stall, and gave him corn. If she
+also relieved the noble animal of his heavy saddle and horse-furniture,
+gave him water as well as corn, and shook down the dry furze for his
+bed, she must have had the courage and skill of a feminine Rarey; and we
+fear her dress of faded silk came out of the stable in a very
+dilapidated condition. After the horse was cared for, Enid put her wits
+and hands to work to prepare the evening meal, and spread it before her
+father and his guest. The knight, indeed, condescended to think her
+"sweet and serviceable"!</p>
+
+<p>The women of those days are often described only as they appeared at
+festivals and tournaments,&mdash;Ladies of Beauty, to whom knights lowered
+their lances, and of whom troubadours sang. They had their amusements
+and their triumphs, doubtless; but they also had their work, domestic,
+industrial, and sanitary. They knew how to bind up wounds and care for
+the sick, and we read many records of their knowledge in this
+department. Elaine, when she found Sir Launcelot terribly wounded in the
+cave, so skilfully aided him that, when the old hermit came who was
+learned in all the simples and science of the times, he told the knight
+that "her fine care had saved his life,"&mdash;a pleasing assurance that
+there were medical men in those days, as well as in our own, who
+expressed no unwillingness to allow a woman credit for success in their
+own profession.</p>
+
+<p>Illuminated books sometimes show us pictures of women of the humbler
+ranks of life at their work. On the border of a fine manuscript of the
+time of Edward IV. there is the figure of a woman employed with her
+distaff, her head and neck enveloped in a coverchief. The figure rises
+out of a flower. In a manuscript of 1316, a country-woman is engaged in
+churning, dressed in a comfortable gown and apron, the gown tidily
+pinned up, and her head and neck in a coverchief. The churn is of
+considerable height, and of very clumsy construction. A blind beggar
+approaches her, led by his dog, who holds apparently a cup in his mouth
+to receive donations. In another part of the same volume is a beautiful
+damsel with her hair spread over her shoulders, while her maid arranges
+her tresses with a comb of ivory set in gold. The young lady holds a
+small mirror, probably of polished steel, in her hand. Specimens of
+these curious combs and mirrors yet exist in collections. A century
+later we see a pretty laundress, holding in her hands a number of
+delicately woven napkins, which look as if they might have come out of
+the elaborately carved napkin press of the same period in the collection
+of Sir Samuel Myrick at Goodrich Court.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Knight of the Tower disapproved of young ladies being
+taught to write, there were women whose employment writing seems to have
+been; but these were nuns safely shut up from the risk of
+<i>billets-doux</i>. In Dr. Maitland's Essays on the Dark Ages, he quotes
+from the biography of Diemudis, a devout nun of the eleventh century, a
+list of the volumes which she prepared with her own hand, written in
+beautiful and legible characters, to the praise of God, and of the holy
+Apostles Peter and Paul, the patrons of the monastery, which was that of
+Wessobrunn in Bavaria. The list comprises thirty-one works, many of them
+in three or four volumes; and although Diemudis is not supposed to have
+been an authoress, she is certainly worthy of having her name handed
+down through eight centuries in witness of woman's indefatigable work in
+the scriptorium. One missal prepared by Diemudis was given<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> to the
+Bishop of Treves, another to the Bishop of Augsburg, and one Bible in
+two volumes is mentioned, which was exchanged by the monastery for an
+estate.</p>
+
+<p>We can picture to ourselves Diemudis in her conventual dress, seated in
+the scriptorium, with her materials for chirography. The sun, as it
+streams through the window, throws a golden light over the vellum page,
+suggesting the rich hue of the gilded nimbus, while in the convent
+garden she sees the white lily or the modest violet, which, typical of
+the Madonna, she transfers to her illuminated borders. Thus has God ever
+interwoven truth and love with their correspondences of beauty and
+development in the natural world, which were open to the eyes of
+Diemudis eight hundred years ago, perhaps as clearly as to our own in
+these latter days. That women of even an earlier century than that of
+Diemudis were permitted to read, if not to write, is proved by the
+description of a private library, given in the letters of C. S. Sidonius
+Apollinaris, and quoted in Edwards's "History of Libraries." This
+book-collection was the property of a gentleman of the fifth century,
+residing at his castle of Prusiana. It was divided into three
+departments, the first of which was expressly intended for the ladies of
+the family, and contained books of piety and devotion. The second
+department was for men, and is rather ungallantly stated to have been of
+a higher order; yet, as the third department was intended for the whole
+family, and contained such works as Augustine, Origen, Varro,
+Prudentius, and Horace, the literary tastes of the ladies should have
+been satisfied. We are also told that it was the custom at the castle of
+Prusiana to discuss at dinner the books read in the morning,&mdash;which
+would tend to a belief that conversation at the dinner-tables of the
+fifth century might be quite as edifying as at those of the nineteenth.</p>
+
+<p>A few feminine names connected with the literature of the Middle Ages
+have come down to us. The lays of Marie de France are among the
+manuscripts in the British Museum. Marie's personal history, as well as
+the period when she flourished, is uncertain. Her style is extremely
+obscure; but in her Preface she seems aware of this defect, yet defends
+it by the example of the ancients. She considers it the duty of all
+persons to employ their talents; and as her gifts were intellectual, she
+cast her thoughts in various directions ere she determined upon her
+peculiar mission. She had intended translating from the Latin a good
+history, but some one else unluckily anticipated her; and she finally
+settled herself down to poetry, and to the translation of numerous lays
+she had treasured in her memory, as these would be new to many of her
+readers. Like other literary ladies, she complains of envy and
+persecution, but she perseveres through all difficulties, and dedicates
+her book "to the King."</p>
+
+<p>Marie was born in France. Some authorities suppose she wrote in England
+during the reign of Henry III., and that the patron she names was
+William Langue-esp&eacute;e, who died in 1226; others, that this <i>plus
+vaillant</i> patron was William, Count of Flanders, who accompanied St.
+Louis on his first crusade in 1248, and was killed at a tournament in
+1251. A later surmise is that the book was dedicated to Stephen, French
+being his native language. Among the manuscripts of the Biblioth&egrave;que
+Royale at Paris, is Marie's translation of the fables which Henry
+Beauclerc translated from Latin into English, and which Marie renders
+into French. A proof that Marie's poems are extremely ancient is deduced
+from the names in one of these fables applied to the wolf and the fox.
+She uses other names than those of Ysengrin and Renard, which were
+introduced as early as the reign of C&oelig;ur de Lion, and it would seem
+that she could not have failed to notice these remarkable names, had
+they existed in her time. A complete collection of the works of Marie de
+France was published in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> Paris in 1820, by M. de Roquefort, who speaks
+of her in the following terms: "She possessed that penetration which
+distinguishes at first sight the different passions of mankind, which
+seizes upon the different forms they assume, and, remarking the objects
+of their notice, discovers at the same time the means by which they are
+attained." If this be a true statement, the acuteness of feminine
+observation has gained but little in the progress of the centuries, and
+her literary sisters of the present era can hardly hope to eclipse the
+penetration of Marie de France.</p>
+
+<p>The Countesses de Die, supposed to be mother and daughter, were both
+poetesses. The elder lady was beloved by Rabaud d'Orange, who died in
+1173, and the younger is celebrated by William Adh&eacute;mar, a distinguished
+troubadour. He was visited on his death-bed by both these ladies, who
+afterwards erected a monument to his memory. The younger countess
+retired to a convent, and died soon after Adh&eacute;mar.</p>
+
+<p>In the Harleian Collection is a fine manuscript containing the writings
+of Christine de Pisan, a distinguished woman of the fourteenth century.
+Her father, Thomas de Pisan, a celebrated <i>savant</i> of Bologna, had
+married a daughter of a member of the Grand Council of Venice. So
+renowned was Thomas de Pisan that the kings of Hungary and France
+determined to win him away from Bologna. Charles V. of France, surnamed
+the Wise, was successful, and Thomas de Pisan went to Paris in 1368; his
+transfer to the French court making a great sensation among learned and
+scientific circles of that day. Charles loaded him with wealth and
+honors, and chose him Astrologer Royal. According to the history, as
+told by Louisa Stuart Costello, in her "Specimens of the Early Poetry of
+France," Christine was but five years old when she accompanied her
+parents to Paris, where she received every advantage of education, and,
+inheriting her father's literary tastes, early became learned in
+languages and science. Her personal charms, together with her father's
+high favor at court, attracted many admirers. She married Stephen
+Castel, a young gentleman of Picardy, to whom she was tenderly attached,
+and whose character she has drawn in most favorable colors. A few years
+passed happily, but, alas! changes came. The king died, the pension and
+offices bestowed upon Thomas de Pisan were suspended, and the Astrologer
+Royal soon followed his patron beyond the stars. Castel was also
+deprived of his preferments; and though he maintained his wife and
+family for a time, he was cut off by death at thirty-four years of age.</p>
+
+<p>Christine had need of all her energies to meet such a succession of
+calamities, following close on so brilliant a career. Devoting herself
+anew to study, she determined to improve her talents for composition,
+and to make her literary attainments a means of support for her
+children. The illustrations in the manuscript volume of her works
+picture to us several scenes in Christine's life. In one, the artist has
+sliced off the side of a house to allow us to see Christine in her
+study, giving us also the exterior, roof, and dormer-windows, with
+points finished by gilt balls. The room is very small, with a crimson
+and white tapestry hanging. Christine wears what may be called the
+regulation color for literary ladies,&mdash;blue, with the extraordinary
+two-peaked head-dress of the period, put on in a decidedly strong-minded
+manner. At her feet sits a white dog, small, but wise-looking, with a
+collar of gold bells round his neck. Before Christine stands a plain
+table, covered with green cloth; her book, bound in crimson and gold, in
+which she is writing, lies before her.</p>
+
+<p>Christine's style of holding the implements,&mdash;one in each hand,&mdash;and the
+case of materials for her work which lies beside her, are according to
+representations of the <i>miniatori caligrafi</i> at their labors; and, as
+the art of caligraphy was well known at Bologna,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> so learned a man as
+Thomas de Pisan must have been acquainted with it, and would have caused
+his talented daughter to be instructed in so rare an accomplishment. It
+is not therefore unreasonable to believe that, in the beautiful volume
+now in the British Museum, the work of Christine's hand, as well as the
+result of her genius, is preserved. The next picture shows us Christine
+presenting her book to Charles VII. of France, who is dressed in a black
+robe edged with ermine; he wears a golden belt, order, and crown. The
+king is seated beneath a canopy, blue, powdered with <i>fleurs de lis</i>.
+Four courtiers stand beside him, dressed in robes of different
+colors,&mdash;one in pink, and wearing a large white hat of Quaker-like
+fashion. Christine has put on a white robe over her blue dress, perhaps
+as a sign of mourning,&mdash;she being then a widow. A white veil depends
+from the peaks of her head-dress. She kneels before the king, and
+presents her book.</p>
+
+<p>Another and more elaborate picture represents the repetition of the same
+ceremony before Isabelle of Bavaria, queen of Charles VI. We are here
+admitted into the private royal apartments of the fourteenth century.
+The hangings of the apartment consist of strips, upon which are
+alternately emblazoned the armorial devices of France and Bavaria. A
+couch or bed, with a square canopy covered with red and blue, having the
+royal arms embroidered in the centre, stands on one side of the room.
+The queen is seated upon a lounge of modern shape, covered to correspond
+with the couch. She is dressed in a splendid robe of purple and gold,
+with long sleeves sweeping the ground, lined with ermine; upon her head
+arises a structure of stuffed rolls, heavy in material and covered with
+jewels, which shoots up into two high peaks above her forehead. Six
+ladies are in waiting, two in black and gold, with the same enormous
+head-gears. They sit on the edge of her Majesty's sofa, while four
+ladies of inferior rank and plainer garments are contented with low
+benches. Christine reappears in her blue dress, and white-veiled, peaked
+cap. She kneels before the queen, on a square carpet with a
+geometrical-patterned border, and presents her book. A white Italian
+hound lies at the foot of the couch, while beside Isabelle sits a small
+white dog, resembling the one we saw in Christine's study. As we can
+hardly suppose Christine would bring her pet on so solemn an
+occasion,&mdash;far less allow him to jump up beside the queen,&mdash;and as this
+little animal wears no gold bells, we are led to suppose that little
+white dogs were in fashion in the fourteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot say that the portrait of Isabelle gives us any idea of her
+splendid beauty; but "handsome is that handsome does," and as Isabelle's
+work was a very bad one in the Middle Ages, we will say no more about
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Christine was but twenty-five years of age when she became a widow, and
+her personal charms captivated the heart of no less a personage than the
+Earl of Salisbury, who came ambassador from England to demand the hand
+of the very youthful princess, Isabelle, for his master.</p>
+
+<p>They exchanged verses; and although Salisbury spoke by no means
+mysteriously, the sage Christine affected to view his declarations only
+in the light of complimentary speeches from a gallant knight. The Earl
+considered himself as rejected, bade adieu to love, and renounced
+marriage. To Christine he made a very singular proposal for a rejected
+lover,&mdash;that of taking with him to England her eldest son, promising to
+devote himself to his education and preferment. The offer was too
+valuable to be declined by a poor widow, whose pen was her only means of
+supporting her family. That such a proof of devotion argued a tenderer
+feeling than that of knightly gallantry must have been apparent to
+Christine; but for reasons best understood by herself,&mdash;and shall we not
+believe with a heart yet true to her husband's memory?&mdash;she merely
+acknowledged the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> kindness shown to her son; and the Earl and his
+adopted boy left France together. When Richard II. was deposed, Henry
+Bolingbroke struck off the head of the Earl of Salisbury. Among the
+papers of the murdered man the lays of Christine were found by King
+Henry, who was so much struck with their purity and beauty, that he
+wrote to the fair authoress of her son's safety, under his protection,
+and invited her to his court.</p>
+
+<p>This invitation was at once a compliment and an insult, for the hand
+that sent it was stained with the blood of her friend. Christine,
+however, had worldly wisdom enough to send a respectful, though firm
+refusal, to a crowned head, a successful soldier, and one, moreover, who
+held her son in his power. Feminine tact must have guided her pen, for
+Henry was not offended, and twice despatched a herald to renew the
+invitation to his court. She steadily declined to leave France, but
+managed the affair so admirably that she at last obtained the return of
+her son from England.</p>
+
+<p>Like her father, Thomas de Pisan, Christine seems to have been sought as
+an ornament of their courts by several rulers. Henry Bolingbroke could
+not gain her for England, and the Duke of Milan in vain urged her to
+reside in that city. Seldom has a literary lady in any age received such
+tempting invitations; yet Christine refused to leave France, although
+her own fortunes were anything but certain. The Duke of Burgundy took
+her son under his protection, and urged Christine to write the history
+of her patron, Charles V. of France. This was a work grateful to her
+feelings, and she had commenced the memoir when the death of the Duke
+deprived her of his patronage, and threw her son again upon her care,
+involving her in many anxieties. But Christine bore herself through all
+her trials with firmness and prudence, and her latter days were more
+tranquil. She took a deep interest in the affairs of her adopted
+country, and welcomed in her writings the appearance of the Maid of
+Orleans. We believe, however, that she was spared the pain of witnessing
+the last act in that drama of history, where an innocent victim was
+given up by French perfidy to English cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>The deeds of Joan of Arc need no recital here. A daughter of France in
+the nineteenth century had a soul pure enough to reflect the image of
+the Maid of Orleans, and with a skilful hand she embodied the vision in
+marble. The statue of Joan of Arc, modelled by the Princess Marie,
+adorns&mdash;or rather sanctifies&mdash;the halls of Versailles.</p>
+
+<p>Of woman's work as an artist in the early centuries we have a curious
+illustration in a manuscript belonging to the Biblioth&egrave;que Royale at
+Paris, which exhibits a female figure painting the statue of the
+Madonna. The artist holds in her left hand a palette, which is the
+earliest notice of the use of that implement with which antiquarians are
+acquainted. The fashion of painting figures cut in wood was once much
+practised, and we see here the representation of a female artist of very
+ancient date. Painting, music, and dancing come under the designation of
+accomplishments; yet to obtain distinction in any of these branches
+implies a vast amount of work. An illustration of Lygate's Pilgrim shows
+us a young lady playing upon a species of organ with one hand; in the
+other she holds to her lips a mellow horn, through which she pours her
+breath, if not her soul; lying beside her is a stringed instrument
+called a sawtry. Such varied musical acquirements certainly argue both
+industry and devotion to art. Charlemagne's daughters were distinguished
+for their skill in dancing; and we read of many instances in the Middle
+Ages of women excelling in these fine arts.</p>
+
+<p>The period of time generally denominated the Middle Ages commences with
+the fifth century, and ends with the fifteenth. We have in several
+instances ventured to extend the limits as far as a part of the
+sixteenth century, and therefore include among female artists the name
+of Sofonisba Anguisciola,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> who was born about 1540. She was a noble lady
+of Cremona, whose fame spread early throughout Italy. In 1559, Philip
+II. of Spain invited her to his court at Madrid, where on her arrival
+she was treated with great distinction. Her chief study was portraiture,
+and her pictures became objects of great value to kings and popes.</p>
+
+<p>Her royal patrons of Spain married their artist to a noble Sicilian,
+giving her a dowry of twelve thousand ducats and a pension of one
+thousand ducats, beside rich presents in tapestries and jewels. She went
+with her husband to Palermo, where they resided several years. On the
+death of her husband the king and queen of Spain urged her to return to
+their court; but she excused herself on account of her wish to visit
+Cremona. Embarking on board a galley for this purpose, bound to Genoa,
+she was entertained with such gallantry by the captain, Orazio
+Lomellini, one of the merchant princes of that city, that the heart of
+the distinguished artist was won, and she gave him her hand on their
+arrival at Genoa.</p>
+
+<p>History does not tell us whether she ever revisited Cremona, but she
+dwelt in Genoa during the remainder of her long life, pursuing her art
+with great success. On her second marriage, her faithful friends in the
+royal family of Spain added four hundred crowns to her pension. The
+Empress of Germany visited Sofonisba on the way to Spain, and accepted
+from her hand a little picture. Sofonisba became blind in her old age,
+but lost no other faculty. Vandyck was her guest when at Genoa, and said
+that he had learned more of his art from one blind old woman than from
+any other teacher. A medal was struck in her honor at Bologna. The
+Academy of Fine Arts at Edinburgh contains a noble picture by Vandyck,
+painted in his Italian manner. It represents individuals of the
+Lomellini family, and was probably in progress when he visited this
+illustrious woman, who had become a member of that house.</p>
+
+<p>Stirling in his "Artists of Spain" states that few of Sofonisba's
+pictures are now known to exist, and that the beautiful portrait of
+herself, probably the one mentioned by Vasari in the wardrobe of the
+Cardinal di Monte at Rome, or that noticed by Soprani in the palace of
+Giovanni Lomellini at Genoa, is now in the possession of Earl Spencer at
+Althorp. The engraving from this picture, in Dibdin's <i>&AElig;des
+Althorpian&aelig;</i>, lies before us. We think the better of kings and queens
+who prized a woman with eyes so clear, and an expression of such honesty
+and truth. The original is said to be masterly in its drawing and
+execution. Sofonisba is represented in a simple black dress, and wears
+no jewels. She touches the keys of a harpsichord with her beautiful
+hands; a duenna-like figure of an old woman stands behind the
+instrument, apparently listening to the melody.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Whatever of skill or fame women have acquired through the ages in other
+departments, the nursery has ever been an undisputed sphere for woman's
+work. Nor have we reason to think that, in the centuries we have been
+considering, she was not faithful to this her especial province. The
+cradle of Henry V., yet in existence, is one of the best specimens of
+nursery furniture in the fourteenth century which have come down to us.
+Beautifully carved foliage fills the space between the uprights and
+stays and stand of the cradle, which is not upon rockers, but apparently
+swings like the modern crib. On each of these uprights is perched a
+dove, carefully carved, whose quiet influences had not much effect on
+the infant dreams of Prince Hal.</p>
+
+<p>Henry was born at Monmouth, 1388, and sent to Courtfield, about seven
+miles distant, where the air was considered more salubrious. There he
+was nursed under the superintendence of Lady Montacute, and in that
+place this cradle was preserved for many years. It was sold by a steward
+of the Montacute property, and, after passing through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> several hands,
+was in the possession of a gentleman near Bristol when engraved for
+Shaw's "Ancient Furniture," in 1836.</p>
+
+<p>In the Douce Collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, there is
+figured in a manuscript of the fifteenth century a cradle, with the baby
+very nicely tucked up in it. The cradle resembles those of modern date,
+and is upon rockers. Another illustration of the same period shows us a
+cradle of similar form, the "cradle, baby, and all" carried on the head
+of the nursery-maid,&mdash;a caryatid style of baby-tending which we cannot
+suppose to have been universal. The inventories of household furniture
+belonging to Reginald de la Pole, after enumerating some bed-hangings of
+costly stuff, describe: "Item, a pane" (piece of cloth which we now call
+counterpane) "and head-shete for y<sup>e</sup> cradell, of same sute, bothe furred
+with mynever,"&mdash;giving us a comfortable idea of the nursery
+establishment in the De la Pole family. The recent discovery in England
+of that which tradition avers to be the tomb of Canute's little
+daughter, speaks of another phase in nursery experience. The relics,
+both of the cradle and the grave, bear their own record of the joys,
+cares, and sorrows of the nursery in vanished years, and bring near to
+every mother's heart the baby that was rocked in the one, and the grief
+which came when that little form was given to the solemn keeping of the
+other.</p>
+
+<p>A miniature in an early manuscript, called "The Birth of St. Edmund,"
+gives us a picture of a bedroom and baby in the fifteenth century. St.
+Edmund himself was born five hundred years previous to that date; but as
+saints and sinners look very much alike when they are an hour old, we
+can imagine that, as far as the baby is concerned, it may be considered
+a portrait. A pretty young woman, in a long white gown, whose cap looks
+like magnified butterflies' wings turned upside down, sits on a low seat
+before the blazing wood-fire burning on great andirons in a wide
+fireplace, which, instead of a mantelpiece, has three niches for
+ornamental vases. She holds the baby very nicely, and, having warmed his
+feet, has wrapt him in a long white garment, so that we see only his
+little head in a plain night-cap, surrounded indeed by the gilded nimbus
+of his saintship, which we hope was not of tangible substance, as it
+would have been an appendage very inconvenient to all parties concerned.
+The mother reposes in a bed with high posts and long curtains. She must
+have been a woman of strong nerves to have borne the sight of such
+stupendous head-gears as those in which her attendants are nid-nodding
+over herself and baby, or to have supported the weight of that which she
+wears by way of night-cap. One nurse raises the lady, while another,
+who, from her showy dress, appears to be the head of the department,
+offers a tall, elegant, but very inconveniently-shaped goblet, which
+contains, we presume, medi&aelig;val gruel. The room has a very comfortable
+aspect, from which we judge that some babies in those times were
+carefully attended.</p>
+
+<p>Many centuries ago, a young woman sat one day among the boys to whom she
+had come, as their father's bride, from a foreign land, to take the name
+and place of their mother. She showed to them a beautiful volume of
+Saxon poems, one of her wedding-gifts,&mdash;perhaps offered by the artists
+of the court of Charles le Chauve, of whose skill such magnificent
+specimens yet exist. As the attention of the boys was arrested by the
+brilliant external decorations, Judith, with that quick instinct for the
+extension of knowledge which showed her a true descendant of
+Charlemagne, promised that the book should be given to him who first
+learned to read it. Young Alfred won the prize, and became Alfred the
+Great.</p>
+
+<p>We are brought near to the presence of a woman of the Middle Ages when
+we stand beside the monument of Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I.,
+in Westminster Abbey. The figure is lifelike and beautiful, with flowing
+drapery folded simply around it. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> countenance, with its delicate
+features, wears a look of sweetness and dignity as fresh to-day as when
+sculptured seven hundred years ago. The hair, confined by a coronet,
+falls on each side of her face in ringlets; one hand lies by her side,
+and once held a sceptre; the other is brought gracefully upward; the
+slender fingers, with trusting touch, are laid upon a cross suspended
+from her neck.</p>
+
+<p>Historians have done their best, or their worst, to throw doubt upon the
+story of Eleanor's sucking the poison with her lips from the arm of her
+husband when a dastardly assassin of those days struck at the life of
+Edward. But such a tradition, whether actually a fact or not, is a
+tribute to the affection and strength of Eleanor's character; and all
+historians agree that she instilled no poison into the life of king or
+country. As a wife, a mother, and a queen, Eleanor of Castile stands
+high on the record of the women of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>Coming from Westminster Abbey, in the spring of 1856, we stood one day
+at a window in the Strand, and watched a multitude which no man could
+number, pulsing through that great artery of the mighty heart of London.
+It was the day of the great Peace celebration, and a holiday. Hour after
+hour the mighty host swept on, in undiminished numbers. The place where
+we stood was Charing Cross, and our thoughts went back seven hundred
+years, when Edward, following the mortal remains of his beloved Eleanor,
+erected on this spot, then a country suburb of London, the last of that
+line of crosses which marked those places where the mournful procession
+paused on its way from Hereby to Westminster. It was the cross of the
+dear queen, <i>la ch&egrave;re reine</i>, which time and changes of language have
+since corrupted into Charing Cross. Through this pathway crowds have
+trodden for many centuries, and few remember that its name is linked
+with the queenly dead or with a kingly sorrow. Thus it is, as we hasten
+on through the busy thoroughfares of life from age to age, even as one
+of our own poets hath said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We pass, and heed each other not."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In these pages we have made some record of woman's work in past
+centuries, and also caught glimpses of duties, loves, hopes, fears, and
+sorrows not unlike our own. A wider sphere is now accorded, and a deeper
+responsibility devolves upon woman to fill it wisely and well. We should
+never forget that, as far as they were faithful to the duties appointed
+to them, they elevated their sex to a higher and nobler position, and
+therein performed the best work of the women of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PASSAGES_FROM_HAWTHORNES_NOTE-BOOKS" id="PASSAGES_FROM_HAWTHORNES_NOTE-BOOKS"></a>PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>IX.</h3>
+
+<p>Concord, <i>Thursday, Sept. 1, 1842.</i>&mdash;Mr. Thoreau dined with us
+yesterday.... He is a keen and delicate observer of nature,&mdash;a genuine
+observer,&mdash;which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an
+original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as
+her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed
+to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has
+strange stories to tell of adventures and friendly passages with these
+lower brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they
+grow, whether in garden or wild<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> wood, are his familiar friends. He is
+also on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of
+storms. It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the
+memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so
+well; and, strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without
+picking up an arrow-point, spear-head, or other relic of the red man, as
+if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth.</p>
+
+<p>With all this he has more than a tincture of literature,&mdash;a deep and
+true taste for poetry, especially for the elder poets, and he is a good
+writer,&mdash;at least he has written a good article, a rambling disquisition
+on Natural History, in the last Dial, which, he says, was chiefly made
+up from journals of his own observations. Methinks this article gives a
+very fair image of his mind and character,&mdash;so true, innate, and literal
+in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as letter of what he sees,
+even as a lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving
+the wild beauty of the whole scene. Then there are in the article
+passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his
+thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse,
+as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them. There is a
+basis of good sense and of moral truth, too, throughout the article,
+which also is a reflection of his character; for he is not unwise to
+think and feel, and I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know.</p>
+
+<p>After dinner, (at which we cut the first watermelon and muskmelon that
+our garden has grown,) Mr. Thoreau and I walked up the bank of the
+river, and at a certain point he shouted for his boat. Forthwith a young
+man paddled it across, and Mr. Thoreau and I voyaged farther up the
+stream, which soon became more beautiful than any picture, with its dark
+and quiet sheet of water, half shaded, half sunny, between high and
+wooded banks. The late rains have swollen the stream so much that many
+trees are standing up to their knees, as it were, in the water, and
+boughs, which lately swung high in air, now dip and drink deep of the
+passing wave. As to the poor cardinals which glowed upon the bank a few
+days since, I could see only a few of their scarlet hats, peeping above
+the tide. Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two
+paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to
+require no physical effort to guide it. He said that, when some Indians
+visited Concord a few years ago, he found that he had acquired, without
+a teacher, their precise method of propelling and steering a canoe.
+Nevertheless he was desirous of selling the boat of which he was so fit
+a pilot, and which was built by his own hands; so I agreed to take it,
+and accordingly became possessor of the Musketaquid. I wish I could
+acquire the aquatic skill of the original owner.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Sept. 2.</i>&mdash;Yesterday afternoon Mr. Thoreau arrived with the boat. The
+adjacent meadow being overflowed by the rise of the stream, he had rowed
+directly to the foot of the orchard, and landed at the bars, after
+floating over forty or fifty yards of water where people were lately
+making hay. I entered the boat with him, in order to have the benefit of
+a lesson in rowing and paddling.... I managed, indeed, to propel the
+boat by rowing with two oars, but the use of the single paddle is quite
+beyond my present skill. Mr. Thoreau had assured me that it was only
+necessary to will the boat to go in any particular direction, and she
+would immediately take that course, as if imbued with the spirit of the
+steersman. It may be so with him, but it is certainly not so with me.
+The boat seemed to be bewitched, and turned its head to every point of
+the compass except the right one. He then took the paddle himself, and
+though I could observe nothing peculiar in his management of it, the
+Musketaquid immediately became as docile as a trained steed. I suspect
+that she has not yet transferred her affections from her old master to
+her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> new one. By and by, when we are better acquainted, she will grow
+more tractable.... We propose to change her name from Musketaquid (the
+Indian name of the Concord River, meaning the river of meadows) to the
+Pond-Lily, which will be very beautiful and appropriate, as, during the
+summer season, she will bring home many a cargo of pond-lilies from
+along the river's weedy shore. It is not very likely that I shall make
+such long voyages in her as Mr. Thoreau has made. He once followed our
+river down to the Merrimack, and thence, I believe, to Newburyport, in
+this little craft.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; called to see us, wishing to talk with me
+about a Boston periodical, of which he had heard that I was to be
+editor, and to which he desired to contribute. He is an odd and clever
+young man, with nothing very peculiar about him,&mdash;some originality and
+self-inspiration in his character, but none, or very little, in his
+intellect. Nevertheless, the lad himself seems to feel as if he were a
+genius. I like him well enough, however; but, after all, these originals
+in a small way, after one has seen a few of them, become more dull and
+commonplace than even those who keep the ordinary pathway of life. They
+have a rule and a routine, which they follow with as little variety as
+other people do their rule and routine, and when once we have fathomed
+their mystery, nothing can be more wearisome. An innate perception and
+reflection of truth give the only sort of originality that does not
+finally grow intolerable.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Sept. 4.</i>&mdash;I made a voyage in the Pond-Lily all by myself yesterday
+morning, and was much encouraged by my success in causing the boat to go
+whither I would. I have always liked to be afloat, but I think I have
+never adequately conceived of the enjoyment till now, when I begin to
+feel a power over that which supports me. I suppose I must have felt
+something like this sense of triumph when I first learned to swim; but I
+have forgotten it. O that I could run wild!&mdash;that is, that I could put
+myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with
+all congenial elements.</p>
+
+<p>We had a thunder-storm last evening; and to-day has been a cool, breezy
+autumnal day, such as my soul and body love.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Sept. 18.</i>&mdash;How the summer-time flits away, even while it seems to be
+loitering onward, arm in arm with autumn! Of late I have walked but
+little over the hills and through the woods, my leisure being chiefly
+occupied with my boat, which I have now learned to manage with tolerable
+skill. Yesterday afternoon I made a voyage alone up the North Branch of
+Concord River. There was a strong west wind blowing dead against me,
+which, together with the current, increased by the height of the water,
+made the first part of the passage pretty toilsome. The black river was
+all dimpled over with little eddies and whirlpools; and the breeze,
+moreover, caused the billows to beat against the bow of the boat, with a
+sound like the flapping of a bird's wing. The water-weeds, where they
+were discernible through the tawny water, were straight outstretched by
+the force of the current, looking as if they were forced to hold on to
+their roots with all their might. If for a moment I desisted from
+paddling, the head of the boat was swept round by the combined might of
+wind and tide. However, I toiled onward stoutly, and, entering the North
+Branch, soon found myself floating quietly along a tranquil stream,
+sheltered from the breeze by the woods and a lofty hill. The current,
+likewise, lingered along so gently that it was merely a pleasure to
+propel the boat against it. I never could have conceived that there was
+so beautiful a river-scene in Concord as this of the North Branch. The
+stream flows through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood,
+which, as if but half satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle, and
+unobtrusive as it is, seems to crowd upon it, and barely to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> allow it
+passage; for the trees are rooted on the very verge of the water, and
+dip their pendent branches into it. On one side there is a high bank,
+forming the side of a hill, the Indian name of which I have forgotten,
+though Mr. Thoreau told it to me; and here, in some instances, the trees
+stand leaning over the river, stretching out their arms as if about to
+plunge in headlong. On the other side, the bank is almost on a level
+with the water; and there the quiet congregation of trees stood with
+feet in the flood, and fringed with foliage down to its very surface.
+Vines here and there twine themselves about bushes or aspens or
+alder-trees, and hang their clusters (though scanty and infrequent this
+season) so that I can reach them from my boat. I scarcely remember a
+scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the
+river through this wood. Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not
+have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. I have never
+elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful
+reflection is than what we call reality. The sky, and the clustering
+foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way
+through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the quiet
+depth of the prevailing tints,&mdash;all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful
+when beheld in upper air. But on gazing downward, there they were, the
+same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which
+satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half
+convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing
+which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate, the
+disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul.</p>
+
+<p>There were many tokens of autumn in this beautiful picture. Two or three
+of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many colors,&mdash;the
+real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning. These
+stood on low, marshy spots, where a frost has probably touched them
+already. Others were of a light, fresh green, resembling the hues of
+spring, though this, likewise, is a token of decay. The great mass of
+the foliage, however, appears unchanged; but ever and anon down came a
+yellow leaf, half flitting upon the air, half falling through it, and
+finally settling upon the water. A multitude of these were floating here
+and there along the river, many of them curling upward, so as to form
+little boats, fit for fairies to voyage in. They looked strangely
+pretty, with yet a melancholy prettiness, as they floated along. The
+general aspect of the river, however, differed but little from that of
+summer,&mdash;at least the difference defies expression. It is more in the
+character of the rich yellow sunlight than in aught else. The water of
+the stream has now a thrill of autumnal coolness; yet whenever a broad
+gleam fell across it, through an interstice of the foliage, multitudes
+of insects were darting to and fro upon its surface. The sunshine, thus
+falling across the dark river, has a most beautiful effect. It burnishes
+it, as it were, and yet leaves it as dark as ever.</p>
+
+<p>On my return, I suffered the boat to float almost of its own will down
+the stream, and caught fish enough for this morning's breakfast. But,
+partly from a qualm of conscience, I finally put them all into the water
+again, and saw them swim away as if nothing had happened.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Monday, October 10, 1842.</i>&mdash;A long while, indeed, since my last date.
+But the weather has been generally sunny and pleasant, though often very
+cold; and I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal
+sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the
+daylight hours in the open air. My chief amusement has been boating up
+and down the river. A week or two ago (September 27 and 28) I went on a
+pedestrian excursion with Mr. Emerson, and was gone two days and one
+night, it being the first and only night that I have spent away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> from
+home. We were that night at the village of Harvard, and the next morning
+walked three miles farther, to the Shaker village, where we breakfasted.
+Mr. Emerson had a theological discussion with two of the Shaker
+brethren; but the particulars of it have faded from my memory; and all
+the other adventures of the tour have now so lost their freshness that I
+cannot adequately recall them. Wherefore let them rest untold. I
+recollect nothing so well as the aspect of some fringed gentians, which
+we saw growing by the roadside, and which were so beautiful that I
+longed to turn back and pluck them. After an arduous journey, we arrived
+safe home in the afternoon of the second day,&mdash;the first time that I
+ever came home in my life; for I never had a home before. On Saturday of
+the same week, my friend D. R&mdash;&mdash; came to see us, and stayed till
+Tuesday morning. On Wednesday there was a cattle-show in the village, of
+which I would give a description, if it had possessed any picturesque
+points. The foregoing are the chief outward events of our life.</p>
+
+<p>In the mean time autumn has been advancing, and is said to be a month
+earlier than usual. We had frosts, sufficient to kill the bean and
+squash vines, more than a fortnight ago; but there has since been some
+of the most delicious Indian-summer weather that I ever
+experienced,&mdash;mild, sweet, perfect days, in which the warm sunshine
+seemed to embrace the earth and all earth's children with love and
+tenderness. Generally, however, the bright days have been vexed with
+winds from the northwest, somewhat too keen and high for comfort. These
+winds have strewn our avenue with withered leaves, although the trees
+still retain some density of foliage, which is now embrowned or
+otherwise variegated by autumn. Our apples, too, have been falling,
+falling, falling; and we have picked the fairest of them from the dewy
+grass, and put them in our store-room and elsewhere. On Thursday, John
+Flint began to gather those which remained on the trees; and I suppose
+they will amount to nearly twenty barrels, or perhaps more. As usual
+when I have anything to sell, apples are very low indeed in price, and
+will not fetch me more than a dollar a barrel. I have sold my share of
+the potato-field for twenty dollars and ten bushels of potatoes for my
+own use. This may suffice for the economical history of our recent life.</p>
+
+<p><i>12 o'clock</i>, <span class="smcap">a. m.</span>&mdash;Just now I heard a sharp tapping at the window of
+my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of Rabelais), behold!
+the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance! He was
+probably attempting to get a fly, which was on the pane of glass against
+which he rapped; and on my first motion the feathered visitor took wing.
+This incident had a curious effect on me. It impressed me as if the bird
+had been a spiritual visitant, so strange was it that this little wild
+thing should seem to ask our hospitality.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>November 8.</i>&mdash;I am sorry that our journal has fallen so into neglect;
+but I see no chance of amendment. All my scribbling propensities will be
+far more than gratified in writing nonsense for the press; so that any
+gratuitous labor of the pen becomes peculiarly distasteful. Since the
+last date, we have paid a visit of nine days to Boston and Salem, whence
+we returned a week ago yesterday. Thus we lost above a week of delicious
+autumnal weather, which should have been spent in the woods or upon the
+river. Ever since our return, however, until to-day, there has been a
+succession of genuine Indian-summer days, with gentle winds or none at
+all, and a misty atmosphere, which idealizes all nature, and a mild,
+beneficent sunshine, inviting one to lie down in a nook and forget all
+earthly care. To-day the sky is dark and lowering, and occasionally lets
+fall a few sullen tears. I suppose we must bid farewell to Indian summer
+now, and expect no more love and tenderness from Mother Nature till next
+spring be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> well advanced. She has already made herself as unlovely in
+outward aspect as can well be. We took a walk to Sleepy Hollow
+yesterday, and beheld scarcely a green thing, except the everlasting
+verdure of the family of pines, which, indeed, are trees to thank God
+for at this season. A range of young birches had retained a pretty
+liberal coloring of yellow or tawny leaves, which became very cheerful
+in the sunshine. There were one or two oak-trees whose foliage still
+retained a deep, dusky red, which looked rich and warm; but most of the
+oaks had reached the last stage of autumnal decay,&mdash;the dusky brown hue.
+Millions of their leaves strew the woods, and rustle underneath the
+foot; but enough remain upon the boughs to make a melancholy harping
+when the wind sweeps over them. We found some fringed gentians in the
+meadow, most of them blighted and withered; but a few were quite
+perfect. The other day, since our return from Salem, I found a violet;
+yet it was so cold that day, that a large pool of water, under the
+shadow of some trees, had remained frozen from morning till afternoon.
+The ice was so thick as not to be broken by some sticks and small stones
+which I threw upon it. But ice and snow too will soon be no
+extraordinary matters with us.</p>
+
+<p>During the last week we have had three stoves put up, and henceforth no
+light of a cheerful fire will gladden us at eventide. Stoves are
+detestable in every respect, except that they keep us perfectly
+comfortable.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Thursday, November 24.</i>&mdash;This is Thanksgiving Day, a good old festival,
+and we have kept it with our hearts, and, besides, have made good cheer
+upon our turkey and pudding, and pies and custards, although none sat at
+our board but our two selves. There was a new and livelier sense, I
+think, that we have at last found a home, and that a new family has been
+gathered since the last Thanksgiving Day. There have been many bright,
+cold days latterly, so cold that it has required a pretty rapid pace to
+keep one's self warm a-walking. Day before yesterday I saw a party of
+boys skating on a pond of water that has overflowed a neighboring
+meadow. Running water has not yet frozen. Vegetation has quite come to a
+stand, except in a few sheltered spots. In a deep ditch we found a tall
+plant of the freshest and healthiest green, which looked as if it must
+have grown within the last few weeks. We wander among the wood-paths,
+which are very pleasant in the sunshine of the afternoons, the trees
+looking rich and warm,&mdash;such of them, I mean, as have retained their
+russet leaves; and where the leaves are strewn along the paths, or
+heaped plentifully in some hollow of the hills, the effect is not
+without a charm. To-day the morning rose with rain, which has since
+changed to snow and sleet; and now the landscape is as dreary as can
+well be imagined,&mdash;white, with the brownness of the soil and withered
+grass everywhere peeping out. The swollen river, of a leaden hue, drags
+itself sullenly along; and this may be termed the first winter's day.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Friday, March 31, 1843.</i>&mdash;The first month of spring is already gone;
+and still the snow lies deep on hill and valley, and the river is still
+frozen from bank to bank, although a late rain has caused pools of water
+to stand on the surface of the ice, and the meadows are overflowed into
+broad lakes. Such a protracted winter has not been known for twenty
+years, at least. I have almost forgotten the wood-paths and shady places
+which I used to know so well last summer; and my views are so much
+confined to the interior of our mansion, that sometimes, looking out of
+the window, I am surprised to catch a glimpse of houses at no great
+distance which had quite passed out of my recollection. From present
+appearances, another month may scarcely suffice to wash away all the
+snow from the open country; and in the woods and hollows it may linger
+yet longer. The winter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> will not have been a day less than five months
+long; and it would not be unfair to call it seven. A great space,
+indeed, to miss the smile of Nature, in a single year of human life.
+Even out of the midst of happiness I have sometimes sighed and groaned;
+for I love the sunshine and the green woods, and the sparkling blue
+water; and it seems as if the picture of our inward bliss should be set
+in a beautiful frame of outward nature.... As to the daily course of our
+life, I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging from
+two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I
+might have written more, if it had seemed worth while; but I was content
+to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants,
+having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away
+with the necessity of writing for bread. Those prospects have not yet
+had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, because an office
+would inevitably remove us from our present happy home,&mdash;at least from
+an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us
+wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so
+that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance,
+not a trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Every day, I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the
+post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return
+home, generally without having spoken a word to a human being.... In the
+way of exercise I saw and split wood, and, physically, I never was in a
+better condition than now. This is chiefly owing, doubtless, to a
+satisfied heart, in aid of which comes the exercise above mentioned, and
+about a fair proportion of intellectual labor.</p>
+
+<p>On the 9th of this month, we left home again on a visit to Boston and
+Salem. I alone went to Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for
+nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth
+flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had
+caught hold of a reality which never could be taken from me. It was good
+thus to get apart from my happiness, for the sake of contemplating it.
+On the 21st, I returned to Boston, and went out to Cambridge to dine
+with Longfellow, whom I had not seen since his return from Europe. The
+next day we came back to our old house, which had been deserted all this
+time; for our servant had gone with us to Boston.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Friday, April 7.</i>&mdash;My wife has gone to Boston to see her sister M&mdash;&mdash;,
+who is to be married in two or three weeks, and then immediately to
+visit Europe for six months.... I betook myself to sawing and splitting
+wood; there being an inward unquietness which demanded active exercise,
+and I sawed, I think, more briskly than ever before. When I re-entered
+the house, it was with somewhat of a desolate feeling; yet not without
+an intermingled pleasure, as being the more conscious that all
+separation was temporary, and scarcely real, even for the little time
+that it may last. After my solitary dinner, I lay down, with the Dial in
+my hand, and attempted to sleep; but sleep would not come.... So I
+arose, and began this record in the journal, almost at the commencement
+of which I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. Thoreau, who came to
+return a book, and to announce his purpose of going to reside at Staten
+Island, as private tutor in the family of Mr. Emerson's brother. We had
+some conversation upon this subject, and upon the spiritual advantages
+of change of place, and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other
+kindred or concatenated subjects. I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau's own
+account, that he is going away, as he is out of health and may be
+benefited by his removal; but, on my account, I should like to have him
+remain here, he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold
+intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree;
+and with all this wild freedom,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> there is high and classic cultivation
+in him too....</p>
+
+<p>I had a purpose, if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole
+term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being;
+but now my Pythagorean vow has been broken, within three or four hours
+after her departure.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>Saturday, April 8.</i>&mdash;After journalizing yesterday afternoon, I went out
+and sawed and split wood till tea-time, then studied German,
+(translating Lenore,) with an occasional glance at a beautiful sunset,
+which I could not enjoy sufficiently by myself to induce me to lay aside
+the book. After lamp-light, finished Lenore, and drowsed over Voltaire's
+Candide, occasionally refreshing myself with a tune from Mr. Thoreau's
+musical box, which he had left in my keeping. The evening was but a dull
+one.</p>
+
+<p>I retired soon after nine, and felt some apprehension that the old
+Doctor's ghost would take this opportunity to visit me; but I rather
+think his former visitations have not been intended for me, and that I
+am not sufficiently spiritual for ghostly communication. At all events,
+I met with no disturbance of the kind, and slept soundly enough till six
+o'clock or thereabouts. The forenoon was spent with the pen in my hand,
+and sometimes I had the glimmering of an idea, and endeavored to
+materialize it in words; but on the whole my mind was idly vagrant, and
+refused to work to any systematic purpose. Between eleven and twelve I
+went to the post-office, but found no letter; then spent above an hour
+reading at the Athen&aelig;um. On my way home, I encountered Mr. Flint, for
+the first time these many weeks, although he is our next neighbor in one
+direction. I inquired if he could sell us some potatoes, and he promised
+to send half a bushel for trial. Also, he encouraged me to hope that he
+might buy a barrel of our apples. After my encounter with Mr. Flint, I
+returned to our lonely old abbey, opened the door without the usual
+heart-spring, ascended to my study, and began to read a tale of Tieck.
+Slow work, and dull work too! Anon, Molly, the cook, rang the bell for
+dinner,&mdash;a sumptuous banquet of stewed veal and macaroni, to which I sat
+down in solitary state. My appetite served me sufficiently to eat with,
+but not for enjoyment. Nothing has a zest in my present widowed state.
+[Thus far I had written, when Mr. Emerson called.] After dinner, I lay
+down on the couch, with the Dial in my hand as a soporific, and had a
+short nap; then began to journalize.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Emerson came, with a sunbeam in his face; and we had as good a talk
+as I ever remember to have had with him. He spoke of Margaret Fuller,
+who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last
+meeting. [There rings the tea-bell.] Then we discoursed of Ellery
+Channing, a volume of whose poems is to be immediately published, with
+revisions by Mr. Emerson himself and Mr. Sam G. Ward.... He calls them
+"poetry for poets." Next Mr. Thoreau was discussed, and his approaching
+departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well.... We talked of
+Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the
+great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed
+and its history written; also of C. N&mdash;&mdash;, who, it appears, is passing
+through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or
+none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of
+his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various
+other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five
+and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took his leave. I then went out to chop
+wood, my allotted space for which had been very much abridged by his
+visit; but I was not sorry. I went on with the journal for a few minutes
+before tea, and have finished the present record in the setting sunshine
+and gathering dusk....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="UNIVERSITY_REFORM" id="UNIVERSITY_REFORM"></a>UNIVERSITY REFORM.</h2>
+
+<h3>AN ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD, AT THEIR TRIENNIAL FESTIVAL, JULY
+19, 1866.</h3>
+
+
+<p>We meet to-day under auspices how different from those which attended
+our last triennial assembling! We were then in the midst of a civil war,
+without sight of the end, though not without hope of final success to
+the cause of national integrity. The three days' agony at Gettysburg had
+issued in the triumph of the loyal arms, repelling the threatened
+invasion of the North. The surrender of Vicksburg had just reopened the
+trade of the Mississippi. The capture of Port Hudson was yet fresh in
+our ears, when suddenly tidings of armed resistance to conscription in
+the city of New York gave ominous note of danger lurking at the very
+heart of the Union. In the shadow of that omen, we celebrated our
+academic festival of 1863.</p>
+
+<p>The shadow passed. With varying fortunes, but unvarying purpose, the
+loyal States pursued the contest. And when, in the autumn of 1864, by a
+solemn act of self-interrogation, they had certified their will and
+their power to maintain that contest to the end of disunion, and when a
+popular election expressing that intent had overcome the land like a
+summer-cloud without a bolt in its bosom, the victory was sown with the
+ballot which Grant and Sherman reaped with the sword.</p>
+
+<p>Secession collapsed. Its last and most illustrious victim, borne to his
+rest through territories draped in mourning, through sobbing
+commonwealths, through populations of uncovered heads, revealed to all
+time the spirit that was in it and the spirit that subdued it. And
+to-day, as we meet our Reverend Mother in this scene of old affections,
+the stupendous struggle has already receded into the shadow-land of
+History. The war is a thing of the past. If hatred still rankles, open
+hostilities have ceased. If rumblings of the recent tempest still mutter
+along the track of its former desolation, the storm is over. The
+conflict is ended. No more conscription of husbands, sons, and brothers
+for the weary work of destruction; no more the forced march by day, the
+bivouac at night, and to-morrow the delirium of carnage. No more anxious
+waiting in distant homes for tidings from the front, and breathless
+conning of the death-list to know if the loved ones are among the slain.
+No more the fresh grief-agony over the unreturning brave. All that is
+past,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For the terrible work is done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the good fight is won<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">For God and for Fatherland."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The sword has returned to its sheath. The symbol-flags that shed their
+starry pomp on the field of death hang idly drooping in the halls of
+state. And before new armies in hostile encounter on American soil shall
+unfurl new banners to the breeze, may every thread and thrum of their
+texture ravel and rot and resolve itself into dust!</p>
+
+<p>Another and nearer interest distinguishes this occasion and suggests its
+appropriate theme,&mdash;our Alma Mater.</p>
+
+<p>The General Court of Massachusetts, which has hitherto elected the Board
+of Overseers of Harvard College, after so many years of fitful and
+experimental legislation, has finally enacted, that "the places of the
+successive classes in the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, and the
+vacancies in such classes, shall hereafter be annually supplied by
+ballot of such persons as have received from the College a degree of
+Bachelor of Arts, or Master of Arts, or any honorary degree, voting on
+Commencement-day in the city of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> Cambridge; such election to be first
+held in the year 1866."</p>
+
+<p>This act initiates a radical change in the organization of this
+University. It establishes for one of its legislative Houses a new
+electorate. The State hereby discharges itself of all active
+participation in the conduct of the College, and devolves on the body of
+the Alumni responsibilities assumed in former enactments extending
+through a period of more than two hundred years. The wisdom or justice
+of this measure I am not inclined to discuss. Certainly there is nothing
+in the history of past relations between the Commonwealth and the
+University that should make us regret the change. That history has not
+been one of mere benefactions on one side, and pure indebtedness on the
+other. Whatever the University may owe to the State, the balance of
+obligation falls heavily on the other side. In the days of Provincial
+rule the Colony of Massachusetts Bay appears to have exhausted its zeal
+for collegiate education in the much-lauded promissory act by which the
+General Court, in 1636, "agree to give four hundred pounds towards a
+school or college, whereof two hundred pounds shall be paid next year."
+The promise was not fulfilled, and the record of those years leaves it
+doubtful whether legislative action alone would during that or the next
+generation have accomplished the work, had not a graduate of Emanuel
+College in English Cambridge, who seems providentially enough to have
+dropped on these shores, where he lived but a year, for that express
+purpose, supplied the requisite funds.</p>
+
+<p>The College once started and got under way, the fathers of the Province
+assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax
+and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected
+the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who
+sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole
+course of its history, on account of certain scruples about infant
+baptism, of which, in the language of the time, "it was not hard to
+discover that they came from the Evil One," and for which poor Dunster
+was indicted by the grand-jury, sentenced to a public admonition, and
+laid under bonds for good behavior.</p>
+
+<p>They starved the second President for eighteen years on a salary payable
+in Indian corn; and in answer to his earnest prayer for relief, alleging
+instant necessity, the sacrifice of personal property, and the custom of
+English universities, a committee of the General Court reported that
+"they conceive the country to have done honorably toward the petitioner,
+and that his parity with English colleges is not pertinent."</p>
+
+<p>The third President, by their connivance and co-operation, was
+sacrificed to the machinations of the students, egged on, it is thought,
+by members of the Corporation, and died, "as was said, with a broken
+heart."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, through neglect of the Province to provide for its support,
+the material fortunes of the College, in the course of thirty years, had
+fallen into such decay that extinction was inevitable, had not the
+people of another Colony come to the rescue. The town of Portsmouth, in
+New Hampshire, hearing, says their address, "the loud groans of the
+sinking College,... and hoping that their example might provoke ... the
+General Court vigorously to act for the diverting of the omen of
+calamity which its destruction would be to New England," pledged
+themselves to an annual contribution of sixty pounds for seven years.
+This act of chivalrous generosity fairly shamed our lagging Commonwealth
+into measures for the resuscitation of an institution especially
+committed to its care.</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable feature of this business is that the Province all
+this while was drawing, not only moral support, but pecuniary aid, from
+the College. "It is manifest," says Quincy,<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> "that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> the treasury of
+the Colony, having been the recipient of many of the early donations to
+the College, was not a little aided by the convenience which these
+available funds afforded to its pecuniary necessities. Some of these
+funds, although received in 1647, were not paid over to the treasury of
+the College until 1713; then, indeed, the College received an allowance
+of simple interest for the delay. With regard, therefore, to the annual
+allowance of &pound;100, whereby," during the first seventy years, "they
+enabled the President of the College simply to exist, it is proper to
+observe, that there was not probably one year in the whole seventy in
+which, by moneys collected from friends of the institution in foreign
+countries, by donations of its friends in this country, by moneys
+brought by students from other Colonies, and above all by furnishing the
+means of education at home, and thus preventing the outgoing of domestic
+wealth for education abroad, the College did not remunerate the Colony
+for that poor annual stipend five hundred fold."</p>
+
+<p>The patronage extended to the College after the Revolution was not more
+cordial and not more adequate than the meagre succors of Colonial
+legislation. The first Governor of independent Massachusetts, from the
+height of his impregnable popularity, for more than twelve years defied
+the repeated attempts of the Corporation, backed by the Overseers, to
+obtain the balance of his account as former Treasurer of the College,
+and died its debtor in a sum exceeding a thousand pounds. The debt was
+finally paid by his heirs, but not without a loss of some hundreds of
+dollars to the College.</p>
+
+<p>At the commencement of hostilities between the Colonies and the mother
+country, the Revolutionary authorities had taken possession of these
+grounds. Reversing the old order, "Cedant arma tog&aelig;," they drove out the
+<i>tog&aelig;</i> and brought in the arms. The books went one way, the boys
+another,&mdash;the books to Andover, the boys to Concord. The dawn of
+American liberty was not an "Aurora musis amica." The Muse of History
+alone remained with Brigadier Putnam and General Ward. The College was
+turned into a camp,&mdash;a measure abundantly justified by public necessity,
+but causing much damage to the buildings occupied as barracks by the
+Continentals. This damage was nominally allowed by the General Court,
+but was reckoned in the currency of that day, whereby the College
+received but a quarter of the cost.</p>
+
+<p>In 1786, the State saw fit to discontinue the small pittance which till
+then had been annually granted toward the support of the President; and
+from that time to this, with the exception of the proceeds of a
+bank-tax, granted for ten years in 1814, and the recent large
+appropriation from the School Fund for the use of the Museum of Natural
+History, the College has received no substantial aid from the State. The
+State has, during the last ten years, expended two millions of dollars
+in a vain attempt to bore a hole through one of her hills: in the whole
+two hundred and thirty years of our academic history she has not
+expended a quarter of that sum in filling up this hole in her
+educational system.</p>
+
+<p>I intend no disrespect to the noble Commonwealth of which no native can
+be insensible to the glory of his birthright. No State has done more for
+popular education than the State of Massachusetts. But for reasons
+satisfactory, no doubt, to themselves, her successive legislators have
+not seen fit to extend to her colleges the fostering care bestowed on
+her schools. And certainly, if one or the other must be neglected, we
+shall all agree in saying, Let the schools be cherished, and let the
+colleges take care of themselves. Let due provision be made for popular
+instruction in the rudiments of knowledge, which are also rudiments of
+good citizenship; let every citizen be taxed for that prime exigency,
+and let literature and science find patrons where they can. Literature
+and science will find patrons, and here in Massachusetts have always
+found them. If the legislators<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> of the State have been sparing of their
+benefactions, the wealthy sons of the State have been prodigal of
+theirs. In no country has the private patronage of science been more
+liberal and prompt than in Massachusetts. Seldom, in the history of
+science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than this
+University is now experiencing, in the mission of one of her professors
+on an enterprise of scientific exploration, started and maintained by a
+private citizen of Boston. When our Agassiz shall return to us
+reinforced with the lore of the Andes, and replenished with the spoils
+of the Amazon,&mdash;<i>tot millia squamiger&aelig; gentis</i>,&mdash;the discoveries he
+shall add to science, and the treasures he shall add to his Museum,
+whilst they splendidly illustrate his own qualifications for such a
+mission, will forever attest the liberality of a son of Massachusetts.</p>
+
+<p>The rich men of the State have not been wanting to literature and
+science. They have not been wanting to this University. Let their names
+be held in everlasting remembrance. When the Memorial Hall, which your
+committee have in charge, shall stand complete, let its mural records
+present, together with the names of those who have deserved well of the
+country by their patriotism, the names of those who have deserved well
+of the College by their benefactions. Let these fautors of science, the
+heroes of peace, have their place side by side with the heroes of war.</p>
+
+<p>Individuals have done their part, but slow is the growth of institutions
+which depend on individual charity for their support. As an illustration
+of what may be done by public patronage, when States are in earnest with
+their universities, and as strangely contrasting the sluggish fortunes
+of our own <i>Alma</i>, look at the State University of Michigan. Here is an
+institution but twenty-five years old, already numbering thirty-two
+professors and over twelve hundred students, having public buildings
+equal in extent to those which two centuries have given to Cambridge,
+and all the apparatus of a well-constituted, thoroughly furnished
+university. All this within twenty-five years! The State itself which
+has generated this wonderful growth had no place in the Union until
+after Harvard had celebrated her two hundredth birthday. In twenty-five
+years, in a country five hundred miles from the seaboard,&mdash;a country
+which fifty years ago was known only to the fur trade,&mdash;a University has
+sprung up, to which students flock from all parts of the land, and which
+offers to thousands, free of expense, the best education this continent
+affords. Such is the difference between public and private patronage,
+between individual effort and the action of a State.</p>
+
+<p>A proof of the broad intent and &oelig;cumenical consciousness of this
+infant College appears in the fact that its Medical Department, which
+alone numbers ten professors and five hundred students, allows the
+option of one of four languages in the thesis required for the medical
+degree. It is the only seminary in the country whose liberal scope and
+cosmopolitan outlook satisfy the idea of a great university. Compared
+with this, our other colleges are all provincial; and unless the State
+of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest
+with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan
+bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with
+this precocious child of the West.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Alumni, the State has devolved upon us, as electors of the
+Board of Overseers, an important trust. This trust conveys no right of
+immediate jurisdiction, but it may become the channel of an influence
+which shall make itself felt in the conduct of this University. It
+invites us to take counsel concerning her wants and her weal. I
+therefore pursue the theme which this crisis in our history suggests.</p>
+
+<p>Of existing universities the greater part are the product of an age
+whose intellectual fashion differed as widely from the present as it did
+from that of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> Greek and Roman antiquity. Our own must be reckoned with
+that majority, dating, as it does, from a period antecedent, not only to
+all other American colleges, but to some of the most eminent of other
+lands. Half of the better known and most influential of German
+universities are of later origin than ours. The University of G&ouml;ttingen,
+once the most flourishing in Germany, is younger than Harvard by a
+hundred years. Halle is younger, and Erlangen, and Munich with its vast
+library, and Bonn, and Berlin, by nearly two hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>When this College was founded, two of the main forces of the
+intellectual world of our time had scarcely come into play,&mdash;modern
+literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry,
+nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. In
+astronomy, the Copernican system was just struggling into notice, and
+far from being universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest
+author of note in the library bequeathed by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon
+rejected the Copernican system. English literature had had its great
+Elizabethan age; but little of the genius of that literature had
+penetrated the Puritan mind. It is doubtful if a copy of Shakespeare had
+found its way to these shores in 1636. Milton's star was just climbing
+its native horizon, invisible as yet to the Western world.</p>
+
+<p>The College was founded for the special and avowed purpose of training
+young men for the service of the Church. All its studies were arranged
+with reference to that object: endless expositions of Scripture,
+catechetical divinity, "commonplacing" of sermons,&mdash;already, one
+fancies, sufficiently commonplace,&mdash;Chaldee, Syriac, Hebrew without
+points, and other Semitic exasperations. Latin, as the language of
+theology, was indispensable, and within certain limits was practically
+better understood, perhaps, in Cambridge of the seventeenth century,
+than in Cambridge of the nineteenth. It was the language of official
+intercourse. Indeed, the use of the English was forbidden to the
+students within the College walls. <i>Scholares vernacula lingua intra
+Collegii limites nullo pr&aelig;textu utuntor</i>, was the law,&mdash;a law which
+Cotton Mather complains was so neglected in his day "as to render our
+scholars very unfit for a conversation with strangers." But the purpose
+for which chiefly the study of Latin is now pursued&mdash;acquaintance with
+the Roman classics&mdash;was no recognized object of Puritan learning. Cicero
+appears to have been for a long time the only classic of whom the
+students were supposed to have any knowledge. The reading of Virgil was
+a daring innovation of the eighteenth century. The only Greek required
+was that of the New Testament and the Greek Catechism. The whole rich
+domain of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Theokritos, was as
+much an unexplored territory as the Baghavad-Gita or the Mababharata.
+Logic and metaphysic and scholastic disputations occupied a prominent
+place. As late as 1726, the books most conspicuous in Tutor Flynt's
+official report of the College exercises, next to Cicero and Virgil, are
+such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense
+obsoleteness,&mdash;Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's
+Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a
+curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have
+recommended in irony to the student who sought his counsel.</p>
+
+<p>With the multiplication of religious sects, with the progress of secular
+culture, with the mental emancipation which followed the great
+convulsions of the eighteenth century, the maintenance of the
+ecclesiastical type originally impressed on the College ceased to be
+practicable,&mdash;ceased to be desirable. The preparation of young men for
+the service of the Church is still a recognized part of the general
+scheme of University education, but is only one in the multiplicity of
+objects which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> that scheme embraces, and can never again have the
+prominence once assigned to it. This secularization, however it might
+seem to compromise the design of the founders of the College, was
+inevitable,&mdash;a wise and needful concession to the exigencies of the
+altered time. Nor is there, in a larger view, any real contravention
+here of the purpose of the founders. The secularization of the College
+is no violation of its motto, "<i>Christo et Ecclesi&aelig;</i>." For, as I
+interpret those sacred ideas, the cause of Christ and the Church is
+advanced by whatever liberalizes and enriches and enlarges the mind. All
+study, scientifically pursued, is at bottom a study of theology; for all
+scientific study is the study of Law; and "of Law nothing less can be
+acknowledged than that her seat is in the bosom of God."</p>
+
+<p>But something more than secularization of the course of study is
+required to satisfy the idea of a university. What is a university? Dr.
+Newman answers this question with the ancient designation of a <i>Studium
+Generale</i>,&mdash;a school of universal learning. "Such a university," he
+says, "is in its essence a place for the communication and circulation
+of thought by means of personal intercourse over a wide tract of
+country."<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a> Accepting this definition, can we say that Harvard College,
+as at present constituted, is a University? Must we not rather describe
+it as a place where boys are made to recite lessons from text-books, and
+to write compulsory exercises, and are marked according to their
+proficiency and fidelity in these performances, with a view to a
+somewhat protracted exhibition of themselves at the close of their
+college course, which, according to a pleasant academic fiction, is
+termed their "Commencement"? This description applies only, it is true,
+to what is called the Undergraduate Department. But that department
+stands for the College, constitutes the College, in the public
+estimation. The professional schools which have gathered about it are
+scarcely regarded as a part of the College. They are incidental
+appendages, of which, indeed, one has its seat in another city. The
+College proper is simply a more advanced school for boys, not differing
+essentially in principle and theory from the public schools in all our
+towns. In this, as in those, the principle is coercion. Hold your
+subject fast with one hand, and pour knowledge into him with the other.
+The professors are task-masters and police-officers, the President the
+chief of the College police.</p>
+
+<p>Now, considering the great advance of our higher town schools, which
+carry their pupils as far as the College carried them fifty years ago,
+and which might, if necessary, have classes still more advanced of such
+as are destined for the university, I venture to suggest that the time
+has come when this whole system of coercion might, with safety and
+profit, be done away. Abolish, I would say, your whole system of marks,
+and college rank, and compulsory tasks. I anticipate an objection drawn
+from the real or supposed danger of abandoning to their own devices and
+optional employment boys of the average age of college students. In
+answer, I say, advance that average by fixing a limit of admissible age.
+Advance the qualifications for admission; make them equal to the studies
+of the Freshman year, and reduce the college career from four years to
+three; or else make the Freshman year a year of probation, and its
+closing examination the condition of full matriculation. Only give the
+young men, when once a sufficient foundation has been laid, and the
+rudiments acquired, the freedom of a true University,&mdash;freedom to select
+their own studies and their own teachers from such material, and such
+<i>personnel</i>, as the place supplies. It is to be expected that a portion
+will abuse this liberty, and waste their years. They do it at their
+peril. At the peril, among other disadvantages, of losing their degree,
+which should be conditioned on satisfactory proof that the student has
+not wholly misspent his time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>An indispensable condition of intellectual growth is liberty. That
+liberty the present system denies. More and more it is straitened by
+imposed tasks. And this I conceive to be the reason why, with increased
+requirements, the College turns out a decreasing proportion of
+first-class men. If the theory of college rank were correct, the highest
+marks should indicate the men who are to be hereafter most conspicuous,
+and leaders in the various walks of life. This is not the case,&mdash;not so
+much so now as in former years. Of the present chief lights of American
+literature and science, how many, if graduates of Harvard, took the
+first honors of the University here? Or, to put the question in another
+form, Of those who took the first honors at Harvard, within the last
+thirty years, how many are now conspicuous among the great lights of
+American literature and science?</p>
+
+<p>Carlyle, in his recent talk to the students at Edinburgh, remarks that,
+"since the time of Bentley, you cannot name anybody that has gained a
+great name for scholarship among the English, or constituted a point of
+revolution in the pursuits of men, in that way." The reason perhaps is,
+that the system of the English universities, though allowing greater
+liberty than ours, is still a struggle for college honors, in which
+renown, not learning for the sake of learning, is the aim. The seeming
+proficiency achieved through the influence of such motives&mdash;knowledge
+acquired for the nonce, not assimilated&mdash;is often delusive, and is apt
+to vanish when the stimulus is withdrawn. The students themselves have
+recorded their judgment of the value of this sort of learning in the
+word "cramming," a phrase which originated in one of the English
+universities.</p>
+
+<p>The rudiments of knowledge may be instilled by compulsory tasks; but to
+form the scholar, to really educate the man, there should intervene
+between the years of compulsory study and the active duties of life a
+season of comparative leisure. By leisure I mean, not cessation of
+activity, but self-determined activity,&mdash;command of one's time for
+voluntary study.</p>
+
+<p>There are two things which unless a university can give, it fails of its
+legitimate end. One is opportunity, the other inspiration. But
+opportunity is marred, not made, and inspiration quenched, not kindled,
+by coercion. Few, I suspect, in recent years, have had the love of
+knowledge awakened by their college life at Harvard,&mdash;more often
+quenched by the rivalries and penalties with which learning here is
+associated. Give the student, first of all, opportunity; place before
+him the best apparatus of instruction; tempt him with the best of
+teachers and books; lead him to the fountains of intellectual life. His
+use of those fountains must depend on himself. There is a homely proverb
+touching the impossibility of compelling a horse to drink, which applies
+to human animals and intellectual draughts as well. The student has been
+defined by a German pedagogue as an animal that cannot be forced, but
+must be persuaded. If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also
+the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its
+work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two
+conditions&mdash;opportunity and inspiration&mdash;will be a success, will draw to
+itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of
+all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the
+land.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing so fatal to inspiration as excessive legislation. It creates two
+parties, the governors and the governed, with efforts and interests
+mutually opposed; the governors seeking to establish an artificial
+order, the governed bent on maintaining their natural liberty. I need
+not ask you, Alumni, if these two parties exist at Cambridge. They have
+always existed within the memory of "the oldest graduate."</p>
+
+<p>Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond
+the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic
+jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> penalty
+but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against
+positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of
+civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern
+himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and
+familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and
+personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the
+most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be
+placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and
+fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German
+Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the
+last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which
+seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the
+ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a> as well as the
+medi&aelig;val and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it
+when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors,
+should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands.
+This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German
+universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of
+oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American
+colleges, and altogether incredible were it not sufficiently vouched by
+contemporary writers, and by the acts of the various governments which
+labored to suppress it. A certain German worthy writes to his son, who
+is about to enter the university: "You think, perhaps, that in the
+universities they sup pure wisdom by spoonfuls,... but when you are
+arrived there, you will find that you must be made a fool of for the
+first year.... Consent to be a fool for this one year; let yourself be
+plagued and abused; and when an old veteran steps up to you and tweaks
+your nose, let it not appear singular; endure it, harden yourself to it.
+<i>Olim meminisse juvabit.</i>"<a name="FNanchor_D_4" id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a> The universities legislated against this
+barbarism; all the governments of Germany conspired to crush it; but in
+spite of all their efforts, which were only partially successful, traces
+of it still lingered in the early years of this century. It was not
+completely abolished until, in 1818, there was formed at Jena by
+delegates from fourteen universities a voluntary association of students
+on a moral basis, known as "The General German Burschenschaft," the
+first principle in whose constitution was, "Unity, freedom, and equality
+of all students among themselves,&mdash;equality of all rights and
+duties,"&mdash;and whose second principle was "Christian German education of
+every mental and bodily faculty for the service of the Fatherland."
+This, according to Raumer, was the end of Pennalism in Germany. What the
+governments, with their stringent enactments and formidable penalties,
+failed to accomplish, was accomplished at last by a voluntary
+association of students, organizing that sense of honor which, in youth
+and societies of youth, if rightly touched, is never appealed to in
+vain.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The question has been newly agitated in these days, whether knowledge of
+Greek and Latin is a necessary part of polite education, and whether it
+should constitute one of the requirements of the academic course. It has
+seemed to me that those who take the affirmative in this discussion give
+undue weight to the literary argument, and not enough to the
+glossological. The literary argument fails to establish the supreme
+importance of a knowledge of these languages as a part of polite
+education. The place which the Greek and Latin authors have come to
+occupy in the estimation of European scholars is due, not entirely to
+their intrinsic merits, great as those merits unquestionably are, but in
+part to traditional prepossessions. When after a millennial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> occultation
+the classics, and especially, with the fall of the Pal&aelig;ologi, the Greek
+classics burst upon Western Europe, there was no literature with which
+to compare them. The Jewish Scriptures were not regarded as literature
+by readers of the Vulgate. Dante, it is true, had given to the world his
+immortal vision, and Boccaccio, its first expounder, had shown the
+capabilities of Italian prose. But the light of Florentine culture was
+even for Italy a partial illumination. On the whole, we may say that
+modern literature did not exist, and the Oriental had not yet come to
+light. What wonder that the classics were received with boundless
+enthusiasm! It was through the influence of that enthusiasm that the
+study of Greek was introduced into schools and universities with the
+close of the fifteenth century. It was through that influence that
+Latin, still a living language in the clerical world, was perpetuated,
+instead of becoming an obsolete ecclesiasticism. The language of Livy
+and Ovid derived fresh impulse from the reappearing stars of secular
+Rome.</p>
+
+<p>It is in vain to deny that those literatures have lost something of the
+relative value they once possessed, and which made it a literary
+necessity to study Greek and Latin for their sakes. The literary
+necessity is in a measure superseded by translations, which, though they
+may fail to communicate the aroma and the verbal felicities of the
+original, reproduce its form and substance. It is furthermore superseded
+by the rise of new literatures, and by introduction to those of other
+and elder lands. The Greeks were masters of literary form, but other
+nations have surpassed them in some particulars. There is but one Iliad,
+and but one Odyssee; but also there is but one Job, but one Sakoontal&agrave;,
+but one Hafiz-Nameh, but one Gulistan, but one Divina Commedia, but one
+Don Quixote, but one Faust. If the argument for the study of Greek and
+Latin is grounded on the value of the literary treasures contained in
+those tongues, the same argument applies to the Hebrew, to the Sanscrit,
+to the Persian, to say nothing of the modern languages, to which the
+College assigns a subordinate place.</p>
+
+<p>But, above all, the literary importance of Greek and Latin for the
+British and American scholar is greatly qualified by the richness and
+superiority of the English literature which has come into being since
+the Gr&aelig;comania of the time of the Tudors, when court ladies of a
+morning, by way of amusement, read Plato's Dialogues in the original. If
+literary edification is the object intended in the study of those
+languages, that end is more easily and more effectually accomplished by
+a thorough acquaintance with English literature, than by the very
+imperfect knowledge which college exercises give of the classics.
+Tugging at the Chained Prometheus, with the aid of grammar and lexicon,
+may be good intellectual discipline, but how many of the subjects of
+that discipline ever divine the secret of &AElig;schylus's wonderful creation,
+or receive any other impression from it than the feeling perhaps that
+the worthy Titan's sense of constraint could hardly have been more
+galling than their own.</p>
+
+<p>Give them Shakespeare's Tempest to read, and with no other pony than
+their own good will, though they may not penetrate the deeper meaning of
+that composition, they will gain more ideas, more nourishment from it,
+than they will from compulsory study of the whole trio of Greek
+tragedians. And if this be their first introduction to the great
+magician, they will say, with Miranda,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"O, wonder!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How many goodly creatures are there here!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">... O brave new world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That has such people in it!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The literary argument for enforced study of Greek and Latin in our day
+has not much weight. What I call the glossological argument has more.
+Every well-educated person should have a thorough understanding of his
+own language, and no one can thoroughly understand the English without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+some knowledge of languages which touch it so nearly as the Latin and
+the Greek. Some knowledge of those languages should constitute, I think,
+a condition of matriculation. But the further prosecution of them should
+not be obligatory on the student once matriculated, though every
+encouragement be given and every facility afforded to those whose genius
+leans in that direction. The College should make ample provision for the
+study of ancient languages, and also for the study of the mathematics,
+but should not enforce those studies on minds that have no vocation for
+such pursuits. There is now and then a born philologer, one who studies
+language for its own sake,&mdash;studies it perhaps in the spirit of "the
+scholar who regretted that he had not concentrated his life on the
+dative case." There are also exceptional natures that delight in
+mathematics, minds whose young affections run to angles and logarithms,
+and with whom the computation of values is itself the chief value in
+life. The College should accommodate either bias, to the top of its
+bent, but should not enforce either with compulsory twist. It should not
+insist on making every alumnus a linguist or a mathematician. If mastery
+of dead languages is not an indispensable part of polite education,
+mathematical learning is still less so. Excessive requirements in that
+department have not even the excuse of intellectual discipline. More
+important than mathematics to the general scholar is the knowledge of
+history, in which American scholars are so commonly deficient. More
+important is the knowledge of modern languages and of English
+literature. More important the knowledge of Nature and Art. May the
+science of sciences never want representatives as able as the learned
+gentlemen who now preside over that department in the mathematical and
+presidential chairs. Happy will it be for the University if they can
+inspire a love for the science in the pupils committed to their charge.
+But where inspiration fails, coercion can never supply its place. If the
+mathematics shall continue to reign at Harvard, may their empire become
+a law of liberty.</p>
+
+<p>I have ventured, fellow-graduates, to throw out these hints of
+University Reform, well aware of the opposition such views must
+encounter in deep-rooted prejudice and fixed routine; aware also of the
+rashness of attempting, within the limits of such an occasion, to
+grapple with such a theme; but strong in my conviction of the pressing
+need of a more emancipated scheme of instruction and discipline, based
+on the facts of the present and the real wants of American life. It is
+time that the oldest college in the land should lay off the <i>pr&aelig;texta</i>
+of its long minority, and take its place among the universities,
+properly so called, of modern time.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>One thing more I have to say while standing in this presence. The
+College has a duty beyond its literary and scientific functions,&mdash;a duty
+to the nation,&mdash;a patriotic, I do not scruple to say a political duty.</p>
+
+<p>Time was when universities were joint estates of the realms they
+enlightened. The University of Paris was, in its best days, an
+association possessing authority second only to that of the Church. The
+faithful ally of the sovereigns of France against the ambition of the
+nobles and against the usurpations of Papal Rome, she bore the proud
+title of "The eldest Daughter of the King,"&mdash;<i>La Fille a&icirc;n&eacute;e du Roi</i>.
+She upheld the Oriflamme against the feudal gonfalons, and was largely
+instrumental in establishing the central power of the crown.<a name="FNanchor_E_5" id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_E_5" class="fnanchor">[E]</a> In the
+terrible struggle of Philip the Fair with Boniface VIII., she furnished
+the legal weapons of the contest. She furnished, in her Chancellor
+Gerson, the leading spirit of the Council of Constance. In the Council
+of B&acirc;le she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> obtained for France the "Pragmatic Sanction." Her voice was
+consulted on the question of the Salic Law; unhappily, also in the trial
+of Jeanne d'Arc; and when Louis XI. concluded a treaty of peace with
+Maximilian of Austria, the University of Paris was the guaranty on the
+part of France.</p>
+
+<p>Universities are no longer political bodies, but they may be still
+political powers,&mdash;centres and sources of political influence. Our own
+College in the time of the Revolution was a manifest power on the side
+of liberty, the political as well as academic mother of Otis and the
+Adamses. In 1768, "when the patronage of American manufactures was the
+test of patriotism," the Senior Class voted unanimously to take their
+degrees apparelled in the coarse cloths of American manufacture. In
+1776, the Overseers required of the professors a satisfactory account of
+their political faith. So much was then thought of the influence on
+young minds of the right or wrong views of political questions
+entertained by their instructors. The fathers were right. When the life
+of the nation is concerned,&mdash;in the struggle with foreign or domestic
+foes,&mdash;there is a right and a wrong in politics which casuistry may seek
+to confuse, but which sound moral sentiment cannot mistake, and which
+those who have schools of learning in charge should be held to respect.
+Better the College should be disbanded than be a nursery of treason.
+Better these halls even now should be levelled with the ground, than
+that any influence should prevail in them unfriendly to American
+nationality. No amount of intellectual acquirements can atone for
+defective patriotism. Intellectual supremacy alone will not avert the
+downfall of states. The subtlest intellect of Greece, the sage who could
+plan an ideal republic of austere virtue and perfect proportions, could
+not preserve his own; but the love of country inspired by Lycurgus kept
+the descendants of the Dorians free two thousand years after the
+disgrace of Ch&aelig;ronea had sealed the fate of the rest of Greece.</p>
+
+<p>In my college days it was the fashion with some to think lightly of our
+American birthright, to talk disparagingly of republics, and to sigh for
+the dispositions and pomps of royalty.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sad fancies did we then affect<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In luxury of disrespect<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To our own prodigal excess<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of too familiar happiness."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All such nonsense, if it had not already yielded to riper reason, would
+ere this have been washed out of us by the blood of a hundred thousand
+martyrs. The events of recent years have enkindled, let us hope, quite
+other sentiments in the youth of this generation. May those sentiments
+find ample nutriment within these precincts evermore.</p>
+
+<p>Soon after the conquest of American independence, Governor Hancock, in
+his speech at the inauguration of President Willard, eulogized the
+College as having "been in some sense the parent and nurse of the late
+happy Revolution in this Commonwealth." Parent and nurse of American
+nationality,&mdash;such was the praise accorded to Harvard by one of the
+foremost patriots of the Revolution! Never may she cease to deserve that
+praise! Never may the Mother refuse to acknowledge the seed herself has
+propagated! Never may her seed be repelled by the Mother's altered mind!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Mutatam ignorent subito ne semina matrem."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When Protagoras came to Athens to teach in the university as
+self-appointed professor, or sophist, according to the fashion of that
+time, it was not to instruct Athenian youth in music or geometry or
+astronomy, but to teach them the art of being good citizens,&mdash;&#932;&#951;&#957; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#953;&#964;&#945;&#987; &#964;&#949;&#967;&#957;&#951;&#957;, &#954;&#945;&#953; &#960;&#959;&#953;&#949;&#953;&#957; &#945;&#957;&#948;&#961;&#945;&#987; &#945;&#947;&#945;&#952;&#959;&#965;&#987; &#960;&#959;&#955;&#953;&#964;&#945;&#987;.
+That was his
+profession. With which, as we read, Hippocrates was so well pleased,
+that he called up Socrates in the middle of the night to inform him of
+the happy arrival. We have no professorship at Cambridge founded for the
+express purpose of making good citizens. In the absence of such, may all
+the professorships work together for that end. The youth intrusted to
+their tutelage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> are soon to take part, if not as legislators, at least
+as freemen, in the government of our common land. May the dignity and
+duty and exceeding privilege of an American citizen be impressed upon
+their minds by all the influences that rule this place! Trust me,
+Alumni, the country will thank the University more for the loyalty her
+influences shall foster, than for all the knowledge her schools may
+impart. Learning is the costly ornament of states, but patriotism is the
+life of a nation.</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> The History of Harvard University, by Josiah Quincy, LL.
+D., Vol. I. pp. 42, 43. All the facts relating to the history of the
+College are taken from this work.</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> The Office and Work of Universities, by John Henry Newman.</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> St. Augustine records his connection, when a student at
+Carthage, with the "Eversores" (Destructives), an association which
+flourished at that university.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_4" id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_4"><span class="label">[D]</span></a> Raumer's "History of German Universities." Translated by
+Frederic B. Perkins.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_E_5" id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_E_5"><span class="label">[E]</span></a> "C'est ainsi que peu &agrave; peu ils [that is, "les lettres"]
+parvinrent &agrave; sapper les fondements du pouvoir f&eacute;odal et &agrave; &eacute;lever
+l'&eacute;tendard royal l&agrave; o&ugrave; flottait la banni&egrave;re du baron."&mdash;<i>Histoire de
+l'Universit&eacute;</i>, par M. Eugene Dubarle, Vol. I. p. 135.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_VOICE" id="THE_VOICE"></a>THE VOICE.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A saintly Voice fell on my ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of the dewy atmosphere:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"O hush, dear Bird of Night, be mute,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be still, O throbbing heart and lute!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Night-Bird shook the sparkling dew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon me as he ruffed and flew:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My heart was still, almost as soon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My lute as silent as the moon:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I hushed my heart, and held my breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And would have died the death of death,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To hear&mdash;but just once more&mdash;to hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That Voice within the atmosphere.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Again The Voice fell on my ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of the dewy atmosphere!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The same words, but half heard at first,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I listened with a quenchless thirst;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And drank as of that heavenly balm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Silence that succeeds a psalm:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My soul to ecstasy was stirred:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It was a Voice that I had heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A thousand blissful times before;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But deemed that I should hear no more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till I should have a spirit's ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And breathe another atmosphere!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then there was Silence in my ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Silence in the atmosphere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And silent moonshine on the mart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Peace and Silence in my heart:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But suddenly a dark Doubt said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"The fancy of a fevered head!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A wild, quick whirlwind of desire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then wrapt me as in folds of fire.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I ran the strange words o'er and o'er,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And listened breathlessly once more:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lo, the third time I did hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The same words in the atmosphere!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They fell and died upon my ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As dew dies on the atmosphere;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then an intense yearning thrilled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My Soul, that all might be fulfilled:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Where art thou, Blessed Spirit, where?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose Voice is dew upon the air!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I looked, around me, and above,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And cried aloud: "Where art thou, Love?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O let me see thy living eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And clasp thy living hand, or die!"&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Again upon the atmosphere<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The self-same words fell: "<i>I Am Here.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Here? Thou art here, Love!"&mdash;"<i>I Am Here.</i>"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The echo died upon my ear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I looked around me&mdash;everywhere,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But ah! there was no mortal there!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The moonlight was upon the mart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And awe and wonder in my heart.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I saw no form!&mdash;I only felt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaven's Peace upon me as I knelt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And knew a Soul Beatified<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was at that moment by my side:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there was Silence in my ear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Silence in the atmosphere!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="LIFE_ASSURANCE" id="LIFE_ASSURANCE"></a>LIFE ASSURANCE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>One of the subjects which for some time has commanded the public
+attention is that of Life Assurance: the means by which a man may,
+through a moderate annual expenditure, make provision for his family
+when death shall have deprived them of his protection.</p>
+
+<p>The number of companies organized for this purpose, their annual
+increase, the assiduity with which their agents press their respective
+claims, the books, pamphlets, and circulars which are disseminated, and
+the large space occupied by their announcements in the issues of the
+press, all unite in creating a spirit of inquiry on this interesting
+subject. We propose in this article to submit a few statements, the
+collection of which has been greatly furthered by recourse to the
+treatises of Babbage, Park, Duer, Ellis, Angell, Bunyon, Blayney, and
+other writers on insurance.</p>
+
+<p>In the early history of insurance, objection was continually made that
+it was of the nature of a wager, and consequently not only unlawful, but
+<i>contra bonos mores</i>; yet the courts of law in England from the first
+drew a distinction between a wager and a contract founded on the
+principle of indemnity, which principle runs through and underlies the
+whole subject of insurance. Lord Mansfield denominated insurance "a
+contract upon speculation," and it has universally been considered as a
+contract of indemnity against loss or damage arising from some uncertain
+and future events.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Insurance may be defined generally as "a contract by which one of the
+parties binds himself to the other to pay him a sum of money, or
+otherwise indemnify him, in the case of the happening of a fortuitous
+event provided for in a general or special manner in the contract, in
+consideration of the sum of money which the latter party pays or binds
+himself to pay"; or, in the words of an eminent English judge, "It is a
+contract to protect men against uncertain events which in any wise may
+be a disadvantage to them."</p>
+
+<p>The contract securing this indemnity is called a policy, from the
+Italian <i>polizza d' assicurazione</i>, or <i>di sicurt&agrave;</i>, which signifies a
+memorandum in writing, or bill of security. The sum paid for the
+indemnity is called a premium, or price; the party taking upon himself
+the risk being termed the underwriter, because his name is written at
+the bottom of the policy, while the person protected by the instrument
+is called the assured. Says one, "The premium paid by the latter and the
+peril assumed by the former are two correlatives inseparable from each
+other, and the union constitutes the essence of the contract."</p>
+
+<p>Some writers, Mr. Babbage among others, use the words "assurance" and
+"insurance" as having distinct meanings; but with all underwriters at
+this day they are considered synonymous.</p>
+
+<p>Insurance in the first instance was exclusively maritime, and great
+efforts have been made to prove its antiquity. Some have endeavored, by
+appeals to Livy, Suetonius, Ulpian, and Cicero, to show that insurance
+was in use in ancient Rome, and that it was invented at Rhodes a
+thousand years before the Christian era; while others claim that it
+existed at Tyre, Carthage, Corinth, Athens, and Alexandria.</p>
+
+<p>There is little doubt, however, that it was first practised by the
+Lombards, and was introduced into England by a Lombard colony, which in
+the thirteenth century settled in London, and controlled entirely the
+foreign trade of the kingdom. After the great fire in London, in 1666,
+the protection hitherto afforded by insurance to ships only was extended
+to goods and houses; and insurance as a contract of indemnity was
+subsequently extended to human life.</p>
+
+<p>It is a singular fact that the subject of effecting insurance on lives
+was largely and excitingly discussed on the continent of Europe before
+it had attracted the slightest attention in England; yet at this day it
+prevails throughout Great Britain, while upon the Continent it is
+comparatively unknown; its operations there being chiefly confined to
+France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.</p>
+
+<p>In Holland, as early as 1681, Van Hadden and De Witt produced elaborate
+works upon the subject, while no publication appeared in England until
+twenty years after. These writers were followed by Struyck, in 1740, and
+by Kirseboon, in 1743; while Parcieux, father and son, St. Cyran, and
+Duvillard, in France, with Euler, Suchmilch, and Wargentin, in Germany,
+were with great ability pressing the subject upon the notice of their
+countrymen. But these efforts led to no practical results, and it was
+reserved for England at a later day to illustrate the principles of life
+assurance, and enable the public to enjoy extensively its privileges.</p>
+
+<p>Policies of life assurance were issued in England before any companies
+were organized to prosecute the business. Like marine policies, they
+were subscribed by one or more individuals; and the first case we find
+is that of a ship captain, in 1641, whose life had been insured by two
+persons who had become his bail. The policy was subscribed by individual
+underwriters, and an able author observes that the case singularly
+illustrates the connection which probably once existed between life and
+maritime insurance, and shows how naturally the latter may have sprung
+from the former.</p>
+
+<p>No business, with the exception, perhaps, of the express system and of
+photography, has grown in the United States so rapidly as that of life
+assurance. There is scarcely a State that has not one or more companies
+organized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> for the prosecution of this business. There are six chartered
+under the laws of Massachusetts, and twenty-six of those organized in
+other States are doing business in this Commonwealth, These companies
+had in force, November 1, 1865, 211,537 policies, assuring the sum of
+$563,396,862.30. In 1830 the New York Life and Trust Company was the
+only life assurance company in New York. At the close of the year 1865
+there were eighteen companies chartered under the laws of that State.
+They had 101,780 policies in force, assuring the sum of $289,846,316.50,
+while their gross combined assets reach the sum of $32,296,832.03.</p>
+
+<p>An insurance upon life is defined as "a contract by which the
+underwriter, for a certain sum proportioned to the age, health,
+profession, and other circumstances of the person whose life is the
+object of insurance, engages that that person shall not die within the
+time limited in the policy; or if he do, that he will pay a sum of money
+to him in whose favor the policy was granted."</p>
+
+<p>A person desiring to effect an insurance on his life usually procures
+from the office in which he proposes to insure a blank form, containing
+a series of interrogatories, all of which must be answered in writing by
+the applicant. To these answers must be appended the certificate of his
+usual medical attendant as to his present and general state of health,
+with a like certificate from an intimate personal friend. The party is
+then subjected to an examination by the medical examiner of the company,
+and, if the application is in all respects satisfactory, a policy is
+issued.</p>
+
+<p>On the death of the party assured, and due proof being made thereof, the
+company must pay the full sum insured. The time fixed for this payment
+varies with different companies. Some agree to pay at thirty, some at
+sixty, and some at ninety days after the proofs of death have been
+received and duly approved.</p>
+
+<p>The peculiarity of life assurance companies is, that they are required
+to pay the entire sum assured on the happening of a single event, making
+the loss a total one; but in fire and marine policies there is a
+distinction made between total and partial loss.</p>
+
+<p>A clause is usually inserted declaring the policy void in case the
+assured should fall in a duel, die by the hands of justice, or by his
+own hand, or while engaged in the violation of any public law. An
+interesting case in point is reported in the English books. On the 25th
+of November, 1824, Henry Fauntleroy, a celebrated banker in London, was
+executed for forgery. The Amicable Society of London, the first company
+established in England, had written a policy on his life, upon which all
+the premiums had been paid. The rules of the company declared that in
+such cases the policy was vitiated, but the clause was not inserted in
+the instrument. The company resisted payment, but a decision was given
+sustaining the validity of the contract, which was, however, reversed,
+on an appeal being made to the House of Lords.</p>
+
+<p>This clause, declaring a policy void in case the assured commits
+suicide, has given rise to much litigation. Some companies use the word
+"suicide," while others insert the words "shall die by his own hand";
+but the courts of law in various adjudications have considered the
+expressions as amounting to the same thing. The word "suicide" is not to
+be found in any English author anterior to the reign of Charles II.
+Lexicographers trace it to the Latin word <i>suicidum</i>, though that word
+does not appear in the older Latin dictionaries. It is really derived
+from two Latin words, <i>se</i> and <i>c&aelig;dere</i>,&mdash;to slay one's self. The great
+commentator on English law, Sir William Blackstone, defines suicide to
+be "the act of designedly destroying one's own life. To constitute
+suicide, the person must be of years of discretion and of sound mind."</p>
+
+<p>In a case submitted to the Supreme Court of the State of New York,
+Chief-Justice Nelson settled the whole question.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> A life company
+resisted payment of the amount specified in their policy, on the ground
+that the assured had committed suicide by drowning himself in the Hudson
+River. To this it was replied, that, when he so drowned himself, he was
+of unsound mind, and wholly unconscious of the act.</p>
+
+<p>Judge Nelson, after stating the question to be whether the act of
+self-destruction by a man in a fit of insanity can be deemed a death by
+his own hand within the meaning of the policy, decided that it could not
+be so considered. That the terms "commit suicide," and "die by his own
+hand," as used indiscriminately by different companies, express the same
+idea, and are so understood by writers in this branch of law. That
+self-destruction by a man bereft of reason can with no more propriety be
+ascribed to the act of his own hand, than to the deadly instrument that
+may have been used for the purpose. That the drowning was no more the
+act of the assured, in the sense of the law, than if he had been
+impelled by irresistible physical power; and that the company could be
+no more exempt from payment, than if his death had been occasioned by
+any uncontrollable means. That suicide involved the deliberate
+termination of one's existence while in the full possession of the
+mental faculties. That self-slaughter by an insane man or a lunatic was
+not suicide within the meaning of the law.</p>
+
+<p>This opinion of Judge Nelson was subsequently affirmed by the Court of
+Appeals.</p>
+
+<p>The whole current of legal decisions, the suggestions thrown out by
+learned judges, and the growing opinion that no sane man would be guilty
+of self-slaughter, have induced several new companies to exclude this
+proviso from their policies, while many older ones have revised their
+policies and eliminated the obnoxious clause. It is not that any man
+contemplates the commission of suicide; but every one feels that, if
+there should be laid upon him that most fearful of all afflictions,
+insanity, or if, when suffering from disease, he should, in the frenzy
+of delirium, put an end to his existence, every principle of equity
+demands that the faithful payments of years should not be lost to his
+family.</p>
+
+<p>Another important principle, which has involved much discussion, is,
+that "the party insuring upon a life must have an interest in the life
+insured." Great latitude has been given in the construction of the law
+as to this point; the declaration of a real, subsisting interest being
+all that is required by the underwriters. In fact, the offices are
+constantly taking insurances where the interest is upon a contingency
+which may very shortly be determined, and if the parties choose to
+continue the policy, <i>bona fide</i>, after the interest ceases, they never
+meet with any difficulty in recovering. So also offices frequently grant
+policies upon interests so slender that, although it may be difficult to
+deny some kind of interest, it is such as a court of law would scarcely
+recognize. This practice of paying upon policies without raising the
+question of interest is so general, that it has even been allowed in
+courts of law.</p>
+
+<p>The great advantages derived from life assurance are proved by its rapid
+progress, both in Great Britain and the United States, after its
+principles had once been fully explained. As already stated, the first
+society for the general assurance of life was the Amicable, founded in
+1706; but, most unreasonably, its rates of premium were made uniform for
+all ages assured; nor was any fixed amount guaranteed in case of death.
+Hence very little was done; and it was not until 1780 that the business
+of life assurance may be said to have fairly begun. Since then,
+companies have been formed from time to time, so that at present there
+are in Great Britain some two hundred in active operation, and the
+amount assured upon life is estimated at more than &pound;200,000,000.</p>
+
+<p>In America, the first life-assurance company open to all was the
+Pennsylvania, established in 1812. And though many others, devoted in
+whole or in part to this object, were formed in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> interim, so little
+pains was taken to inform the public upon the system, that in 1842 the
+amount assured probably did not exceed $5,000,000. But, in a Christian
+country, all material enterprises go swiftly forward, and of late years
+the progress of life assurance has equalled that of railroads and
+telegraphs; so that there are in the United States at least fifty
+companies, which are disbursing in claims, chiefly to widows and
+orphans, about five millions of dollars annually.</p>
+
+<p>With this large extension of business, the fundamental principles of
+life assurance are now universally agreed on; but, in carrying them out,
+there are differences deserving attention.</p>
+
+<p>Life-assurance companies may be divided into three classes,&mdash;the stock,
+the mutual, and the mixed. In the stock company, the management is in
+the hands of the stockholders, or their agents, with whom the applicant
+for insurance contracts to pay so much while living, in consideration of
+a certain sum to be paid to his representatives at his death; and here
+his connection with it ceases; the profits of the business being divided
+among the stockholders. In the mutual company the assured themselves
+receive all the surplus premium or profit. The law of the State of New
+York passed in 1849 requires that all life-insurance companies organized
+in the State shall have a capital of at least one hundred thousand
+dollars. Mutual life-insurance companies organized in that State since
+1849 pay only seven per cent on their capital, which their stock by
+investment may produce. In the mixed companies there are various
+combinations of the principles peculiar to the other two. They differ
+from the mutual companies only in the fact that, besides paying the
+stockholders legal interest, they receive a portion of the profits of
+the business, which in some cases in this country has caused the capital
+stock to appreciate in value over three hundred per cent, and in England
+over five hundred per cent.</p>
+
+<p>To decide which of these is most advantageous to the assured, we must
+consider the subject of premiums, and understand whence companies derive
+their surplus, or, as it is sometimes called, the profits. This is
+easily explained. As the liability to death increases with age, the
+proper annual premium for assurance would increase with each year of
+life. But as it is important not to burden age too heavily, and as it is
+simpler to pay a uniform sum every year, a mean rate is taken,&mdash;one too
+little for old age, but greater than is absolutely necessary to cover
+the risk in the first years of the assurance. Hence the company receives
+at first more than it has to pay, and thus accumulates funds to provide
+for the time when its payments will naturally be in excess of its
+receipts. Now these funds may be invested so as of themselves to produce
+an income, and the increase thence derived may, by the magical power of
+compound interest, reaching through a long series of years, become very
+large. In forming rates of premium, regard is had to this; but, to gain
+security in a contract which may extend far into the future, it is
+prudent to base the calculations on so low a rate of interest that there
+can be a certainty of obtaining it. The rate adopted is usually three
+per cent in England, and four or five per cent in this country. But, in
+point of fact, the American companies now obtain on secure investments
+six or seven per cent.</p>
+
+<p>Again, in order to cover expenses and provide against possible
+contingencies, it is common to add to the rates obtained by calculation
+from correct tables of mortality a certain percentage, called <i>loading</i>,
+which is usually found more than is necessary, and forms a second source
+of profit.</p>
+
+<p>Again, most tables of mortality are derived from the experience of whole
+communities, while all companies now subject applicants to a medical
+examination, and reject those found diseased; it being possible to
+discover, through the progress of medical science, even incipient signs
+of disease. Hence one would expect that among these selected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> lives the
+rates of mortality would be less than by ordinary statistics; and this
+is confirmed by the published experience of many companies. Here we find
+a third source of profit.</p>
+
+<p>In these three ways, and others incidental to the business, it happens
+that all corporations managed with ordinary prudence accumulate a much
+larger capital than is needed for future losses. The advocates of the
+stock plan contend that, by a low rate of premium, they furnish their
+assured with a full equivalent for that division of profits which is the
+special boast of other companies. In a corporation purely mutual, the
+whole surplus is periodically applied to the benefit of the assured,
+either by a dividend in cash, or by equitable additions to the amount
+assured without increase of premium, or by deducting from future
+premiums, while the amount assured remains the same. The advantages of
+the latter system must be evident to every one.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course important in all companies, whether mutual or not, that
+the officers should be men of integrity, sagacity, and financial
+experience, as well as that due precautions should be taken in the care
+and investment of the company's fund; and it is now proved by experience
+in this country, that, when a company is thus managed, so regular are
+the rates of mortality, so efficient the safeguards derived from the
+selection of lives, the assumption of low rates of interest, and the
+loading of premiums, that no company, when once well established, has
+ever met with disaster. On the other hand, there has been a rapid
+accretion of funds, in some instances to the amount of many millions of
+dollars. The characteristics of a good company are security and
+assurance at cost. It should sell, not policies merely, but assurance;
+and it should not make a profit for the capitalist out of the widow and
+orphan.</p>
+
+<p>The policies issued by life companies vary in their form and nature. The
+ordinary one is called the life policy, by which the company contracts
+to pay, on the death of the assured, the sum named in the policy, to the
+person in whose behalf the assurance is made.</p>
+
+<p>In mutual (cash) companies, when the premium has been paid in full for
+about sixteen years, judging from past experience, the policy-holder may
+expect that his annual dividend on policy and additions will exceed the
+annual premium, thus obviating the necessity of further payments to the
+company, while his policy annually increases in amount for the remainder
+of life. But, on the contrary, when the dividends have been anticipated,
+as in the note system, by giving a note for part of the premium, the
+policy-holder insuring in this way, although he may at first receive a
+larger policy than he has the ability to pay for in cash, may lose the
+chief benefit of life insurance. For should he become unable, either by
+age, disease, or loss of property, to continue the payment of his
+premiums, his policy must lapse, because there is no accumulation of
+profits to his credit on which it can be continued.</p>
+
+<p>In other forms of life policies, called "Non-forfeitable," premiums are
+made payable in "one," "five," or "ten" annual payments. In all cash
+companies, and in some of the note companies, after the specified number
+of premiums have been paid, the policy-holder draws an annual dividend
+in cash.</p>
+
+<p>A further advantage arising from this plan is, that the policy-holder,
+at any time after two annual payments have been made, is always entitled
+to a "paid-up" policy for as many "fifths" or "tenths" of the sum
+assured as he shall have paid annual premiums. For example: a
+"five-annual-payment policy" for $10,000, on which three premiums had
+been paid, would entitle the holder to a "paid-up policy" for $6,000; a
+"ten-annual-payment policy" for $10,000, on which three payments had
+been made, would entitle the holder to $3,000; and so on for any number
+of payments and for any amount, in accordance with the face of the
+policy.</p>
+
+<p>Another form is denominated the Endowment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> Policy, in which the amount
+assured is payable when the party attains a certain age, or at death,
+should he die before reaching that age. This policy is rapidly gaining
+favor, as it provides for the man himself in old age, or for his family
+in case of his death. It is also fast becoming a favorite form of
+investment. We can show instances where the policy-holders have received
+a <i>surplus</i> above all they have paid to the company, with compound
+interest at six per cent, and no charge whatever for expenses or cost of
+insurance meanwhile.</p>
+
+<p>The Term Policy, as its name implies, is issued for a term of one or
+more years.</p>
+
+<p>Policies are also issued on joint lives, payable at the death of the
+first of two or more parties named in the policy; and on survivorship,
+payable to a party named in case he survives another.</p>
+
+<p>Some companies require all premiums to be paid in cash, while others
+take the note of the assured in part payment. These are denominated cash
+and note companies, and much difference of opinion exists as to their
+comparative merits.</p>
+
+<p>The latter is at first sight an attractive system, and its advocates
+present many specious arguments in its favor. The friends of cash
+payments, however, contend that the note system is detrimental and
+delusive, from the fact that these notes are liable to assessment, and,
+in case of death, to be deducted from the amount assured; also that the
+notes accumulate as the years roll on, the interest growing annually
+larger, and the total cash payment consequently heavier, while the
+actual amount of assurance, that is, the difference between its nominal
+amount and the sum of the notes, steadily lessens; and thus a provision
+for one's family gradually changes into a burden upon one's self.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever differences of opinion may exist as to the comparative
+value of various systems, few will deny the advantages which life
+assurance has conferred upon the public, especially in America, whose
+middle classes, ambitiously living up to their income, are rich mostly
+in their labor and their homesteads,&mdash;in their earnings rather than
+their savings; and whose wealthy classes are rich chiefly through the
+giddy uncertainties of speculation,&mdash;magnificent to-day, in ruins
+to-morrow. In a country like this, no one can estimate the amount of
+comfort secured by investment in life assurance. It is the one measure
+of thrift which remains to atone for our extravagance in living and
+recklessness in trade.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Ward Beecher spoke wisely when he advised all men to seek life
+assurance. He says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is every man's duty to provide for his family. That provision must
+include its future contingent condition. That provision, in so far as it
+is material, men ordinarily seek to secure by their own accumulations
+and investments. But all these are uncertain. The man that is rich
+to-day, by causes beyond his reach is poor to-morrow. A war in China, a
+revolution in Europe, a rebellion in America, overrule ten thousand
+fortunes in every commercial community.</p>
+
+<p>"But <i>in life assurance there are no risks or contingencies</i>. Other
+investments may fail. A house may burn down. Banks may break; and their
+stock be worthless. Bonds and mortgages may be seized for debt, and all
+property or evidences of property may fall into the bottomless gulf of
+bankruptcy. But money secured to your family by life assurance will go
+to them without fail or interruption, provided you have used due
+discretion in the selection of a sound and honorable assurance company.
+Of two courses, one of which <i>may</i> leave your family destitute, and the
+other of which <i>assures</i> them a comfortable support at your decease, can
+there be a doubt which is to be chosen? Can there be a doubt about
+duty?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="A_DISTINGUISHED_CHARACTER" id="A_DISTINGUISHED_CHARACTER"></a>A DISTINGUISHED CHARACTER.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In order to prevent conjectures which might not be entirely pleasant to
+one or two persons whom I have in my mind, I prefer to state, at once
+and frankly, that I, Dionysius Green, am the author of this article. It
+requires some courage to make this avowal, I am well aware; and I am
+prepared to experience a rapid diminution of my present rather extensive
+popularity. One result I certainly foresee, namely, a great falling-off
+in the number of applications for autographs ("accompanied with a
+sentiment"), which I daily receive; possibly, also, fewer invitations to
+lecture before literary societies next winter. Fortunately, my recent
+marriage enables me to dispense with a large portion of my popularity,
+without great inconvenience; or, rather, I am relieved from the very
+laborious necessity of maintaining it in the face of so many aggressive
+rivalries.</p>
+
+<p>The day may arrive, therefore, when I shall cease to be a Distinguished
+Character. Since I have admitted this much, I may as well confess that
+my reputation&mdash;enviable as it may be considered by the public&mdash;is of
+that kind which seems to be meant to run for a certain length of time,
+at the expiration whereof it must be wound up again. I was fortunate
+enough to discover this secret betimes, and I have since then known
+several amiable and worthy persons to slip out of sight, from the lack
+of it. There was Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, for example, whose comic articles shook the
+fat sides of the nation for one summer, and whose pseudonyme was in
+everybody's mouth. Alas! what he took for perpetual motion was but an
+eight-day clock, and I need not call your attention to the present dead
+and leaden stillness of its pendulum.</p>
+
+<p>Although my earliest notoriety was achieved in very much the same
+way,&mdash;that is, by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no
+doubt remember,&mdash;I soon perceived the unstable character of my
+reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in
+inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in
+literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. They tickle the
+palates of the multitude for a while, but they don't wear like the plain
+old beverages. I saw very plainly, that much more was to be gained, in
+the long run, by planting myself&mdash;not with a sudden and startling jump,
+but by a graceful, cautious pirouette&mdash;upon a basis of the Moral and the
+Didactic. I should thus reach a class of slow, but very tough stomachs,
+which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to
+offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever:
+they always mistake their mental gripings for the process of digestion.
+Why, bless your souls! I have known Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy" to
+fill one of them to repletion, for the space of ten years!</p>
+
+<p>I owe this resolution to my natural acuteness of perception, but my
+success in carrying it into execution was partly the result of luck. The
+field, now occupied by such a crowd, (I name no names,) was at that time
+nearly clear; and I managed to shift my costume before the public fairly
+knew what I was about. I found, indeed, that a combination of the two
+styles enabled me to retain much of my old audience while acquiring the
+new. It was like singing a hymn of serious admonition to a lively,
+rattling tune. One is diverted: there is a present sense of fun, while a
+gentle feeling of the grave truths inculcated lingers in one's mind
+afterwards. The pious can find no fault with the matter, nor the profane
+with the manner. Instead of approaching the moral consciousness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> of
+one's readers with stern, lugubrious countenance, and ponderous or
+lamentable voice, you make your appearance with a smile and a joke,
+punch the reader playfully in the ribs, and say, as it were, "Ha! ha!
+I've a good thing to tell you!" Although I have many imitators, some of
+whom have attained an excellence in the art which may be considered
+classic, yet I may fairly claim to have originated this branch of
+literature, and, while it retains its present unbounded popularity, my
+name cannot wholly perish.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, greatness has its drawbacks. I appeal to all distinguished
+authors, from Tupper to Weenie Willows, to confirm the truth of this
+assertion. I have sometimes, especially of late, doubted seriously
+whether it is a good thing to be distinguished. Alas! my dear young
+gentleman and lady, whose albums would be so dismally incomplete without
+my autograph ("accompanied with a sentiment"), would that you could
+taste the bitter with the sweet,&mdash;the honey and aloes of an American
+author's life! At first, it is exceedingly pleasant. You are like a
+newly-hatched chicken, or a pup at the end of his nine-days' blindness.
+You are petted, and stroked, and called sweet names, and fed with
+dainties, and carried in the arms of the gentlemen, and cuddled in the
+laps of the ladies. But when you get to be a big dog or a full-grown
+game-cock, take care! If people would but fancy that you still wore your
+down or silken skin, they might continue to be delighted with every
+gambol of your fancy. But they suspect pin-feathers and bristles,
+whether the latter grow or not; and, after doing their best to spoil
+you, they suddenly demand the utmost propriety of behavior. However, let
+me not anticipate. I can still call myself, without the charge of
+self-flattery, a Distinguished Character; at least I am told so, every
+day, each person who makes the remark supposing that it is an entirely
+original and most acceptable compliment. While this distinction lasts,
+(for I find that I lose it in proportion as I gain in sound knowledge
+and independent common-sense,) I should like to describe, for the
+contemplation of future ages, some of the penalties attached to
+popularity at present.</p>
+
+<p>I was weak enough, I admit, to be immensely delighted with the first
+which I experienced,&mdash;not foreseeing whitherward they led. The timid,
+enthusiastic notes of girls of fifteen, with the words "sweet" and
+"exquisite," duly underscored, the letters of aspiring boys, enclosing
+specimens of their composition, and the touching pleas of individuals of
+both sexes, in reduced circumstances, were so many evidences of success,
+which I hugged to my bosom. Reducing the matter to statistics, I have
+since ascertained that about one in ten of these letters is dictated
+either by honest sympathy, the warm, uncritical recognition of youth
+(which I don't suppose any author would diminish, if he could), or the
+craving for encouragement, under unpropitious circumstances of growth.
+But how was I, in the beginning, to guess at the motives of the writers?
+They offered sugar-plums, which I swallowed without a suspicion of the
+drastic ingredients so many of them contained. Good Mrs. Sigourney kept
+a journal of her experiences in this line. I wish I had done the same.</p>
+
+<p>The young lady correspondent, I find, in most cases replies to your
+reply, proposing a permanent correspondence. The young gentleman, who
+desires, above all things, your "<i>candid opinion</i> of the poems
+enclosed,&mdash;be sure and point out the <i>faults</i>, and how they can be
+<i>improved</i>"&mdash;is highly indignant when you take him at his word, and do
+so. You receive a letter of defence and explanation, showing that what
+you consider to be faults are not such. Moreover, his friends have
+assured him that the poem which you advise him to omit is one of his
+finest things! The distressed aspirant for literary fame, who only
+requests that you shall read and correct his or her manuscript, procure
+a publisher, and prefix a commendatory notice, signed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> with your name,
+to the work, writes that he or she is at last undeceived in regard to
+the character of authors. "I thank you, Mr. Green, for the <i>lesson</i>! The
+remembrance of <i>your</i> former struggles is <i>happily</i> effaced in your
+present success. It is hard for a heart throbbing with warmth to be
+chilled, and a guileless confidence in human brotherhood to be crushed
+forever! I will strive to bury my disappointed hopes in my own darkened
+bosom; and that you may be saved from the experience which you have
+prepared for another, is the wish of, <i>Sir</i>, yours, &mdash;&mdash;."</p>
+
+<p>For a day or two I went about with a horrible feeling of dread and
+remorse. I opened the morning paper with trembling hands, and only
+breathed freely when I found no item headed "Suicide" in the columns. A
+year afterwards, chance threw me in the way of my broken-hearted victim.
+I declare to you I never saw a better specimen of gross animal health.
+She&mdash;no, he (on second thoughts, I won't say which)&mdash;was at an evening
+party, laughing boisterously, with a plate of chicken-salad in one hand
+and a glass of champagne in the other.</p>
+
+<p>One of my first admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me
+with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years
+before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of
+poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by
+writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,&mdash;the
+few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the
+result of excitement,&mdash;and why should he apply to me? O, there was a
+great deal of poetry in my prose, he said. My didactic paper called
+"Wait for the Wagon!" showed such a knowledge of metaphor! I looked over
+the innumerable leaves, here and there venturing the remark that "rain"
+and "shame" were not good rhymes, and that my friend's blank verse had
+now and then lines of four and six feet. "Poetic license, sir!" was the
+reply. "I thought you were aware that poets are bound to no rules!"</p>
+
+<p>What could I do with such a man? What, indeed, but to return him the
+manuscript with that combined gentleness and grace which I have
+endeavored to cultivate in my demeanor, and to suggest, in the tenderest
+way, that he should be content to write, and not publish? He got up,
+stiffened his backbone, placed his conventional hat hard upon his head,
+gave a look of mingled mortification and wrath, and hurried away without
+saying a word. That man, I assure you, will be my secret enemy to the
+day of his death. He is no doubt a literary authority in a small circle
+of equal calibre. When my name is mentioned, he will sneer down my
+rising fame, and his sneer will control the sale of half a dozen copies
+of my last volume.</p>
+
+<p>This is a business view of the subject, I grant; but then <i>I</i> have
+always followed literature with an eye to business. The position of a
+popular writer is much more independent than that of a teacher or a
+clergyman, for which reason I prefer it. The same amount of intellect,
+made available in a different way, will produce material results just as
+satisfactory. Compensation, however, is the law of the world; hence I
+must pay for my independence; and this adventure with the old gentleman
+is one of the many forms in which the payment is made.</p>
+
+<p>When the applications for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I
+gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon
+an oracular sentence from one of my most popular papers. After a while
+my replies degenerated to "Sincerely, Your Friend, Dionysius Green," and
+finally, (daily blessings come at last to be disregarded,) no
+application was favored, which did not enclose a postage-stamp. When
+some school-boy requested an autograph, "accompanied with a sentiment,"
+and forwarded slips of paper on behalf of "two other boys," I sometimes
+lost my patience, and left the letters unanswered for a month at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> a
+time. There was a man in Tennessee, just before the war, who had a
+printed circular, with a blank for the author's name; and I know of one
+author who replied to him with a printed note, and a printed address on
+the envelope, not a word of manuscript about it!</p>
+
+<p>Next in frequency are the applications for private literary
+contributions,&mdash;such as epithalamia, obituaries, addresses for lovers,
+and the like. One mourning father wished me to write an article about
+the death of his little girl, aged four months, assuring me that "her
+intellect was the astonishment of all who knew her." A young lady wished
+for something that would "overwhelm with remorse the heart of a
+gentleman who had broken off an engagement without any cause." A young
+gentleman, about to graduate, offered five dollars for an oration on
+"The Past and Probable Future History of the Human Race," long enough to
+occupy twenty minutes in speaking, and "to be made very fine and
+flowery." (I had a mind to punish this youth by complying with his
+request, to the very letter!) It is difficult to say what people won't
+write about, when they write to a Distinguished Character.</p>
+
+<p>There is a third class of correspondents, whose requests used to
+astonish me profoundly, until I surmised that their object was to
+procure an autograph in a roundabout way. One wants to know who is the
+publisher of your book; one, whether you can give the post-office
+address of Gordon Cumming or Thomas Carlyle; one, which is the best
+Latin Grammar; one, whether you know the author of that exquisite poem,
+"The Isle of Tears"; and one, perhaps, whether Fanny Forrester was the
+grandmother of Fanny Fern. And when you consider that what letters I get
+are not a tithe of what older and more widely known authors receive, you
+may form some idea of the immense number of persons engaged in this sort
+of correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>But I have not yet come to the worst. So long as you live at home,
+whether it's in the city or country, (the city would be preferable, if
+you could keep your name out of the Directory,) the number of applicants
+in person is limited; and as for the letters, we know that the
+post-office department is very badly managed, and a great many epistles
+never reach their destination. Besides, it's astonishing how soon and
+how easily an author acquires the reputation of being unapproachable. If
+he don't pour out his heart, in unlimited torrents and cascades of
+feeling, to a curious stranger, the latter goes away with the report
+that the author, personally, is "icy, reserved, uncommunicative; in the
+man, one sees nothing of his works; it is difficult to believe that that
+cold, forbidding brow conceived, those rigid, unsmiling lips uttered,
+and that dry, bloodless hand wrote, the fervid passion of"&mdash;such or such
+a book. When I read a description of myself, written in that style, I
+was furious; but I afterwards noticed that the number of my visitors
+fell off very rapidly.</p>
+
+<p>Most of us American authors, however, now go to the people, instead of
+waiting for them to come to us. And this is what I mean by coming to the
+worst. Four or five years ago, I determined to talk as well as write.
+Everybody was doing it, and well paid; nothing seemed to be requisite
+except a little distinction, which I had already acquired by my comic
+and didactic writings. There was Mr. E&mdash;&mdash; declaiming philosophy; Drs.
+B&mdash;&mdash; and C&mdash;&mdash; occupying secular pulpits; Mr. C&mdash;&mdash; inculcating loftier
+politics; Mr. T&mdash;&mdash; talking about all sorts of countries and people; Mr.
+W&mdash;&mdash; reading his essays in public; and a great many more, whom you all
+know. Why should I not also "pursue the triumph and partake the gale"? I
+found that the lecture was in most cases an essay, written in short,
+pointed sentences, and pleasantly delivered. The audience must laugh
+occasionally, and yet receive an impression strong enough to last until
+next morning. The style which, as I said before, I claim to have
+invented, was the very thing! I noticed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> further, that there was a
+great deal in the title of the lecture. It must be alliterative,
+antithetical, or, still better, paradoxical. There was profound skill in
+Artemus Ward's "Babes in the Wood." Such titles as "Doubts and Duties,"
+"Mystery and Muffins," "Here, There, and Nowhere," "The Elegance of
+Evil," "Sunshine and Shrapnel," "The Coming Cloud," "The Averted Agony,"
+and "Peeps at Peccadillos," will explain my meaning. The latter, in
+fact, was the actual title of my first lecture, which I gave with such
+signal success,&mdash;eighty-five times in one winter.</p>
+
+<p>The crowds that everywhere thronged to hear me gave me a new and
+delicious experience of popularity. How grand it was to be escorted by
+the president of the society down the central aisle, amid the rustling
+sound of turning heads, and audible whispers of "There he is! there he
+is!" And always, when the name of Dionysius Green was announced, the
+applause which followed! Then the hush of expectation, the faint smile
+and murmur coming with my first unexpected flash of humor
+(<i>unexpectedness</i> is one of my strong points), the broad laugh breaking
+out just where I intended it, and finally the solemn peroration, which
+showed that I possessed depth and earnestness as well as brilliancy!
+Well, I must say that the applauses and the fees were honestly earned. I
+did my best, and the audiences must have been satisfied, or the
+societies wouldn't have invited me over and over again to the same
+place.</p>
+
+<p>If my literary style was so admirably adapted to this new vocation, it
+was, on the other hand, a source of great annoyance. Only a small class
+was sufficiently enlightened to comprehend my true aim in inculcating
+moral lessons under a partly humorous guise. All the rest,
+unfortunately, took me to be either one thing or the other. While some
+invited me to family prayer-meetings, as the most cheering and welcome
+relief after the fatigue of speaking, the rougher characters of the
+place would claim me (on the strength of my earlier writings) as one of
+themselves, would slap me on the back, call me familiarly "Dionysius,"
+and insist on my drinking with them. Others, again, occupied a middle or
+doubtful ground; they did not consider that my personal views were
+strictly defined, and wanted to be enlightened on this or that point of
+faith. They gave me a deal of trouble. Singularly enough, all these
+classes began their attacks with the same phrase, "O, we have a right to
+ask it of you: you're a Distinguished Character, you know!"</p>
+
+<p>It is hardly necessary to say that I am of rather a frail constitution:
+so many persons have seen me, that the public is generally aware of the
+fact. A lecture of an hour and a quarter quite exhausts my nervous
+energy. Moreover, it gives me a vigorous appetite, and my two
+overpowering desires, after speaking, are, first to eat, and then to
+sleep. But it frequently happens that I am carried, perforce, to the
+house of some good but ascetic gentleman, who gives me a glass of cold
+water, talks until midnight, and then delivers me, more dead than alive,
+to my bed. I am so sensitive in regard to the relation of guest and host
+that I can do naught but submit. Astr&aelig;a, I am told, always asks for what
+she wants, and does what she feels inclined to do,&mdash;indeed, why
+shouldn't she?&mdash;but I am cast in a more timid mould.</p>
+
+<p>There are some small country places which I visit where I have other
+sufferings to undergo. Being a Distinguished Character, it would be a
+neglect and a slight if I were left alone for two minutes. And the
+people seem to think that the most delightful topic of conversation
+which they can select is&mdash;myself. How weary of myself I become! I have
+wished, a thousand times, that my popular work, "The Tin Trumpet," had
+never been written. I cannot blame the people, because there are &mdash;&mdash;
+and &mdash;&mdash;, who like nothing better than to be talked about to their
+faces, and to take the principal part in the conversation. Of course the
+people think, in regard to lecturers, <i>ex uno disce omnes</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In travelling by rail, the same thing happens over and over. When I
+leave a town in the morning, some one is sure to enter the car and greet
+me in a loud voice: "How are you, Mr. Green? What a fine lecture you
+gave us last night!" Then the other travellers turn and look at me,
+listen to catch my words, and tell the new-comers at every station,
+until I'm afraid to take a nap for fear of snoring, afraid to read lest
+somebody should be scandalized at my novel, or to lunch lest I should be
+reported as a drunkard for taking a sip of sherry (the physician
+prescribes it) from a pocket-flask. At such times I envy the fellow in
+homespun on the seat in front of me, who loafs, yawns, eats, and drinks
+as he pleases, and nobody gives him a second glance.</p>
+
+<p>When I am not recognized, I sometimes meet with another experience,
+which was a little annoying until I became accustomed to it. I am the
+subject of very unembarrassed conversation, and hear things said of me
+that sometimes flatter and sometimes sting. It is true that I have
+learned many curious and unsuspected facts concerning my birth,
+parentage, history, and opinions; but, on the other hand, I am
+humiliated by the knowledge of what texture a great deal of my
+reputation is made. Sometimes I am even confounded with Graves, whom, as
+an author, I detest; my "Tin Trumpet" being ascribed to him, and his
+"Drippings from the Living Rock" being admired as mine! At such times,
+it is very difficult to preserve my incognito. I have wondered that
+nobody ever reads the truth in my indignant face.</p>
+
+<p>As a consequence of all these trials, I sometimes become impatient,
+inaccessible to compliment, and&mdash;since the truth must be told&mdash;a little
+ill-tempered. My temperament, as my family and friends know, is of an
+unusually genial and amiable quality, and I never snub an innocent but
+indiscreet admirer without afterwards repenting of my rudeness. I have
+often, indeed, a double motive for repentance; for those snubs carry
+their operation far beyond their recipients, and come back to me
+sometimes, after months or even years, in "Book Notices," or other
+newspaper articles. Thus the serene path of literature, which the
+aspiring youth imagines to be so fair and sunny, overspread with the
+mellowest ideal tints, becomes rough and cloudy. No doubt I am to blame:
+possibly I am rightly treated: I "belong to the public," I am told with
+endless congratulatory iteration, and therefore I ought not to feel the
+difference between the public's original humoring of my moods, and my
+present enforced humoring of its moods. But I <i>do</i> feel it, somehow. I
+have of late entertained the suspicion, that I am not wholly the
+creation of popular favor. "The public," I am sure, never furnished me
+with my comic or my lively-serious vein of writing. If either of those
+veins had not been found good, they would not have encouraged me to work
+them. I declare, boldly, that I give an ample return for what I get, and
+when I satisfy curiosity or yield to unreasonable demands upon my
+patience and good-humor, it is "to boot."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it is a generous public, on the whole, and gives trouble
+only through thoughtlessness, not malice. It delights in its favorites,
+because imagining that they so intensely enjoy its favor. And don't we,
+after all? (I say <i>we</i> purposely, and my publisher will tell you why.)
+Now that I have written away my vexation, I recognize very clearly that
+my object in writing this article is apology rather than complaint. All
+whom I have ever rudely treated will now comprehend the unfortunate
+circumstances under which the act occurred. If some one should visit me
+to-morrow, I have no doubt he will write: "Mr. Dionysius Green is all,
+and more than all, one would anticipate from reading his charming works.
+Benevolence beams from his brow, fancy sparkles from his eyes, and
+genial sympathy with all mankind sits enthroned upon his lips. It was a
+rare pleasure to me to listen to his conversation, and I could but wish
+that the many thousands of his admirers might enjoy the privilege of an
+interview with so Distinguished a Character!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_BOBOLINKS" id="THE_BOBOLINKS"></a>THE BOBOLINKS.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When Nature had made all her birds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And had no cares to think on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She gave a rippling laugh&mdash;and out<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There flew a Bobolinkon.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She laughed again,&mdash;out flew a mate.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A breeze of Eden bore them<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Across the fields of Paradise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The sunrise reddening o'er them.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Incarnate sport and holiday,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They flew and sang forever;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their souls through June were all in tune,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Their wings were weary never.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The blithest song of breezy farms,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Quaintest of field-note flavors,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Exhaustless fount of trembling trills<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And demisemiquavers.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Their tribe, still drunk with air and light<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And perfume of the meadow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Go reeling up and down the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In sunshine and in shadow.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One springs from out the dew-wet grass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Another follows after;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The morn is thrilling with their songs<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And peals of fairy laughter.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">From out the marshes and the brook,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They set the tall reeds swinging,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And meet and frolic in the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Half prattling and half singing.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When morning winds sweep meadow lands<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In green and russet billows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And toss the lonely elm-tree's boughs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And silver all the willows,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I see you buffeting the breeze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or with its motion swaying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your notes half drowned against the wind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or down the current playing.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When far away o'er grassy flats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where the thick wood commences,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The white-sleeved mowers look like specks<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beyond the zigzag fences,<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And noon is hot, and barn-roofs gleam<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">White in the pale-blue distance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I hear the saucy minstrels still<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In chattering persistence.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When Eve her domes of opal fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Piles round the blue horizon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or thunder rolls from hill to hill<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A Kyrie Eleison,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Still, merriest of the merry birds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Your sparkle is unfading,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pied harlequins of June, no end<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of song and masquerading.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What cadences of bubbling mirth<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Too quick for bar or rhythm!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What ecstasies, too full to keep<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Coherent measure with them!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O could I share, without champagne<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or muscadel, your frolic,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The glad delirium of your joy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Your fun un-apostolic,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Your drunken jargon through the fields,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Your bobolinkish gabble,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your fine anacreontic glee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Your tipsy reveller's babble!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nay,&mdash;let me not profane such joy<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With similes of folly,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No wine of earth could waken songs<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So delicately jolly!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">O boundless self-contentment, voiced<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In flying air-born bubbles!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O joy that mocks our sad unrest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And drowns our earth-born troubles!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hope springs with you: I dread no more<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Despondency and dullness;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Good Supreme can never fail<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That gives such perfect fullness.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The Life that floods the happy fields<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With song and light and color<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will shape our lives to richer states,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And heap our measures fuller.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="GRIFFITH_GAUNT_OR_JEALOUSY" id="GRIFFITH_GAUNT_OR_JEALOUSY"></a>GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.</h2>
+
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XXXIX.</h3>
+
+<p>She recoiled with a violent shudder at first; and hid her face with one
+hand. Then she gradually stole a horror-stricken side-glance.</p>
+
+<p>She had not looked at it a moment, when she uttered a loud cry, and
+pointed at its feet with quivering hand.</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">The shoes! the shoes!&mdash;It is not my Griffith</span>."</p>
+
+<p>With this she fell into violent hysterics, and was carried out of the
+room at Houseman's earnest entreaty.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as she was gone, Mr. Houseman, being freed from his fear that
+his client would commit herself irretrievably, recovered a show of
+composure, and his wits went keenly to work.</p>
+
+<p>"On behalf of the accused," said he, "I admit the suicide of some person
+unknown, wearing heavy hobnailed shoes; probably one of the lower order
+of people."</p>
+
+<p>This adroit remark produced some little effect, notwithstanding the
+strong feeling against the accused.</p>
+
+<p>The coroner inquired if there were any bodily marks by which the remains
+could be identified.</p>
+
+<p>"My master had a long black mole on his forehead," suggested Caroline
+Ryder.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis here!" cried a juryman, bending over the remains.</p>
+
+<p>And now they all gathered in great excitement round the <i>corpus
+delicti</i>; and there, sure enough, was a long black mole.</p>
+
+<p>Then was there a buzz of pity for Griffith Gaunt, followed by a stern
+murmur of execration.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen," said the coroner solemnly, "behold in this the finger of
+Heaven. The poor gentleman may well have put off his boots, since, it
+seems, he left his horse; but he could not take from his forehead his
+natal sign; and that, by God's will, hath strangely escaped mutilation,
+and revealed a most foul deed. We must now do our duty, gentlemen,
+without respect of persons."</p>
+
+<p>A warrant was then issued for the apprehension of Thomas Leicester. And,
+that same night, Mrs. Gaunt left Hernshaw in her own chariot between two
+constables, and escorted by armed yeomen.</p>
+
+<p>Her proud head was bowed almost to her knees, and her streaming eyes
+hidden in her lovely hands. For why? A mob accompanied her for miles,
+shouting, "Murderess!&mdash;Bloody Papist!&mdash;Hast done to death the kindliest
+gentleman in Cumberland. We'll all come to see thee hanged.&mdash;Fair face
+but foul heart!"&mdash;and groaning, hissing, and cursing, and indeed only
+kept from violence by the escort.</p>
+
+<p>And so they took that poor proud lady and lodged her in Carlisle jail.</p>
+
+<p>She was <i>enceinte</i> into the bargain. By the man she was to be hanged for
+murdering.</p>
+
+
+<h3>CHAPTER XL.</h3>
+
+<p>The county was against her, with some few exceptions. Sir George Neville
+and Mr. Houseman stood stoutly by her.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George's influence and money obtained her certain comforts in jail;
+and, in that day, the law of England was so far respected in a jail that
+untried prisoners were not thrown into cells, nor impeded, as they now
+are, in preparing their defence.</p>
+
+<p>Her two stanch friends visited her every day, and tried to keep her
+heart up.</p>
+
+<p>But they could not do it. She was in a state of dejection bordering upon
+lethargy.</p>
+
+<p>"If he is dead," said she, "what matters it? If, by God's mercy, he is
+alive still, he will not let me die for want of a word from him.
+Impatience hath been my bane. Now, I say,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> God's will be done. I am
+weary of the world."</p>
+
+<p>Houseman tried every argument to rouse her out of this desperate frame
+of mind; but in vain.</p>
+
+<p>It ran its course, and then, behold, it passed away like a cloud, and
+there came a keen desire to live and defeat her accusers.</p>
+
+<p>She made Houseman write out all the evidence against her; and she
+studied it by day, and thought of it by night, and often surprised both
+her friends by the acuteness of her remarks.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Mr. Atkins discontinued his advertisements. It was Houseman, who now
+filled every paper with notices informing Griffith Gaunt of his
+accession to fortune, and entreating him for that, and other weighty
+reasons, to communicate in confidence with his old friend, John
+Houseman, attorney at law.</p>
+
+<p>Houseman was too wary to invite him to appear and save his wife; for, in
+that case, he feared the Crown would use his advertisements as evidence
+at the trial, should Griffith not appear.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, Houseman relied more upon certain <i>lacun&aelig;</i> in the evidence,
+and the absence of all marks of violence, than upon any hope that
+Griffith might be alive.</p>
+
+<p>The assizes drew near, and no fresh light broke in upon this mysterious
+case.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaunt lay in her bed at night, and thought and thought.</p>
+
+<p>Now the female understanding has sometimes remarkable power under such
+circumstances. By degrees Truth flashes across it, like lightning in the
+dark.</p>
+
+<p>After many such nightly meditations, Mrs. Gaunt sent one day for Sir
+George Neville and Mr. Houseman, and addressed them as follows:&mdash;"I
+believe he is alive, and that I can guess where he is at this moment."</p>
+
+<p>Both the gentlemen started, and looked amazed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sirs; so sure as we sit here, he is now at a little inn in
+Lancashire, called the 'Packhorse,' with a woman he calls his wife."
+And, with this, her face was scarlet, and her eyes flashed their old
+fire.</p>
+
+<p>She exacted a solemn promise of secrecy from them, and then she told
+them all she had learned from Thomas Leicester.</p>
+
+<p>"And so now," said she, "I believe you can save my life, if you think it
+is worth saving." And with this, she began to cry bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>But Houseman, the practical, had no patience with the pangs of love
+betrayed, and jealousy, and such small deer, in a client whose life was
+at stake. "Great Heaven! madam," said he, roughly: "why did you not tell
+me this before?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I am not a man&mdash;to go and tell everything, all at once," sobbed
+Mrs. Gaunt. "Besides, I wanted to shield his good name, whose dear life
+they pretend I have taken."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as she recovered her composure, she begged Sir George Neville to
+ride to the "Packhorse" for her. Sir George assented eagerly, but asked
+how he was to find it. "I have thought of that, too," said she. "His
+black horse has been to and fro. Ride that horse into Lancashire, and
+give him his head: ten to one but he takes you to the place, or where
+you may hear of it. If not, go to Lancaster, and ask about the
+'Packhorse.' He wrote to me from Lancaster: see." And she showed him the
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George embraced with ardor this opportunity of serving her. "I'll be
+at Hernshaw in one hour," said he, "and ride the black horse south at
+once."</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," said Houseman; "but would it not be better for me to go? As
+a lawyer, I may be more able to cope with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay," said Mrs. Gaunt, "Sir George is young and handsome. If he manages
+well, she will tell him more than she will you. All I beg of him is to
+drop the chevalier for this once, and see women with a woman's eyes and
+not a man's,&mdash;see them as they are. Do not go telling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> a creature of
+this kind that she has had my money, as well as my husband, and ought to
+pity me lying here in prison. Keep me out of her sight as much as you
+can. Whether Griffith hath deceived her or not, you will never raise in
+her any feeling but love for him, and hatred for his lawful wife. Dress
+like a yeoman; go quietly, and lodge in the house a day or two; begin by
+flattering her; and then get from her when she saw him last, or heard
+from him. But indeed I fear you will surprise him with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Fear?" exclaimed Sir George.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, hope, then," said the lady; and a tear trickled down her face in
+a moment. "But if you do, promise me, on your honor as a gentleman, not
+to affront him. For I know you think him a villain."</p>
+
+<p>"A d&mdash;&mdash;d villain, saving your presence."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, you have said it to me. Now promise me to say naught to
+<i>him</i>, but just this: 'Rose Gaunt's mother, she lies in Carlisle jail,
+to be tried for her life for murdering you. She begs of you not to let
+her die publicly upon the scaffold; but quietly at home, of her broken
+heart.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Write it," said Sir George, with the tears in his eyes, "that I may
+just put it in his hand; for I can never utter your sweet words to such
+a monster as he is."</p>
+
+<p>Armed with this appeal, and several minute instructions, which it is
+needless to particularize here, that stanch friend rode into Lancashire.</p>
+
+<p>And next day the black horse justified his mistress's sagacity, and his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed all along to know where he was going, and late in the
+afternoon he turned off the road on to a piece of green: and Sir George,
+with beating heart, saw right before him the sign of the "Packhorse,"
+and, on coming nearer, the words</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">THOMAS LEICESTER.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He dismounted at the door, and asked if he could have a bed.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Vint said yes; and supper into the bargain, if he liked.</p>
+
+<p>He ordered a substantial supper directly.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Vint saw at once it was a good customer, and showed him into the
+parlor.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down by the fire. But the moment she retired, he got up and made
+a circuit of the house, looking quietly into every window, to see if he
+could catch a glance of Griffith Gaunt.</p>
+
+<p>There were no signs of him; and Sir George returned to his parlor
+heavy-hearted. One hope, the greatest of all, had been defeated
+directly. Still, it was just possible that Griffith might be away on
+temporary business.</p>
+
+<p>In this faint hope Sir George strolled about till his supper was ready
+for him.</p>
+
+<p>When he had eaten his supper, he rang the bell, and, taking advantage of
+a common custom, insisted on the landlord, Thomas Leicester, taking a
+glass with him.</p>
+
+<p>"Thomas Leicester!" said the girl. "He is not at home. But I'll send
+Master Vint."</p>
+
+<p>Old Vint came in, and readily accepted an invitation to drink his
+guest's health.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George found him loquacious, and soon extracted from him that his
+daughter Mercy was Leicester's wife, that Leicester was gone on a
+journey, and that Mercy was in care for him. "Leastways," said he, "she
+is very dull, and cries at times when her mother speaks of him; but she
+is too close to say much."</p>
+
+<p>All this puzzled Sir George Neville sorely.</p>
+
+<p>But greater surprises were in store.</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, after breakfast, the servant came and told him Dame
+Leicester desired to see him.</p>
+
+<p>He started at that, but put on nonchalance, and said he was at her
+service.</p>
+
+<p>He was ushered into another parlor, and there he found a grave, comely
+young woman, seated working, with a child on the floor beside her. She
+rose quietly; he bowed low and respectfully; she blushed faintly; but,
+with every appearance of self-possession,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> courtesied to him; then eyed
+him point-blank a single moment, and requested him to be seated.</p>
+
+<p>"I hear, sir," said she, "you did ask my father many questions last
+night. May I ask you one?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir George colored, but bowed assent.</p>
+
+<p>"From whom had you the black horse you ride?"</p>
+
+<p>Now, if Sir George had not been a veracious man, he would have been
+caught directly. But, although he saw at once the oversight he had
+committed, he replied, "I had him of a lady in Cumberland, one Mistress
+Gaunt."</p>
+
+<p>Mercy Vint trembled. "No doubt," said she, softly. "Excuse my question:
+you shall understand that the horse is well known here."</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," said Sir George, "if you admire the horse, he is at your
+service for twenty pounds, though indeed he is worth more."</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you, sir," said Mercy; "I have no desire for the horse
+whatever. And be pleased to excuse my curiosity: you must think me
+impertinent."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, madam," said Sir George, "I consider nothing impertinent that hath
+procured me the pleasure of an interview with you."</p>
+
+<p>He then, as directed by Mrs. Gaunt, proceeded to flatter the mother and
+the child, and exerted those powers of pleasing which had made him
+irresistible in society.</p>
+
+<p>Here, however, he found they went a very little way. Mercy did not even
+smile. She cast out of her dove-like eyes a gentle, humble, reproachful
+glance, as much as to say, "What! do I seem so vain a creature as to
+believe all this?"</p>
+
+<p>Sir George himself had tact and sensibility; and by and by became
+discontented with the part he was playing, under those meek, honest
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause; and, as her sex have a wonderful art of reading the
+face, Mercy looked at him steadily, and said, "<i>Yes</i>, sir, 'tis best to
+be straightforward, especially with women-folk."</p>
+
+<p>Before he could recover this little facer, she said, quietly, "What is
+your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"George Neville."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, George Neville," said Mercy, very slowly and softly, "when you
+have a mind to tell me what you came here for, and who sent you, you
+will find me in this little room. I seldom leave it now. I beg you to
+speak your errand to none but me." And she sighed deeply.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George bowed low, and retired to collect his wits. He had come here
+strongly prepossessed against Mercy. But, instead of a vulgar, shallow
+woman, whom he was to surprise into confession, he encountered a
+soft-eyed Puritan, all unpretending dignity, grace, propriety, and
+sagacity.</p>
+
+<p>"Flatter her!" said he, to himself. "I might as well flatter an iceberg.
+Outwit her! I feel like a child beside her."</p>
+
+<p>He strolled about in a brown study, not knowing what to do.</p>
+
+<p>She had given him a fair opening. She had invited him to tell the truth.
+But he was afraid to take her at her word; and yet what was the use to
+persist in what his own eyes told him was the wrong course?</p>
+
+<p>Whilst he hesitated, and debated within himself, a trifling incident
+turned the scale.</p>
+
+<p>A poor woman came begging, with her child, and was received rather
+roughly by Harry Vint. "Pass on, good woman," said he, "we want no
+tramps here."</p>
+
+<p>Then a window was opened on the ground floor, and Mercy beckoned the
+woman. Sir George flattened himself against the wall, and listened to
+the two talking.</p>
+
+<p>Mercy examined the woman gently, but shrewdly, and elicited a tale of
+genuine distress. Sir George then saw her hand out to the woman some
+warm flannel for herself, a piece of stuff for the child, a large piece
+of bread, and a sixpence.</p>
+
+<p>He also caught sight of Mercy's dove-like eyes as she bestowed her alms,
+and they were lit with an inward lustre.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"She cannot be an ill woman," said Sir George. "I'll e'en go by my own
+eyes and judgment. After all, Mrs. Gaunt has never seen her, and I
+have."</p>
+
+<p>He went and knocked at Mercy's door.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in," said a mild voice.</p>
+
+<p>Neville entered, and said, abruptly, and with great emotion, "Madam, I
+see you can feel for the unhappy; so I take my own way now, and appeal
+to your pity. I <i>have</i> come to speak to you on the saddest business."</p>
+
+<p>"You come from <i>him</i>," said Mercy, closing her lips tight; but her bosom
+heaved. Her heart and her judgment grappled like wrestlers that moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, madam," said Sir George, "I come from <i>her</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Mercy knew in a moment who "her" must be.</p>
+
+<p>She looked scared, and drew back with manifest signs of repulsion.</p>
+
+<p>The movement did not escape Sir George: it alarmed him. He remembered
+what Mrs. Gaunt had said,&mdash;that this woman would be sure to hate Gaunt's
+lawful wife. But it was too late to go back. He did the next best thing,
+he rushed on.</p>
+
+<p>He threw himself on his knees before Mercy Vint.</p>
+
+<p>"O madam," he cried, piteously, "do not set your heart against the most
+unhappy lady in England. If you did but know her, her nobleness, her
+misery! Before you steel yourself against me, her friend, let me ask you
+one question. Do you know where Mrs. Gaunt is at this moment?"</p>
+
+<p>Mercy answered coldly, "How should I know where she is?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, she lies in Carlisle jail."</p>
+
+<p>"She&mdash;lies&mdash;in Carlisle jail?" repeated Mercy, looking all confused.</p>
+
+<p>"They accuse her of murdering her husband."</p>
+
+<p>Mercy uttered a scream, and, catching her child up off the floor, began
+to rock herself and moan over it.</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no," cried Sir George, "she is innocent, she is innocent."</p>
+
+<p>"What is that to <i>me</i>?" cried Mercy, wildly. "He is murdered, he is
+dead, and my child an orphan." And so she went on moaning and rocking
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>"But I tell you he is not dead at all," cried Sir George. "'Tis all a
+mistake. When did you see him last?"</p>
+
+<p>"More than six weeks ago."</p>
+
+<p>"I mean, when did you hear from him last?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never, since that day."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George groaned aloud at this intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>And Mercy, who heard him groan, was heart-broken. She accused herself of
+Griffith's death. "'T was I who drove him from me," she said. "'T was I
+who bade him go back to his lawful wife; and the wretch hated him. I
+sent him to his death." Her grief was wild, and deep. She could not hear
+Sir George's arguments.</p>
+
+<p>But presently she said, sternly, "What does that woman say for herself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," said Sir George, dejectedly, "Heaven knows you are in no
+condition to fathom a mystery that hath puzzled wiser heads than yours
+or mine; and I am little able to lay the tale before you fairly; for
+your grief, it moves me deeply, and I could curse myself for putting the
+matter to you so bluntly and so uncouthly. Permit me to retire a while
+and compose my own spirits for the task I have undertaken too rashly."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, George Neville," said Mercy, "stay you there. Only give me a
+moment to draw my breath."</p>
+
+<p>She struggled hard for a little composure, and, after a shower of tears,
+she hung her head over the chair like a crushed thing, but made him a
+sign of attention.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George told the story as fairly as he could; only of course his bias
+was in favor of Mrs. Gaunt; but as Mercy's bias was against her, this
+brought the thing nearly square.</p>
+
+<p>When he came to the finding of the body, Mercy was seized with a deadly
+faintness; and though she did not become insensible, yet she was in no
+condition to judge, or even to comprehend.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Sir George was moved with pity, and would have called for help; but she
+shook her head. So then he sprinkled water on her face, and slapped her
+hand; and a beautifully moulded hand it was.</p>
+
+<p>When she got a little better she sobbed faintly, and sobbing thanked
+him, and begged him to go on.</p>
+
+<p>"My mind is stronger than my heart," she said. "I'll hear it all, though
+it kill me where I sit."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George went on, and, to avoid repetition, I must ask the reader to
+understand that he left out nothing whatever which has been hitherto
+related in these pages; and, in fact, told her one or two little things
+that I have omitted.</p>
+
+<p>When he had done, she sat quite still a minute or two, pale as a statue.</p>
+
+<p>Then she turned to Neville, and said, solemnly, "You wish to know the
+truth in this dark matter: for dark it is in very sooth."</p>
+
+<p>Neville was much impressed by her manner, and answered, respectfully,
+Yes, he desired to know,&mdash;by all means.</p>
+
+<p>"Then take my hand," said Mercy, "and kneel down with me."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George looked surprised, but obeyed, and kneeled down beside her,
+with his hand in hers.</p>
+
+<p>There was a long pause, and then took place a transformation.</p>
+
+<p>The dove-like eyes were lifted to heaven and gleamed like opals with an
+inward and celestial light; the comely face shone with a higher beauty,
+and the rich voice rose in ardent supplication.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou God, to whom all hearts be known, and no secrets hid from thine
+eye, look down now on thy servant in sore trouble, that putteth her
+trust in thee. Give wisdom to the simple this day, and understanding to
+the lowly. Thou that didst reveal to babes and sucklings the great
+things that were hidden from the wise, O show us the truth in this dark
+matter: enlighten us by thy spirit, for His dear sake who suffered more
+sorrows than I suffer now. Amen. Amen."</p>
+
+<p>Then she looked at Neville; and he said "Amen," with all his heart, and
+the tears in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He had never heard real live prayer before. Here the little hand gripped
+his hard, as she wrestled; and the heart seemed to rise out of the bosom
+and fly to Heaven on the sublime and thrilling voice.</p>
+
+<p>They rose, and she sat down; but it seemed as if her eyes once raised to
+Heaven in prayer could not come down again: they remained fixed and
+angelic, and her lips still moved in supplication.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George Neville, though a loose liver, was no scoffer. He was smitten
+with reverence for this inspired countenance, and retired, bowing low
+and obsequiously.</p>
+
+<p>He took a long walk, and thought it all over. One thing was clear, and
+consoling. He felt sure he had done wisely to disobey Mrs. Gaunt's
+instructions, and make a friend of Mercy, instead of trying to set his
+wits against hers. Ere he returned to the "Packhorse" he had determined
+to take another step in the right direction. He did not like to agitate
+her with another interview, so soon. But he wrote her a little letter.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Madam</span>,&mdash;When I came here, I did not know you; and therefore I
+feared to trust you too far. But, now I do know you for the
+best woman in England, I take the open way with you.</p>
+
+<p>"Know that Mrs. Gaunt said the man would be here with you; and
+she charged me with a few written lines to him. She would be
+angry if she knew that I had shown them to any other. Yet I
+take on me to show them to you; for I believe you are wiser
+than any of us, if the truth were known. I do therefore entreat
+you to read these lines, and tell me whether you think the hand
+that wrote them can have shed the blood of him to whom they are
+writ.</p></div>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I am, madam, with profound respect,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Your grateful and very humble servant,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">"<span class="smcap">George Neville</span>."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>He very soon received a line in reply, written in a clear and beautiful
+handwriting.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Mercy Vint sends you her duty; and she will speak to you at
+nine of the clock to-morrow morning. Pray for light."</p></div>
+
+<p>At the appointed time, Sir George found her working with her needle. His
+letter lay on a table before her.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and courtesied to him, and called the servant to take away the
+child for a while. She went with her to the door and kissed the bairn
+several times at parting, as if he was going away for good. "I'm loath
+to let him go," said she to Neville; "but it weakens a mother's mind to
+have her babe in the room,&mdash;takes her attention off each moment. Pray
+you be seated. Well, sir, I have read these lines of Mistress Gaunt, and
+wept over them. Methinks I had not done so, were they cunningly devised.
+Also I lay all night, and thought."</p>
+
+<p>"That is just what she does."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt, sir; and the upshot is, I don't <i>feel</i> as if he was dead.
+Thank God."</p>
+
+<p>"That is something," said Neville. But he could not help thinking it was
+very little; especially to produce in a court of justice.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," said she, thoughtfully, "you say that the real Thomas
+Leicester was seen thereabouts as well as my Thomas Leicester. Then
+answer me one little question. What had the real Thomas Leicester on his
+feet that night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, I know not," was the half-careless reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Bethink you. 'Tis a question that must have been often put in your
+hearing."</p>
+
+<p>"Begging your pardon, it was never put at all; nor do I see&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What, not at the inquest?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"That is very strange. What, so many wise heads have bent over this
+riddle, and not one to ask how was yon pedler shod!"</p>
+
+<p>"Madam," said Sir George, "our minds were fixed upon the fate of Gaunt.
+Many did ask how was the pedler armed, but none how was he shod."</p>
+
+<p>"Hath he been seen since?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not he; and that hath an ugly look; for the constables are out after
+him with hue and cry; but he is not to be found."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said Mercy, "I must e'en answer my own question. I do know how
+that pedler was shod. <span class="smcap">With hobnailed shoes</span>."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George bounded from his chair. One great ray of daylight broke in
+upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," said Mercy, "she was right. Women do see clearer in some things
+than men. The pair went from my house to hers. He you call Griffith
+Gaunt had on a new pair of boots; and by the same token 't was I did pay
+for them, and there is the receipt in that cupboard: he you call Thomas
+Leicester went hence in hobnailed shoes. I think the body they found was
+the body of Thomas Leicester, the pedler. May God have mercy on his poor
+unprepared soul."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George uttered a joyful exclamation. But the next moment he had a
+doubt. "Ay, but," said he, "you forget the mole! 'T was on that they
+built."</p>
+
+<p>"I forget naught," said Mercy, calmly. "The pedler had a black mole over
+his left temple. He showed it me in this very room. You have found the
+body of Thomas Leicester, and Griffith Gaunt is hiding from the law that
+he hath broken. He is afeared of her and her friends, if he shows his
+face in Cumberland; he is afeared of my folk, if he be seen in
+Lancashire. Ah, Thomas, as if I would let them harm thee."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George Neville walked to and fro in grand excitement. "O blessed day
+that I came hither! Madam, you are an angel. You will save an innocent,
+broken-hearted lady from death and dishonor. Your good heart and rare
+wit have read in a moment the dark riddle that hath puzzled a county."</p>
+
+<p>"George," said Mercy, gravely, "you have gotten the wrong end of the
+stick.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> The wise in their own conceit are blinded. In Cumberland, where
+all this befell, they went not to God for light, as you and I did,
+George."</p>
+
+<p>In saying this, she gave him her hand to celebrate their success.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed it devoutly, and owned afterward that it was the proudest
+moment of his life, when that sweet Puritan gave him her neat hand so
+cordially, with a pressure so gentle yet frank.</p>
+
+<p>And now came the question how they were to make a Cumberland jury see
+this matter as they saw it.</p>
+
+<p>He asked her would she come to the trial as a witness?</p>
+
+<p>At that she drew back with manifest repugnance.</p>
+
+<p>"My shame would be public. I must tell who I am; and what. A ruined
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Say rather an injured saint. You have nothing to be ashamed of. All
+good men would feel for you."</p>
+
+<p>Mercy shook her head. "Ay, but the women. Shame is shame with us. Right
+or wrong goes for little. Nay, I hope to do better for you than that. I
+must find <i>him</i>, and send him to deliver her. 'Tis his only chance of
+happiness."</p>
+
+<p>She then asked him if he would draw up an advertisement of quite a
+different kind from those he had described to her.</p>
+
+<p>He assented, and between them they concocted the following:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"If Thomas Leicester, who went from the 'Packhorse' two months
+ago, will come thither at once, Mercy will be much beholden to
+him, and tell him strange things that have befallen."</p></div>
+
+<p>Sir George then, at her request, rode over to Lancaster, and inserted
+the above in the county paper, and also in a small sheet that was issued
+in the city three times a week. He had also handbills to the same effect
+printed, and sent into Cumberland and Westmoreland. Finally, he sent a
+copy to his man of business in London, with orders to insert it in all
+the journals.</p>
+
+<p>Then he returned to the "Packhorse," and told Mercy what he had done.</p>
+
+<p>The next day he bade her farewell, and away for Carlisle. It was a two
+days' journey. He reached Carlisle in the evening, and went all glowing
+to Mrs. Gaunt. "Madam," said he, "be of good cheer. I bless the day I
+went to see her; she is an angel of wit and goodness."</p>
+
+<p>He then related to her, in glowing terms, most that had passed between
+Mercy and him. But, to his surprise, Mrs. Gaunt wore a cold, forbidding
+air.</p>
+
+<p>"This is all very well," said she. "But 't will avail me little unless
+<i>he</i> comes before the judge and clears me; and she will never let him do
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, that she will,&mdash;if she can find him."</p>
+
+<p>"If she can find him? How simple you are!"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, madam, not so simple but I can tell a good woman from a bad one,
+and a true from a false."</p>
+
+<p>"What! when you are in love with her? Not if you were the wisest of your
+sex."</p>
+
+<p>"In love with her?" cried Sir George; and colored high.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," said the lady. "Think you I cannot tell? Don't deceive yourself.
+You have gone and fallen in love with her. At your years! Not that 'tis
+any business of mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, madam," said Sir George, stiffly, "say what you please on that
+score; but at least welcome my good news."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaunt begged him to excuse her petulance, and thanked him kindly
+for all he had just done. But the next moment she rose from her chair in
+great agitation, and burst out, "I'd as lief die as owe anything to that
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George remonstrated. "Why hate her? She does not hate you."</p>
+
+<p>"O, yes, she does. 'Tis not in nature she should do any other."</p>
+
+<p>"Her acts prove the contrary."</p>
+
+<p>"Her acts! She has <i>done</i> nothing, but make fair promises; and that has
+blinded you. Women of this sort are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> very cunning, and never show their
+real characters to a man. No more; prithee mention not her name to me.
+It makes me ill. I know he is with her at this moment Ah, let me die,
+and be forgotten, since I am no more beloved."</p>
+
+<p>The voice was sad and weary now, and the tears ran fast.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Sir George was moved and melted, and set himself to flatter and
+console this impracticable lady, who hated her best friend in this sore
+strait, for being what she was herself, a woman; and was much less
+annoyed at being hanged than at not being loved.</p>
+
+<p>When she was a little calmer, he left her, and rode off to Houseman.
+That worthy was delighted.</p>
+
+<p>"Get her to swear to those hobnailed shoes," said he, "and we shall
+shake them." He then let Sir George know that he had obtained private
+information which he would use in cross-examining a principal witness
+for the crown. "However," he added, "do not deceive yourself, nothing
+can make the prisoner really safe but the appearance of Griffith Gaunt.
+He has such strong motives for coming to light. He is heir to a fortune,
+and his wife is accused of murdering him. The jury will never believe he
+is alive till they see him. That man's prolonged disappearance is
+hideous. It turns my blood cold when I think of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Do not despair on that score," said Neville. "I believe our good angel
+will produce him."</p>
+
+<p>Three days only before the assizes, came the long-expected letter from
+Mercy Vint. Sir George tore it open, but bitter was his disappointment.
+The letter merely said that Griffith had not appeared in answer to her
+advertisements, and she was sore grieved and perplexed.</p>
+
+<p>There were two postscripts, each on a little piece of paper.</p>
+
+<p>First postscript, in a tremulous hand, "Pray."</p>
+
+<p>Second postscript, in a firm hand, "Drain the water."</p>
+
+<p>Houseman shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "Drain the water? Let the
+crown do that. We should but fish up more trouble. And prayers quo' she!
+'Tis not prayers we want, but evidence."</p>
+
+<p>He sent his clerk off to travel post night and day, and subp&oelig;na
+Mercy, and bring her back with him to the trial. She was to have every
+comfort on the road, and be treated like a duchess.</p>
+
+<p>The evening before the assizes, Mrs. Gaunt's apartments were Mr.
+Houseman's head-quarters, and messages were coming and going all day, on
+matters connected with the defence.</p>
+
+<p>Just at sunset, up rattled a post-chaise, and the clerk got out and came
+haggard and bloodshot before his employer. "The witness has disappeared,
+sir. Left home last Tuesday, with her child, and has never been seen nor
+heard of since."</p>
+
+<p>Here was a terrible blow. They all paled under it: it seriously
+diminished the chances of an acquittal.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Gaunt bore it nobly. She seemed to rise under it.</p>
+
+<p>She turned to Sir George Neville, with a sweet smile. "The noble heart
+sees base things noble. No wonder then an artful woman deluded <i>you</i>. He
+has left England with her, and condemned me to the gallows, in cold
+blood. So be it. I shall defend myself."</p>
+
+<p>She then sat down with Mr. Houseman, and went through the written case
+he had prepared for her, and showed him notes she had taken of full a
+hundred criminal trials great and small.</p>
+
+<p>While they were putting their heads together, Sir George sat in a brown
+study, and uttered not a word. Presently he got up a little brusquely,
+and said, "I'm going to Hernshaw."</p>
+
+<p>"What, at this time of night? What to do?"</p>
+
+<p>"To obey my orders. To drain the mere."</p>
+
+<p>"And who could have ordered you to drain my mere?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy Vint."</p>
+
+<p>Sir George uttered this in a very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> curious way, half ashamed, half
+resolute, and retired before Mrs. Gaunt could vent in speech the
+surprise and indignation that fired her eye.</p>
+
+<p>Houseman implored her not to heed Sir George and his vagaries, but to
+bend her whole mind on those approved modes of defence with which he had
+supplied her.</p>
+
+<p>Being now alone with her, he no longer concealed his great anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>"We have lost an invaluable witness in that woman," said he. "I was mad
+to think she would come."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaunt shivered with repugnance. "I would not have her come, for all
+the world," said she. "For Heaven's sake never mention her name to me. I
+want help from none but friends. Send Mrs. Houseman to me in the
+morning; and do not distress yourself so. I shall defend myself far
+better than you think. I have not studied a hundred trials for naught."</p>
+
+<p>Thus the prisoner cheered up her attorney, and soon after insisted on
+his going home to bed; for she saw he was worn out by his exertions.</p>
+
+<p>And now she was alone.</p>
+
+<p>All was silent.</p>
+
+<p>A few short hours, and she was to be tried for her life: tried, not by
+the All-wise Judge, but by fallible men, and under a system most
+unfavorable to the accused.</p>
+
+<p>Worse than all this, she was a Papist; and, as ill-luck would have it,
+since her imprisonment an alarm had been raised that the Pretender
+meditated another invasion. This report had set jurists very much
+against all the Romanists in the country, and had already perverted
+justice in one or two cases, especially in the North.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaunt knew all this, and trembled at the peril to come.</p>
+
+<p>She spent the early part of the night in studying her defence. Then she
+laid it quite aside, and prayed long and fervently. Towards morning she
+fell asleep from exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>When she awoke, Mrs. Houseman was sitting by her bedside, looking at
+her, and crying.</p>
+
+<p>They were soon clasped in each other's arms, condoling.</p>
+
+<p>But presently Houseman came, and took his wife away rather angrily.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaunt was prevailed on to eat a little toast and drink a glass of
+wine, and then she sat waiting her dreadful summons.</p>
+
+<p>She waited and waited, until she became impatient to face her danger.</p>
+
+<p>But there were two petty larcenies on before her. She had to wait.</p>
+
+<p>At last, about noon, came a message to say that the grand jury had found
+a true bill against her.</p>
+
+<p>"Then may God forgive them!" said she.</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterwards she was informed her time drew very near.</p>
+
+<p>She made her toilet carefully, and passed with her attendant into a
+small room under the court.</p>
+
+<p>Here she had to endure another chilling wait, and in a sombre room.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she heard a voice above her cry out, "The King <i>versus</i>
+Catharine Gaunt."</p>
+
+<p>Then she was beckoned to.</p>
+
+<p>She mounted some steps, badly lighted, and found herself in the glare of
+day, and greedy eyes, in the felon's dock.</p>
+
+<p>In a matter entirely strange, we seldom know beforehand what we can do,
+and how we shall carry ourselves. Mrs. Gaunt no sooner set her foot in
+that dock, and saw the awful front of Justice face to face, than her
+tremors abated, and all her powers awoke, and she thrilled with love of
+life, and bristled with all those fine arts of defence that Nature lends
+to superior women.</p>
+
+<p>She entered on that defence before she spoke a word; for she attacked
+the prejudices of the court, by deportment.</p>
+
+<p>She courtesied reverently to the Judge, and contrived to make her
+reverence seem a willing homage, unmixed with fear.</p>
+
+<p>She cast her eyes round and saw the court thronged with ladies and
+gentlemen she knew. In a moment she read in their eyes that only two or
+three were on her side. She bowed to those only; and they returned her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
+courtesy. This gave an impression (a false one) that the gentry
+sympathized with her.</p>
+
+<p>After a little murmur of functionaries, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to
+the prisoner, and said, in a loud voice, "Catharine Gaunt, hold up thy
+hand."</p>
+
+<p>She held up her hand, and he recited the indictment, which charged that,
+not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being moved by the
+instigation of the Devil, she had on the fifteenth of October, in the
+tenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, aided and abetted one
+Thomas Leicester in an assault upon one Griffith Gaunt, Esq., and him,
+the said Griffith Gaunt, did with force and arms assassinate and do to
+death, against the peace of our said Lord the King, his crown and
+dignity.</p>
+
+<p>After reading the indictment, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to the
+prisoner: "How sayest thou, Catharine Gaunt; art thou guilty of the
+felony and murder whereof thou standest indicted,&mdash;or not guilty?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not guilty."</p>
+
+<p>"Culprit, how wilt thou be tried?"</p>
+
+<p>"Culprit I am none, but only accused. I will be tried by God and my
+country."</p>
+
+<p>"God send thee a good deliverance."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Whitworth, the junior counsel for the crown, then rose to open the
+case; but the prisoner, with a pale face, but most courteous demeanor,
+begged his leave to make a previous motion to the court. Mr. Whitworth
+bowed, and sat down. "My Lord," said she, "I have first a favor to ask;
+and that favor, methinks, you will grant, since it is but justice,
+impartial justice. My accuser, I hear, has two counsel; both learned and
+able. I am but a woman, and no match for their skill Therefore I beg
+your Lordship to allow me counsel on my defence, to matter of fact as
+well as of law. I know this is not usual; but it is just, and I am
+informed it has sometimes been granted in trials of life and death, and
+that your Lordship hath the <i>power</i>, if you have the <i>will</i>, to do me so
+much justice."</p>
+
+<p>The Judge looked towards Mr. Serjeant Wiltshire, who was the leader on
+the other side. He rose instantly and replied to this purpose: "The
+prisoner is misinformed. The truth is, that from time immemorial, and
+down to the other day, a person indicted for a capital offence was never
+allowed counsel at all, except to matters of law, and these must be
+started by himself. By recent practice the rule hath been so far relaxed
+that counsel have sometimes been permitted to examine and cross-examine
+witnesses for a prisoner; but never to make observations on the
+evidence, nor to draw inferences from it to the point in issue."</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Gaunt.</i> So, then, if I be sued for a small sum of money, I may
+have skilled orators to defend me against their like. But if I be sued
+for my life and honor, I may not oppose skill to skill, but must stand
+here a child against you that are masters. 'Tis a monstrous iniquity,
+and you yourself, sir, will not deny it.</p>
+
+<p><i>Serjeant Wiltshire.</i> Madam, permit me. Whether it be a hardship to deny
+full counsel to prisoners in criminal cases, I shall not pretend to say;
+but if it be, 'tis a hardship of the law's making, and not of mine nor
+of my lord's; and none have suffered by it (at least in our day) but
+those who had broken the law.</p>
+
+<p>The Serjeant then stopped a minute, and whispered with his junior. After
+which he turned to the Judge. "My Lord, we that are of counsel for the
+crown desire to do nothing that is hard where a person's life is at
+stake. We yield to the prisoner any indulgence for which your Lordship
+can find a precedent in your reading; but no more: and so we leave the
+matter to you."</p>
+
+<p><i>The Clerk of Arraigns.</i> Crier, proclaim silence.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Crier.</i> Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! His Majesty's Justices do strictly charge
+all manner of persons to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Judge.</i> Prisoner, what my Brother Wiltshire says, the law is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> clear
+in. There is no precedent for what you ask, and the contrary practice
+stares us in the face for centuries. What seems to you a partial
+practice, and, to be frank, some learned persons are of your mind, must
+be set against this,&mdash;that in capital cases the burden of proof lies on
+the crown, and not on the accused. Also it is my duty to give you all
+the assistance I can, and that I shall do. Thus then it is: you can be
+allowed counsel to examine your own witnesses, and cross-examine the
+witnesses for the crown, and speak to points of law, to be started by
+yourself,&mdash;but no further.</p>
+
+<p>He then asked her what gentleman there present he should assign to her
+for counsel.</p>
+
+<p>Her reply to this inquiry took the whole court by surprise, and made her
+solicitor, Houseman, very miserable. "None, my Lord," said she.
+"Half-justice is injustice; and I will lend it no color. I will not set
+able men to fight for me with their hands tied, against men as able
+whose hands be free. Counsel, on terms so partial, I will have none. My
+counsel shall be three, and no more,&mdash;Yourself, my Lord, my Innocence,
+and the Lord God Omniscient."</p>
+
+<p>These words, grandly uttered, caused a dead silence in the court, but
+only for a few moments. It was broken by the loud mechanical voice of
+the crier, who proclaimed silence, and then called the names of the jury
+that were to try this cause.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gaunt listened keenly to the names,&mdash;familiar and bourgeois names,
+that now seemed regal; for they who owned them held her life in their
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>Each juryman was sworn in the grand old form, now slightly curtailed.</p>
+
+<p>"Joseph King, look upon the prisoner.&mdash;You shall well and truly try, and
+true deliverance make, between our Sovereign Lord the King and the
+prisoner at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, and a true verdict
+give, according to the evidence. So help you God."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Whitworth, for the crown, then opened the case, but did little more
+than translate the indictment into more rational language.</p>
+
+<p>He sat down, and Serjeant Wiltshire addressed the court somewhat after
+this fashion:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"May it please your Lordship, and you, gentlemen of the jury,
+this is a case of great expectation and importance. The
+prisoner at the bar, a gentlewoman by birth and education, and,
+as you must have already perceived, by breeding also, stands
+indicted for no less a crime than murder.</p>
+
+<p>"I need not paint to you the heinousness of this crime: you
+have but to consult your own breasts. Who ever saw the ghastly
+corpse of the victim weltering in its blood, and did not feel
+his own blood run cold through his veins? Has the murderer
+fled? With what eagerness do we pursue! with what zeal
+apprehend! with what joy do we bring him to justice! Even the
+dreadful sentence of death does not shock us, when pronounced
+upon him. We hear it with solemn satisfaction; and acknowledge
+the justice of the Divine sentence, 'Whoso sheddeth man's
+blood, by man shall his blood be shed.'</p>
+
+<p>"But if this be the case in every common murder, what shall be
+thought of her who has murdered her husband,&mdash;the man in whose
+arms she has lain, and whom she has sworn at God's altar to
+love and cherish? Such a murderer is a robber as well as an
+assassin; for she robs her own children of their father, that
+tender parent, who can never be replaced in this world.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen, it will, I fear, be proved that the prisoner at the
+bar hath been guilty of murder in this high degree; and, though
+I will endeavor rather to extenuate than to aggravate, yet I
+trust [<i>sic</i>] I have such a history to open as will shock the
+ears of all who hear me.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Griffith Gaunt, the unfortunate deceased, was a man of
+descent and worship. As to his character, it was inoffensive.
+He was known as a worthy, kindly gentleman, deeply attached<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> to
+her who now stands accused of his murder. They lived happily
+together for some years; but, unfortunately, there was a thorn
+in the rose of their wedded life: he was of the Church of
+England; she was, and is, a Roman Catholic. This led to
+disputes; and no wonder, since this same unhappy difference
+hath more than once embroiled a nation, let alone a single
+family.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, gentlemen, about a year ago there was a more violent
+quarrel than usual between the deceased and the prisoner at the
+bar; and the deceased left his home for several months.</p>
+
+<p>"He returned upon a certain day in this year, and a
+reconciliation, real or apparent, took place. He left home
+again soon afterwards, but only for a short period. On the 15th
+of last October he suddenly returned for good, as he intended;
+and here begins the tragedy, to which what I have hitherto
+related was but the prologue.</p>
+
+<p>"Scarce an hour before he came, one Thomas Leicester entered
+the house. Now this Thomas Leicester was a creature of the
+prisoner's. He had been her gamekeeper, and was now a pedler.
+It was the prisoner who set him up as a pedler, and purchased
+the wares to start him in his trade.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen, this pedler, as I shall prove, was concealed in the
+house when the deceased arrived. One Caroline Ryder, who is the
+prisoner's gentlewoman, was the person who first informed her
+of Leicester's arrival, and it seems she was much moved: Mrs.
+Ryder will tell you she fell into hysterics. But, soon after,
+her husband's arrival was announced, and then the passion was
+of a very different kind. So violent was her rage against this
+unhappy man that, for once, she forgot all prudence, and
+threatened his life before a witness. Yes, gentlemen, we shall
+prove that this gentlewoman, who in appearance and manners
+might grace a court, was so transported out of her usual self
+that she held up a knife,&mdash;a knife, gentlemen,&mdash;and vowed to
+put it into her husband's heart. And this was no mere temporary
+ebullition of wrath. We shall see presently that, long after
+she had had time to cool, she repeated this menace to the
+unfortunate man's face. The first threat, however, was uttered
+in her own bedroom, before her confidential servant, Caroline
+Ryder aforesaid. But now the scene shifts. She has, to all
+appearance, recovered herself, and sits smiling at the head of
+her table; for, you must know, she entertained company that
+night,&mdash;persons of the highest standing in the county.</p>
+
+<p>"Presently her husband, all unconscious of the terrible
+sentiments she entertained towards him, and the fearful purpose
+she had announced, enters the room, makes obeisance to his
+guests, and goes to take his wife's hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What does she? She draws back with so strange a look, and such
+forbidding words, that the company were disconcerted.
+Consternation fell on all present; and erelong they made their
+excuses, and left the house. Thus the prisoner was left alone
+with her husband; but, meantime, curiosity had been excited by
+her strange conduct, and some of the servants, with foreboding
+hearts, listened at the door of the dining-room. What did they
+hear, gentlemen? A furious quarrel, in which, however, the
+deceased was comparatively passive, and the prisoner again
+threatened his life, with vehemence. Her passion, it is clear,
+had not cooled.</p>
+
+<p>"Now it may fairly be alleged, on behalf of the prisoner, that
+the witnesses for the crown were on one side of the door, the
+prisoner and the deceased on the other, and that such evidence
+should be received with caution. I grant this&mdash;where it is not
+sustained by other circumstances, or by direct proofs. Let us
+then give the prisoner the benefit of this doubt, and let us
+inquire how the deceased himself understood her,&mdash;he, who not
+only heard the words, and the accents, but saw the looks,
+whatever they were, that accompanied them.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen, he was a man of known courage and resolution; yet
+he was found, after this terrible interview, much cowed and
+dejected. He spoke to Mrs. Ryder of his death as an event not
+far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> distant, and so went to his bedroom in a melancholy and
+foreboding state. And where was that bedroom? He was thrust, by
+his wife's orders, into a small chamber, and not allowed to
+enter hers,&mdash;he, the master of the house, her husband, and her
+lord.</p>
+
+<p>"But his interpretation of the prisoner's words did not end
+there. He left us a further comment by his actions next
+ensuing. He dared not&mdash;(I beg pardon, this is my inference:
+receive it as such)&mdash;he <i>did</i> not, remain in that house a
+single night. He at all events bolted his chamber door inside;
+and in the very dead of night, notwithstanding the fatigues of
+the day's journey, (for he had ridden some distance,) he let
+himself out by the window, and reached the ground safely,
+though it was a height of fourteen feet,&mdash;a leap, gentlemen,
+that few of us would venture to take. But what will not men
+risk when destruction is at their heels? He did not wait even
+to saddle his horse, but fled on foot. Unhappy man, he fled
+from danger, and met his death.</p>
+
+<p>"From the hour when he went up to bed, none of the inmates of
+the house ever saw Griffith Gaunt alive; but one Thomas Hayes,
+a laborer, saw him walking in a certain direction at one
+o'clock that morning; and behind him, gentlemen, there walked
+another man.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was that other man?</p>
+
+<p>"When I have told you (and this is an essential feature of the
+case) how the prisoner was employed during the time that her
+husband lay quaking in his little room, waiting an opportunity
+to escape,&mdash;when I have told you this, I fear you will divine
+who it was that followed the deceased, and for what purpose.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen, when the prisoner had threatened her husband in
+person, as I have described, she retired to her own room, but
+not to sleep. She ordered her maid, Mrs. Ryder, to bring Thomas
+Leicester to her chamber. Yes, gentlemen, she received this
+pedler, at midnight, in her bedchamber.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, an act so strange as this admits, I think, but of two
+interpretations. Either she had a guilty amour with this
+fellow, or she had some extraordinary need of his services. Her
+whole character, by consent of the witnesses, renders it very
+improbable that she would descend to a low amour. Moreover, she
+acted too publicly in the matter. The man, as we know, was her
+tool, her creature: she had bought his wares for him, and set
+him up as a pedler. She openly summoned him to her presence,
+and kept him there about half an hour.</p>
+
+<p>"He went from her, and very soon after is seen, by Thomas
+Hayes, following Griffith Gaunt, at one o'clock in the
+morning,&mdash;that Griffith Gaunt who after that hour was never
+seen alive.</p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen, up to this point, the evidence is clear, connected,
+and cogent; but it rarely happens in cases of murder that any
+human eye sees the very blow struck. The penalty is too severe
+for such an act to be done in the presence of an eyewitness;
+and not one murderer in ten could be convicted without the help
+of circumstantial evidence.</p>
+
+<p>"The next link, however, is taken up by an ear-witness; and, in
+some cases, the ear is even better evidence than the eye,&mdash;for
+instance, as to the discharge of firearms,&mdash;for, by the eye
+alone, we could not positively tell whether a pistol had gone
+off or had but flashed in the pan. Well, then, gentlemen, a few
+minutes after Mr. Gaunt was last seen alive,&mdash;which was by
+Thomas Hayes,&mdash;Mrs. Ryder, who had retired to her bedroom,
+heard the said Gaunt distinctly cry for help; she also heard a
+pistol-shot discharged. This took place by the side of a lake
+or large pond near the house, called the mere. Mrs. Ryder
+alarmed the house, and she and the other servants proceeded to
+her master's room. They found it bolted from the inside. They
+broke it open. Mr. Gaunt had escaped by the window, as I have
+already told you.</p>
+
+<p>"Presently in comes the prisoner from out of doors. This was at
+one o'clock in the morning. Now she appears<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> to have seen at
+once that she must explain her being abroad at that time, so
+she told Mrs. Ryder she had been out&mdash;praying."</p></div>
+
+<p>(Here some people laughed harshly, but were threatened severely, and
+silenced.)</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Is that credible? Do people go out of doors at one o'clock in
+the morning, to pray? Nay, but I fear it was to do an act that
+years of prayer and penitence cannot efface.</p>
+
+<p>"From that moment Mr. Gaunt was seen no more among living men.
+And what made his disappearance the more mysterious was that he
+had actually at this time just inherited largely from his
+namesake, Mr. Gaunt of Biggleswade; and his own interest, and
+that of the other legatees, required his immediate presence.
+Mr. Atkins, the testator's solicitor, advertised for this
+unfortunate gentleman; but he did not appear to claim his
+fortune. Then plain men began to put this and that together,
+and cried out, 'Foul play!'</p>
+
+<p>"Justice was set in motion at last, but was embarrassed by the
+circumstance that the body of the deceased could not be found.</p>
+
+<p>"At last, Mr. Atkins, the solicitor, being unable to get the
+estate I have mentioned administered, for want of proof of
+Griffith Gaunt's decease, entered heartily in this affair, on
+mere civil grounds. He asked the prisoner, before several
+witnesses, if she would permit him to drag that piece of water
+by the side of which Mr. Gaunt was heard to cry for help and,
+after that seen no more.</p>
+
+<p>"The prisoner did not reply, but Mr. Houseman, her solicitor, a
+very worthy man, who has, I believe, or had, up to that moment,
+a sincere conviction of her innocence, answered for her, and
+told Mr. Atkins he was welcome to drag it or drain it. Then the
+prisoner said nothing. She fainted away.</p>
+
+<p>"After this, you may imagine with what expectation the water
+was dragged. Gentlemen, after hours of fruitless labor, a body
+was found.</p>
+
+<p>"But here an unforeseen circumstance befriended the prisoner.
+It seems that piece of water swarms with enormous pike and
+other ravenous fish. These had so horribly mutilated the
+deceased, that neither form nor feature remained to swear by;
+and, as the law wisely and humanely demands that in these cases
+a body shall be identified beyond doubt, justice bade fair to
+be baffled again. But lo! as often happens in cases of murder,
+Providence interposed and pointed with unerring finger to a
+slight, but infallible mark. The deceased gentleman was known
+to have a large mole over his left temple. It had been noticed
+by his servants and his neighbors. Well, gentlemen, the greedy
+fish had spared this mole,&mdash;spared it, perhaps, by His command,
+who bade the whale swallow Jonah, yet not destroy him. There it
+was, clear and infallible. It was examined by several
+witnesses, it was recognized. It completed that chain of
+evidence, some of it direct, some of it circumstantial, which I
+have laid before you very briefly, and every part of which I
+shall now support by credible witnesses."</p></div>
+
+<p>He called thirteen witnesses, including Mr. Atkins, Thomas Hayes, Jane
+Banister, Caroline Ryder, and others; and their evidence in chief bore
+out every positive statement the counsel had made.</p>
+
+<p>In cross-examining these witnesses, Mrs. Gaunt took a line that
+agreeably surprised the court. It was not for nothing she had studied a
+hundred trials, with a woman's observation and patient docility. She had
+found out how badly people plead their own causes, and had noticed the
+reasons: one of which is that they say too much, and stray from the
+point. The line she took, with one exception, was keen brevity.</p>
+
+<p>She cross-examined Thomas Hayes as follows.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_CHIMNEY-CORNER_FOR_1866" id="THE_CHIMNEY-CORNER_FOR_1866"></a>THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.</h2>
+
+<h3>IX.</h3>
+
+
+<h4>HOW SHALL WE BE AMUSED?</h4>
+
+<p>"One, two, three, four,&mdash;this makes the fifth accident on the Fourth of
+July, in the two papers I have just read," said Jenny.</p>
+
+<p>"A very moderate allowance," said Theophilus Thoro, "if you consider the
+Fourth as a great national saturnalia, in which every boy in the land
+has the privilege of doing whatever is right in his own eyes."</p>
+
+<p>"The poor boys!" said Mrs. Crowfield. "All the troubles of the world are
+laid at their door."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Jenny, "they did burn the city of Portland, it appears. The
+fire arose from fire-crackers, thrown by boys among the shavings of a
+carpenter's shop,&mdash;so says the paper."</p>
+
+<p>"And," said Rudolph, "we surgeons expect a harvest of business from the
+Fourth, as surely as from a battle. Certain to be woundings, fractures,
+possibly amputations, following the proceedings of our glorious
+festival."</p>
+
+<p>"Why cannot we Americans learn to amuse ourselves peaceably, like other
+nations?" said Bob Stephens. "In France and Italy, the greatest national
+festivals pass off without fatal accident, or danger to any one. The
+fact is, in our country we have not learned <i>how to be amused</i>.
+Amusement has been made of so small account in our philosophy of life,
+that we are raw and unpractised in being amused. Our diversions,
+compared with those of the politer nations of Europe, are coarse and
+savage,&mdash;and consist mainly in making disagreeable noises and disturbing
+the peace of the community by rude uproar. The only idea an American boy
+associates with the Fourth of July is that of gunpowder in some form,
+and a wild liberty to fire off pistols in all miscellaneous directions,
+and to throw fire-crackers under the heels of horses, and into crowds of
+women and children, for the fun of seeing the stir and commotion thus
+produced. Now take a young Parisian boy and give him a f&ecirc;te, and he
+conducts himself with greater gentleness and good breeding, because he
+is part of a community in which the art of amusement has been refined
+and perfected, so that he has a thousand resources beyond the very
+obvious one of making a great banging and disturbance.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," continued Bob Stephens, "the fact is, that our grim old Puritan
+fathers set their feet down resolutely on all forms of amusement; they
+would have stopped the lambs from wagging their tails, and shot the
+birds for singing, if they could have had their way; and in consequence
+of it, what a barren, cold, flowerless life is our New England
+existence! Life is all, as Mantalini said, one 'demd horrid grind.'
+'Nothing here but working and going to church,' said the German
+emigrants,&mdash;and they were about right. A French traveller, in the year
+1837, says that attending the Thursday-evening lectures and church
+prayer-meetings was the only recreation of the young people of Boston;
+and we can remember the time when this really was no exaggeration. Think
+of that, with all the seriousness of our Boston east winds to give it
+force, and fancy the provision for amusement in our society! The
+consequence is, that boys who have the longing for amusement strongest
+within them, and plenty of combativeness to back it, are the standing
+terror of good society, and our Fourth of July is a day of fear to all
+invalids and persons of delicate nervous organization, and of real,
+appreciable danger of life and limb to every one."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, Robert," said my wife, "though I agree with you as to the actual
+state of society in this respect, I must enter my protest against your
+slur on the memory of our Pilgrim fathers."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Theophilus Thoro, "the New-Englanders are the only people, I
+believe, who take delight in vilifying their ancestry. Every young
+hopeful in our day makes a target of his grandfather's gravestone, and
+fires away, with great self-applause. People in general seem to like to
+show that they are well-born, and come of good stock; but the young
+New-Englanders, many of them, appear to take pleasure in insisting that
+they came of a race of narrow-minded, persecuting bigots.</p>
+
+<p>"It is true, that our Puritan fathers saw not everything. They made a
+state where there were no amusements, but where people could go to bed
+and leave their house doors wide open all night, without a shadow of
+fear or danger, as was for years the custom in all our country villages.
+The fact is, that the simple early New England life, before we began to
+import foreigners, realized a state of society in whose possibility
+Europe would scarcely believe. If our fathers had few amusements, they
+needed few. Life was too really and solidly comfortable and happy to
+need much amusement.</p>
+
+<p>"Look over the countries where people are most sedulously amused by
+their rulers and governors. Are they not the countries where the people
+are most oppressed, most unhappy in their circumstances, and therefore
+in greatest need of amusement? It is the slave who dances and sings, and
+why? Because he owns nothing, and <i>can</i> own nothing, and may as well
+dance and forget the fact. But give the slave a farm of his own, a wife
+of his own, and children of his own, with a school-house and a vote, and
+ten to one he dances no more. He needs no <i>amusement</i>, because he is
+<i>happy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"The legislators of Europe wished nothing more than to bring up a people
+who would be content with amusements, and not ask after their rights or
+think too closely how they were governed. 'Gild the dome of the
+Invalides,' was Napoleon's scornful prescription, when he heard the
+Parisian population were discontented. They gilded it, and the people
+forgot to talk about anything else. They were a childish race, educated
+from the cradle on spectacle and show, and by the sight of their eyes
+could they be governed. The people of Boston, in 1776, could not have
+been managed in this way, chiefly because they were brought up in the
+strict schools of the fathers."</p>
+
+<p>"But don't you think," said Jenny, "that something might be added and
+amended in the state of society our fathers established here in New
+England? Without becoming frivolous, there might be more attention paid
+to rational amusement."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly," said my wife, "the State and the Church both might take a
+lesson from the providence of foreign governments, and make liberty, to
+say the least, as attractive as despotism. It is a very unwise mother
+that does not provide her children with play-things."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet," said Bob, "the only thing that the Church has yet done is to
+forbid and to frown. We have abundance of tracts against dancing,
+whist-playing, ninepins, billiards, operas, theatres,&mdash;in short,
+anything that young people would be apt to like. The General Assembly of
+the Presbyterian Church refused to testify against slavery, because of
+political diffidence, but made up for it by ordering a more stringent
+crusade against dancing. The theatre and opera grow up and exist among
+us like plants on the windy side of a hill, blown all awry by a constant
+blast of conscientious rebuke. There is really no amusement young people
+are fond of, which they do not pursue, in a sort of defiance of the
+frown of the peculiarly religious world. With all the telling of what
+the young shall <i>not</i> do, there has been very little telling what they
+shall do.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"The whole department of amusements&mdash;certainly one of the most important
+in education&mdash;has been by the Church made a sort of outlaws' ground, to
+be taken possession of and held by all sorts of spiritual ragamuffins;
+and then the faults and short-comings resulting from this arrangement
+have been held up and insisted on as reasons why no Christian should
+ever venture into it.</p>
+
+<p>"If the Church would set herself to amuse her young folks, instead of
+discussing doctrines and metaphysical hair-splitting, she would prove
+herself a true mother, and not a hard-visaged step-dame. Let her keep
+this department, so powerful and so difficult to manage, in what are
+morally the strongest hands, instead of giving it up to the weakest.</p>
+
+<p>"I think, if the different churches of a city, for example, would rent a
+building where there should be a billiard-table, one or two
+ninepin-alleys, a reading-room, a garden and grounds for ball-playing or
+innocent lounging, that they would do more to keep their young people
+from the ways of sin than a Sunday school could. Nay, more: I would go
+further. I would have a portion of the building fitted up with scenery
+and a stage, for the getting up of tableaux or dramatic performances,
+and thus give scope for the exercise of that histrionic talent of which
+there is so much lying unemployed in society.</p>
+
+<p>"Young people do not like amusements any better for the wickedness
+connected with them. The spectacle of a sweet little child singing
+hymns, and repeating prayers, of a pious old Uncle Tom dying for his
+religion, has filled theatres night after night, and proved that there
+really is no need of indecent or improper plays to draw full houses.</p>
+
+<p>"The things that draw young people to places of amusement are not at
+first gross things. Take the most notorious public place in Paris,&mdash;the
+Jardin Mabille, for instance,&mdash;and the things which give it its first
+charm are all innocent and artistic. Exquisite beds of lilies, roses,
+gillyflowers, lighted with jets of gas so artfully as to make every
+flower translucent as a gem; fountains where the gas-light streams out
+from behind misty wreaths of falling water and calla-blossoms; sofas of
+velvet turf, canopied with fragrant honeysuckle; dim bowers overarched
+with lilacs and roses; a dancing ground under trees whose branches bend
+with a fruitage of many-colored lamps; enchanting music and graceful
+motion; in all these there is not only no sin, but they are really
+beautiful and desirable; and if they were only used on the side and in
+the service of virtue and religion, if they were contrived and kept up
+by the guardians and instructors of youth, instead of by those whose
+interest it is to demoralize and destroy, young people would have no
+temptation to stray into the haunts of vice.</p>
+
+<p>"In Prussia, under the reign of Frederick William II., when one good,
+hard-handed man governed the whole country like a strict schoolmaster,
+the public amusements for the people were made such as to present a
+model for all states. The theatres were strictly supervised, and actors
+obliged to conform to the rules of decorum and morality. The plays and
+performances were under the immediate supervision of men of grave
+morals, who allowed nothing corrupting to appear; and the effect of this
+administration and restraint is to be seen in Berlin even to this day.
+The public gardens are full of charming little resorts, where, every
+afternoon, for a very moderate sum, one can have either a concert of
+good music, or a very fair dramatic or operatic performance. Here whole
+families may be seen enjoying together a wholesome and refreshing
+entertainment,&mdash;the mother and aunts with their knitting, the baby, the
+children of all ages, and the father,&mdash;their faces radiant with that
+mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be
+characteristic of the nation. When I saw these things, and thought of
+our own outcast, unprovided boys and young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> men, haunting the streets
+and alleys of cities, in places far from the companionship of mothers
+and sisters, I felt as if it would be better for a nation to be brought
+up by a good strict schoolmaster king than to try to be a republic."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I, "but the difficulty is to <i>get</i> the good schoolmaster
+king. For one good shepherd, there are twenty who use the sheep only for
+their flesh and their wool. Republics can do all that kings
+can,&mdash;witness our late army and Sanitary Commission. Once fix the idea
+thoroughly in the public mind that there ought to be as regular and
+careful provision for public amusement as there is for going to church
+and Sunday school, and it will be done. Central Park in New York is a
+beginning in the right direction, and Brooklyn is following the example
+of her sister city. There is, moreover, an indication of the proper
+spirit in the increased efforts that are made to beautify Sunday-school
+rooms, and make them interesting, and to have Sunday-school f&ecirc;tes and
+picnics,&mdash;the most harmless and commendable way of celebrating the
+Fourth of July. Why should saloons and bar-rooms be made attractive by
+fine paintings, choice music, flowers, and fountains, and Sunday-school
+rooms be four bare walls? There are churches whose broad aisles
+represent ten and twenty millions of dollars, and whose sons and
+daughters are daily drawn to circuses, operas, theatres, because they
+have tastes and feelings, in themselves perfectly laudable and innocent,
+for the gratification of which no provision is made in any other place."</p>
+
+<p>"I know one church," said Rudolph, "whose Sunday-school room is as
+beautifully adorned as any haunt of sin. There is a fountain in the
+centre, which plays into a basin surrounded with shells and flowers; it
+has a small organ to lead the children's voices, and the walls are hung
+with oil-paintings and engravings from the best masters. The festivals
+of the Sabbath school, which are from time to time held in this place,
+educate the taste of the children, as well as amuse them; and, above
+all, they have through life the advantage of associating with their
+early religious education all those ideas of taste, elegance, and
+artistic culture which too often come through polluted channels.</p>
+
+<p>"When the <i>amusement</i> of the young shall become the care of the
+experienced and the wise, and the floods of wealth that are now rolling
+over and over, in silent investments, shall be put into the form of
+innocent and refined pleasures for the children and youth of the state,
+our national festivals may become days to be desired, and not dreaded.</p>
+
+<p>"On the Fourth of July, our city fathers do in a certain dim wise
+perceive that the public owes some attempt at amusement to its children,
+and they vote large sums, principally expended in bell-ringing, cannons,
+and fireworks. The sidewalks are witness to the number who fall victims
+to the temptations held out by grog-shops and saloons; and the papers,
+for weeks after, are crowded with accounts of accidents. Now, a yearly
+sum expended to keep up, and keep pure, places of amusement which hold
+out no temptation to vice, but which excel all vicious places in real
+beauty and attractiveness, would greatly lessen the sum needed to be
+expended on any one particular day, and would refine and prepare our
+people to keep holidays and festivals appropriately."</p>
+
+<p>"For my part," said Mrs. Crowfield, "I am grieved at the opprobrium
+which falls on the race of <i>boys</i>. Why should the most critical era in
+the life of those who are to be men, and to <i>govern</i> society, be passed
+in a sort of outlawry,&mdash;a rude warfare with all existing institutions?
+The years between ten and twenty are full of the nervous excitability
+which marks the growth and maturing of the manly nature. The boy feels
+wild impulses, which ought to be vented in legitimate and healthful
+exercise. He wants to run, shout, wrestle, ride, row, skate; and all
+these together are often not sufficient to relieve the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> need he feels of
+throwing off the excitability that burns within.</p>
+
+<p>"For the wants of this period what safe provision is made by the Church,
+or by the State, or any of the boy's lawful educators? In all the
+Prussian schools amusements are as much a part of the regular
+school-system as grammar or geography. The teacher is with the boys on
+the play-ground, and plays as heartily as any of them. The boy has his
+physical wants anticipated. He is not left to fight his way, blindly
+stumbling, against society, but goes forward in a safe path, which his
+elders and betters have marked out for him.</p>
+
+<p>"In our country, the boy's career is often a series of skirmishes with
+society. He wants to skate, and contrives ingeniously to dam the course
+of a brook, and flood a meadow which makes a splendid skating-ground.
+Great is the joy for a season, and great the skating. But the water
+floods the neighboring cellars. The boys are cursed through all the
+moods and tenses,&mdash;boys are such a plague! The dam is torn down with
+emphasis and execration. The boys, however, lie in wait some cold night,
+between twelve and one, and build it up again; and thus goes on the
+battle. The boys care not whose cellar they flood, because nobody cares
+for their amusement. They understand themselves to be outlaws, and take
+an outlaw's advantage.</p>
+
+<p>"Again, the boys have their sleds; and sliding down hill is splendid
+fun. But they trip up some grave citizen, who sprains his shoulder. What
+is the result? Not the provision of a safe, good place, where boys <i>may</i>
+slide down hill without danger to any one, but an edict forbidding all
+sliding, under penalty of fine.</p>
+
+<p>"Boys want to swim: it is best they should swim; and if city fathers,
+foreseeing and caring for this want, should think it worth while to mark
+off some good place, and have it under such police surveillance as to
+enforce decency of language and demeanor, they would prevent a great
+deal that now is disagreeable in the unguided efforts of boys to enjoy
+this luxury.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be <i>cheaper</i> in the end, even if one had to build
+sliding-piles, as they do in Russia, or to build skating-rinks, as they
+do in Montreal,&mdash;it would be cheaper for every city, town, and village
+to provide legitimate amusement for boys, under proper superintendence,
+than to leave them, as they are now left, to fight their way against
+society.</p>
+
+<p>"In the boys' academies of our country, what provision is made for
+amusement? There are stringent rules, and any number of them, to prevent
+boys making any noise that may disturb the neighbors; and generally the
+teacher thinks that, if he keeps the boys <i>still</i>, and sees that they
+get their lessons, his duty is done. But a hundred boys ought not to be
+kept still. There ought to be noise and motion among them, in order that
+they may healthily survive the great changes which Nature is working
+within them. If they become silent, averse to movement, fond of indoor
+lounging and warm rooms, they are going in far worse ways than any
+amount of outward lawlessness could bring them to.</p>
+
+<p>"Smoking and yellow-covered novels are worse than any amount of
+hullabaloo; and the quietest boy is often a poor, ignorant victim, whose
+life is being drained out of him before it is well begun. If mothers
+could only see the <i>series of books</i> that are sold behind counters to
+boarding-school boys, whom nobody warns and nobody cares for,&mdash;if they
+could see the poison, going from pillow to pillow, in books pretending
+to make clear the great, sacred mysteries of our nature, but trailing
+them over with the filth of utter corruption! These horrible works are
+the inward and secret channel of hell, into which a boy is thrust by the
+pressure of strict outward rules, forbidding that physical and
+out-of-door exercise and motion to which he ought rather to be
+encouraged, and even driven.</p>
+
+<p>"It is melancholy to see that, while parents, teachers, and churches
+make no provision for boys in the way of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> amusement, the world, the
+flesh, and the Devil are incessantly busy and active in giving it to
+them. There are ninepin-alleys, with cigars and a bar. There are
+billiard-saloons, with a bar, and, alas! with the occasional company of
+girls who are still beautiful, but who have lost the innocence of
+womanhood, while yet retaining many of its charms. There are theatres,
+with a bar, and with the society of lost women. The boy comes to one and
+all of these places, seeking only what is natural and proper he should
+have,&mdash;what should be given him under the eye and by the care of the
+Church, the school. He comes for exercise and amusement,&mdash;he gets these,
+and a ticket to destruction besides,&mdash;and whose fault is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"These are the aspects of public life," said I, "which make me feel that
+we never shall have a perfect state till women vote and bear rule
+equally with men. State housekeeping has been, hitherto, like what any
+housekeeping would be, conducted by the voice and knowledge of man
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>"If women had an equal voice in the management of our public money, I
+have faith to believe that thousands which are now wasted in mere
+political charlatanism would go to provide for the rearing of the
+children of the state, male and female. My wife has spoken for the boys;
+I speak for the girls also. What is provided for their physical
+development and amusement? Hot, gas-lighted theatric and operatic
+performances, beginning at eight, and ending at midnight; hot, crowded
+parties and balls; dancing with dresses tightly laced over the laboring
+lungs,&mdash;these are almost the whole story. I bless the advent of croquet
+and skating. And yet the latter exercise, pursued as it generally is, is
+a most terrible exposure. There is no kindly parental provision for the
+poor, thoughtless, delicate young creature,&mdash;not even the shelter of a
+dressing-room with a fire, at which she may warm her numb fingers and
+put on her skates when she arrives on the ground, and to which she may
+retreat in intervals of fatigue; so she catches cold, and perhaps sows
+the seed which with air-tight stoves and other appliances of hot-house
+culture may ripen into consumption.</p>
+
+<p>"What provision is there for the amusement of all the shop girls,
+seamstresses, factory girls, that crowd our cities? What for the
+thousands of young clerks and operatives? Not long since, in a
+respectable old town in New England, the body of a beautiful girl was
+drawn from the river in which she had drowned herself,&mdash;a young girl
+only fifteen, who came to the city, far from home and parents, and fell
+a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation.
+Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the
+ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable.</p>
+
+<p>"Let those who have homes and every appliance to make life pass
+agreeably, and who yet yawn over an unoccupied evening, fancy a lively
+young girl all day cooped up at sewing in a close, ill-ventilated room.
+Evening comes, and she has three times the desire for amusement and
+three times the need of it that her fashionable sister has. And where
+can she go? To the theatre, perhaps, with some young man as thoughtless
+as herself, and more depraved; then to the bar for a glass of wine, and
+another; and then, with a head swimming and turning, who shall say where
+else she may be led? Past midnight and no one to look after her,&mdash;and
+one night ruins her utterly and for life, and she as yet only a child!</p>
+
+<p>"John Newton had a very wise saying: 'Here is a man trying to fill a
+bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better than
+to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I would
+say on the subject of amusements."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="AN_ITALIAN_RAIN-STORM" id="AN_ITALIAN_RAIN-STORM"></a>AN ITALIAN RAIN-STORM.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The coast-road between Nice and Genoa,&mdash;known throughout the world for
+its unrivalled beauty of scenery, the altitudes to which it climbs, and
+the depths to which it dives,&mdash;now on the olive-clad heights, now close
+down upon the shore shaded by palm or carob-trees, now stretching inland
+amid orange-grounds and vineyards, now rounding some precipitous point
+that hangs hundreds of feet over the Mediterranean,&mdash;is generally seen
+with all the advantage of an unclouded sky above, and a sea as blue
+beneath.</p>
+
+<p>It was the fortune of a certain party of four to behold it under the
+unusual aspect of bad weather. They set out in the diligence one winter
+evening, expecting to arrive at Genoa by the same time next day,
+according to ordinary course. But no one unaccustomed to the effect of
+rain, continuous rain, in mountainous districts, can conceive the
+wonders worked by a long succession of wet days. The arrival was
+retarded six hours, and the four found themselves in <i>Genova la superba</i>
+somewhere about midnight. However, this was only the commencement of the
+pouring visitation; and the roads had been rendered merely so "heavy" as
+to make the horses contumacious when dragging the ponderous vehicle up
+hill, which contumacy had occasioned the delay in question. Despite the
+hopes entertained that the weather would clear, the rain set in; and
+during no interval did it hold up, with the exception of a short period,
+which permitted one gentleman of the party of four to visit on business
+two bachelor brothers, manufacturers in Genoa. The residence of these
+brothers being in rather an out-of-the-way quarter of the city, and
+being very peculiar in itself, the gentleman advised the rest of his
+party to accompany him on this visit.</p>
+
+<p>The four, only too glad to find themselves able to get out of doors, set
+forth on foot through the steep and narrow streets of Genoa, which make
+driving in a carriage a fatigue, and walking a feat of great excitement,
+especially when mud prevails. Trucks, ponderously laden with bales of
+goods, and pushed along at a reckless rate of speed by
+mahogany-complexioned men; dashing coaches, impelled by drivers
+hallooing when close upon you with distracting loudness and abruptness;
+mules coming onward with the blundering obtuseness peculiar to their
+tribe, or with their heads fastened to doorways, and their flanks
+extending across the street, affording just space enough for the
+passenger to slide behind their heels; a busy, jostling crowd of people
+hurrying to and fro, with no definite current, but streaming over any
+portion of the undistinguishable carriage-way and foot-way,&mdash;all combine
+to make Genoese pedestrianism a work only less onerous than driving.</p>
+
+<p>Choosing the minor trouble, our party trusted to their own legs; and,
+after picking their way through sludge and mire, along murky alleys that
+branched off into wharves and quays, and up slippery by-ways that looked
+like paved staircases without regular steps, the four emerged upon an
+open space in front of a noble church. Leaving this on their left hand,
+they turned short into a place that wore something the appearance of a
+stable-yard,&mdash;with this difference, that there were neither steeds nor
+stabling to be seen; but instead there were blank walls, enclosing a
+kind of court adjoining a huge old mansion, and beyond there was a steep
+descent leading down to the sea-side.</p>
+
+<p>On ringing a bell that hung beside a gate in the wall enclosure, the
+door opened apparently of itself, and a dismal scream ensued. The scream
+proceeded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> from a sea-gull, peering out of a kind of pen formed by a
+wooden paling in one corner of a grass-grown patch, half cabbage-garden,
+half excavated earth and rock; and the mysterious opening of the door
+was explained by a connecting cord pulled by some unseen hand within a
+smaller house that stood near to the huge old mansion. From the house
+appeared, advancing towards us, the two bachelor brothers, who welcomed
+our friend and his three companions with grave Italian courtesy.
+Understanding the curiosity the four felt to see their premises, they
+did the honors of their place, with a minuteness as politely considerate
+towards the strangers as it was gratifying to the interest felt by them.</p>
+
+<p>First the visitors were led by the bachelor brothers to see the huge old
+mansion, which they called the <i>Palazzo</i>. Let no one who has seen an
+ordinary Genoese palace, magnificent with gilding, enriched by priceless
+pictures, supplied with choice books, and adorned with gorgeous
+furniture, figure to himself any such combination in the <i>palazzo</i> in
+question. This was a vast pile of building, that would make five
+moderate-sized dwelling-houses, one in the roof, and the other four in
+the habitable portion of the edifice. A general air of ramshackledness
+pervaded the exterior, while the interior presented an effect of
+interminable ranges of white-washed walls, divided off into numberless
+apartments of various sizes, from a saloon on the <i>piano nobile</i>, or
+principal floor, measuring more than forty feet long, to small square
+attic rooms that were little more than cupboards. But this attic story
+was not all composed of chambers thus dimensioned. Among its apartments
+were rooms that might have accommodated a banqueting assemblage, had
+diners been so inclined; while among the accommodations comprised in
+this garret range was a kitchen, with spacious dressers, stoves,
+closets, and a well of water some hundred and odd feet deep. It was
+impossible for the imagination to refrain from picturing the troops of
+ghosts which doubtless occupied these upper chambers of the old
+<i>palazzo</i>, and held nightly vigil, undisturbed, amid the silence and
+solitude of their neglected spaces. Through one of the dwarf windows
+that pierced at intervals all sides of the mansion, just beneath the
+lofty roof, and which gave light to the attic story, we were directed to
+look by the emphatic words of the elder bachelor brother,&mdash;"Ma, veda che
+vista c' &egrave;!"</p>
+
+<p>The view thence was indeed well worthy his praise; and he himself formed
+an appropriate companion-picture to the scene. Bluish-gray eyes, a
+fairer complexion than usually belongs to men of his clime and country,
+a look of penetration, combined with an expression of quiet content,
+were surmounted by a steeple-crowned hat that might have become a Dutch
+burgomaster, or one of Teniers's land-proprietors, rather than a denizen
+of a southern city. Yet the association which his face, figure, and
+costume had with some of George Cruikshank's illustrations of German
+tales afforded pictorial harmony with the range of ghostly rooms we were
+viewing. He "marshalled us the way that we should go," by leading us
+down a steep flight of steps, which landed us on the <i>piano nobile</i>.
+This, for the present, was tenanted by a set of weavers, to whom the
+principal floor of the <i>palazzo</i> had been let for a short term. They had
+proved but turbulent occupants, being in a constant state of
+refractoriness against their landlords, the bachelor brothers, who
+seemed to be somewhat in awe of them. On the present occasion, for
+instance, the brothers apologized for being unable to show us the grand
+saloon, as the weavers (whom we could hear, while he spoke, singing in a
+loud, uproarious, insurgent kind of way, that might well have drawn
+three souls out of one of their own craft, and evidently made the souls
+of their two landlords quail) did not like to be disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>Their contumacious voices, mingled with the clamor of their looms, died
+off in the distance, while we proceeded down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> the back staircase to the
+ground-floor. We at first fancied that this apparently surreptitious
+proceeding was perhaps traceable to the awe entertained by the bachelor
+brothers for their unruly tenants; but we were relieved from the sense
+of acting in a style bordering on poltroonery, by finding that the
+principal staircase had been boarded up to preserve its marble steps and
+sides from injury. On arriving at the foot we found ourselves in a
+spacious hall, opposite the approach to the grand staircase, which
+looked like an archway built for giants, toweringly defined above the
+scaffold-planks by which it was barricaded. Many doors opened from this
+hall, to each of which, in turn, one of the bachelor brothers applied
+successive keys from a ponderous bunch that he held in his hand. These
+doors led to vast suites of apartments, all unfurnished, like the upper
+rooms, with the exception of one suite, which the brothers had lent to a
+friend of theirs, and which was sparely supplied with some old Italian
+furniture, of so antique a fashion that each article might have been a
+family heirloom ever since the times of that famous Genoese gentleman,
+Christopher Columbus. One peculiarity the four remarked, which spoke
+volumes for the geniality of the climate: in all this huge rambling
+edifice they saw only one room which could boast of a fireplace. The
+sun's warmth evidently supplied all the heat necessary, and&mdash;as might be
+conjectured from its other peculiarities as well as this&mdash;anything like
+what the English call "the joys and comforts of the domestic hearth"
+seemed an impossible attainment in this dreary old <i>palazzo</i>. The social
+amenities must wither in its desolate atmosphere, and dwindle to chill
+shadows, like the ghosts that haunt the attic story.</p>
+
+<p>To complete the air of saddening vacancy that clung like a damp to the
+really arid white walls, when the brothers led us down a wide staircase
+to the vaulted space beneath the basement, we came upon some hundreds of
+small bird-cages, containing each a miserable linnet, titmouse, or
+finch, condemned to chirp out its wretched existence in this airless
+underground region. In reply to our pitying exclamation, we were told
+that the bachelors' friend who occupied the corner apartment on the
+ground-floor was a great sportsman, and devotedly fond of <i>la caccia</i>;
+that these unhappy little prisoners were employed by him in the season
+as decoy-birds; that they were kept in these dungeons during the other
+months of the year; and that they were <span class="smcap">blinded</span> to make them sing better
+and be more serviceable at the period when he needed them. As we looked
+shudderingly at these forlorn little creatures, and expressed our
+commiseration at their fate, the younger brother stepped forward, and,
+examining one of the cages, in which sat hunched up in one corner a
+stiff lump of feathers, coolly announced that "this goldfinch" was dead.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a feeling of relief that we left the death-released bird,
+and the vaults beneath the old <i>palazzo</i>, to return once more to the
+fresh air and the breathing-space of the broad earth and sky. Our next
+visit was to the bachelor brothers' factory, which was for the
+fabrication of wax candles. Adjoining this was a terrace-plot of ground,
+dotted over with what looked like Liliputian tombstones. We were
+beginning to wonder whether this were a cemetery for the dead
+birds,&mdash;speculating on the probability that these might be the
+monumental tributes placed over their graves by the sportsman friend of
+the two brothers,&mdash;when the elder informed us that this was the place
+they used for bleaching the wax, and that the square stones we saw were
+the supports on which rested the large flat stands whereon it was laid
+to whiten in the sun. From this terrace-plot of ground,&mdash;which projected
+in a narrowish green ledge, skirted by a low ivy-grown wall, over the
+sea,&mdash;we beheld a prospect of almost matchless beauty. Before us
+stretched a wide expanse of Mediterranean waters; to the extreme left
+was just visible the bold rocky point<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> of Porto Fino; to the right
+extended westward a grand line of picturesque coast, including the
+headlands of Capo di Noli and Capo delle Mele; and near at hand lay the
+harbor of Genoa, with its shipping, its amphitheatre of palaces,
+surmounted by the high ground above, and crowned by the fortressed
+summits beyond.</p>
+
+<p>We were roused from the absorbing admiration which this majestic sea and
+land view had excited, by one of the four asking whether there were any
+access to the <i>palazzo</i> from this terrace. Whereupon the brothers showed
+us a winding turret staircase, which led by a subterranean passage into
+one of the lower vaulted rooms. Nothing more like a place in a wonderful
+story-book ever met us in real life; and while we were lost in a dream
+of romantic imaginings, one of the brothers was engaged in giving a
+prosaic relation of how the old <i>palazzo</i> had come into their family by
+a lawsuit, which terminated in their favor, and left them possessors of
+this unexpected property. During the narrative a brood of adolescent
+chickens had come near to where we stood listening on the green plot,
+and eyed us with expectant looks, as if accustomed to be fed or noticed.
+The elder brother indulged the foremost among the poultry group&mdash;a white
+bantam cock of courageous character&mdash;by giving him his foot to assault.
+Valiantly the little fellow flew at, and spurred, and pecked the boot
+and trousers; again and again he returned to the charge, while the
+blue-gray eyes beamed smilingly down from beneath the steeple-crowned
+hat, as the old man humored the bird's pugnacious spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Presently a shy little girl of some ten or twelve years came peering out
+at the strangers from beneath a row of evergreen oaks that ornamented
+the back of the dwelling-house overlooking the terrace. There she stood
+at the foot of the ilexes, shading her eyes with one hand, (for the sun
+coyly gleamed through the rain-clouds at that moment,) while the other
+was employed in restraining the lumbering fondness of two large
+bull-dogs, that gambolled heavily round her. She was introduced to us as
+the daughter of the younger of the two brothers; who proved after all to
+be no bachelor, but a widower. One ponderous brindled brute poked his
+black muzzle against the child with such a weight of affection that we
+expected to see her overturned on the sward; but she seemed to have
+complete control over her canine favorites, and to live with them and a
+large macaw she had up stairs in her own room (we afterwards found it
+perched there, when taken to see the upper floor of the bachelor
+residence), as her familiars and sole associates,&mdash;like some enchanted
+princess in a fairy-tale.</p>
+
+<p>On entering the house from the terrace, we found ourselves in its
+kitchen, which strongly resembled a cavern made habitable. It was hewn
+out of the rock on which the dwelling stood; and it only required the
+presence of the black man and the old woman who figure in Gil Blas's
+story to give, to the life, the cooking-department of the robbers' cave
+there. As we ascended a rude stone staircase that led from it, we heard
+the lowing of cows; and, turning, we saw two of these animals
+comfortably stalled in a side recess, not far from the rocky ledge on
+which the culinary apparatus for dressing the food of the establishment
+was deposited. Mounting into the parlor, we discovered a good-sized
+apartment, its windows looking out through the foliage of the ilexes
+over the sea, skirted by the extensive coast view. Behind was the
+dining-room; on each side were the brothers' bedrooms; and leading from
+a small entrance-hall at the back was a large billiard-room. This opened
+on a small garden nook, in which were orange-trees and camellias, full
+of bud and blossom,&mdash;from which some of the flowers were gathered for us
+by the Italian brethren, on our taking leave and thanking them for the
+unusual treat we had had in going over their curious abode.</p>
+
+<p>The transient gleam of sunshine that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> had shone forth while we were
+there was the only intermission vouchsafed by the rain, which afterwards
+poured down with a steady vehemence and pertinacity seldom seen on the
+Ligurian Riviera. The effects of this rare continuance of wet weather
+were soon made impressively perceptible to the four as they emerged upon
+the open road, after passing the Lighthouse of Genoa and the long
+straggling suburbs of San Pier d'Arena, Pegli, and Voltri. The horses
+splashed through channels of water which filled the spongy ruts,
+smoking, and toiling, and plunging on; while the whoops and yells of the
+postilion urging them forward, together with the loud smacks of his
+whip, made a savage din. This was farther increased as we crashed along
+a ledge road, cut in a cliff overhanging the sea;&mdash;the waves tearing up
+from beneath with a whelming roar; the rocks jutting forth in points,
+every one of which was a streaming water-spout; the rain pelting, the
+wind rushing, the side-currents pouring and dashing. These latter,
+ordinarily but small rills, carrying off the drainage of the land by
+gentle course, were now swollen to rough cataracts, leaping with furious
+rapidity from crag to crag in deluges of turbid water, discolored to a
+dingy yellow-brown by the heaps of earth and stone which they dislodged
+and brought down with them, and hurled hither and thither over the
+precipitous projections, and occasionally flung athwart the highway. At
+one spot, where a heap of such stones&mdash;large, flat slabs&mdash;had been
+tossed upon the road, and a few of their companions were in the very act
+of plunging down after them, our postilion drew up to guide his cattle
+among those already fallen; and, raising his voice above the thunder of
+the sea-waves, rain, wind, and waters, shouted out in broad Genoese to
+the falling ones, "Halloo, you there, up above! Stop a bit, will you?
+Wait a moment, you up there!" Then, driving on carefully till he had
+steered by the largest of the fragments that lay prostrate, he turned
+back his head, shook his whip at it, and apostrophised it with, "Ah, you
+big pig! I've passed you, for this time!"</p>
+
+<p>The first change of horses took place at a village close down on the
+sea-shore, where some fishermen were busily employed hauling up the last
+of a row of boats that lay upon the beach. Every available hand, not
+occupied in aiding the conductor and postilion to unharness the
+diligence horses and put to the fresh team, was enlisted in the service
+of the boat-hauling. Young gentlemen out for an evening's amusement,
+attired in sacks or tarpaulins thrown over their shoulders, while their
+nether garments were rolled up tightly into a neat twist that encircled
+the top of each thigh, were frisking about a line of men with
+weather-beaten countenances and blown hair, who tugged bare-legged at
+the sides of the fishing-boat, half in the water and half out.
+Occasionally one of these young gentry, feeling perhaps that he had
+aided sufficiently in the general work, betook himself to a doorway
+near, dripping and shaking himself, and looking out through the sheeted
+rain at his companions, who were still in the excitement of whisking
+round the heaving and tugging fishermen, while the waves rose high, the
+spray dashed up in mist over their grizzled heads and beards, and the
+wind whistled sharply amid the deeper tumult of the sea and torrent
+waters. To heighten the grim wildness of the scene, the shades of
+evening were closing round, and by the time the four travellers were off
+again and proceeding on their way, darkness was fast setting in.</p>
+
+<p>Nightfall found them toiling up a steep ascent that diverges inland for
+a few miles, winding round the estate of some inflexible proprietor,
+upon whom nothing can prevail to permit the high-road to take its
+passage through his land, there bordering the sea-side. Up the ascent we
+labored, and down the descent we lunged, the wheels lodging in deep mire
+at every moment, and threatening to abide in the deeper holes and
+furrows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> which the water-courses (forced from their due channels by
+overflowing and by obstructive fallen masses) had cut and dug into the
+road as they strayed swiftly over it.</p>
+
+<p>By the time the next stage was reached, the conductor consulted the four
+on the advisability of stopping to sleep, instead of proceeding on such
+a tempestuous night, the like of which, for perilous effects, he said he
+had but once before encountered during the whole of the sixteen years he
+had been in office on this road. The three <i>coup&eacute;</i> passengers,
+consisting of two ladies&mdash;sisters&mdash;and a ruddy-faced, cheerful gentleman
+in a velvet travelling-cap, who made it a principle, like Falstaff, to
+take things easily, and "not to sweat extraordinarily," warmly approved
+the conductor's proposal as a sensible one; and even the alert gentleman
+in the <i>banquette</i> agreed that it would be more prudent to remain at the
+first good inn the diligence came to. This, the conductor replied, was
+at Savona, one stage farther, as the place they now were at was a mere
+boat-building hamlet, that scarcely boasted an inn at all,&mdash;certainly
+not "good beds." A group of eager, bronzed faces were visible by
+lamp-light, assembled round the conductor, listening to him as he held
+this conference with his coach-passengers; and at its close the
+bronze-faced crowd broke into a rapid outburst of Genoese dialect, which
+was interrupted by our conductor's making his way through them all, and
+disappearing round the corner of the small <i>piazza</i> wherein the
+diligence stood to have its horses changed. After some moments'
+pause,&mdash;not in the rain, or wind, or sea-waves, for they kept pouring
+and rushing and roaring on,&mdash;but in the hurly-burly of rapid talk, which
+ceased, owing to the talkers' hurrying off in pursuit of the vanished
+conductor, he returned, saying, "Andiamo a Savona." It soon proved that
+he had been to ascertain the feasibility of what the group of
+bronze-faced men had proposed, namely, that they would undertake to
+convey the diligence (without its horses, its "outsides," and its
+"insides") bodily over a high, steep, slippery mule-bridge, which
+crossed a torrent near at hand, now swollen to an unfordable depth and
+swiftness. The four beheld this impassable stream, boiling and surging
+and sweeping on to mingle itself with the madly leaping sea-waves out
+there in the dim night-gloom to the left, as they descended from the
+diligence and prepared to go on foot across something that looked like a
+rudely-constructed imitation of the Rialto Bridge at Venice, seen
+through a haze of darkness, slanting rain, faintly-beaming coach-lamps,
+pushing and heaving men, panting led horses, passengers muffled up and
+umbrellaed, conductor leading and directing. Then came the reharnessing
+of the horses, the reassembling of the passengers, the remounting of the
+"insides," the reclambering to his seat of the alert <i>banquette</i>
+"outside" (after a hearty interchange of those few brief, smiling words
+with his <i>coup&eacute;</i> companions which, between English friends, say so much
+in so little utterance at periods of mutual anxiety and interest), the
+payment of the agreed-for sum by the conductor to the bronze-faced
+pushers and heavers, amid a violent renewal of the storm of Genoese
+jargon, terminated by an authoritative word from the payer as he swung
+himself up into his place by a leathern strap dangling from the
+coach-side, a smart crack of the postilion's whip, a forward plunge of
+the struggling horses, an onward jerk of the diligence, and the final
+procedure into the wet and dark and roar of the wild night.</p>
+
+<p>The gas and stir of Savona came as welcome tokens of repose to the
+toilsome journey; and the four alighted at one of the hotels there with
+an inexpressible sense of relief. His fellow-travellers were warned,
+however, by the alert gentleman, that they must hold themselves in
+readiness to start before dawn next morning, as the conductor wished to
+avail himself of the first peep of daylight in passing several<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> torrents
+on the road which lay beyond Savona. Velvet-cap assented with a grunt;
+one of the sisters&mdash;all briskness at night, but fit for nothing of a
+morning&mdash;proposed not to go to bed at all; while the other&mdash;quite used
+up at night, but "up to everything" of a morning&mdash;undertook to call the
+whole party in time for departure.</p>
+
+<p>This she did,&mdash;ordering coffee, seeing that some was swallowed by the
+sister who had been unwillingly roused from the sleep she had willingly
+offered to forego overnight, collecting cloaks, baskets, and
+travelling-rugs, and altogether looking so wakeful and ready that she
+wellnigh drove her drowsy sister to desperation.</p>
+
+<p>The preannounced torrents proved as swollen as were expected; so that
+the passengers had to unpack themselves from the heaps of wrappings
+stowed snugly round their feet and knees, and issue forth into the keen
+morning air, armed with difficultly-put-up umbrellas, to traverse
+certain wooden foot-bridges, in the midst of which they could not help
+halting to watch the lightened diligence dragged splashingly through the
+deep and rapid streams, expecting, at every lunge it made into the
+water-dug gullies, to see it turn helplessly over on its side in the
+very midst of them. Nevertheless, no such accident occurred; and the
+four jogged on, along soaking, soppy, drenched roads, that seemed never
+to have known dust or drought. At one saturated village, they saw a
+dripping procession of people under crimson umbrellas, shouldering two
+rude coffins of deal boards, which were borne to the door of a church
+that stood by the wayside,&mdash;where the train waited in a kind of moist
+dejection to be admitted, and to look dispiritedly after the passing
+diligence. The alert gentleman heard from what the conductor gathered
+from an old woman wrapped in a many-colored gaudy-patterned scarf of
+chintz, which, wet through, covered her head and shoulders clingingly,
+that this was the funeral of a poor peasant-man and his wife, who had
+both died suddenly and both on the same day. The old woman held up her
+brown, shrivelled hands, and gesticulated pityingly with them in the
+pouring rain, as she mumbled her hurried tale of sorrow; while the
+postilion involuntarily slackened pace, that her words might be heard
+where he and the conductor sat.</p>
+
+<p>The horses were suffered to creep on at their own snail pace, while the
+influence of the funeral scene lasted; but soon the long lash was plied
+vivaciously again, and we came to another torrent, more deep, more
+rapid, more swollen than any previous one. Fortunately for us, a day or
+two before there had been a postilion nearly drowned in attempting to
+drive through this impassable ford; and still more fortunately for us,
+this postilion chanced to have a relation who was a servant in the
+household of Count Cavour, then prime-minister to King Victor Emanuel.
+"Papa Camillo's" servant's kinsman's life being endangered, an order had
+come from Turin only a few hours before our diligence arrived at the
+bank of the dangerous stream,&mdash;now swollen into a swift, broad
+river,&mdash;decreeing that the new road and bridge, lately in course of
+construction on this spot, should be opened immediately for passage to
+and fro. The road was more like a stone-quarry than a carriageable
+public highway, so encumbered was it with granite fragments, heaped
+ready for top-dressing and finishing; and the bridge led on to a raised
+embankment, coming to a sudden fissure, where the old coach-road crossed
+it. Still, our conductor, finding that some few carts and one diligence
+had actually passed over the ground, set himself to the work of getting
+ours also across. First, the insides and outsides were abstracted from
+the coach,&mdash;which they had by this time come to regard as quite an
+extraneous part of their travelling, not so much a "conveyance" as
+something to be conveyed,&mdash;and the four took their way over the stones,
+amused at this new and most unexpected obstacle to their progress.
+Hastening across the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> fissure, they went and placed themselves (always
+under umbrellas) beside a troop of little vagabond boys,&mdash;who had come
+to see the fun, and had secured good front places on the opposite
+bank,&mdash;to view the diligence brought down the sharp declivity of the
+embankment to the old road below. The spectators beheld the jolting
+vehicle come slowly and gratingly along, like a sturdy recusant, holding
+back, until the straining horses had tugged it by main force to the
+brink of the fissure. Here the animals stopped, snorted, eyed the sheer
+descent with twitching ears and quivering skins, as though they said in
+equine language, "We're surely not required to drag it down <i>this</i>!"
+They were soon relieved from their doubt, by being taken out of the
+traces, patted, and gently led down the embankment, leaving their
+burdensome charge behind. There it stuck, helplessly alone,&mdash;even more
+thoroughly belying its own name than diligences usually do,&mdash;perched on
+the edge of a declivity of the height of a tall house, stock still,
+top-heavy with piled luggage, deserted by its passengers, abandoned of
+its friend in the velvet cap, a motionless and apparently objectless
+coach. How it was to be dislodged and conveyed down the "vast abrupt"
+became matter of conjecture to the four, when presently some men came to
+the spot with a large coil of cable-cord, which they proceeded to pass
+through the two hindmost side-windows of the diligence, threading it
+like a bead on a string; and then they gradually lowered the lumbering
+coach down the side of the descent, amid the <i>evvivas</i> of the vagabond
+boys, led by an enthusiastic "<i>Bravissimo!</i>" from Velvet-cap.</p>
+
+<p>This incident occupied much time; and though the travellers made some
+progress during the afternoon, the gray shades of twilight were
+gathering over and deepening the gloom of the already gray sky and gray
+landscape,&mdash;deadened to that color from their naturally brilliant hues
+by the prevailing wet,&mdash;as the travellers stopped to change horses again
+at the entrance of the town of Oneglia. Here, while the conductor ran
+into a house to make purchase of a loaf about half a yard in length and
+a corpulent bottle of wine, the four saw another funeral train
+approaching. This time it was still more dreary, being attended by a
+show of processional pomp, inexpressibly forlorn and squalid. The coffin
+was palled with a square of rusty black velvet, whence all the pile had
+long been worn, and which the soaking rain now helped age to embrown and
+make flabby; a standard cross was borne by an ecclesiastical official,
+who had on a quadrangular cap surmounted by a centre tuft; two priests
+followed, sheltered by umbrellas, their sacerdotal garments dabbled and
+draggled with mud, and showing thick-shod feet beneath the dingy serge
+and lawn that flapped above them, as they came along at a smart pace,
+suggestive of anything but solemnity. As little of that effect was there
+in the burial-hymn which they bawled, rather than chanted, in a
+careless, off-hand style, until they reached the end of the street and
+of the town, when the bawlers suddenly ceased, took an abrupt leave of
+the coffin and its bearers, fairly turned on their heels, accompanied by
+the official holy standard-bearer, and went back at a brisk trot,
+having, it seems, fulfilled the functions required of them. Obsequies
+more heartless in their manner of performance, it was never the fate of
+the four to behold. The impression left by this sight assorted well with
+the deep and settled murkiness that dwelt like a thick veil on all
+around. Even the cheery tones of Velvet-cap's voice lost their
+elasticity, and the sprightliness of the sister's spirits, that
+invariably rose with the coming on of night, failed under the depressing
+influence of that rain-hastened funeral and that "set-in" rainy evening.
+As for the sister whose spirits fell with the fall of day, she was fast
+lapsing into a melancholy condition of silence and utter "giving-up."</p>
+
+<p>Rattling over the pavement of the long, straggling town,&mdash;plashing
+along<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> a few miles of level road,&mdash;struggling up hill,&mdash;rattling through
+another pavemented town,&mdash;striking into the country again,&mdash;we came to
+another long ascent. As we toiled to the top, a postilion, having the
+care of five return horses, joined company with ours, the two men
+walking up hill together, while their beasts paced slowly on, with
+drooping heads and smoking sides. Now and then, when the road was less
+steep, and levelled into trotting-ground, the postilions climbed to
+their seats,&mdash;ours on his rightful box-seat, the other on an impromptu
+one, which he made for himself upon a sack of corn slung beneath the
+front windows of the <i>coup&eacute;</i>,&mdash;and while our horses fell into an easy
+jog, we could see the return ones go on before at a swagging run, with
+their loosened harness tossing and hanging from them as they took their
+own course, now on one side of the way, now on the other, according to
+the promptings of their unreined fancy.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, at a turn of the road, we came upon an undistinguishable
+something, which, when our eyes could pierce through and beyond the
+immediate light afforded by our diligence-lamp, we discovered to be
+another diligence leaning heavily over a ditch, while its conductor and
+postilion were at their horses' heads, endeavoring to make them
+extricate it from its awkward position. This, however, was a feat beyond
+the poor beasts' strength; and our conductor, after a few "Sacramentos"
+at this new delay, got down and ran to see what could be done to help
+them out of the scrape. It had been occasioned partly by the
+carelessness of the conductor, who, unlike ours, (for the latter was a
+man of good sense and judgment, self-possessed, and perfectly attentive
+to the duties of his office,) had neglected to light the diligence-lamp,
+and partly by the obstinacy of a drunken postilion, who insisted on
+keeping too close to the ditch side of the road, while he instinctively
+avoided the precipice side. Nearly two mortal hours was our diligence
+detained, during which time our cattle were taken from their traces and
+harnessed to those of the half-overturned coach, in various attempts to
+dislodge it. The first resulted in a further locking of the wheel
+against a projecting point of rock, and an additional bundling sideways
+of the leaning diligence; the second was made by attaching the horses to
+the back of it, while the men set their strength to the wheels,
+endeavoring to push them round by main force in aid of the straining
+team. The weight of the heavily-loaded coach resisted their efforts to
+move it; and then the passengers were requested to descend. Out into the
+rain and mud and darkness they came, warned by our conductor, in his
+prompt, thoughtful way, to beware of stumbling over the precipitous
+cliff, which dropped straight from the roadside there, hundreds of feet
+down, into the sea. We could hear the dash of the waves far below, as
+our conductor's voice sounded out clear and peremptory, uttering the
+timely reminder; we could hear the words of two French
+<i>commis-voyageurs</i>, coming from the ditch-sunk diligence, making some
+facetious remark, one to the other, about their present adventure being
+very much like some of Alexandre Dumas's <i>Impressions de Voyage</i>; we
+could hear the cries and calls of the men refastening the horses, and
+preparing to push anew at the wheels; we could distinguish a domestic
+party dismounting from the back portion of the other diligence,
+consisting of a father and mother with their baby and the <i>bonne</i>; we
+could see the little white cap covered up carefully with a handkerchief
+by the young mother, while the father held an umbrella over their heads,
+and conducted them to the counterpart portion of our diligence, where
+the family took refuge during the fresh attempts to drag theirs forth.</p>
+
+<p>Then there came a tap against our <i>coup&eacute;</i> window, and an unmistakably
+British accent was heard to say: "Anglais? Anglais?" Tap&mdash;tap&mdash;tap. "Any
+English here?"</p>
+
+<p>Velvet-cap let the window down, and answered in his cheerfullest tone,
+"Yes."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This reply seemed to rejoice the heart of the inquirer, who immediately
+rejoined, "Oh!&mdash;Well, I really wished to know if there were any one here
+who could understand me. These fellows don't comprehend one word that I
+say; and I can't speak one word of their jabber. Just listen to them!
+What a confounded row they keep up! Parcel of stupid brutes! If I could
+only have made myself understood, I could have told them how to get it
+out in a minute. Confounded thing this, ain't it? Kept last night, too,
+by something of the same kind of accident; and I couldn't get those
+stupid fellows to make out what I meant, and give me my carpet-bag."</p>
+
+<p>Polite condolences from Velvet-cap.</p>
+
+<p>"I say, are these your Italian skies? Is Nice no better than this? By
+George, I didn't come here for this, though!"</p>
+
+<p>Assurances of the unusually bad weather this season from Velvet-cap.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but just hark! what a confounded row and jabber those fellows keep
+up."</p>
+
+<p>A simultaneous "Ee-ye-ho! ee-yuch-yuch!" came from the striving men at
+this moment, and our British acquaintance, with a hasty "Good night!"
+hurried off to see the result. It was this time a successful one; the
+leaning diligence was plucked out, restored to an upright position, and
+its passengers were reassembled. Once more on its way, our conductor
+returned to his own coach; and, with the help of our postilion,
+reharnessed our horses. But the difficulty now was to start them. Tired
+with their unexpected task of having to tug at another and a stuck-fast
+diligence,&mdash;made startlish with having to stand in the rain and chill
+night air, in the open road, while the debates were going on as to the
+best method of attaching them to the sunken vehicle,&mdash;when once put back
+into their own traces, they took to rearing and kicking instead of
+proceeding. It is by no means amusing to sit in a diligence behind five
+plunging horses, on a cliff-road,&mdash;one edge of which overhangs the sea,
+and the other consists of a deep ditch or water-way, beneath a sheer
+upright rock,&mdash;"when rain and wind beat dark December"; and even after
+whip and whoop had succeeded in prevailing on the rearers and kickers to
+"take the road" again, that road proved so unprecedentedly bad as almost
+to render futile the struggles of the poor beasts. They did their best;
+they strained their haunches, they bent their heads forward, they
+actually made leaps of motion, in trying to lug the clogged wheels on
+through the sludge and clammy soil; but this was a <i>mauvais pas</i>, where
+the <i>cantonniers'</i> good offices in road-mending had been lately
+neglected, and it seemed almost an impossibility to get through with our
+tired cattle. However, the thing was achieved, and the town of San Remo
+at length reached.</p>
+
+<p>Here, with a change of horses, it was now our turn to have a drunken
+postilion; whom our conductor, after seizing him by the collar with both
+hands, permitted to mount to his high seat and gather up the reins,
+there being no other driver to be had. Smacking his long whip with an
+energy that made the night-echoes resound far and wide, galloping his
+horses up hill at a rate that swayed the coach to and fro and threatened
+speedy upsetting, screaming and raving like a wild Indian uttering his
+battle-cry, our charioteer pursued his headlong course, until brought to
+a stop by something that suddenly obstructed his career.</p>
+
+<p>A voice before us shouted out, "We must all go back to San Remo!"</p>
+
+<p>A silence ensued; and then our conductor got down, running forward to
+see what was the matter. The three in the <i>coup&eacute;</i> saw their alert friend
+of the <i>banquette</i> descend; which caused Velvet-cap to bestir himself,
+and let down the window. Not obtaining any satisfactory information by
+looking out into the darkness and confusion, he opened the door also,
+and called to some one to help him forth. Whereupon he found himself in
+the arms of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> the maudlin postilion; who, taking him doubtless for some
+foreign lady passenger in great alarm, hugged him affectionately,
+stuttering out, "N'ayez pas peur! Point de danger! point de danger!"</p>
+
+<p>"Get off with you, will you?" was the ejaculation from Velvet-cap, as he
+pushed away the man, and went in search of his alert friend.</p>
+
+<p>The latter soon came running back to the coach-side, bidding the sisters
+get out quickly and come and look at what was well worth seeing.</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed! There lay a gigantic mass of earth, stones, and trees,
+among which were several large blocks of solid rock, hurled across the
+road, showing a jagged outline against the night-sky, like an
+interposing mountain-barrier but just recently dropped in their path.
+The whole had fallen not an hour ago; and it was matter of
+congratulation to the four, that it had not done so at the very moment
+their diligence passed beneath.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing to be done but what the voice (which proved to be that
+of the conductor belonging to the other diligence) had proposed, namely,
+to go back to San Remo.</p>
+
+<p>Here the travellers of both diligences soon arrived; the four, as they
+passed to their rooms, hearing the British accent on the landing, in
+disconsolate appeal to a waiter: "Oh!&mdash;look here,&mdash;sack, you know, sack,
+sack!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oui, monsieur; votre sac de nuit. Il est en bas,&mdash;en bas, sur la
+diligence. On le montera bient&ocirc;t."</p>
+
+<p>The lady whose spirits rose at night was flitting about, brisk as a bee,
+getting morsels of bread and dipping them into wine to revive her
+sister; who, worn out with fatigue and exhaustion, sat in a collapsed
+and speechless state on a sofa.</p>
+
+<p>Next morning, however, she was herself again, and able to note the owner
+of the British accent, who had certainly obtained his desired
+carpet-bag, since there he was, at the <i>coup&eacute;</i> window, brushed and
+beaming, addressing Velvet-cap with, "Excuse me, as an Englishman; but,
+could you oblige me with change for a napoleon? I want it to pay my bill
+with. They could get some from the next shop, if these jabbering fellows
+would but understand, and go and try."</p>
+
+<p>The morning-animated sister was now also able to observe upon the more
+promising aspect of the weather, which was evidently clearing up; for it
+not only did not rain, but showed streaks of brightness over the sea, in
+lines between the hitherto unbroken gray clouds. She adverted to the
+pleasant look of the cap-lifting <i>cantonniers</i>, as they stood drawn up
+and nodding encouragement at the diligence, near the mass of earth which
+had fallen overnight; and which they, by dint of several hours' hard
+work from long before dawn, had sufficiently dug away to admit of
+present passage. She said how comforting the sight of their honest
+weather-lined faces was, bright with the touch of morning and early
+good-humor.</p>
+
+<p>This brought a muttered rejoinder from the other sister; who, huddled up
+in one corner, still half asleep, remarked that the faces of the
+<i>cantonniers</i> were surely far more comforting when visible by the light
+of the diligence-lamp, coming to bring succor amid darkness and danger.</p>
+
+<p>"But it is precisely because they are never to be seen during the
+darkness, when danger is increased by there rarely being help at hand,
+that I dread and dislike night," returned Morning-lover.</p>
+
+<p>"How oppressive the scent of those truffles is, the first thing after
+breakfast!" exclaimed Night-favorer.</p>
+
+<p>"I had not yet perceived it," replied Morning-lover. "Last evening,
+indeed, after a whole day's haunting with it, the smell of that hamper
+of truffles which the conductor took up at Finale was almost
+insupportable; but now, in the fresh morning air, it is anything but
+disagreeable. I shall never hereafter encounter the scent of truffles
+without being forcibly reminded of all the incidents of this journey.
+That<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> smell seems absolutely interwoven with images of torrent-crossing,
+cliff-falling, pouring rain, and roaring waves."</p>
+
+<p>The talk fell upon associations of sense with events and places; sounds,
+sights, and scents, intimately connected with and vividly recalling
+certain occurrences of our lives. We had missed the glimpse of the baby
+face and little white cap from the back of the diligence that preceded
+us during the first portion of the day, owing to our coach having been
+delayed at Ventimiglia by some peculiar arrangement which required the
+team that had dragged us up a steep ascent to stop and bait,&mdash;merely
+resting instead of changing, before we went on again.</p>
+
+<p>The Pont St. Louis, with the picturesque ravine it crosses, had been
+passed, and the pretty town of Mentone was full in view, when we caught
+sight of the other diligence, some way on the road before us, brought
+once more to a stand-still, while a crowd of persons surrounded it, and
+its passengers were to be seen, in the distance, descending, with the
+baby cap among them. At this instant, an excited French official darted
+out from a doorway by the side of the road near us, raising his arms
+distractedly, and throwing his sentences up at the conductor, who
+understood him to say that there was no going on; that a whole garden
+had come tumbling down across the road just at the entrance to Mentone,
+and prevented passing.</p>
+
+<p>We drove on to the spot, and found it was indeed so; the grounds of a
+villa, skirting the highway on a terrace-ledge, had been loosened by the
+many days' rain, and had fallen during the forenoon, a heap of
+ruins,&mdash;shrubs, plants, garden-walls, flowers, borders, railings,&mdash;one
+mass of obstruction.</p>
+
+<p>With a glance at the <i>coup&eacute;</i> passengers, another French official (the
+newly-appointed frontier custom-house being close at hand) stepped
+forward to suggest that the "insides" could be accommodated, during the
+interim required for the <i>cantonniers</i> to do their work, at a
+lately-built hotel he pointed to; but the four agreed to spend the time
+in walking round by the path above the obstruction, so as to see its
+whole extent.</p>
+
+<p>The wet, percolating and penetrating through the softer soil, gradually
+accumulates a weight of water behind and beneath the harder and rockier
+portions, which dislodges them from their places, pushes them forward,
+and finally topples them over headlong. This is generally prevented
+where terrace-walls are built up, by leaving holes here and there in the
+structure, which allow the wet to drain through innocuously; but if, as
+in the present instance, this caution be neglected, many days'
+successive rain is almost sure to produce the disaster in question. It
+had a woful look,&mdash;all those garden elegances cast there, flung out upon
+the high-road, like discarded rubbish; pots of selected flowers,
+favorite seats, well-worn paths, carefully-tended beds, trailing
+climbers, torn and snapped branches, all lying to be shovelled away as
+fast as the road-menders could ply their pickaxes and spades.</p>
+
+<p>At length this task was accomplished; the diligences were hauled over
+the broken ground (their contents being also "hauled over" at the
+custom-house); the passengers (after the important ceremonial of handing
+their passports for inspection, and having them handed back by
+personages who kept their countenances wonderfully) were in again and
+off again.</p>
+
+<p>But one more torrent to cross,&mdash;where the foremost coach had nearly been
+overset, and where the occupants of the hindmost one, profiting by
+example, got out and walked over the footbridge, in time to behold the
+owner of the British accent wave his hat triumphantly from the <i>coup&eacute;</i>
+with a hearty (English) "Huzza!" as the vehicle recovered, by a violent
+lurch to the left, from an equally violent one to the right, issuing
+scathless from the last flood that lay in the way,&mdash;and then both
+diligences began at a leisurely pace to crawl up a long ascent of road,
+bordered on each side by olive-grounds;&mdash;until the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> view opened to a
+fine stretch of prospect, now colored and vivified by a glance of the
+afternoon sun,&mdash;the diminutive peninsular kingdom of Monaco, lying down
+in the very sea, bright, and green, and fairy-like; the bold barren crag
+of the Turbia rock frowning sternly in front, with its antique Roman
+tower and modern Italian church; the rocky heights above to the right,
+with their foreground of olive-trees, vine-trellises, and orange-groves,
+interspersed with country-houses; while through all wound the
+ever-climbing road, a white thread in the distance, with the telegraphic
+poles, dwindled to pin-like dimensions, indicating its numberless turns
+and bends.</p>
+
+<p>As the sun sank over the far western lines of the Estrelle Mountains,
+and the sky faded into grayish purple, succeeded by an ever-deepening
+suffusion of black, unpierced by a single star, the high reach of road
+above Villafranca Bay was passed; and, on our turning the corner of the
+last intervening upland, full in view came the many lights of Nice, with
+its castled rock, its minarets and cupolas, its stretch of sea, its look
+of sheltered repose;&mdash;all most welcome to sight, after our sensational
+journey on the Cornice Road in a great rain.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INCIDENTS_OF_THE_PORTLAND_FIRE" id="INCIDENTS_OF_THE_PORTLAND_FIRE"></a>INCIDENTS OF THE PORTLAND FIRE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Never had Portland looked more beautiful than when the sunrise-gun
+boomed across the waters, announcing the ninetieth anniversary of our
+independence. The sun, which on another day should look down on the
+city's desolation, rose unclouded over the houses, that stood forth from
+the foliage of the embowering elms, or nestled in their shadow; over the
+quaintness of the old-fashioned churches and the beauty of the more
+modern temples; over the stately public edifices, and the streets
+everywhere decked with flags and thronged with crowds of happy,
+well-dressed people. Of course, the popular satisfaction expressed
+itself in the report of pistols, guns, and fire-crackers; and all
+through the day the usual amusements went on, and in the afternoon
+almost everybody was on the street.</p>
+
+<p>A few minutes before five o'clock, when the festivity was at its
+wildest, the alarm of fire rang out. Every circumstance was favorable
+for a conflagration,&mdash;the people scattered, the city dry and heated by a
+July sun, and a high southwesterly wind blowing. It needed only the
+exciting cause in the shape of a fire-cracker, and lo! half the city was
+doomed.</p>
+
+<p>My youngest brother, at the first sound of the bell, came and begged me
+to take him to the fire; so I went, to please him. Poor child! I little
+thought that by twelve o'clock at night there would be no place at home
+to lay the little head.</p>
+
+<p>We found the fire near Brown's sugar-house, where there was a large
+crowd already assembled. But, though the smoke and masses of flame were
+rising only from one house, the wind was blowing a perfect gale; and a
+foreboding of the calamity impending seemed to possess the spectators.
+There was none of the usual noise, and men appeared to look at the
+burning house with a feeling of awe. We did not stop there at all; and
+some idea of the rapid progress of the fire may be gathered from the
+fact, that about four squares distant, where, on the way up, we could
+see one fire, on our return we saw three,&mdash;two lighted by sparks from
+the first. We slowly retraced our way, and met people on every side
+quickening their steps in the direction of the fire.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>About seven o'clock, mother and I thought it would be wise to pack up
+our silver and valuables; for it seemed as if we were directly in the
+path of the conflagration. Down Fore Street, and from Fore to Free, it
+was rushing on. The southwestern heavens were entirely shut from our
+view by the flames and smoke; cinders, ashes, and blazing embers were
+falling like rain down Middle Street, and across to Congress, as far as
+the eye could see. The scene was terrible; but it was soon surpassed in
+fearfulness, for the work of desolation was not half completed. The
+Irish population were the chief sufferers up to this hour. It was
+heart-rending to see the women rushing hither and thither, trying to
+save their few possessions. Here, a poor creature was dragging a
+mattress, followed by several little crying children, her face the
+picture of despair; there, another, with her family, stood over the
+remnants of her scanty stock. A poor woman, who was in the habit of
+working for us, lived near the corner of Cross and Fore Streets. She had
+five children and a sick husband to care for. Almost all her energies
+were bent in getting them to a place of safety; and the few little
+things which she succeeded in rescuing from the flames were afterwards
+stolen from her by some one of the many wretches who gathered the spoils
+that awful night.</p>
+
+<p>It soon became evident that we must decide upon some plan of action, in
+case it should come to the worst. We had two married sisters,&mdash;one
+living in India Street, the other at the west end of the city. As the
+former had no family, and was alone, even her husband being away, and as
+the latter had three children, and a house full of company, we decided
+that, if we must move, it should be to India Street. We sent off one
+team, and my youngest brother with it, before the fire was anywhere near
+us; and then, while my two little sisters assisted mother in getting
+things together, I worked with my brother and cousin, hanging wet
+blankets against the walls, pouring water on the roof, and taking other
+precautionary measures. But all was useless. On came the fire with a
+steady sweep. We saw that it was idle to combat it longer, and turned
+all our energies to saving what we could. Our home was to be ours no
+longer. The dear old roof-tree, under which had assembled so many loved
+ones, now gone forever,&mdash;where the eyes of all our home circle first saw
+the light of life,&mdash;where three of that number closed theirs in
+death,&mdash;the centre of the hopes and joys of a lifetime,&mdash;was to be
+abandoned to the flames. It was like tearing our heart-strings to leave
+it so; but there was no time for lingering. With streaming eyes and
+aching hearts we started out, taking what we could in our hands. There
+was by this time no vehicle to be obtained in which we could ride; and,
+supporting my mother, my sisters clinging to us in silent terror, we
+were borne along with the crowd down Middle Street to India. I cannot
+remember any incidents of that walk. The hurrying throng around me, the
+flying sparks, and the roar of the engines, seem like the confusion of a
+dream.</p>
+
+<p>Our sister, who met us at the door, felt perfectly secure, and had done
+nothing towards packing. I gave her an account of our proceedings,
+thinking each moment of some precious thing I might have brought away.
+We went to the front door, and looked out on the scene before us. The
+fire seemed to come on the wings of the wind. Middle Street was ablaze;
+Wood's marble hotel was in flames, together with the beautiful dwelling
+opposite. The fire leaped from house to house, and, if for a moment
+checked, it was but to rush on in wilder fury. Churches, one by one,
+were seized by the flame, and crumbled into ruin before it. No human
+power could arrest its fierce progress. In vain the firemen put forth a
+strength almost superhuman: their exertions seemed but to add to its
+fury. Explosion after explosion gave greater terror to the scene:
+buildings were successively blown up in the useless effort to bar its
+pathway; the fire leaped the chasm and sped on. Fugitives of every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> age
+and condition were hurrying through the streets, laden with everything
+imaginable,&mdash;especially looking-glasses, which seem the one important
+thing to be saved during a fire. My brother and cousin had not yet made
+their appearance, nor had we seen anything of my brother-in-law, from
+the other end of the city. But we knew they must be at their places of
+business, which were now in the heart of the burning district. Swiftly
+the destruction hurried towards us; and people were now seen bringing in
+their goods and seeking shelter on our premises. O what heart-broken
+faces surrounded us that fearful night! Friends, and people we had never
+seen, alike threw themselves on our kindness; and I must say that a
+spirit of humanity and good-will seemed everywhere prevalent among the
+citizens. We were now ourselves tortured by suspense. Could we escape,
+or should we again have to seek refuge from the flames? Surely the work
+of destruction would stop before it reached India Street? The hot breath
+of the maddening fire, and its lurid glare, were the only response. O,
+if the wind would only change! But a vane, glistening like gold in the
+firelight, steadfastly pointed to the southeast. For one moment it
+veered, and our hearts almost stood still with hope; but it swung back,
+and a feeling of despair settled upon us.</p>
+
+<p>Our house was full. One poor lady, with a little baby only a week old,
+lay on a sofa in one of the rooms; near her, bent over in a
+rocking-chair, sat an old woman who had not been out of her house for
+five years, with a look of hopeless bewilderment on her wrinkled face.
+But people were now beginning to move from our house. India Street was
+almost blocked up. Every kind of vehicle that went upon wheels, from a
+barouche to a wheelbarrow, passed by laden with furniture.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment my brother and brother-in-law approached, blackened
+almost beyond recognition. It was not until C&mdash;&mdash; spoke that I really
+knew him.</p>
+
+<p>"We must be calm and collected, and save what we can. John is trying to
+get a team to carry mother up to L&mdash;&mdash;'s; the rest of us will have to go
+to the graveyard. But John may not be successful, so you stay here, and
+see if you can get any one to take mother: they may do it for you, when
+they wouldn't for a man."</p>
+
+<p>I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, clinging to the horse-post, and
+appealed in vain to wagons going by.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Won't</i> you take a lady and children away from here?"</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>can't</i>, ma'am, not if you was to give me twenty-five dollars,&mdash;not
+if you was to give me five hundred. I'm taking a load for a gentleman
+now."</p>
+
+<p>So it was in every case. Very many were worse off than we were,&mdash;had not
+even a man to help. One well-known citizen was appealed to for help, in
+the early part of the evening, by a poor woman,&mdash;a sort of dependant of
+his family. He took her and her daughter, with their effects, outside
+the city, and returned to find India Street on fire and no means of
+getting through the crowd to his house, which was burned, with all that
+was not saved by the exertions of his wife. They had visiting them a
+lady whose child lay dead in the house, awaiting burial. The mother took
+the little corpse in her arms and carried it herself up to the other end
+of the city!</p>
+
+<p>While I was making these vain attempts, John drove up in a light,
+open-topped buggy. We hurriedly got mother and E&mdash;&mdash; into it, and gave
+into their charge the jewelry and silver, and they drove away. I could
+not but tremble for their safety. The road seemed impassable, so dense
+was the struggling crowd. On every side the fire was raging. Looking up
+India Street it was one sheet of flame, and equally so before us. It
+looked like a world on fire, for we could see no smoke,&mdash;it was too near
+for that,&mdash;and the heat was terribly intense.</p>
+
+<p>There was no time to be lost. Both our servants and M&mdash;&mdash;'s were away
+spending the Fourth, so we had to depend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> entirely on ourselves. Our
+back fence was soon torn down, and we all worked as we never had before.
+We saved a good deal, but not one half of what we brought from our house
+in the first place. We had thrown things out of the window, and C&mdash;&mdash;
+and J&mdash;&mdash; worked hard dragging them out of the yard, until, scorched and
+almost suffocated, they were compelled to desist. The flames were upon
+us so quickly, it seemed incredible that they could have seized the
+house so soon after we thought we were in danger.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank God, we are all safe!" cried M&mdash;&mdash;, sinking upon the ground in
+the graveyard, where we took refuge. She tried to look cheerful; but the
+sight before her&mdash;her house in flames&mdash;and the thought of her husband's
+absence overcame her, and she burst into tears. I laid the two little
+girls upon the grass; and, wearied out, they soon fell asleep. It was a
+strange scene in that quiet old cemetery, where the dead of more than a
+century had lain undisturbed in their graves. Where only the reverent
+tread of the mourner, or of some visitor carefully threading his way
+among the grassy mounds, was wont to be known, crowds of frantic people
+were hurrying across; while here and there were family groups clustered
+together, watching the destruction of their property.</p>
+
+<p>How long the remaining hours seemed! Would the daylight never come? The
+children slept on, and we four talked in low tones of the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>At length, faint, rosy lights began to streak the eastern horizon, and
+slowly the day dawned. The sun rose unclouded above the hills, sending
+down his beams upon the desolation which the night had wrought, lighting
+up the islands and the blue waters, flecked with sail-boats.</p>
+
+<p>Not less welcome to us, J&mdash;&mdash; now also appeared,&mdash;with a hay-cart, whose
+driver he had engaged to come and remove us. Our goods were put into it;
+we took our places among them, and, as soon as the tardy oxen could
+carry us, were safe in my sister's house, living over again in words
+that fearful night, and relating to each other some of those incidents
+of the fire which can never all be told. A little friend of ours, when
+leaving her home, took in her arms her doll, nearly as large as herself;
+obliged to flee a second time, her mother told her it was useless to try
+and save the doll, and she must leave it there. With many tears she laid
+it on the sofa, feeling, no doubt, as if she were leaving a human being
+to be burnt. The next day, a friend brought to her the identical dolly,
+which had been found in the graveyard! The little one's joy may be
+imagined.</p>
+
+<p>One of the women in the Irish quarter picked up her big pig in her arms
+and carried it to a place of safety, then returned to take care of her
+children and furniture. A woman went by our house in the early part of
+the evening bent nearly double beneath the weight of a trunk strapped
+upon her back. We saw women that night with loads under which almost any
+man would have staggered in ordinary circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Before we were supposed to be in danger, I walked out with a young
+friend to see what progress the fire was making. At a corner we observed
+a woman with a child about eight years old, talking, in great agitation,
+to a lady, and evidently urging her to accede to some request. My
+companion suggested that we should see if we could aid her in any way.
+As we approached, the lady had taken the child by the hand, with the
+words, "What is your address?" which was given. We inquired if we could
+be of any service. "No, thank you," was the reply. "I asked that lady to
+take care of my daughter. I keep store on that street over there. My
+husband is out of town, and I don't know what I shall do!"&mdash;and,
+wringing her hands, she hurried away. I have wondered since what was the
+fate of the little girl thus intrusted to the care of strangers; for the
+lady went in the direction, afterwards swept by the fire.</p>
+
+<p>One family, whose house the flames did not reach until near two o'clock
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> the morning, behaved with great coolness. The head of the household
+lay ill. It was their first care to provide for him. Then they went
+deliberately about, gathering up their valuables, taking just what they
+wanted. They secured a wagon to carry away their things. Their house,
+meanwhile, had been full of refugees from the flames. One of the young
+ladies, going for the last time through the deserted rooms, found, on a
+sofa in the parlor, a sick woman, utterly unable to move. At first, she
+felt almost in despair at sight of this poor creature, so near meeting a
+fearful fate. But quickly recovering her presence of mind, she called in
+men from the street, and, by their united efforts, they carried her out,
+and forced a passing wagon to take her to a safe place. A young lady,
+who lived at a little distance from this family, was spending the night
+at the other end of the city. They sat up till half past twelve, and she
+was then in the act of retiring, never dreaming that her home was in
+danger, when a loaded wagon stopped at the door, and out stepped her
+sister and child. She went back in the same vehicle, and worked till
+twelve the next day, getting things out of the house, collecting and
+guarding them till they could be removed.</p>
+
+<p>There was, of course, the usual difference shown amongst people in such
+circumstances,&mdash;energy and coolness contrasted with imbecility and
+frantic excitement. A friend who moved three times, with her husband so
+ill that he had to be carried from place to place, never once forgot to
+administer his medicine at regular intervals,&mdash;with a steady hand
+pouring out the drops by the light of the fire.</p>
+
+<p>A gentleman was carrying some of his books, preceded by an assistant,
+who also had his arms full. The latter walked so rapidly that his
+employer could not keep up with him. He called upon him to slacken his
+pace; but, as no attention was paid to this, the gentleman dropped his
+books upon the ground, and, running forward, knocked him down,
+determined to be obeyed, fire or no fire.</p>
+
+<p>But all were not so cool. One man, seeing the flames advancing in the
+direction of his house, rushed thither to save his property. He worked
+with might and main, but, when the house was nearly emptied, became
+aware of the fact that it was his neighbor's. By this time his own
+dwelling was on fire, from which he saved scarcely anything. I know one
+person who passed through his hall perfectly empty-handed, while all
+around him were bundles and boxes, which were consumed in the fire;
+another walked out of his house with a package of envelopes in his hand,
+leaving, close by, an article worth thirty dollars.</p>
+
+<p>I must mention one of many instances of unselfishness that came under my
+observation. A gentleman was comfortably established in a house which he
+had recently bought and furnished, expecting there to enjoy the
+pleasures of a home. One half of the house he had rented; but the
+husband of the woman to whom it was let was not in town. Their dwelling
+shared the fate of those around them, being burnt. He first set to work
+to save his own things; but, struck by the forlorn condition of his
+tenant, he did his best to save her effects, even to the detriment of
+his own; for when they were examined, the greater portion of them was
+found to be hers. Time has not exhausted the truth and beauty of the
+saying, that "in the night the stars shine forth," and the stars did not
+pale even in the terrible light of the fire that consumed half a city.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="MY_LITTLE_BOY" id="MY_LITTLE_BOY"></a>MY LITTLE BOY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>There were nine of us, all told, when mother died; myself, the eldest,
+aged twenty, a plain and serious woman, well fitted by nature and
+circumstance to fill the place made vacant by death.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot remember when I was young. Indeed, when I hear other women
+recount the story of their early days, I think I had no childhood, for
+mine was like no other.</p>
+
+<p>Mother was married so young, that at the age when most women begin to
+think seriously of marriage she had around her a numerous brood, of
+which I was less the elder sister than the younger mother. She was
+delicate by nature, and peevish by reason of her burdens, and I think
+could never have been a self-reliant character; so she fretted and
+sighed through life, and when death came, unawares, she seemed not sorry
+for the refuge.</p>
+
+<p>She called me to her bed one day in a tone so cheerful that I wondered,
+and when I saw the calm and brightness in her face, hope made me glad,
+"Margaret," she said, "you have been a good daughter. I never did you
+justice until this illness opened my eyes. You have shamed me by your
+patience and your sacrifices so gently borne. You are more fit to be a
+mother than I ever was; and I leave the children to your care without a
+fear. It is not likely you will ever marry, and I die content, knowing
+that you will do your duty."</p>
+
+<p>After this came many sad days,&mdash;the parting, the silent form which death
+had made majestic, the funeral hymns, the tolling bell, the clods upon
+the coffin-lid; and when the sun shone out and the birds sang again, it
+seemed to me I had dreamed it all, and that the sun could not shine nor
+the birds sing above a grave on which the grass had not yet had time to
+grow. But I had not dreamed, nor had I time for dreaming. Mother was
+dead, and eight children claimed from me a mother's care,&mdash;the youngest
+a wailing babe but seven days old, whom I came to cherish and love as my
+little boy.</p>
+
+<p>When I had settled down, and grown accustomed to the vacuum which never
+could be filled for me, I thought a great deal upon mother's last words.
+I was proud of the trust she reposed in me, and I meant to be faithful
+to it. I wondered much why she had thought it likely I should never
+marry; for I was a woman with strong instincts, and, amid all the toil
+and care of my barren life, I had seen afar, through gleaming mists, the
+mountains of hope arise, and beyond the heat and dust and labor of duty
+caught glimpses of green ways made pleasant by quiet waters.</p>
+
+<p>I do not think my burden seemed heavier now that mother no longer helped
+me to bear it; for my sense of responsibility had been increased by her
+complaining spirit. Her discouraging views of life held in check the
+reins of my eager fancy: it seemed wrong to enjoy a happiness I could
+not share with her. Now I no longer felt this restraint; but, knowing
+that somehow she had missed this happiness for which I waited, the
+knowledge invested her memory with a tender pity, and tempered my
+pleasure with a feeling akin to pain.</p>
+
+<p>I was never idle. Behind the real work of life, my fancy wrought on,
+unknown and unsuspected by the world; my lamp of joy, fed by the sweet
+oil of hope, was ready for the lighting, and I was content to wait.</p>
+
+<p>My little boy throve bravely. Every morning I awoke him with a kiss;
+and, perhaps because each day seemed but a continuation of the other,
+time stood still for him. He was for me the incarnation of all
+loveliness. The fair face, and blond hair, and brown, brooding eyes,
+were beautiful as an angel's, and goodness set its seal on his
+perfections.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> He gave me no trouble: grief brings age, joy confirms
+youth, and I and my little boy grew young together. He was with me
+everywhere, lightening my labor with his prattling tongue, helping me
+with his sweet, hindering ways; and when the kisses had been many that
+had waked him many morns, he stood beside me, my little boy, hardly a
+hand's breadth lower than myself.</p>
+
+<p>The world had changed for all but him and me. My father had wandered off
+to foreign parts; sisters and brothers, one by one, had gone forth to
+conquer kingdoms and reign in their own right, and one young sister,
+just on the border-land of maiden fancies, (O friends, I write this line
+with tears!) turned from earth and crossed the border-land of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>But he and I remained alone in the old homestead, and walked together
+sweetly down the years.</p>
+
+<p>If I came upon disappointment, I had not sought it, neither did I fall
+by it; but that which was my future slid by me and became the past, so
+gently that I scarce remember where one ended or the other began; and
+though all other lovers failed me, one true remained, to whom I ever
+would be true. The future did not look less fair; nay, I deemed it more
+full of promise than ever. It was as though I had passed from my old
+stand-point of observation to a more easterly window; and the prospect
+was not the less enchanting that I looked upon it over the shoulder of
+my little boy. We talked much of it together; and though he had the
+nearer view, it was my practised vision that saw pathways of beauty not
+yet suspected by him.</p>
+
+<p>But we were still happy in the present, and did not speculate much upon
+the future. The rolling years brought him completeness, and to the
+graces of person were added the gifts of wisdom and knowledge. The down
+that shaded his cheek, like the down upon a ripe peach, had darkened and
+strengthened to the symbol of manhood, and his words had the clear ring
+of purpose. For there was a cloud upon the horizon which at first was no
+bigger than a man's hand, but it grew until it filled the land with
+darkness, and the fair prospect on which I had so loved to gaze was
+hidden behind the storm. My little boy and I looked into each other's
+faces, and he cried, "Margaret, I must go!"</p>
+
+<p>I did not say nay,&mdash;for the tears which were not in my eyes were in my
+voice, and to speak was to betray them,&mdash;but I turned about to make him
+ready.</p>
+
+<p>In these days my little boy's vision was finer than my own; and when we
+stood together, looking from our orient window, he saw keener and
+farther than I had ever done; for my eyes now looked through a veil of
+tears, while his, like the eagle's, penetrated the cloud to the sunshine
+behind it. He was full of the dream of glory; and his words, fraught
+with purpose and power, stirred me like a trumpet. I caught the
+inspiration that thrilled his soul; for we had walked so long together
+that all paths pursued by him must find me ever at his side.</p>
+
+<p>One day I was summoned to meet a visitor; and going, a tall figure in
+military dress gave me a military salute. It was my little boy, who,
+half abashed at his presumption, drew himself up, and sought refuge from
+shyness in valor. It was not a sight to make me smile, though I smiled
+to please my warrior, who, well pleased, displayed his art, to show how
+fields were won. Won! He had no thought of loss; for youth and hope
+dream not of defeat, and he talked of how the war was to be fought and
+ended, and all should be well.</p>
+
+<p>I kissed my little boy good night; and he slept peacefully, dreaming of
+fields of glory, as Jacob dreamed and saw a heavenly vision.</p>
+
+<p>He went; and then it seemed as if there had been with him one fair long
+summer day, and this was the evening thereof; and my heart was heavy
+within me.</p>
+
+<p>But many letters reached me from the distant field,&mdash;long and loving
+letters, full of hope, portraying all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> poetry and beauty of
+camp-life, casting the grosser part aside; and to me at home, musing
+amid peaceful scenes, it seemed a great, triumphant march, which must
+crush, with its mere <i>display</i> of power, all wicked foes. But the
+sacrifice of blood was needed for the remission of sin, and these
+holiday troops&mdash;heroes in all save the art of war&mdash;lost the day, and,
+returning, brought back with their thinned ranks my little boy unharmed.
+Unharmed, thank God! but bronzed and bearded like the pard, and
+tarnished with the wear and burnished with the use of war.</p>
+
+<p>How he talked and laughed, making light of danger, and, growing serious,
+said the fight had but begun,&mdash;the business of the nation must, for
+years, be war,&mdash;and that his strength and manhood, nay, his life if need
+be, should be given to his country. Then his words made me brave, and
+his looks made me proud. I blessed him with unfaltering lips; and above
+the hills of promise, which my little boy and I saw looking from our
+orient window, rose higher yet the mountains of truth, with the straight
+path of duty leading to the skies. But when he was gone
+again,&mdash;gone,&mdash;there fell a shadow of the coming night, and the evening
+and the morning were the second day.</p>
+
+<p>His frequent letters dissipated the sense of danger, and brought me
+great comfort. War is not a literary art, and letters from the "imminent
+deadly breach," made it seem less deadly. His self-abnegation filled me
+with wonder. "It is well that few should be lost, that many may be
+saved," he wrote. In what school had this tender youth learned heroism,
+I asked myself, as I read his noble words and trembled at his courage.</p>
+
+<p>My dreams and my gaze turned southward. No eastern beams lured me to
+that lookout so long endeared; for the eyes through which I once gazed
+looked through the smoke of battle, and hope and faith had fled with
+him, and left me but suspense.</p>
+
+<p>Now came hot work. The enemy pressed sorely, and men's&mdash;ay, and
+women's&mdash;souls were tried. Long days of silence passed, days of
+sickening doubt, and then came the news of <i>victory</i>,&mdash;victory bought
+with precious blood and heavy loss. Over the ghastly hospital lists I
+hung, fearing and dreading to meet the name of my little boy, taking
+hope, as the list shortened, from the despair of others, <i>and no
+mention</i>. Thank God, who giveth <i>us</i> the victory!</p>
+
+<p>And later, when details come in, I see in "official report" my little
+boy's name mentioned for meritorious and gallant conduct, and
+recommended for promotion. Ah! the groans of the dying are lost in the
+shouts of the victor; and, forgetting the evil because of this good, a
+woman's heart cried, <i>Laus Deo</i>!</p>
+
+<p>After the battle, hardly fought and dearly purchased, my hero came home
+on furlough. War had developed him faster than the daily kisses of love
+had done; for my little boy&mdash;crowned with immortal youth for me&mdash;for all
+the world came from this rude embrace a man in stature and wisdom, a
+hero in valor and endurance, a leader beloved and revered.</p>
+
+<p>But for all this I tucked him in o' nights, and shut off harmful
+draughts from him who oft had lain upon the sod, and for covering had
+but the cloudy sky.</p>
+
+<p>These were blissful days,&mdash;marked in the past by white memories,&mdash;in
+which we talked of future plans, the future so near, yet to our vision
+so remote, and purposed this and that, not considering that Heaven
+disposes all things.</p>
+
+<p>And when he must be off, I kissed him lightly; for success brings
+security, and I was growing accustomed to these partings; but he drew me
+to his breast, struck by some pang of coming evil, and called me
+<i>mother</i>. Ah! then my heart yearned over my little boy, and I would fain
+have stayed his going; but, dashing the tears from his eyes, he hurried
+away, nor looked behind him once.</p>
+
+<p>All through the winter, which for him was summer, my heart lay lightly
+in its place, and I waited calmly the coming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> of the end. The struggle
+was almost over; the storm-cloud had rolled back, after deluging the
+land in blood; in this consecrated soil slavery was forever buried; the
+temple of freedom was reared in the name of all men, and the dove of
+peace sat brooding in its eaves.</p>
+
+<p>All this my little boy had said must come to pass before he sheathed his
+sword; and this had come to pass.</p>
+
+<p>He had marched "to the sea," my conquering hero, and was "coming up,"
+crowned with new laurels. I was waiting the fulness of time, lulled with
+the fulness of content. Sherman had gathered his hosts for another
+combat,&mdash;the last,&mdash;and then the work would be done, and well done. Thus
+wrote my little boy; and my heart echoed his words, "well done."</p>
+
+<p>This battle-day I worked out of doors from morning until night, seeking
+to bring order and beauty out of confusion and decay, striving to have
+all things ready when he came. My sleep was sweet that night, and I
+awoke with these words in my mind:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Lord, in the morning Thou shall hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">My voice ascending high."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The sun streamed in through the eastern window, and all the hills beyond
+were bathed in glory; the earth was fair to look upon, and happiness,
+descending from the skies, nestled in my heart.</p>
+
+<p>I planted all this day, covering precious seed, thinking on their summer
+beauty; and, as the evening fell, I stood at the garden gate watching
+the way he must come for whose coming I longed with a longing that could
+not be uttered.</p>
+
+<p>As I looked, idly speculating on his speed, a horseman dashed up in mad
+haste, his steed spent and flecked with foam. Men do not ride so hot
+with good tidings,&mdash;what need to make such haste with evil?</p>
+
+<p>Still, no sense of loss, no shadow of the coming night. Peace covered my
+heart, and would not be scared away. Blind infatuation! that could not
+see.</p>
+
+<p>"Was it not then a victory?" I cried; for sadness and defeat were
+written in his face.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, not that." The outstretched hand turned white with pity. "But
+this&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Too kind to speak the words, at sight of which I fell, struck by a bolt
+that, riving <i>his</i> heart, through leagues of space had travelled
+straight to mine.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Months later, when the long night had passed away, and the dawn brought
+patience and resignation, one who saw him fall, gloriously, told me the
+story. I could bear it then; for in my soul's eclipse I had beheld him
+walking on the heavenly hills, and knew that there he was waiting for
+me.</p>
+
+<p>He lies buried, at his own request, where he fell, on Southern soil.</p>
+
+<p>O pilgrim to those sacred shrines, if in your wandering ye come upon a
+nameless grave, marked by a sunken sword, tread lightly above the
+slumbers of my little boy!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="LAKE_CHAMPLAIN" id="LAKE_CHAMPLAIN"></a>LAKE CHAMPLAIN.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not thoughtless let us enter thy domain;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Well did the tribes of yore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who sought the ocean from the distant plain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Call thee their country's door.<a name="FNanchor_F_6" id="FNanchor_F_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_F_6" class="fnanchor">[F]</a><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And as the portals of a saintly pile<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The wanderer's steps delay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, while he musing roams the lofty aisle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Care's phantoms melt away<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In the vast realm where tender memories brood<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">O'er sacred haunts of time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That woo his spirit to a nobler mood<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And more benignant clime,&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">So in the fane of thy majestic hills<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We meekly stand elate;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The baffled heart a tranquil rapture fills<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Beside thy crystal gate:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For here the incense of the cloistered pines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stained windows of the sky,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The frescoed clouds and mountains' purple shrines,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Proclaim God's temple nigh.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Through wild ravines thy wayward currents glide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Round bosky islands play;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here tufted headlands meet the lucent tide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There gleams the spacious bay;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Untracked for ages, save when crouching flew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Through forest-hung defiles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dusky savage in his frail canoe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To seek the thousand isles,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Or rally to the fragrant cedar's shade<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The settler's crafty foe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With toilsome march and midnight ambuscade<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To lay his dwelling low.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Along the far horizon's opal wall<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The dark blue summits rise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And o'er them rifts of misty sunshine fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or golden vapor lies.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And over all tradition's gracious spell<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A fond allurement weaves;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Her low refrain the moaning tempest swells,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And thrills the whispering leaves.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To win this virgin land,&mdash;a kingly quest,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Chivalric deeds were wrought;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Long by thy marge and on thy placid breast<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The Gaul and Saxon fought.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What cheers of triumph in thy echoes sleep!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">What brave blood dyed thy wave!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A grass-grown rampart crowns each rugged steep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Each isle a hero's grave.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And gallant squadrons manned for border fray,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That rival standards bore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sprung from thy woods and on thy bosom lay,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Stern warders of the shore.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How changed since he whose name thy waters bear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The silent hills between,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Led by his swarthy guides to conflict there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Entranced beheld the scene!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Fleets swiftly ply where lagged the lone batteau,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And quarries trench the gorge;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where waned the council-fire, now steadfast glow<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The pharos and the forge.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">On Adirondack's lake-encircled crest<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Old war-paths mark the soil,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where idly bivouacks the summer guest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And peaceful miners toil.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Where lurked the wigwam, cultured households throng;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where rung the panther's yell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is heard the low of kine, a blithesome song,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Or chime of village bell.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And when, to subjugate the peopled land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Invaders crossed the sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rushed from thy meadow-slopes a stalwart band,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To battle for the free.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Nor failed the pristine valor of the race<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To guard the nation's life;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy hardy sons met treason face to face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The foremost in the strife.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When locusts bloom and wild-rose scents the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When moonbeams fleck the stream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And June's long twilights crimson shadows wear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Here linger, gaze, and dream!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_F_6" id="Footnote_F_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_F_6"><span class="label">[F]</span></a> One of the aboriginal names of Lake Champlain signifies the
+open door of the country.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="YESTERDAY" id="YESTERDAY"></a>YESTERDAY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is a gleam of ultramarine,&mdash;which, most of all tints, say the
+painters, possesses the quality of light in itself,&mdash;banished to the
+farthest horizon of the ocean, where it lies all day, a line of infinite
+richness, not to be drawn by Apelles, and in its compression of
+expanse&mdash;leagues of sloping sea and summer calm being written in that
+single line&mdash;suggestive of more depth than plummet or diver can ever
+reach. Such an enchantment of color deepens the farther and interior
+horizon with most men,&mdash;whether it is the atmosphere of one's own
+identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of
+time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams
+falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue
+to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and
+perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it
+slips over into other hemispheres, tangents with the illumined
+atmosphere beyond, it affords a finer filter for these blue rays, and
+thenceforth hoards in its heart the wealth and beauty of tint found in
+that line of ultramarine. Thus too, perhaps, in the eyes of these
+fortunate men, every year of their deepening past presents only a purer
+strain for such sunshine as is theirs, until it becomes indeed</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The light that never was, on sea or land."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The child's conjecture of the future is one of some great, bright, busy
+thing beyond the hills or over the river. But the thought is not
+definite: having nothing to remember, he has nothing by which to model
+his idea.</p>
+
+<p>The man looks back at the past in much the same manner, to be
+sure,&mdash;always with something between,&mdash;if not the river or the hills, at
+least a breath of mist out of which rises the vision he invokes; but the
+vision has a shape, precise and clear.</p>
+
+<p>If it is sadness that he seeks, sadness comes, dark as the nun of the
+Penseroso, without a glimmer of the countless and daily trifles of
+fairer aspect that made her actual presence possible to suffer,&mdash;comes
+to flatter his memory with assurance of strength in having endured so
+much and yet survived, or to stab him with her phantom poniards freshly
+and fiercely as ever,&mdash;no diffused affair, but a positive shape of
+melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>But if the phase to be recalled is of a cheerful sort, how completely
+likewise does it assert its essence,&mdash;a sunbeam falling through that
+past from beginning to end. All the vexatious annoyances of the period
+that then seemed to counterbalance pleasure are lost to view, and only
+the rosy face of an experience that was happiness itself smiles upon
+him. What matter the myriad frets that then beset him in the flesh? They
+were superficial substance,&mdash;burrs that fell; he was happy in spite of
+them; he does not remember them; he sees nothing but the complete
+content; he in fact possesses his experience only in the ideal.</p>
+
+<p>It is the dropping out of detail that accomplishes this in one case and
+the other. In either, the point of view alone is fixed. The rest is
+variable, and depends, it may be, on the nature of that subtile and
+volatile ether through which each man gazes.</p>
+
+<p>That the latter, the brighter vision, predominates, is as true as that
+sunny days outnumber rainy ones. Though Argemone, rather than remember,
+may have blotted out her memory; or though Viviani, after fifty years of
+renowned practice in his profession, may be unable to look back at it
+without a shudder,&mdash;then endowed with youth, health, energy,
+ambition,&mdash;now lacking these, the recollection of the suffering he has
+seen overwhelming his sensitive nature blackly and heavily as clods of
+burial might do;&mdash;yet they are but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> those points of shadow that throw
+the fact into prominence. It has been said that pain, remembered, is
+delight. This is true only of physical pain. Mental agony ever remains
+agony; for it is the body that perishes and the affections of the body.
+Still, with most men the past is an illuminated region, forever throwing
+the present into the shade. In the Zend Avesta, a farsang is defined to
+be the space within which a long-sighted man can see a camel and
+distinguish whether it be white or black; but the milestones of the
+memory are even less arbitrary than this: no matter how far the glance
+flies, in those distances every man's camel is white. Thus the backward
+view is ever of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Summits soft and fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Clad in colors of the air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which to those who journey near<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Barren, brown, and rough appear."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The maidens of to-day are not so beautiful as the maidens were when our
+young senses could drink in their beauty; the St. Michael pears have
+died out; the blight has got possession of the roses. When we married, a
+white one climbed up the house-side and thrust its snowy sprays in at
+the casement of the wedding-chamber. Find us such climbers now! A young
+girl once on the beach, watching her father's ship slip away on the
+wind, had her glance caught by a sparkle in the sand; and there lay a
+treasure at her feet, a heap of crimson crystals, a mine of jewels. What
+wealth! What possibilities! No more going to sea! No more watching ships
+out of sight! She gathered a double-handful of the splendid cubes as
+earnest, and ran back to the house with them. Such assurance having been
+displayed, there was no hesitation. The man-servant followed her swift
+guidance to the shore again, with shovel and sack and a train of the
+whole household,&mdash;but the tide had come in, and the place was not there.
+Day after day was search made for that mass of garnets, but always in
+vain. It was one of those deposits that Hugh Miller somewhere speaks of,
+as disclosed by one tide and hidden by another. But all her life long,
+though she wore jewels and scattered gold, no gem rivalled the blood-red
+lustre of that sudden sparkle in the sands; and no wealth equalled the
+fabulous dreams that were born of it. It was to her as precious and
+irreparable as to the poet the Lost Bower.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"I affirm that since I lost it<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Never bower has seemed so fair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Never garden-creeper crossed it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">With so deft and brave an air;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never bird sang in the summer, as I saw and heard them there."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This light of other days is unfailingly, by its owners, carried over to
+every child they meet. As if the caterpillar were in better estate than
+the butterfly, each boy is seeing his best days. Yet there is not a
+child in the world but is pursued by cares. His desk-mate's marbles
+oppress him more than will forcemeat-balls and turtle-soup when he
+becomes an alderman; there are lessons to learn, terrible threats of
+telling the teacher to brave, and many a smart to suffer. Childhood is
+beautiful in truth, but not therefore blest,&mdash;that is, for the little
+bodiless cherubs of the canvas. It was one of Origen's fancies that the
+coats of skins given to Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Paradise
+were their corporeal textures, and that in Eden they had neither flesh
+nor blood, bones nor nerves. The opening soul, that puts back petal
+after petal till the fructifying heart of it is bare to all the sweet
+influences of the universe, is something lovely for older eyes to
+see,&mdash;perhaps no lovelier than the lawful development of later lives to
+larger eyes than ours,&mdash;perhaps no lovelier than that we are to undergo.
+The first moment when the force of beauty strikes a child's perceptions
+would be an ineffable one, if he had anything to compare it with or
+measure it by; but as it is, even though it pierce him through and
+through with rapture, he is not aware of that rapture till after-years
+reproduce it for him and sweeten the sensation with full knowledge. The
+child is so dear to the parents, because it is their own beings bound
+together<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> in one; the baby is so beautiful to all, because so sacred and
+mysterious. Where was this life a moment since? Whither will it fleet a
+moment hence? He may be a fiend or an archangel by and by, as he and
+Fate together please; but now his little skin is like a blush rose-leaf,
+and his little kisses are so tender and so dear! yet it is as an object
+of nature that he charms, not in his identity as a sufferer of either
+pain or pleasure. Childhood, by these blind worshippers of yesterday, is
+simply so vaunted and so valued because it is seen again in the ideal:
+the detail is lost in distance; the fair fact alone remains.</p>
+
+<p>But yesterday has its uses, of more value than its idolatries. Though
+too often with its aerial distances and borrowed hues it is a mere
+pleasure region, instead of that great reservoir from which we might
+draw fountains of inexhaustible treasure, yet, if we cultivated our
+present from our past, homage to it might be as much to the purpose at
+least as the Gheber's worship of the sun. The past is an atmosphere
+weighing over each man's life. The skilful farmer with his
+subsoil-plough lets down the wealthy air of the actual atmosphere into
+his furrows, deeper than it ever went before; the greedy loam sucks in
+the nitrogen there, and one day he finds his mould stored with ammonia,
+the great fertilizer, worth many a harvest. Are they numerous who thus
+enrich the present with the disengaged agents of the past, the chemic
+powers obtained from that superincumbent atmosphere ever elastically
+stretching over them? Let our farmer scatter pulverized marble upon his
+soil forever,&mdash;crude carbonate of lime,&mdash;and it remains unassimilated;
+but let him powder burnt bones there, and his crop uses it to golden
+advantage,&mdash;now merely the phosphate of lime, but material that has
+passed through the operations of animal life, of organism. With whatever
+manure he work his land, be it wood-ashes or guano or compost, he knows
+that that which has received the action of organic tissues fattens it
+the best; and so a wise man may fertilize to-day better with the facts
+of an experience that he has once lived through, than with any vague and
+unorganized dreams. But the fool has never lived;&mdash;life, said Bichat, is
+the totality of the functions;&mdash;his past has endured no more
+organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no
+use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a
+joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its
+sweet and beneficent capabilities;&mdash;as if it were likely that one moment
+of his existence could be of any more weight than another.</p>
+
+<p>The sentiment which a generation feels for another long antecedent to
+itself, is not utterly dissimilar from this. Its individuals being
+regarded with the veneration due to parents and due to the dead, it is
+forgotten that they were men, and men whose lessons were necessarily no
+wiser than those of the men among us; men, too, of no surpassing
+humility, since they presumed to prescribe inviolable laws to ages far
+wiser than themselves. Yet though the philosophy of the Greek and Roman
+were lost, would it need more than the years of a generation to replace
+what scarcely can exceed the introspection of a single experience? If
+their art were lost, does not the ideal of humanity remain the same so
+long as the nature of humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of
+antiquity, two alone deserve the name,&mdash;their arithmetic and their
+geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, and the
+others were exercises of wit and pleasure and superstition. It is true
+that the Egyptian excelled, that the Arabian delved somewhat into the
+secrets of nature; but who venerates those people, and who spends all
+that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting
+oxygen into his blood and lime into his bones? The sensuous Greek loved
+beauty; he did not care to puzzle his brain when he could please it
+instead. Euclid and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> Apollonius, indeed, carried the positive science of
+mathematics to great height, but physical science is the growth of
+comparative to-day; with habits of thought hampered by priesthoods and
+systems, the efforts of antiquity were like abortive shoots,&mdash;it is
+within the last four centuries that the strong stem has sprung up, and
+the plant has flowered. Neither do our youth study the classics for
+their science; and yet is not the pursuit of science nobler than all
+other pursuits, since it leads its followers into the mysteries of the
+creation and into the purposes of God? Small is the profit to be found
+in recital of the fancies of heathen ages or the warfares of savage
+tribes. But so far is the mere breath of the ancients exalted above this
+sacred search, that a university will turn out proficients who write
+Greek verses by the ream, but cannot spell their own speech; who can
+name you the winning athletes of the first Olympiad, but are unable to
+state the constituents of the gas that lights their page, and never
+dream, as the chemist does, that these "sunbeams absorbed by vegetation
+in the primordial ages of the earth, and buried in its depths as
+vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon
+system of slowly formed rocks has been piled above, come forth at last,
+at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the night of civilized
+man into day." They can paint to you the blush of Rhodope or Phryne,
+till you see the delicious color blend and mingle on the ivory of their
+tablets; but until, like Agassiz, we can all of us deduce the fish from
+the scale, and from that blush alone deduce the human race, we are no
+nearer the Divine intentions in the creation of man, for all such lore
+as that. An author has somewhere asked, What signify our telegraphs, our
+an&aelig;sthetics, our railways? What signifies our knowledge of the earth's
+structure, of the stars' courses? Are we any the more or less men? But
+certainly he is the more a man, he comes nearer to God's meaning in a
+man, who conquers matter, circumstance, time, and space. That one who
+sees the universe move round him understandingly, and fathoms in some
+degree the wonder and the beauty of the eternal laws, must be a
+pleasanter object to his Creator than any other who, merely employing
+pleasure, makes a fetich of his luxuries, his Aldines and Elzevirs, and,
+dying, goes into the unknown world no wiser concerning the ends and aims
+of this one than when he entered it. Rather than periods that decay and
+sin might bring again, should one remember the wonderful history of the
+natural world when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
+Rather should one read the record of the rain, it seems,&mdash;the story of
+the weather some morning, cycles since, with the way the wind was
+blowing written in the slanting drip of the rain-drops caught and
+petrified on the old red sandstone,&mdash;marks of the Maker as he passed,
+one day, a million years ago,&mdash;than decipher on the scroll of any
+palimpsest, under the light-headed visions of an anchorite, some
+half-erased ode of Anacreon.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, this veneration for the ancients&mdash;who personally might
+be forgiven for their misfortune in having lived when the world was
+young, were not one so slavish before them&mdash;is only because again one
+looks at the ideal,&mdash;looks through that magical Claude Lorraine glass
+which makes even the commonest landscape picturesque. We forget the
+dirty days of straw-strewn floors, and see the leather hangings stamped
+with gold; we forget the fearful feet of sandal shoon, but see the dust
+of a Triumph rising in clouds of glory. We look at that past, feeling
+something like gods, too.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The gods are happy:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They turn on all sides<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their shining eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And see, below them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The earth and men."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We cannot consider those things happening remotely from us on the
+earth's surface, even now, without suffering them to partake somewhat of
+the property of by-gone days. It makes little difference<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> whether the
+distance be that of meridians or of eras. When at sunrise we fancy some
+foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we
+are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and
+his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays,&mdash;so that even
+our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow
+air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of
+a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire,
+it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and
+night has already darkened down over the wide and awful
+ice-fields,&mdash;then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere
+phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment
+but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us
+only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past. It requires
+the comprehensive vision of the poet to catch the light of existing
+scenes as they shift along the globe, and harmonize them with the
+instant;&mdash;whether he view</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"The Indian<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Drifting, knife in hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">His frail boat moored to<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">A floating isle thick matted<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And the dark cucumber.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">He reaps and stows them,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Drifting,&mdash;drifting. Round him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Round his green harvest-plot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Flow the cool lake waves:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The mountains ring them";&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or whether, far across the continent, he chance to see</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"The ferry<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">On the broad, clay-laden<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lone Chorasmian stream: thereon,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">With snort and strain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Two horses, strongly swimming, tow<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The ferry-boat, with woven ropes<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">To either bow<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Firm harnessed by the mane:&mdash;a chief<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">With shout and shaken spear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The cowering merchants, in long robes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Sit pale beside their wealth<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Of gold and ivory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">Jasper and chalcedony,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And milk-barred onyx-stones.<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">The loaded boat swings groaning<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">In the yellow eddies.<br /></span>
+<span class="i8">The gods behold them,"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>the gods and the poets. But, except to these blest beholders, the
+inhabitants of the dead centuries are mere spectral shades; for it takes
+a poet's fancy to vitalize with warmth and breath again those things
+that, having apparently left no impress on their own generation, seem to
+have no more signification for this than the persons of the drama or the
+heroes of romance.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in a far inferior way, every man is a poet to himself. In the
+microcosm of his own small round, every one has the power to vivify old
+incident, every one raises bawbles of the desk and drawer, not only into
+life, but into life they never had. With the flower whose leaves are
+shed about the box, we can bring back the brilliant morning of its
+blossoming, desire and hope and joyous youth once more; with the letter
+laid away beside it rises the dear hand that rested on the sheet, and
+moved along the leaf with every line it penned: each trinket has its
+pretty past, pleasant or painful to recall as it may be. There is no
+trifle, however vulgar, but, looking at its previous page, it has a side
+in the ideal. When one at the theatre saw so many ringlets arranged as
+"waterfalls," he laughed and said, they undoubtedly belonged to the
+"dead-heads." But Belinda, who wears a waterfall, and at night puts it
+into a box, considers the remark a profanity, and confesses that she
+never adorns herself with this addition but she thinks of that girl in
+France who cherished her long locks, and combed them out with care until
+her marriage-day, when she put on a fair white cap, and sold them for
+her dowry. There are more poetic locks of hair, it must be said;&mdash;the
+keepsake of two lovers; the lock of Keats's hair, too sacred to touch,
+lying in its precious salvatory. But that is the ideal of the past
+belonging to Belinda's waterfall, a trivial, common thing enough, yet
+one that has a right to its ideal, nevertheless, if we accept the
+ecstasies of a noted writer upon its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> magic material. "In spinning and
+weaving," says he, "the ideal that we pursue is the hair of a woman. How
+far are the softest wools, the finest cottons, from reaching it! At what
+an enormous distance from this hair all our progress leaves us, and will
+forever leave us! We drag behind and watch with envy this supreme
+perfection that every day Nature realizes in her play. This hair, fine,
+strong, resistant, vibrant in light sonority, and, with all that, soft,
+warm, luminous, and electric,&mdash;it is the flower of the human flower.
+There are idle disputes concerning the merit of its color. What matter?
+The lustrous black contains and promises the flame. The blond displays
+it with the splendors of the Fleece of Gold. The brown, chatoyant in the
+sun, appropriates the sun itself, mingles it with its mirages, floats,
+undulates, varies ceaselessly in its brook-like reflections, by moments
+smiles in the light or glooms in the shade, deceives always, and,
+whatever you say of it, gives you the lie charmingly.&mdash;The chief effort
+of human industry has combined all methods in order to exalt cotton.
+Rare accord of capital, machinery, arts of design, and finally chemical
+science, has produced those beautiful results to which England herself
+renders homage in buying them. Alas! all that cannot disguise the
+original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which has been so much
+adorned. If woman, who clothes herself with it in vanity, and believes
+herself more beautiful because of it, would but let her hair fall and
+unroll its waves over the indigent richness of our most brilliant
+cloths, what must become of them! how humiliated would the vestment
+be!&mdash;It is necessary to confess that one thing alone sustains itself
+beside a woman's hair. A single fabricator can strive there. This
+fabricator is an insect,&mdash;the modest silkworm."</p>
+
+<p>"A particular charm surrounds the works in silk," our author then goes
+on to say. "It ennobles all about it. In traversing our rudest
+districts, the valleys of the Ard&egrave;che, where all is rock, where the
+mulberry, the chestnut, seem to dispense with earth, to live on air and
+flint, where low houses of unmortared stone sadden the eyes with their
+gray tint, everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or
+three charming girls, with brown skin, with white teeth, who smiled at
+the passer-by and spun gold. The passer-by, whirled on by the coach,
+said to them under his breath: 'What a pity, innocent fays, that this
+gold may not be for you! Instead of disguising it with a useless color,
+instead of disfiguring it by art, what would it not gain by remaining
+itself and upon these beautiful spinners! How much better than any grand
+dames would this royal tissue become yourselves!'"</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps it was the dowry of one of these very maidens that Belinda
+wears; and all this would only go to show that to every meanest thing
+the past can lend a halo. When one person showed another the "entire
+costume of a Nubian woman, purchased as she wore it,"&mdash;a necklace of red
+beads, and two brass ear-rings simply, hanging on a nail,&mdash;how it
+brought up the whole scene, the wondrous ruins, the Nile, the lotos, and
+the palm-branch, the splendid sky soaring over all, the bronze-skinned
+creature shining in the sun! What a past the little glass bits had at
+their command, and what a more magnificent past hung yet behind them!
+Who would value a diamond, the product of any laboratory, were such a
+possibility, so much as that one which, by its own unknown and
+inscrutable process, defying philosopher and jeweller, has imprisoned
+the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set
+its crystals in the darkness of the earth,&mdash;a drop of dew eternalized?
+What tree of swift and sudden springing, that grows like a gourd in the
+night to never so stately a height, could equal in our eyes the gnarled
+and may be stunted trunk that has thrown the flickering shadows of its
+leaves over the dying pillows alike of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> father, child, and grandchild?
+The ring upon the finger is crusted thick with memories, and, looking at
+it, far more than in the present do you live in the past. Perhaps it is
+for this that we are so jealous of events: we fear to have our memories
+impinged upon by pain. The woman whose lover has deserted her mourns not
+the man she must despise, but the love that has dropped out of her past,
+proving hollow and worthless. But she to whom he remains faithful
+borrows perpetually store of old love to enrich the daily feast; she
+gilds and glorifies the blest to-day with the light of that love
+transfigured in the past. And so, in other shapes and experiences, it is
+with all of us indeed; since into this fairy-land all can fly for
+refuge, can pick again their roses and ignore their thorns, can</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"Change<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Torment with ease, and soonest recompense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dole with delight,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nor is this living in the past entirely the voluntary affair of pleasure
+and of memory. In another and more spiritual way it masters us. Never
+quite losing the vitality that once it had, with an elastic springiness
+it constantly rebounds, and the deed of yesterday reacts upon the deed
+of to-day. There is something solemn in the thought that thus the
+blemish or the grace of a day that long ago disappeared passes on with
+awfully increasing undulations into the demesne of the everlasting. And
+though the Judge of all may not cast each deed of other days and weigh
+them in the balance for us or against, yet what those deeds have made
+us, that we shall stand before him when,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"'Mid the dark, a gleam<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of yet another morning breaks;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, like the hand which ends a dream,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Death, with the might of his sunbeam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yesterday, in truth,&mdash;looking though it may like a shadow and the
+phantom of itself,&mdash;is the only substance that we possess, the one
+immutable fact. To-day is but the asymptote of to-morrow, that curve
+perpetually drawing near, but never reaching the straight line flying
+into infinity. To-morrow, the great future, belongs to the heaven where
+it tends. Were it otherwise, seeing the indestructible elements, and the
+two great central forces forever at their work, we might fancy
+ourselves, in one form or another, continual here on the round world.
+For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten
+seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's
+orbit,&mdash;swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to
+ellipse, vibrating like a mighty pendulum, the "horologe of eternity"
+itself, with tremendous oscillations, through the depths of space,&mdash;he
+taught us that the earth endures; and so that the clay with which we are
+clothed still makes a part of the great revolution. Yet, since the
+future is no possession of our own, but a dole and pittance, we know
+that the earth does not endure for us, but that when we shall have
+submitted to the conditions of eternal spirit, yesterday, to-morrow, and
+to-day must alike have ceased to exist, must have vanished like
+illusions; for eternity can be no mere duration of time, but rather some
+state of being past all our power of cognition.</p>
+
+<p>And though we are to inherit eternity, yet have authority now only over
+the period that we have passed, with what wealth then are the aged
+furnished! Sweet must it be to sit with folded hands and dream life over
+once again. How rich we are, how happy! How dear is the old hand in
+ours! Years have added up the sum of all the felicity that we have known
+together, and carried it over to to-day. Those that have left our arms
+and gone out into other homes are still our own; but little sunny heads
+besides cluster round the knees as once before they did. Not only have
+we age and wisdom, but youth and gayety as well. On what light and
+jocund scenes we look! on what deep and dearer bliss!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> We see the
+meaning of our sorrows now, and bless them that they came. With such
+firm feet we have walked in the lighted way that we gaze back upon, how
+can we fear the Valley of the Shadow? Ah! none but they, indeed, who
+have threescore years and ten hived away in the past, can see the high
+design of Heaven in their lives, and from the wrong side of the pattern
+picture out the right.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So at the last shall come old age,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Decrepit, as befits that stage.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How else wouldst thou retire apart<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the hoarded memories of thy heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And gather all to the very least<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let fall through eagerness to find<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The crowning dainties yet behind?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ponder on the entire past,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Laid together thus at last,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the twilight helps to fuse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The first fresh with the faded hues,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the outline of the whole,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As round Eve's shades their framework roll,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grandly fronts for once thy soul!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_JOHNSON_PARTY" id="THE_JOHNSON_PARTY"></a>THE JOHNSON PARTY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The President of the United States has so singular a combination of
+defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could
+have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation
+of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as
+unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well
+as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his
+will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of
+demagogue and autocrat, and converts the Presidential chair into a stump
+or a throne, according as the impulse seizes him to cajole or to
+command. Doubtless much of the evil developed in him is due to his
+misfortune in having been lifted by events to a position which he lacked
+the elevation and breadth of intelligence adequately to fill. He was
+cursed with the possession of a power and authority which no man of
+narrow mind, bitter prejudices, and inordinate self-estimation can
+exercise without depraving himself as well as injuring the nation.
+Egotistic to the point of mental disease, he resented the direct and
+manly opposition of statesmen to his opinions and moods as a personal
+affront, and descended to the last degree of littleness in a political
+leader,&mdash;that of betraying his party, in order to gratify his spite. He
+of course became the prey of intriguers and sycophants,&mdash;of persons who
+understand the art of managing minds which are at once arbitrary and
+weak, by allowing them to retain unity of will amid the most palpable
+inconsistencies of opinion, so that inconstancy to principle shall not
+weaken force of purpose, nor the emphasis be at all abated with which
+they may bless to-day what yesterday they cursed. Thus the abhorrer of
+traitors has now become their tool. Thus the denouncer of Copperheads
+has now sunk into dependence on their support. Thus the imposer of
+conditions of reconstruction has now become the foremost friend of the
+unconditioned return of the Rebel States. Thus the furious Union
+Republican, whose harangues against his political opponents almost
+scared his political friends by their violence, has now become the
+shameless betrayer of the people who trusted him. And in all these
+changes of base he has appeared supremely conscious, in his own mind, of
+playing an independent, a consistent, and especially a conscientious
+part.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, Mr. Johnson's character would be imperfectly described if some
+attention were not paid to his conscience, the purity of which is a
+favorite subject of his own discourse,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> and the perversity of which is
+the wonder of the rest of mankind. As a public man, his real position is
+similar to that of a commander of an army, who should pass over to the
+ranks of the enemy he was commissioned to fight, and then plead his
+individual convictions of duty as a justification of his treachery. In
+truth, Mr. Johnson's conscience is, like his understanding, a mere form
+or expression of his will. The will of ordinary men is addressed through
+their understanding and conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and
+conscience can be addressed only through his will. He puts intellectual
+principles and the moral law in the possessive case, thinks he pays them
+a compliment and adds to their authority when he makes them the adjuncts
+of his petted pronoun "my"; and things to him are reasonable and right,
+not from any quality inherent in themselves, but because they are made
+so by his determinations. Indeed, he sees hardly anything as it is, but
+almost everything as colored by his own dominant egotism. Thus he is
+never weary of asserting that the people are on his side; yet his method
+of learning the wishes of the people is to scrutinize his own, and, when
+acting out his own passionate impulses, he ever insists that he is
+obeying public sentiment. Of all the wilful men who, by strange chance,
+have found themselves at the head of a constitutional government, he
+most resembles the last Stuart king of England, James II.; and the
+likeness is increased from the circumstance that the American James has,
+in his supple and plausible Secretary of State, one fully competent to
+play the part of Sunderland.</p>
+
+<p>The party which, under the ironical designation of the National Union
+Party, now proposes to take the policy and character of Mr. Johnson
+under its charge, is composed chiefly of Democrats defeated at the
+polls, and Democrats defeated on the field of battle. The few apostate
+Republicans, who have joined its ranks while seeming to lead its
+organization, are of small account. Its great strength is in its
+Southern supporters, and, if it comes into power, it must obey a Rebel
+direction. By the treachery of the President, it will have the executive
+patronage on its side,&mdash;for Mr. Johnson's "conscience" is of that
+peculiar kind which finds satisfaction in arraying the interest of
+others against their convictions; and having thus the power to purchase
+support, it will not fail of those means of dividing the North which
+come from corrupting it. The party under which the war for the Union was
+conducted is to be denounced and proscribed as the party of disunion,
+and we are to be edified by addresses on the indissoluble unity of the
+nation by Secessionists, who have hardly yet had time to wash from their
+hands the stains of Union blood. The leading proposition on which this
+conspiracy against the country is to be conducted is the monstrous
+absurdity, that the Rebel States have an inherent, "continuous,"
+unconditioned, constitutional <i>right</i> to form a part of the Federal
+government, when they have once acknowledged the fact of the defeat of
+their inhabitants in an armed attempt to overthrow and subvert it,&mdash;a
+proposition which implies that victory paralyzes the powers of the
+victors, that ruin begins when success is assured, that the only effect
+of beating a Southern Rebel in the field is to exalt him into a maker of
+laws for his antagonist.</p>
+
+<p>In the minority Report of the Congressional Joint Committee on
+Reconstruction, which is designed to supply the new party with
+constitutional law, this theory of State Rights is most elaborately
+presented. The ground is taken, that during the Rebellion the States in
+which it prevailed were as "completely competent States of the United
+States as they were before the Rebellion, and were bound by all the
+obligations which the Constitution imposed, and entitled to all its
+privileges"; and that the Rebellion consisted merely in a series of
+"illegal acts of the citizens of such States." On this theory it is
+difficult to find where the guilt of rebellion lies. The States are
+innocent because the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> Rebellion was a rising of individuals; the
+individuals cannot be very criminal, for it is on their votes that the
+committee chiefly rely to build up the National Union Party. Again, we
+are informed that, in respect to the admission of representatives from
+"such States," Congress has no right or power to ask more than two
+questions. These are: "Have these States organized governments? Are
+these governments republican in form?" The committee proceed to say:
+"How they were formed, under what auspices they were formed, are
+inquiries with which Congress has no concern. The right of the people to
+form a government for themselves has never been questioned." On this
+principle, President Johnson's labors in organizing State governments
+were works of supererogation. At the close of active hostilities the
+Rebel States had organized, though disloyal, governments, as republican
+in form as they were before the war broke out. The only thing,
+therefore, they were required to do was to send their Senators and
+Representatives to Washington. Congress could not have rightfully
+refused to receive them, because all questions as to their being loyal
+or disloyal, and as to the changes which the war had wrought in the
+relations of the States they represented to the Union, were inquiries
+with which Congress had no concern! And here again we have the
+ever-recurring difficulty respecting the "individuals" who were alone
+guilty of the acts of rebellion. "The right of the people," we are
+assured, "to form a government for themselves, has never been
+questioned." But it happens that "the people" here indicated are the
+very individuals who were before pointed out as alone responsible for
+the Rebellion. In the exercise of their right "to form a government for
+themselves," they rebelled; and now, it seems, by the exercise of the
+same right, they can unconditionally return. There is no wrong anywhere:
+it is all "right." The people are first made criminals, in order to
+exculpate the States, and then the innocence of the States is used to
+exculpate the people. When we see such outrages on common sense gravely
+perpetrated by so eminent a lawyer as the one who drew up the
+committee's Report, one is almost inclined to define minds as of two
+kinds, the legal mind and the human mind, and to doubt if there is any
+possible connection in reason between the two. To the human mind it
+appears that the Federal government has spent thirty-five hundred
+millions of dollars, and sacrificed three hundred thousand lives, in a
+contest which the legal mind dissolves into a mere mist of unsubstantial
+phrases; and by skill in the trick of substituting words for things, and
+definitions for events, the legal mind proceeds to show that these words
+and definitions, though scrupulously shielded from any contact with
+realities, are sufficient to prevent the nation from taking ordinary
+precautions against the recurrence of calamities fresh in its bitter
+experience. The phrase "State Rights," translated from legal into human
+language, is found to mean, the power to commit wrongs on individuals
+whom States may desire to oppress, or the power to protect the
+inhabitants of States from the consequences of their own crimes. The
+minority of the committee, indeed, seem to have forgotten that there has
+been any real war, and bring to mind the converted Australian savage,
+whom the missionary could not make penitent for a murder committed the
+day before, because the trifling occurrence had altogether passed from
+his recollection.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, all attempts to discriminate between Rebels and Rebel States,
+to the advantage of the latter, are done in defiance of notorious facts.
+If the Rebellion had been merely a rising of individual citizens of
+States, it would have been an insurrection against the States, as well
+as against the Federal government, and might have been easily put down.
+In that case, there would have been no withdrawal of Southern Senators
+and Representatives from Congress, and therefore no question as to their
+inherent right to return. In Missouri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> and Kentucky, for example, there
+was civil war, waged by inhabitants of those States against their local
+governments, as well as against the United States; and nobody contends
+that the rights and privileges of those States were forfeited by the
+criminal acts of their citizens. But the real strength of the Rebellion
+consisted in this, that it was not a rebellion <i>against</i> States, but a
+rebellion <i>by</i> States. No loose assemblage of individuals, though
+numbering hundreds of thousands, could long have resisted the pressure
+of the Federal power and the power of the State governments. They would
+have had no means of subsistence except those derived from plunder and
+voluntary contributions, and they would have lacked the military
+organization by which mobs are transformed into formidable armies. But
+the Rebellion being one of States, being virtually decreed by the people
+of States assembled in convention, was sustained by the two tremendous
+governmental powers of taxation and conscription. The willing and the
+unwilling were thus equally placed at the disposition of a strong
+government. The population and wealth of the whole immense region of
+country in which the Rebellion prevailed were at the service of this
+government. So completely was it a rebellion of States, that the
+universal excuse of the minority of original Union men for entering
+heartily into the contest after it had once begun was, that they thought
+it their duty to abide by the decision, and share the fortunes, of their
+respective <i>States</i>. Nobody at the South believed at the time the war
+commenced, or during its progress, that his State possessed any
+"continuous" right to a participation in the privileges of the Federal
+Constitution, the obligations of which it had repudiated. When confident
+of success, the Southerner scornfully scouted the mere suspicion of
+entertaining such a degrading notion; when assured of defeat, his only
+thought was to "get his State back into the Union on the best terms that
+could be made." The idea of "conditions of readmission" was as firmly
+fixed in the Southern as in the Northern mind. If the politicians of the
+South now adopt the principle that the Rebel States have not, as States,
+ever altered their relations to the Union, they do it from policy,
+finding that its adoption will give them "better terms" than they ever
+dreamed of getting before the President of the United States taught them
+that it would be more politic to bully than to plead.</p>
+
+<p>In the last analysis, indeed, the theory of the minority of the
+Reconstruction Committee reduces the Rebel States to mere abstractions.
+It is plain that a State, in the concrete, is constituted by that
+portion of the inhabitants who form its legal people; and that, in
+passing back of its government and constitution, we reach a convention
+of the legal people as its ultimate expression. By such conventions the
+acts of secession were passed; and, as far as the people of the Rebel
+States could do it, they destroyed their States considered as organized
+communities forming a part of the United States. The claim of the United
+States to authority over the territory and inhabitants was of course not
+affected by these acts; but in what condition did they place the people?
+Plainly in the condition of rebels, engaged in an attempt to overturn
+the Constitution and government of the United States. As the whole force
+of the people in each of the Rebel communities was engaged in this work,
+the whole of the people were rebels and public enemies. Nothing was
+left, in each case, but an abstract State, without any external body,
+and as destitute of people having a right to enjoy the privileges of the
+Constitution as if the territory had been swept clean of population by a
+pestilence. It is, then, only this abstract State which has a right to
+representation in Congress. But how can there be a right to
+representation when there is nobody to be represented? All this may
+appear puerile, but the puerility is in the premises as well as in the
+logical deductions; and the premises are laid down as indisputable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span>
+constitutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for
+the National Union Party.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine of the unconditional right of the Rebel States to
+representation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question
+relates to the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly
+these conditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has
+passed both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever
+exacted of defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a
+distinctly "radical" idea in the whole amendment,&mdash;nothing that
+President Johnson has not himself, within a comparatively recent period,
+stamped with his high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage?
+No. Does it ordain impartial suffrage? No. Does it proscribe,
+disfranchise, or expatriate the recent armed enemies of the country, or
+confiscate their property? No. It simply ordains that the national debt
+shall be paid and the Rebel debt repudiated; that the civil rights of
+all persons shall be maintained; that Rebels who have added perjury to
+treason shall be disqualified for office; and that the Rebel States
+shall not have their political power in the Union increased by the
+presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights,
+but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on
+voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the
+last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection
+can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against
+Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South
+Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal voters
+in New York? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the South
+should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power in
+the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal
+to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined?</p>
+
+<p>Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid,
+and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below
+the requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still
+denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals,
+bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr
+of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union
+man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the
+Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize
+"conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to drive from power
+that radical party who are daily trampling under foot the Constitution,
+and fast converting a constitutional Republic into a consolidated
+despotism." The terms to which South Carolina is asked to submit, before
+she can be made the equal of Ohio or New York in the Union, are stated
+to be "too degrading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for
+a single instant." When we consider that this "radical party"
+constitutes nearly four fifths of the legal legislature of the nation,
+that it was the party which saved the country from dismemberment while
+Mr. Orr and his friends were notoriously engaged in "trampling the
+Constitution under foot," and that the man who denounces it owes his
+forfeited life to its clemency, the astounding insolence of the
+impeachment touches the sublime. Here is confessed treason inveighing
+against tried loyalty, in the name of the Constitution it has violated
+and the law it has broken! But why does Mr. Orr think the terms of South
+Carolina's restored relations to the Union "too degrading and
+humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant"? Is it
+because he wishes to have the Rebel debt paid? Is it because he desires
+to have the Federal debt repudiated? Is it because he thinks it
+intolerable that a negro should have civil rights? Is it because he
+resents the idea that breakers of oaths, like himself, should be
+disqualified from having another opportunity of forswearing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> themselves?
+Is it because he considers that a white Rebel freeman of South Carolina
+has a natural right to exercise double the political power of a white
+loyal freeman of Massachusetts? He must return an affirmative answer to
+all these questions in order to make it out that his State will be
+degraded and humiliated by ratifying the amendment; and the necessity of
+the measure is therefore proved by the motives known to prompt the
+attacks of its vilifiers.</p>
+
+<p>The insolence of Mr. Orr is not merely individual, but representative.
+It is the result of Mr. Johnson's attempt "to produce harmony between
+the two sections," by betraying the section to which he owed his
+election. Had it not been for his treachery, there would have been
+little difficulty in settling the terms of peace, so as to avoid all
+causes for future war; but, from the time he quarrelled with Congress,
+he has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the
+virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party. Every man at the South
+who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was
+prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his
+partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the
+representatives of the people by whom the Rebellion was put down. Among
+traitors and Copperheads the fear of punishment has been succeeded by
+the hope of revenge; elation is on faces which the downfall of Richmond
+overcast; and a return to the old times, when a united South ruled the
+country by means of a divided North, is confidently expected by the
+whole crew of political bullies and political sycophants whose profit is
+in the abasement of the nation. It is even said that, if the majority of
+the "Rump" Congress cannot be overcome by fair means, it will be by
+foul; and there are noisy partisans of the President who assert that he
+has in him a Cromwellian capacity for dealing with legislative
+assemblies whose notions of the public good clash with his own. In
+short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Congress, a <i>coup
+d'&eacute;tat</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Garret Davis, of Kentucky, was, we believe, the first to announce this
+executive remedy for the "radical" disease of the state, and it has
+since been often prescribed by Democratic politicians as a sovereign
+panacea. General McClernand, indeed, proposed a scheme, simpler even
+than that of executive recognition, by which the Southern Senators and
+Representatives might effect a lodgment in Congress. They should,
+according to him, have gone to Washington, entered the halls of
+legislation, and proceeded to occupy their seats, "peaceably if they
+could, forcibly if they must"; but the record of General McClernand, as
+a military man, was not such as to give to his advice on a question of
+carrying positions by assault a high degree of authority, and, there
+being some natural hesitation in following his counsel, the golden
+opportunity was lost. Mr. Montgomery Blair, who professes his
+willingness to act with any men, "Rebels or any one else," to put down
+the radicals, is never weary of talking to conservative conventions of
+"two Presidents and two Congresses." There can be no doubt that the
+project of a <i>coup d'&eacute;tat</i> has become dangerously familiar to the
+"conservative" mind, and that the eminent legal gentlemen of the North
+who are publishing opinions affirming the right of the excluded Southern
+representatives to their seats are playing into the hands of the
+desperate gang of unscrupulous politicians who are determined to have
+the right established by force. It is computed that the gain, in the
+approaching elections, of twenty-five districts now represented by Union
+Republicans, will give the Johnson party, in the next Congress, a
+majority of the House of Representatives, should the Southern
+delegations be counted; and it is proposed that the Johnson members
+legally entitled to seats should combine with the Southern pretenders to
+seats, organize as the House of Representatives<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> of the United States,
+and apply to the President for recognition. Should the President comply,
+he would be impeached by an unrecognized House before an "incomplete"
+Senate, and, if convicted, would deny the validity of the proceeding.
+The result would be civil war, in which the name of the Federal
+government would be on the side of the revolutionists. Such is the
+programme which is freely discussed by partisans of the President,
+considered to be high in his favor; and the scheme, it is contended, is
+the logical result of the position he has assumed as to the rights of
+the excluded States to representation. It is certain that the present
+Congress is as much the Congress of the United States as he is the
+President of the United States; but it is well known that he considers
+himself to represent the whole country, while he thinks that Congress
+only represents a portion of it; and he has in his character just that
+combination of qualities, and is placed in just those anomalous
+circumstances, which lead men to the commission of great political
+crimes. The mere hint of the possibility of his attempting a <i>coup
+d'&eacute;tat</i> is received by some Republicans with a look of incredulous
+surprise; yet what has his administration been to such persons but a
+succession of surprises?</p>
+
+<p>But whatever view may be taken of the President's designs, there can be
+no doubt that the safety, peace, interest, and honor of the country
+depend on the success of the Union Republicans in the approaching
+elections. The loyal nation must see to it that the Fortieth Congress
+shall be as competent to override executive vetoes as the Thirty-Ninth,
+and be equally removed from the peril of being expelled for one more in
+harmony with Executive ideas. The same earnestness, energy, patriotism,
+and intelligence which gave success to the war, must now be exerted to
+reap its fruits and prevent its recurrence. The only danger is, that, in
+some representative districts, the people may be swindled by
+plausibilities and respectabilities; for when, in political contests,
+any great villany is contemplated, there are always found some eminently
+respectable men, with a fixed capital of certain eminently conservative
+phrases, innocently ready to furnish the wolves of politics with
+abundant supplies of sheep's clothing. These dignified dupes are more
+than usually active at the present time; and the gravity of their speech
+is as edifying as its emptiness. Immersed in words, and with no clear
+perception of things, they mistake conspiracy for conservatism. Their
+pet horror is the term "radical"; their ideal of heroic patriotism, the
+spectacle of a great nation which allows itself to be ruined with
+decorum, and dies rather than commit the slightest breach of
+constitutional etiquette. This insensibility to facts and blindness to
+the tendency of events, they call wisdom and moderation. Behind these
+political dummies are the real forces of the Johnson party, men of
+insolent spirit, resolute will, embittered temper, and unscrupulous
+purpose, who clearly know what they are after, and will hesitate at no
+"informality" in the attempt to obtain it. To give these persons
+political power will be to surrender the results of the war, by placing
+the government practically in the hands of those against whom the war
+was waged. No smooth words about "the equality of the States," "the
+necessity of conciliation," "the wickedness of sectional conflicts,"
+will alter the fact, that, in refusing to support Congress, the people
+would set a reward on treachery and place a bounty on treason. "The
+South," says a Mr. Hill of Georgia, in a letter favoring the
+Philadelphia Convention, "sought to save the Constitution out of the
+Union. She failed. Let her now bring her diminished and shattered, but
+united and earnest counsels and energies to save the Constitution in the
+Union." The sort of Constitution the South sought to save by warring
+against the government is the Constitution which she now proposes to
+save by administering it! Is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> this the tone of pardoned and penitent
+treason? Is this the spirit to build up a "National Union Party"? No;
+but it is the tone and spirit now fashionable in the defeated Rebel
+States, and will not be changed until the autumn elections shall have
+proved that they have as little to expect from the next Congress as from
+the present, and that they must give securities for their future conduct
+before they can be relieved from the penalties incurred by their past.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES" id="REVIEWS_AND_LITERARY_NOTICES"></a>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</h2>
+
+
+<p><br /><br /><i>Armadale.</i> A Novel. By <span class="smcap">Wilkie Collins</span>. New York: Harper and Brothers.</p>
+
+<p>Except for the fact that there is nothing at all automatic in his
+inventions, there seems to be no good reason why Mr. Collins should not
+make a perpetual motion. He has a surprising mechanical faculty, and
+great patience and skill in passing the figures he contrives through the
+programme arranged for them. Having read one of his novels, you feel as
+if you had been amused with a puppet-show of rare merit, and you would
+like to have the ingenious mechanician before the curtain. So much
+cleverness, however, seems to be thrown away on the entertainment of a
+single evening, and you sigh for its application to some work of more
+lasting usefulness; and the perpetual motion occurs to you as the thing
+worthiest such powers. Let it be a perpetual literary motion, if the
+public please. Given a remarkable dream and a beautiful bad woman to
+fulfil it; you have but to amplify the vision sufficiently, and your
+beautiful bad woman goes on fulfilling it forever in tens of thousands
+of volumes. As the brother of De Quincey said, when proposing to stand
+on the ceiling, head downwards, and be spun there like a whip-top, thus
+overcoming the attraction of gravitation by the mere rapidity of
+revolution, "If you can keep it up for an instant, you can keep it up
+all day." Alas! it is just at this point that the fatal defect of Mr.
+Collins's mechanism appears. But for the artisan's hand, the complicated
+work would not start at all, and we perceive that, if he lifted it for a
+moment from the crank, the painfully contrived dream would drop to
+pieces, and the beautiful bad woman would come to a jerky stand-still in
+the midst of her most atrocious development. A perpetual literary motion
+is therefore out of the question, so far as Mr. Collins is concerned;
+and we can merely examine his defective machinery, with many a regret
+that a plan so ingenious, and devices so labored and costly, should be
+of no better effect.</p>
+
+<p>We think, indeed, that all his stories are constructed upon a principle
+as false to art as it is false to life. In this world, we have first men
+and women, with certain well-known good and evil passions, and these
+passions are the causes of all the events that happen in the world. We
+doubt if it has occurred to any of our readers to see a set of
+circumstances, even of the most relentless and malignant description,
+grouping themselves about any human being without the agency of his own
+love or hate. Yet this is what happens very frequently in Mr. Collins's
+novels, impoverishing and enfeebling his characters in a surprising
+degree, and reducing them to the condition of juiceless puppets without
+proper will or motion. It is not that they are all wanting in
+verisimilitude. Even the entirely wicked Miss Gwilt is a conceivable
+character; but, being destined merely to fulfil Armadale's dream, she
+loses all freedom of action, and, we must say, takes most clumsy and
+hopeless and long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which
+one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found
+much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all
+her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a
+dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in
+art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's advantages should not marry both of
+them; and the author's overruling on this point is more creditable to
+his heart than to his head. These three people are the chief persons of
+the story, and their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> hands are tied from first to last They are not to
+act out their characters: they are to act out the plot; and the author's
+designs are accomplished in defiance of their several natures. Some of
+the minor persons are not so ruthlessly treated. The Pedgifts, father
+and son, are free agents, and they are admirably true to their instincts
+of upright, astute lawyers, who love best to employ their legal
+shrewdness in a good cause. Their joint triumph over Miss Gwilt is
+probable and natural, and would be a successful point in the book, if it
+were conceivable that she should expose herself to such a defeat by so
+much needless plotting with Mrs. Oldershaw. But to fill so large a
+stage, an immense deal of by-play was necessary, and great numbers of
+people are visibly dragged upon the scene. Some of these accomplish
+nothing in the drama. To what end have we so much of Mr. Brock? Others
+elaborately presented only contribute to the result in the most
+intricate and tedious way; and in Major Milroy's family there is no
+means of discovering that Miss Gwilt is an adventuress, but for Mrs.
+Milroy to become jealous of her and to open her letters.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot, of course, be denied that Mr. Collins's stories are
+interesting; for an infinite number of persons read them through. But it
+is the bare plot that interests, and the disposition of mankind to
+listen to story-telling is such that the idlest <i>conteur</i> can entertain.
+We must demand of literary art, however, that it shall interest in
+people's fortunes by first interesting in people. Can any one of all Mr.
+Collins's readers declare that he sympathizes with the loves of Armadale
+and Neelie Milroy, or actually cares a straw what becomes of either of
+those insipid young persons? Neither is Midwinter one to take hold on
+like or dislike; and Miss Gwilt is interesting only as the capable but
+helpless spider out of which the plot of the story is spun. Pathos there
+is not in the book, and the humor is altogether too serious to laugh at.</p>
+
+
+<p><br /><br /><i>Four Years in the Saddle.</i> By <span class="smcap">Colonel Harry Gilmore</span>. New York: Harper
+and Brothers.</p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes difficult to believe, in reading this book, that it is
+not the production of Major Gahagan of the Ahmednuggar Irregulars, or
+Mr. Barry Lyndon of Castle Lyndon. Being merely a record of personal
+adventure, it does not suggest itself as part of the history of our late
+war, and, but for the recurrence of the familiar names of American
+persons and places, it might pass for the narrative of either of the
+distinguished characters mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>In dealing with events creditable to his own courage and gallantry,
+Colonel Gilmore has the unsparing frankness of Major Gahagan, and it
+must be allowed that there is a remarkable likeness in all the
+adventures of these remarkable men. It is true that Colonel Gilmore does
+not fire upon a file of twenty elephants so as to cut away all their
+trunks by a single shot; but he does kill eleven Yankees by the
+discharge of a cannon which he touches off with a live coal held between
+his thumb and finger. Being made prisoner, he is quite as defiant and
+outrageous as the Guj-puti under similar circumstances: at one time he
+can scarcely restrain himself from throwing into the sea the insolent
+captain of a Federal gunboat; at another time, when handcuffed by order
+of General Sheridan, he spends an hour in cursing his captors. The
+red-hair of the Lord of the White Elephants waved his followers to
+victory; Colonel Gilmore's "hat, with the long black plume upon it," is
+the signal of triumph to his marauders. Both, finally, are loved by the
+ladies, and are alike extravagant in their devotion to the sex. Colonel
+Gilmore, indeed, withholds no touch that can go to make him the hero of
+a dime novel; and there is not a more picturesque and dashing character
+in literature outside of the adventures of Claude Duval. Everywhere we
+behold him waving his steel (as he calls his sword); he wheels before
+our dazzled eyes like a meteor; he charges, and the foe fly like sheep
+before him. And no sooner is he come into town from killing a score or
+two of Yankees, than the ladies&mdash;who are all good Union women and have
+just taken the oath of allegiance&mdash;crowd to kiss and caress him; or, as
+he puts it in his own vivid language, he receives "a kiss from more than
+one pair of ruby lips, and gives many a hearty hug and kiss in return."
+In his wild way, he takes a pleasure in evoking the tender solicitude of
+the ladies for his safety,&mdash;eats a dish of strawberries in a house upon
+which the Yankees are charging to capture him, and remains for some
+minutes after the strawberries are eaten, while the ladies, proffering
+him his arms, are "dancing about, and positively screaming with
+excitement." At another time, when the bullets of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> enemy are hissing
+about his ears, he puts on a pretty girl's slipper for her. "Such," he
+remarks, with a pensive air, "are some of the few happy scenes that
+brighten a soldier's life."</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Gilmore, who has the diffidence of Major Gahagan, has also the
+engaging artlessness which lends so great a charm to the personal
+narrative of Mr. Barry Lyndon. He does not reserve from the reader's
+knowledge such of his exploits as stealing the chaplain's whiskey, and
+drinking the peach-brandy of the simple old woman who supposed she was
+offering it to General Lee. "Place him where you may," says Colonel
+Gilmore, "and under no matter what adverse circumstances, you can always
+distinguish a gentleman." He has a great deal of fine feeling, and can
+scarcely restrain his tears at the burning of Chambersburg, after
+setting it on fire. Desiring a memento of a brother officer, he takes a
+small piece of the dead man's skull. It has been supposed that civilized
+soldiers, however brave and resolute, scarcely exulted in the
+remembrance of the lives they had taken; and it is thought to be one of
+the merciful features of modern warfare, that in the vast majority of
+cases the slayer and the slain are unknown to each other. Colonel
+Gilmore has none of the false tenderness which shrinks from a knowledge
+of homicide. On the contrary, he is careful to know when he has killed a
+man; and he recounts, with an exactness revolting to feebler nerves, the
+circumstances and the methods by which he put this or that enemy to
+death.</p>
+
+<p>We think we could hardly admire Colonel Gilmore if he had been of our
+side during the war, and had done to the Rebels the things he professes
+to have done to us. As it is, we trust he will forgive us, if we confess
+that we have not read his narrative with a tranquil stomach, and that we
+think it will impress his Northern readers as the history of a brigand
+who had the good luck to be also a traitor.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="RECENT_AMERICAN_PUBLICATIONS" id="RECENT_AMERICAN_PUBLICATIONS"></a>RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The Structure of Animal Life. Six Lectures delivered at the Brooklyn
+Academy of Music, in January and February, 1862. By Louis Agassiz,
+Professor of Zo&ouml;logy and Geology in the Lawrence Scientific School. New
+York. C. Scribner &amp; Co. 8vo. pp. viii., 128. $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>History of the Life and Times of James Madison. By William C. Rives.
+Vol. II. Boston. Little, Brown, &amp; Co. 8vo. pp. xxii., 657. $3.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Physiology of Man; designed to represent the Existing State of
+Physiological Science, as applied to the Functions of the Human Body. By
+Austin Flint, Jr., M. D., Professor of Physiology and Microscopy in the
+Bellevue Medical College, N. Y., and in the Long Island College
+Hospital; Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, etc. Introduction;
+the Blood; Circulation; Respiration. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 8vo.
+pp. 502, $4.50.</p>
+
+<p>Poems. By Annie E. Clarke. Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott &amp; Co. 16mo.
+pp. 146. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Living Forces of the Universe. The Temple and the Worshippers. By
+George W. Thompson. Philadelphia. Howard Challen. 12mo. pp. xxiv., 358.
+$1.75.</p>
+
+<p>Jealousy. By George Sand, Author of "Consuelo," &amp;c. With a Biographical
+Sketch of the Author. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &amp; Bro. 12mo. pp. 304.
+$2.00.</p>
+
+<p>Stories told to a Child. By Jean Ingelow. Boston. Roberts Brothers.
+18mo. pp. vi., 424, $1.75.</p>
+
+<p>Canary Birds. A Manual of Useful and Practical Information for
+Bird-Keepers. New York. William Wood &amp; Co. 16mo. paper, pp. 110. 50
+cents.</p>
+
+<p>The Origin of the Late War, traced from the Beginning of the
+Constitution to the Revolt of the Southern States. By George Lunt. New
+York. D. Appleton &amp; Co. 12mo, pp. xiv., 491. $3.00.</p>
+
+<p>False Pride; or, Two Ways to Matrimony. A Companion to "Family Pride."
+Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &amp; Bro. 12mo. pp. 265. $2.00.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Genius of Edmund Burke. By J. L. Batchelder. Chicago. J. L.
+Batchelder. 12mo. pp. 50. $1.00</p>
+
+<p>Letters of Life. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+12mo. pp. 414. $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Church of England a Portion of Christ's one Holy Catholic Church,
+and a Means of restoring Visible Unity. An Eirenicon, in a Letter to the
+Author of "The Christian Year." By E. B. Pusey, D. D., Regius Professor
+of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. New York. D. Appleton &amp;
+Co. 12mo. pp. 395. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost; or, Reason and Revelation. By
+Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+12mo. pp. 274. $1.75.</p>
+
+<p>The Fortune Seeker. By Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth. Philadelphia. T.
+B. Peterson &amp; Bro. 12mo, pp. 498. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>Stonewall Jackson: a Biography. With a Portrait and Map. By John Esten
+Cooke, formerly of General Stuart's Staff. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+12mo. pp. 470. $3.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Phenomena of Plant Life. By Leo H. Grindon, Lecturer on Botany at
+the Royal School of Medicine, Manchester, etc. Boston. Nichols &amp; Noyes.
+12mo. pp. 93. $1.00</p>
+
+<p>A History of New England, from the Discovery by Europeans to the
+Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, being an Abridgment of his
+"History of New England during the Stuart Dynasty." By John Gorham
+Palfrey. In Two Volumes. New York. Hurd &amp; Houghton. 12mo. pp. xx., 408;
+xii., 426. $5.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Story of Kennett. By Bayard Taylor. New York. Hurd &amp; Houghton. 12mo.
+pp. x., 418. $2.25.</p>
+
+<p>A New Translation of the Hebrew Prophets, with an Introduction and
+Notes. By George R. Noyes, D. D., Hancock Professor of Hebrew, etc., and
+Dexter Lecturer in Harvard University. Third Edition, with a New
+Introduction and additional Notes. In Two Volumes. Boston. American
+Unitarian Association. 12mo. pp. xcii., 271; iv., 413. $4.50.</p>
+
+<p>St. Martin's Eve. By Mrs. Henry Wood. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &amp;
+Brothers. 8vo. pp. 327. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>The Man of the World. By William North, Author of "The Usurer's Gift,"
+etc. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &amp; Bro. 12mo. pp. 437. $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>Life of Emanuel Swedenborg. Together with a brief Synopsis of his
+Writings, both Philosophical and Theological. By William White. With an
+Introduction by B. F. Barrett. First American Edition. Philadelphia. J.
+B. Lippincott &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. 272. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Reunion of Christendom. A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, etc. By
+Henry Edward, Archbishop of Westminster. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+8vo. paper. pp. 66. 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p>The Principles of Biology. By Herbert Spencer. Vol. I. New York. D.
+Appleton &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. x., 475. $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts. By George H. Moore,
+Librarian of the New York Historical Society, and Corresponding Member
+of the Massachusetts Historical Society. New York. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+8vo. pp. iv., 256. $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>The Miniature Fruit-Garden; or, The Culture of Pyramidal and Bush
+Fruit-Trees. By Thomas Rivers. First American, from the Thirteenth
+English Edition. New York. Orange Judd &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. x., 133. $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>New Book of Flowers. By Joseph Breck. New York. Orange Judd &amp; Co. 12mo.
+pp. 480. $1.75.</p>
+
+<p>The History of Usury, from the earliest Period to the present Time.
+Together with a brief Statement of General Principles concerning the
+Conflict of the Laws of different States and Countries, and an
+Examination into the Policy of Laws on Usury and their Effect upon
+Commerce. By J. B. C. Murray. Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott &amp; Co. 12mo.
+pp. 158. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Hidden Depths. Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott &amp; Co. 12mo. pp. 351.
+$2.00.</p>
+
+<p>A Historical Inquiry concerning Henry Hudson; his Friends, Relatives,
+and Early Life, his Connection with the Muscovy Company, and Discovery
+of Delaware Bay. By John Meredith Read, Jr. Albany. Joel Munsell. 8vo.
+pp. vi., 209. $5.00.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No.
+107, September, 1866, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 23743-h.htm or 23743-h.zip *****
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107,
+September, 1866, 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 18, No. 107, September, 1866
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 5, 2007 [EBook #23743]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 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, Science, Art, and Politics._
+
+VOL. XVIII.--SEPTEMBER, 1866.--NO. CVII.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND
+FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
+to the end of the article.
+
+
+
+
+THE SURGEON'S ASSISTANT.
+
+
+I.
+
+The sickness of the nation not being unto death, we now begin to number
+its advantages. They will not all be numbered by this generation; and as
+for story-tellers, essayists, letter-writers, historians, and
+philosophers, if their "genius" flags in half a century with such
+material as hearts, homes, and battle-fields beyond counting afford
+them, they deserve to be drummed out of their respective regiments, and
+banished into the dominion of silence and darkness, forever to sit on
+the borders of unfathomable ink-pools, minus pen and paper, with
+fool's-caps on their heads.
+
+I know of a place which you may call Dalton, if it must have a name. At
+the beginning of our war,--for which some true spirits thank Almighty
+God,--a family as wretched as Satan wandering up and down the earth
+could wish to find lived there, close beside the borders of a lake which
+the Indians once called--but why should not your fancy build the lowly
+cottage on whatsoever green and sloping bank it will? Fair as you please
+the outside world may be,--waters pure as those of Lake St. Sacrament,
+with islands on their bosom like those of Horicon, and shores
+beautifully wooded as those of Lake George,--but what delight will you
+find in all the heavenly mansions, if love be not there?
+
+"I'll enlist," said the master of this mansion of misery in the midst of
+the garden of delight, one day.
+
+"I would," replied his wife.
+
+They spoke with equal vigor, but neither believed in the other. The
+instant the man dropped the book he had been reading, he was like Samson
+with his hair shorn, for his wife couldn't tell one letter from another;
+and when she saw him sit down on the stone wall which surrounded their
+potato-field, overgrown with weeds, she marched out boldly to the corner
+of the wood-shed, where never any wood was, and attacked him thus:--
+
+"S'pose you show fight awhile in that potato-patch afore you go to fight
+Ribils. Gov'ment don't need you any more than I do. May be it'll find
+out getting ain't gaining!"
+
+She had no answer. The man was thinking, when she interrupted him, as
+she was always doing, that, if he could secure the State and town
+bounty, that would be some provision for the woman and child. As for
+himself, he was indifferent as to where he was sent, or how soon. But if
+he went away, they might look for him to come again. Gabriel's trumpet,
+he thought, would be a more welcome sound than his wife's voice.
+
+He enlisted. The bounties paid him were left in the hands of a trusty
+neighbor, and were to be appropriated to the supply of his family's
+needs; and he went away along with a boat-load of recruits,--his own man
+no longer. Even his wife noticed the change in him, from the morning
+when he put on his uniform and began to obey orders, for she had time to
+notice. Several days elapsed after enlistment before the company's ranks
+were complete, and the captain would not report at head-quarters, he
+said, until his own townsfolk had supplied the number requisite.
+
+_Even_ his wife noticed the change, I said; for, contrary to what is
+usual and expected, she was not the first to perceive that the slow and
+heavy step had now a spring in it, and that there was a light in his
+clouded eyes. She supposed the new clothes made the difference.
+
+Nearly a year had passed away, and this woman was leaning over the rail
+fence which surrounded a barren field, and listening, while she leaned,
+to the story of Ezra Cramer, just home from the war. She listened well,
+even eagerly, to what he had to tell, and seemed moved by the account in
+ways various as pride and indignation.
+
+"I wish I had him here!" she said, when he had come to the end of his
+story,--the story of her husband's promotion.
+
+Ezra looked at her, and thought of the pretty girl she used to be, and
+wondered how it happened that such a one could grow into a woman like
+this. The vindictiveness of her voice accorded well with her
+person,--expressed it. Where were her red cheeks? What had become of her
+brown hair? She was once a free one at joking with, and rallying the
+young men about; but now how like a virago she looked! and her tongue
+was sharp as a two-edged sword.
+
+Ezra was sorry that he had taken the trouble to ascertain in the village
+where Nancy Elkins lived. Poor fellow! While enduring the hardships of
+the past year, his imagination had transformed all the Dalton women into
+angels, and the circuit of that small hamlet had become to his loving
+thought as the circuit of Paradise.
+
+Some degree of comprehension seemed to break upon him while he stood
+gazing upon her, and he said: "O well, Miss Nancy, he's got his hands
+full, and besides he didn't know I was coming home so quick. I didn't
+know it myself till the last minute. He would 'a' sent some
+message,--course he would!"
+
+"I guess there ain't anything to hender his _writing_ home to his
+folks," she answered, unappeased and unconvinced. "Other people hear
+from the war. There's Mynders always a-writing and sending money to the
+old folks, and that's the difference."
+
+"We've been slow to get our pay down where we was," said Ezra. "It's
+been a trouble to me all the while, having nothing to show for the time
+I was taking from father."
+
+The woman looked at the young fellow who had spoken so seriously, and
+her eyes and her voice softened.
+
+"Nobody would mind about your not sending money hum, Ezra. They'd know
+_you_ was all right. Such a hard-working set as you belong to! You're
+looking as if you wondered what I was doing here 'n this lot. I'm living
+in that shanty! Like as not I'll have its pictur' taken, and sent to my
+man. Old Uncle Torry said we might have it for the summer; and I expect
+the town was glad enough to turn me and my girl out anywhere. They won't
+do a thing towards fixing the old hut up. Say 't ain't worth it. We
+can't stay there in cold weather. Roof leaks like a sieve. If he don't
+send me some money pretty quick, I'll list myself, and serve long enough
+to find _him_ out, see 'f I don't."
+
+At this threat, the soldier, who knew something about WAR, straightened
+himself, and with a cheery laugh limped off towards the road. "I'll see
+ye ag'in, Miss Nancy, afore you start," said he, looking back and
+nodding gayly at her. Things weren't so bad as they seemed about her, he
+guessed. He was going home, and his heart was soft. Happiness is very
+kind; but let it do its best it cannot come very near to misery.
+
+Nancy stood and watched the young man as he went, commenting thus:
+"Well, _he_'s made a good deal out of 'listing, any way." His pale face
+and his hurt did not make him sacred in her sight.
+
+She was speaking to herself, and not to her little daughter, who, when
+she saw her mother talking to a soldier, ran up to hear the
+conversation. A change that was wonderful to see had passed over the
+child's face, when she heard that her father had been promoted from the
+ranks. The bald fact, unilluminated by a single particular, seemed to
+satisfy her. She hadn't a question to ask. Her first thought was to run
+down to the village and tell Miss Ellen Holmes, who told _her_, not long
+ago, so proud and wonderful a story about her brother's promotion.
+
+If it were not for this Jenny, my story would be short. Is it not for
+the future we live? For the children the world goes on.
+
+Does this little girl--she might be styled a beauty by a true catholic
+taste, but oh! I fear that the Boston Convention "ORTHODOX," lately
+convened to settle all great questions concerning the past, present, and
+future, would never recognize her, on any showing, as a babe of
+grace!--does she, as she runs down the hill and along the crooked street
+of Dalton, look anything like a messenger of Heaven to your eyes? Must,
+the angels show their wings before they shall have recognition?
+
+Going past the blacksmith's shop she was hailed by the blacksmith's
+self, with the blacksmith's own authority. "See here, Jenny!" At the
+call, she stood at bay like a fair little fawn in the woods.
+
+"I'm writing a letter to my boy," he continued. "Step in here. Did you
+know Ezra Cramer had come back?"
+
+"I saw him just now," she answered. "He told us about father." She said
+it with a pride that made her young face shine.
+
+"So! what about him, I wonder?" asked the blacksmith.
+
+And that he really did wonder, Jenny could not doubt. She heard more in
+his words than she liked to hear, and answered with a tremulous voice,
+in spite of pride, "O, he's been promoted."
+
+"The deuse! what's _he_ permoted to?"
+
+"I don't know," she said, and for the first time she wondered.
+
+"Where is he, though?" asked the blacksmith.
+
+"I don't know,--in the war."
+
+"That's 'cute. Well, see here, sis, we'll find that out,--you and me
+will." The angry voice of the blacksmith became tender. "You sit down
+there and write him a letter. My son, he'll find out if your pa is
+alive. As for Ezra, he don't know any more 'n he did when he went away;
+but, poor fellow, he's been mostually in the hospertal, instead of
+fighting Ribils, so p'r'aps he ain't to blame. You write to yer pa, and
+I'll wage you get an answer back, and he'll tell you all about his
+permotion quick enough."
+
+Jenny stood looking at the blacksmith for a moment, with mouth and eyes
+wide open, so much astonished by the proposition as not to know what
+answer should be made to it. She had never written a line in her life,
+except in her old copy-book. If her hand could be made to express what
+she was thinking of, it would be the greatest work and wonder in the
+world. But then, it never could!
+
+That decisive _never_ seemed to settle the point. She turned forthwith
+to the blacksmith, smiling very seriously. At the same time she took
+three decided steps, which led her into his dingy shop, as awed as
+though she were about to have some wonderful exhibition there. But she
+must be her own astrologer.
+
+The blacksmith, elated by his own success that morning in the very
+difficult business of letter-writing, was mightily pleased to have under
+direction this little disciple in the work of love, and forthwith laid
+his strong hands on the bench and brought it out into the light, setting
+it down with a force that said something for the earnestness of his
+purpose in regard to Miss Jenny.
+
+When he wrote his own letter, he did it in retirement and solitude,
+having sought out the darkest corner of his shop for the purpose. A
+mighty man in the shoeing of horses and the handling of hammers, he
+shrank from exposing his incompetence in the management of a miserable
+pen, even to the daylight and himself.
+
+His big account-book placed against his forge, with a small sheet of
+paper spread thereon, his pen in Jenny's hands, and the inkstand near
+by, there was nothing for him to do but to go away and let her do her
+work.
+
+"Give him a tall letter!" said he. "And you must be spry about it. He'll
+be glad to hear from his little girl, I reckon. See, the stage 'll be
+along by four o'clock, and now it's----"--he stepped to the door and
+looked out on the tall pine-tree across the road,--that was his
+sun-dial,--"it's just two o'clock now, Jenny. Work away!" So saying, he
+went off as tired, after the exertion he had made, as if he had shod all
+the Dalton horses since daybreak.
+
+She had just two hours for doing the greatest piece of work she had done
+in her short life. And consciously it was the greatest work. Every
+stroke of that pen, every straight line and curve and capital, seemed to
+require as much deliberation as the building of a house; and how her
+brain worked! Fly to and fro, O swallows, from your homes beneath the
+eaves of the blacksmith's old stone shop in the shade of the
+far-spreading walnut,--stretch forth your importunate necks and lift
+aloft your greedy voices, O young ones in the nests!--the little girl
+who has so often stood to watch you is sitting in the shadow within
+there, blind and deaf to you, and unaware of everything in the great
+world except the promotion of her father "in the war," and the letter he
+will be sure to get, because the blacksmith is going to send it along
+with _his_ letter to his son.
+
+She was doing her work well. Any one who had ever seen the girl before
+must have asked with wonder what had happened to her,--it was so evident
+that something had happened which stirred heart and soul to the depths.
+
+So, even so, unconsciously, love sometimes works out the work of a
+lifetime, touches the key-note of an anthem of everlasting praise,--does
+it with as little ostentation as the son of science draws yellow gold
+from the quartz rock which tells no tale on the face of it concerning
+its "hid treasure." So, wisely and without ostentation, work the true
+agents, the apostles of liberty in this world.
+
+"O dear papa! my dear papa!" she wrote, "Ezra has come home, and he says
+you are promoted! But he couldn't tell for what it was, or where you
+were, or anything. And O, it seems as if I couldn't wait a minute, I
+want to hear so all about it." When she had written thus far the spirit
+of the mother seemed to stir in the child. She sat and mused for a
+moment. Her eyes flashed. Her right hand moved nervously. Strange that
+her father had not sent some word by Ezra; but then he didn't know, of
+course, that Ezra was coming. Ay! that was a lucky thought. What she had
+written seemed to imply some blame. So, with many a blot and erasure,
+her loving belief that all was right must make itself evident.
+
+At the end of the two hours she found herself at the bottom of the page
+the blacksmith had spread before her. Twice he had come into the shop
+and assured himself that the work was going on, and smiled to see the
+progress she was making. The third time he came he was under
+considerable excitement.
+
+"Ready!" he shouted. "The stage 'll be along now in ten minutes."
+
+She did not answer, she was so busy, and so _hard_ at work, signing her
+name to the sheet that was covered with what looked like hieroglyphics.
+
+When she had made the last emphatic pen-stroke, she turned towards him,
+flushed and smiling. "There!" she said.
+
+He looked over her shoulder.
+
+"Good!" said he. "But you haven't writ his name out. Give me the pen
+here, quick!" Then he took the quill and wrote her father's name up in
+one blank corner, and dried the ink with a little sand, and put the note
+into the envelope containing his own, and the great work was done.
+
+Do you know how great a work, you dingy old Dalton blacksmith?
+
+Do _you_ know, fair child,--who must fight till the day of your death
+with alien, opposite forces, because the blood-vessels of Nancy Elkins,
+as they sail through the grand canals of the city of your life, so often
+hang out piratical banners, and bear down on better craft as they near
+the dangerous places, or put out, like wreckers after a storm, seeking
+for treasure the owners somehow lost the power to hold?
+
+In a few minutes after the letter was inscribed and sealed, the stage
+came rattling along, and Jenny stood by and saw the blacksmith give it
+to the driver, and heard him say: "Now be kerful about that ere letter.
+It's got two inside. One's my boy's, as ye'll see by the facing on it;
+t' other's this little girl's. She's been writin' to her pa. So be
+kerful."
+
+They stood together watching the stage till it was out of sight, then
+the blacksmith nodded at Jenny as if they had done a good day's work,
+and proceeded to light his pipe. That was not her way of celebrating the
+event. She remembered now that she had promised a little girl, Miss
+Ellen Holmes indeed, that she would some time show her where the
+red-caps and fairy-cups grew, and there was yet time, before sunset, for
+a long walk in the woods.
+
+The little town-bred lady happened to come along just then, while Jenny
+stood hesitating whether to go home first and tell her mother of this
+great thing she had done. The question was therefore settled; and now
+let them go seeking red-caps. Good luck attend the children! Jenny will
+be sure to say something about promotions before they separate. She will
+say that something with a genuine human pride; and the end of the hunt
+for red-caps may be, conspicuously, success in finding them; but still
+more to the purpose, it will be the child's establishment on a better
+basis--a securer basis of equality--than she has occupied before. She
+forgets about Dalton and poverty. She thinks about camps and honor. She
+has something to claim of all the world. She is the citizen of a great
+nation. She bears the name of one who is fighting for the Union, who
+_has_ fought, and fought so well that those in authority have beckoned
+him up higher. Why, it is as though a crown were placed on her dear
+father's head.
+
+
+II.
+
+Going out of quiet and beautiful green Dalton, and into the hospital of
+Frere's Landing, 't is a wonderful change we make.
+
+The silence of one place is as remarkable as the silence of the other,
+perhaps. That of the hospital does not resemble that of the hamlet,
+however. At times it grows oppressive and appalling, being the silence
+of anguish or of death. A stranger reaching Dalton in the night might
+wonder in the morning if there were in reality any passage out of it,
+for there the lake, on one of whose western slopes is the
+"neighborhood," seems locked in completely by the hills, and an ascent
+towards heaven is apparently the only way of egress. Yet there's
+another way; for I am not writing this true story among celestial
+altitudes for you. I returned from Dalton by a mundane road.
+
+Out of Frere's Hospital, however, _its_ silence and seclusion, many a
+stranger never found his way except by the high mountains of
+transfiguration, in the chariots of fire, driven by the horsemen of
+Heaven, covered with whose glory they departed.
+
+Through the wards of this well-ordered hospital a lady passed one night,
+and, entering a small apartment separated from the others, advanced with
+noiseless step to a bedside, and there sat down. You may guess if her
+heart was beating fast, and whether it was with difficulty that she kept
+her gray eyes clear of tears. There were about her traces of long and
+hurried journeying.
+
+Under no limitations of caution had she passed so noiselessly through
+the wards. Involuntary was that noiselessness,--involuntary also the
+surprise with which one and another of the more wakeful patients turned
+to follow her, with hopeless, weary eyes, as she passed on. Now and then
+some feeble effort was made to attract her attention and arrest her
+progress, but she went, absorbed beyond observation by the errand that
+constrained her steps and thoughts.
+
+When she reached the door of the apartment to which the surgeon had
+directed her, she seemed for an instant to hesitate; then she pushed the
+door open and passed into the room. The next instant she sank into a
+chair by the bedside of a man who was lying there asleep. It seemed as
+if the silent room had a profounder stillness added to it since she
+entered.
+
+It was Colonel Ames whom she saw lying on the cot before her with a
+bandage round his forehead, so evidently asleep. He was smiling in a
+dream. He was not going to give up the ghost, it seemed, though he had
+given up so much--how much!--with that passion of giving which possessed
+this nation, North and South, during four awful, glorious years. _He_
+had given up the splendor and the beauty of this world. All its radiance
+was blotted out in that moment of fury and of death when the shot struck
+him, and left him blind upon the field.
+
+Never on earth would it be said to him, "Receive thy sight." The lady
+knew this who sat down by his bedside to wait for his awaking. The
+surgeon had told her this, when at last, after having searched for her
+brother long among the dead, she came to Frere's Hospital and found him
+alive.
+
+She sat so close beside him it seemed that he could not remain a moment
+unconscious of her immediate presence after waking. Her hand lay just
+where his hand, moving when he wakened, must touch it. She had rightly
+calculated the chances; he did touch it, and started and said: "Who's
+here? Doctor!" Then with a firmer grasp he seized the unresisting
+fingers, and exclaimed, "My God, am I dreaming? it ought to be Lizzie's
+hand."
+
+"The doctor told me I should find you here, and might come," she
+answered; and, disguised as the voice was by the feeling that tore her
+heart, the Colonel, poor young fellow, listening as if for life, knew
+it, and said, "O Lizzie, my child, I don't know about this,--why
+couldn't you wait?"
+
+"I waited and waited forever," she answered. "You're not sorry that I've
+found you out after such a hunt? Of course you'll make believe, but
+then--you needn't; I'm here, any way!"
+
+Just then the surgeon came in. The Colonel knew his step, and said,
+"Doctor, look here; is this Lizzie?"
+
+"I believe you're right," said the doctor. "She said she had a hero for
+a brother, and I have no doubt about that myself."
+
+"O Dan, we had given you up! Though I knew all the time we shouldn't. I
+could not believe--"
+
+"Must come to that Lizzie,--do it over again; for what you have here
+isn't your old Dan."
+
+"My old Dan!" she exclaimed, and then there was a little break in the
+conversation the two heroes were endeavoring to maintain.
+
+Meanwhile the surgeon had seated himself on the edge of the bed waiting
+the moment when there should be a positive need of him. He saw when it
+arrived.
+
+"Colonel," said he, in his hearty, cheery voice, which alone had lifted
+many a poor fellow from the slough of misery, and put new heart and soul
+in him, since his ministrations began in the hospital,--"Colonel, your
+aids are in waiting."
+
+The soldier smiled; his face flushed. "My aids can wait," said he.
+
+"That is a fine thing to say. Here he has been bothering me, madam, not
+to say browbeating me, and I've been moving heaven and earth for my
+part, and at last have secured the aids, and now hear him dismiss them!"
+
+"Bring them round here," said the patient suddenly.
+
+The surgeon quietly lifted from the floor a pair of crutches, and placed
+them in his patient's hands.
+
+"How many years must I rely on my aids?" he asked quietly.
+
+"Perhaps three months. By that time you will be as good as ever."
+
+A change passed over the young man's face at this. Whatever the emotion
+so expressed, it had otherwise no demonstration. He turned now abruptly
+toward his sister, and said: "They can wait. I've got another kind of
+aid now. Come, Lizzie, say something."
+
+A sudden radiance flashed across his face when he ceased to speak, and
+waited for that voice.
+
+"I shall be round again in an hour," said the surgeon.
+
+He could well be spared. The brother and sister had now neither eye nor
+thought except for each other.
+
+The surgeon's face changed as he closed the door. Every one of their
+faces changed. As for the gentleman whose duty took him now from ward to
+ward, from one sick-bed to another, it was only by an effort that he
+gave his cheerful words and courageous looks to the men who had found
+day after day a tonic in his presence.
+
+The brother and sister clasped each other's hands. Few were the words
+they spoke. He was looking forward to the years before him, endeavoring
+to steady himself, in a moment of weakness, by the remembrance of past
+months of active service.
+
+She was thinking of the days when she walked with her hero out of
+delightsomeness and ease into danger and anxiety, all for the nation's
+succor, in the nation's time of need. Some had deemed it a needless
+sacrifice. Of old, when sacrifice was to be offered, it was not the
+worthless and the worst men dared or cared to bring. The spotless, the
+pure, the beautiful, these were no vain oblations. These two said in
+solemn conference, "We will make an offering of our all." And their all
+they offered. See how much had been accepted!
+
+Having offered, having sacrificed, it was not in either of these to
+repent the doing, or despise the honor that was put upon them. No going
+back for them! No looking back! No secret repining! The Colonel had done
+his work. As for the Colonel's sister, there was no place on earth where
+she would not find work to do.
+
+And here in this hospital, in her brother's room, she found a sphere.
+Going and coming through the various wards, singing hymns of heavenly
+love and purest patriotism, scattering comforts with ministering hands,
+which found brothers on all those beds of languishing, how many learned
+to look for her appearing, and to bless her when she came! But
+concerning her work there, and that of other women, some of whom will go
+crippled to the grave from their service,--soldiers and veterans of the
+army of the Union,--enough has everywhere been said.
+
+Among all these patients there was one, a sick man, to whom her coming
+and her going, her speech and her silence, became most notable events.
+Living within the influence of such manner and degree of social life as
+her presence in the hospital established, he was like a returned exile,
+who, yet under ban, felt all the awkwardness, constraint, and danger of
+his position. This man, who discovered in himself merely helplessness,
+was not accounted helpless, but the helper of many. He was, in short,
+the surgeon of the hospital.
+
+One day the Colonel said to him, "You don't like to have my sister here.
+Are the hired nurses making a row?"
+
+The surgeon's face betrayed so much interest in this subject, and so
+much embarrassment, it seemed probable he would come out with an
+absolute "Yes"; but his speech contradicted him, for he said with
+indifference, "Where did you get that pretty notion?"
+
+"Out of you, and nowhere else. What puzzles me, though, is, she seems to
+think she is doing some good here. And didn't you say you'd no objection
+to her visiting the wards?"
+
+"I should think it a positive loss if she were called or sent away from
+the hospital," said the surgeon, speaking now seriously enough. "She is
+of the greatest service, out of this room as well as in it."
+
+"Why do I feel then as if something had happened,--something
+disagreeable? We don't have such good times as we used to have when you
+sat here and told stories, and let me run on like a school-boy."
+
+"You have better company, that's all. I'm not such a fool that I can't
+see it. You have better times, lad,--if I don't."
+
+"Then all you did for me before she came was for pity's sake! Who's in
+the ditch now, getting all the favor you used to show to me?"
+
+The voice and manner with which these words were spoken produced an
+effect not readily yielded to, though the surgeon was perfectly aware
+that his emotion was unperceived and unguessed by the man on the bed
+there, who was investigating a difficulty which had puzzled him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So we have come to _this_ point. Away down at Frere's Landing, amid
+scenes of anguish, tribulation, and death, where elect souls did
+minister, there was found ministration by these elect souls in their own
+behalf.
+
+They had gained a "Landing-Place" that was sacred ground, and if
+Philosophy and Science would also stand there they must put their shoes
+from off their feet, for the ground was holy. Priests whose right it was
+to stand within the veil were servants there; and day by day, as they
+discerned each other's work, it was not required of them always to dwell
+upon the nature of sacrifice.
+
+Each, in such work as now was occupying the doctor and Miss Ames, had
+need of the other's strengthening sympathy, day by day, and of all the
+consolations of friendship, such as royal souls are permitted to bestow
+on one another.
+
+With the surgeon, not a young man in anything except happiness, it was
+as if there were broad openings, not _rents_, in the heavy leaden skies.
+Pure, bright lights shone along the horizon, warmth overspread the cold.
+
+With her, perpetual and sufficient are the compensations of love. To him
+who plants of this it is returned out of earth, and out of heaven, in
+good measure, pressed down, and running over. Nay, let us not argue.
+
+The sick man lying on his cot, the convalescent guided by her to balcony
+or garden, the crippled and the dying, had all to give her of their
+hearts' best bloom. And if it proved that there was one among these who,
+to her apprehension, walked in white, like an angel, of whom she asked
+no thanks, no praise, only aid and sympathy, what mortal should look
+surprise? The constant, the pure, the alive through all generations, the
+Alive Forever, will not. And the rest may apologize for overhearing a
+story not intended for their ears.
+
+It happened one evening that the surgeon and Miss Ames met outside the
+hospital doors, near the old sea-wall. They were walking in no haste,
+watching, it seemed, the flight of the brave little sea-birds, as they
+made their way now above and now among the breakers. After the
+heart-trying labors of the day, an hour like this was full of balm to
+those who were now entered on its rest. But it was not secure from
+invasion. Even now a voice was shouting to the surgeon, and he heard it,
+though he walked on as if he were determined not to hear. He had taken
+to himself this hour; he had earned it, he needed it; surely the world
+could go on for one hour without him!
+
+But the importunity of the call was not to be resisted. So, because the
+irresistible must be met, the surgeon stood still and looked around. A
+poor little fellow was making toward him with all speed.
+
+"Mail for you, sir," he said, as he came nearer, and he gave a package
+of newspapers, and one little letter, into the surgeon's hands.
+
+So Miss Ames and he sat down on the stone wall to scan those newspapers,
+and the surgeon opened his note.
+
+Obviously a scrawl from some poor fellow who had obtained a discharge on
+account of sickness, and gone home. It was not rare for the surgeon to
+receive such missives from the men who had been under his charge.
+Wonderful was the influence he gained over the majority of his patients.
+Wonderful? No. The man of meanest talents, who gives himself body and
+spirit to a noble work, can no more fail of his great reward, than the
+seasons of their glory. Never man on this Landing thought meanly of the
+hospital surgeon's skill, or questioned his right to rank among the
+ablest of his tribe,--no man, and certainly not the woman who was making
+a hero out of him, to her heart's great content.
+
+While Miss Ames looked at the papers, he proceeded, without much
+interest in the business, to open and read his note.
+
+One glance down the blurred and blotted page served to arrest his
+attention, in a way that letters could not always do. Here was not a cup
+of cold water to sip and put aside. He glanced at Miss Ames. She was
+absorbed in a report of "the situation," getting items of renown out of
+one column and another, which should ease many an aching body, smooth
+many a sick man's pillow, ere the night-lamps were lighted in the wards.
+
+If she had chanced to look up at him just then, while he, with scared,
+astonished eyes, was glancing at her, it is impossible to say what words
+might have escaped him, or what might have forever been prevented
+utterance. But she was not looking. What heavenly angel turned her eyes
+away?
+
+And now, before him whose prerogative was Victory, what vision did
+arise? An apocalyptic vision: blackness of darkness forever, and side by
+side with chaos, fair fields of living green, through which a young girl
+walked towards a womanhood as fair as hers who sat beside him.
+Unconscious of wrong that child, and yet how deeply, how variously
+wronged! If he had meditated a great robbery, he could not have quailed
+in the light of the discovered enormity as he did now before the vision
+of his Janet.
+
+Years upon years of struggle and of conquest could hardly give to the
+surgeon of Frere's a more notable victory, one which could fill his soul
+with a serener sense of triumph, than this hour gave, when he sat on the
+old stone wall that guarded shore from sea, with the child's letter in
+his hands, which had not miscarried, but had moved straight,
+straight--do not Divine providences always?--as an arrow to its mark.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out of the secret place of strength he came, and he held that letter
+open towards Miss Ames.
+
+"Here's something to be thought of," said he, endeavoring to speak in a
+natural and easy tone of voice. "I don't know that I could ask for
+better counsel than yours. My little girl has written me a letter. I
+didn't know that she could write. See what work she has made of it. But
+what sort of parents can she have, do you think, twelve years old, and
+writing a thing like that?"
+
+Miss Ames laid aside, or rather, to speak correctly, she _dropped_ the
+newspapers. There was nothing in all their printed columns to compare
+with this item of intelligence,--that the surgeon had a living wife and
+a living daughter. She took the letter he was holding towards her, and
+said, "Indeed, Doctor," quite as naturally as he had spoken. But she did
+not look at him. She read the letter,--every misspelled word of
+it,--then she said: "Perhaps it doesn't say much for the parents. But
+something--I should think a great deal--for the child. Strange you
+didn't tell me about her before. But I like to have her introduce
+herself."
+
+"You do!"
+
+"Promotion, eh!" she was looking the scrawl over again.
+
+The word, as she pronounced it, was not an interrogation. Miss Ames
+seemed to be musing, yet with no activity of curiosity, on the one idea
+which had evidently possessed the child's mind in writing.
+
+There was silence for a moment after this ejaculation; then the surgeon
+spoke.
+
+"I enlisted as a private," said he, speaking with a difficulty that
+might not have been manifest to any ordinary hearer. "My daughter did
+not know that I had a profession; but my diploma satisfied the
+Department when my promotion was spoken of. When I became a live man in
+the service, I wished to serve where I could bring the most to pass, and
+it was not in camp, or on the field,--except as a healer." He looked at
+his watch as he uttered these last words, and arose as if his hour of
+rest had expired; but then, instead of taking one step forward, he
+turned and looked at Miss Ames, and she seemed to hear him saying, "Is
+this a time for flight?"
+
+He answered that question, for he had asked it of himself, by sitting
+down again.
+
+"I _ought_ to take a few minutes to myself," he said, with grave
+deliberation, "I shall have no time like this to speak of my child,--for
+her, I mean"; and if, while he spoke thus, he lacked perfect composure,
+the hour was his, and he knew it. "More than a dozen years ago," he
+continued, "I went to Dalton. I was sick and dying, as I thought.
+Janet's mother nursed me through a fever, and was the means of saving my
+life. I married her. I was grateful for the care she had taken of me;
+and while regaining my strength, during that September and October, I
+fell into the mistake of thinking that it was she who made the world
+seem beautiful to me again, and life worth keeping. But you have seen
+enough since you have been in this hospital to understand that this war
+has been salvation to a good many men, as it will prove to the nation. I
+enlisted as much as anything to get away from--where I was. The Devil
+himself couldn't hold me there any longer. He had managed things long
+enough. The child is capable of love, you see. Can you help us? I don't
+know, but I think you were sent from above to do it, somehow. I see--I
+must live for Janet. When I think that she might live in the same world
+where you do, that I have no right to surround her with any other
+conditions--does God take me for a robber? No! for he managed to get
+this letter to me when--" He stopped speaking,--it seemed as if he were
+about to look at his watch again; but instead of that, he said "Good
+evening" to Miss Ames, and bowed, and walked back towards the hospital.
+
+His assistant gathered up the newspapers, and then sat down again and
+looked out towards the sea. The tide was coming in. She sat awhile and
+watched the great waves lift aloft the graceful branches of green and
+purple sea-weed, and saw the stormy petrels going to and fro, and
+listened to the ocean's roar. She was sounding deeper depths than those
+awful caverns which were hidden by the green and shining water from her
+eyes.
+
+If Janet Saunders, child of Nancy Elkins, at that moment felt a thrill
+of joy, and broke forth into singing, would you deem the fact
+inconsequent, not to be classed among the wonders of telegraphic
+achievement?
+
+I think her little cold, pinched, meagre life--nay, _lot_--was
+brightened consciously on that great day of being,--that the sun felt
+warmer, and the skies looked fairer than they ever had before. The
+destiny which had seemed to be in the hands or charge of no one on earth
+was in the hands of two as capable as any in this world for services of
+love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But now what was to be done by Dr. Saunders? Every man and woman sees
+the "situation." For the present, of course, he was sufficiently
+occupied; he was in the service of his country. But when these urgent
+demands on his time, patience, and humanity, which were now incessant,
+should no longer be made, because the country had need of him no
+longer,--what then? Men mustered out of service generally went home;
+family and neighborhood claimed them. What family, what neighborhood,
+claimed him? His very soul abhorred the thought of Dalton, where he had
+died to life; where he had buried his manhood. The very thought that the
+neighbors would not be able to recognize him was a thought which made
+him say to himself they never _should_ recognize him. He would _not_ be
+identified as the poor creature who went out of Dalton with one hope,
+and only one,--that the first day's engagement might see him lying among
+the unnamed and unknown dead. But if the neighbors and his wife exposed
+to him relations which he swore he would not degrade himself so far as
+to resume, what was to become of his daughter? That was more easily
+managed. He could send her away from home to school, if he could find a
+lady in the land who would compassionate that neglected little girl, and
+teach her, and train her, and be a mother to her.
+
+Miss Ames knew such a one. Let the little girl be sent to Charlestown to
+Miss Hall, Miss Ames's dear friend, and no better training than she
+would have in her school could be found for her throughout the land.
+Miss Ames gave this advice the day she went away from Frere's, for she
+had decided, for her brother, that he never would recover his strength
+until he was removed to a cooler climate. So they were going on a
+government transport, which would sail for Charlestown direct. This
+little business in regard to Janet Saunders could be managed by her
+immediately on arrival home. And so the surgeon wrote a letter, which he
+sent by his assistant, to Miss Hall, and another to the minister of
+Dalton, and another still to Janet and her mother. And all these
+concerned little Jenny; and all this grew out of the letter written in
+the blacksmith's shop, and the doctor's recovered integrity.
+
+But the question yet remained, What could be done for Nancy? If
+education in that direction were possible,--to what purpose? That she
+might become his equal when the strength of his hope that he had done
+with her was lying merely in this, that they were unequal? But
+hope,--what had he to do with hope, especially with such a hope as this?
+What had he to do with hope, who had come forth from Dalton as from a
+pit of despair? There were no foes like those of his own household; he
+was hoping that for all time he had rid himself of them. That would have
+been desertion, in point of fact. Well; but all that a man hath will he
+give for his life. He was safely distant from that place of disaster and
+death; but he must recognize his home duties, at least by the
+maintenance of his family. Yes, that he would do. He began to consider
+how much was due to him for services rendered to the government,--for
+the first time to consider.
+
+So, long before winter came, Nancy Saunders found herself on intimate
+terms with the minister and his wife,--for the minister had received his
+letters from the surgeon, and promptly accepted his commission, securing
+comfortable winter quarters for Nancy, and escorting Janet to
+Charlestown, after his wife had aided the doctor's wife in preparing the
+child for boarding-school. All these changes and transactions excited
+talk in Dalton. Every kind of rumor went abroad that you can imagine;
+and it was currently believed at last that the doctor had made a fortune
+by some army contract. So well persuaded of this fact was his wife,
+that, as time wore on, she began to think, and to say, that, if such was
+the case, she didn't know why she should be kept on short allowance, and
+to inquire among the neighbors the easiest and the shortest route from
+Dalton to Frere's Landing. Nobody seemed able to answer the question so
+well as Ezra Cramer; and he assured her that she would lose her head
+before she got half through the army lines which stretched between her
+and the hospital. But then Ezra was a born know-nothing, said
+Nancy,--that everybody knew.
+
+Walking up and down the sea-wall, night after night, during the hour of
+rest he appropriated to himself,--knowing that these things were
+accomplished, for in due time letters came informing him of the
+fulfilment of his wishes,--the surgeon had ample leisure for considering
+and reconsidering this case. It was one that would not stay disposed of.
+What adjournments were made! what exceptions were taken! and what
+appeals to higher courts were constantly being made!
+
+As often as a scrawl came from Colonel Ames reporting progress, and the
+plans he and his sister were making, the deeds they were doing, the
+grand-jury was sworn and the surgeon arraigned before it; the chief
+justice came into court, and all the witnesses, and the accusation was
+read. Then the counsel for the defendant and the counsel for the
+plaintiff appeared. But, with every new trial of the case, new charges
+and new specifications were brought forward and made, and it was equal
+to being in chancery. If the war lasted through a generation, it was
+likely that the surgeon's suit would last as long.
+
+This was as notable a divorce case as ever was made public.
+
+On the plaintiff's behalf the argument ran thus: Here was a man, a
+gentleman by birth, education, and profession, legally united to a woman
+low-born, low-bred, and so ignorant that she could neither read nor
+write. He had come to the neighborhood where she lived, to the door of
+the very house she occupied, sick in body and in mind. Disappointments
+and ill-health had reduced him to the shadow of himself in person, and
+his mind, of course, shared his body's disaffection.
+
+A sick person, as all experience in practice has proved over and over
+again, is hardly to be called a responsible being. Invalids love and
+hate without reason,--which is contrary, he said, as he stood in the
+presence of the court,--contrary to what is done among persons in sound
+health.
+
+Under the shelter of her uncle's roof he had lain for weeks, sick of a
+fever. He was saved alive, but so as by fire. This girl waited on him
+through that time as a servant. He was thrown chiefly on her hands,--no
+other person could be spared to wait on the poor stranger. She comforted
+him. Her ways were not refined and gentle as if she had been taught
+refinement and tenderness by precept or example. She had strong
+good-sense. So far as she understood his orders, she obeyed them. When
+he could not give any, she made use of her own judgment, and sought
+first of all his comfort. She was kind. In her rough honesty and
+unwearied attention he found cause for gratitude.
+
+Rising for the first time from his bed of sickness, he would have fallen
+if she had not lifted him and laid him back upon his bed. When he became
+strong enough to stand, but not without support, she gave him that
+support. She assisted him from the little room, and the little house
+when the walls became intolerable to him, and it happened to be in the
+early morning of a day so magnificent that it seemed another could never
+be made like it. He could not forget how the world looked that morning;
+how the waters shone; how the islands stood about; how the surrounding
+hills were arrayed in purple glory; how the birds sang. This land to
+which he was a stranger, which he had seen before only on that night
+when he came in the dark to her uncle's door, looked like Paradise to
+him; he gazed and gazed, and silent tears ran down his pale face through
+the furrows of his wasted cheeks. She saw them shining in his beard, and
+said something to soothe him in a comforting way, as any woman would
+have spoken who saw any creature in weakness and pain. The manner or the
+word, whatever it was, expressed a superiority of health, if of no other
+kind, and he was in no condition to investigate either its quality or
+its degree.
+
+When, with voice feeble and broken as a sick child's, he thanked her for
+all she had done, and she answered that it was nothing but a pleasure,
+and he need not thank her, he did not forthwith forget that she had
+watched day and night over him for nearly two months; that many a time
+weariness so overpowered her that she sat and slept in the broad
+daylight, and looked paler than when he lay like a dead weight on her
+hands.
+
+He remembered in court, and could not deny it, that when, believing that
+this was destiny as it was also pleasure, he asked the girl to marry
+him, she answered, "No,"--as if she did not trust what he said, that she
+was necessary to his happiness. She told him that he did not belong in
+Dalton, and that he would not be happy there with her and her people. He
+answered that all he desired to know was whether she loved him. By and
+by he was able to gather from the answers she gave, as well as failed to
+give, all he desired to know, and they were married.
+
+And, since he was beginning life anew, it was shown in court, nothing of
+the old life should enter into this of Dalton. He buried his profession
+in the past, and undertook other labors,--labors like those of Uncle
+Elkins; he would abide on that level where he found himself on his
+recovery, and make no effort to lift his wife to that he had renounced.
+She was a child of Nature. He would learn life anew of her; but he
+failed of success in all his undertakings. Shall a man attempt to
+extenuate his failures? It seemed new to him; he acknowledged it in open
+court, that from the day of his entrance into Dalton to the day he left
+it, he was under some enchantment there. And if an insane man is not to
+be held responsible in law for his offences, he had the amplest title to
+a quitclaim deed from that which had grown out of the Dalton experience.
+
+So the lower courts disposed of the case. He was free. But after a time
+the suit was carried up before superior powers, and thus the advocate
+for the defendant showed cause on the new trial.
+
+She was living among the people of whom she had been born. In person she
+was attractive as any girl to be found on all the lake or hillside; a
+rosy-cheeked, fair-faced, fair-haired blue-eyed girl, with a frank voice
+and easy address. She had a "Hail fellow! well met!" for every man,
+woman, and child of the vicinity. She had lovers, all the way up from
+her childhood, rustic admirers, and one who looked at her from a not far
+distance, who dressed himself in his best and went to her uncle's house
+on Sundays and other holidays, and who was courting Nancy after his
+fashion, with all plans for their future marked out fully in his
+mind,--and these would have fulfilment if his suit were only successful;
+and in regard to that he had no fears or doubts.
+
+Until this stranger came to Uncle Elkins's house! During his long
+sickness the young lover was helpful in many ways to Nancy. But he
+began to be suspicious by and by of the results of this much waiting. At
+last, before he was himself ready to do it, he asked Nancy to be his
+wife; but he was too late. She had "given her word" to the poor fellow
+whom she had lured back from Death's door.
+
+The court was admonished to take cognizance of this fact, that, if Nancy
+had married the man in whom her heart had been interested up to the time
+when the stranger came, she would have married in her own sphere, a man
+of her own rank, and would have loved him as he did her, with an equal
+love; they would have lived out their lives, animating them with
+skirmishes and small warfare, and winning victories over each other,
+which would have proved disastrous as defeats to neither.
+
+It would have been no high crime to such a man that Nancy was ignorant
+up and down through the range of knowledge; he would not have turned
+away in disgust from his endeavors to teach her, if she took it into her
+head to learn, though she dropped and regained the ambition through
+every winter of her life. He would have plodded on in his accustomed
+ways, would have protected his wife and child from starvation and cold,
+without imagining that a husband and father could retire from his
+position as such, or abrogate his duties. No vague expectations in
+regard to herself, no bitter disappointment in regard to him, would have
+attended her. The very changes in her character, which had made her not
+to be endured,--how far was he whose name she bore responsible for them?
+She had been accustomed to thrift and labor, she saw in him idleness and
+waste of power and life. She had exhausted the resources readiest to her
+hand in vain, and had only then given up her expectation.
+
+It was not be denied that it was humiliation and wrath to live with her;
+but her husband had sought her,--she had not sought him! If he could
+plead for himself the force and constraint of circumstances, should not
+the same defence be set up for her? And what might not patience, and
+better management, and gentler and more noble demeanor towards her, have
+done for her? Was _he_ the same man he was when he went away from
+Dalton? Was he the same man in Dalton that he had been in his youth? Was
+it not out of the pit that he himself had been digged? It became evident
+that the arguments for the defendant were producing a result in court.
+The judge on his throne, as well as the grand-jury, listened to the
+argument in favor of the woman. And at last the case was decided; for
+the judge charged the jury, that, if it could be shown that there was
+mere incompatibility, it was the business of the superior mind to make
+straight a highway for the Lord across those lives. Let every valley be
+exalted, every hill be brought low.
+
+Dr. Saunders _acquiesced_ in this verdict, and wrote a letter to his
+wife. He knew she could not read it, but he knew also that she could
+procure it to be read to her. He filled it with accounts of his
+situation, occupation, expectation; and he sent her money. He said that,
+if he could get a furlough, he might run up North for a few days, as
+other men went home who could get leave of absence, to see that those
+whom he had left behind him were doing well; and they would both perhaps
+be able to go and see their daughter Jenny, or else they might have her
+home for a holiday. He wrote a letter saying these things and others,
+and any wife might have been proud to receive such from her husband, "in
+the war."
+
+And when he had sent it, he looked for no answer. This was a kind of
+giving which must look for no return. And yet an answer was sent him. He
+did not receive it, however, it was sent at so late a date; he was then
+on his way to Dalton.
+
+When the whistle of the miniature boat which plied the lake sent a
+warning along the hillside that a passenger was on board who wished to
+land, or that mail was to be sent ashore, a small boat was rowed from
+the Point by a lad who was lingering about, waiting to know if any such
+signal were to come, and one passenger stood at the head of the ladder,
+waiting for him to come alongside. This was Dr. Saunders, who, having
+been rowed ashore, walked three miles down the road, and up along the
+mountain, to the Dalton neighborhood.
+
+The first man whom he met as he walked on was the blacksmith, who had
+been instrumental in getting Jenny's letter written. He was sitting in
+front of his shop, alone. There was nothing about this man who was
+walking into Dalton to excite a suspicion in the mind of the shrewdest
+old inhabitant who should meet him that his personality was familiar to
+Dalton eyes. He might safely ask what questions he would, and pursue his
+way if he chose to do it. Nobody would recognize him.
+
+The doctor lingered as he went past the shop; but the blacksmith did not
+speak, and he walked on; and he passed others, his old neighbors, as he
+went. This was hardly pleasant, though it might be the thing he desired.
+
+He walked on until he came to the red farm-gate of Farmer Elkins,
+Nancy's uncle. There he stopped. Under the chestnut-trees, before the
+door, the farmer sat. The doctor walked in, and towards him like a man
+at home, and said, "Good evening, Uncle."
+
+The wrinkled old farmer looked up from his drowse. He had hardly heard
+the words spoken; but the voice that spoke had in it a tone that was
+familiar, were it not for the cheeriness of it; and--but no! one glance
+at the figure before him assured him of anything rather than Saunders!
+Yet the old man, either because of his vague expectation or because of
+the confusion of his half-awake condition, said something audibly, of
+which the name of Nancy, and her name alone, was intelligible.
+
+"Well, where _is_ Nancy," said the other, laying his hand on the
+farmer's shoulder in a manner calculated to dissipate his dream.
+
+The old man looked at the doctor with serious, suspicious eyes, scanned
+him from head to foot, and there was a dash of anger, of unbelief, of
+awe, and of deference in the spirit with which he said, "If you're
+Saunders, I'm glad you've come, but you might 'a' come sooner."
+
+"You're right, and you're wrong, Uncle. I'm Saunders, true enough. But I
+couldn't come before,--this is my first furlough."
+
+"Did you get the letter?"
+
+"No, what letter? Who wrote to me?"
+
+The judge and the jury looked down from the awful circle, in the midst
+of which stood Saunders, and surveyed the little hard-faced,
+yellow-haired farmer, with eyes which seemed intent on searching him
+through all his shadowy ambiguity. If only he would make such answer as
+any other man in all the land might expect,--thought the
+prisoner,--"Why, your wife, of course." The doctor was prepared to
+believe in a miracle. Since he went away his wife might have been
+spurred on by the ambition to rival her daughter, who was being
+educated. She perhaps had learned to write, and in her pride had written
+to her husband!
+
+The answer Elkins gave was the only one of which the doctor's mind had
+taken no thought.
+
+"Nancy died a month ago." There the old man paused. But as the doctor
+made no answer, merely stood looking at him, he went on. "She got your
+letter first, though, Nancy did. I think, if anything could a-hindered
+her dying, that would. She came out here to read your letter," (he did
+not say to hear it read, and Saunders noticed that,) "and my folks, she
+found, was busy, and nobody was round to talk it over with her, so
+nothing could stop her, but she put right in and worked till night, and
+on top o' that she would go back to the village, and it was raining, and
+so dark you could scurce see the road; but she'd made up her mind to go
+South and find you, and so we couldn't persuade her to stop over night.
+But the next day, when she come back to tell us when she was going to
+start for Dixie, she was took down right here, that suddin. There's been
+a good deal of that sickness round here sense, and fatalish, most
+always. But I tell 'em it took the smartest of the lot off first, when
+it took Nancy."
+
+The doctor stood there when the teller of this story had stopped
+speaking. He was not looking at _him_,--of that the old man was certain.
+He seemed to be looking nowhere, and to see nothing that was near or
+visible.
+
+"Come into the house and take something," said Uncle Elkins, for he
+began to be alarmed.
+
+"Was Janet here?" asked the doctor, as if he had not heard the
+invitation.
+
+"We had to send for her. Nancy was calling for her all the time," said
+Farmer Elkins, as if he doubted how far this story ought to be
+continued, for he did not understand the man before him. He only knew
+that once he had fallen down on his door-step, and lain helpless beneath
+his roof hard on to two months; and he watched him now as if he
+anticipated some renewal of that old attack,--and there was no Nancy now
+to nurse, and watch, and slave herself to death for him; for that was
+the way folk in the house were talking about Nancy and her husband in
+these days.
+
+"Did she get here in time? Who went after her?"
+
+"The minister went. We had 'em here a fortnight,--well on to 't."
+
+"What, the minister, too?"
+
+"No, I mean the young woman who come from Charlestown with Jenny. Her
+name was--" He paused long, endeavoring to recall that name. It trembled
+on the doctor's lips, but he did not utter it. At last said Farmer
+Elkins, "There! it was Miss Amey,--Amey? Yes. She took the little girl
+back hum with her. It was right in there, in the room where you had that
+spell of fever of yourn. She got you well through that! Ef anything
+could 'a' brought her through that turn, your letter would. It came
+across my mind once that, as she'd saved _your_ life, may be you was
+going to save hern by that are letter! And she was so determined to get
+to your hospital!"
+
+"Thank God she got the letter, any way!" exclaimed the doctor.
+
+At that the old man walked into the house to set its best cheer before
+Nancy's husband, who looked so much like a mourner as he stood there
+under the trees, with the bitter recollections of the past overwhelming
+every other thought and feeling of the present.
+
+Because it seemed to him that he could not sleep under old Elkins's roof
+that night, he remained there and slept there,--in the room where his
+fever ran its course,--in the room where Nancy died.
+
+Because this story of the last months of her life was as gall and
+wormwood to him, he refused it not, but went over it with his wife's
+relations, and helped them spread a decent pall, according to the custom
+of mourners; over what had been.
+
+Was he endeavoring to deceive himself and others into the belief that he
+was a mourning man? He was but accepting the varied humiliations of
+death; for they do not all pertain to the surrendering life. He was not
+thinking at all of his loss through her, nor of his gain by her. He was
+thinking, as he stood above the grave of fifteen years, how high
+Disgrace and Misery had heaped the mound. So bitterly he was thinking of
+the past, it was without desire that he at last arose and faced the
+future.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he went to Charlestown--for a man on furlough had no time to
+lose--and saw his Janet in the Colonel's house,--Miss Ames took Janet
+home with her after that death and funeral,--when he saw how fair and
+beautiful a promise of girlhood was budding on the poor neglected
+branch, he said to his assistant, "Will you keep this child with you
+until the war is over? I am afraid to touch her, or interfere with her
+destiny. It has been so easy for me to mar, so hard to mend."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Miss Ames kept the child; the war ended. The surgeon then, like other
+men, returned home; his regiments were disbanded, and now, one duty, to
+mankind and the ages, well discharged, another, less conspicuous, but as
+urgent, claimed him. There was Janet, and Janet's mother,--she who had
+risen, not from the grave indeed, but from the midst of dangers,
+sacredly to guard and guide the child.
+
+On his way to them he asked himself this question, "How many times must
+a man be born before he is fit to live?"
+
+He did not answer that question; neither can I.
+
+He informed his assistant of the court's decision in reference to the
+plea of "incompatibility," and she said that the justice of the sentence
+was not to be controverted with success by any counsellor on earth; but
+the reader may smile, and say that it was not difficult to come to this
+decision under the circumstances.
+
+We will not argue that point. I had only the story to tell, and have
+told it.
+
+
+
+
+ON TRANSLATING THE DIVINA COMMEDIA.
+
+THIRD SONNET.
+
+
+    I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
+        With forms of Saints and holy men who died,
+        Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
+        And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
+    Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
+        With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
+        And Beatrice, again at Dante's side,
+        No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.
+    And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
+        Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
+        And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
+    And the melodious bells among the spires
+        O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
+        Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN'S WORK IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
+
+              "King Arthur's sword, Excalibur,
+    Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake.
+    Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps
+    Upon the hidden bases of the hills."
+
+
+Sir Bedivere's heart misgave him twice ere he could obey the dying
+commands of King Arthur, and fling away so precious a relic. The lonely
+maiden's industry has been equalled by many of her mortal sisters,
+sitting, not indeed "upon the hidden bases of the hills," but in all the
+varied human habitations built above them since the days of King Arthur.
+
+The richness, beauty, and skill displayed in the needle-work of the
+Middle Ages demonstrate the perfection that art had attained; while
+church inventories, wills, and costumes represented in the miniatures of
+illuminated manuscripts and elsewhere, amaze us by the quantity as well
+as the quality of this department of woman's work. Though regal robes
+and heavy church vestments were sometimes wrought by monks, yet to
+woman's taste and skill the greater share of the result must be
+attributed, the professional hands being those of nuns and their pupils
+in convents. The life of woman in those days was extremely monotonous.
+For the mass of the people, there hardly existed any means of
+locomotion, the swampy state of the land in England and on the Continent
+allowing few roads to be made, except such as were traversed by
+pack-horses. Ladies of rank who wished to journey were borne on litters
+carried upon men's shoulders, and, until the fourteenth and fifteenth
+centuries, few representations of carriages appear. Such a conveyance is
+depicted in an illustration of the Romance of the Rose, where Venus,
+attired in the fashionable costume of the fifteenth century, is seated
+in a _chare_, by courtesy a chariot, but in fact a clumsy covered wagon
+without springs. Six doves are perched upon the shafts, and fastened by
+mediaeval harness. The goddess of course possessed superhuman powers for
+guiding this extraordinary equipage, but to mere mortals it must have
+been a slow coach, and a horribly uncomfortable conveyance even when
+horses were substituted for doves. An ordinance of Philip le Bel, in
+1294, forbids any wheel carriages to be used by the wives of citizens,
+as too great a luxury. As the date of the coach which Venus guides is
+two hundred years later, it is difficult to imagine what style of
+equipage belonged to those ladies over whom Philip le Bel tyrannized.
+
+With so little means of going about, our sisters of the Middle Ages were
+perforce domestic; no wonder they excelled in needle-work. To women of
+any culture it was almost the only tangible form of creative art they
+could command, and the love of the beautiful implanted in their souls
+must find some expression. The great pattern-book of nature, filled with
+graceful forms, in ever-varied arrangement, and illuminated by delicate
+tints or gorgeous hues, suggested the beauty they endeavored to
+represent. Whether religious devotion, human affection, or a taste for
+dress prompted them, the needle was the instrument to effect their
+purpose. The monogram of the blessed Mary's name, intertwined with pure
+white lilies on the deep blue ground, was designed and embroidered with
+holy reverence, and laid on the altar of the Lady-chapel by the
+trembling hand of one whose sorrows had there found solace, or by
+another in token of gratitude for joys which were heightened by a
+conviction of celestial sympathy. The pennon of the knight--a silken
+streamer affixed to the top of the lance--bore his crest, or an
+emblematic allusion to some event in his career, embroidered, it was
+supposed, by the hand of his lady-love. A yet more sacred gift was the
+scarf worn across the shoulder, an indispensable appendage to a knight
+fully equipped. The emotions of the human soul send an electric current
+through the ages, and women who during four years of war toiled to aid
+our soldiers in the great struggle of the nineteenth century felt their
+hearts beat in unison with hers who gave, with tears and prayers, pennon
+and scarf to the knightly and beloved hero seven hundred years ago.
+
+Not only were the appointments of the warriors adorned by needle-work,
+but the ladies must have found ample scope for industry and taste in
+their own toilets. The Anglo-Saxon women as far back as the eighth
+century excelled in needle-work, although, judging from the
+representations which have come down to us, their dress was much less
+ornamented than that of the gentlemen. During the eighth, ninth, and
+tenth centuries there were few changes in fashion. A purple gown or
+robe, with long yellow sleeves, and coverchief wrapt round the head and
+neck, frequently appears, the edges of the long gown and sleeves being
+slightly ornamented by the needle. How the ladies dressed their hair in
+those days is more difficult to decide, as the coverchief conceals it.
+Crisping-needles to curl and plat the hair, and golden hair-cauls, are
+mentioned in Saxon writings, and give us reason to suppose that the
+locks of the fair damsels were not neglected. In the eleventh century
+the embroidery upon the long gowns becomes more elaborate, and other
+changes of the mode appear.
+
+From the report of an ancient Spanish ballad, the art of needle-work and
+taste in dress must have attained great perfection in that country while
+our Anglo-Saxon sisters were wearing their plain long gowns. The fair
+Sybilla is described as changing her dress seven times in one evening,
+on the arrival of that successful and victorious knight, Prince Baldwin.
+First, she dazzles him in blue and silver, with a rich turban; then
+appears in purple satin, fringed and looped with gold, with white
+feathers in her hair; next, in green silk and emeralds; anon, in pale
+straw-color, with a tuft of flowers; next, in pink and silver, with
+varied plumes, white, carnation, and blue; then, in brown, with a
+splendid crescent. As the fortunate Prince beholds each transformation,
+he is bewildered (as well he may be) to choose which array becomes her
+best; but when
+
+    "Lastly in white she comes, and loosely
+      Down in ringlets floats her hair,
+    'O,' exclaimed the Prince, 'what beauty!
+      Ne'er was princess half so fair.'"
+
+Simplicity and natural grace carried the day after all, as they
+generally do with men of true taste. "Woman is fine for her own
+satisfaction alone," says that nice observer of human nature, Jane
+Austen. "Man only knows man's insensibility to a new gown." We hope,
+however, that the dressmakers and tirewomen of the fair Sybilla, who had
+expended so much time and invention, were handsomely rewarded by the
+Prince, since they must have been most accomplished needle-women and
+handmaids to have got up their young lady in so many costumes and in
+such rapid succession.
+
+A very odd fashion appears in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
+of embroidering heraldic devices on the long gowns of the ladies of
+rank. In one of the illuminations of a famous psalter, executed for Sir
+Geoffery Loutterell, who died in 1345, that nobleman is represented
+armed at all points, receiving from the ladies of his family his tilting
+helmet, shield, and _pavon_. His coat of arms is repeated on every part
+of his own dress, and is embroidered on that of his wife, who wears also
+the crest of her own family.
+
+Marie de Hainault, wife of the first Duke of Bourbon, 1354, appears in a
+corsage and train of ermine, with a very fierce-looking lion rampant
+embroidered twice on her long gown. Her jewels are magnificent. Anne,
+Dauphine d'Auvergne, wife of Louis, second Duke of Bourbon, married in
+1371, displays an heraldic dolphin of very sinister aspect upon one side
+of her corsage, and on the skirt of her long gown,--which, divided in
+the centre, seems to be composed of two different stuffs, that opposite
+to the dolphin being powdered with _fleurs de lis_. Her circlet of
+jewels is very elegant, and is worn just above her brow, while the hair
+is braided close to the face. An attendant lady wears neither train nor
+jewels, but her dress is likewise formed of different material, divided
+like that of the Dauphine. Six little parrots are emblazoned on the
+right side, one on her sleeve, two on her corsage, and three on her
+skirt. The fashion of embroidering armorial bearings on ladies' dresses
+must have given needle-women a vast deal of work. It died out in the
+fifteenth century.
+
+It was the custom in feudal times for knightly families to send their
+daughters to the castles of their suzerain lords, to be trained to weave
+and embroider. The young ladies on their return home instructed the more
+intelligent of their female servants in these arts. Ladies of rank in
+all countries prided themselves upon the number of these attendants, and
+were in the habit of passing the morning surrounded by their workwomen,
+singing the _chansons a toile_, as ballads composed for these hours were
+called.
+
+Estienne Jodelle, a French poet, 1573, addressed a fair lady whose
+cunning fingers plied the needle in words thus translated:--
+
+    "I saw thee weave a web with care,
+    Where at thy touch fresh roses grew,
+    And marvelled they were formed so fair,
+    And that thy heart such nature knew.
+    Alas! how idle my surprise,
+    Since naught so plain can be:
+    Thy cheek their richest hue supplies,
+    And in thy breath their perfume lies;
+    Their grace and beauty all are drawn from thee."
+
+If needle-work had its poetry, it had also its reckonings. Old
+account-books bear many entries of heavy payments for working materials
+used by industrious queens and indefatigable ladies of rank. Good
+authorities state that, before the sixth century, all silk materials
+were brought to Europe by the Seres, ancestors of the ancient
+Bokharians, whence it derived its name of Serica. In 551, silk-worms
+were introduced by two monks into Constantinople, but the Greeks
+monopolized the manufacture until 1130, when Roger, king of Sicily,
+returning from a crusade, collected some Greek manufacturers, and
+established them at Palermo, whence the trade was disseminated over
+Italy.
+
+In the thirteenth century, Bruges was the great mart for silk. The
+stuffs then known were velvet, satin (called samite), and taffeta,--all
+of which were stitched with gold or silver thread. The expense of
+working materials was therefore very great, and royal ladies
+condescended to superintend sewing-schools.
+
+Editha, consort of Edward the Confessor, was a highly accomplished lady,
+who sometimes intercepted the master of Westminster School and his
+scholars in their walks, questioning them in Latin. She was also skilled
+in all feminine works, embroidering the robes of her royal husband with
+her own hands.
+
+Of all the fair ones, however, who have wrought for the service of a
+king, since the manufacture of Excalibur, let the name of Matilda of
+Flanders, wife of William the Conqueror, stand at the head of the
+record, in spite of historians' doubts. Matilda, born about the year
+1031, was carefully educated. She had beauty, learning, industry; and
+the Bayeux tapestry connected with her name still exists, a monument of
+her achievements in the art of needle-work. It is, as everybody knows, a
+pictured chronicle of the conquest of England,--a wife's tribute to the
+glory of her husband.
+
+As a specimen of ancient stitchery and feminine industry, this work is
+extremely curious. The tapestry is two hundred and twenty-two feet in
+length and twenty in width. It is worked in different-colored worsteds
+on white cloth, now brown with age. The attempts to represent the human
+figure are very rude, and it is merely given in outline. Matilda
+evidently had very few colors at her disposal, as the horses are
+depicted of any hue,--blue, green, or yellow; the arabesque patterns
+introduced are rich and varied.
+
+During the French Revolution, this tapestry was demanded by the
+insurgents to cover their guns; but a priest succeeded in concealing it
+until the storm had passed. Bonaparte knew its value. He caused it to be
+brought to Paris and displayed, after which he restored the precious
+relic to Bayeux.
+
+We have many records of royal ladies who practised and patronized
+needle-work. Anne of Brittany, first wife of Louis XII. of France,
+caused three hundred girls, daughters of the nobility, to be instructed
+in that art under her personal supervision. Her daughter Claude pursued
+the same laudable plan. Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre, and mother of
+Henry IV. of France, a woman of vigorous mind, was skilled also in the
+handicraft of the needle, and wrought a set of hangings called "The
+Prison Opened," meaning that she had broken the bonds of the Pope.
+
+The practice of teaching needle-work continued long at the French court,
+and it was there that Mary of Scotland learned the art in which she so
+much excelled. When cast into prison, she beguiled the time, and soothed
+the repentant anxieties of her mind, with the companionship of her
+needle. The specimens of her work yet existing are principally
+bed-trimmings, hangings, and coverlets, composed of dark satin, upon
+which flowers, separately embroidered, are transferred.
+
+The romances and lays of chivalry contain many descriptions of the
+ornamental needle-work of those early days. In one of the ancient
+ballads, a knight, after describing a fair damsel whom he had rescued
+and carried to his castle, adds that she "knewe how to sewe and marke
+all manner of silken worke," and no doubt he made her repair many of his
+mantles and scarfs frayed and torn by time and tourney.
+
+The beautiful Elaine covered the shield of Sir Launcelot with a case of
+silk, upon which devices were braided by her fair hands, and added, from
+her own design,
+
+    "A border fantasy of branch and flower,
+    And yellow-throated nestling in the nest."
+
+When he went to the tourney she gave him a red sleeve "broidered with
+great pearls," which he bound upon his helmet. It is recorded that, in a
+tournament at the court of Burgundy in 1445, one of the knights received
+from his lady a sleeve of delicate dove-color, which he fastened on his
+left arm. These sleeves were made of a different material from the
+dress, and generally of a richer fabric elaborately ornamented; so they
+were considered valuable enough to form a separate legacy in wills of
+those centuries. Maddalena Doni, in her portrait, painted by Raphael,
+which hangs in the Pitti Palace at Florence, wears a pair of these rich,
+heavy sleeves, fastened slightly at the shoulder, and worn over a
+shorter sleeve belonging to her dress. Thus we see how it was that a
+lady could disengage her sleeve at the right moment, and give it to the
+fortunate knight.
+
+The art of adorning linen was practised from the earliest times. Threads
+were drawn and fashioned with the needle, or the ends of the cloth
+unravelled and plaited into geometrical patterns. St. Cuthbert's curious
+grave-clothes, as described by an eyewitness to his disinterment in the
+twelfth century, were ornamented with cut-work, which was used
+principally for ecclesiastical purposes, and was looked upon in England
+till the dissolution of the monasteries as a church secret. The
+open-work embroidery, which went under the general name of cut-work, is
+the origin of lace.
+
+The history of lace by Mrs. Bury Palliser, recently published in London,
+is worthy of the exquisite fabric of which it treats. The author has
+woven valuable facts, historical associations, and curious anecdotes
+into the web of her narrative, with an industry and skill rivalling the
+work of her mediaeval sisters. The illustrations of this beautiful volume
+are taken from rare specimens of ancient and modern lace, so perfectly
+executed as quite to deceive the eye, and almost the touch.
+
+Italy and Flanders dispute the invention of point or needle-made lace.
+The Italians probably derived the art of needle-work from the Greeks who
+took refuge in Italy during the troubles of the Lower Empire. Its origin
+was undoubtedly Byzantine, as the places which were in constant
+intercourse with the Greek Empire were the cities where point-lace was
+earliest made. The traditions of the Low Countries also ascribe it to an
+Eastern origin, assigning the introduction of lace-making to the
+Crusaders on their return from the Holy Land. A modern writer, Francis
+North, asserts that the Italians learned embroidery from the Saracens,
+as Spaniards learned the same art from the Moors, and, in proof of his
+theory, states that the word _embroider_ is derived from the Arabic, and
+does not belong to any European language. In the opinion of some
+authorities, the English word _lace_ comes from the Latin word _licina_,
+signifying the hem or fringe of a garment; others suppose it derived
+from the word _laces_, which appears in Anglo-Norman statutes, meaning
+braids which were used to unite different parts of the dress. In England
+the earliest lace was called _passament_, from the fact that the threads
+were passed over each other in its formation; and it is not until the
+reign of Richard III. that the word _lace_ appears in royal accounts.
+The French term _dentelle_ is also of modern date, and was not used
+until fashion caused _passament_ to be made with a toothed edge, when
+the designation _passament dentele_ appears.
+
+But whatever the origin of the name, lace-making and embroidery have
+employed many fingers, and worn out many eyes, and even created
+revolutions. In England, until the time of Henry VIII., shirts,
+handkerchiefs, sheets, and pillow-cases were embroidered in silks of
+different colors, until the fashion gave way to cut-work and lace. Italy
+produced lace fabrics early in the fifteenth century; and the Florentine
+poet, Firenzuola, who flourished about 1520, composed an elegy upon a
+collar of raised point lace made by the hand of his mistress. Portraits
+of Venetian ladies dated as early as 1500 reveal white lace trimmings;
+but at that period lace was, professedly, only made by nuns for the
+service of the Church, and the term _nuns' work_ has been the
+designation of lace in many places to a very modern date. Venice was
+famed for point, Genoa for pillow laces. English Parliamentary records
+have statutes on the subject of Venice laces; at the coronation of
+Richard III., fringes of Venice and mantle laces of gold and white silk
+appear.
+
+    "To know the age and pedigrees
+    Of points of Flanders and Venise,"
+
+depends much upon the ancient pattern-books yet in existence. Parchment
+patterns, drawn and pricked for pillow lace, bearing the date of 1577,
+were lately found covering old law-books, in Albisola, a town near
+Savona, which was a place celebrated for its laces, as we infer from the
+fact that it was long the custom of the daughters of the nobles to
+select these laces for their wedding shawls and veils. There is a pretty
+tradition at Venice, handed down among the inhabitants of the Lagoons,
+which says that a sailor brought home to his betrothed a branch of the
+delicate coralline known as "mermaids' lace." The girl, a worker in
+points, attracted by the grace of the coral, imitated it with her
+needle, and after much toil produced the exquisite fabric which, as
+Venice point, soon became the mode in all Europe. Lace-making in Italy
+formed the occupation of many women of the higher classes, who wished to
+add to their incomes. Each lady had a number of workers, to whom she
+supplied patterns, pricked by herself, paying her workwomen at the end
+of every week, each day being notched on a tally.
+
+In the convent of Gesu Bambino, at Rome, curious specimens of old
+Spanish conventual work--parchment patterns with lace in progress--have
+been found. They belonged to Spanish nuns, who long ago taught the art
+of lace-making to novices. Like all point lace, this appears to be
+executed in separate pieces, given out by the nuns, and then joined
+together by a skilful hand. We see the pattern traced, the work partly
+finished, and the very thread left, as when "Sister Felice Vittoria"
+laid down her work, centuries ago. Mrs. Palliser received from Rome
+photographs of these valuable relics, engravings from which she has
+inserted in her history of lace. Aloe-thread was then used for
+lace-making, as it is now in Florence for sewing straw-plait. Spanish
+point has been as celebrated as that of Flanders or Italy. Some
+traditions aver that Spain taught the art to Flanders. Spain had no
+cause to import laces: they were extensively made at home, and were less
+known than the manufacture of other countries, because very little was
+exported. The numberless images of the Madonna and patron saints dressed
+and undressed daily, together with the albs of the priests and
+decorations of the altars, caused an immense consumption for
+ecclesiastical uses. Thread lace was manufactured in Spain in 1492, and
+in the Cathedral of Granada is a lace alb presented to the church by
+Ferdinand and Isabella,--one of the few relics of ecclesiastical
+grandeur preserved in the country. Cardinal Wiseman, in a letter to Mrs.
+Palliser, states that he had himself officiated in this vestment, which
+was valued at ten thousand crowns. The fine church lace of Spain was
+little known in Europe until the revolution of 1830, when splendid
+specimens were suddenly thrown into the market,--not merely the heavy
+lace known as Spanish point, but pieces of the most exquisite
+description, which could only have been made, says Mrs. Palliser, by
+those whose time was not money.
+
+Among the Saxon Hartz Mountains is the old town of Annaburg, and beneath
+a lime-tree in its ancient burial-ground stands a simple monument with
+this inscription:--
+
+"Here lies Barbara Uttman, died on the 14th of January, 1576, whose
+invention of lace in the year 1561 made her the benefactress of the
+Hartz Mountains.
+
+    'An active mind, a skilful hand,
+    Bring blessings down on Fatherland.'"
+
+Barbara was born in 1514. Her parents, burghers of Nuremberg, removed to
+the Hartz Mountains for the purpose of working a mine in that
+neighborhood. It is said that Barbara learned the art of lace-making
+from a native of Brabant, a Protestant, whom the cruelties of the Duke
+of Alva had driven from her country. Barbara, observing the mountain
+girls making nets for the miners to wear over their hair, took great
+interest in the improvement of their work, and succeeded in teaching
+them a fine knitted _tricot_, and afterwards a lace ground. In 1561,
+having procured aid from Flanders, she set up a work-shop in Annaburg
+for lace-making. This branch of industry spread beyond Bavaria, giving
+employment to thirty thousand persons, and producing a revenue of one
+million thalers.
+
+Italy and Flanders dispute the invention of lace, but it was probably
+introduced into both countries about the same time. The Emperor Charles
+V. commanded lace-making to be taught in schools and convents. A
+specimen of the manufacture of his day may be seen in his cap, now
+preserved in the museum at Hotel Cluny, Paris. It is of fine linen, with
+the Emperor's arms embroidered in relief, with designs in lace, of
+exquisite workmanship. The old Flemish laces are of great beauty and
+world-wide fame.
+
+Many passages in the history of lace show how severely the manufacture
+of this beautiful fabric has strained the nerves of eye and brain. The
+fishermen's wives on the Scottish coast apostrophize the fish they sell,
+after their husbands' perilous voyages, and sing,
+
+    "Call them lives o' men."
+
+Not more fatal to life are the blasts from ocean winds than the tasks
+of laborious lace-makers; and this thought cannot but mingle with our
+admiration for the skill displayed in this branch of woman's endless
+toil and endeavor to supply her own wants and aid those who are dear to
+her, in the present as well as in the past centuries.
+
+In the British Museum there is a curious manuscript of the fourteenth
+century, afterwards translated "into our maternall englisshe by me
+William Caxton, and emprynted at Westminstre the last day of Januer, the
+first yere of the regne of King Richard the thyrd," called "the booke
+which the Knight of the Towere made for the enseygnement and teching of
+his doughtres."
+
+The Knight of the Tower was Geoffory Landry, surnamed De la Tour, of a
+noble family of Anjou. In the month of April, 1371, he was one day
+reflecting beneath the shade of some trees on various passages in his
+life, and upon the memory of his wife, whose early death had caused him
+sorrow, when his three daughters walked into the garden. The sight of
+these motherless girls naturally turned his thoughts to the condition of
+woman in society, and he resolved to write a treatise, enforced by
+examples of both good and evil, for their instruction. The state of
+society which the "evil" examples portray might well cause a father's
+heart to tremble.
+
+The education of young ladies, as we have before stated, was in that age
+usually assigned to convents or to families of higher rank. It consisted
+of instruction in needle-work, confectionery, surgery, and the rudiments
+of church music. Men were strongly opposed to any high degree of mental
+culture for women; and although the Knight of the Tower thinks it good
+for women to be taught to read their Bibles, yet the pen is too
+dangerous an instrument to trust to their hands. The art of writing he
+disapproves,--"Better women can naught of it." Religious observances he
+strictly recommends; but we shudder at some of the stories which even
+this well-meaning father relates as illustrations of the efficacy of
+religious austerities. Extravagance in dress prevailed at that time
+among men and women to such a degree that Parliament was appealed to on
+the subject in 1363. From the Knight's exhortations on the subject, this
+mania seems to have affected the women alarmingly, and the examples
+given of the passion for dress appear to surpass what is acknowledged in
+our day. Yet the vast increase of materials, as well as the extended
+interests and objects opened to woman now, renders the extravagance of
+dress in the Middle Ages far less reprehensible.
+
+The record of woman's work in the Middle Ages includes far more than the
+account of what her needle accomplished. The position of the mistress of
+a family in those centuries was no sinecure. When we look up at castles
+perched on rocks, or walk through the echoing apartments of baronial
+halls, we know that woman must have worked there with brain and fingers.
+The household and its dependencies, in such mansions, consisted of more
+than a score of persons, and provisions must be laid in during the
+autumn for many months. As we glance at the enormous fireplaces and
+ovens in the kitchens of those castles and halls, and remember the
+weight of the armor men wore, we can readily imagine that no trifling
+supply of brawn and beef was needed for their meals; and the sight of a
+husband frowning out of one of those old helmets because the dinner was
+scanty, must have been a fearful trial to feminine nerves. The title of
+"Lady" means the "Giver of bread" in Saxon, and the lady of the castle
+dispensed food to many beyond her own household.
+
+The task of preparing the raiment of the family devolved upon the women;
+for there were no travelling dealers except for the richest and most
+expensive articles. Wool, the produce of the flock, was carded and spun;
+flax was grown, and woven into coarse linen; and both materials were
+prepared and fashioned into garments at home. Glimpses of domestic life
+come down to us through early legends and records, some of which modern
+genius has melodized. Authentic history and romantic story often show us
+that women of all ranks were little better, in fact, than household
+drudges to these splendid knights and courtly old barons. The fair Enid
+sang a charming song as she turned her wheel; but when Geraint arrived,
+she not only assisted her mother to receive him, but, by her father's
+order, led the knight's charger to the stall, and gave him corn. If she
+also relieved the noble animal of his heavy saddle and horse-furniture,
+gave him water as well as corn, and shook down the dry furze for his
+bed, she must have had the courage and skill of a feminine Rarey; and we
+fear her dress of faded silk came out of the stable in a very
+dilapidated condition. After the horse was cared for, Enid put her wits
+and hands to work to prepare the evening meal, and spread it before her
+father and his guest. The knight, indeed, condescended to think her
+"sweet and serviceable"!
+
+The women of those days are often described only as they appeared at
+festivals and tournaments,--Ladies of Beauty, to whom knights lowered
+their lances, and of whom troubadours sang. They had their amusements
+and their triumphs, doubtless; but they also had their work, domestic,
+industrial, and sanitary. They knew how to bind up wounds and care for
+the sick, and we read many records of their knowledge in this
+department. Elaine, when she found Sir Launcelot terribly wounded in the
+cave, so skilfully aided him that, when the old hermit came who was
+learned in all the simples and science of the times, he told the knight
+that "her fine care had saved his life,"--a pleasing assurance that
+there were medical men in those days, as well as in our own, who
+expressed no unwillingness to allow a woman credit for success in their
+own profession.
+
+Illuminated books sometimes show us pictures of women of the humbler
+ranks of life at their work. On the border of a fine manuscript of the
+time of Edward IV. there is the figure of a woman employed with her
+distaff, her head and neck enveloped in a coverchief. The figure rises
+out of a flower. In a manuscript of 1316, a country-woman is engaged in
+churning, dressed in a comfortable gown and apron, the gown tidily
+pinned up, and her head and neck in a coverchief. The churn is of
+considerable height, and of very clumsy construction. A blind beggar
+approaches her, led by his dog, who holds apparently a cup in his mouth
+to receive donations. In another part of the same volume is a beautiful
+damsel with her hair spread over her shoulders, while her maid arranges
+her tresses with a comb of ivory set in gold. The young lady holds a
+small mirror, probably of polished steel, in her hand. Specimens of
+these curious combs and mirrors yet exist in collections. A century
+later we see a pretty laundress, holding in her hands a number of
+delicately woven napkins, which look as if they might have come out of
+the elaborately carved napkin press of the same period in the collection
+of Sir Samuel Myrick at Goodrich Court.
+
+Although the Knight of the Tower disapproved of young ladies being
+taught to write, there were women whose employment writing seems to have
+been; but these were nuns safely shut up from the risk of
+_billets-doux_. In Dr. Maitland's Essays on the Dark Ages, he quotes
+from the biography of Diemudis, a devout nun of the eleventh century, a
+list of the volumes which she prepared with her own hand, written in
+beautiful and legible characters, to the praise of God, and of the holy
+Apostles Peter and Paul, the patrons of the monastery, which was that of
+Wessobrunn in Bavaria. The list comprises thirty-one works, many of them
+in three or four volumes; and although Diemudis is not supposed to have
+been an authoress, she is certainly worthy of having her name handed
+down through eight centuries in witness of woman's indefatigable work in
+the scriptorium. One missal prepared by Diemudis was given to the
+Bishop of Treves, another to the Bishop of Augsburg, and one Bible in
+two volumes is mentioned, which was exchanged by the monastery for an
+estate.
+
+We can picture to ourselves Diemudis in her conventual dress, seated in
+the scriptorium, with her materials for chirography. The sun, as it
+streams through the window, throws a golden light over the vellum page,
+suggesting the rich hue of the gilded nimbus, while in the convent
+garden she sees the white lily or the modest violet, which, typical of
+the Madonna, she transfers to her illuminated borders. Thus has God ever
+interwoven truth and love with their correspondences of beauty and
+development in the natural world, which were open to the eyes of
+Diemudis eight hundred years ago, perhaps as clearly as to our own in
+these latter days. That women of even an earlier century than that of
+Diemudis were permitted to read, if not to write, is proved by the
+description of a private library, given in the letters of C. S. Sidonius
+Apollinaris, and quoted in Edwards's "History of Libraries." This
+book-collection was the property of a gentleman of the fifth century,
+residing at his castle of Prusiana. It was divided into three
+departments, the first of which was expressly intended for the ladies of
+the family, and contained books of piety and devotion. The second
+department was for men, and is rather ungallantly stated to have been of
+a higher order; yet, as the third department was intended for the whole
+family, and contained such works as Augustine, Origen, Varro,
+Prudentius, and Horace, the literary tastes of the ladies should have
+been satisfied. We are also told that it was the custom at the castle of
+Prusiana to discuss at dinner the books read in the morning,--which
+would tend to a belief that conversation at the dinner-tables of the
+fifth century might be quite as edifying as at those of the nineteenth.
+
+A few feminine names connected with the literature of the Middle Ages
+have come down to us. The lays of Marie de France are among the
+manuscripts in the British Museum. Marie's personal history, as well as
+the period when she flourished, is uncertain. Her style is extremely
+obscure; but in her Preface she seems aware of this defect, yet defends
+it by the example of the ancients. She considers it the duty of all
+persons to employ their talents; and as her gifts were intellectual, she
+cast her thoughts in various directions ere she determined upon her
+peculiar mission. She had intended translating from the Latin a good
+history, but some one else unluckily anticipated her; and she finally
+settled herself down to poetry, and to the translation of numerous lays
+she had treasured in her memory, as these would be new to many of her
+readers. Like other literary ladies, she complains of envy and
+persecution, but she perseveres through all difficulties, and dedicates
+her book "to the King."
+
+Marie was born in France. Some authorities suppose she wrote in England
+during the reign of Henry III., and that the patron she names was
+William Langue-espee, who died in 1226; others, that this _plus
+vaillant_ patron was William, Count of Flanders, who accompanied St.
+Louis on his first crusade in 1248, and was killed at a tournament in
+1251. A later surmise is that the book was dedicated to Stephen, French
+being his native language. Among the manuscripts of the Bibliotheque
+Royale at Paris, is Marie's translation of the fables which Henry
+Beauclerc translated from Latin into English, and which Marie renders
+into French. A proof that Marie's poems are extremely ancient is deduced
+from the names in one of these fables applied to the wolf and the fox.
+She uses other names than those of Ysengrin and Renard, which were
+introduced as early as the reign of Coeur de Lion, and it would seem
+that she could not have failed to notice these remarkable names, had
+they existed in her time. A complete collection of the works of Marie de
+France was published in Paris in 1820, by M. de Roquefort, who speaks
+of her in the following terms: "She possessed that penetration which
+distinguishes at first sight the different passions of mankind, which
+seizes upon the different forms they assume, and, remarking the objects
+of their notice, discovers at the same time the means by which they are
+attained." If this be a true statement, the acuteness of feminine
+observation has gained but little in the progress of the centuries, and
+her literary sisters of the present era can hardly hope to eclipse the
+penetration of Marie de France.
+
+The Countesses de Die, supposed to be mother and daughter, were both
+poetesses. The elder lady was beloved by Rabaud d'Orange, who died in
+1173, and the younger is celebrated by William Adhemar, a distinguished
+troubadour. He was visited on his death-bed by both these ladies, who
+afterwards erected a monument to his memory. The younger countess
+retired to a convent, and died soon after Adhemar.
+
+In the Harleian Collection is a fine manuscript containing the writings
+of Christine de Pisan, a distinguished woman of the fourteenth century.
+Her father, Thomas de Pisan, a celebrated _savant_ of Bologna, had
+married a daughter of a member of the Grand Council of Venice. So
+renowned was Thomas de Pisan that the kings of Hungary and France
+determined to win him away from Bologna. Charles V. of France, surnamed
+the Wise, was successful, and Thomas de Pisan went to Paris in 1368; his
+transfer to the French court making a great sensation among learned and
+scientific circles of that day. Charles loaded him with wealth and
+honors, and chose him Astrologer Royal. According to the history, as
+told by Louisa Stuart Costello, in her "Specimens of the Early Poetry of
+France," Christine was but five years old when she accompanied her
+parents to Paris, where she received every advantage of education, and,
+inheriting her father's literary tastes, early became learned in
+languages and science. Her personal charms, together with her father's
+high favor at court, attracted many admirers. She married Stephen
+Castel, a young gentleman of Picardy, to whom she was tenderly attached,
+and whose character she has drawn in most favorable colors. A few years
+passed happily, but, alas! changes came. The king died, the pension and
+offices bestowed upon Thomas de Pisan were suspended, and the Astrologer
+Royal soon followed his patron beyond the stars. Castel was also
+deprived of his preferments; and though he maintained his wife and
+family for a time, he was cut off by death at thirty-four years of age.
+
+Christine had need of all her energies to meet such a succession of
+calamities, following close on so brilliant a career. Devoting herself
+anew to study, she determined to improve her talents for composition,
+and to make her literary attainments a means of support for her
+children. The illustrations in the manuscript volume of her works
+picture to us several scenes in Christine's life. In one, the artist has
+sliced off the side of a house to allow us to see Christine in her
+study, giving us also the exterior, roof, and dormer-windows, with
+points finished by gilt balls. The room is very small, with a crimson
+and white tapestry hanging. Christine wears what may be called the
+regulation color for literary ladies,--blue, with the extraordinary
+two-peaked head-dress of the period, put on in a decidedly strong-minded
+manner. At her feet sits a white dog, small, but wise-looking, with a
+collar of gold bells round his neck. Before Christine stands a plain
+table, covered with green cloth; her book, bound in crimson and gold, in
+which she is writing, lies before her.
+
+Christine's style of holding the implements,--one in each hand,--and the
+case of materials for her work which lies beside her, are according to
+representations of the _miniatori caligrafi_ at their labors; and, as
+the art of caligraphy was well known at Bologna, so learned a man as
+Thomas de Pisan must have been acquainted with it, and would have caused
+his talented daughter to be instructed in so rare an accomplishment. It
+is not therefore unreasonable to believe that, in the beautiful volume
+now in the British Museum, the work of Christine's hand, as well as the
+result of her genius, is preserved. The next picture shows us Christine
+presenting her book to Charles VII. of France, who is dressed in a black
+robe edged with ermine; he wears a golden belt, order, and crown. The
+king is seated beneath a canopy, blue, powdered with _fleurs de lis_.
+Four courtiers stand beside him, dressed in robes of different
+colors,--one in pink, and wearing a large white hat of Quaker-like
+fashion. Christine has put on a white robe over her blue dress, perhaps
+as a sign of mourning,--she being then a widow. A white veil depends
+from the peaks of her head-dress. She kneels before the king, and
+presents her book.
+
+Another and more elaborate picture represents the repetition of the same
+ceremony before Isabelle of Bavaria, queen of Charles VI. We are here
+admitted into the private royal apartments of the fourteenth century.
+The hangings of the apartment consist of strips, upon which are
+alternately emblazoned the armorial devices of France and Bavaria. A
+couch or bed, with a square canopy covered with red and blue, having the
+royal arms embroidered in the centre, stands on one side of the room.
+The queen is seated upon a lounge of modern shape, covered to correspond
+with the couch. She is dressed in a splendid robe of purple and gold,
+with long sleeves sweeping the ground, lined with ermine; upon her head
+arises a structure of stuffed rolls, heavy in material and covered with
+jewels, which shoots up into two high peaks above her forehead. Six
+ladies are in waiting, two in black and gold, with the same enormous
+head-gears. They sit on the edge of her Majesty's sofa, while four
+ladies of inferior rank and plainer garments are contented with low
+benches. Christine reappears in her blue dress, and white-veiled, peaked
+cap. She kneels before the queen, on a square carpet with a
+geometrical-patterned border, and presents her book. A white Italian
+hound lies at the foot of the couch, while beside Isabelle sits a small
+white dog, resembling the one we saw in Christine's study. As we can
+hardly suppose Christine would bring her pet on so solemn an
+occasion,--far less allow him to jump up beside the queen,--and as this
+little animal wears no gold bells, we are led to suppose that little
+white dogs were in fashion in the fourteenth century.
+
+We cannot say that the portrait of Isabelle gives us any idea of her
+splendid beauty; but "handsome is that handsome does," and as Isabelle's
+work was a very bad one in the Middle Ages, we will say no more about
+her.
+
+Christine was but twenty-five years of age when she became a widow, and
+her personal charms captivated the heart of no less a personage than the
+Earl of Salisbury, who came ambassador from England to demand the hand
+of the very youthful princess, Isabelle, for his master.
+
+They exchanged verses; and although Salisbury spoke by no means
+mysteriously, the sage Christine affected to view his declarations only
+in the light of complimentary speeches from a gallant knight. The Earl
+considered himself as rejected, bade adieu to love, and renounced
+marriage. To Christine he made a very singular proposal for a rejected
+lover,--that of taking with him to England her eldest son, promising to
+devote himself to his education and preferment. The offer was too
+valuable to be declined by a poor widow, whose pen was her only means of
+supporting her family. That such a proof of devotion argued a tenderer
+feeling than that of knightly gallantry must have been apparent to
+Christine; but for reasons best understood by herself,--and shall we not
+believe with a heart yet true to her husband's memory?--she merely
+acknowledged the kindness shown to her son; and the Earl and his
+adopted boy left France together. When Richard II. was deposed, Henry
+Bolingbroke struck off the head of the Earl of Salisbury. Among the
+papers of the murdered man the lays of Christine were found by King
+Henry, who was so much struck with their purity and beauty, that he
+wrote to the fair authoress of her son's safety, under his protection,
+and invited her to his court.
+
+This invitation was at once a compliment and an insult, for the hand
+that sent it was stained with the blood of her friend. Christine,
+however, had worldly wisdom enough to send a respectful, though firm
+refusal, to a crowned head, a successful soldier, and one, moreover, who
+held her son in his power. Feminine tact must have guided her pen, for
+Henry was not offended, and twice despatched a herald to renew the
+invitation to his court. She steadily declined to leave France, but
+managed the affair so admirably that she at last obtained the return of
+her son from England.
+
+Like her father, Thomas de Pisan, Christine seems to have been sought as
+an ornament of their courts by several rulers. Henry Bolingbroke could
+not gain her for England, and the Duke of Milan in vain urged her to
+reside in that city. Seldom has a literary lady in any age received such
+tempting invitations; yet Christine refused to leave France, although
+her own fortunes were anything but certain. The Duke of Burgundy took
+her son under his protection, and urged Christine to write the history
+of her patron, Charles V. of France. This was a work grateful to her
+feelings, and she had commenced the memoir when the death of the Duke
+deprived her of his patronage, and threw her son again upon her care,
+involving her in many anxieties. But Christine bore herself through all
+her trials with firmness and prudence, and her latter days were more
+tranquil. She took a deep interest in the affairs of her adopted
+country, and welcomed in her writings the appearance of the Maid of
+Orleans. We believe, however, that she was spared the pain of witnessing
+the last act in that drama of history, where an innocent victim was
+given up by French perfidy to English cruelty.
+
+The deeds of Joan of Arc need no recital here. A daughter of France in
+the nineteenth century had a soul pure enough to reflect the image of
+the Maid of Orleans, and with a skilful hand she embodied the vision in
+marble. The statue of Joan of Arc, modelled by the Princess Marie,
+adorns--or rather sanctifies--the halls of Versailles.
+
+Of woman's work as an artist in the early centuries we have a curious
+illustration in a manuscript belonging to the Bibliotheque Royale at
+Paris, which exhibits a female figure painting the statue of the
+Madonna. The artist holds in her left hand a palette, which is the
+earliest notice of the use of that implement with which antiquarians are
+acquainted. The fashion of painting figures cut in wood was once much
+practised, and we see here the representation of a female artist of very
+ancient date. Painting, music, and dancing come under the designation of
+accomplishments; yet to obtain distinction in any of these branches
+implies a vast amount of work. An illustration of Lygate's Pilgrim shows
+us a young lady playing upon a species of organ with one hand; in the
+other she holds to her lips a mellow horn, through which she pours her
+breath, if not her soul; lying beside her is a stringed instrument
+called a sawtry. Such varied musical acquirements certainly argue both
+industry and devotion to art. Charlemagne's daughters were distinguished
+for their skill in dancing; and we read of many instances in the Middle
+Ages of women excelling in these fine arts.
+
+The period of time generally denominated the Middle Ages commences with
+the fifth century, and ends with the fifteenth. We have in several
+instances ventured to extend the limits as far as a part of the
+sixteenth century, and therefore include among female artists the name
+of Sofonisba Anguisciola, who was born about 1540. She was a noble lady
+of Cremona, whose fame spread early throughout Italy. In 1559, Philip
+II. of Spain invited her to his court at Madrid, where on her arrival
+she was treated with great distinction. Her chief study was portraiture,
+and her pictures became objects of great value to kings and popes.
+
+Her royal patrons of Spain married their artist to a noble Sicilian,
+giving her a dowry of twelve thousand ducats and a pension of one
+thousand ducats, beside rich presents in tapestries and jewels. She went
+with her husband to Palermo, where they resided several years. On the
+death of her husband the king and queen of Spain urged her to return to
+their court; but she excused herself on account of her wish to visit
+Cremona. Embarking on board a galley for this purpose, bound to Genoa,
+she was entertained with such gallantry by the captain, Orazio
+Lomellini, one of the merchant princes of that city, that the heart of
+the distinguished artist was won, and she gave him her hand on their
+arrival at Genoa.
+
+History does not tell us whether she ever revisited Cremona, but she
+dwelt in Genoa during the remainder of her long life, pursuing her art
+with great success. On her second marriage, her faithful friends in the
+royal family of Spain added four hundred crowns to her pension. The
+Empress of Germany visited Sofonisba on the way to Spain, and accepted
+from her hand a little picture. Sofonisba became blind in her old age,
+but lost no other faculty. Vandyck was her guest when at Genoa, and said
+that he had learned more of his art from one blind old woman than from
+any other teacher. A medal was struck in her honor at Bologna. The
+Academy of Fine Arts at Edinburgh contains a noble picture by Vandyck,
+painted in his Italian manner. It represents individuals of the
+Lomellini family, and was probably in progress when he visited this
+illustrious woman, who had become a member of that house.
+
+Stirling in his "Artists of Spain" states that few of Sofonisba's
+pictures are now known to exist, and that the beautiful portrait of
+herself, probably the one mentioned by Vasari in the wardrobe of the
+Cardinal di Monte at Rome, or that noticed by Soprani in the palace of
+Giovanni Lomellini at Genoa, is now in the possession of Earl Spencer at
+Althorp. The engraving from this picture, in Dibdin's _AEdes
+Althorpianae_, lies before us. We think the better of kings and queens
+who prized a woman with eyes so clear, and an expression of such honesty
+and truth. The original is said to be masterly in its drawing and
+execution. Sofonisba is represented in a simple black dress, and wears
+no jewels. She touches the keys of a harpsichord with her beautiful
+hands; a duenna-like figure of an old woman stands behind the
+instrument, apparently listening to the melody.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whatever of skill or fame women have acquired through the ages in other
+departments, the nursery has ever been an undisputed sphere for woman's
+work. Nor have we reason to think that, in the centuries we have been
+considering, she was not faithful to this her especial province. The
+cradle of Henry V., yet in existence, is one of the best specimens of
+nursery furniture in the fourteenth century which have come down to us.
+Beautifully carved foliage fills the space between the uprights and
+stays and stand of the cradle, which is not upon rockers, but apparently
+swings like the modern crib. On each of these uprights is perched a
+dove, carefully carved, whose quiet influences had not much effect on
+the infant dreams of Prince Hal.
+
+Henry was born at Monmouth, 1388, and sent to Courtfield, about seven
+miles distant, where the air was considered more salubrious. There he
+was nursed under the superintendence of Lady Montacute, and in that
+place this cradle was preserved for many years. It was sold by a steward
+of the Montacute property, and, after passing through several hands,
+was in the possession of a gentleman near Bristol when engraved for
+Shaw's "Ancient Furniture," in 1836.
+
+In the Douce Collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, there is
+figured in a manuscript of the fifteenth century a cradle, with the baby
+very nicely tucked up in it. The cradle resembles those of modern date,
+and is upon rockers. Another illustration of the same period shows us a
+cradle of similar form, the "cradle, baby, and all" carried on the head
+of the nursery-maid,--a caryatid style of baby-tending which we cannot
+suppose to have been universal. The inventories of household furniture
+belonging to Reginald de la Pole, after enumerating some bed-hangings of
+costly stuff, describe: "Item, a pane" (piece of cloth which we now call
+counterpane) "and head-shete for y'e cradell, of same sute, bothe furred
+with mynever,"--giving us a comfortable idea of the nursery
+establishment in the De la Pole family. The recent discovery in England
+of that which tradition avers to be the tomb of Canute's little
+daughter, speaks of another phase in nursery experience. The relics,
+both of the cradle and the grave, bear their own record of the joys,
+cares, and sorrows of the nursery in vanished years, and bring near to
+every mother's heart the baby that was rocked in the one, and the grief
+which came when that little form was given to the solemn keeping of the
+other.
+
+A miniature in an early manuscript, called "The Birth of St. Edmund,"
+gives us a picture of a bedroom and baby in the fifteenth century. St.
+Edmund himself was born five hundred years previous to that date; but as
+saints and sinners look very much alike when they are an hour old, we
+can imagine that, as far as the baby is concerned, it may be considered
+a portrait. A pretty young woman, in a long white gown, whose cap looks
+like magnified butterflies' wings turned upside down, sits on a low seat
+before the blazing wood-fire burning on great andirons in a wide
+fireplace, which, instead of a mantelpiece, has three niches for
+ornamental vases. She holds the baby very nicely, and, having warmed his
+feet, has wrapt him in a long white garment, so that we see only his
+little head in a plain night-cap, surrounded indeed by the gilded nimbus
+of his saintship, which we hope was not of tangible substance, as it
+would have been an appendage very inconvenient to all parties concerned.
+The mother reposes in a bed with high posts and long curtains. She must
+have been a woman of strong nerves to have borne the sight of such
+stupendous head-gears as those in which her attendants are nid-nodding
+over herself and baby, or to have supported the weight of that which she
+wears by way of night-cap. One nurse raises the lady, while another,
+who, from her showy dress, appears to be the head of the department,
+offers a tall, elegant, but very inconveniently-shaped goblet, which
+contains, we presume, mediaeval gruel. The room has a very comfortable
+aspect, from which we judge that some babies in those times were
+carefully attended.
+
+Many centuries ago, a young woman sat one day among the boys to whom she
+had come, as their father's bride, from a foreign land, to take the name
+and place of their mother. She showed to them a beautiful volume of
+Saxon poems, one of her wedding-gifts,--perhaps offered by the artists
+of the court of Charles le Chauve, of whose skill such magnificent
+specimens yet exist. As the attention of the boys was arrested by the
+brilliant external decorations, Judith, with that quick instinct for the
+extension of knowledge which showed her a true descendant of
+Charlemagne, promised that the book should be given to him who first
+learned to read it. Young Alfred won the prize, and became Alfred the
+Great.
+
+We are brought near to the presence of a woman of the Middle Ages when
+we stand beside the monument of Eleanor of Castile, queen of Edward I.,
+in Westminster Abbey. The figure is lifelike and beautiful, with flowing
+drapery folded simply around it. The countenance, with its delicate
+features, wears a look of sweetness and dignity as fresh to-day as when
+sculptured seven hundred years ago. The hair, confined by a coronet,
+falls on each side of her face in ringlets; one hand lies by her side,
+and once held a sceptre; the other is brought gracefully upward; the
+slender fingers, with trusting touch, are laid upon a cross suspended
+from her neck.
+
+Historians have done their best, or their worst, to throw doubt upon the
+story of Eleanor's sucking the poison with her lips from the arm of her
+husband when a dastardly assassin of those days struck at the life of
+Edward. But such a tradition, whether actually a fact or not, is a
+tribute to the affection and strength of Eleanor's character; and all
+historians agree that she instilled no poison into the life of king or
+country. As a wife, a mother, and a queen, Eleanor of Castile stands
+high on the record of the women of the Middle Ages.
+
+Coming from Westminster Abbey, in the spring of 1856, we stood one day
+at a window in the Strand, and watched a multitude which no man could
+number, pulsing through that great artery of the mighty heart of London.
+It was the day of the great Peace celebration, and a holiday. Hour after
+hour the mighty host swept on, in undiminished numbers. The place where
+we stood was Charing Cross, and our thoughts went back seven hundred
+years, when Edward, following the mortal remains of his beloved Eleanor,
+erected on this spot, then a country suburb of London, the last of that
+line of crosses which marked those places where the mournful procession
+paused on its way from Hereby to Westminster. It was the cross of the
+dear queen, _la chere reine_, which time and changes of language have
+since corrupted into Charing Cross. Through this pathway crowds have
+trodden for many centuries, and few remember that its name is linked
+with the queenly dead or with a kingly sorrow. Thus it is, as we hasten
+on through the busy thoroughfares of life from age to age, even as one
+of our own poets hath said,--
+
+    "We pass, and heed each other not."
+
+In these pages we have made some record of woman's work in past
+centuries, and also caught glimpses of duties, loves, hopes, fears, and
+sorrows not unlike our own. A wider sphere is now accorded, and a deeper
+responsibility devolves upon woman to fill it wisely and well. We should
+never forget that, as far as they were faithful to the duties appointed
+to them, they elevated their sex to a higher and nobler position, and
+therein performed the best work of the women of the Middle Ages.
+
+
+
+
+PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS.
+
+
+IX.
+
+Concord, _Thursday, Sept. 1, 1842._--Mr. Thoreau dined with us
+yesterday.... He is a keen and delicate observer of nature,--a genuine
+observer,--which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an
+original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as
+her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed
+to witness. He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl, and reptile, and has
+strange stories to tell of adventures and friendly passages with these
+lower brethren of mortality. Herb and flower, likewise, wherever they
+grow, whether in garden or wild wood, are his familiar friends. He is
+also on intimate terms with the clouds, and can tell the portents of
+storms. It is a characteristic trait, that he has a great regard for the
+memory of the Indian tribes, whose wild life would have suited him so
+well; and, strange to say, he seldom walks over a ploughed field without
+picking up an arrow-point, spear-head, or other relic of the red man, as
+if their spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth.
+
+With all this he has more than a tincture of literature,--a deep and
+true taste for poetry, especially for the elder poets, and he is a good
+writer,--at least he has written a good article, a rambling disquisition
+on Natural History, in the last Dial, which, he says, was chiefly made
+up from journals of his own observations. Methinks this article gives a
+very fair image of his mind and character,--so true, innate, and literal
+in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as letter of what he sees,
+even as a lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving
+the wild beauty of the whole scene. Then there are in the article
+passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his
+thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse,
+as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them. There is a
+basis of good sense and of moral truth, too, throughout the article,
+which also is a reflection of his character; for he is not unwise to
+think and feel, and I find him a healthy and wholesome man to know.
+
+After dinner, (at which we cut the first watermelon and muskmelon that
+our garden has grown,) Mr. Thoreau and I walked up the bank of the
+river, and at a certain point he shouted for his boat. Forthwith a young
+man paddled it across, and Mr. Thoreau and I voyaged farther up the
+stream, which soon became more beautiful than any picture, with its dark
+and quiet sheet of water, half shaded, half sunny, between high and
+wooded banks. The late rains have swollen the stream so much that many
+trees are standing up to their knees, as it were, in the water, and
+boughs, which lately swung high in air, now dip and drink deep of the
+passing wave. As to the poor cardinals which glowed upon the bank a few
+days since, I could see only a few of their scarlet hats, peeping above
+the tide. Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two
+paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to
+require no physical effort to guide it. He said that, when some Indians
+visited Concord a few years ago, he found that he had acquired, without
+a teacher, their precise method of propelling and steering a canoe.
+Nevertheless he was desirous of selling the boat of which he was so fit
+a pilot, and which was built by his own hands; so I agreed to take it,
+and accordingly became possessor of the Musketaquid. I wish I could
+acquire the aquatic skill of the original owner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Sept. 2._--Yesterday afternoon Mr. Thoreau arrived with the boat. The
+adjacent meadow being overflowed by the rise of the stream, he had rowed
+directly to the foot of the orchard, and landed at the bars, after
+floating over forty or fifty yards of water where people were lately
+making hay. I entered the boat with him, in order to have the benefit of
+a lesson in rowing and paddling.... I managed, indeed, to propel the
+boat by rowing with two oars, but the use of the single paddle is quite
+beyond my present skill. Mr. Thoreau had assured me that it was only
+necessary to will the boat to go in any particular direction, and she
+would immediately take that course, as if imbued with the spirit of the
+steersman. It may be so with him, but it is certainly not so with me.
+The boat seemed to be bewitched, and turned its head to every point of
+the compass except the right one. He then took the paddle himself, and
+though I could observe nothing peculiar in his management of it, the
+Musketaquid immediately became as docile as a trained steed. I suspect
+that she has not yet transferred her affections from her old master to
+her new one. By and by, when we are better acquainted, she will grow
+more tractable.... We propose to change her name from Musketaquid (the
+Indian name of the Concord River, meaning the river of meadows) to the
+Pond-Lily, which will be very beautiful and appropriate, as, during the
+summer season, she will bring home many a cargo of pond-lilies from
+along the river's weedy shore. It is not very likely that I shall make
+such long voyages in her as Mr. Thoreau has made. He once followed our
+river down to the Merrimack, and thence, I believe, to Newburyport, in
+this little craft.
+
+In the evening, ---- ---- called to see us, wishing to talk with me
+about a Boston periodical, of which he had heard that I was to be
+editor, and to which he desired to contribute. He is an odd and clever
+young man, with nothing very peculiar about him,--some originality and
+self-inspiration in his character, but none, or very little, in his
+intellect. Nevertheless, the lad himself seems to feel as if he were a
+genius. I like him well enough, however; but, after all, these originals
+in a small way, after one has seen a few of them, become more dull and
+commonplace than even those who keep the ordinary pathway of life. They
+have a rule and a routine, which they follow with as little variety as
+other people do their rule and routine, and when once we have fathomed
+their mystery, nothing can be more wearisome. An innate perception and
+reflection of truth give the only sort of originality that does not
+finally grow intolerable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Sept. 4._--I made a voyage in the Pond-Lily all by myself yesterday
+morning, and was much encouraged by my success in causing the boat to go
+whither I would. I have always liked to be afloat, but I think I have
+never adequately conceived of the enjoyment till now, when I begin to
+feel a power over that which supports me. I suppose I must have felt
+something like this sense of triumph when I first learned to swim; but I
+have forgotten it. O that I could run wild!--that is, that I could put
+myself into a true relation with Nature, and be on friendly terms with
+all congenial elements.
+
+We had a thunder-storm last evening; and to-day has been a cool, breezy
+autumnal day, such as my soul and body love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Sept. 18._--How the summer-time flits away, even while it seems to be
+loitering onward, arm in arm with autumn! Of late I have walked but
+little over the hills and through the woods, my leisure being chiefly
+occupied with my boat, which I have now learned to manage with tolerable
+skill. Yesterday afternoon I made a voyage alone up the North Branch of
+Concord River. There was a strong west wind blowing dead against me,
+which, together with the current, increased by the height of the water,
+made the first part of the passage pretty toilsome. The black river was
+all dimpled over with little eddies and whirlpools; and the breeze,
+moreover, caused the billows to beat against the bow of the boat, with a
+sound like the flapping of a bird's wing. The water-weeds, where they
+were discernible through the tawny water, were straight outstretched by
+the force of the current, looking as if they were forced to hold on to
+their roots with all their might. If for a moment I desisted from
+paddling, the head of the boat was swept round by the combined might of
+wind and tide. However, I toiled onward stoutly, and, entering the North
+Branch, soon found myself floating quietly along a tranquil stream,
+sheltered from the breeze by the woods and a lofty hill. The current,
+likewise, lingered along so gently that it was merely a pleasure to
+propel the boat against it. I never could have conceived that there was
+so beautiful a river-scene in Concord as this of the North Branch. The
+stream flows through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of a wood,
+which, as if but half satisfied with its presence, calm, gentle, and
+unobtrusive as it is, seems to crowd upon it, and barely to allow it
+passage; for the trees are rooted on the very verge of the water, and
+dip their pendent branches into it. On one side there is a high bank,
+forming the side of a hill, the Indian name of which I have forgotten,
+though Mr. Thoreau told it to me; and here, in some instances, the trees
+stand leaning over the river, stretching out their arms as if about to
+plunge in headlong. On the other side, the bank is almost on a level
+with the water; and there the quiet congregation of trees stood with
+feet in the flood, and fringed with foliage down to its very surface.
+Vines here and there twine themselves about bushes or aspens or
+alder-trees, and hang their clusters (though scanty and infrequent this
+season) so that I can reach them from my boat. I scarcely remember a
+scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the
+river through this wood. Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not
+have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. I have never
+elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful
+reflection is than what we call reality. The sky, and the clustering
+foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way
+through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the quiet
+depth of the prevailing tints,--all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful
+when beheld in upper air. But on gazing downward, there they were, the
+same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which
+satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half
+convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing
+which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate, the
+disembodied shadow is nearest to the soul.
+
+There were many tokens of autumn in this beautiful picture. Two or three
+of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many colors,--the
+real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning. These
+stood on low, marshy spots, where a frost has probably touched them
+already. Others were of a light, fresh green, resembling the hues of
+spring, though this, likewise, is a token of decay. The great mass of
+the foliage, however, appears unchanged; but ever and anon down came a
+yellow leaf, half flitting upon the air, half falling through it, and
+finally settling upon the water. A multitude of these were floating here
+and there along the river, many of them curling upward, so as to form
+little boats, fit for fairies to voyage in. They looked strangely
+pretty, with yet a melancholy prettiness, as they floated along. The
+general aspect of the river, however, differed but little from that of
+summer,--at least the difference defies expression. It is more in the
+character of the rich yellow sunlight than in aught else. The water of
+the stream has now a thrill of autumnal coolness; yet whenever a broad
+gleam fell across it, through an interstice of the foliage, multitudes
+of insects were darting to and fro upon its surface. The sunshine, thus
+falling across the dark river, has a most beautiful effect. It burnishes
+it, as it were, and yet leaves it as dark as ever.
+
+On my return, I suffered the boat to float almost of its own will down
+the stream, and caught fish enough for this morning's breakfast. But,
+partly from a qualm of conscience, I finally put them all into the water
+again, and saw them swim away as if nothing had happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Monday, October 10, 1842._--A long while, indeed, since my last date.
+But the weather has been generally sunny and pleasant, though often very
+cold; and I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal
+sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the
+daylight hours in the open air. My chief amusement has been boating up
+and down the river. A week or two ago (September 27 and 28) I went on a
+pedestrian excursion with Mr. Emerson, and was gone two days and one
+night, it being the first and only night that I have spent away from
+home. We were that night at the village of Harvard, and the next morning
+walked three miles farther, to the Shaker village, where we breakfasted.
+Mr. Emerson had a theological discussion with two of the Shaker
+brethren; but the particulars of it have faded from my memory; and all
+the other adventures of the tour have now so lost their freshness that I
+cannot adequately recall them. Wherefore let them rest untold. I
+recollect nothing so well as the aspect of some fringed gentians, which
+we saw growing by the roadside, and which were so beautiful that I
+longed to turn back and pluck them. After an arduous journey, we arrived
+safe home in the afternoon of the second day,--the first time that I
+ever came home in my life; for I never had a home before. On Saturday of
+the same week, my friend D. R---- came to see us, and stayed till
+Tuesday morning. On Wednesday there was a cattle-show in the village, of
+which I would give a description, if it had possessed any picturesque
+points. The foregoing are the chief outward events of our life.
+
+In the mean time autumn has been advancing, and is said to be a month
+earlier than usual. We had frosts, sufficient to kill the bean and
+squash vines, more than a fortnight ago; but there has since been some
+of the most delicious Indian-summer weather that I ever
+experienced,--mild, sweet, perfect days, in which the warm sunshine
+seemed to embrace the earth and all earth's children with love and
+tenderness. Generally, however, the bright days have been vexed with
+winds from the northwest, somewhat too keen and high for comfort. These
+winds have strewn our avenue with withered leaves, although the trees
+still retain some density of foliage, which is now embrowned or
+otherwise variegated by autumn. Our apples, too, have been falling,
+falling, falling; and we have picked the fairest of them from the dewy
+grass, and put them in our store-room and elsewhere. On Thursday, John
+Flint began to gather those which remained on the trees; and I suppose
+they will amount to nearly twenty barrels, or perhaps more. As usual
+when I have anything to sell, apples are very low indeed in price, and
+will not fetch me more than a dollar a barrel. I have sold my share of
+the potato-field for twenty dollars and ten bushels of potatoes for my
+own use. This may suffice for the economical history of our recent life.
+
+_12 o'clock_, A. M.--Just now I heard a sharp tapping at the window of
+my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of Rabelais), behold!
+the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance! He was
+probably attempting to get a fly, which was on the pane of glass against
+which he rapped; and on my first motion the feathered visitor took wing.
+This incident had a curious effect on me. It impressed me as if the bird
+had been a spiritual visitant, so strange was it that this little wild
+thing should seem to ask our hospitality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_November 8._--I am sorry that our journal has fallen so into neglect;
+but I see no chance of amendment. All my scribbling propensities will be
+far more than gratified in writing nonsense for the press; so that any
+gratuitous labor of the pen becomes peculiarly distasteful. Since the
+last date, we have paid a visit of nine days to Boston and Salem, whence
+we returned a week ago yesterday. Thus we lost above a week of delicious
+autumnal weather, which should have been spent in the woods or upon the
+river. Ever since our return, however, until to-day, there has been a
+succession of genuine Indian-summer days, with gentle winds or none at
+all, and a misty atmosphere, which idealizes all nature, and a mild,
+beneficent sunshine, inviting one to lie down in a nook and forget all
+earthly care. To-day the sky is dark and lowering, and occasionally lets
+fall a few sullen tears. I suppose we must bid farewell to Indian summer
+now, and expect no more love and tenderness from Mother Nature till next
+spring be well advanced. She has already made herself as unlovely in
+outward aspect as can well be. We took a walk to Sleepy Hollow
+yesterday, and beheld scarcely a green thing, except the everlasting
+verdure of the family of pines, which, indeed, are trees to thank God
+for at this season. A range of young birches had retained a pretty
+liberal coloring of yellow or tawny leaves, which became very cheerful
+in the sunshine. There were one or two oak-trees whose foliage still
+retained a deep, dusky red, which looked rich and warm; but most of the
+oaks had reached the last stage of autumnal decay,--the dusky brown hue.
+Millions of their leaves strew the woods, and rustle underneath the
+foot; but enough remain upon the boughs to make a melancholy harping
+when the wind sweeps over them. We found some fringed gentians in the
+meadow, most of them blighted and withered; but a few were quite
+perfect. The other day, since our return from Salem, I found a violet;
+yet it was so cold that day, that a large pool of water, under the
+shadow of some trees, had remained frozen from morning till afternoon.
+The ice was so thick as not to be broken by some sticks and small stones
+which I threw upon it. But ice and snow too will soon be no
+extraordinary matters with us.
+
+During the last week we have had three stoves put up, and henceforth no
+light of a cheerful fire will gladden us at eventide. Stoves are
+detestable in every respect, except that they keep us perfectly
+comfortable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Thursday, November 24._--This is Thanksgiving Day, a good old festival,
+and we have kept it with our hearts, and, besides, have made good cheer
+upon our turkey and pudding, and pies and custards, although none sat at
+our board but our two selves. There was a new and livelier sense, I
+think, that we have at last found a home, and that a new family has been
+gathered since the last Thanksgiving Day. There have been many bright,
+cold days latterly, so cold that it has required a pretty rapid pace to
+keep one's self warm a-walking. Day before yesterday I saw a party of
+boys skating on a pond of water that has overflowed a neighboring
+meadow. Running water has not yet frozen. Vegetation has quite come to a
+stand, except in a few sheltered spots. In a deep ditch we found a tall
+plant of the freshest and healthiest green, which looked as if it must
+have grown within the last few weeks. We wander among the wood-paths,
+which are very pleasant in the sunshine of the afternoons, the trees
+looking rich and warm,--such of them, I mean, as have retained their
+russet leaves; and where the leaves are strewn along the paths, or
+heaped plentifully in some hollow of the hills, the effect is not
+without a charm. To-day the morning rose with rain, which has since
+changed to snow and sleet; and now the landscape is as dreary as can
+well be imagined,--white, with the brownness of the soil and withered
+grass everywhere peeping out. The swollen river, of a leaden hue, drags
+itself sullenly along; and this may be termed the first winter's day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Friday, March 31, 1843._--The first month of spring is already gone;
+and still the snow lies deep on hill and valley, and the river is still
+frozen from bank to bank, although a late rain has caused pools of water
+to stand on the surface of the ice, and the meadows are overflowed into
+broad lakes. Such a protracted winter has not been known for twenty
+years, at least. I have almost forgotten the wood-paths and shady places
+which I used to know so well last summer; and my views are so much
+confined to the interior of our mansion, that sometimes, looking out of
+the window, I am surprised to catch a glimpse of houses at no great
+distance which had quite passed out of my recollection. From present
+appearances, another month may scarcely suffice to wash away all the
+snow from the open country; and in the woods and hollows it may linger
+yet longer. The winter will not have been a day less than five months
+long; and it would not be unfair to call it seven. A great space,
+indeed, to miss the smile of Nature, in a single year of human life.
+Even out of the midst of happiness I have sometimes sighed and groaned;
+for I love the sunshine and the green woods, and the sparkling blue
+water; and it seems as if the picture of our inward bliss should be set
+in a beautiful frame of outward nature.... As to the daily course of our
+life, I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging from
+two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I
+might have written more, if it had seemed worth while; but I was content
+to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants,
+having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away
+with the necessity of writing for bread. Those prospects have not yet
+had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, because an office
+would inevitably remove us from our present happy home,--at least from
+an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us
+wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so
+that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance,
+not a trouble.
+
+Every day, I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the
+post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return
+home, generally without having spoken a word to a human being.... In the
+way of exercise I saw and split wood, and, physically, I never was in a
+better condition than now. This is chiefly owing, doubtless, to a
+satisfied heart, in aid of which comes the exercise above mentioned, and
+about a fair proportion of intellectual labor.
+
+On the 9th of this month, we left home again on a visit to Boston and
+Salem. I alone went to Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for
+nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth
+flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had
+caught hold of a reality which never could be taken from me. It was good
+thus to get apart from my happiness, for the sake of contemplating it.
+On the 21st, I returned to Boston, and went out to Cambridge to dine
+with Longfellow, whom I had not seen since his return from Europe. The
+next day we came back to our old house, which had been deserted all this
+time; for our servant had gone with us to Boston.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Friday, April 7._--My wife has gone to Boston to see her sister M----,
+who is to be married in two or three weeks, and then immediately to
+visit Europe for six months.... I betook myself to sawing and splitting
+wood; there being an inward unquietness which demanded active exercise,
+and I sawed, I think, more briskly than ever before. When I re-entered
+the house, it was with somewhat of a desolate feeling; yet not without
+an intermingled pleasure, as being the more conscious that all
+separation was temporary, and scarcely real, even for the little time
+that it may last. After my solitary dinner, I lay down, with the Dial in
+my hand, and attempted to sleep; but sleep would not come.... So I
+arose, and began this record in the journal, almost at the commencement
+of which I was interrupted by a visit from Mr. Thoreau, who came to
+return a book, and to announce his purpose of going to reside at Staten
+Island, as private tutor in the family of Mr. Emerson's brother. We had
+some conversation upon this subject, and upon the spiritual advantages
+of change of place, and upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other
+kindred or concatenated subjects. I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau's own
+account, that he is going away, as he is out of health and may be
+benefited by his removal; but, on my account, I should like to have him
+remain here, he being one of the few persons, I think, with whom to hold
+intercourse is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest-tree;
+and with all this wild freedom, there is high and classic cultivation
+in him too....
+
+I had a purpose, if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole
+term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being;
+but now my Pythagorean vow has been broken, within three or four hours
+after her departure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Saturday, April 8._--After journalizing yesterday afternoon, I went out
+and sawed and split wood till tea-time, then studied German,
+(translating Lenore,) with an occasional glance at a beautiful sunset,
+which I could not enjoy sufficiently by myself to induce me to lay aside
+the book. After lamp-light, finished Lenore, and drowsed over Voltaire's
+Candide, occasionally refreshing myself with a tune from Mr. Thoreau's
+musical box, which he had left in my keeping. The evening was but a dull
+one.
+
+I retired soon after nine, and felt some apprehension that the old
+Doctor's ghost would take this opportunity to visit me; but I rather
+think his former visitations have not been intended for me, and that I
+am not sufficiently spiritual for ghostly communication. At all events,
+I met with no disturbance of the kind, and slept soundly enough till six
+o'clock or thereabouts. The forenoon was spent with the pen in my hand,
+and sometimes I had the glimmering of an idea, and endeavored to
+materialize it in words; but on the whole my mind was idly vagrant, and
+refused to work to any systematic purpose. Between eleven and twelve I
+went to the post-office, but found no letter; then spent above an hour
+reading at the Athenaeum. On my way home, I encountered Mr. Flint, for
+the first time these many weeks, although he is our next neighbor in one
+direction. I inquired if he could sell us some potatoes, and he promised
+to send half a bushel for trial. Also, he encouraged me to hope that he
+might buy a barrel of our apples. After my encounter with Mr. Flint, I
+returned to our lonely old abbey, opened the door without the usual
+heart-spring, ascended to my study, and began to read a tale of Tieck.
+Slow work, and dull work too! Anon, Molly, the cook, rang the bell for
+dinner,--a sumptuous banquet of stewed veal and macaroni, to which I sat
+down in solitary state. My appetite served me sufficiently to eat with,
+but not for enjoyment. Nothing has a zest in my present widowed state.
+[Thus far I had written, when Mr. Emerson called.] After dinner, I lay
+down on the couch, with the Dial in my hand as a soporific, and had a
+short nap; then began to journalize.
+
+Mr. Emerson came, with a sunbeam in his face; and we had as good a talk
+as I ever remember to have had with him. He spoke of Margaret Fuller,
+who, he says, has risen perceptibly into a higher state since their last
+meeting. [There rings the tea-bell.] Then we discoursed of Ellery
+Channing, a volume of whose poems is to be immediately published, with
+revisions by Mr. Emerson himself and Mr. Sam G. Ward.... He calls them
+"poetry for poets." Next Mr. Thoreau was discussed, and his approaching
+departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well.... We talked of
+Brook Farm, and the singular moral aspects which it presents, and the
+great desirability that its progress and developments should be observed
+and its history written; also of C. N----, who, it appears, is passing
+through a new moral phasis. He is silent, inexpressive, talks little or
+none, and listens without response, except a sardonic laugh; and some of
+his friends think that he is passing into permanent eclipse. Various
+other matters were considered or glanced at, and finally, between five
+and six o'clock, Mr. Emerson took his leave. I then went out to chop
+wood, my allotted space for which had been very much abridged by his
+visit; but I was not sorry. I went on with the journal for a few minutes
+before tea, and have finished the present record in the setting sunshine
+and gathering dusk....
+
+
+
+
+UNIVERSITY REFORM.
+
+AN ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD, AT THEIR TRIENNIAL FESTIVAL, JULY
+19, 1866.
+
+
+We meet to-day under auspices how different from those which attended
+our last triennial assembling! We were then in the midst of a civil war,
+without sight of the end, though not without hope of final success to
+the cause of national integrity. The three days' agony at Gettysburg had
+issued in the triumph of the loyal arms, repelling the threatened
+invasion of the North. The surrender of Vicksburg had just reopened the
+trade of the Mississippi. The capture of Port Hudson was yet fresh in
+our ears, when suddenly tidings of armed resistance to conscription in
+the city of New York gave ominous note of danger lurking at the very
+heart of the Union. In the shadow of that omen, we celebrated our
+academic festival of 1863.
+
+The shadow passed. With varying fortunes, but unvarying purpose, the
+loyal States pursued the contest. And when, in the autumn of 1864, by a
+solemn act of self-interrogation, they had certified their will and
+their power to maintain that contest to the end of disunion, and when a
+popular election expressing that intent had overcome the land like a
+summer-cloud without a bolt in its bosom, the victory was sown with the
+ballot which Grant and Sherman reaped with the sword.
+
+Secession collapsed. Its last and most illustrious victim, borne to his
+rest through territories draped in mourning, through sobbing
+commonwealths, through populations of uncovered heads, revealed to all
+time the spirit that was in it and the spirit that subdued it. And
+to-day, as we meet our Reverend Mother in this scene of old affections,
+the stupendous struggle has already receded into the shadow-land of
+History. The war is a thing of the past. If hatred still rankles, open
+hostilities have ceased. If rumblings of the recent tempest still mutter
+along the track of its former desolation, the storm is over. The
+conflict is ended. No more conscription of husbands, sons, and brothers
+for the weary work of destruction; no more the forced march by day, the
+bivouac at night, and to-morrow the delirium of carnage. No more anxious
+waiting in distant homes for tidings from the front, and breathless
+conning of the death-list to know if the loved ones are among the slain.
+No more the fresh grief-agony over the unreturning brave. All that is
+past,--
+
+    "For the terrible work is done,
+    And the good fight is won
+        For God and for Fatherland."
+
+The sword has returned to its sheath. The symbol-flags that shed their
+starry pomp on the field of death hang idly drooping in the halls of
+state. And before new armies in hostile encounter on American soil shall
+unfurl new banners to the breeze, may every thread and thrum of their
+texture ravel and rot and resolve itself into dust!
+
+Another and nearer interest distinguishes this occasion and suggests its
+appropriate theme,--our Alma Mater.
+
+The General Court of Massachusetts, which has hitherto elected the Board
+of Overseers of Harvard College, after so many years of fitful and
+experimental legislation, has finally enacted, that "the places of the
+successive classes in the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, and the
+vacancies in such classes, shall hereafter be annually supplied by
+ballot of such persons as have received from the College a degree of
+Bachelor of Arts, or Master of Arts, or any honorary degree, voting on
+Commencement-day in the city of Cambridge; such election to be first
+held in the year 1866."
+
+This act initiates a radical change in the organization of this
+University. It establishes for one of its legislative Houses a new
+electorate. The State hereby discharges itself of all active
+participation in the conduct of the College, and devolves on the body of
+the Alumni responsibilities assumed in former enactments extending
+through a period of more than two hundred years. The wisdom or justice
+of this measure I am not inclined to discuss. Certainly there is nothing
+in the history of past relations between the Commonwealth and the
+University that should make us regret the change. That history has not
+been one of mere benefactions on one side, and pure indebtedness on the
+other. Whatever the University may owe to the State, the balance of
+obligation falls heavily on the other side. In the days of Provincial
+rule the Colony of Massachusetts Bay appears to have exhausted its zeal
+for collegiate education in the much-lauded promissory act by which the
+General Court, in 1636, "agree to give four hundred pounds towards a
+school or college, whereof two hundred pounds shall be paid next year."
+The promise was not fulfilled, and the record of those years leaves it
+doubtful whether legislative action alone would during that or the next
+generation have accomplished the work, had not a graduate of Emanuel
+College in English Cambridge, who seems providentially enough to have
+dropped on these shores, where he lived but a year, for that express
+purpose, supplied the requisite funds.
+
+The College once started and got under way, the fathers of the Province
+assumed a vigilant oversight of its orthodoxy, but discharged with a lax
+and grudging service the responsibility of its maintenance. They ejected
+the first President, the protomartyr of American learning, the man who
+sacrificed more to the College than any one individual in the whole
+course of its history, on account of certain scruples about infant
+baptism, of which, in the language of the time, "it was not hard to
+discover that they came from the Evil One," and for which poor Dunster
+was indicted by the grand-jury, sentenced to a public admonition, and
+laid under bonds for good behavior.
+
+They starved the second President for eighteen years on a salary payable
+in Indian corn; and in answer to his earnest prayer for relief, alleging
+instant necessity, the sacrifice of personal property, and the custom of
+English universities, a committee of the General Court reported that
+"they conceive the country to have done honorably toward the petitioner,
+and that his parity with English colleges is not pertinent."
+
+The third President, by their connivance and co-operation, was
+sacrificed to the machinations of the students, egged on, it is thought,
+by members of the Corporation, and died, "as was said, with a broken
+heart."
+
+Meanwhile, through neglect of the Province to provide for its support,
+the material fortunes of the College, in the course of thirty years, had
+fallen into such decay that extinction was inevitable, had not the
+people of another Colony come to the rescue. The town of Portsmouth, in
+New Hampshire, hearing, says their address, "the loud groans of the
+sinking College,... and hoping that their example might provoke ... the
+General Court vigorously to act for the diverting of the omen of
+calamity which its destruction would be to New England," pledged
+themselves to an annual contribution of sixty pounds for seven years.
+This act of chivalrous generosity fairly shamed our lagging Commonwealth
+into measures for the resuscitation of an institution especially
+committed to its care.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this business is that the Province all
+this while was drawing, not only moral support, but pecuniary aid, from
+the College. "It is manifest," says Quincy,[A] "that the treasury of
+the Colony, having been the recipient of many of the early donations to
+the College, was not a little aided by the convenience which these
+available funds afforded to its pecuniary necessities. Some of these
+funds, although received in 1647, were not paid over to the treasury of
+the College until 1713; then, indeed, the College received an allowance
+of simple interest for the delay. With regard, therefore, to the annual
+allowance of L100, whereby," during the first seventy years, "they
+enabled the President of the College simply to exist, it is proper to
+observe, that there was not probably one year in the whole seventy in
+which, by moneys collected from friends of the institution in foreign
+countries, by donations of its friends in this country, by moneys
+brought by students from other Colonies, and above all by furnishing the
+means of education at home, and thus preventing the outgoing of domestic
+wealth for education abroad, the College did not remunerate the Colony
+for that poor annual stipend five hundred fold."
+
+The patronage extended to the College after the Revolution was not more
+cordial and not more adequate than the meagre succors of Colonial
+legislation. The first Governor of independent Massachusetts, from the
+height of his impregnable popularity, for more than twelve years defied
+the repeated attempts of the Corporation, backed by the Overseers, to
+obtain the balance of his account as former Treasurer of the College,
+and died its debtor in a sum exceeding a thousand pounds. The debt was
+finally paid by his heirs, but not without a loss of some hundreds of
+dollars to the College.
+
+At the commencement of hostilities between the Colonies and the mother
+country, the Revolutionary authorities had taken possession of these
+grounds. Reversing the old order, "Cedant arma togae," they drove out the
+_togae_ and brought in the arms. The books went one way, the boys
+another,--the books to Andover, the boys to Concord. The dawn of
+American liberty was not an "Aurora musis amica." The Muse of History
+alone remained with Brigadier Putnam and General Ward. The College was
+turned into a camp,--a measure abundantly justified by public necessity,
+but causing much damage to the buildings occupied as barracks by the
+Continentals. This damage was nominally allowed by the General Court,
+but was reckoned in the currency of that day, whereby the College
+received but a quarter of the cost.
+
+In 1786, the State saw fit to discontinue the small pittance which till
+then had been annually granted toward the support of the President; and
+from that time to this, with the exception of the proceeds of a
+bank-tax, granted for ten years in 1814, and the recent large
+appropriation from the School Fund for the use of the Museum of Natural
+History, the College has received no substantial aid from the State. The
+State has, during the last ten years, expended two millions of dollars
+in a vain attempt to bore a hole through one of her hills: in the whole
+two hundred and thirty years of our academic history she has not
+expended a quarter of that sum in filling up this hole in her
+educational system.
+
+I intend no disrespect to the noble Commonwealth of which no native can
+be insensible to the glory of his birthright. No State has done more for
+popular education than the State of Massachusetts. But for reasons
+satisfactory, no doubt, to themselves, her successive legislators have
+not seen fit to extend to her colleges the fostering care bestowed on
+her schools. And certainly, if one or the other must be neglected, we
+shall all agree in saying, Let the schools be cherished, and let the
+colleges take care of themselves. Let due provision be made for popular
+instruction in the rudiments of knowledge, which are also rudiments of
+good citizenship; let every citizen be taxed for that prime exigency,
+and let literature and science find patrons where they can. Literature
+and science will find patrons, and here in Massachusetts have always
+found them. If the legislators of the State have been sparing of their
+benefactions, the wealthy sons of the State have been prodigal of
+theirs. In no country has the private patronage of science been more
+liberal and prompt than in Massachusetts. Seldom, in the history of
+science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than this
+University is now experiencing, in the mission of one of her professors
+on an enterprise of scientific exploration, started and maintained by a
+private citizen of Boston. When our Agassiz shall return to us
+reinforced with the lore of the Andes, and replenished with the spoils
+of the Amazon,--_tot millia squamigerae gentis_,--the discoveries he
+shall add to science, and the treasures he shall add to his Museum,
+whilst they splendidly illustrate his own qualifications for such a
+mission, will forever attest the liberality of a son of Massachusetts.
+
+The rich men of the State have not been wanting to literature and
+science. They have not been wanting to this University. Let their names
+be held in everlasting remembrance. When the Memorial Hall, which your
+committee have in charge, shall stand complete, let its mural records
+present, together with the names of those who have deserved well of the
+country by their patriotism, the names of those who have deserved well
+of the College by their benefactions. Let these fautors of science, the
+heroes of peace, have their place side by side with the heroes of war.
+
+Individuals have done their part, but slow is the growth of institutions
+which depend on individual charity for their support. As an illustration
+of what may be done by public patronage, when States are in earnest with
+their universities, and as strangely contrasting the sluggish fortunes
+of our own _Alma_, look at the State University of Michigan. Here is an
+institution but twenty-five years old, already numbering thirty-two
+professors and over twelve hundred students, having public buildings
+equal in extent to those which two centuries have given to Cambridge,
+and all the apparatus of a well-constituted, thoroughly furnished
+university. All this within twenty-five years! The State itself which
+has generated this wonderful growth had no place in the Union until
+after Harvard had celebrated her two hundredth birthday. In twenty-five
+years, in a country five hundred miles from the seaboard,--a country
+which fifty years ago was known only to the fur trade,--a University has
+sprung up, to which students flock from all parts of the land, and which
+offers to thousands, free of expense, the best education this continent
+affords. Such is the difference between public and private patronage,
+between individual effort and the action of a State.
+
+A proof of the broad intent and oecumenical consciousness of this
+infant College appears in the fact that its Medical Department, which
+alone numbers ten professors and five hundred students, allows the
+option of one of four languages in the thesis required for the medical
+degree. It is the only seminary in the country whose liberal scope and
+cosmopolitan outlook satisfy the idea of a great university. Compared
+with this, our other colleges are all provincial; and unless the State
+of Massachusetts shall see fit to adopt us, and to foster our interest
+with something of the zeal and liberality which the State of Michigan
+bestows on her academic masterpiece, Harvard cannot hope to compete with
+this precocious child of the West.
+
+Meanwhile, Alumni, the State has devolved upon us, as electors of the
+Board of Overseers, an important trust. This trust conveys no right of
+immediate jurisdiction, but it may become the channel of an influence
+which shall make itself felt in the conduct of this University. It
+invites us to take counsel concerning her wants and her weal. I
+therefore pursue the theme which this crisis in our history suggests.
+
+Of existing universities the greater part are the product of an age
+whose intellectual fashion differed as widely from the present as it did
+from that of Greek and Roman antiquity. Our own must be reckoned with
+that majority, dating, as it does, from a period antecedent, not only to
+all other American colleges, but to some of the most eminent of other
+lands. Half of the better known and most influential of German
+universities are of later origin than ours. The University of Goettingen,
+once the most flourishing in Germany, is younger than Harvard by a
+hundred years. Halle is younger, and Erlangen, and Munich with its vast
+library, and Bonn, and Berlin, by nearly two hundred years.
+
+When this College was founded, two of the main forces of the
+intellectual world of our time had scarcely come into play,--modern
+literature and modern science. Science knew nothing as yet of chemistry,
+nothing of electricity, of geology, scarce anything of botany. In
+astronomy, the Copernican system was just struggling into notice, and
+far from being universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest
+author of note in the library bequeathed by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon
+rejected the Copernican system. English literature had had its great
+Elizabethan age; but little of the genius of that literature had
+penetrated the Puritan mind. It is doubtful if a copy of Shakespeare had
+found its way to these shores in 1636. Milton's star was just climbing
+its native horizon, invisible as yet to the Western world.
+
+The College was founded for the special and avowed purpose of training
+young men for the service of the Church. All its studies were arranged
+with reference to that object: endless expositions of Scripture,
+catechetical divinity, "commonplacing" of sermons,--already, one
+fancies, sufficiently commonplace,--Chaldee, Syriac, Hebrew without
+points, and other Semitic exasperations. Latin, as the language of
+theology, was indispensable, and within certain limits was practically
+better understood, perhaps, in Cambridge of the seventeenth century,
+than in Cambridge of the nineteenth. It was the language of official
+intercourse. Indeed, the use of the English was forbidden to the
+students within the College walls. _Scholares vernacula lingua intra
+Collegii limites nullo praetextu utuntor_, was the law,--a law which
+Cotton Mather complains was so neglected in his day "as to render our
+scholars very unfit for a conversation with strangers." But the purpose
+for which chiefly the study of Latin is now pursued--acquaintance with
+the Roman classics--was no recognized object of Puritan learning. Cicero
+appears to have been for a long time the only classic of whom the
+students were supposed to have any knowledge. The reading of Virgil was
+a daring innovation of the eighteenth century. The only Greek required
+was that of the New Testament and the Greek Catechism. The whole rich
+domain of ancient Greek literature, from Homer to Theokritos, was as
+much an unexplored territory as the Baghavad-Gita or the Mababharata.
+Logic and metaphysic and scholastic disputations occupied a prominent
+place. As late as 1726, the books most conspicuous in Tutor Flynt's
+official report of the College exercises, next to Cicero and Virgil, are
+such as convey to the modern scholar no idea but that of intense
+obsoleteness,--Ramus's Definitions, Burgersdicius's Logic, Heereboord's
+Meletemata; and for Seniors, on Saturday, Ames's Medulla. This is such a
+curriculum as Mephistopheles, in his character of Magister, might have
+recommended in irony to the student who sought his counsel.
+
+With the multiplication of religious sects, with the progress of secular
+culture, with the mental emancipation which followed the great
+convulsions of the eighteenth century, the maintenance of the
+ecclesiastical type originally impressed on the College ceased to be
+practicable,--ceased to be desirable. The preparation of young men for
+the service of the Church is still a recognized part of the general
+scheme of University education, but is only one in the multiplicity of
+objects which that scheme embraces, and can never again have the
+prominence once assigned to it. This secularization, however it might
+seem to compromise the design of the founders of the College, was
+inevitable,--a wise and needful concession to the exigencies of the
+altered time. Nor is there, in a larger view, any real contravention
+here of the purpose of the founders. The secularization of the College
+is no violation of its motto, "_Christo et Ecclesiae_." For, as I
+interpret those sacred ideas, the cause of Christ and the Church is
+advanced by whatever liberalizes and enriches and enlarges the mind. All
+study, scientifically pursued, is at bottom a study of theology; for all
+scientific study is the study of Law; and "of Law nothing less can be
+acknowledged than that her seat is in the bosom of God."
+
+But something more than secularization of the course of study is
+required to satisfy the idea of a university. What is a university? Dr.
+Newman answers this question with the ancient designation of a _Studium
+Generale_,--a school of universal learning. "Such a university," he
+says, "is in its essence a place for the communication and circulation
+of thought by means of personal intercourse over a wide tract of
+country."[B] Accepting this definition, can we say that Harvard College,
+as at present constituted, is a University? Must we not rather describe
+it as a place where boys are made to recite lessons from text-books, and
+to write compulsory exercises, and are marked according to their
+proficiency and fidelity in these performances, with a view to a
+somewhat protracted exhibition of themselves at the close of their
+college course, which, according to a pleasant academic fiction, is
+termed their "Commencement"? This description applies only, it is true,
+to what is called the Undergraduate Department. But that department
+stands for the College, constitutes the College, in the public
+estimation. The professional schools which have gathered about it are
+scarcely regarded as a part of the College. They are incidental
+appendages, of which, indeed, one has its seat in another city. The
+College proper is simply a more advanced school for boys, not differing
+essentially in principle and theory from the public schools in all our
+towns. In this, as in those, the principle is coercion. Hold your
+subject fast with one hand, and pour knowledge into him with the other.
+The professors are task-masters and police-officers, the President the
+chief of the College police.
+
+Now, considering the great advance of our higher town schools, which
+carry their pupils as far as the College carried them fifty years ago,
+and which might, if necessary, have classes still more advanced of such
+as are destined for the university, I venture to suggest that the time
+has come when this whole system of coercion might, with safety and
+profit, be done away. Abolish, I would say, your whole system of marks,
+and college rank, and compulsory tasks. I anticipate an objection drawn
+from the real or supposed danger of abandoning to their own devices and
+optional employment boys of the average age of college students. In
+answer, I say, advance that average by fixing a limit of admissible age.
+Advance the qualifications for admission; make them equal to the studies
+of the Freshman year, and reduce the college career from four years to
+three; or else make the Freshman year a year of probation, and its
+closing examination the condition of full matriculation. Only give the
+young men, when once a sufficient foundation has been laid, and the
+rudiments acquired, the freedom of a true University,--freedom to select
+their own studies and their own teachers from such material, and such
+_personnel_, as the place supplies. It is to be expected that a portion
+will abuse this liberty, and waste their years. They do it at their
+peril. At the peril, among other disadvantages, of losing their degree,
+which should be conditioned on satisfactory proof that the student has
+not wholly misspent his time.
+
+An indispensable condition of intellectual growth is liberty. That
+liberty the present system denies. More and more it is straitened by
+imposed tasks. And this I conceive to be the reason why, with increased
+requirements, the College turns out a decreasing proportion of
+first-class men. If the theory of college rank were correct, the highest
+marks should indicate the men who are to be hereafter most conspicuous,
+and leaders in the various walks of life. This is not the case,--not so
+much so now as in former years. Of the present chief lights of American
+literature and science, how many, if graduates of Harvard, took the
+first honors of the University here? Or, to put the question in another
+form, Of those who took the first honors at Harvard, within the last
+thirty years, how many are now conspicuous among the great lights of
+American literature and science?
+
+Carlyle, in his recent talk to the students at Edinburgh, remarks that,
+"since the time of Bentley, you cannot name anybody that has gained a
+great name for scholarship among the English, or constituted a point of
+revolution in the pursuits of men, in that way." The reason perhaps is,
+that the system of the English universities, though allowing greater
+liberty than ours, is still a struggle for college honors, in which
+renown, not learning for the sake of learning, is the aim. The seeming
+proficiency achieved through the influence of such motives--knowledge
+acquired for the nonce, not assimilated--is often delusive, and is apt
+to vanish when the stimulus is withdrawn. The students themselves have
+recorded their judgment of the value of this sort of learning in the
+word "cramming," a phrase which originated in one of the English
+universities.
+
+The rudiments of knowledge may be instilled by compulsory tasks; but to
+form the scholar, to really educate the man, there should intervene
+between the years of compulsory study and the active duties of life a
+season of comparative leisure. By leisure I mean, not cessation of
+activity, but self-determined activity,--command of one's time for
+voluntary study.
+
+There are two things which unless a university can give, it fails of its
+legitimate end. One is opportunity, the other inspiration. But
+opportunity is marred, not made, and inspiration quenched, not kindled,
+by coercion. Few, I suspect, in recent years, have had the love of
+knowledge awakened by their college life at Harvard,--more often
+quenched by the rivalries and penalties with which learning here is
+associated. Give the student, first of all, opportunity; place before
+him the best apparatus of instruction; tempt him with the best of
+teachers and books; lead him to the fountains of intellectual life. His
+use of those fountains must depend on himself. There is a homely proverb
+touching the impossibility of compelling a horse to drink, which applies
+to human animals and intellectual draughts as well. The student has been
+defined by a German pedagogue as an animal that cannot be forced, but
+must be persuaded. If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also
+the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its
+work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two
+conditions--opportunity and inspiration--will be a success, will draw to
+itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of
+all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the
+land.
+
+Nothing so fatal to inspiration as excessive legislation. It creates two
+parties, the governors and the governed, with efforts and interests
+mutually opposed; the governors seeking to establish an artificial
+order, the governed bent on maintaining their natural liberty. I need
+not ask you, Alumni, if these two parties exist at Cambridge. They have
+always existed within the memory of "the oldest graduate."
+
+Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond
+the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic
+jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no penalty
+but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against
+positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of
+civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern
+himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and
+familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and
+personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the
+most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be
+placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and
+fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German
+Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the
+last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which
+seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the
+ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,[C] as well as the
+mediaeval and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it
+when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors,
+should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands.
+This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German
+universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of
+oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American
+colleges, and altogether incredible were it not sufficiently vouched by
+contemporary writers, and by the acts of the various governments which
+labored to suppress it. A certain German worthy writes to his son, who
+is about to enter the university: "You think, perhaps, that in the
+universities they sup pure wisdom by spoonfuls,... but when you are
+arrived there, you will find that you must be made a fool of for the
+first year.... Consent to be a fool for this one year; let yourself be
+plagued and abused; and when an old veteran steps up to you and tweaks
+your nose, let it not appear singular; endure it, harden yourself to it.
+_Olim meminisse juvabit._"[D] The universities legislated against this
+barbarism; all the governments of Germany conspired to crush it; but in
+spite of all their efforts, which were only partially successful, traces
+of it still lingered in the early years of this century. It was not
+completely abolished until, in 1818, there was formed at Jena by
+delegates from fourteen universities a voluntary association of students
+on a moral basis, known as "The General German Burschenschaft," the
+first principle in whose constitution was, "Unity, freedom, and equality
+of all students among themselves,--equality of all rights and
+duties,"--and whose second principle was "Christian German education of
+every mental and bodily faculty for the service of the Fatherland."
+This, according to Raumer, was the end of Pennalism in Germany. What the
+governments, with their stringent enactments and formidable penalties,
+failed to accomplish, was accomplished at last by a voluntary
+association of students, organizing that sense of honor which, in youth
+and societies of youth, if rightly touched, is never appealed to in
+vain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The question has been newly agitated in these days, whether knowledge of
+Greek and Latin is a necessary part of polite education, and whether it
+should constitute one of the requirements of the academic course. It has
+seemed to me that those who take the affirmative in this discussion give
+undue weight to the literary argument, and not enough to the
+glossological. The literary argument fails to establish the supreme
+importance of a knowledge of these languages as a part of polite
+education. The place which the Greek and Latin authors have come to
+occupy in the estimation of European scholars is due, not entirely to
+their intrinsic merits, great as those merits unquestionably are, but in
+part to traditional prepossessions. When after a millennial occultation
+the classics, and especially, with the fall of the Palaeologi, the Greek
+classics burst upon Western Europe, there was no literature with which
+to compare them. The Jewish Scriptures were not regarded as literature
+by readers of the Vulgate. Dante, it is true, had given to the world his
+immortal vision, and Boccaccio, its first expounder, had shown the
+capabilities of Italian prose. But the light of Florentine culture was
+even for Italy a partial illumination. On the whole, we may say that
+modern literature did not exist, and the Oriental had not yet come to
+light. What wonder that the classics were received with boundless
+enthusiasm! It was through the influence of that enthusiasm that the
+study of Greek was introduced into schools and universities with the
+close of the fifteenth century. It was through that influence that
+Latin, still a living language in the clerical world, was perpetuated,
+instead of becoming an obsolete ecclesiasticism. The language of Livy
+and Ovid derived fresh impulse from the reappearing stars of secular
+Rome.
+
+It is in vain to deny that those literatures have lost something of the
+relative value they once possessed, and which made it a literary
+necessity to study Greek and Latin for their sakes. The literary
+necessity is in a measure superseded by translations, which, though they
+may fail to communicate the aroma and the verbal felicities of the
+original, reproduce its form and substance. It is furthermore superseded
+by the rise of new literatures, and by introduction to those of other
+and elder lands. The Greeks were masters of literary form, but other
+nations have surpassed them in some particulars. There is but one Iliad,
+and but one Odyssee; but also there is but one Job, but one Sakoontala,
+but one Hafiz-Nameh, but one Gulistan, but one Divina Commedia, but one
+Don Quixote, but one Faust. If the argument for the study of Greek and
+Latin is grounded on the value of the literary treasures contained in
+those tongues, the same argument applies to the Hebrew, to the Sanscrit,
+to the Persian, to say nothing of the modern languages, to which the
+College assigns a subordinate place.
+
+But, above all, the literary importance of Greek and Latin for the
+British and American scholar is greatly qualified by the richness and
+superiority of the English literature which has come into being since
+the Graecomania of the time of the Tudors, when court ladies of a
+morning, by way of amusement, read Plato's Dialogues in the original. If
+literary edification is the object intended in the study of those
+languages, that end is more easily and more effectually accomplished by
+a thorough acquaintance with English literature, than by the very
+imperfect knowledge which college exercises give of the classics.
+Tugging at the Chained Prometheus, with the aid of grammar and lexicon,
+may be good intellectual discipline, but how many of the subjects of
+that discipline ever divine the secret of AEschylus's wonderful creation,
+or receive any other impression from it than the feeling perhaps that
+the worthy Titan's sense of constraint could hardly have been more
+galling than their own.
+
+Give them Shakespeare's Tempest to read, and with no other pony than
+their own good will, though they may not penetrate the deeper meaning of
+that composition, they will gain more ideas, more nourishment from it,
+than they will from compulsory study of the whole trio of Greek
+tragedians. And if this be their first introduction to the great
+magician, they will say, with Miranda,
+
+            "O, wonder!
+    How many goodly creatures are there here!
+    ... O brave new world,
+    That has such people in it!"
+
+The literary argument for enforced study of Greek and Latin in our day
+has not much weight. What I call the glossological argument has more.
+Every well-educated person should have a thorough understanding of his
+own language, and no one can thoroughly understand the English without
+some knowledge of languages which touch it so nearly as the Latin and
+the Greek. Some knowledge of those languages should constitute, I think,
+a condition of matriculation. But the further prosecution of them should
+not be obligatory on the student once matriculated, though every
+encouragement be given and every facility afforded to those whose genius
+leans in that direction. The College should make ample provision for the
+study of ancient languages, and also for the study of the mathematics,
+but should not enforce those studies on minds that have no vocation for
+such pursuits. There is now and then a born philologer, one who studies
+language for its own sake,--studies it perhaps in the spirit of "the
+scholar who regretted that he had not concentrated his life on the
+dative case." There are also exceptional natures that delight in
+mathematics, minds whose young affections run to angles and logarithms,
+and with whom the computation of values is itself the chief value in
+life. The College should accommodate either bias, to the top of its
+bent, but should not enforce either with compulsory twist. It should not
+insist on making every alumnus a linguist or a mathematician. If mastery
+of dead languages is not an indispensable part of polite education,
+mathematical learning is still less so. Excessive requirements in that
+department have not even the excuse of intellectual discipline. More
+important than mathematics to the general scholar is the knowledge of
+history, in which American scholars are so commonly deficient. More
+important is the knowledge of modern languages and of English
+literature. More important the knowledge of Nature and Art. May the
+science of sciences never want representatives as able as the learned
+gentlemen who now preside over that department in the mathematical and
+presidential chairs. Happy will it be for the University if they can
+inspire a love for the science in the pupils committed to their charge.
+But where inspiration fails, coercion can never supply its place. If the
+mathematics shall continue to reign at Harvard, may their empire become
+a law of liberty.
+
+I have ventured, fellow-graduates, to throw out these hints of
+University Reform, well aware of the opposition such views must
+encounter in deep-rooted prejudice and fixed routine; aware also of the
+rashness of attempting, within the limits of such an occasion, to
+grapple with such a theme; but strong in my conviction of the pressing
+need of a more emancipated scheme of instruction and discipline, based
+on the facts of the present and the real wants of American life. It is
+time that the oldest college in the land should lay off the _praetexta_
+of its long minority, and take its place among the universities,
+properly so called, of modern time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One thing more I have to say while standing in this presence. The
+College has a duty beyond its literary and scientific functions,--a duty
+to the nation,--a patriotic, I do not scruple to say a political duty.
+
+Time was when universities were joint estates of the realms they
+enlightened. The University of Paris was, in its best days, an
+association possessing authority second only to that of the Church. The
+faithful ally of the sovereigns of France against the ambition of the
+nobles and against the usurpations of Papal Rome, she bore the proud
+title of "The eldest Daughter of the King,"--_La Fille ainee du Roi_.
+She upheld the Oriflamme against the feudal gonfalons, and was largely
+instrumental in establishing the central power of the crown.[E] In the
+terrible struggle of Philip the Fair with Boniface VIII., she furnished
+the legal weapons of the contest. She furnished, in her Chancellor
+Gerson, the leading spirit of the Council of Constance. In the Council
+of Bale she obtained for France the "Pragmatic Sanction." Her voice was
+consulted on the question of the Salic Law; unhappily, also in the trial
+of Jeanne d'Arc; and when Louis XI. concluded a treaty of peace with
+Maximilian of Austria, the University of Paris was the guaranty on the
+part of France.
+
+Universities are no longer political bodies, but they may be still
+political powers,--centres and sources of political influence. Our own
+College in the time of the Revolution was a manifest power on the side
+of liberty, the political as well as academic mother of Otis and the
+Adamses. In 1768, "when the patronage of American manufactures was the
+test of patriotism," the Senior Class voted unanimously to take their
+degrees apparelled in the coarse cloths of American manufacture. In
+1776, the Overseers required of the professors a satisfactory account of
+their political faith. So much was then thought of the influence on
+young minds of the right or wrong views of political questions
+entertained by their instructors. The fathers were right. When the life
+of the nation is concerned,--in the struggle with foreign or domestic
+foes,--there is a right and a wrong in politics which casuistry may seek
+to confuse, but which sound moral sentiment cannot mistake, and which
+those who have schools of learning in charge should be held to respect.
+Better the College should be disbanded than be a nursery of treason.
+Better these halls even now should be levelled with the ground, than
+that any influence should prevail in them unfriendly to American
+nationality. No amount of intellectual acquirements can atone for
+defective patriotism. Intellectual supremacy alone will not avert the
+downfall of states. The subtlest intellect of Greece, the sage who could
+plan an ideal republic of austere virtue and perfect proportions, could
+not preserve his own; but the love of country inspired by Lycurgus kept
+the descendants of the Dorians free two thousand years after the
+disgrace of Chaeronea had sealed the fate of the rest of Greece.
+
+In my college days it was the fashion with some to think lightly of our
+American birthright, to talk disparagingly of republics, and to sigh for
+the dispositions and pomps of royalty.
+
+    "Sad fancies did we then affect
+    In luxury of disrespect
+    To our own prodigal excess
+    Of too familiar happiness."
+
+All such nonsense, if it had not already yielded to riper reason, would
+ere this have been washed out of us by the blood of a hundred thousand
+martyrs. The events of recent years have enkindled, let us hope, quite
+other sentiments in the youth of this generation. May those sentiments
+find ample nutriment within these precincts evermore.
+
+Soon after the conquest of American independence, Governor Hancock, in
+his speech at the inauguration of President Willard, eulogized the
+College as having "been in some sense the parent and nurse of the late
+happy Revolution in this Commonwealth." Parent and nurse of American
+nationality,--such was the praise accorded to Harvard by one of the
+foremost patriots of the Revolution! Never may she cease to deserve that
+praise! Never may the Mother refuse to acknowledge the seed herself has
+propagated! Never may her seed be repelled by the Mother's altered mind!
+
+    "Mutatam ignorent subito ne semina matrem."
+
+When Protagoras came to Athens to teach in the university as
+self-appointed professor, or sophist, according to the fashion of that
+time, it was not to instruct Athenian youth in music or geometry or
+astronomy, but to teach them the art of being good citizens,--[Greek:
+Ten politiken technen, kai poiein andras agathous politas.] That was his
+profession. With which, as we read, Hippocrates was so well pleased,
+that he called up Socrates in the middle of the night to inform him of
+the happy arrival. We have no professorship at Cambridge founded for the
+express purpose of making good citizens. In the absence of such, may all
+the professorships work together for that end. The youth intrusted to
+their tutelage are soon to take part, if not as legislators, at least
+as freemen, in the government of our common land. May the dignity and
+duty and exceeding privilege of an American citizen be impressed upon
+their minds by all the influences that rule this place! Trust me,
+Alumni, the country will thank the University more for the loyalty her
+influences shall foster, than for all the knowledge her schools may
+impart. Learning is the costly ornament of states, but patriotism is the
+life of a nation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] The History of Harvard University, by Josiah Quincy, LL. D., Vol. I.
+pp. 42, 43. All the facts relating to the history of the College are
+taken from this work.
+
+[B] The Office and Work of Universities, by John Henry Newman.
+
+[C] St. Augustine records his connection, when a student at Carthage,
+with the "Eversores" (Destructives), an association which flourished at
+that university.
+
+[D] Raumer's "History of German Universities." Translated by Frederic B.
+Perkins.
+
+[E] "C'est ainsi que peu a peu ils [that is, "les lettres"] parvinrent a
+sapper les fondements du pouvoir feodal et a elever l'etendard royal la
+ou flottait la banniere du baron."--_Histoire de l'Universite_, par M.
+Eugene Dubarle, Vol. I. p. 135.
+
+
+
+
+THE VOICE.
+
+
+    A saintly Voice fell on my ear,
+    Out of the dewy atmosphere:--
+    "O hush, dear Bird of Night, be mute,--
+    Be still, O throbbing heart and lute!"
+    The Night-Bird shook the sparkling dew
+    Upon me as he ruffed and flew:
+    My heart was still, almost as soon,
+    My lute as silent as the moon:
+    I hushed my heart, and held my breath,
+    And would have died the death of death,
+    To hear--but just once more--to hear
+    That Voice within the atmosphere.
+
+    Again The Voice fell on my ear,
+    Out of the dewy atmosphere!--
+    The same words, but half heard at first,--
+    I listened with a quenchless thirst;
+    And drank as of that heavenly balm,
+    The Silence that succeeds a psalm:
+    My soul to ecstasy was stirred:--
+    It was a Voice that I had heard
+    A thousand blissful times before;
+    But deemed that I should hear no more
+    Till I should have a spirit's ear,
+    And breathe another atmosphere!
+
+    Then there was Silence in my ear,
+    And Silence in the atmosphere,
+    And silent moonshine on the mart,
+    And Peace and Silence in my heart:
+    But suddenly a dark Doubt said,
+    "The fancy of a fevered head!"
+    A wild, quick whirlwind of desire
+    Then wrapt me as in folds of fire.
+    I ran the strange words o'er and o'er,
+    And listened breathlessly once more:
+    And lo, the third time I did hear
+    The same words in the atmosphere!
+
+    They fell and died upon my ear,
+    As dew dies on the atmosphere;
+    And then an intense yearning thrilled
+    My Soul, that all might be fulfilled:
+    "Where art thou, Blessed Spirit, where?--
+    Whose Voice is dew upon the air!"
+    I looked, around me, and above,
+    And cried aloud: "Where art thou, Love?
+    O let me see thy living eye,
+    And clasp thy living hand, or die!"--
+    Again upon the atmosphere
+    The self-same words fell: "_I Am Here._"
+
+    "Here? Thou art here, Love!"--"_I Am Here._"
+    The echo died upon my ear!
+    I looked around me--everywhere,--
+    But ah! there was no mortal there!
+    The moonlight was upon the mart,
+    And awe and wonder in my heart.
+    I saw no form!--I only felt
+    Heaven's Peace upon me as I knelt,
+    And knew a Soul Beatified
+    Was at that moment by my side:--
+    And there was Silence in my ear,
+    And Silence in the atmosphere!
+
+
+
+
+LIFE ASSURANCE.
+
+
+One of the subjects which for some time has commanded the public
+attention is that of Life Assurance: the means by which a man may,
+through a moderate annual expenditure, make provision for his family
+when death shall have deprived them of his protection.
+
+The number of companies organized for this purpose, their annual
+increase, the assiduity with which their agents press their respective
+claims, the books, pamphlets, and circulars which are disseminated, and
+the large space occupied by their announcements in the issues of the
+press, all unite in creating a spirit of inquiry on this interesting
+subject. We propose in this article to submit a few statements, the
+collection of which has been greatly furthered by recourse to the
+treatises of Babbage, Park, Duer, Ellis, Angell, Bunyon, Blayney, and
+other writers on insurance.
+
+In the early history of insurance, objection was continually made that
+it was of the nature of a wager, and consequently not only unlawful, but
+_contra bonos mores_; yet the courts of law in England from the first
+drew a distinction between a wager and a contract founded on the
+principle of indemnity, which principle runs through and underlies the
+whole subject of insurance. Lord Mansfield denominated insurance "a
+contract upon speculation," and it has universally been considered as a
+contract of indemnity against loss or damage arising from some uncertain
+and future events.
+
+Insurance may be defined generally as "a contract by which one of the
+parties binds himself to the other to pay him a sum of money, or
+otherwise indemnify him, in the case of the happening of a fortuitous
+event provided for in a general or special manner in the contract, in
+consideration of the sum of money which the latter party pays or binds
+himself to pay"; or, in the words of an eminent English judge, "It is a
+contract to protect men against uncertain events which in any wise may
+be a disadvantage to them."
+
+The contract securing this indemnity is called a policy, from the
+Italian _polizza d' assicurazione_, or _di sicurta_, which signifies a
+memorandum in writing, or bill of security. The sum paid for the
+indemnity is called a premium, or price; the party taking upon himself
+the risk being termed the underwriter, because his name is written at
+the bottom of the policy, while the person protected by the instrument
+is called the assured. Says one, "The premium paid by the latter and the
+peril assumed by the former are two correlatives inseparable from each
+other, and the union constitutes the essence of the contract."
+
+Some writers, Mr. Babbage among others, use the words "assurance" and
+"insurance" as having distinct meanings; but with all underwriters at
+this day they are considered synonymous.
+
+Insurance in the first instance was exclusively maritime, and great
+efforts have been made to prove its antiquity. Some have endeavored, by
+appeals to Livy, Suetonius, Ulpian, and Cicero, to show that insurance
+was in use in ancient Rome, and that it was invented at Rhodes a
+thousand years before the Christian era; while others claim that it
+existed at Tyre, Carthage, Corinth, Athens, and Alexandria.
+
+There is little doubt, however, that it was first practised by the
+Lombards, and was introduced into England by a Lombard colony, which in
+the thirteenth century settled in London, and controlled entirely the
+foreign trade of the kingdom. After the great fire in London, in 1666,
+the protection hitherto afforded by insurance to ships only was extended
+to goods and houses; and insurance as a contract of indemnity was
+subsequently extended to human life.
+
+It is a singular fact that the subject of effecting insurance on lives
+was largely and excitingly discussed on the continent of Europe before
+it had attracted the slightest attention in England; yet at this day it
+prevails throughout Great Britain, while upon the Continent it is
+comparatively unknown; its operations there being chiefly confined to
+France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.
+
+In Holland, as early as 1681, Van Hadden and De Witt produced elaborate
+works upon the subject, while no publication appeared in England until
+twenty years after. These writers were followed by Struyck, in 1740, and
+by Kirseboon, in 1743; while Parcieux, father and son, St. Cyran, and
+Duvillard, in France, with Euler, Suchmilch, and Wargentin, in Germany,
+were with great ability pressing the subject upon the notice of their
+countrymen. But these efforts led to no practical results, and it was
+reserved for England at a later day to illustrate the principles of life
+assurance, and enable the public to enjoy extensively its privileges.
+
+Policies of life assurance were issued in England before any companies
+were organized to prosecute the business. Like marine policies, they
+were subscribed by one or more individuals; and the first case we find
+is that of a ship captain, in 1641, whose life had been insured by two
+persons who had become his bail. The policy was subscribed by individual
+underwriters, and an able author observes that the case singularly
+illustrates the connection which probably once existed between life and
+maritime insurance, and shows how naturally the latter may have sprung
+from the former.
+
+No business, with the exception, perhaps, of the express system and of
+photography, has grown in the United States so rapidly as that of life
+assurance. There is scarcely a State that has not one or more companies
+organized for the prosecution of this business. There are six chartered
+under the laws of Massachusetts, and twenty-six of those organized in
+other States are doing business in this Commonwealth, These companies
+had in force, November 1, 1865, 211,537 policies, assuring the sum of
+$563,396,862.30. In 1830 the New York Life and Trust Company was the
+only life assurance company in New York. At the close of the year 1865
+there were eighteen companies chartered under the laws of that State.
+They had 101,780 policies in force, assuring the sum of $289,846,316.50,
+while their gross combined assets reach the sum of $32,296,832.03.
+
+An insurance upon life is defined as "a contract by which the
+underwriter, for a certain sum proportioned to the age, health,
+profession, and other circumstances of the person whose life is the
+object of insurance, engages that that person shall not die within the
+time limited in the policy; or if he do, that he will pay a sum of money
+to him in whose favor the policy was granted."
+
+A person desiring to effect an insurance on his life usually procures
+from the office in which he proposes to insure a blank form, containing
+a series of interrogatories, all of which must be answered in writing by
+the applicant. To these answers must be appended the certificate of his
+usual medical attendant as to his present and general state of health,
+with a like certificate from an intimate personal friend. The party is
+then subjected to an examination by the medical examiner of the company,
+and, if the application is in all respects satisfactory, a policy is
+issued.
+
+On the death of the party assured, and due proof being made thereof, the
+company must pay the full sum insured. The time fixed for this payment
+varies with different companies. Some agree to pay at thirty, some at
+sixty, and some at ninety days after the proofs of death have been
+received and duly approved.
+
+The peculiarity of life assurance companies is, that they are required
+to pay the entire sum assured on the happening of a single event, making
+the loss a total one; but in fire and marine policies there is a
+distinction made between total and partial loss.
+
+A clause is usually inserted declaring the policy void in case the
+assured should fall in a duel, die by the hands of justice, or by his
+own hand, or while engaged in the violation of any public law. An
+interesting case in point is reported in the English books. On the 25th
+of November, 1824, Henry Fauntleroy, a celebrated banker in London, was
+executed for forgery. The Amicable Society of London, the first company
+established in England, had written a policy on his life, upon which all
+the premiums had been paid. The rules of the company declared that in
+such cases the policy was vitiated, but the clause was not inserted in
+the instrument. The company resisted payment, but a decision was given
+sustaining the validity of the contract, which was, however, reversed,
+on an appeal being made to the House of Lords.
+
+This clause, declaring a policy void in case the assured commits
+suicide, has given rise to much litigation. Some companies use the word
+"suicide," while others insert the words "shall die by his own hand";
+but the courts of law in various adjudications have considered the
+expressions as amounting to the same thing. The word "suicide" is not to
+be found in any English author anterior to the reign of Charles II.
+Lexicographers trace it to the Latin word _suicidum_, though that word
+does not appear in the older Latin dictionaries. It is really derived
+from two Latin words, _se_ and _caedere_,--to slay one's self. The great
+commentator on English law, Sir William Blackstone, defines suicide to
+be "the act of designedly destroying one's own life. To constitute
+suicide, the person must be of years of discretion and of sound mind."
+
+In a case submitted to the Supreme Court of the State of New York,
+Chief-Justice Nelson settled the whole question. A life company
+resisted payment of the amount specified in their policy, on the ground
+that the assured had committed suicide by drowning himself in the Hudson
+River. To this it was replied, that, when he so drowned himself, he was
+of unsound mind, and wholly unconscious of the act.
+
+Judge Nelson, after stating the question to be whether the act of
+self-destruction by a man in a fit of insanity can be deemed a death by
+his own hand within the meaning of the policy, decided that it could not
+be so considered. That the terms "commit suicide," and "die by his own
+hand," as used indiscriminately by different companies, express the same
+idea, and are so understood by writers in this branch of law. That
+self-destruction by a man bereft of reason can with no more propriety be
+ascribed to the act of his own hand, than to the deadly instrument that
+may have been used for the purpose. That the drowning was no more the
+act of the assured, in the sense of the law, than if he had been
+impelled by irresistible physical power; and that the company could be
+no more exempt from payment, than if his death had been occasioned by
+any uncontrollable means. That suicide involved the deliberate
+termination of one's existence while in the full possession of the
+mental faculties. That self-slaughter by an insane man or a lunatic was
+not suicide within the meaning of the law.
+
+This opinion of Judge Nelson was subsequently affirmed by the Court of
+Appeals.
+
+The whole current of legal decisions, the suggestions thrown out by
+learned judges, and the growing opinion that no sane man would be guilty
+of self-slaughter, have induced several new companies to exclude this
+proviso from their policies, while many older ones have revised their
+policies and eliminated the obnoxious clause. It is not that any man
+contemplates the commission of suicide; but every one feels that, if
+there should be laid upon him that most fearful of all afflictions,
+insanity, or if, when suffering from disease, he should, in the frenzy
+of delirium, put an end to his existence, every principle of equity
+demands that the faithful payments of years should not be lost to his
+family.
+
+Another important principle, which has involved much discussion, is,
+that "the party insuring upon a life must have an interest in the life
+insured." Great latitude has been given in the construction of the law
+as to this point; the declaration of a real, subsisting interest being
+all that is required by the underwriters. In fact, the offices are
+constantly taking insurances where the interest is upon a contingency
+which may very shortly be determined, and if the parties choose to
+continue the policy, _bona fide_, after the interest ceases, they never
+meet with any difficulty in recovering. So also offices frequently grant
+policies upon interests so slender that, although it may be difficult to
+deny some kind of interest, it is such as a court of law would scarcely
+recognize. This practice of paying upon policies without raising the
+question of interest is so general, that it has even been allowed in
+courts of law.
+
+The great advantages derived from life assurance are proved by its rapid
+progress, both in Great Britain and the United States, after its
+principles had once been fully explained. As already stated, the first
+society for the general assurance of life was the Amicable, founded in
+1706; but, most unreasonably, its rates of premium were made uniform for
+all ages assured; nor was any fixed amount guaranteed in case of death.
+Hence very little was done; and it was not until 1780 that the business
+of life assurance may be said to have fairly begun. Since then,
+companies have been formed from time to time, so that at present there
+are in Great Britain some two hundred in active operation, and the
+amount assured upon life is estimated at more than L200,000,000.
+
+In America, the first life-assurance company open to all was the
+Pennsylvania, established in 1812. And though many others, devoted in
+whole or in part to this object, were formed in the interim, so little
+pains was taken to inform the public upon the system, that in 1842 the
+amount assured probably did not exceed $5,000,000. But, in a Christian
+country, all material enterprises go swiftly forward, and of late years
+the progress of life assurance has equalled that of railroads and
+telegraphs; so that there are in the United States at least fifty
+companies, which are disbursing in claims, chiefly to widows and
+orphans, about five millions of dollars annually.
+
+With this large extension of business, the fundamental principles of
+life assurance are now universally agreed on; but, in carrying them out,
+there are differences deserving attention.
+
+Life-assurance companies may be divided into three classes,--the stock,
+the mutual, and the mixed. In the stock company, the management is in
+the hands of the stockholders, or their agents, with whom the applicant
+for insurance contracts to pay so much while living, in consideration of
+a certain sum to be paid to his representatives at his death; and here
+his connection with it ceases; the profits of the business being divided
+among the stockholders. In the mutual company the assured themselves
+receive all the surplus premium or profit. The law of the State of New
+York passed in 1849 requires that all life-insurance companies organized
+in the State shall have a capital of at least one hundred thousand
+dollars. Mutual life-insurance companies organized in that State since
+1849 pay only seven per cent on their capital, which their stock by
+investment may produce. In the mixed companies there are various
+combinations of the principles peculiar to the other two. They differ
+from the mutual companies only in the fact that, besides paying the
+stockholders legal interest, they receive a portion of the profits of
+the business, which in some cases in this country has caused the capital
+stock to appreciate in value over three hundred per cent, and in England
+over five hundred per cent.
+
+To decide which of these is most advantageous to the assured, we must
+consider the subject of premiums, and understand whence companies derive
+their surplus, or, as it is sometimes called, the profits. This is
+easily explained. As the liability to death increases with age, the
+proper annual premium for assurance would increase with each year of
+life. But as it is important not to burden age too heavily, and as it is
+simpler to pay a uniform sum every year, a mean rate is taken,--one too
+little for old age, but greater than is absolutely necessary to cover
+the risk in the first years of the assurance. Hence the company receives
+at first more than it has to pay, and thus accumulates funds to provide
+for the time when its payments will naturally be in excess of its
+receipts. Now these funds may be invested so as of themselves to produce
+an income, and the increase thence derived may, by the magical power of
+compound interest, reaching through a long series of years, become very
+large. In forming rates of premium, regard is had to this; but, to gain
+security in a contract which may extend far into the future, it is
+prudent to base the calculations on so low a rate of interest that there
+can be a certainty of obtaining it. The rate adopted is usually three
+per cent in England, and four or five per cent in this country. But, in
+point of fact, the American companies now obtain on secure investments
+six or seven per cent.
+
+Again, in order to cover expenses and provide against possible
+contingencies, it is common to add to the rates obtained by calculation
+from correct tables of mortality a certain percentage, called _loading_,
+which is usually found more than is necessary, and forms a second source
+of profit.
+
+Again, most tables of mortality are derived from the experience of whole
+communities, while all companies now subject applicants to a medical
+examination, and reject those found diseased; it being possible to
+discover, through the progress of medical science, even incipient signs
+of disease. Hence one would expect that among these selected lives the
+rates of mortality would be less than by ordinary statistics; and this
+is confirmed by the published experience of many companies. Here we find
+a third source of profit.
+
+In these three ways, and others incidental to the business, it happens
+that all corporations managed with ordinary prudence accumulate a much
+larger capital than is needed for future losses. The advocates of the
+stock plan contend that, by a low rate of premium, they furnish their
+assured with a full equivalent for that division of profits which is the
+special boast of other companies. In a corporation purely mutual, the
+whole surplus is periodically applied to the benefit of the assured,
+either by a dividend in cash, or by equitable additions to the amount
+assured without increase of premium, or by deducting from future
+premiums, while the amount assured remains the same. The advantages of
+the latter system must be evident to every one.
+
+It is of course important in all companies, whether mutual or not, that
+the officers should be men of integrity, sagacity, and financial
+experience, as well as that due precautions should be taken in the care
+and investment of the company's fund; and it is now proved by experience
+in this country, that, when a company is thus managed, so regular are
+the rates of mortality, so efficient the safeguards derived from the
+selection of lives, the assumption of low rates of interest, and the
+loading of premiums, that no company, when once well established, has
+ever met with disaster. On the other hand, there has been a rapid
+accretion of funds, in some instances to the amount of many millions of
+dollars. The characteristics of a good company are security and
+assurance at cost. It should sell, not policies merely, but assurance;
+and it should not make a profit for the capitalist out of the widow and
+orphan.
+
+The policies issued by life companies vary in their form and nature. The
+ordinary one is called the life policy, by which the company contracts
+to pay, on the death of the assured, the sum named in the policy, to the
+person in whose behalf the assurance is made.
+
+In mutual (cash) companies, when the premium has been paid in full for
+about sixteen years, judging from past experience, the policy-holder may
+expect that his annual dividend on policy and additions will exceed the
+annual premium, thus obviating the necessity of further payments to the
+company, while his policy annually increases in amount for the remainder
+of life. But, on the contrary, when the dividends have been anticipated,
+as in the note system, by giving a note for part of the premium, the
+policy-holder insuring in this way, although he may at first receive a
+larger policy than he has the ability to pay for in cash, may lose the
+chief benefit of life insurance. For should he become unable, either by
+age, disease, or loss of property, to continue the payment of his
+premiums, his policy must lapse, because there is no accumulation of
+profits to his credit on which it can be continued.
+
+In other forms of life policies, called "Non-forfeitable," premiums are
+made payable in "one," "five," or "ten" annual payments. In all cash
+companies, and in some of the note companies, after the specified number
+of premiums have been paid, the policy-holder draws an annual dividend
+in cash.
+
+A further advantage arising from this plan is, that the policy-holder,
+at any time after two annual payments have been made, is always entitled
+to a "paid-up" policy for as many "fifths" or "tenths" of the sum
+assured as he shall have paid annual premiums. For example: a
+"five-annual-payment policy" for $10,000, on which three premiums had
+been paid, would entitle the holder to a "paid-up policy" for $6,000; a
+"ten-annual-payment policy" for $10,000, on which three payments had
+been made, would entitle the holder to $3,000; and so on for any number
+of payments and for any amount, in accordance with the face of the
+policy.
+
+Another form is denominated the Endowment Policy, in which the amount
+assured is payable when the party attains a certain age, or at death,
+should he die before reaching that age. This policy is rapidly gaining
+favor, as it provides for the man himself in old age, or for his family
+in case of his death. It is also fast becoming a favorite form of
+investment. We can show instances where the policy-holders have received
+a _surplus_ above all they have paid to the company, with compound
+interest at six per cent, and no charge whatever for expenses or cost of
+insurance meanwhile.
+
+The Term Policy, as its name implies, is issued for a term of one or
+more years.
+
+Policies are also issued on joint lives, payable at the death of the
+first of two or more parties named in the policy; and on survivorship,
+payable to a party named in case he survives another.
+
+Some companies require all premiums to be paid in cash, while others
+take the note of the assured in part payment. These are denominated cash
+and note companies, and much difference of opinion exists as to their
+comparative merits.
+
+The latter is at first sight an attractive system, and its advocates
+present many specious arguments in its favor. The friends of cash
+payments, however, contend that the note system is detrimental and
+delusive, from the fact that these notes are liable to assessment, and,
+in case of death, to be deducted from the amount assured; also that the
+notes accumulate as the years roll on, the interest growing annually
+larger, and the total cash payment consequently heavier, while the
+actual amount of assurance, that is, the difference between its nominal
+amount and the sum of the notes, steadily lessens; and thus a provision
+for one's family gradually changes into a burden upon one's self.
+
+But whatever differences of opinion may exist as to the comparative
+value of various systems, few will deny the advantages which life
+assurance has conferred upon the public, especially in America, whose
+middle classes, ambitiously living up to their income, are rich mostly
+in their labor and their homesteads,--in their earnings rather than
+their savings; and whose wealthy classes are rich chiefly through the
+giddy uncertainties of speculation,--magnificent to-day, in ruins
+to-morrow. In a country like this, no one can estimate the amount of
+comfort secured by investment in life assurance. It is the one measure
+of thrift which remains to atone for our extravagance in living and
+recklessness in trade.
+
+Henry Ward Beecher spoke wisely when he advised all men to seek life
+assurance. He says:--
+
+"It is every man's duty to provide for his family. That provision must
+include its future contingent condition. That provision, in so far as it
+is material, men ordinarily seek to secure by their own accumulations
+and investments. But all these are uncertain. The man that is rich
+to-day, by causes beyond his reach is poor to-morrow. A war in China, a
+revolution in Europe, a rebellion in America, overrule ten thousand
+fortunes in every commercial community.
+
+"But _in life assurance there are no risks or contingencies_. Other
+investments may fail. A house may burn down. Banks may break; and their
+stock be worthless. Bonds and mortgages may be seized for debt, and all
+property or evidences of property may fall into the bottomless gulf of
+bankruptcy. But money secured to your family by life assurance will go
+to them without fail or interruption, provided you have used due
+discretion in the selection of a sound and honorable assurance company.
+Of two courses, one of which _may_ leave your family destitute, and the
+other of which _assures_ them a comfortable support at your decease, can
+there be a doubt which is to be chosen? Can there be a doubt about
+duty?"
+
+
+
+
+A DISTINGUISHED CHARACTER.
+
+
+In order to prevent conjectures which might not be entirely pleasant to
+one or two persons whom I have in my mind, I prefer to state, at once
+and frankly, that I, Dionysius Green, am the author of this article. It
+requires some courage to make this avowal, I am well aware; and I am
+prepared to experience a rapid diminution of my present rather extensive
+popularity. One result I certainly foresee, namely, a great falling-off
+in the number of applications for autographs ("accompanied with a
+sentiment"), which I daily receive; possibly, also, fewer invitations to
+lecture before literary societies next winter. Fortunately, my recent
+marriage enables me to dispense with a large portion of my popularity,
+without great inconvenience; or, rather, I am relieved from the very
+laborious necessity of maintaining it in the face of so many aggressive
+rivalries.
+
+The day may arrive, therefore, when I shall cease to be a Distinguished
+Character. Since I have admitted this much, I may as well confess that
+my reputation--enviable as it may be considered by the public--is of
+that kind which seems to be meant to run for a certain length of time,
+at the expiration whereof it must be wound up again. I was fortunate
+enough to discover this secret betimes, and I have since then known
+several amiable and worthy persons to slip out of sight, from the lack
+of it. There was Mr. ----, for example, whose comic articles shook the
+fat sides of the nation for one summer, and whose pseudonyme was in
+everybody's mouth. Alas! what he took for perpetual motion was but an
+eight-day clock, and I need not call your attention to the present dead
+and leaden stillness of its pendulum.
+
+Although my earliest notoriety was achieved in very much the same
+way,--that is, by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no
+doubt remember,--I soon perceived the unstable character of my
+reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in
+inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in
+literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. They tickle the
+palates of the multitude for a while, but they don't wear like the plain
+old beverages. I saw very plainly, that much more was to be gained, in
+the long run, by planting myself--not with a sudden and startling jump,
+but by a graceful, cautious pirouette--upon a basis of the Moral and the
+Didactic. I should thus reach a class of slow, but very tough stomachs,
+which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to
+offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever:
+they always mistake their mental gripings for the process of digestion.
+Why, bless your souls! I have known Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy" to
+fill one of them to repletion, for the space of ten years!
+
+I owe this resolution to my natural acuteness of perception, but my
+success in carrying it into execution was partly the result of luck. The
+field, now occupied by such a crowd, (I name no names,) was at that time
+nearly clear; and I managed to shift my costume before the public fairly
+knew what I was about. I found, indeed, that a combination of the two
+styles enabled me to retain much of my old audience while acquiring the
+new. It was like singing a hymn of serious admonition to a lively,
+rattling tune. One is diverted: there is a present sense of fun, while a
+gentle feeling of the grave truths inculcated lingers in one's mind
+afterwards. The pious can find no fault with the matter, nor the profane
+with the manner. Instead of approaching the moral consciousness of
+one's readers with stern, lugubrious countenance, and ponderous or
+lamentable voice, you make your appearance with a smile and a joke,
+punch the reader playfully in the ribs, and say, as it were, "Ha! ha!
+I've a good thing to tell you!" Although I have many imitators, some of
+whom have attained an excellence in the art which may be considered
+classic, yet I may fairly claim to have originated this branch of
+literature, and, while it retains its present unbounded popularity, my
+name cannot wholly perish.
+
+Nevertheless, greatness has its drawbacks. I appeal to all distinguished
+authors, from Tupper to Weenie Willows, to confirm the truth of this
+assertion. I have sometimes, especially of late, doubted seriously
+whether it is a good thing to be distinguished. Alas! my dear young
+gentleman and lady, whose albums would be so dismally incomplete without
+my autograph ("accompanied with a sentiment"), would that you could
+taste the bitter with the sweet,--the honey and aloes of an American
+author's life! At first, it is exceedingly pleasant. You are like a
+newly-hatched chicken, or a pup at the end of his nine-days' blindness.
+You are petted, and stroked, and called sweet names, and fed with
+dainties, and carried in the arms of the gentlemen, and cuddled in the
+laps of the ladies. But when you get to be a big dog or a full-grown
+game-cock, take care! If people would but fancy that you still wore your
+down or silken skin, they might continue to be delighted with every
+gambol of your fancy. But they suspect pin-feathers and bristles,
+whether the latter grow or not; and, after doing their best to spoil
+you, they suddenly demand the utmost propriety of behavior. However, let
+me not anticipate. I can still call myself, without the charge of
+self-flattery, a Distinguished Character; at least I am told so, every
+day, each person who makes the remark supposing that it is an entirely
+original and most acceptable compliment. While this distinction lasts,
+(for I find that I lose it in proportion as I gain in sound knowledge
+and independent common-sense,) I should like to describe, for the
+contemplation of future ages, some of the penalties attached to
+popularity at present.
+
+I was weak enough, I admit, to be immensely delighted with the first
+which I experienced,--not foreseeing whitherward they led. The timid,
+enthusiastic notes of girls of fifteen, with the words "sweet" and
+"exquisite," duly underscored, the letters of aspiring boys, enclosing
+specimens of their composition, and the touching pleas of individuals of
+both sexes, in reduced circumstances, were so many evidences of success,
+which I hugged to my bosom. Reducing the matter to statistics, I have
+since ascertained that about one in ten of these letters is dictated
+either by honest sympathy, the warm, uncritical recognition of youth
+(which I don't suppose any author would diminish, if he could), or the
+craving for encouragement, under unpropitious circumstances of growth.
+But how was I, in the beginning, to guess at the motives of the writers?
+They offered sugar-plums, which I swallowed without a suspicion of the
+drastic ingredients so many of them contained. Good Mrs. Sigourney kept
+a journal of her experiences in this line. I wish I had done the same.
+
+The young lady correspondent, I find, in most cases replies to your
+reply, proposing a permanent correspondence. The young gentleman, who
+desires, above all things, your "_candid opinion_ of the poems
+enclosed,--be sure and point out the _faults_, and how they can be
+_improved_"--is highly indignant when you take him at his word, and do
+so. You receive a letter of defence and explanation, showing that what
+you consider to be faults are not such. Moreover, his friends have
+assured him that the poem which you advise him to omit is one of his
+finest things! The distressed aspirant for literary fame, who only
+requests that you shall read and correct his or her manuscript, procure
+a publisher, and prefix a commendatory notice, signed with your name,
+to the work, writes that he or she is at last undeceived in regard to
+the character of authors. "I thank you, Mr. Green, for the _lesson_! The
+remembrance of _your_ former struggles is _happily_ effaced in your
+present success. It is hard for a heart throbbing with warmth to be
+chilled, and a guileless confidence in human brotherhood to be crushed
+forever! I will strive to bury my disappointed hopes in my own darkened
+bosom; and that you may be saved from the experience which you have
+prepared for another, is the wish of, _Sir_, yours, ----."
+
+For a day or two I went about with a horrible feeling of dread and
+remorse. I opened the morning paper with trembling hands, and only
+breathed freely when I found no item headed "Suicide" in the columns. A
+year afterwards, chance threw me in the way of my broken-hearted victim.
+I declare to you I never saw a better specimen of gross animal health.
+She--no, he (on second thoughts, I won't say which)--was at an evening
+party, laughing boisterously, with a plate of chicken-salad in one hand
+and a glass of champagne in the other.
+
+One of my first admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me
+with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years
+before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of
+poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by
+writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,--the
+few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the
+result of excitement,--and why should he apply to me? O, there was a
+great deal of poetry in my prose, he said. My didactic paper called
+"Wait for the Wagon!" showed such a knowledge of metaphor! I looked over
+the innumerable leaves, here and there venturing the remark that "rain"
+and "shame" were not good rhymes, and that my friend's blank verse had
+now and then lines of four and six feet. "Poetic license, sir!" was the
+reply. "I thought you were aware that poets are bound to no rules!"
+
+What could I do with such a man? What, indeed, but to return him the
+manuscript with that combined gentleness and grace which I have
+endeavored to cultivate in my demeanor, and to suggest, in the tenderest
+way, that he should be content to write, and not publish? He got up,
+stiffened his backbone, placed his conventional hat hard upon his head,
+gave a look of mingled mortification and wrath, and hurried away without
+saying a word. That man, I assure you, will be my secret enemy to the
+day of his death. He is no doubt a literary authority in a small circle
+of equal calibre. When my name is mentioned, he will sneer down my
+rising fame, and his sneer will control the sale of half a dozen copies
+of my last volume.
+
+This is a business view of the subject, I grant; but then _I_ have
+always followed literature with an eye to business. The position of a
+popular writer is much more independent than that of a teacher or a
+clergyman, for which reason I prefer it. The same amount of intellect,
+made available in a different way, will produce material results just as
+satisfactory. Compensation, however, is the law of the world; hence I
+must pay for my independence; and this adventure with the old gentleman
+is one of the many forms in which the payment is made.
+
+When the applications for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I
+gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon
+an oracular sentence from one of my most popular papers. After a while
+my replies degenerated to "Sincerely, Your Friend, Dionysius Green," and
+finally, (daily blessings come at last to be disregarded,) no
+application was favored, which did not enclose a postage-stamp. When
+some school-boy requested an autograph, "accompanied with a sentiment,"
+and forwarded slips of paper on behalf of "two other boys," I sometimes
+lost my patience, and left the letters unanswered for a month at a
+time. There was a man in Tennessee, just before the war, who had a
+printed circular, with a blank for the author's name; and I know of one
+author who replied to him with a printed note, and a printed address on
+the envelope, not a word of manuscript about it!
+
+Next in frequency are the applications for private literary
+contributions,--such as epithalamia, obituaries, addresses for lovers,
+and the like. One mourning father wished me to write an article about
+the death of his little girl, aged four months, assuring me that "her
+intellect was the astonishment of all who knew her." A young lady wished
+for something that would "overwhelm with remorse the heart of a
+gentleman who had broken off an engagement without any cause." A young
+gentleman, about to graduate, offered five dollars for an oration on
+"The Past and Probable Future History of the Human Race," long enough to
+occupy twenty minutes in speaking, and "to be made very fine and
+flowery." (I had a mind to punish this youth by complying with his
+request, to the very letter!) It is difficult to say what people won't
+write about, when they write to a Distinguished Character.
+
+There is a third class of correspondents, whose requests used to
+astonish me profoundly, until I surmised that their object was to
+procure an autograph in a roundabout way. One wants to know who is the
+publisher of your book; one, whether you can give the post-office
+address of Gordon Cumming or Thomas Carlyle; one, which is the best
+Latin Grammar; one, whether you know the author of that exquisite poem,
+"The Isle of Tears"; and one, perhaps, whether Fanny Forrester was the
+grandmother of Fanny Fern. And when you consider that what letters I get
+are not a tithe of what older and more widely known authors receive, you
+may form some idea of the immense number of persons engaged in this sort
+of correspondence.
+
+But I have not yet come to the worst. So long as you live at home,
+whether it's in the city or country, (the city would be preferable, if
+you could keep your name out of the Directory,) the number of applicants
+in person is limited; and as for the letters, we know that the
+post-office department is very badly managed, and a great many epistles
+never reach their destination. Besides, it's astonishing how soon and
+how easily an author acquires the reputation of being unapproachable. If
+he don't pour out his heart, in unlimited torrents and cascades of
+feeling, to a curious stranger, the latter goes away with the report
+that the author, personally, is "icy, reserved, uncommunicative; in the
+man, one sees nothing of his works; it is difficult to believe that that
+cold, forbidding brow conceived, those rigid, unsmiling lips uttered,
+and that dry, bloodless hand wrote, the fervid passion of"--such or such
+a book. When I read a description of myself, written in that style, I
+was furious; but I afterwards noticed that the number of my visitors
+fell off very rapidly.
+
+Most of us American authors, however, now go to the people, instead of
+waiting for them to come to us. And this is what I mean by coming to the
+worst. Four or five years ago, I determined to talk as well as write.
+Everybody was doing it, and well paid; nothing seemed to be requisite
+except a little distinction, which I had already acquired by my comic
+and didactic writings. There was Mr. E---- declaiming philosophy; Drs.
+B---- and C---- occupying secular pulpits; Mr. C---- inculcating loftier
+politics; Mr. T---- talking about all sorts of countries and people; Mr.
+W---- reading his essays in public; and a great many more, whom you all
+know. Why should I not also "pursue the triumph and partake the gale"? I
+found that the lecture was in most cases an essay, written in short,
+pointed sentences, and pleasantly delivered. The audience must laugh
+occasionally, and yet receive an impression strong enough to last until
+next morning. The style which, as I said before, I claim to have
+invented, was the very thing! I noticed, further, that there was a
+great deal in the title of the lecture. It must be alliterative,
+antithetical, or, still better, paradoxical. There was profound skill in
+Artemus Ward's "Babes in the Wood." Such titles as "Doubts and Duties,"
+"Mystery and Muffins," "Here, There, and Nowhere," "The Elegance of
+Evil," "Sunshine and Shrapnel," "The Coming Cloud," "The Averted Agony,"
+and "Peeps at Peccadillos," will explain my meaning. The latter, in
+fact, was the actual title of my first lecture, which I gave with such
+signal success,--eighty-five times in one winter.
+
+The crowds that everywhere thronged to hear me gave me a new and
+delicious experience of popularity. How grand it was to be escorted by
+the president of the society down the central aisle, amid the rustling
+sound of turning heads, and audible whispers of "There he is! there he
+is!" And always, when the name of Dionysius Green was announced, the
+applause which followed! Then the hush of expectation, the faint smile
+and murmur coming with my first unexpected flash of humor
+(_unexpectedness_ is one of my strong points), the broad laugh breaking
+out just where I intended it, and finally the solemn peroration, which
+showed that I possessed depth and earnestness as well as brilliancy!
+Well, I must say that the applauses and the fees were honestly earned. I
+did my best, and the audiences must have been satisfied, or the
+societies wouldn't have invited me over and over again to the same
+place.
+
+If my literary style was so admirably adapted to this new vocation, it
+was, on the other hand, a source of great annoyance. Only a small class
+was sufficiently enlightened to comprehend my true aim in inculcating
+moral lessons under a partly humorous guise. All the rest,
+unfortunately, took me to be either one thing or the other. While some
+invited me to family prayer-meetings, as the most cheering and welcome
+relief after the fatigue of speaking, the rougher characters of the
+place would claim me (on the strength of my earlier writings) as one of
+themselves, would slap me on the back, call me familiarly "Dionysius,"
+and insist on my drinking with them. Others, again, occupied a middle or
+doubtful ground; they did not consider that my personal views were
+strictly defined, and wanted to be enlightened on this or that point of
+faith. They gave me a deal of trouble. Singularly enough, all these
+classes began their attacks with the same phrase, "O, we have a right to
+ask it of you: you're a Distinguished Character, you know!"
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that I am of rather a frail constitution:
+so many persons have seen me, that the public is generally aware of the
+fact. A lecture of an hour and a quarter quite exhausts my nervous
+energy. Moreover, it gives me a vigorous appetite, and my two
+overpowering desires, after speaking, are, first to eat, and then to
+sleep. But it frequently happens that I am carried, perforce, to the
+house of some good but ascetic gentleman, who gives me a glass of cold
+water, talks until midnight, and then delivers me, more dead than alive,
+to my bed. I am so sensitive in regard to the relation of guest and host
+that I can do naught but submit. Astraea, I am told, always asks for what
+she wants, and does what she feels inclined to do,--indeed, why
+shouldn't she?--but I am cast in a more timid mould.
+
+There are some small country places which I visit where I have other
+sufferings to undergo. Being a Distinguished Character, it would be a
+neglect and a slight if I were left alone for two minutes. And the
+people seem to think that the most delightful topic of conversation
+which they can select is--myself. How weary of myself I become! I have
+wished, a thousand times, that my popular work, "The Tin Trumpet," had
+never been written. I cannot blame the people, because there are ----
+and ----, who like nothing better than to be talked about to their
+faces, and to take the principal part in the conversation. Of course the
+people think, in regard to lecturers, _ex uno disce omnes_.
+
+In travelling by rail, the same thing happens over and over. When I
+leave a town in the morning, some one is sure to enter the car and greet
+me in a loud voice: "How are you, Mr. Green? What a fine lecture you
+gave us last night!" Then the other travellers turn and look at me,
+listen to catch my words, and tell the new-comers at every station,
+until I'm afraid to take a nap for fear of snoring, afraid to read lest
+somebody should be scandalized at my novel, or to lunch lest I should be
+reported as a drunkard for taking a sip of sherry (the physician
+prescribes it) from a pocket-flask. At such times I envy the fellow in
+homespun on the seat in front of me, who loafs, yawns, eats, and drinks
+as he pleases, and nobody gives him a second glance.
+
+When I am not recognized, I sometimes meet with another experience,
+which was a little annoying until I became accustomed to it. I am the
+subject of very unembarrassed conversation, and hear things said of me
+that sometimes flatter and sometimes sting. It is true that I have
+learned many curious and unsuspected facts concerning my birth,
+parentage, history, and opinions; but, on the other hand, I am
+humiliated by the knowledge of what texture a great deal of my
+reputation is made. Sometimes I am even confounded with Graves, whom, as
+an author, I detest; my "Tin Trumpet" being ascribed to him, and his
+"Drippings from the Living Rock" being admired as mine! At such times,
+it is very difficult to preserve my incognito. I have wondered that
+nobody ever reads the truth in my indignant face.
+
+As a consequence of all these trials, I sometimes become impatient,
+inaccessible to compliment, and--since the truth must be told--a little
+ill-tempered. My temperament, as my family and friends know, is of an
+unusually genial and amiable quality, and I never snub an innocent but
+indiscreet admirer without afterwards repenting of my rudeness. I have
+often, indeed, a double motive for repentance; for those snubs carry
+their operation far beyond their recipients, and come back to me
+sometimes, after months or even years, in "Book Notices," or other
+newspaper articles. Thus the serene path of literature, which the
+aspiring youth imagines to be so fair and sunny, overspread with the
+mellowest ideal tints, becomes rough and cloudy. No doubt I am to blame:
+possibly I am rightly treated: I "belong to the public," I am told with
+endless congratulatory iteration, and therefore I ought not to feel the
+difference between the public's original humoring of my moods, and my
+present enforced humoring of its moods. But I _do_ feel it, somehow. I
+have of late entertained the suspicion, that I am not wholly the
+creation of popular favor. "The public," I am sure, never furnished me
+with my comic or my lively-serious vein of writing. If either of those
+veins had not been found good, they would not have encouraged me to work
+them. I declare, boldly, that I give an ample return for what I get, and
+when I satisfy curiosity or yield to unreasonable demands upon my
+patience and good-humor, it is "to boot."
+
+Nevertheless, it is a generous public, on the whole, and gives trouble
+only through thoughtlessness, not malice. It delights in its favorites,
+because imagining that they so intensely enjoy its favor. And don't we,
+after all? (I say _we_ purposely, and my publisher will tell you why.)
+Now that I have written away my vexation, I recognize very clearly that
+my object in writing this article is apology rather than complaint. All
+whom I have ever rudely treated will now comprehend the unfortunate
+circumstances under which the act occurred. If some one should visit me
+to-morrow, I have no doubt he will write: "Mr. Dionysius Green is all,
+and more than all, one would anticipate from reading his charming works.
+Benevolence beams from his brow, fancy sparkles from his eyes, and
+genial sympathy with all mankind sits enthroned upon his lips. It was a
+rare pleasure to me to listen to his conversation, and I could but wish
+that the many thousands of his admirers might enjoy the privilege of an
+interview with so Distinguished a Character!"
+
+
+
+
+THE BOBOLINKS.
+
+
+    When Nature had made all her birds,
+      And had no cares to think on,
+    She gave a rippling laugh--and out
+      There flew a Bobolinkon.
+
+    She laughed again,--out flew a mate.
+      A breeze of Eden bore them
+    Across the fields of Paradise,
+      The sunrise reddening o'er them.
+
+    Incarnate sport and holiday,
+      They flew and sang forever;
+    Their souls through June were all in tune,
+      Their wings were weary never.
+
+    The blithest song of breezy farms,
+      Quaintest of field-note flavors,
+    Exhaustless fount of trembling trills
+      And demisemiquavers.
+
+    Their tribe, still drunk with air and light
+      And perfume of the meadow,
+    Go reeling up and down the sky,
+      In sunshine and in shadow.
+
+    One springs from out the dew-wet grass,
+      Another follows after;
+    The morn is thrilling with their songs
+      And peals of fairy laughter.
+
+    From out the marshes and the brook,
+      They set the tall reeds swinging,
+    And meet and frolic in the air,
+      Half prattling and half singing.
+
+    When morning winds sweep meadow lands
+      In green and russet billows,
+    And toss the lonely elm-tree's boughs,
+      And silver all the willows,
+
+    I see you buffeting the breeze,
+      Or with its motion swaying,
+    Your notes half drowned against the wind,
+      Or down the current playing.
+
+    When far away o'er grassy flats,
+      Where the thick wood commences,
+    The white-sleeved mowers look like specks
+      Beyond the zigzag fences,
+
+    And noon is hot, and barn-roofs gleam
+      White in the pale-blue distance,
+    I hear the saucy minstrels still
+      In chattering persistence.
+
+    When Eve her domes of opal fire
+      Piles round the blue horizon,
+    Or thunder rolls from hill to hill
+      A Kyrie Eleison,--
+
+    Still, merriest of the merry birds,
+      Your sparkle is unfading,--
+    Pied harlequins of June, no end
+      Of song and masquerading.
+
+    What cadences of bubbling mirth
+      Too quick for bar or rhythm!
+    What ecstasies, too full to keep
+      Coherent measure with them!
+
+    O could I share, without champagne
+      Or muscadel, your frolic,
+    The glad delirium of your joy,
+      Your fun un-apostolic,
+
+    Your drunken jargon through the fields,
+      Your bobolinkish gabble,
+    Your fine anacreontic glee,
+      Your tipsy reveller's babble!
+
+    Nay,--let me not profane such joy
+      With similes of folly,--
+    No wine of earth could waken songs
+      So delicately jolly!
+
+    O boundless self-contentment, voiced
+      In flying air-born bubbles!
+    O joy that mocks our sad unrest,
+      And drowns our earth-born troubles!
+
+    Hope springs with you: I dread no more
+      Despondency and dullness;
+    For Good Supreme can never fail
+      That gives such perfect fullness.
+
+    The Life that floods the happy fields
+      With song and light and color
+    Will shape our lives to richer states,
+      And heap our measures fuller.
+
+
+
+
+GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+She recoiled with a violent shudder at first; and hid her face with one
+hand. Then she gradually stole a horror-stricken side-glance.
+
+She had not looked at it a moment, when she uttered a loud cry, and
+pointed at its feet with quivering hand.
+
+"THE SHOES! THE SHOES!--IT IS NOT MY GRIFFITH."
+
+With this she fell into violent hysterics, and was carried out of the
+room at Houseman's earnest entreaty.
+
+As soon as she was gone, Mr. Houseman, being freed from his fear that
+his client would commit herself irretrievably, recovered a show of
+composure, and his wits went keenly to work.
+
+"On behalf of the accused," said he, "I admit the suicide of some person
+unknown, wearing heavy hobnailed shoes; probably one of the lower order
+of people."
+
+This adroit remark produced some little effect, notwithstanding the
+strong feeling against the accused.
+
+The coroner inquired if there were any bodily marks by which the remains
+could be identified.
+
+"My master had a long black mole on his forehead," suggested Caroline
+Ryder.
+
+"'Tis here!" cried a juryman, bending over the remains.
+
+And now they all gathered in great excitement round the _corpus
+delicti_; and there, sure enough, was a long black mole.
+
+Then was there a buzz of pity for Griffith Gaunt, followed by a stern
+murmur of execration.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the coroner solemnly, "behold in this the finger of
+Heaven. The poor gentleman may well have put off his boots, since, it
+seems, he left his horse; but he could not take from his forehead his
+natal sign; and that, by God's will, hath strangely escaped mutilation,
+and revealed a most foul deed. We must now do our duty, gentlemen,
+without respect of persons."
+
+A warrant was then issued for the apprehension of Thomas Leicester. And,
+that same night, Mrs. Gaunt left Hernshaw in her own chariot between two
+constables, and escorted by armed yeomen.
+
+Her proud head was bowed almost to her knees, and her streaming eyes
+hidden in her lovely hands. For why? A mob accompanied her for miles,
+shouting, "Murderess!--Bloody Papist!--Hast done to death the kindliest
+gentleman in Cumberland. We'll all come to see thee hanged.--Fair face
+but foul heart!"--and groaning, hissing, and cursing, and indeed only
+kept from violence by the escort.
+
+And so they took that poor proud lady and lodged her in Carlisle jail.
+
+She was _enceinte_ into the bargain. By the man she was to be hanged for
+murdering.
+
+
+CHAPTER XL.
+
+The county was against her, with some few exceptions. Sir George Neville
+and Mr. Houseman stood stoutly by her.
+
+Sir George's influence and money obtained her certain comforts in jail;
+and, in that day, the law of England was so far respected in a jail that
+untried prisoners were not thrown into cells, nor impeded, as they now
+are, in preparing their defence.
+
+Her two stanch friends visited her every day, and tried to keep her
+heart up.
+
+But they could not do it. She was in a state of dejection bordering upon
+lethargy.
+
+"If he is dead," said she, "what matters it? If, by God's mercy, he is
+alive still, he will not let me die for want of a word from him.
+Impatience hath been my bane. Now, I say, God's will be done. I am
+weary of the world."
+
+Houseman tried every argument to rouse her out of this desperate frame
+of mind; but in vain.
+
+It ran its course, and then, behold, it passed away like a cloud, and
+there came a keen desire to live and defeat her accusers.
+
+She made Houseman write out all the evidence against her; and she
+studied it by day, and thought of it by night, and often surprised both
+her friends by the acuteness of her remarks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Atkins discontinued his advertisements. It was Houseman, who now
+filled every paper with notices informing Griffith Gaunt of his
+accession to fortune, and entreating him for that, and other weighty
+reasons, to communicate in confidence with his old friend, John
+Houseman, attorney at law.
+
+Houseman was too wary to invite him to appear and save his wife; for, in
+that case, he feared the Crown would use his advertisements as evidence
+at the trial, should Griffith not appear.
+
+The fact is, Houseman relied more upon certain _lacunae_ in the evidence,
+and the absence of all marks of violence, than upon any hope that
+Griffith might be alive.
+
+The assizes drew near, and no fresh light broke in upon this mysterious
+case.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt lay in her bed at night, and thought and thought.
+
+Now the female understanding has sometimes remarkable power under such
+circumstances. By degrees Truth flashes across it, like lightning in the
+dark.
+
+After many such nightly meditations, Mrs. Gaunt sent one day for Sir
+George Neville and Mr. Houseman, and addressed them as follows:--"I
+believe he is alive, and that I can guess where he is at this moment."
+
+Both the gentlemen started, and looked amazed.
+
+"Yes, sirs; so sure as we sit here, he is now at a little inn in
+Lancashire, called the 'Packhorse,' with a woman he calls his wife."
+And, with this, her face was scarlet, and her eyes flashed their old
+fire.
+
+She exacted a solemn promise of secrecy from them, and then she told
+them all she had learned from Thomas Leicester.
+
+"And so now," said she, "I believe you can save my life, if you think it
+is worth saving." And with this, she began to cry bitterly.
+
+But Houseman, the practical, had no patience with the pangs of love
+betrayed, and jealousy, and such small deer, in a client whose life was
+at stake. "Great Heaven! madam," said he, roughly: "why did you not tell
+me this before?"
+
+"Because I am not a man--to go and tell everything, all at once," sobbed
+Mrs. Gaunt. "Besides, I wanted to shield his good name, whose dear life
+they pretend I have taken."
+
+As soon as she recovered her composure, she begged Sir George Neville to
+ride to the "Packhorse" for her. Sir George assented eagerly, but asked
+how he was to find it. "I have thought of that, too," said she. "His
+black horse has been to and fro. Ride that horse into Lancashire, and
+give him his head: ten to one but he takes you to the place, or where
+you may hear of it. If not, go to Lancaster, and ask about the
+'Packhorse.' He wrote to me from Lancaster: see." And she showed him the
+letter.
+
+Sir George embraced with ardor this opportunity of serving her. "I'll be
+at Hernshaw in one hour," said he, "and ride the black horse south at
+once."
+
+"Excuse me," said Houseman; "but would it not be better for me to go? As
+a lawyer, I may be more able to cope with her."
+
+"Nay," said Mrs. Gaunt, "Sir George is young and handsome. If he manages
+well, she will tell him more than she will you. All I beg of him is to
+drop the chevalier for this once, and see women with a woman's eyes and
+not a man's,--see them as they are. Do not go telling a creature of
+this kind that she has had my money, as well as my husband, and ought to
+pity me lying here in prison. Keep me out of her sight as much as you
+can. Whether Griffith hath deceived her or not, you will never raise in
+her any feeling but love for him, and hatred for his lawful wife. Dress
+like a yeoman; go quietly, and lodge in the house a day or two; begin by
+flattering her; and then get from her when she saw him last, or heard
+from him. But indeed I fear you will surprise him with her."
+
+"Fear?" exclaimed Sir George.
+
+"Well, hope, then," said the lady; and a tear trickled down her face in
+a moment. "But if you do, promise me, on your honor as a gentleman, not
+to affront him. For I know you think him a villain."
+
+"A d----d villain, saving your presence."
+
+"Well, sir, you have said it to me. Now promise me to say naught to
+_him_, but just this: 'Rose Gaunt's mother, she lies in Carlisle jail,
+to be tried for her life for murdering you. She begs of you not to let
+her die publicly upon the scaffold; but quietly at home, of her broken
+heart.'"
+
+"Write it," said Sir George, with the tears in his eyes, "that I may
+just put it in his hand; for I can never utter your sweet words to such
+a monster as he is."
+
+Armed with this appeal, and several minute instructions, which it is
+needless to particularize here, that stanch friend rode into Lancashire.
+
+And next day the black horse justified his mistress's sagacity, and his
+own.
+
+He seemed all along to know where he was going, and late in the
+afternoon he turned off the road on to a piece of green: and Sir George,
+with beating heart, saw right before him the sign of the "Packhorse,"
+and, on coming nearer, the words
+
+    THOMAS LEICESTER.
+
+He dismounted at the door, and asked if he could have a bed.
+
+Mrs. Vint said yes; and supper into the bargain, if he liked.
+
+He ordered a substantial supper directly.
+
+Mrs. Vint saw at once it was a good customer, and showed him into the
+parlor.
+
+He sat down by the fire. But the moment she retired, he got up and made
+a circuit of the house, looking quietly into every window, to see if he
+could catch a glance of Griffith Gaunt.
+
+There were no signs of him; and Sir George returned to his parlor
+heavy-hearted. One hope, the greatest of all, had been defeated
+directly. Still, it was just possible that Griffith might be away on
+temporary business.
+
+In this faint hope Sir George strolled about till his supper was ready
+for him.
+
+When he had eaten his supper, he rang the bell, and, taking advantage of
+a common custom, insisted on the landlord, Thomas Leicester, taking a
+glass with him.
+
+"Thomas Leicester!" said the girl. "He is not at home. But I'll send
+Master Vint."
+
+Old Vint came in, and readily accepted an invitation to drink his
+guest's health.
+
+Sir George found him loquacious, and soon extracted from him that his
+daughter Mercy was Leicester's wife, that Leicester was gone on a
+journey, and that Mercy was in care for him. "Leastways," said he, "she
+is very dull, and cries at times when her mother speaks of him; but she
+is too close to say much."
+
+All this puzzled Sir George Neville sorely.
+
+But greater surprises were in store.
+
+The next morning, after breakfast, the servant came and told him Dame
+Leicester desired to see him.
+
+He started at that, but put on nonchalance, and said he was at her
+service.
+
+He was ushered into another parlor, and there he found a grave, comely
+young woman, seated working, with a child on the floor beside her. She
+rose quietly; he bowed low and respectfully; she blushed faintly; but,
+with every appearance of self-possession, courtesied to him; then eyed
+him point-blank a single moment, and requested him to be seated.
+
+"I hear, sir," said she, "you did ask my father many questions last
+night. May I ask you one?"
+
+Sir George colored, but bowed assent.
+
+"From whom had you the black horse you ride?"
+
+Now, if Sir George had not been a veracious man, he would have been
+caught directly. But, although he saw at once the oversight he had
+committed, he replied, "I had him of a lady in Cumberland, one Mistress
+Gaunt."
+
+Mercy Vint trembled. "No doubt," said she, softly. "Excuse my question:
+you shall understand that the horse is well known here."
+
+"Madam," said Sir George, "if you admire the horse, he is at your
+service for twenty pounds, though indeed he is worth more."
+
+"I thank you, sir," said Mercy; "I have no desire for the horse
+whatever. And be pleased to excuse my curiosity: you must think me
+impertinent."
+
+"Nay, madam," said Sir George, "I consider nothing impertinent that hath
+procured me the pleasure of an interview with you."
+
+He then, as directed by Mrs. Gaunt, proceeded to flatter the mother and
+the child, and exerted those powers of pleasing which had made him
+irresistible in society.
+
+Here, however, he found they went a very little way. Mercy did not even
+smile. She cast out of her dove-like eyes a gentle, humble, reproachful
+glance, as much as to say, "What! do I seem so vain a creature as to
+believe all this?"
+
+Sir George himself had tact and sensibility; and by and by became
+discontented with the part he was playing, under those meek, honest
+eyes.
+
+There was a pause; and, as her sex have a wonderful art of reading the
+face, Mercy looked at him steadily, and said, "_Yes_, sir, 'tis best to
+be straightforward, especially with women-folk."
+
+Before he could recover this little facer, she said, quietly, "What is
+your name?"
+
+"George Neville."
+
+"Well, George Neville," said Mercy, very slowly and softly, "when you
+have a mind to tell me what you came here for, and who sent you, you
+will find me in this little room. I seldom leave it now. I beg you to
+speak your errand to none but me." And she sighed deeply.
+
+Sir George bowed low, and retired to collect his wits. He had come here
+strongly prepossessed against Mercy. But, instead of a vulgar, shallow
+woman, whom he was to surprise into confession, he encountered a
+soft-eyed Puritan, all unpretending dignity, grace, propriety, and
+sagacity.
+
+"Flatter her!" said he, to himself. "I might as well flatter an iceberg.
+Outwit her! I feel like a child beside her."
+
+He strolled about in a brown study, not knowing what to do.
+
+She had given him a fair opening. She had invited him to tell the truth.
+But he was afraid to take her at her word; and yet what was the use to
+persist in what his own eyes told him was the wrong course?
+
+Whilst he hesitated, and debated within himself, a trifling incident
+turned the scale.
+
+A poor woman came begging, with her child, and was received rather
+roughly by Harry Vint. "Pass on, good woman," said he, "we want no
+tramps here."
+
+Then a window was opened on the ground floor, and Mercy beckoned the
+woman. Sir George flattened himself against the wall, and listened to
+the two talking.
+
+Mercy examined the woman gently, but shrewdly, and elicited a tale of
+genuine distress. Sir George then saw her hand out to the woman some
+warm flannel for herself, a piece of stuff for the child, a large piece
+of bread, and a sixpence.
+
+He also caught sight of Mercy's dove-like eyes as she bestowed her alms,
+and they were lit with an inward lustre.
+
+"She cannot be an ill woman," said Sir George. "I'll e'en go by my own
+eyes and judgment. After all, Mrs. Gaunt has never seen her, and I
+have."
+
+He went and knocked at Mercy's door.
+
+"Come in," said a mild voice.
+
+Neville entered, and said, abruptly, and with great emotion, "Madam, I
+see you can feel for the unhappy; so I take my own way now, and appeal
+to your pity. I _have_ come to speak to you on the saddest business."
+
+"You come from _him_," said Mercy, closing her lips tight; but her bosom
+heaved. Her heart and her judgment grappled like wrestlers that moment.
+
+"Nay, madam," said Sir George, "I come from _her_."
+
+Mercy knew in a moment who "her" must be.
+
+She looked scared, and drew back with manifest signs of repulsion.
+
+The movement did not escape Sir George: it alarmed him. He remembered
+what Mrs. Gaunt had said,--that this woman would be sure to hate Gaunt's
+lawful wife. But it was too late to go back. He did the next best thing,
+he rushed on.
+
+He threw himself on his knees before Mercy Vint.
+
+"O madam," he cried, piteously, "do not set your heart against the most
+unhappy lady in England. If you did but know her, her nobleness, her
+misery! Before you steel yourself against me, her friend, let me ask you
+one question. Do you know where Mrs. Gaunt is at this moment?"
+
+Mercy answered coldly, "How should I know where she is?"
+
+"Well, then, she lies in Carlisle jail."
+
+"She--lies--in Carlisle jail?" repeated Mercy, looking all confused.
+
+"They accuse her of murdering her husband."
+
+Mercy uttered a scream, and, catching her child up off the floor, began
+to rock herself and moan over it.
+
+"No, no, no," cried Sir George, "she is innocent, she is innocent."
+
+"What is that to _me_?" cried Mercy, wildly. "He is murdered, he is
+dead, and my child an orphan." And so she went on moaning and rocking
+herself.
+
+"But I tell you he is not dead at all," cried Sir George. "'Tis all a
+mistake. When did you see him last?"
+
+"More than six weeks ago."
+
+"I mean, when did you hear from him last?"
+
+"Never, since that day."
+
+Sir George groaned aloud at this intelligence.
+
+And Mercy, who heard him groan, was heart-broken. She accused herself of
+Griffith's death. "'T was I who drove him from me," she said. "'T was I
+who bade him go back to his lawful wife; and the wretch hated him. I
+sent him to his death." Her grief was wild, and deep. She could not hear
+Sir George's arguments.
+
+But presently she said, sternly, "What does that woman say for herself?"
+
+"Madam," said Sir George, dejectedly, "Heaven knows you are in no
+condition to fathom a mystery that hath puzzled wiser heads than yours
+or mine; and I am little able to lay the tale before you fairly; for
+your grief, it moves me deeply, and I could curse myself for putting the
+matter to you so bluntly and so uncouthly. Permit me to retire a while
+and compose my own spirits for the task I have undertaken too rashly."
+
+"Nay, George Neville," said Mercy, "stay you there. Only give me a
+moment to draw my breath."
+
+She struggled hard for a little composure, and, after a shower of tears,
+she hung her head over the chair like a crushed thing, but made him a
+sign of attention.
+
+Sir George told the story as fairly as he could; only of course his bias
+was in favor of Mrs. Gaunt; but as Mercy's bias was against her, this
+brought the thing nearly square.
+
+When he came to the finding of the body, Mercy was seized with a deadly
+faintness; and though she did not become insensible, yet she was in no
+condition to judge, or even to comprehend.
+
+Sir George was moved with pity, and would have called for help; but she
+shook her head. So then he sprinkled water on her face, and slapped her
+hand; and a beautifully moulded hand it was.
+
+When she got a little better she sobbed faintly, and sobbing thanked
+him, and begged him to go on.
+
+"My mind is stronger than my heart," she said. "I'll hear it all, though
+it kill me where I sit."
+
+Sir George went on, and, to avoid repetition, I must ask the reader to
+understand that he left out nothing whatever which has been hitherto
+related in these pages; and, in fact, told her one or two little things
+that I have omitted.
+
+When he had done, she sat quite still a minute or two, pale as a statue.
+
+Then she turned to Neville, and said, solemnly, "You wish to know the
+truth in this dark matter: for dark it is in very sooth."
+
+Neville was much impressed by her manner, and answered, respectfully,
+Yes, he desired to know,--by all means.
+
+"Then take my hand," said Mercy, "and kneel down with me."
+
+Sir George looked surprised, but obeyed, and kneeled down beside her,
+with his hand in hers.
+
+There was a long pause, and then took place a transformation.
+
+The dove-like eyes were lifted to heaven and gleamed like opals with an
+inward and celestial light; the comely face shone with a higher beauty,
+and the rich voice rose in ardent supplication.
+
+"Thou God, to whom all hearts be known, and no secrets hid from thine
+eye, look down now on thy servant in sore trouble, that putteth her
+trust in thee. Give wisdom to the simple this day, and understanding to
+the lowly. Thou that didst reveal to babes and sucklings the great
+things that were hidden from the wise, O show us the truth in this dark
+matter: enlighten us by thy spirit, for His dear sake who suffered more
+sorrows than I suffer now. Amen. Amen."
+
+Then she looked at Neville; and he said "Amen," with all his heart, and
+the tears in his eyes.
+
+He had never heard real live prayer before. Here the little hand gripped
+his hard, as she wrestled; and the heart seemed to rise out of the bosom
+and fly to Heaven on the sublime and thrilling voice.
+
+They rose, and she sat down; but it seemed as if her eyes once raised to
+Heaven in prayer could not come down again: they remained fixed and
+angelic, and her lips still moved in supplication.
+
+Sir George Neville, though a loose liver, was no scoffer. He was smitten
+with reverence for this inspired countenance, and retired, bowing low
+and obsequiously.
+
+He took a long walk, and thought it all over. One thing was clear, and
+consoling. He felt sure he had done wisely to disobey Mrs. Gaunt's
+instructions, and make a friend of Mercy, instead of trying to set his
+wits against hers. Ere he returned to the "Packhorse" he had determined
+to take another step in the right direction. He did not like to agitate
+her with another interview, so soon. But he wrote her a little letter.
+
+     "MADAM,--When I came here, I did not know you; and therefore I
+     feared to trust you too far. But, now I do know you for the
+     best woman in England, I take the open way with you.
+
+     "Know that Mrs. Gaunt said the man would be here with you; and
+     she charged me with a few written lines to him. She would be
+     angry if she knew that I had shown them to any other. Yet I
+     take on me to show them to you; for I believe you are wiser
+     than any of us, if the truth were known. I do therefore entreat
+     you to read these lines, and tell me whether you think the hand
+     that wrote them can have shed the blood of him to whom they are
+     writ.
+
+    "I am, madam, with profound respect,
+
+        "Your grateful and very humble servant,
+
+            "GEORGE NEVILLE."
+
+He very soon received a line in reply, written in a clear and beautiful
+handwriting.
+
+     "Mercy Vint sends you her duty; and she will speak to you at
+     nine of the clock to-morrow morning. Pray for light."
+
+At the appointed time, Sir George found her working with her needle. His
+letter lay on a table before her.
+
+She rose and courtesied to him, and called the servant to take away the
+child for a while. She went with her to the door and kissed the bairn
+several times at parting, as if he was going away for good. "I'm loath
+to let him go," said she to Neville; "but it weakens a mother's mind to
+have her babe in the room,--takes her attention off each moment. Pray
+you be seated. Well, sir, I have read these lines of Mistress Gaunt, and
+wept over them. Methinks I had not done so, were they cunningly devised.
+Also I lay all night, and thought."
+
+"That is just what she does."
+
+"No doubt, sir; and the upshot is, I don't _feel_ as if he was dead.
+Thank God."
+
+"That is something," said Neville. But he could not help thinking it was
+very little; especially to produce in a court of justice.
+
+"And now," said she, thoughtfully, "you say that the real Thomas
+Leicester was seen thereabouts as well as my Thomas Leicester. Then
+answer me one little question. What had the real Thomas Leicester on his
+feet that night?"
+
+"Nay, I know not," was the half-careless reply.
+
+"Bethink you. 'Tis a question that must have been often put in your
+hearing."
+
+"Begging your pardon, it was never put at all; nor do I see--"
+
+"What, not at the inquest?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That is very strange. What, so many wise heads have bent over this
+riddle, and not one to ask how was yon pedler shod!"
+
+"Madam," said Sir George, "our minds were fixed upon the fate of Gaunt.
+Many did ask how was the pedler armed, but none how was he shod."
+
+"Hath he been seen since?"
+
+"Not he; and that hath an ugly look; for the constables are out after
+him with hue and cry; but he is not to be found."
+
+"Then," said Mercy, "I must e'en answer my own question. I do know how
+that pedler was shod. WITH HOBNAILED SHOES."
+
+Sir George bounded from his chair. One great ray of daylight broke in
+upon him.
+
+"Ay," said Mercy, "she was right. Women do see clearer in some things
+than men. The pair went from my house to hers. He you call Griffith
+Gaunt had on a new pair of boots; and by the same token 't was I did pay
+for them, and there is the receipt in that cupboard: he you call Thomas
+Leicester went hence in hobnailed shoes. I think the body they found was
+the body of Thomas Leicester, the pedler. May God have mercy on his poor
+unprepared soul."
+
+Sir George uttered a joyful exclamation. But the next moment he had a
+doubt. "Ay, but," said he, "you forget the mole! 'T was on that they
+built."
+
+"I forget naught," said Mercy, calmly. "The pedler had a black mole over
+his left temple. He showed it me in this very room. You have found the
+body of Thomas Leicester, and Griffith Gaunt is hiding from the law that
+he hath broken. He is afeared of her and her friends, if he shows his
+face in Cumberland; he is afeared of my folk, if he be seen in
+Lancashire. Ah, Thomas, as if I would let them harm thee."
+
+Sir George Neville walked to and fro in grand excitement. "O blessed day
+that I came hither! Madam, you are an angel. You will save an innocent,
+broken-hearted lady from death and dishonor. Your good heart and rare
+wit have read in a moment the dark riddle that hath puzzled a county."
+
+"George," said Mercy, gravely, "you have gotten the wrong end of the
+stick. The wise in their own conceit are blinded. In Cumberland, where
+all this befell, they went not to God for light, as you and I did,
+George."
+
+In saying this, she gave him her hand to celebrate their success.
+
+He kissed it devoutly, and owned afterward that it was the proudest
+moment of his life, when that sweet Puritan gave him her neat hand so
+cordially, with a pressure so gentle yet frank.
+
+And now came the question how they were to make a Cumberland jury see
+this matter as they saw it.
+
+He asked her would she come to the trial as a witness?
+
+At that she drew back with manifest repugnance.
+
+"My shame would be public. I must tell who I am; and what. A ruined
+woman."
+
+"Say rather an injured saint. You have nothing to be ashamed of. All
+good men would feel for you."
+
+Mercy shook her head. "Ay, but the women. Shame is shame with us. Right
+or wrong goes for little. Nay, I hope to do better for you than that. I
+must find _him_, and send him to deliver her. 'Tis his only chance of
+happiness."
+
+She then asked him if he would draw up an advertisement of quite a
+different kind from those he had described to her.
+
+He assented, and between them they concocted the following:--
+
+     "If Thomas Leicester, who went from the 'Packhorse' two months
+     ago, will come thither at once, Mercy will be much beholden to
+     him, and tell him strange things that have befallen."
+
+Sir George then, at her request, rode over to Lancaster, and inserted
+the above in the county paper, and also in a small sheet that was issued
+in the city three times a week. He had also handbills to the same effect
+printed, and sent into Cumberland and Westmoreland. Finally, he sent a
+copy to his man of business in London, with orders to insert it in all
+the journals.
+
+Then he returned to the "Packhorse," and told Mercy what he had done.
+
+The next day he bade her farewell, and away for Carlisle. It was a two
+days' journey. He reached Carlisle in the evening, and went all glowing
+to Mrs. Gaunt. "Madam," said he, "be of good cheer. I bless the day I
+went to see her; she is an angel of wit and goodness."
+
+He then related to her, in glowing terms, most that had passed between
+Mercy and him. But, to his surprise, Mrs. Gaunt wore a cold, forbidding
+air.
+
+"This is all very well," said she. "But 't will avail me little unless
+_he_ comes before the judge and clears me; and she will never let him do
+that."
+
+"Ay, that she will,--if she can find him."
+
+"If she can find him? How simple you are!"
+
+"Nay, madam, not so simple but I can tell a good woman from a bad one,
+and a true from a false."
+
+"What! when you are in love with her? Not if you were the wisest of your
+sex."
+
+"In love with her?" cried Sir George; and colored high.
+
+"Ay," said the lady. "Think you I cannot tell? Don't deceive yourself.
+You have gone and fallen in love with her. At your years! Not that 'tis
+any business of mine."
+
+"Well, madam," said Sir George, stiffly, "say what you please on that
+score; but at least welcome my good news."
+
+Mrs. Gaunt begged him to excuse her petulance, and thanked him kindly
+for all he had just done. But the next moment she rose from her chair in
+great agitation, and burst out, "I'd as lief die as owe anything to that
+woman."
+
+Sir George remonstrated. "Why hate her? She does not hate you."
+
+"O, yes, she does. 'Tis not in nature she should do any other."
+
+"Her acts prove the contrary."
+
+"Her acts! She has _done_ nothing, but make fair promises; and that has
+blinded you. Women of this sort are very cunning, and never show their
+real characters to a man. No more; prithee mention not her name to me.
+It makes me ill. I know he is with her at this moment Ah, let me die,
+and be forgotten, since I am no more beloved."
+
+The voice was sad and weary now, and the tears ran fast.
+
+Poor Sir George was moved and melted, and set himself to flatter and
+console this impracticable lady, who hated her best friend in this sore
+strait, for being what she was herself, a woman; and was much less
+annoyed at being hanged than at not being loved.
+
+When she was a little calmer, he left her, and rode off to Houseman.
+That worthy was delighted.
+
+"Get her to swear to those hobnailed shoes," said he, "and we shall
+shake them." He then let Sir George know that he had obtained private
+information which he would use in cross-examining a principal witness
+for the crown. "However," he added, "do not deceive yourself, nothing
+can make the prisoner really safe but the appearance of Griffith Gaunt.
+He has such strong motives for coming to light. He is heir to a fortune,
+and his wife is accused of murdering him. The jury will never believe he
+is alive till they see him. That man's prolonged disappearance is
+hideous. It turns my blood cold when I think of it."
+
+"Do not despair on that score," said Neville. "I believe our good angel
+will produce him."
+
+Three days only before the assizes, came the long-expected letter from
+Mercy Vint. Sir George tore it open, but bitter was his disappointment.
+The letter merely said that Griffith had not appeared in answer to her
+advertisements, and she was sore grieved and perplexed.
+
+There were two postscripts, each on a little piece of paper.
+
+First postscript, in a tremulous hand, "Pray."
+
+Second postscript, in a firm hand, "Drain the water."
+
+Houseman shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "Drain the water? Let the
+crown do that. We should but fish up more trouble. And prayers quo' she!
+'Tis not prayers we want, but evidence."
+
+He sent his clerk off to travel post night and day, and subpoena
+Mercy, and bring her back with him to the trial. She was to have every
+comfort on the road, and be treated like a duchess.
+
+The evening before the assizes, Mrs. Gaunt's apartments were Mr.
+Houseman's head-quarters, and messages were coming and going all day, on
+matters connected with the defence.
+
+Just at sunset, up rattled a post-chaise, and the clerk got out and came
+haggard and bloodshot before his employer. "The witness has disappeared,
+sir. Left home last Tuesday, with her child, and has never been seen nor
+heard of since."
+
+Here was a terrible blow. They all paled under it: it seriously
+diminished the chances of an acquittal.
+
+But Mrs. Gaunt bore it nobly. She seemed to rise under it.
+
+She turned to Sir George Neville, with a sweet smile. "The noble heart
+sees base things noble. No wonder then an artful woman deluded _you_. He
+has left England with her, and condemned me to the gallows, in cold
+blood. So be it. I shall defend myself."
+
+She then sat down with Mr. Houseman, and went through the written case
+he had prepared for her, and showed him notes she had taken of full a
+hundred criminal trials great and small.
+
+While they were putting their heads together, Sir George sat in a brown
+study, and uttered not a word. Presently he got up a little brusquely,
+and said, "I'm going to Hernshaw."
+
+"What, at this time of night? What to do?"
+
+"To obey my orders. To drain the mere."
+
+"And who could have ordered you to drain my mere?"
+
+"Mercy Vint."
+
+Sir George uttered this in a very curious way, half ashamed, half
+resolute, and retired before Mrs. Gaunt could vent in speech the
+surprise and indignation that fired her eye.
+
+Houseman implored her not to heed Sir George and his vagaries, but to
+bend her whole mind on those approved modes of defence with which he had
+supplied her.
+
+Being now alone with her, he no longer concealed his great anxiety.
+
+"We have lost an invaluable witness in that woman," said he. "I was mad
+to think she would come."
+
+Mrs. Gaunt shivered with repugnance. "I would not have her come, for all
+the world," said she. "For Heaven's sake never mention her name to me. I
+want help from none but friends. Send Mrs. Houseman to me in the
+morning; and do not distress yourself so. I shall defend myself far
+better than you think. I have not studied a hundred trials for naught."
+
+Thus the prisoner cheered up her attorney, and soon after insisted on
+his going home to bed; for she saw he was worn out by his exertions.
+
+And now she was alone.
+
+All was silent.
+
+A few short hours, and she was to be tried for her life: tried, not by
+the All-wise Judge, but by fallible men, and under a system most
+unfavorable to the accused.
+
+Worse than all this, she was a Papist; and, as ill-luck would have it,
+since her imprisonment an alarm had been raised that the Pretender
+meditated another invasion. This report had set jurists very much
+against all the Romanists in the country, and had already perverted
+justice in one or two cases, especially in the North.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt knew all this, and trembled at the peril to come.
+
+She spent the early part of the night in studying her defence. Then she
+laid it quite aside, and prayed long and fervently. Towards morning she
+fell asleep from exhaustion.
+
+When she awoke, Mrs. Houseman was sitting by her bedside, looking at
+her, and crying.
+
+They were soon clasped in each other's arms, condoling.
+
+But presently Houseman came, and took his wife away rather angrily.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt was prevailed on to eat a little toast and drink a glass of
+wine, and then she sat waiting her dreadful summons.
+
+She waited and waited, until she became impatient to face her danger.
+
+But there were two petty larcenies on before her. She had to wait.
+
+At last, about noon, came a message to say that the grand jury had found
+a true bill against her.
+
+"Then may God forgive them!" said she.
+
+Soon afterwards she was informed her time drew very near.
+
+She made her toilet carefully, and passed with her attendant into a
+small room under the court.
+
+Here she had to endure another chilling wait, and in a sombre room.
+
+Presently she heard a voice above her cry out, "The King _versus_
+Catharine Gaunt."
+
+Then she was beckoned to.
+
+She mounted some steps, badly lighted, and found herself in the glare of
+day, and greedy eyes, in the felon's dock.
+
+In a matter entirely strange, we seldom know beforehand what we can do,
+and how we shall carry ourselves. Mrs. Gaunt no sooner set her foot in
+that dock, and saw the awful front of Justice face to face, than her
+tremors abated, and all her powers awoke, and she thrilled with love of
+life, and bristled with all those fine arts of defence that Nature lends
+to superior women.
+
+She entered on that defence before she spoke a word; for she attacked
+the prejudices of the court, by deportment.
+
+She courtesied reverently to the Judge, and contrived to make her
+reverence seem a willing homage, unmixed with fear.
+
+She cast her eyes round and saw the court thronged with ladies and
+gentlemen she knew. In a moment she read in their eyes that only two or
+three were on her side. She bowed to those only; and they returned her
+courtesy. This gave an impression (a false one) that the gentry
+sympathized with her.
+
+After a little murmur of functionaries, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to
+the prisoner, and said, in a loud voice, "Catharine Gaunt, hold up thy
+hand."
+
+She held up her hand, and he recited the indictment, which charged that,
+not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being moved by the
+instigation of the Devil, she had on the fifteenth of October, in the
+tenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, aided and abetted one
+Thomas Leicester in an assault upon one Griffith Gaunt, Esq., and him,
+the said Griffith Gaunt, did with force and arms assassinate and do to
+death, against the peace of our said Lord the King, his crown and
+dignity.
+
+After reading the indictment, the Clerk of Arraigns turned to the
+prisoner: "How sayest thou, Catharine Gaunt; art thou guilty of the
+felony and murder whereof thou standest indicted,--or not guilty?"
+
+"I am not guilty."
+
+"Culprit, how wilt thou be tried?"
+
+"Culprit I am none, but only accused. I will be tried by God and my
+country."
+
+"God send thee a good deliverance."
+
+Mr. Whitworth, the junior counsel for the crown, then rose to open the
+case; but the prisoner, with a pale face, but most courteous demeanor,
+begged his leave to make a previous motion to the court. Mr. Whitworth
+bowed, and sat down. "My Lord," said she, "I have first a favor to ask;
+and that favor, methinks, you will grant, since it is but justice,
+impartial justice. My accuser, I hear, has two counsel; both learned and
+able. I am but a woman, and no match for their skill Therefore I beg
+your Lordship to allow me counsel on my defence, to matter of fact as
+well as of law. I know this is not usual; but it is just, and I am
+informed it has sometimes been granted in trials of life and death, and
+that your Lordship hath the _power_, if you have the _will_, to do me so
+much justice."
+
+The Judge looked towards Mr. Serjeant Wiltshire, who was the leader on
+the other side. He rose instantly and replied to this purpose: "The
+prisoner is misinformed. The truth is, that from time immemorial, and
+down to the other day, a person indicted for a capital offence was never
+allowed counsel at all, except to matters of law, and these must be
+started by himself. By recent practice the rule hath been so far relaxed
+that counsel have sometimes been permitted to examine and cross-examine
+witnesses for a prisoner; but never to make observations on the
+evidence, nor to draw inferences from it to the point in issue."
+
+_Mrs. Gaunt._ So, then, if I be sued for a small sum of money, I may
+have skilled orators to defend me against their like. But if I be sued
+for my life and honor, I may not oppose skill to skill, but must stand
+here a child against you that are masters. 'Tis a monstrous iniquity,
+and you yourself, sir, will not deny it.
+
+_Serjeant Wiltshire._ Madam, permit me. Whether it be a hardship to deny
+full counsel to prisoners in criminal cases, I shall not pretend to say;
+but if it be, 'tis a hardship of the law's making, and not of mine nor
+of my lord's; and none have suffered by it (at least in our day) but
+those who had broken the law.
+
+The Serjeant then stopped a minute, and whispered with his junior. After
+which he turned to the Judge. "My Lord, we that are of counsel for the
+crown desire to do nothing that is hard where a person's life is at
+stake. We yield to the prisoner any indulgence for which your Lordship
+can find a precedent in your reading; but no more: and so we leave the
+matter to you."
+
+_The Clerk of Arraigns._ Crier, proclaim silence.
+
+_The Crier._ Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! His Majesty's Justices do strictly charge
+all manner of persons to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.
+
+_The Judge._ Prisoner, what my Brother Wiltshire says, the law is clear
+in. There is no precedent for what you ask, and the contrary practice
+stares us in the face for centuries. What seems to you a partial
+practice, and, to be frank, some learned persons are of your mind, must
+be set against this,--that in capital cases the burden of proof lies on
+the crown, and not on the accused. Also it is my duty to give you all
+the assistance I can, and that I shall do. Thus then it is: you can be
+allowed counsel to examine your own witnesses, and cross-examine the
+witnesses for the crown, and speak to points of law, to be started by
+yourself,--but no further.
+
+He then asked her what gentleman there present he should assign to her
+for counsel.
+
+Her reply to this inquiry took the whole court by surprise, and made her
+solicitor, Houseman, very miserable. "None, my Lord," said she.
+"Half-justice is injustice; and I will lend it no color. I will not set
+able men to fight for me with their hands tied, against men as able
+whose hands be free. Counsel, on terms so partial, I will have none. My
+counsel shall be three, and no more,--Yourself, my Lord, my Innocence,
+and the Lord God Omniscient."
+
+These words, grandly uttered, caused a dead silence in the court, but
+only for a few moments. It was broken by the loud mechanical voice of
+the crier, who proclaimed silence, and then called the names of the jury
+that were to try this cause.
+
+Mrs. Gaunt listened keenly to the names,--familiar and bourgeois names,
+that now seemed regal; for they who owned them held her life in their
+hands.
+
+Each juryman was sworn in the grand old form, now slightly curtailed.
+
+"Joseph King, look upon the prisoner.--You shall well and truly try, and
+true deliverance make, between our Sovereign Lord the King and the
+prisoner at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, and a true verdict
+give, according to the evidence. So help you God."
+
+Mr. Whitworth, for the crown, then opened the case, but did little more
+than translate the indictment into more rational language.
+
+He sat down, and Serjeant Wiltshire addressed the court somewhat after
+this fashion:--
+
+     "May it please your Lordship, and you, gentlemen of the jury,
+     this is a case of great expectation and importance. The
+     prisoner at the bar, a gentlewoman by birth and education, and,
+     as you must have already perceived, by breeding also, stands
+     indicted for no less a crime than murder.
+
+     "I need not paint to you the heinousness of this crime: you
+     have but to consult your own breasts. Who ever saw the ghastly
+     corpse of the victim weltering in its blood, and did not feel
+     his own blood run cold through his veins? Has the murderer
+     fled? With what eagerness do we pursue! with what zeal
+     apprehend! with what joy do we bring him to justice! Even the
+     dreadful sentence of death does not shock us, when pronounced
+     upon him. We hear it with solemn satisfaction; and acknowledge
+     the justice of the Divine sentence, 'Whoso sheddeth man's
+     blood, by man shall his blood be shed.'
+
+     "But if this be the case in every common murder, what shall be
+     thought of her who has murdered her husband,--the man in whose
+     arms she has lain, and whom she has sworn at God's altar to
+     love and cherish? Such a murderer is a robber as well as an
+     assassin; for she robs her own children of their father, that
+     tender parent, who can never be replaced in this world.
+
+     "Gentlemen, it will, I fear, be proved that the prisoner at the
+     bar hath been guilty of murder in this high degree; and, though
+     I will endeavor rather to extenuate than to aggravate, yet I
+     trust [_sic_] I have such a history to open as will shock the
+     ears of all who hear me.
+
+     "Mr. Griffith Gaunt, the unfortunate deceased, was a man of
+     descent and worship. As to his character, it was inoffensive.
+     He was known as a worthy, kindly gentleman, deeply attached to
+     her who now stands accused of his murder. They lived happily
+     together for some years; but, unfortunately, there was a thorn
+     in the rose of their wedded life: he was of the Church of
+     England; she was, and is, a Roman Catholic. This led to
+     disputes; and no wonder, since this same unhappy difference
+     hath more than once embroiled a nation, let alone a single
+     family.
+
+     "Well, gentlemen, about a year ago there was a more violent
+     quarrel than usual between the deceased and the prisoner at the
+     bar; and the deceased left his home for several months.
+
+     "He returned upon a certain day in this year, and a
+     reconciliation, real or apparent, took place. He left home
+     again soon afterwards, but only for a short period. On the 15th
+     of last October he suddenly returned for good, as he intended;
+     and here begins the tragedy, to which what I have hitherto
+     related was but the prologue.
+
+     "Scarce an hour before he came, one Thomas Leicester entered
+     the house. Now this Thomas Leicester was a creature of the
+     prisoner's. He had been her gamekeeper, and was now a pedler.
+     It was the prisoner who set him up as a pedler, and purchased
+     the wares to start him in his trade.
+
+     "Gentlemen, this pedler, as I shall prove, was concealed in the
+     house when the deceased arrived. One Caroline Ryder, who is the
+     prisoner's gentlewoman, was the person who first informed her
+     of Leicester's arrival, and it seems she was much moved: Mrs.
+     Ryder will tell you she fell into hysterics. But, soon after,
+     her husband's arrival was announced, and then the passion was
+     of a very different kind. So violent was her rage against this
+     unhappy man that, for once, she forgot all prudence, and
+     threatened his life before a witness. Yes, gentlemen, we shall
+     prove that this gentlewoman, who in appearance and manners
+     might grace a court, was so transported out of her usual self
+     that she held up a knife,--a knife, gentlemen,--and vowed to
+     put it into her husband's heart. And this was no mere temporary
+     ebullition of wrath. We shall see presently that, long after
+     she had had time to cool, she repeated this menace to the
+     unfortunate man's face. The first threat, however, was uttered
+     in her own bedroom, before her confidential servant, Caroline
+     Ryder aforesaid. But now the scene shifts. She has, to all
+     appearance, recovered herself, and sits smiling at the head of
+     her table; for, you must know, she entertained company that
+     night,--persons of the highest standing in the county.
+
+     "Presently her husband, all unconscious of the terrible
+     sentiments she entertained towards him, and the fearful purpose
+     she had announced, enters the room, makes obeisance to his
+     guests, and goes to take his wife's hand.
+
+     "What does she? She draws back with so strange a look, and such
+     forbidding words, that the company were disconcerted.
+     Consternation fell on all present; and erelong they made their
+     excuses, and left the house. Thus the prisoner was left alone
+     with her husband; but, meantime, curiosity had been excited by
+     her strange conduct, and some of the servants, with foreboding
+     hearts, listened at the door of the dining-room. What did they
+     hear, gentlemen? A furious quarrel, in which, however, the
+     deceased was comparatively passive, and the prisoner again
+     threatened his life, with vehemence. Her passion, it is clear,
+     had not cooled.
+
+     "Now it may fairly be alleged, on behalf of the prisoner, that
+     the witnesses for the crown were on one side of the door, the
+     prisoner and the deceased on the other, and that such evidence
+     should be received with caution. I grant this--where it is not
+     sustained by other circumstances, or by direct proofs. Let us
+     then give the prisoner the benefit of this doubt, and let us
+     inquire how the deceased himself understood her,--he, who not
+     only heard the words, and the accents, but saw the looks,
+     whatever they were, that accompanied them.
+
+     "Gentlemen, he was a man of known courage and resolution; yet
+     he was found, after this terrible interview, much cowed and
+     dejected. He spoke to Mrs. Ryder of his death as an event not
+     far distant, and so went to his bedroom in a melancholy and
+     foreboding state. And where was that bedroom? He was thrust, by
+     his wife's orders, into a small chamber, and not allowed to
+     enter hers,--he, the master of the house, her husband, and her
+     lord.
+
+     "But his interpretation of the prisoner's words did not end
+     there. He left us a further comment by his actions next
+     ensuing. He dared not--(I beg pardon, this is my inference:
+     receive it as such)--he _did_ not, remain in that house a
+     single night. He at all events bolted his chamber door inside;
+     and in the very dead of night, notwithstanding the fatigues of
+     the day's journey, (for he had ridden some distance,) he let
+     himself out by the window, and reached the ground safely,
+     though it was a height of fourteen feet,--a leap, gentlemen,
+     that few of us would venture to take. But what will not men
+     risk when destruction is at their heels? He did not wait even
+     to saddle his horse, but fled on foot. Unhappy man, he fled
+     from danger, and met his death.
+
+     "From the hour when he went up to bed, none of the inmates of
+     the house ever saw Griffith Gaunt alive; but one Thomas Hayes,
+     a laborer, saw him walking in a certain direction at one
+     o'clock that morning; and behind him, gentlemen, there walked
+     another man.
+
+     "Who was that other man?
+
+     "When I have told you (and this is an essential feature of the
+     case) how the prisoner was employed during the time that her
+     husband lay quaking in his little room, waiting an opportunity
+     to escape,--when I have told you this, I fear you will divine
+     who it was that followed the deceased, and for what purpose.
+
+     "Gentlemen, when the prisoner had threatened her husband in
+     person, as I have described, she retired to her own room, but
+     not to sleep. She ordered her maid, Mrs. Ryder, to bring Thomas
+     Leicester to her chamber. Yes, gentlemen, she received this
+     pedler, at midnight, in her bedchamber.
+
+     "Now, an act so strange as this admits, I think, but of two
+     interpretations. Either she had a guilty amour with this
+     fellow, or she had some extraordinary need of his services. Her
+     whole character, by consent of the witnesses, renders it very
+     improbable that she would descend to a low amour. Moreover, she
+     acted too publicly in the matter. The man, as we know, was her
+     tool, her creature: she had bought his wares for him, and set
+     him up as a pedler. She openly summoned him to her presence,
+     and kept him there about half an hour.
+
+     "He went from her, and very soon after is seen, by Thomas
+     Hayes, following Griffith Gaunt, at one o'clock in the
+     morning,--that Griffith Gaunt who after that hour was never
+     seen alive.
+
+     "Gentlemen, up to this point, the evidence is clear, connected,
+     and cogent; but it rarely happens in cases of murder that any
+     human eye sees the very blow struck. The penalty is too severe
+     for such an act to be done in the presence of an eyewitness;
+     and not one murderer in ten could be convicted without the help
+     of circumstantial evidence.
+
+     "The next link, however, is taken up by an ear-witness; and, in
+     some cases, the ear is even better evidence than the eye,--for
+     instance, as to the discharge of firearms,--for, by the eye
+     alone, we could not positively tell whether a pistol had gone
+     off or had but flashed in the pan. Well, then, gentlemen, a few
+     minutes after Mr. Gaunt was last seen alive,--which was by
+     Thomas Hayes,--Mrs. Ryder, who had retired to her bedroom,
+     heard the said Gaunt distinctly cry for help; she also heard a
+     pistol-shot discharged. This took place by the side of a lake
+     or large pond near the house, called the mere. Mrs. Ryder
+     alarmed the house, and she and the other servants proceeded to
+     her master's room. They found it bolted from the inside. They
+     broke it open. Mr. Gaunt had escaped by the window, as I have
+     already told you.
+
+     "Presently in comes the prisoner from out of doors. This was at
+     one o'clock in the morning. Now she appears to have seen at
+     once that she must explain her being abroad at that time, so
+     she told Mrs. Ryder she had been out--praying."
+
+(Here some people laughed harshly, but were threatened severely, and
+silenced.)
+
+     "Is that credible? Do people go out of doors at one o'clock in
+     the morning, to pray? Nay, but I fear it was to do an act that
+     years of prayer and penitence cannot efface.
+
+     "From that moment Mr. Gaunt was seen no more among living men.
+     And what made his disappearance the more mysterious was that he
+     had actually at this time just inherited largely from his
+     namesake, Mr. Gaunt of Biggleswade; and his own interest, and
+     that of the other legatees, required his immediate presence.
+     Mr. Atkins, the testator's solicitor, advertised for this
+     unfortunate gentleman; but he did not appear to claim his
+     fortune. Then plain men began to put this and that together,
+     and cried out, 'Foul play!'
+
+     "Justice was set in motion at last, but was embarrassed by the
+     circumstance that the body of the deceased could not be found.
+
+     "At last, Mr. Atkins, the solicitor, being unable to get the
+     estate I have mentioned administered, for want of proof of
+     Griffith Gaunt's decease, entered heartily in this affair, on
+     mere civil grounds. He asked the prisoner, before several
+     witnesses, if she would permit him to drag that piece of water
+     by the side of which Mr. Gaunt was heard to cry for help and,
+     after that seen no more.
+
+     "The prisoner did not reply, but Mr. Houseman, her solicitor, a
+     very worthy man, who has, I believe, or had, up to that moment,
+     a sincere conviction of her innocence, answered for her, and
+     told Mr. Atkins he was welcome to drag it or drain it. Then the
+     prisoner said nothing. She fainted away.
+
+     "After this, you may imagine with what expectation the water
+     was dragged. Gentlemen, after hours of fruitless labor, a body
+     was found.
+
+     "But here an unforeseen circumstance befriended the prisoner.
+     It seems that piece of water swarms with enormous pike and
+     other ravenous fish. These had so horribly mutilated the
+     deceased, that neither form nor feature remained to swear by;
+     and, as the law wisely and humanely demands that in these cases
+     a body shall be identified beyond doubt, justice bade fair to
+     be baffled again. But lo! as often happens in cases of murder,
+     Providence interposed and pointed with unerring finger to a
+     slight, but infallible mark. The deceased gentleman was known
+     to have a large mole over his left temple. It had been noticed
+     by his servants and his neighbors. Well, gentlemen, the greedy
+     fish had spared this mole,--spared it, perhaps, by His command,
+     who bade the whale swallow Jonah, yet not destroy him. There it
+     was, clear and infallible. It was examined by several
+     witnesses, it was recognized. It completed that chain of
+     evidence, some of it direct, some of it circumstantial, which I
+     have laid before you very briefly, and every part of which I
+     shall now support by credible witnesses."
+
+He called thirteen witnesses, including Mr. Atkins, Thomas Hayes, Jane
+Banister, Caroline Ryder, and others; and their evidence in chief bore
+out every positive statement the counsel had made.
+
+In cross-examining these witnesses, Mrs. Gaunt took a line that
+agreeably surprised the court. It was not for nothing she had studied a
+hundred trials, with a woman's observation and patient docility. She had
+found out how badly people plead their own causes, and had noticed the
+reasons: one of which is that they say too much, and stray from the
+point. The line she took, with one exception, was keen brevity.
+
+She cross-examined Thomas Hayes as follows.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.
+
+IX.
+
+
+HOW SHALL WE BE AMUSED?
+
+"One, two, three, four,--this makes the fifth accident on the Fourth of
+July, in the two papers I have just read," said Jenny.
+
+"A very moderate allowance," said Theophilus Thoro, "if you consider the
+Fourth as a great national saturnalia, in which every boy in the land
+has the privilege of doing whatever is right in his own eyes."
+
+"The poor boys!" said Mrs. Crowfield. "All the troubles of the world are
+laid at their door."
+
+"Well," said Jenny, "they did burn the city of Portland, it appears. The
+fire arose from fire-crackers, thrown by boys among the shavings of a
+carpenter's shop,--so says the paper."
+
+"And," said Rudolph, "we surgeons expect a harvest of business from the
+Fourth, as surely as from a battle. Certain to be woundings, fractures,
+possibly amputations, following the proceedings of our glorious
+festival."
+
+"Why cannot we Americans learn to amuse ourselves peaceably, like other
+nations?" said Bob Stephens. "In France and Italy, the greatest national
+festivals pass off without fatal accident, or danger to any one. The
+fact is, in our country we have not learned _how to be amused_.
+Amusement has been made of so small account in our philosophy of life,
+that we are raw and unpractised in being amused. Our diversions,
+compared with those of the politer nations of Europe, are coarse and
+savage,--and consist mainly in making disagreeable noises and disturbing
+the peace of the community by rude uproar. The only idea an American boy
+associates with the Fourth of July is that of gunpowder in some form,
+and a wild liberty to fire off pistols in all miscellaneous directions,
+and to throw fire-crackers under the heels of horses, and into crowds of
+women and children, for the fun of seeing the stir and commotion thus
+produced. Now take a young Parisian boy and give him a fete, and he
+conducts himself with greater gentleness and good breeding, because he
+is part of a community in which the art of amusement has been refined
+and perfected, so that he has a thousand resources beyond the very
+obvious one of making a great banging and disturbance.
+
+"Yes," continued Bob Stephens, "the fact is, that our grim old Puritan
+fathers set their feet down resolutely on all forms of amusement; they
+would have stopped the lambs from wagging their tails, and shot the
+birds for singing, if they could have had their way; and in consequence
+of it, what a barren, cold, flowerless life is our New England
+existence! Life is all, as Mantalini said, one 'demd horrid grind.'
+'Nothing here but working and going to church,' said the German
+emigrants,--and they were about right. A French traveller, in the year
+1837, says that attending the Thursday-evening lectures and church
+prayer-meetings was the only recreation of the young people of Boston;
+and we can remember the time when this really was no exaggeration. Think
+of that, with all the seriousness of our Boston east winds to give it
+force, and fancy the provision for amusement in our society! The
+consequence is, that boys who have the longing for amusement strongest
+within them, and plenty of combativeness to back it, are the standing
+terror of good society, and our Fourth of July is a day of fear to all
+invalids and persons of delicate nervous organization, and of real,
+appreciable danger of life and limb to every one."
+
+"Well, Robert," said my wife, "though I agree with you as to the actual
+state of society in this respect, I must enter my protest against your
+slur on the memory of our Pilgrim fathers."
+
+"Yes," said Theophilus Thoro, "the New-Englanders are the only people, I
+believe, who take delight in vilifying their ancestry. Every young
+hopeful in our day makes a target of his grandfather's gravestone, and
+fires away, with great self-applause. People in general seem to like to
+show that they are well-born, and come of good stock; but the young
+New-Englanders, many of them, appear to take pleasure in insisting that
+they came of a race of narrow-minded, persecuting bigots.
+
+"It is true, that our Puritan fathers saw not everything. They made a
+state where there were no amusements, but where people could go to bed
+and leave their house doors wide open all night, without a shadow of
+fear or danger, as was for years the custom in all our country villages.
+The fact is, that the simple early New England life, before we began to
+import foreigners, realized a state of society in whose possibility
+Europe would scarcely believe. If our fathers had few amusements, they
+needed few. Life was too really and solidly comfortable and happy to
+need much amusement.
+
+"Look over the countries where people are most sedulously amused by
+their rulers and governors. Are they not the countries where the people
+are most oppressed, most unhappy in their circumstances, and therefore
+in greatest need of amusement? It is the slave who dances and sings, and
+why? Because he owns nothing, and _can_ own nothing, and may as well
+dance and forget the fact. But give the slave a farm of his own, a wife
+of his own, and children of his own, with a school-house and a vote, and
+ten to one he dances no more. He needs no _amusement_, because he is
+_happy_.
+
+"The legislators of Europe wished nothing more than to bring up a people
+who would be content with amusements, and not ask after their rights or
+think too closely how they were governed. 'Gild the dome of the
+Invalides,' was Napoleon's scornful prescription, when he heard the
+Parisian population were discontented. They gilded it, and the people
+forgot to talk about anything else. They were a childish race, educated
+from the cradle on spectacle and show, and by the sight of their eyes
+could they be governed. The people of Boston, in 1776, could not have
+been managed in this way, chiefly because they were brought up in the
+strict schools of the fathers."
+
+"But don't you think," said Jenny, "that something might be added and
+amended in the state of society our fathers established here in New
+England? Without becoming frivolous, there might be more attention paid
+to rational amusement."
+
+"Certainly," said my wife, "the State and the Church both might take a
+lesson from the providence of foreign governments, and make liberty, to
+say the least, as attractive as despotism. It is a very unwise mother
+that does not provide her children with play-things."
+
+"And yet," said Bob, "the only thing that the Church has yet done is to
+forbid and to frown. We have abundance of tracts against dancing,
+whist-playing, ninepins, billiards, operas, theatres,--in short,
+anything that young people would be apt to like. The General Assembly of
+the Presbyterian Church refused to testify against slavery, because of
+political diffidence, but made up for it by ordering a more stringent
+crusade against dancing. The theatre and opera grow up and exist among
+us like plants on the windy side of a hill, blown all awry by a constant
+blast of conscientious rebuke. There is really no amusement young people
+are fond of, which they do not pursue, in a sort of defiance of the
+frown of the peculiarly religious world. With all the telling of what
+the young shall _not_ do, there has been very little telling what they
+shall do.
+
+"The whole department of amusements--certainly one of the most important
+in education--has been by the Church made a sort of outlaws' ground, to
+be taken possession of and held by all sorts of spiritual ragamuffins;
+and then the faults and short-comings resulting from this arrangement
+have been held up and insisted on as reasons why no Christian should
+ever venture into it.
+
+"If the Church would set herself to amuse her young folks, instead of
+discussing doctrines and metaphysical hair-splitting, she would prove
+herself a true mother, and not a hard-visaged step-dame. Let her keep
+this department, so powerful and so difficult to manage, in what are
+morally the strongest hands, instead of giving it up to the weakest.
+
+"I think, if the different churches of a city, for example, would rent a
+building where there should be a billiard-table, one or two
+ninepin-alleys, a reading-room, a garden and grounds for ball-playing or
+innocent lounging, that they would do more to keep their young people
+from the ways of sin than a Sunday school could. Nay, more: I would go
+further. I would have a portion of the building fitted up with scenery
+and a stage, for the getting up of tableaux or dramatic performances,
+and thus give scope for the exercise of that histrionic talent of which
+there is so much lying unemployed in society.
+
+"Young people do not like amusements any better for the wickedness
+connected with them. The spectacle of a sweet little child singing
+hymns, and repeating prayers, of a pious old Uncle Tom dying for his
+religion, has filled theatres night after night, and proved that there
+really is no need of indecent or improper plays to draw full houses.
+
+"The things that draw young people to places of amusement are not at
+first gross things. Take the most notorious public place in Paris,--the
+Jardin Mabille, for instance,--and the things which give it its first
+charm are all innocent and artistic. Exquisite beds of lilies, roses,
+gillyflowers, lighted with jets of gas so artfully as to make every
+flower translucent as a gem; fountains where the gas-light streams out
+from behind misty wreaths of falling water and calla-blossoms; sofas of
+velvet turf, canopied with fragrant honeysuckle; dim bowers overarched
+with lilacs and roses; a dancing ground under trees whose branches bend
+with a fruitage of many-colored lamps; enchanting music and graceful
+motion; in all these there is not only no sin, but they are really
+beautiful and desirable; and if they were only used on the side and in
+the service of virtue and religion, if they were contrived and kept up
+by the guardians and instructors of youth, instead of by those whose
+interest it is to demoralize and destroy, young people would have no
+temptation to stray into the haunts of vice.
+
+"In Prussia, under the reign of Frederick William II., when one good,
+hard-handed man governed the whole country like a strict schoolmaster,
+the public amusements for the people were made such as to present a
+model for all states. The theatres were strictly supervised, and actors
+obliged to conform to the rules of decorum and morality. The plays and
+performances were under the immediate supervision of men of grave
+morals, who allowed nothing corrupting to appear; and the effect of this
+administration and restraint is to be seen in Berlin even to this day.
+The public gardens are full of charming little resorts, where, every
+afternoon, for a very moderate sum, one can have either a concert of
+good music, or a very fair dramatic or operatic performance. Here whole
+families may be seen enjoying together a wholesome and refreshing
+entertainment,--the mother and aunts with their knitting, the baby, the
+children of all ages, and the father,--their faces radiant with that
+mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be
+characteristic of the nation. When I saw these things, and thought of
+our own outcast, unprovided boys and young men, haunting the streets
+and alleys of cities, in places far from the companionship of mothers
+and sisters, I felt as if it would be better for a nation to be brought
+up by a good strict schoolmaster king than to try to be a republic."
+
+"Yes," said I, "but the difficulty is to _get_ the good schoolmaster
+king. For one good shepherd, there are twenty who use the sheep only for
+their flesh and their wool. Republics can do all that kings
+can,--witness our late army and Sanitary Commission. Once fix the idea
+thoroughly in the public mind that there ought to be as regular and
+careful provision for public amusement as there is for going to church
+and Sunday school, and it will be done. Central Park in New York is a
+beginning in the right direction, and Brooklyn is following the example
+of her sister city. There is, moreover, an indication of the proper
+spirit in the increased efforts that are made to beautify Sunday-school
+rooms, and make them interesting, and to have Sunday-school fetes and
+picnics,--the most harmless and commendable way of celebrating the
+Fourth of July. Why should saloons and bar-rooms be made attractive by
+fine paintings, choice music, flowers, and fountains, and Sunday-school
+rooms be four bare walls? There are churches whose broad aisles
+represent ten and twenty millions of dollars, and whose sons and
+daughters are daily drawn to circuses, operas, theatres, because they
+have tastes and feelings, in themselves perfectly laudable and innocent,
+for the gratification of which no provision is made in any other place."
+
+"I know one church," said Rudolph, "whose Sunday-school room is as
+beautifully adorned as any haunt of sin. There is a fountain in the
+centre, which plays into a basin surrounded with shells and flowers; it
+has a small organ to lead the children's voices, and the walls are hung
+with oil-paintings and engravings from the best masters. The festivals
+of the Sabbath school, which are from time to time held in this place,
+educate the taste of the children, as well as amuse them; and, above
+all, they have through life the advantage of associating with their
+early religious education all those ideas of taste, elegance, and
+artistic culture which too often come through polluted channels.
+
+"When the _amusement_ of the young shall become the care of the
+experienced and the wise, and the floods of wealth that are now rolling
+over and over, in silent investments, shall be put into the form of
+innocent and refined pleasures for the children and youth of the state,
+our national festivals may become days to be desired, and not dreaded.
+
+"On the Fourth of July, our city fathers do in a certain dim wise
+perceive that the public owes some attempt at amusement to its children,
+and they vote large sums, principally expended in bell-ringing, cannons,
+and fireworks. The sidewalks are witness to the number who fall victims
+to the temptations held out by grog-shops and saloons; and the papers,
+for weeks after, are crowded with accounts of accidents. Now, a yearly
+sum expended to keep up, and keep pure, places of amusement which hold
+out no temptation to vice, but which excel all vicious places in real
+beauty and attractiveness, would greatly lessen the sum needed to be
+expended on any one particular day, and would refine and prepare our
+people to keep holidays and festivals appropriately."
+
+"For my part," said Mrs. Crowfield, "I am grieved at the opprobrium
+which falls on the race of _boys_. Why should the most critical era in
+the life of those who are to be men, and to _govern_ society, be passed
+in a sort of outlawry,--a rude warfare with all existing institutions?
+The years between ten and twenty are full of the nervous excitability
+which marks the growth and maturing of the manly nature. The boy feels
+wild impulses, which ought to be vented in legitimate and healthful
+exercise. He wants to run, shout, wrestle, ride, row, skate; and all
+these together are often not sufficient to relieve the need he feels of
+throwing off the excitability that burns within.
+
+"For the wants of this period what safe provision is made by the Church,
+or by the State, or any of the boy's lawful educators? In all the
+Prussian schools amusements are as much a part of the regular
+school-system as grammar or geography. The teacher is with the boys on
+the play-ground, and plays as heartily as any of them. The boy has his
+physical wants anticipated. He is not left to fight his way, blindly
+stumbling, against society, but goes forward in a safe path, which his
+elders and betters have marked out for him.
+
+"In our country, the boy's career is often a series of skirmishes with
+society. He wants to skate, and contrives ingeniously to dam the course
+of a brook, and flood a meadow which makes a splendid skating-ground.
+Great is the joy for a season, and great the skating. But the water
+floods the neighboring cellars. The boys are cursed through all the
+moods and tenses,--boys are such a plague! The dam is torn down with
+emphasis and execration. The boys, however, lie in wait some cold night,
+between twelve and one, and build it up again; and thus goes on the
+battle. The boys care not whose cellar they flood, because nobody cares
+for their amusement. They understand themselves to be outlaws, and take
+an outlaw's advantage.
+
+"Again, the boys have their sleds; and sliding down hill is splendid
+fun. But they trip up some grave citizen, who sprains his shoulder. What
+is the result? Not the provision of a safe, good place, where boys _may_
+slide down hill without danger to any one, but an edict forbidding all
+sliding, under penalty of fine.
+
+"Boys want to swim: it is best they should swim; and if city fathers,
+foreseeing and caring for this want, should think it worth while to mark
+off some good place, and have it under such police surveillance as to
+enforce decency of language and demeanor, they would prevent a great
+deal that now is disagreeable in the unguided efforts of boys to enjoy
+this luxury.
+
+"It would be _cheaper_ in the end, even if one had to build
+sliding-piles, as they do in Russia, or to build skating-rinks, as they
+do in Montreal,--it would be cheaper for every city, town, and village
+to provide legitimate amusement for boys, under proper superintendence,
+than to leave them, as they are now left, to fight their way against
+society.
+
+"In the boys' academies of our country, what provision is made for
+amusement? There are stringent rules, and any number of them, to prevent
+boys making any noise that may disturb the neighbors; and generally the
+teacher thinks that, if he keeps the boys _still_, and sees that they
+get their lessons, his duty is done. But a hundred boys ought not to be
+kept still. There ought to be noise and motion among them, in order that
+they may healthily survive the great changes which Nature is working
+within them. If they become silent, averse to movement, fond of indoor
+lounging and warm rooms, they are going in far worse ways than any
+amount of outward lawlessness could bring them to.
+
+"Smoking and yellow-covered novels are worse than any amount of
+hullabaloo; and the quietest boy is often a poor, ignorant victim, whose
+life is being drained out of him before it is well begun. If mothers
+could only see the _series of books_ that are sold behind counters to
+boarding-school boys, whom nobody warns and nobody cares for,--if they
+could see the poison, going from pillow to pillow, in books pretending
+to make clear the great, sacred mysteries of our nature, but trailing
+them over with the filth of utter corruption! These horrible works are
+the inward and secret channel of hell, into which a boy is thrust by the
+pressure of strict outward rules, forbidding that physical and
+out-of-door exercise and motion to which he ought rather to be
+encouraged, and even driven.
+
+"It is melancholy to see that, while parents, teachers, and churches
+make no provision for boys in the way of amusement, the world, the
+flesh, and the Devil are incessantly busy and active in giving it to
+them. There are ninepin-alleys, with cigars and a bar. There are
+billiard-saloons, with a bar, and, alas! with the occasional company of
+girls who are still beautiful, but who have lost the innocence of
+womanhood, while yet retaining many of its charms. There are theatres,
+with a bar, and with the society of lost women. The boy comes to one and
+all of these places, seeking only what is natural and proper he should
+have,--what should be given him under the eye and by the care of the
+Church, the school. He comes for exercise and amusement,--he gets these,
+and a ticket to destruction besides,--and whose fault is it?"
+
+"These are the aspects of public life," said I, "which make me feel that
+we never shall have a perfect state till women vote and bear rule
+equally with men. State housekeeping has been, hitherto, like what any
+housekeeping would be, conducted by the voice and knowledge of man
+alone.
+
+"If women had an equal voice in the management of our public money, I
+have faith to believe that thousands which are now wasted in mere
+political charlatanism would go to provide for the rearing of the
+children of the state, male and female. My wife has spoken for the boys;
+I speak for the girls also. What is provided for their physical
+development and amusement? Hot, gas-lighted theatric and operatic
+performances, beginning at eight, and ending at midnight; hot, crowded
+parties and balls; dancing with dresses tightly laced over the laboring
+lungs,--these are almost the whole story. I bless the advent of croquet
+and skating. And yet the latter exercise, pursued as it generally is, is
+a most terrible exposure. There is no kindly parental provision for the
+poor, thoughtless, delicate young creature,--not even the shelter of a
+dressing-room with a fire, at which she may warm her numb fingers and
+put on her skates when she arrives on the ground, and to which she may
+retreat in intervals of fatigue; so she catches cold, and perhaps sows
+the seed which with air-tight stoves and other appliances of hot-house
+culture may ripen into consumption.
+
+"What provision is there for the amusement of all the shop girls,
+seamstresses, factory girls, that crowd our cities? What for the
+thousands of young clerks and operatives? Not long since, in a
+respectable old town in New England, the body of a beautiful girl was
+drawn from the river in which she had drowned herself,--a young girl
+only fifteen, who came to the city, far from home and parents, and fell
+a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation.
+Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the
+ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable.
+
+"Let those who have homes and every appliance to make life pass
+agreeably, and who yet yawn over an unoccupied evening, fancy a lively
+young girl all day cooped up at sewing in a close, ill-ventilated room.
+Evening comes, and she has three times the desire for amusement and
+three times the need of it that her fashionable sister has. And where
+can she go? To the theatre, perhaps, with some young man as thoughtless
+as herself, and more depraved; then to the bar for a glass of wine, and
+another; and then, with a head swimming and turning, who shall say where
+else she may be led? Past midnight and no one to look after her,--and
+one night ruins her utterly and for life, and she as yet only a child!
+
+"John Newton had a very wise saying: 'Here is a man trying to fill a
+bushel with chaff. Now if I fill it with wheat first, it is better than
+to fight him.' This apothegm contains in it the whole of what I would
+say on the subject of amusements."
+
+
+
+
+AN ITALIAN RAIN-STORM.
+
+
+The coast-road between Nice and Genoa,--known throughout the world for
+its unrivalled beauty of scenery, the altitudes to which it climbs, and
+the depths to which it dives,--now on the olive-clad heights, now close
+down upon the shore shaded by palm or carob-trees, now stretching inland
+amid orange-grounds and vineyards, now rounding some precipitous point
+that hangs hundreds of feet over the Mediterranean,--is generally seen
+with all the advantage of an unclouded sky above, and a sea as blue
+beneath.
+
+It was the fortune of a certain party of four to behold it under the
+unusual aspect of bad weather. They set out in the diligence one winter
+evening, expecting to arrive at Genoa by the same time next day,
+according to ordinary course. But no one unaccustomed to the effect of
+rain, continuous rain, in mountainous districts, can conceive the
+wonders worked by a long succession of wet days. The arrival was
+retarded six hours, and the four found themselves in _Genova la superba_
+somewhere about midnight. However, this was only the commencement of the
+pouring visitation; and the roads had been rendered merely so "heavy" as
+to make the horses contumacious when dragging the ponderous vehicle up
+hill, which contumacy had occasioned the delay in question. Despite the
+hopes entertained that the weather would clear, the rain set in; and
+during no interval did it hold up, with the exception of a short period,
+which permitted one gentleman of the party of four to visit on business
+two bachelor brothers, manufacturers in Genoa. The residence of these
+brothers being in rather an out-of-the-way quarter of the city, and
+being very peculiar in itself, the gentleman advised the rest of his
+party to accompany him on this visit.
+
+The four, only too glad to find themselves able to get out of doors, set
+forth on foot through the steep and narrow streets of Genoa, which make
+driving in a carriage a fatigue, and walking a feat of great excitement,
+especially when mud prevails. Trucks, ponderously laden with bales
+of goods, and pushed along at a reckless rate of speed by
+mahogany-complexioned men; dashing coaches, impelled by drivers
+hallooing when close upon you with distracting loudness and abruptness;
+mules coming onward with the blundering obtuseness peculiar to their
+tribe, or with their heads fastened to doorways, and their flanks
+extending across the street, affording just space enough for the
+passenger to slide behind their heels; a busy, jostling crowd of people
+hurrying to and fro, with no definite current, but streaming over any
+portion of the undistinguishable carriage-way and foot-way,--all combine
+to make Genoese pedestrianism a work only less onerous than driving.
+
+Choosing the minor trouble, our party trusted to their own legs; and,
+after picking their way through sludge and mire, along murky alleys that
+branched off into wharves and quays, and up slippery by-ways that looked
+like paved staircases without regular steps, the four emerged upon an
+open space in front of a noble church. Leaving this on their left hand,
+they turned short into a place that wore something the appearance of a
+stable-yard,--with this difference, that there were neither steeds nor
+stabling to be seen; but instead there were blank walls, enclosing a
+kind of court adjoining a huge old mansion, and beyond there was a steep
+descent leading down to the sea-side.
+
+On ringing a bell that hung beside a gate in the wall enclosure, the
+door opened apparently of itself, and a dismal scream ensued. The scream
+proceeded from a sea-gull, peering out of a kind of pen formed by a
+wooden paling in one corner of a grass-grown patch, half cabbage-garden,
+half excavated earth and rock; and the mysterious opening of the door
+was explained by a connecting cord pulled by some unseen hand within a
+smaller house that stood near to the huge old mansion. From the house
+appeared, advancing towards us, the two bachelor brothers, who welcomed
+our friend and his three companions with grave Italian courtesy.
+Understanding the curiosity the four felt to see their premises, they
+did the honors of their place, with a minuteness as politely considerate
+towards the strangers as it was gratifying to the interest felt by them.
+
+First the visitors were led by the bachelor brothers to see the huge old
+mansion, which they called the _Palazzo_. Let no one who has seen an
+ordinary Genoese palace, magnificent with gilding, enriched by priceless
+pictures, supplied with choice books, and adorned with gorgeous
+furniture, figure to himself any such combination in the _palazzo_ in
+question. This was a vast pile of building, that would make five
+moderate-sized dwelling-houses, one in the roof, and the other four in
+the habitable portion of the edifice. A general air of ramshackledness
+pervaded the exterior, while the interior presented an effect of
+interminable ranges of white-washed walls, divided off into numberless
+apartments of various sizes, from a saloon on the _piano nobile_, or
+principal floor, measuring more than forty feet long, to small square
+attic rooms that were little more than cupboards. But this attic story
+was not all composed of chambers thus dimensioned. Among its apartments
+were rooms that might have accommodated a banqueting assemblage, had
+diners been so inclined; while among the accommodations comprised in
+this garret range was a kitchen, with spacious dressers, stoves,
+closets, and a well of water some hundred and odd feet deep. It was
+impossible for the imagination to refrain from picturing the troops of
+ghosts which doubtless occupied these upper chambers of the old
+_palazzo_, and held nightly vigil, undisturbed, amid the silence and
+solitude of their neglected spaces. Through one of the dwarf windows
+that pierced at intervals all sides of the mansion, just beneath the
+lofty roof, and which gave light to the attic story, we were directed to
+look by the emphatic words of the elder bachelor brother,--"Ma, veda che
+vista c' e!"
+
+The view thence was indeed well worthy his praise; and he himself formed
+an appropriate companion-picture to the scene. Bluish-gray eyes, a
+fairer complexion than usually belongs to men of his clime and country,
+a look of penetration, combined with an expression of quiet content,
+were surmounted by a steeple-crowned hat that might have become a Dutch
+burgomaster, or one of Teniers's land-proprietors, rather than a denizen
+of a southern city. Yet the association which his face, figure, and
+costume had with some of George Cruikshank's illustrations of German
+tales afforded pictorial harmony with the range of ghostly rooms we were
+viewing. He "marshalled us the way that we should go," by leading us
+down a steep flight of steps, which landed us on the _piano nobile_.
+This, for the present, was tenanted by a set of weavers, to whom the
+principal floor of the _palazzo_ had been let for a short term. They had
+proved but turbulent occupants, being in a constant state of
+refractoriness against their landlords, the bachelor brothers, who
+seemed to be somewhat in awe of them. On the present occasion, for
+instance, the brothers apologized for being unable to show us the grand
+saloon, as the weavers (whom we could hear, while he spoke, singing in a
+loud, uproarious, insurgent kind of way, that might well have drawn
+three souls out of one of their own craft, and evidently made the souls
+of their two landlords quail) did not like to be disturbed.
+
+Their contumacious voices, mingled with the clamor of their looms, died
+off in the distance, while we proceeded down the back staircase to the
+ground-floor. We at first fancied that this apparently surreptitious
+proceeding was perhaps traceable to the awe entertained by the bachelor
+brothers for their unruly tenants; but we were relieved from the sense
+of acting in a style bordering on poltroonery, by finding that the
+principal staircase had been boarded up to preserve its marble steps and
+sides from injury. On arriving at the foot we found ourselves in a
+spacious hall, opposite the approach to the grand staircase, which
+looked like an archway built for giants, toweringly defined above the
+scaffold-planks by which it was barricaded. Many doors opened from this
+hall, to each of which, in turn, one of the bachelor brothers applied
+successive keys from a ponderous bunch that he held in his hand. These
+doors led to vast suites of apartments, all unfurnished, like the upper
+rooms, with the exception of one suite, which the brothers had lent to a
+friend of theirs, and which was sparely supplied with some old Italian
+furniture, of so antique a fashion that each article might have been a
+family heirloom ever since the times of that famous Genoese gentleman,
+Christopher Columbus. One peculiarity the four remarked, which spoke
+volumes for the geniality of the climate: in all this huge rambling
+edifice they saw only one room which could boast of a fireplace. The
+sun's warmth evidently supplied all the heat necessary, and--as might be
+conjectured from its other peculiarities as well as this--anything like
+what the English call "the joys and comforts of the domestic hearth"
+seemed an impossible attainment in this dreary old _palazzo_. The social
+amenities must wither in its desolate atmosphere, and dwindle to chill
+shadows, like the ghosts that haunt the attic story.
+
+To complete the air of saddening vacancy that clung like a damp to the
+really arid white walls, when the brothers led us down a wide staircase
+to the vaulted space beneath the basement, we came upon some hundreds of
+small bird-cages, containing each a miserable linnet, titmouse, or
+finch, condemned to chirp out its wretched existence in this airless
+underground region. In reply to our pitying exclamation, we were told
+that the bachelors' friend who occupied the corner apartment on the
+ground-floor was a great sportsman, and devotedly fond of _la caccia_;
+that these unhappy little prisoners were employed by him in the season
+as decoy-birds; that they were kept in these dungeons during the other
+months of the year; and that they were BLINDED to make them sing better
+and be more serviceable at the period when he needed them. As we looked
+shudderingly at these forlorn little creatures, and expressed our
+commiseration at their fate, the younger brother stepped forward, and,
+examining one of the cages, in which sat hunched up in one corner a
+stiff lump of feathers, coolly announced that "this goldfinch" was dead.
+
+It was with a feeling of relief that we left the death-released bird,
+and the vaults beneath the old _palazzo_, to return once more to the
+fresh air and the breathing-space of the broad earth and sky. Our next
+visit was to the bachelor brothers' factory, which was for the
+fabrication of wax candles. Adjoining this was a terrace-plot of ground,
+dotted over with what looked like Liliputian tombstones. We were
+beginning to wonder whether this were a cemetery for the dead
+birds,--speculating on the probability that these might be the
+monumental tributes placed over their graves by the sportsman friend of
+the two brothers,--when the elder informed us that this was the place
+they used for bleaching the wax, and that the square stones we saw were
+the supports on which rested the large flat stands whereon it was laid
+to whiten in the sun. From this terrace-plot of ground,--which projected
+in a narrowish green ledge, skirted by a low ivy-grown wall, over the
+sea,--we beheld a prospect of almost matchless beauty. Before us
+stretched a wide expanse of Mediterranean waters; to the extreme left
+was just visible the bold rocky point of Porto Fino; to the right
+extended westward a grand line of picturesque coast, including the
+headlands of Capo di Noli and Capo delle Mele; and near at hand lay the
+harbor of Genoa, with its shipping, its amphitheatre of palaces,
+surmounted by the high ground above, and crowned by the fortressed
+summits beyond.
+
+We were roused from the absorbing admiration which this majestic sea and
+land view had excited, by one of the four asking whether there were any
+access to the _palazzo_ from this terrace. Whereupon the brothers showed
+us a winding turret staircase, which led by a subterranean passage into
+one of the lower vaulted rooms. Nothing more like a place in a wonderful
+story-book ever met us in real life; and while we were lost in a dream
+of romantic imaginings, one of the brothers was engaged in giving a
+prosaic relation of how the old _palazzo_ had come into their family by
+a lawsuit, which terminated in their favor, and left them possessors of
+this unexpected property. During the narrative a brood of adolescent
+chickens had come near to where we stood listening on the green plot,
+and eyed us with expectant looks, as if accustomed to be fed or noticed.
+The elder brother indulged the foremost among the poultry group--a white
+bantam cock of courageous character--by giving him his foot to assault.
+Valiantly the little fellow flew at, and spurred, and pecked the boot
+and trousers; again and again he returned to the charge, while the
+blue-gray eyes beamed smilingly down from beneath the steeple-crowned
+hat, as the old man humored the bird's pugnacious spirit.
+
+Presently a shy little girl of some ten or twelve years came peering out
+at the strangers from beneath a row of evergreen oaks that ornamented
+the back of the dwelling-house overlooking the terrace. There she stood
+at the foot of the ilexes, shading her eyes with one hand, (for the sun
+coyly gleamed through the rain-clouds at that moment,) while the other
+was employed in restraining the lumbering fondness of two large
+bull-dogs, that gambolled heavily round her. She was introduced to us as
+the daughter of the younger of the two brothers; who proved after all to
+be no bachelor, but a widower. One ponderous brindled brute poked his
+black muzzle against the child with such a weight of affection that we
+expected to see her overturned on the sward; but she seemed to have
+complete control over her canine favorites, and to live with them and a
+large macaw she had up stairs in her own room (we afterwards found it
+perched there, when taken to see the upper floor of the bachelor
+residence), as her familiars and sole associates,--like some enchanted
+princess in a fairy-tale.
+
+On entering the house from the terrace, we found ourselves in its
+kitchen, which strongly resembled a cavern made habitable. It was hewn
+out of the rock on which the dwelling stood; and it only required the
+presence of the black man and the old woman who figure in Gil Blas's
+story to give, to the life, the cooking-department of the robbers' cave
+there. As we ascended a rude stone staircase that led from it, we heard
+the lowing of cows; and, turning, we saw two of these animals
+comfortably stalled in a side recess, not far from the rocky ledge on
+which the culinary apparatus for dressing the food of the establishment
+was deposited. Mounting into the parlor, we discovered a good-sized
+apartment, its windows looking out through the foliage of the ilexes
+over the sea, skirted by the extensive coast view. Behind was the
+dining-room; on each side were the brothers' bedrooms; and leading from
+a small entrance-hall at the back was a large billiard-room. This opened
+on a small garden nook, in which were orange-trees and camellias, full
+of bud and blossom,--from which some of the flowers were gathered for us
+by the Italian brethren, on our taking leave and thanking them for the
+unusual treat we had had in going over their curious abode.
+
+The transient gleam of sunshine that had shone forth while we were
+there was the only intermission vouchsafed by the rain, which afterwards
+poured down with a steady vehemence and pertinacity seldom seen on the
+Ligurian Riviera. The effects of this rare continuance of wet weather
+were soon made impressively perceptible to the four as they emerged upon
+the open road, after passing the Lighthouse of Genoa and the long
+straggling suburbs of San Pier d'Arena, Pegli, and Voltri. The horses
+splashed through channels of water which filled the spongy ruts,
+smoking, and toiling, and plunging on; while the whoops and yells of the
+postilion urging them forward, together with the loud smacks of his
+whip, made a savage din. This was farther increased as we crashed along
+a ledge road, cut in a cliff overhanging the sea;--the waves tearing up
+from beneath with a whelming roar; the rocks jutting forth in points,
+every one of which was a streaming water-spout; the rain pelting, the
+wind rushing, the side-currents pouring and dashing. These latter,
+ordinarily but small rills, carrying off the drainage of the land by
+gentle course, were now swollen to rough cataracts, leaping with furious
+rapidity from crag to crag in deluges of turbid water, discolored to a
+dingy yellow-brown by the heaps of earth and stone which they dislodged
+and brought down with them, and hurled hither and thither over the
+precipitous projections, and occasionally flung athwart the highway. At
+one spot, where a heap of such stones--large, flat slabs--had been
+tossed upon the road, and a few of their companions were in the very act
+of plunging down after them, our postilion drew up to guide his cattle
+among those already fallen; and, raising his voice above the thunder of
+the sea-waves, rain, wind, and waters, shouted out in broad Genoese to
+the falling ones, "Halloo, you there, up above! Stop a bit, will you?
+Wait a moment, you up there!" Then, driving on carefully till he had
+steered by the largest of the fragments that lay prostrate, he turned
+back his head, shook his whip at it, and apostrophised it with, "Ah, you
+big pig! I've passed you, for this time!"
+
+The first change of horses took place at a village close down on the
+sea-shore, where some fishermen were busily employed hauling up the last
+of a row of boats that lay upon the beach. Every available hand, not
+occupied in aiding the conductor and postilion to unharness the
+diligence horses and put to the fresh team, was enlisted in the service
+of the boat-hauling. Young gentlemen out for an evening's amusement,
+attired in sacks or tarpaulins thrown over their shoulders, while their
+nether garments were rolled up tightly into a neat twist that encircled
+the top of each thigh, were frisking about a line of men with
+weather-beaten countenances and blown hair, who tugged bare-legged at
+the sides of the fishing-boat, half in the water and half out.
+Occasionally one of these young gentry, feeling perhaps that he had
+aided sufficiently in the general work, betook himself to a doorway
+near, dripping and shaking himself, and looking out through the sheeted
+rain at his companions, who were still in the excitement of whisking
+round the heaving and tugging fishermen, while the waves rose high, the
+spray dashed up in mist over their grizzled heads and beards, and the
+wind whistled sharply amid the deeper tumult of the sea and torrent
+waters. To heighten the grim wildness of the scene, the shades of
+evening were closing round, and by the time the four travellers were off
+again and proceeding on their way, darkness was fast setting in.
+
+Nightfall found them toiling up a steep ascent that diverges inland for
+a few miles, winding round the estate of some inflexible proprietor,
+upon whom nothing can prevail to permit the high-road to take its
+passage through his land, there bordering the sea-side. Up the ascent we
+labored, and down the descent we lunged, the wheels lodging in deep mire
+at every moment, and threatening to abide in the deeper holes and
+furrows which the water-courses (forced from their due channels by
+overflowing and by obstructive fallen masses) had cut and dug into the
+road as they strayed swiftly over it.
+
+By the time the next stage was reached, the conductor consulted the four
+on the advisability of stopping to sleep, instead of proceeding on such
+a tempestuous night, the like of which, for perilous effects, he said he
+had but once before encountered during the whole of the sixteen years he
+had been in office on this road. The three _coupe_ passengers,
+consisting of two ladies--sisters--and a ruddy-faced, cheerful gentleman
+in a velvet travelling-cap, who made it a principle, like Falstaff, to
+take things easily, and "not to sweat extraordinarily," warmly approved
+the conductor's proposal as a sensible one; and even the alert gentleman
+in the _banquette_ agreed that it would be more prudent to remain at the
+first good inn the diligence came to. This, the conductor replied, was
+at Savona, one stage farther, as the place they now were at was a mere
+boat-building hamlet, that scarcely boasted an inn at all,--certainly
+not "good beds." A group of eager, bronzed faces were visible by
+lamp-light, assembled round the conductor, listening to him as he held
+this conference with his coach-passengers; and at its close the
+bronze-faced crowd broke into a rapid outburst of Genoese dialect, which
+was interrupted by our conductor's making his way through them all, and
+disappearing round the corner of the small _piazza_ wherein the
+diligence stood to have its horses changed. After some moments'
+pause,--not in the rain, or wind, or sea-waves, for they kept pouring
+and rushing and roaring on,--but in the hurly-burly of rapid talk, which
+ceased, owing to the talkers' hurrying off in pursuit of the vanished
+conductor, he returned, saying, "Andiamo a Savona." It soon proved that
+he had been to ascertain the feasibility of what the group of
+bronze-faced men had proposed, namely, that they would undertake to
+convey the diligence (without its horses, its "outsides," and its
+"insides") bodily over a high, steep, slippery mule-bridge, which
+crossed a torrent near at hand, now swollen to an unfordable depth and
+swiftness. The four beheld this impassable stream, boiling and surging
+and sweeping on to mingle itself with the madly leaping sea-waves out
+there in the dim night-gloom to the left, as they descended from the
+diligence and prepared to go on foot across something that looked like a
+rudely-constructed imitation of the Rialto Bridge at Venice, seen
+through a haze of darkness, slanting rain, faintly-beaming coach-lamps,
+pushing and heaving men, panting led horses, passengers muffled up and
+umbrellaed, conductor leading and directing. Then came the reharnessing
+of the horses, the reassembling of the passengers, the remounting of the
+"insides," the reclambering to his seat of the alert _banquette_
+"outside" (after a hearty interchange of those few brief, smiling words
+with his _coupe_ companions which, between English friends, say so much
+in so little utterance at periods of mutual anxiety and interest), the
+payment of the agreed-for sum by the conductor to the bronze-faced
+pushers and heavers, amid a violent renewal of the storm of Genoese
+jargon, terminated by an authoritative word from the payer as he swung
+himself up into his place by a leathern strap dangling from the
+coach-side, a smart crack of the postilion's whip, a forward plunge of
+the struggling horses, an onward jerk of the diligence, and the final
+procedure into the wet and dark and roar of the wild night.
+
+The gas and stir of Savona came as welcome tokens of repose to the
+toilsome journey; and the four alighted at one of the hotels there with
+an inexpressible sense of relief. His fellow-travellers were warned,
+however, by the alert gentleman, that they must hold themselves in
+readiness to start before dawn next morning, as the conductor wished to
+avail himself of the first peep of daylight in passing several torrents
+on the road which lay beyond Savona. Velvet-cap assented with a grunt;
+one of the sisters--all briskness at night, but fit for nothing of a
+morning--proposed not to go to bed at all; while the other--quite used
+up at night, but "up to everything" of a morning--undertook to call the
+whole party in time for departure.
+
+This she did,--ordering coffee, seeing that some was swallowed by the
+sister who had been unwillingly roused from the sleep she had willingly
+offered to forego overnight, collecting cloaks, baskets, and
+travelling-rugs, and altogether looking so wakeful and ready that she
+wellnigh drove her drowsy sister to desperation.
+
+The preannounced torrents proved as swollen as were expected; so that
+the passengers had to unpack themselves from the heaps of wrappings
+stowed snugly round their feet and knees, and issue forth into the keen
+morning air, armed with difficultly-put-up umbrellas, to traverse
+certain wooden foot-bridges, in the midst of which they could not help
+halting to watch the lightened diligence dragged splashingly through the
+deep and rapid streams, expecting, at every lunge it made into the
+water-dug gullies, to see it turn helplessly over on its side in the
+very midst of them. Nevertheless, no such accident occurred; and the
+four jogged on, along soaking, soppy, drenched roads, that seemed never
+to have known dust or drought. At one saturated village, they saw a
+dripping procession of people under crimson umbrellas, shouldering two
+rude coffins of deal boards, which were borne to the door of a church
+that stood by the wayside,--where the train waited in a kind of moist
+dejection to be admitted, and to look dispiritedly after the passing
+diligence. The alert gentleman heard from what the conductor gathered
+from an old woman wrapped in a many-colored gaudy-patterned scarf of
+chintz, which, wet through, covered her head and shoulders clingingly,
+that this was the funeral of a poor peasant-man and his wife, who had
+both died suddenly and both on the same day. The old woman held up her
+brown, shrivelled hands, and gesticulated pityingly with them in the
+pouring rain, as she mumbled her hurried tale of sorrow; while the
+postilion involuntarily slackened pace, that her words might be heard
+where he and the conductor sat.
+
+The horses were suffered to creep on at their own snail pace, while the
+influence of the funeral scene lasted; but soon the long lash was plied
+vivaciously again, and we came to another torrent, more deep, more
+rapid, more swollen than any previous one. Fortunately for us, a day or
+two before there had been a postilion nearly drowned in attempting to
+drive through this impassable ford; and still more fortunately for us,
+this postilion chanced to have a relation who was a servant in the
+household of Count Cavour, then prime-minister to King Victor Emanuel.
+"Papa Camillo's" servant's kinsman's life being endangered, an order had
+come from Turin only a few hours before our diligence arrived at the
+bank of the dangerous stream,--now swollen into a swift, broad
+river,--decreeing that the new road and bridge, lately in course of
+construction on this spot, should be opened immediately for passage to
+and fro. The road was more like a stone-quarry than a carriageable
+public highway, so encumbered was it with granite fragments, heaped
+ready for top-dressing and finishing; and the bridge led on to a raised
+embankment, coming to a sudden fissure, where the old coach-road crossed
+it. Still, our conductor, finding that some few carts and one diligence
+had actually passed over the ground, set himself to the work of getting
+ours also across. First, the insides and outsides were abstracted from
+the coach,--which they had by this time come to regard as quite an
+extraneous part of their travelling, not so much a "conveyance" as
+something to be conveyed,--and the four took their way over the stones,
+amused at this new and most unexpected obstacle to their progress.
+Hastening across the fissure, they went and placed themselves (always
+under umbrellas) beside a troop of little vagabond boys,--who had come
+to see the fun, and had secured good front places on the opposite
+bank,--to view the diligence brought down the sharp declivity of the
+embankment to the old road below. The spectators beheld the jolting
+vehicle come slowly and gratingly along, like a sturdy recusant, holding
+back, until the straining horses had tugged it by main force to the
+brink of the fissure. Here the animals stopped, snorted, eyed the sheer
+descent with twitching ears and quivering skins, as though they said in
+equine language, "We're surely not required to drag it down _this_!"
+They were soon relieved from their doubt, by being taken out of the
+traces, patted, and gently led down the embankment, leaving their
+burdensome charge behind. There it stuck, helplessly alone,--even more
+thoroughly belying its own name than diligences usually do,--perched on
+the edge of a declivity of the height of a tall house, stock still,
+top-heavy with piled luggage, deserted by its passengers, abandoned of
+its friend in the velvet cap, a motionless and apparently objectless
+coach. How it was to be dislodged and conveyed down the "vast abrupt"
+became matter of conjecture to the four, when presently some men came to
+the spot with a large coil of cable-cord, which they proceeded to pass
+through the two hindmost side-windows of the diligence, threading it
+like a bead on a string; and then they gradually lowered the lumbering
+coach down the side of the descent, amid the _evvivas_ of the vagabond
+boys, led by an enthusiastic "_Bravissimo!_" from Velvet-cap.
+
+This incident occupied much time; and though the travellers made some
+progress during the afternoon, the gray shades of twilight were
+gathering over and deepening the gloom of the already gray sky and gray
+landscape,--deadened to that color from their naturally brilliant hues
+by the prevailing wet,--as the travellers stopped to change horses again
+at the entrance of the town of Oneglia. Here, while the conductor ran
+into a house to make purchase of a loaf about half a yard in length and
+a corpulent bottle of wine, the four saw another funeral train
+approaching. This time it was still more dreary, being attended by a
+show of processional pomp, inexpressibly forlorn and squalid. The coffin
+was palled with a square of rusty black velvet, whence all the pile had
+long been worn, and which the soaking rain now helped age to embrown and
+make flabby; a standard cross was borne by an ecclesiastical official,
+who had on a quadrangular cap surmounted by a centre tuft; two priests
+followed, sheltered by umbrellas, their sacerdotal garments dabbled and
+draggled with mud, and showing thick-shod feet beneath the dingy serge
+and lawn that flapped above them, as they came along at a smart pace,
+suggestive of anything but solemnity. As little of that effect was there
+in the burial-hymn which they bawled, rather than chanted, in a
+careless, off-hand style, until they reached the end of the street and
+of the town, when the bawlers suddenly ceased, took an abrupt leave of
+the coffin and its bearers, fairly turned on their heels, accompanied by
+the official holy standard-bearer, and went back at a brisk trot,
+having, it seems, fulfilled the functions required of them. Obsequies
+more heartless in their manner of performance, it was never the fate of
+the four to behold. The impression left by this sight assorted well with
+the deep and settled murkiness that dwelt like a thick veil on all
+around. Even the cheery tones of Velvet-cap's voice lost their
+elasticity, and the sprightliness of the sister's spirits, that
+invariably rose with the coming on of night, failed under the depressing
+influence of that rain-hastened funeral and that "set-in" rainy evening.
+As for the sister whose spirits fell with the fall of day, she was fast
+lapsing into a melancholy condition of silence and utter "giving-up."
+
+Rattling over the pavement of the long, straggling town,--plashing
+along a few miles of level road,--struggling up hill,--rattling through
+another pavemented town,--striking into the country again,--we came to
+another long ascent. As we toiled to the top, a postilion, having the
+care of five return horses, joined company with ours, the two men
+walking up hill together, while their beasts paced slowly on, with
+drooping heads and smoking sides. Now and then, when the road was less
+steep, and levelled into trotting-ground, the postilions climbed to
+their seats,--ours on his rightful box-seat, the other on an impromptu
+one, which he made for himself upon a sack of corn slung beneath the
+front windows of the _coupe_,--and while our horses fell into an easy
+jog, we could see the return ones go on before at a swagging run, with
+their loosened harness tossing and hanging from them as they took their
+own course, now on one side of the way, now on the other, according to
+the promptings of their unreined fancy.
+
+Suddenly, at a turn of the road, we came upon an undistinguishable
+something, which, when our eyes could pierce through and beyond the
+immediate light afforded by our diligence-lamp, we discovered to be
+another diligence leaning heavily over a ditch, while its conductor and
+postilion were at their horses' heads, endeavoring to make them
+extricate it from its awkward position. This, however, was a feat beyond
+the poor beasts' strength; and our conductor, after a few "Sacramentos"
+at this new delay, got down and ran to see what could be done to help
+them out of the scrape. It had been occasioned partly by the
+carelessness of the conductor, who, unlike ours, (for the latter was a
+man of good sense and judgment, self-possessed, and perfectly attentive
+to the duties of his office,) had neglected to light the diligence-lamp,
+and partly by the obstinacy of a drunken postilion, who insisted on
+keeping too close to the ditch side of the road, while he instinctively
+avoided the precipice side. Nearly two mortal hours was our diligence
+detained, during which time our cattle were taken from their traces and
+harnessed to those of the half-overturned coach, in various attempts to
+dislodge it. The first resulted in a further locking of the wheel
+against a projecting point of rock, and an additional bundling sideways
+of the leaning diligence; the second was made by attaching the horses to
+the back of it, while the men set their strength to the wheels,
+endeavoring to push them round by main force in aid of the straining
+team. The weight of the heavily-loaded coach resisted their efforts to
+move it; and then the passengers were requested to descend. Out into the
+rain and mud and darkness they came, warned by our conductor, in his
+prompt, thoughtful way, to beware of stumbling over the precipitous
+cliff, which dropped straight from the roadside there, hundreds of feet
+down, into the sea. We could hear the dash of the waves far below, as
+our conductor's voice sounded out clear and peremptory, uttering
+the timely reminder; we could hear the words of two French
+_commis-voyageurs_, coming from the ditch-sunk diligence, making some
+facetious remark, one to the other, about their present adventure being
+very much like some of Alexandre Dumas's _Impressions de Voyage_; we
+could hear the cries and calls of the men refastening the horses, and
+preparing to push anew at the wheels; we could distinguish a domestic
+party dismounting from the back portion of the other diligence,
+consisting of a father and mother with their baby and the _bonne_; we
+could see the little white cap covered up carefully with a handkerchief
+by the young mother, while the father held an umbrella over their heads,
+and conducted them to the counterpart portion of our diligence, where
+the family took refuge during the fresh attempts to drag theirs forth.
+
+Then there came a tap against our _coupe_ window, and an unmistakably
+British accent was heard to say: "Anglais? Anglais?" Tap--tap--tap. "Any
+English here?"
+
+Velvet-cap let the window down, and answered in his cheerfullest tone,
+"Yes."
+
+This reply seemed to rejoice the heart of the inquirer, who immediately
+rejoined, "Oh!--Well, I really wished to know if there were any one here
+who could understand me. These fellows don't comprehend one word that I
+say; and I can't speak one word of their jabber. Just listen to them!
+What a confounded row they keep up! Parcel of stupid brutes! If I could
+only have made myself understood, I could have told them how to get it
+out in a minute. Confounded thing this, ain't it? Kept last night, too,
+by something of the same kind of accident; and I couldn't get those
+stupid fellows to make out what I meant, and give me my carpet-bag."
+
+Polite condolences from Velvet-cap.
+
+"I say, are these your Italian skies? Is Nice no better than this? By
+George, I didn't come here for this, though!"
+
+Assurances of the unusually bad weather this season from Velvet-cap.
+
+"No, but just hark! what a confounded row and jabber those fellows keep
+up."
+
+A simultaneous "Ee-ye-ho! ee-yuch-yuch!" came from the striving men at
+this moment, and our British acquaintance, with a hasty "Good night!"
+hurried off to see the result. It was this time a successful one; the
+leaning diligence was plucked out, restored to an upright position, and
+its passengers were reassembled. Once more on its way, our conductor
+returned to his own coach; and, with the help of our postilion,
+reharnessed our horses. But the difficulty now was to start them. Tired
+with their unexpected task of having to tug at another and a stuck-fast
+diligence,--made startlish with having to stand in the rain and chill
+night air, in the open road, while the debates were going on as to the
+best method of attaching them to the sunken vehicle,--when once put back
+into their own traces, they took to rearing and kicking instead of
+proceeding. It is by no means amusing to sit in a diligence behind five
+plunging horses, on a cliff-road,--one edge of which overhangs the sea,
+and the other consists of a deep ditch or water-way, beneath a sheer
+upright rock,--"when rain and wind beat dark December"; and even after
+whip and whoop had succeeded in prevailing on the rearers and kickers to
+"take the road" again, that road proved so unprecedentedly bad as almost
+to render futile the struggles of the poor beasts. They did their best;
+they strained their haunches, they bent their heads forward, they
+actually made leaps of motion, in trying to lug the clogged wheels on
+through the sludge and clammy soil; but this was a _mauvais pas_, where
+the _cantonniers'_ good offices in road-mending had been lately
+neglected, and it seemed almost an impossibility to get through with our
+tired cattle. However, the thing was achieved, and the town of San Remo
+at length reached.
+
+Here, with a change of horses, it was now our turn to have a drunken
+postilion; whom our conductor, after seizing him by the collar with both
+hands, permitted to mount to his high seat and gather up the reins,
+there being no other driver to be had. Smacking his long whip with an
+energy that made the night-echoes resound far and wide, galloping his
+horses up hill at a rate that swayed the coach to and fro and threatened
+speedy upsetting, screaming and raving like a wild Indian uttering his
+battle-cry, our charioteer pursued his headlong course, until brought to
+a stop by something that suddenly obstructed his career.
+
+A voice before us shouted out, "We must all go back to San Remo!"
+
+A silence ensued; and then our conductor got down, running forward to
+see what was the matter. The three in the _coupe_ saw their alert friend
+of the _banquette_ descend; which caused Velvet-cap to bestir himself,
+and let down the window. Not obtaining any satisfactory information by
+looking out into the darkness and confusion, he opened the door also,
+and called to some one to help him forth. Whereupon he found himself in
+the arms of the maudlin postilion; who, taking him doubtless for some
+foreign lady passenger in great alarm, hugged him affectionately,
+stuttering out, "N'ayez pas peur! Point de danger! point de danger!"
+
+"Get off with you, will you?" was the ejaculation from Velvet-cap, as he
+pushed away the man, and went in search of his alert friend.
+
+The latter soon came running back to the coach-side, bidding the sisters
+get out quickly and come and look at what was well worth seeing.
+
+It was indeed! There lay a gigantic mass of earth, stones, and trees,
+among which were several large blocks of solid rock, hurled across the
+road, showing a jagged outline against the night-sky, like an
+interposing mountain-barrier but just recently dropped in their path.
+The whole had fallen not an hour ago; and it was matter of
+congratulation to the four, that it had not done so at the very moment
+their diligence passed beneath.
+
+There was nothing to be done but what the voice (which proved to be that
+of the conductor belonging to the other diligence) had proposed, namely,
+to go back to San Remo.
+
+Here the travellers of both diligences soon arrived; the four, as they
+passed to their rooms, hearing the British accent on the landing, in
+disconsolate appeal to a waiter: "Oh!--look here,--sack, you know, sack,
+sack!"
+
+"Oui, monsieur; votre sac de nuit. Il est en bas,--en bas, sur la
+diligence. On le montera bientot."
+
+The lady whose spirits rose at night was flitting about, brisk as a bee,
+getting morsels of bread and dipping them into wine to revive her
+sister; who, worn out with fatigue and exhaustion, sat in a collapsed
+and speechless state on a sofa.
+
+Next morning, however, she was herself again, and able to note the owner
+of the British accent, who had certainly obtained his desired
+carpet-bag, since there he was, at the _coupe_ window, brushed and
+beaming, addressing Velvet-cap with, "Excuse me, as an Englishman; but,
+could you oblige me with change for a napoleon? I want it to pay my bill
+with. They could get some from the next shop, if these jabbering fellows
+would but understand, and go and try."
+
+The morning-animated sister was now also able to observe upon the more
+promising aspect of the weather, which was evidently clearing up; for it
+not only did not rain, but showed streaks of brightness over the sea, in
+lines between the hitherto unbroken gray clouds. She adverted to the
+pleasant look of the cap-lifting _cantonniers_, as they stood drawn up
+and nodding encouragement at the diligence, near the mass of earth which
+had fallen overnight; and which they, by dint of several hours' hard
+work from long before dawn, had sufficiently dug away to admit of
+present passage. She said how comforting the sight of their honest
+weather-lined faces was, bright with the touch of morning and early
+good-humor.
+
+This brought a muttered rejoinder from the other sister; who, huddled up
+in one corner, still half asleep, remarked that the faces of the
+_cantonniers_ were surely far more comforting when visible by the light
+of the diligence-lamp, coming to bring succor amid darkness and danger.
+
+"But it is precisely because they are never to be seen during the
+darkness, when danger is increased by there rarely being help at hand,
+that I dread and dislike night," returned Morning-lover.
+
+"How oppressive the scent of those truffles is, the first thing after
+breakfast!" exclaimed Night-favorer.
+
+"I had not yet perceived it," replied Morning-lover. "Last evening,
+indeed, after a whole day's haunting with it, the smell of that hamper
+of truffles which the conductor took up at Finale was almost
+insupportable; but now, in the fresh morning air, it is anything but
+disagreeable. I shall never hereafter encounter the scent of truffles
+without being forcibly reminded of all the incidents of this journey.
+That smell seems absolutely interwoven with images of torrent-crossing,
+cliff-falling, pouring rain, and roaring waves."
+
+The talk fell upon associations of sense with events and places; sounds,
+sights, and scents, intimately connected with and vividly recalling
+certain occurrences of our lives. We had missed the glimpse of the baby
+face and little white cap from the back of the diligence that preceded
+us during the first portion of the day, owing to our coach having been
+delayed at Ventimiglia by some peculiar arrangement which required the
+team that had dragged us up a steep ascent to stop and bait,--merely
+resting instead of changing, before we went on again.
+
+The Pont St. Louis, with the picturesque ravine it crosses, had been
+passed, and the pretty town of Mentone was full in view, when we caught
+sight of the other diligence, some way on the road before us, brought
+once more to a stand-still, while a crowd of persons surrounded it, and
+its passengers were to be seen, in the distance, descending, with the
+baby cap among them. At this instant, an excited French official darted
+out from a doorway by the side of the road near us, raising his arms
+distractedly, and throwing his sentences up at the conductor, who
+understood him to say that there was no going on; that a whole garden
+had come tumbling down across the road just at the entrance to Mentone,
+and prevented passing.
+
+We drove on to the spot, and found it was indeed so; the grounds of a
+villa, skirting the highway on a terrace-ledge, had been loosened by the
+many days' rain, and had fallen during the forenoon, a heap of
+ruins,--shrubs, plants, garden-walls, flowers, borders, railings,--one
+mass of obstruction.
+
+With a glance at the _coupe_ passengers, another French official (the
+newly-appointed frontier custom-house being close at hand) stepped
+forward to suggest that the "insides" could be accommodated, during the
+interim required for the _cantonniers_ to do their work, at a
+lately-built hotel he pointed to; but the four agreed to spend the time
+in walking round by the path above the obstruction, so as to see its
+whole extent.
+
+The wet, percolating and penetrating through the softer soil, gradually
+accumulates a weight of water behind and beneath the harder and rockier
+portions, which dislodges them from their places, pushes them forward,
+and finally topples them over headlong. This is generally prevented
+where terrace-walls are built up, by leaving holes here and there in the
+structure, which allow the wet to drain through innocuously; but if, as
+in the present instance, this caution be neglected, many days'
+successive rain is almost sure to produce the disaster in question. It
+had a woful look,--all those garden elegances cast there, flung out upon
+the high-road, like discarded rubbish; pots of selected flowers,
+favorite seats, well-worn paths, carefully-tended beds, trailing
+climbers, torn and snapped branches, all lying to be shovelled away as
+fast as the road-menders could ply their pickaxes and spades.
+
+At length this task was accomplished; the diligences were hauled over
+the broken ground (their contents being also "hauled over" at the
+custom-house); the passengers (after the important ceremonial of handing
+their passports for inspection, and having them handed back by
+personages who kept their countenances wonderfully) were in again and
+off again.
+
+But one more torrent to cross,--where the foremost coach had nearly been
+overset, and where the occupants of the hindmost one, profiting by
+example, got out and walked over the footbridge, in time to behold the
+owner of the British accent wave his hat triumphantly from the _coupe_
+with a hearty (English) "Huzza!" as the vehicle recovered, by a violent
+lurch to the left, from an equally violent one to the right, issuing
+scathless from the last flood that lay in the way,--and then both
+diligences began at a leisurely pace to crawl up a long ascent of road,
+bordered on each side by olive-grounds;--until the view opened to a
+fine stretch of prospect, now colored and vivified by a glance of the
+afternoon sun,--the diminutive peninsular kingdom of Monaco, lying down
+in the very sea, bright, and green, and fairy-like; the bold barren crag
+of the Turbia rock frowning sternly in front, with its antique Roman
+tower and modern Italian church; the rocky heights above to the right,
+with their foreground of olive-trees, vine-trellises, and orange-groves,
+interspersed with country-houses; while through all wound the
+ever-climbing road, a white thread in the distance, with the telegraphic
+poles, dwindled to pin-like dimensions, indicating its numberless turns
+and bends.
+
+As the sun sank over the far western lines of the Estrelle Mountains,
+and the sky faded into grayish purple, succeeded by an ever-deepening
+suffusion of black, unpierced by a single star, the high reach of road
+above Villafranca Bay was passed; and, on our turning the corner of the
+last intervening upland, full in view came the many lights of Nice, with
+its castled rock, its minarets and cupolas, its stretch of sea, its look
+of sheltered repose;--all most welcome to sight, after our sensational
+journey on the Cornice Road in a great rain.
+
+
+
+
+INCIDENTS OF THE PORTLAND FIRE.
+
+
+Never had Portland looked more beautiful than when the sunrise-gun
+boomed across the waters, announcing the ninetieth anniversary of our
+independence. The sun, which on another day should look down on the
+city's desolation, rose unclouded over the houses, that stood forth from
+the foliage of the embowering elms, or nestled in their shadow; over the
+quaintness of the old-fashioned churches and the beauty of the more
+modern temples; over the stately public edifices, and the streets
+everywhere decked with flags and thronged with crowds of happy,
+well-dressed people. Of course, the popular satisfaction expressed
+itself in the report of pistols, guns, and fire-crackers; and all
+through the day the usual amusements went on, and in the afternoon
+almost everybody was on the street.
+
+A few minutes before five o'clock, when the festivity was at its
+wildest, the alarm of fire rang out. Every circumstance was favorable
+for a conflagration,--the people scattered, the city dry and heated by a
+July sun, and a high southwesterly wind blowing. It needed only the
+exciting cause in the shape of a fire-cracker, and lo! half the city was
+doomed.
+
+My youngest brother, at the first sound of the bell, came and begged me
+to take him to the fire; so I went, to please him. Poor child! I little
+thought that by twelve o'clock at night there would be no place at home
+to lay the little head.
+
+We found the fire near Brown's sugar-house, where there was a large
+crowd already assembled. But, though the smoke and masses of flame were
+rising only from one house, the wind was blowing a perfect gale; and a
+foreboding of the calamity impending seemed to possess the spectators.
+There was none of the usual noise, and men appeared to look at the
+burning house with a feeling of awe. We did not stop there at all; and
+some idea of the rapid progress of the fire may be gathered from the
+fact, that about four squares distant, where, on the way up, we could
+see one fire, on our return we saw three,--two lighted by sparks from
+the first. We slowly retraced our way, and met people on every side
+quickening their steps in the direction of the fire.
+
+About seven o'clock, mother and I thought it would be wise to pack up
+our silver and valuables; for it seemed as if we were directly in the
+path of the conflagration. Down Fore Street, and from Fore to Free, it
+was rushing on. The southwestern heavens were entirely shut from our
+view by the flames and smoke; cinders, ashes, and blazing embers were
+falling like rain down Middle Street, and across to Congress, as far as
+the eye could see. The scene was terrible; but it was soon surpassed in
+fearfulness, for the work of desolation was not half completed. The
+Irish population were the chief sufferers up to this hour. It was
+heart-rending to see the women rushing hither and thither, trying to
+save their few possessions. Here, a poor creature was dragging a
+mattress, followed by several little crying children, her face the
+picture of despair; there, another, with her family, stood over the
+remnants of her scanty stock. A poor woman, who was in the habit of
+working for us, lived near the corner of Cross and Fore Streets. She had
+five children and a sick husband to care for. Almost all her energies
+were bent in getting them to a place of safety; and the few little
+things which she succeeded in rescuing from the flames were afterwards
+stolen from her by some one of the many wretches who gathered the spoils
+that awful night.
+
+It soon became evident that we must decide upon some plan of action, in
+case it should come to the worst. We had two married sisters,--one
+living in India Street, the other at the west end of the city. As the
+former had no family, and was alone, even her husband being away, and as
+the latter had three children, and a house full of company, we decided
+that, if we must move, it should be to India Street. We sent off one
+team, and my youngest brother with it, before the fire was anywhere near
+us; and then, while my two little sisters assisted mother in getting
+things together, I worked with my brother and cousin, hanging wet
+blankets against the walls, pouring water on the roof, and taking other
+precautionary measures. But all was useless. On came the fire with a
+steady sweep. We saw that it was idle to combat it longer, and turned
+all our energies to saving what we could. Our home was to be ours no
+longer. The dear old roof-tree, under which had assembled so many loved
+ones, now gone forever,--where the eyes of all our home circle first saw
+the light of life,--where three of that number closed theirs in
+death,--the centre of the hopes and joys of a lifetime,--was to be
+abandoned to the flames. It was like tearing our heart-strings to leave
+it so; but there was no time for lingering. With streaming eyes and
+aching hearts we started out, taking what we could in our hands. There
+was by this time no vehicle to be obtained in which we could ride; and,
+supporting my mother, my sisters clinging to us in silent terror, we
+were borne along with the crowd down Middle Street to India. I cannot
+remember any incidents of that walk. The hurrying throng around me, the
+flying sparks, and the roar of the engines, seem like the confusion of a
+dream.
+
+Our sister, who met us at the door, felt perfectly secure, and had done
+nothing towards packing. I gave her an account of our proceedings,
+thinking each moment of some precious thing I might have brought away.
+We went to the front door, and looked out on the scene before us. The
+fire seemed to come on the wings of the wind. Middle Street was ablaze;
+Wood's marble hotel was in flames, together with the beautiful dwelling
+opposite. The fire leaped from house to house, and, if for a moment
+checked, it was but to rush on in wilder fury. Churches, one by one,
+were seized by the flame, and crumbled into ruin before it. No human
+power could arrest its fierce progress. In vain the firemen put forth a
+strength almost superhuman: their exertions seemed but to add to its
+fury. Explosion after explosion gave greater terror to the scene:
+buildings were successively blown up in the useless effort to bar its
+pathway; the fire leaped the chasm and sped on. Fugitives of every age
+and condition were hurrying through the streets, laden with everything
+imaginable,--especially looking-glasses, which seem the one important
+thing to be saved during a fire. My brother and cousin had not yet made
+their appearance, nor had we seen anything of my brother-in-law, from
+the other end of the city. But we knew they must be at their places of
+business, which were now in the heart of the burning district. Swiftly
+the destruction hurried towards us; and people were now seen bringing in
+their goods and seeking shelter on our premises. O what heart-broken
+faces surrounded us that fearful night! Friends, and people we had never
+seen, alike threw themselves on our kindness; and I must say that a
+spirit of humanity and good-will seemed everywhere prevalent among the
+citizens. We were now ourselves tortured by suspense. Could we escape,
+or should we again have to seek refuge from the flames? Surely the work
+of destruction would stop before it reached India Street? The hot breath
+of the maddening fire, and its lurid glare, were the only response. O,
+if the wind would only change! But a vane, glistening like gold in the
+firelight, steadfastly pointed to the southeast. For one moment it
+veered, and our hearts almost stood still with hope; but it swung back,
+and a feeling of despair settled upon us.
+
+Our house was full. One poor lady, with a little baby only a week old,
+lay on a sofa in one of the rooms; near her, bent over in a
+rocking-chair, sat an old woman who had not been out of her house for
+five years, with a look of hopeless bewilderment on her wrinkled face.
+But people were now beginning to move from our house. India Street was
+almost blocked up. Every kind of vehicle that went upon wheels, from a
+barouche to a wheelbarrow, passed by laden with furniture.
+
+At this moment my brother and brother-in-law approached, blackened
+almost beyond recognition. It was not until C---- spoke that I really
+knew him.
+
+"We must be calm and collected, and save what we can. John is trying to
+get a team to carry mother up to L----'s; the rest of us will have to go
+to the graveyard. But John may not be successful, so you stay here, and
+see if you can get any one to take mother: they may do it for you, when
+they wouldn't for a man."
+
+I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, clinging to the horse-post, and
+appealed in vain to wagons going by.
+
+"_Won't_ you take a lady and children away from here?"
+
+"I _can't_, ma'am, not if you was to give me twenty-five dollars,--not
+if you was to give me five hundred. I'm taking a load for a gentleman
+now."
+
+So it was in every case. Very many were worse off than we were,--had not
+even a man to help. One well-known citizen was appealed to for help, in
+the early part of the evening, by a poor woman,--a sort of dependant of
+his family. He took her and her daughter, with their effects, outside
+the city, and returned to find India Street on fire and no means of
+getting through the crowd to his house, which was burned, with all that
+was not saved by the exertions of his wife. They had visiting them a
+lady whose child lay dead in the house, awaiting burial. The mother took
+the little corpse in her arms and carried it herself up to the other end
+of the city!
+
+While I was making these vain attempts, John drove up in a light,
+open-topped buggy. We hurriedly got mother and E---- into it, and gave
+into their charge the jewelry and silver, and they drove away. I could
+not but tremble for their safety. The road seemed impassable, so dense
+was the struggling crowd. On every side the fire was raging. Looking up
+India Street it was one sheet of flame, and equally so before us. It
+looked like a world on fire, for we could see no smoke,--it was too near
+for that,--and the heat was terribly intense.
+
+There was no time to be lost. Both our servants and M----'s were away
+spending the Fourth, so we had to depend entirely on ourselves. Our
+back fence was soon torn down, and we all worked as we never had before.
+We saved a good deal, but not one half of what we brought from our house
+in the first place. We had thrown things out of the window, and C----
+and J---- worked hard dragging them out of the yard, until, scorched and
+almost suffocated, they were compelled to desist. The flames were upon
+us so quickly, it seemed incredible that they could have seized the
+house so soon after we thought we were in danger.
+
+"Thank God, we are all safe!" cried M----, sinking upon the ground in
+the graveyard, where we took refuge. She tried to look cheerful; but the
+sight before her--her house in flames--and the thought of her husband's
+absence overcame her, and she burst into tears. I laid the two little
+girls upon the grass; and, wearied out, they soon fell asleep. It was a
+strange scene in that quiet old cemetery, where the dead of more than a
+century had lain undisturbed in their graves. Where only the reverent
+tread of the mourner, or of some visitor carefully threading his way
+among the grassy mounds, was wont to be known, crowds of frantic people
+were hurrying across; while here and there were family groups clustered
+together, watching the destruction of their property.
+
+How long the remaining hours seemed! Would the daylight never come? The
+children slept on, and we four talked in low tones of the morrow.
+
+At length, faint, rosy lights began to streak the eastern horizon, and
+slowly the day dawned. The sun rose unclouded above the hills, sending
+down his beams upon the desolation which the night had wrought, lighting
+up the islands and the blue waters, flecked with sail-boats.
+
+Not less welcome to us, J---- now also appeared,--with a hay-cart, whose
+driver he had engaged to come and remove us. Our goods were put into it;
+we took our places among them, and, as soon as the tardy oxen could
+carry us, were safe in my sister's house, living over again in words
+that fearful night, and relating to each other some of those incidents
+of the fire which can never all be told. A little friend of ours, when
+leaving her home, took in her arms her doll, nearly as large as herself;
+obliged to flee a second time, her mother told her it was useless to try
+and save the doll, and she must leave it there. With many tears she laid
+it on the sofa, feeling, no doubt, as if she were leaving a human being
+to be burnt. The next day, a friend brought to her the identical dolly,
+which had been found in the graveyard! The little one's joy may be
+imagined.
+
+One of the women in the Irish quarter picked up her big pig in her arms
+and carried it to a place of safety, then returned to take care of her
+children and furniture. A woman went by our house in the early part of
+the evening bent nearly double beneath the weight of a trunk strapped
+upon her back. We saw women that night with loads under which almost any
+man would have staggered in ordinary circumstances.
+
+Before we were supposed to be in danger, I walked out with a young
+friend to see what progress the fire was making. At a corner we observed
+a woman with a child about eight years old, talking, in great agitation,
+to a lady, and evidently urging her to accede to some request. My
+companion suggested that we should see if we could aid her in any way.
+As we approached, the lady had taken the child by the hand, with the
+words, "What is your address?" which was given. We inquired if we could
+be of any service. "No, thank you," was the reply. "I asked that lady to
+take care of my daughter. I keep store on that street over there. My
+husband is out of town, and I don't know what I shall do!"--and,
+wringing her hands, she hurried away. I have wondered since what was the
+fate of the little girl thus intrusted to the care of strangers; for the
+lady went in the direction, afterwards swept by the fire.
+
+One family, whose house the flames did not reach until near two o'clock
+in the morning, behaved with great coolness. The head of the household
+lay ill. It was their first care to provide for him. Then they went
+deliberately about, gathering up their valuables, taking just what they
+wanted. They secured a wagon to carry away their things. Their house,
+meanwhile, had been full of refugees from the flames. One of the young
+ladies, going for the last time through the deserted rooms, found, on a
+sofa in the parlor, a sick woman, utterly unable to move. At first, she
+felt almost in despair at sight of this poor creature, so near meeting a
+fearful fate. But quickly recovering her presence of mind, she called in
+men from the street, and, by their united efforts, they carried her out,
+and forced a passing wagon to take her to a safe place. A young lady,
+who lived at a little distance from this family, was spending the night
+at the other end of the city. They sat up till half past twelve, and she
+was then in the act of retiring, never dreaming that her home was in
+danger, when a loaded wagon stopped at the door, and out stepped her
+sister and child. She went back in the same vehicle, and worked till
+twelve the next day, getting things out of the house, collecting and
+guarding them till they could be removed.
+
+There was, of course, the usual difference shown amongst people in such
+circumstances,--energy and coolness contrasted with imbecility and
+frantic excitement. A friend who moved three times, with her husband so
+ill that he had to be carried from place to place, never once forgot to
+administer his medicine at regular intervals,--with a steady hand
+pouring out the drops by the light of the fire.
+
+A gentleman was carrying some of his books, preceded by an assistant,
+who also had his arms full. The latter walked so rapidly that his
+employer could not keep up with him. He called upon him to slacken his
+pace; but, as no attention was paid to this, the gentleman dropped his
+books upon the ground, and, running forward, knocked him down,
+determined to be obeyed, fire or no fire.
+
+But all were not so cool. One man, seeing the flames advancing in the
+direction of his house, rushed thither to save his property. He worked
+with might and main, but, when the house was nearly emptied, became
+aware of the fact that it was his neighbor's. By this time his own
+dwelling was on fire, from which he saved scarcely anything. I know one
+person who passed through his hall perfectly empty-handed, while all
+around him were bundles and boxes, which were consumed in the fire;
+another walked out of his house with a package of envelopes in his hand,
+leaving, close by, an article worth thirty dollars.
+
+I must mention one of many instances of unselfishness that came under my
+observation. A gentleman was comfortably established in a house which he
+had recently bought and furnished, expecting there to enjoy the
+pleasures of a home. One half of the house he had rented; but the
+husband of the woman to whom it was let was not in town. Their dwelling
+shared the fate of those around them, being burnt. He first set to work
+to save his own things; but, struck by the forlorn condition of his
+tenant, he did his best to save her effects, even to the detriment of
+his own; for when they were examined, the greater portion of them was
+found to be hers. Time has not exhausted the truth and beauty of the
+saying, that "in the night the stars shine forth," and the stars did not
+pale even in the terrible light of the fire that consumed half a city.
+
+
+
+
+MY LITTLE BOY.
+
+
+There were nine of us, all told, when mother died; myself, the eldest,
+aged twenty, a plain and serious woman, well fitted by nature and
+circumstance to fill the place made vacant by death.
+
+I cannot remember when I was young. Indeed, when I hear other women
+recount the story of their early days, I think I had no childhood, for
+mine was like no other.
+
+Mother was married so young, that at the age when most women begin to
+think seriously of marriage she had around her a numerous brood, of
+which I was less the elder sister than the younger mother. She was
+delicate by nature, and peevish by reason of her burdens, and I think
+could never have been a self-reliant character; so she fretted and
+sighed through life, and when death came, unawares, she seemed not sorry
+for the refuge.
+
+She called me to her bed one day in a tone so cheerful that I wondered,
+and when I saw the calm and brightness in her face, hope made me glad,
+"Margaret," she said, "you have been a good daughter. I never did you
+justice until this illness opened my eyes. You have shamed me by your
+patience and your sacrifices so gently borne. You are more fit to be a
+mother than I ever was; and I leave the children to your care without a
+fear. It is not likely you will ever marry, and I die content, knowing
+that you will do your duty."
+
+After this came many sad days,--the parting, the silent form which death
+had made majestic, the funeral hymns, the tolling bell, the clods upon
+the coffin-lid; and when the sun shone out and the birds sang again, it
+seemed to me I had dreamed it all, and that the sun could not shine nor
+the birds sing above a grave on which the grass had not yet had time to
+grow. But I had not dreamed, nor had I time for dreaming. Mother was
+dead, and eight children claimed from me a mother's care,--the youngest
+a wailing babe but seven days old, whom I came to cherish and love as my
+little boy.
+
+When I had settled down, and grown accustomed to the vacuum which never
+could be filled for me, I thought a great deal upon mother's last words.
+I was proud of the trust she reposed in me, and I meant to be faithful
+to it. I wondered much why she had thought it likely I should never
+marry; for I was a woman with strong instincts, and, amid all the toil
+and care of my barren life, I had seen afar, through gleaming mists, the
+mountains of hope arise, and beyond the heat and dust and labor of duty
+caught glimpses of green ways made pleasant by quiet waters.
+
+I do not think my burden seemed heavier now that mother no longer helped
+me to bear it; for my sense of responsibility had been increased by her
+complaining spirit. Her discouraging views of life held in check the
+reins of my eager fancy: it seemed wrong to enjoy a happiness I could
+not share with her. Now I no longer felt this restraint; but, knowing
+that somehow she had missed this happiness for which I waited, the
+knowledge invested her memory with a tender pity, and tempered my
+pleasure with a feeling akin to pain.
+
+I was never idle. Behind the real work of life, my fancy wrought on,
+unknown and unsuspected by the world; my lamp of joy, fed by the sweet
+oil of hope, was ready for the lighting, and I was content to wait.
+
+My little boy throve bravely. Every morning I awoke him with a kiss;
+and, perhaps because each day seemed but a continuation of the other,
+time stood still for him. He was for me the incarnation of all
+loveliness. The fair face, and blond hair, and brown, brooding eyes,
+were beautiful as an angel's, and goodness set its seal on his
+perfections. He gave me no trouble: grief brings age, joy confirms
+youth, and I and my little boy grew young together. He was with me
+everywhere, lightening my labor with his prattling tongue, helping me
+with his sweet, hindering ways; and when the kisses had been many that
+had waked him many morns, he stood beside me, my little boy, hardly a
+hand's breadth lower than myself.
+
+The world had changed for all but him and me. My father had wandered off
+to foreign parts; sisters and brothers, one by one, had gone forth to
+conquer kingdoms and reign in their own right, and one young sister,
+just on the border-land of maiden fancies, (O friends, I write this line
+with tears!) turned from earth and crossed the border-land of heaven.
+
+But he and I remained alone in the old homestead, and walked together
+sweetly down the years.
+
+If I came upon disappointment, I had not sought it, neither did I fall
+by it; but that which was my future slid by me and became the past, so
+gently that I scarce remember where one ended or the other began; and
+though all other lovers failed me, one true remained, to whom I ever
+would be true. The future did not look less fair; nay, I deemed it more
+full of promise than ever. It was as though I had passed from my old
+stand-point of observation to a more easterly window; and the prospect
+was not the less enchanting that I looked upon it over the shoulder of
+my little boy. We talked much of it together; and though he had the
+nearer view, it was my practised vision that saw pathways of beauty not
+yet suspected by him.
+
+But we were still happy in the present, and did not speculate much upon
+the future. The rolling years brought him completeness, and to the
+graces of person were added the gifts of wisdom and knowledge. The down
+that shaded his cheek, like the down upon a ripe peach, had darkened and
+strengthened to the symbol of manhood, and his words had the clear ring
+of purpose. For there was a cloud upon the horizon which at first was no
+bigger than a man's hand, but it grew until it filled the land with
+darkness, and the fair prospect on which I had so loved to gaze was
+hidden behind the storm. My little boy and I looked into each other's
+faces, and he cried, "Margaret, I must go!"
+
+I did not say nay,--for the tears which were not in my eyes were in my
+voice, and to speak was to betray them,--but I turned about to make him
+ready.
+
+In these days my little boy's vision was finer than my own; and when we
+stood together, looking from our orient window, he saw keener and
+farther than I had ever done; for my eyes now looked through a veil of
+tears, while his, like the eagle's, penetrated the cloud to the sunshine
+behind it. He was full of the dream of glory; and his words, fraught
+with purpose and power, stirred me like a trumpet. I caught the
+inspiration that thrilled his soul; for we had walked so long together
+that all paths pursued by him must find me ever at his side.
+
+One day I was summoned to meet a visitor; and going, a tall figure in
+military dress gave me a military salute. It was my little boy, who,
+half abashed at his presumption, drew himself up, and sought refuge from
+shyness in valor. It was not a sight to make me smile, though I smiled
+to please my warrior, who, well pleased, displayed his art, to show how
+fields were won. Won! He had no thought of loss; for youth and hope
+dream not of defeat, and he talked of how the war was to be fought and
+ended, and all should be well.
+
+I kissed my little boy good night; and he slept peacefully, dreaming of
+fields of glory, as Jacob dreamed and saw a heavenly vision.
+
+He went; and then it seemed as if there had been with him one fair long
+summer day, and this was the evening thereof; and my heart was heavy
+within me.
+
+But many letters reached me from the distant field,--long and loving
+letters, full of hope, portraying all the poetry and beauty of
+camp-life, casting the grosser part aside; and to me at home, musing
+amid peaceful scenes, it seemed a great, triumphant march, which must
+crush, with its mere _display_ of power, all wicked foes. But the
+sacrifice of blood was needed for the remission of sin, and these
+holiday troops--heroes in all save the art of war--lost the day, and,
+returning, brought back with their thinned ranks my little boy unharmed.
+Unharmed, thank God! but bronzed and bearded like the pard, and
+tarnished with the wear and burnished with the use of war.
+
+How he talked and laughed, making light of danger, and, growing serious,
+said the fight had but begun,--the business of the nation must, for
+years, be war,--and that his strength and manhood, nay, his life if need
+be, should be given to his country. Then his words made me brave, and
+his looks made me proud. I blessed him with unfaltering lips; and above
+the hills of promise, which my little boy and I saw looking from our
+orient window, rose higher yet the mountains of truth, with the straight
+path of duty leading to the skies. But when he was gone
+again,--gone,--there fell a shadow of the coming night, and the evening
+and the morning were the second day.
+
+His frequent letters dissipated the sense of danger, and brought me
+great comfort. War is not a literary art, and letters from the "imminent
+deadly breach," made it seem less deadly. His self-abnegation filled me
+with wonder. "It is well that few should be lost, that many may be
+saved," he wrote. In what school had this tender youth learned heroism,
+I asked myself, as I read his noble words and trembled at his courage.
+
+My dreams and my gaze turned southward. No eastern beams lured me to
+that lookout so long endeared; for the eyes through which I once gazed
+looked through the smoke of battle, and hope and faith had fled with
+him, and left me but suspense.
+
+Now came hot work. The enemy pressed sorely, and men's--ay, and
+women's--souls were tried. Long days of silence passed, days of
+sickening doubt, and then came the news of _victory_,--victory bought
+with precious blood and heavy loss. Over the ghastly hospital lists I
+hung, fearing and dreading to meet the name of my little boy, taking
+hope, as the list shortened, from the despair of others, _and no
+mention_. Thank God, who giveth _us_ the victory!
+
+And later, when details come in, I see in "official report" my little
+boy's name mentioned for meritorious and gallant conduct, and
+recommended for promotion. Ah! the groans of the dying are lost in the
+shouts of the victor; and, forgetting the evil because of this good, a
+woman's heart cried, _Laus Deo_!
+
+After the battle, hardly fought and dearly purchased, my hero came home
+on furlough. War had developed him faster than the daily kisses of love
+had done; for my little boy--crowned with immortal youth for me--for all
+the world came from this rude embrace a man in stature and wisdom, a
+hero in valor and endurance, a leader beloved and revered.
+
+But for all this I tucked him in o' nights, and shut off harmful
+draughts from him who oft had lain upon the sod, and for covering had
+but the cloudy sky.
+
+These were blissful days,--marked in the past by white memories,--in
+which we talked of future plans, the future so near, yet to our vision
+so remote, and purposed this and that, not considering that Heaven
+disposes all things.
+
+And when he must be off, I kissed him lightly; for success brings
+security, and I was growing accustomed to these partings; but he drew me
+to his breast, struck by some pang of coming evil, and called me
+_mother_. Ah! then my heart yearned over my little boy, and I would fain
+have stayed his going; but, dashing the tears from his eyes, he hurried
+away, nor looked behind him once.
+
+All through the winter, which for him was summer, my heart lay lightly
+in its place, and I waited calmly the coming of the end. The struggle
+was almost over; the storm-cloud had rolled back, after deluging the
+land in blood; in this consecrated soil slavery was forever buried; the
+temple of freedom was reared in the name of all men, and the dove of
+peace sat brooding in its eaves.
+
+All this my little boy had said must come to pass before he sheathed his
+sword; and this had come to pass.
+
+He had marched "to the sea," my conquering hero, and was "coming up,"
+crowned with new laurels. I was waiting the fulness of time, lulled with
+the fulness of content. Sherman had gathered his hosts for another
+combat,--the last,--and then the work would be done, and well done. Thus
+wrote my little boy; and my heart echoed his words, "well done."
+
+This battle-day I worked out of doors from morning until night, seeking
+to bring order and beauty out of confusion and decay, striving to have
+all things ready when he came. My sleep was sweet that night, and I
+awoke with these words in my mind:--
+
+    "Lord, in the morning Thou shall hear
+      My voice ascending high."
+
+The sun streamed in through the eastern window, and all the hills beyond
+were bathed in glory; the earth was fair to look upon, and happiness,
+descending from the skies, nestled in my heart.
+
+I planted all this day, covering precious seed, thinking on their summer
+beauty; and, as the evening fell, I stood at the garden gate watching
+the way he must come for whose coming I longed with a longing that could
+not be uttered.
+
+As I looked, idly speculating on his speed, a horseman dashed up in mad
+haste, his steed spent and flecked with foam. Men do not ride so hot
+with good tidings,--what need to make such haste with evil?
+
+Still, no sense of loss, no shadow of the coming night. Peace covered my
+heart, and would not be scared away. Blind infatuation! that could not
+see.
+
+"Was it not then a victory?" I cried; for sadness and defeat were
+written in his face.
+
+"Nay, not that." The outstretched hand turned white with pity. "But
+this--"
+
+Too kind to speak the words, at sight of which I fell, struck by a bolt
+that, riving _his_ heart, through leagues of space had travelled
+straight to mine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Months later, when the long night had passed away, and the dawn brought
+patience and resignation, one who saw him fall, gloriously, told me the
+story. I could bear it then; for in my soul's eclipse I had beheld him
+walking on the heavenly hills, and knew that there he was waiting for
+me.
+
+He lies buried, at his own request, where he fell, on Southern soil.
+
+O pilgrim to those sacred shrines, if in your wandering ye come upon a
+nameless grave, marked by a sunken sword, tread lightly above the
+slumbers of my little boy!
+
+
+
+
+LAKE CHAMPLAIN.
+
+
+    Not thoughtless let us enter thy domain;
+      Well did the tribes of yore,
+    Who sought the ocean from the distant plain,
+      Call thee their country's door.[F]
+
+    And as the portals of a saintly pile
+      The wanderer's steps delay,
+    And, while he musing roams the lofty aisle,
+      Care's phantoms melt away
+
+    In the vast realm where tender memories brood
+      O'er sacred haunts of time,
+    That woo his spirit to a nobler mood
+      And more benignant clime,--
+
+    So in the fane of thy majestic hills
+      We meekly stand elate;
+    The baffled heart a tranquil rapture fills
+      Beside thy crystal gate:
+
+    For here the incense of the cloistered pines,
+      Stained windows of the sky,
+    The frescoed clouds and mountains' purple shrines,
+      Proclaim God's temple nigh.
+
+    Through wild ravines thy wayward currents glide,
+      Round bosky islands play;
+    Here tufted headlands meet the lucent tide,
+      There gleams the spacious bay;
+
+    Untracked for ages, save when crouching flew,
+      Through forest-hung defiles,
+    The dusky savage in his frail canoe,
+      To seek the thousand isles,
+
+    Or rally to the fragrant cedar's shade
+      The settler's crafty foe,
+    With toilsome march and midnight ambuscade
+      To lay his dwelling low.
+
+    Along the far horizon's opal wall
+      The dark blue summits rise,
+    And o'er them rifts of misty sunshine fall,
+      Or golden vapor lies.
+
+    And over all tradition's gracious spell
+      A fond allurement weaves;
+    Her low refrain the moaning tempest swells,
+      And thrills the whispering leaves.
+
+    To win this virgin land,--a kingly quest,--
+      Chivalric deeds were wrought;
+    Long by thy marge and on thy placid breast
+      The Gaul and Saxon fought.
+
+    What cheers of triumph in thy echoes sleep!
+      What brave blood dyed thy wave!
+    A grass-grown rampart crowns each rugged steep,
+      Each isle a hero's grave.
+
+    And gallant squadrons manned for border fray,
+      That rival standards bore,
+    Sprung from thy woods and on thy bosom lay,--
+      Stern warders of the shore.
+
+    How changed since he whose name thy waters bear,
+      The silent hills between,
+    Led by his swarthy guides to conflict there,
+      Entranced beheld the scene!
+
+    Fleets swiftly ply where lagged the lone batteau,
+      And quarries trench the gorge;
+    Where waned the council-fire, now steadfast glow
+      The pharos and the forge.
+
+    On Adirondack's lake-encircled crest
+      Old war-paths mark the soil,
+    Where idly bivouacks the summer guest,
+      And peaceful miners toil.
+
+    Where lurked the wigwam, cultured households throng;
+      Where rung the panther's yell
+    Is heard the low of kine, a blithesome song,
+      Or chime of village bell.
+
+    And when, to subjugate the peopled land,
+      Invaders crossed the sea,
+    Rushed from thy meadow-slopes a stalwart band,
+      To battle for the free.
+
+    Nor failed the pristine valor of the race
+      To guard the nation's life;
+    Thy hardy sons met treason face to face,
+      The foremost in the strife.
+
+    When locusts bloom and wild-rose scents the air,
+      When moonbeams fleck the stream,
+    And June's long twilights crimson shadows wear,
+      Here linger, gaze, and dream!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[F] One of the aboriginal names of Lake Champlain signifies the open
+door of the country.
+
+
+
+
+YESTERDAY.
+
+
+There is a gleam of ultramarine,--which, most of all tints, say the
+painters, possesses the quality of light in itself,--banished to the
+farthest horizon of the ocean, where it lies all day, a line of infinite
+richness, not to be drawn by Apelles, and in its compression of
+expanse--leagues of sloping sea and summer calm being written in that
+single line--suggestive of more depth than plummet or diver can ever
+reach. Such an enchantment of color deepens the farther and interior
+horizon with most men,--whether it is the atmosphere of one's own
+identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of
+time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams
+falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue
+to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and
+perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it
+slips over into other hemispheres, tangents with the illumined
+atmosphere beyond, it affords a finer filter for these blue rays, and
+thenceforth hoards in its heart the wealth and beauty of tint found in
+that line of ultramarine. Thus too, perhaps, in the eyes of these
+fortunate men, every year of their deepening past presents only a purer
+strain for such sunshine as is theirs, until it becomes indeed
+
+    "The light that never was, on sea or land."
+
+The child's conjecture of the future is one of some great, bright, busy
+thing beyond the hills or over the river. But the thought is not
+definite: having nothing to remember, he has nothing by which to model
+his idea.
+
+The man looks back at the past in much the same manner, to be
+sure,--always with something between,--if not the river or the hills, at
+least a breath of mist out of which rises the vision he invokes; but the
+vision has a shape, precise and clear.
+
+If it is sadness that he seeks, sadness comes, dark as the nun of the
+Penseroso, without a glimmer of the countless and daily trifles of
+fairer aspect that made her actual presence possible to suffer,--comes
+to flatter his memory with assurance of strength in having endured so
+much and yet survived, or to stab him with her phantom poniards freshly
+and fiercely as ever,--no diffused affair, but a positive shape of
+melancholy.
+
+But if the phase to be recalled is of a cheerful sort, how completely
+likewise does it assert its essence,--a sunbeam falling through that
+past from beginning to end. All the vexatious annoyances of the period
+that then seemed to counterbalance pleasure are lost to view, and only
+the rosy face of an experience that was happiness itself smiles upon
+him. What matter the myriad frets that then beset him in the flesh? They
+were superficial substance,--burrs that fell; he was happy in spite of
+them; he does not remember them; he sees nothing but the complete
+content; he in fact possesses his experience only in the ideal.
+
+It is the dropping out of detail that accomplishes this in one case and
+the other. In either, the point of view alone is fixed. The rest is
+variable, and depends, it may be, on the nature of that subtile and
+volatile ether through which each man gazes.
+
+That the latter, the brighter vision, predominates, is as true as that
+sunny days outnumber rainy ones. Though Argemone, rather than remember,
+may have blotted out her memory; or though Viviani, after fifty years of
+renowned practice in his profession, may be unable to look back at it
+without a shudder,--then endowed with youth, health, energy,
+ambition,--now lacking these, the recollection of the suffering he has
+seen overwhelming his sensitive nature blackly and heavily as clods of
+burial might do;--yet they are but those points of shadow that throw
+the fact into prominence. It has been said that pain, remembered, is
+delight. This is true only of physical pain. Mental agony ever remains
+agony; for it is the body that perishes and the affections of the body.
+Still, with most men the past is an illuminated region, forever throwing
+the present into the shade. In the Zend Avesta, a farsang is defined to
+be the space within which a long-sighted man can see a camel and
+distinguish whether it be white or black; but the milestones of the
+memory are even less arbitrary than this: no matter how far the glance
+flies, in those distances every man's camel is white. Thus the backward
+view is ever of
+
+        "Summits soft and fair,
+    Clad in colors of the air,
+    Which to those who journey near
+    Barren, brown, and rough appear."
+
+The maidens of to-day are not so beautiful as the maidens were when our
+young senses could drink in their beauty; the St. Michael pears have
+died out; the blight has got possession of the roses. When we married, a
+white one climbed up the house-side and thrust its snowy sprays in at
+the casement of the wedding-chamber. Find us such climbers now! A young
+girl once on the beach, watching her father's ship slip away on the
+wind, had her glance caught by a sparkle in the sand; and there lay a
+treasure at her feet, a heap of crimson crystals, a mine of jewels. What
+wealth! What possibilities! No more going to sea! No more watching ships
+out of sight! She gathered a double-handful of the splendid cubes as
+earnest, and ran back to the house with them. Such assurance having been
+displayed, there was no hesitation. The man-servant followed her swift
+guidance to the shore again, with shovel and sack and a train of the
+whole household,--but the tide had come in, and the place was not there.
+Day after day was search made for that mass of garnets, but always in
+vain. It was one of those deposits that Hugh Miller somewhere speaks of,
+as disclosed by one tide and hidden by another. But all her life long,
+though she wore jewels and scattered gold, no gem rivalled the blood-red
+lustre of that sudden sparkle in the sands; and no wealth equalled the
+fabulous dreams that were born of it. It was to her as precious and
+irreparable as to the poet the Lost Bower.
+
+          "I affirm that since I lost it
+            Never bower has seemed so fair;
+          Never garden-creeper crossed it,
+            With so deft and brave an air;
+    Never bird sang in the summer, as I saw and heard them there."
+
+This light of other days is unfailingly, by its owners, carried over to
+every child they meet. As if the caterpillar were in better estate than
+the butterfly, each boy is seeing his best days. Yet there is not a
+child in the world but is pursued by cares. His desk-mate's marbles
+oppress him more than will forcemeat-balls and turtle-soup when he
+becomes an alderman; there are lessons to learn, terrible threats of
+telling the teacher to brave, and many a smart to suffer. Childhood is
+beautiful in truth, but not therefore blest,--that is, for the little
+bodiless cherubs of the canvas. It was one of Origen's fancies that the
+coats of skins given to Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Paradise
+were their corporeal textures, and that in Eden they had neither flesh
+nor blood, bones nor nerves. The opening soul, that puts back petal
+after petal till the fructifying heart of it is bare to all the sweet
+influences of the universe, is something lovely for older eyes to
+see,--perhaps no lovelier than the lawful development of later lives to
+larger eyes than ours,--perhaps no lovelier than that we are to undergo.
+The first moment when the force of beauty strikes a child's perceptions
+would be an ineffable one, if he had anything to compare it with or
+measure it by; but as it is, even though it pierce him through and
+through with rapture, he is not aware of that rapture till after-years
+reproduce it for him and sweeten the sensation with full knowledge. The
+child is so dear to the parents, because it is their own beings bound
+together in one; the baby is so beautiful to all, because so sacred and
+mysterious. Where was this life a moment since? Whither will it fleet a
+moment hence? He may be a fiend or an archangel by and by, as he and
+Fate together please; but now his little skin is like a blush rose-leaf,
+and his little kisses are so tender and so dear! yet it is as an object
+of nature that he charms, not in his identity as a sufferer of either
+pain or pleasure. Childhood, by these blind worshippers of yesterday, is
+simply so vaunted and so valued because it is seen again in the ideal:
+the detail is lost in distance; the fair fact alone remains.
+
+But yesterday has its uses, of more value than its idolatries. Though
+too often with its aerial distances and borrowed hues it is a mere
+pleasure region, instead of that great reservoir from which we might
+draw fountains of inexhaustible treasure, yet, if we cultivated our
+present from our past, homage to it might be as much to the purpose at
+least as the Gheber's worship of the sun. The past is an atmosphere
+weighing over each man's life. The skilful farmer with his
+subsoil-plough lets down the wealthy air of the actual atmosphere into
+his furrows, deeper than it ever went before; the greedy loam sucks in
+the nitrogen there, and one day he finds his mould stored with ammonia,
+the great fertilizer, worth many a harvest. Are they numerous who thus
+enrich the present with the disengaged agents of the past, the chemic
+powers obtained from that superincumbent atmosphere ever elastically
+stretching over them? Let our farmer scatter pulverized marble upon his
+soil forever,--crude carbonate of lime,--and it remains unassimilated;
+but let him powder burnt bones there, and his crop uses it to golden
+advantage,--now merely the phosphate of lime, but material that has
+passed through the operations of animal life, of organism. With whatever
+manure he work his land, be it wood-ashes or guano or compost, he knows
+that that which has received the action of organic tissues fattens it
+the best; and so a wise man may fertilize to-day better with the facts
+of an experience that he has once lived through, than with any vague and
+unorganized dreams. But the fool has never lived;--life, said Bichat, is
+the totality of the functions;--his past has endured no more
+organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no
+use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a
+joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its
+sweet and beneficent capabilities;--as if it were likely that one moment
+of his existence could be of any more weight than another.
+
+The sentiment which a generation feels for another long antecedent to
+itself, is not utterly dissimilar from this. Its individuals being
+regarded with the veneration due to parents and due to the dead, it is
+forgotten that they were men, and men whose lessons were necessarily no
+wiser than those of the men among us; men, too, of no surpassing
+humility, since they presumed to prescribe inviolable laws to ages far
+wiser than themselves. Yet though the philosophy of the Greek and Roman
+were lost, would it need more than the years of a generation to replace
+what scarcely can exceed the introspection of a single experience? If
+their art were lost, does not the ideal of humanity remain the same so
+long as the nature of humanity endures? But of the seven sciences of
+antiquity, two alone deserve the name,--their arithmetic and their
+geometry. Their music was a cumbrous and complicated machinery, and the
+others were exercises of wit and pleasure and superstition. It is true
+that the Egyptian excelled, that the Arabian delved somewhat into the
+secrets of nature; but who venerates those people, and who spends all
+that season in study of their language that he should spend in putting
+oxygen into his blood and lime into his bones? The sensuous Greek loved
+beauty; he did not care to puzzle his brain when he could please it
+instead. Euclid and Apollonius, indeed, carried the positive science of
+mathematics to great height, but physical science is the growth of
+comparative to-day; with habits of thought hampered by priesthoods and
+systems, the efforts of antiquity were like abortive shoots,--it is
+within the last four centuries that the strong stem has sprung up, and
+the plant has flowered. Neither do our youth study the classics for
+their science; and yet is not the pursuit of science nobler than all
+other pursuits, since it leads its followers into the mysteries of the
+creation and into the purposes of God? Small is the profit to be found
+in recital of the fancies of heathen ages or the warfares of savage
+tribes. But so far is the mere breath of the ancients exalted above this
+sacred search, that a university will turn out proficients who write
+Greek verses by the ream, but cannot spell their own speech; who can
+name you the winning athletes of the first Olympiad, but are unable to
+state the constituents of the gas that lights their page, and never
+dream, as the chemist does, that these "sunbeams absorbed by vegetation
+in the primordial ages of the earth, and buried in its depths as
+vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon
+system of slowly formed rocks has been piled above, come forth at last,
+at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the night of civilized
+man into day." They can paint to you the blush of Rhodope or Phryne,
+till you see the delicious color blend and mingle on the ivory of their
+tablets; but until, like Agassiz, we can all of us deduce the fish from
+the scale, and from that blush alone deduce the human race, we are no
+nearer the Divine intentions in the creation of man, for all such lore
+as that. An author has somewhere asked, What signify our telegraphs, our
+anaesthetics, our railways? What signifies our knowledge of the earth's
+structure, of the stars' courses? Are we any the more or less men? But
+certainly he is the more a man, he comes nearer to God's meaning in a
+man, who conquers matter, circumstance, time, and space. That one who
+sees the universe move round him understandingly, and fathoms in some
+degree the wonder and the beauty of the eternal laws, must be a
+pleasanter object to his Creator than any other who, merely employing
+pleasure, makes a fetich of his luxuries, his Aldines and Elzevirs, and,
+dying, goes into the unknown world no wiser concerning the ends and aims
+of this one than when he entered it. Rather than periods that decay and
+sin might bring again, should one remember the wonderful history of the
+natural world when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
+Rather should one read the record of the rain, it seems,--the story of
+the weather some morning, cycles since, with the way the wind was
+blowing written in the slanting drip of the rain-drops caught and
+petrified on the old red sandstone,--marks of the Maker as he passed,
+one day, a million years ago,--than decipher on the scroll of any
+palimpsest, under the light-headed visions of an anchorite, some
+half-erased ode of Anacreon.
+
+But, after all, this veneration for the ancients--who personally might
+be forgiven for their misfortune in having lived when the world was
+young, were not one so slavish before them--is only because again one
+looks at the ideal,--looks through that magical Claude Lorraine glass
+which makes even the commonest landscape picturesque. We forget the
+dirty days of straw-strewn floors, and see the leather hangings stamped
+with gold; we forget the fearful feet of sandal shoon, but see the dust
+of a Triumph rising in clouds of glory. We look at that past, feeling
+something like gods, too.
+
+    "The gods are happy:
+    They turn on all sides
+    Their shining eyes,
+    And see, below them,
+    The earth and men."
+
+We cannot consider those things happening remotely from us on the
+earth's surface, even now, without suffering them to partake somewhat of
+the property of by-gone days. It makes little difference whether the
+distance be that of meridians or of eras. When at sunrise we fancy some
+foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we
+are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and
+his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays,--so that even
+our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow
+air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of
+a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire,
+it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and
+night has already darkened down over the wide and awful
+ice-fields,--then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere
+phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment
+but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us
+only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past. It requires
+the comprehensive vision of the poet to catch the light of existing
+scenes as they shift along the globe, and harmonize them with the
+instant;--whether he view
+
+              "The Indian
+        Drifting, knife in hand,
+        His frail boat moored to
+        A floating isle thick matted
+    With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants,
+        And the dark cucumber.
+          He reaps and stows them,
+        Drifting,--drifting. Round him,
+        Round his green harvest-plot,
+        Flow the cool lake waves:
+        The mountains ring them";--
+
+or whether, far across the continent, he chance to see
+
+              "The ferry
+        On the broad, clay-laden
+    Lone Chorasmian stream: thereon,
+          With snort and strain,
+        Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
+        The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
+            To either bow
+        Firm harnessed by the mane:--a chief
+          With shout and shaken spear
+    Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern,
+        The cowering merchants, in long robes,
+        Sit pale beside their wealth
+        Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops,
+            Of gold and ivory,
+        Of turquoise-earth and amethyst,
+            Jasper and chalcedony,
+        And milk-barred onyx-stones.
+        The loaded boat swings groaning
+            In the yellow eddies.
+            The gods behold them,"--
+
+the gods and the poets. But, except to these blest beholders, the
+inhabitants of the dead centuries are mere spectral shades; for it takes
+a poet's fancy to vitalize with warmth and breath again those things
+that, having apparently left no impress on their own generation, seem to
+have no more signification for this than the persons of the drama or the
+heroes of romance.
+
+Yet, in a far inferior way, every man is a poet to himself. In the
+microcosm of his own small round, every one has the power to vivify old
+incident, every one raises bawbles of the desk and drawer, not only into
+life, but into life they never had. With the flower whose leaves are
+shed about the box, we can bring back the brilliant morning of its
+blossoming, desire and hope and joyous youth once more; with the letter
+laid away beside it rises the dear hand that rested on the sheet, and
+moved along the leaf with every line it penned: each trinket has its
+pretty past, pleasant or painful to recall as it may be. There is no
+trifle, however vulgar, but, looking at its previous page, it has a side
+in the ideal. When one at the theatre saw so many ringlets arranged as
+"waterfalls," he laughed and said, they undoubtedly belonged to the
+"dead-heads." But Belinda, who wears a waterfall, and at night puts it
+into a box, considers the remark a profanity, and confesses that she
+never adorns herself with this addition but she thinks of that girl in
+France who cherished her long locks, and combed them out with care until
+her marriage-day, when she put on a fair white cap, and sold them for
+her dowry. There are more poetic locks of hair, it must be said;--the
+keepsake of two lovers; the lock of Keats's hair, too sacred to touch,
+lying in its precious salvatory. But that is the ideal of the past
+belonging to Belinda's waterfall, a trivial, common thing enough, yet
+one that has a right to its ideal, nevertheless, if we accept the
+ecstasies of a noted writer upon its magic material. "In spinning and
+weaving," says he, "the ideal that we pursue is the hair of a woman. How
+far are the softest wools, the finest cottons, from reaching it! At what
+an enormous distance from this hair all our progress leaves us, and will
+forever leave us! We drag behind and watch with envy this supreme
+perfection that every day Nature realizes in her play. This hair, fine,
+strong, resistant, vibrant in light sonority, and, with all that, soft,
+warm, luminous, and electric,--it is the flower of the human flower.
+There are idle disputes concerning the merit of its color. What matter?
+The lustrous black contains and promises the flame. The blond displays
+it with the splendors of the Fleece of Gold. The brown, chatoyant in the
+sun, appropriates the sun itself, mingles it with its mirages, floats,
+undulates, varies ceaselessly in its brook-like reflections, by moments
+smiles in the light or glooms in the shade, deceives always, and,
+whatever you say of it, gives you the lie charmingly.--The chief effort
+of human industry has combined all methods in order to exalt cotton.
+Rare accord of capital, machinery, arts of design, and finally chemical
+science, has produced those beautiful results to which England herself
+renders homage in buying them. Alas! all that cannot disguise the
+original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which has been so much
+adorned. If woman, who clothes herself with it in vanity, and believes
+herself more beautiful because of it, would but let her hair fall and
+unroll its waves over the indigent richness of our most brilliant
+cloths, what must become of them! how humiliated would the vestment
+be!--It is necessary to confess that one thing alone sustains itself
+beside a woman's hair. A single fabricator can strive there. This
+fabricator is an insect,--the modest silkworm."
+
+"A particular charm surrounds the works in silk," our author then goes
+on to say. "It ennobles all about it. In traversing our rudest
+districts, the valleys of the Ardeche, where all is rock, where the
+mulberry, the chestnut, seem to dispense with earth, to live on air and
+flint, where low houses of unmortared stone sadden the eyes with their
+gray tint, everywhere I saw at the door, under a kind of arcade, two or
+three charming girls, with brown skin, with white teeth, who smiled at
+the passer-by and spun gold. The passer-by, whirled on by the coach,
+said to them under his breath: 'What a pity, innocent fays, that this
+gold may not be for you! Instead of disguising it with a useless color,
+instead of disfiguring it by art, what would it not gain by remaining
+itself and upon these beautiful spinners! How much better than any grand
+dames would this royal tissue become yourselves!'"
+
+Perhaps it was the dowry of one of these very maidens that Belinda
+wears; and all this would only go to show that to every meanest thing
+the past can lend a halo. When one person showed another the "entire
+costume of a Nubian woman, purchased as she wore it,"--a necklace of red
+beads, and two brass ear-rings simply, hanging on a nail,--how it
+brought up the whole scene, the wondrous ruins, the Nile, the lotos, and
+the palm-branch, the splendid sky soaring over all, the bronze-skinned
+creature shining in the sun! What a past the little glass bits had at
+their command, and what a more magnificent past hung yet behind them!
+Who would value a diamond, the product of any laboratory, were such a
+possibility, so much as that one which, by its own unknown and
+inscrutable process, defying philosopher and jeweller, has imprisoned
+the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set
+its crystals in the darkness of the earth,--a drop of dew eternalized?
+What tree of swift and sudden springing, that grows like a gourd in the
+night to never so stately a height, could equal in our eyes the gnarled
+and may be stunted trunk that has thrown the flickering shadows of its
+leaves over the dying pillows alike of father, child, and grandchild?
+The ring upon the finger is crusted thick with memories, and, looking at
+it, far more than in the present do you live in the past. Perhaps it is
+for this that we are so jealous of events: we fear to have our memories
+impinged upon by pain. The woman whose lover has deserted her mourns not
+the man she must despise, but the love that has dropped out of her past,
+proving hollow and worthless. But she to whom he remains faithful
+borrows perpetually store of old love to enrich the daily feast; she
+gilds and glorifies the blest to-day with the light of that love
+transfigured in the past. And so, in other shapes and experiences, it is
+with all of us indeed; since into this fairy-land all can fly for
+refuge, can pick again their roses and ignore their thorns, can
+
+              "Change
+    Torment with ease, and soonest recompense
+    Dole with delight,"
+
+Nor is this living in the past entirely the voluntary affair of pleasure
+and of memory. In another and more spiritual way it masters us. Never
+quite losing the vitality that once it had, with an elastic springiness
+it constantly rebounds, and the deed of yesterday reacts upon the deed
+of to-day. There is something solemn in the thought that thus the
+blemish or the grace of a day that long ago disappeared passes on with
+awfully increasing undulations into the demesne of the everlasting. And
+though the Judge of all may not cast each deed of other days and weigh
+them in the balance for us or against, yet what those deeds have made
+us, that we shall stand before him when,
+
+              "'Mid the dark, a gleam
+    Of yet another morning breaks;
+    And, like the hand which ends a dream,
+    Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
+    Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes!"
+
+Yesterday, in truth,--looking though it may like a shadow and the
+phantom of itself,--is the only substance that we possess, the one
+immutable fact. To-day is but the asymptote of to-morrow, that curve
+perpetually drawing near, but never reaching the straight line flying
+into infinity. To-morrow, the great future, belongs to the heaven where
+it tends. Were it otherwise, seeing the indestructible elements, and the
+two great central forces forever at their work, we might fancy
+ourselves, in one form or another, continual here on the round world.
+For when Laplace, through the acceleration of the moon, dropping her ten
+seconds a hundred years towards us, discovered the change in the earth's
+orbit,--swinging as it does from ellipse to circle and back again to
+ellipse, vibrating like a mighty pendulum, the "horologe of eternity"
+itself, with tremendous oscillations, through the depths of space,--he
+taught us that the earth endures; and so that the clay with which we are
+clothed still makes a part of the great revolution. Yet, since the
+future is no possession of our own, but a dole and pittance, we know
+that the earth does not endure for us, but that when we shall have
+submitted to the conditions of eternal spirit, yesterday, to-morrow, and
+to-day must alike have ceased to exist, must have vanished like
+illusions; for eternity can be no mere duration of time, but rather some
+state of being past all our power of cognition.
+
+And though we are to inherit eternity, yet have authority now only over
+the period that we have passed, with what wealth then are the aged
+furnished! Sweet must it be to sit with folded hands and dream life over
+once again. How rich we are, how happy! How dear is the old hand in
+ours! Years have added up the sum of all the felicity that we have known
+together, and carried it over to to-day. Those that have left our arms
+and gone out into other homes are still our own; but little sunny heads
+besides cluster round the knees as once before they did. Not only have
+we age and wisdom, but youth and gayety as well. On what light and
+jocund scenes we look! on what deep and dearer bliss! We see the
+meaning of our sorrows now, and bless them that they came. With such
+firm feet we have walked in the lighted way that we gaze back upon, how
+can we fear the Valley of the Shadow? Ah! none but they, indeed, who
+have threescore years and ten hived away in the past, can see the high
+design of Heaven in their lives, and from the wrong side of the pattern
+picture out the right.
+
+    "So at the last shall come old age,
+    Decrepit, as befits that stage.
+    How else wouldst thou retire apart
+    With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
+    And gather all to the very least
+    Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
+    Let fall through eagerness to find
+    The crowning dainties yet behind?
+    Ponder on the entire past,
+    Laid together thus at last,
+    When the twilight helps to fuse
+    The first fresh with the faded hues,
+    And the outline of the whole,
+    As round Eve's shades their framework roll,
+    Grandly fronts for once thy soul!"
+
+
+
+
+THE JOHNSON PARTY.
+
+
+The President of the United States has so singular a combination of
+defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could
+have obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation
+of Providence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as
+unreasonable, vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well
+as arbitrary in disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his
+will, he unites in his character the seemingly opposite qualities of
+demagogue and autocrat, and converts the Presidential chair into a stump
+or a throne, according as the impulse seizes him to cajole or to
+command. Doubtless much of the evil developed in him is due to his
+misfortune in having been lifted by events to a position which he lacked
+the elevation and breadth of intelligence adequately to fill. He was
+cursed with the possession of a power and authority which no man of
+narrow mind, bitter prejudices, and inordinate self-estimation can
+exercise without depraving himself as well as injuring the nation.
+Egotistic to the point of mental disease, he resented the direct and
+manly opposition of statesmen to his opinions and moods as a personal
+affront, and descended to the last degree of littleness in a political
+leader,--that of betraying his party, in order to gratify his spite. He
+of course became the prey of intriguers and sycophants,--of persons who
+understand the art of managing minds which are at once arbitrary and
+weak, by allowing them to retain unity of will amid the most palpable
+inconsistencies of opinion, so that inconstancy to principle shall not
+weaken force of purpose, nor the emphasis be at all abated with which
+they may bless to-day what yesterday they cursed. Thus the abhorrer of
+traitors has now become their tool. Thus the denouncer of Copperheads
+has now sunk into dependence on their support. Thus the imposer of
+conditions of reconstruction has now become the foremost friend of the
+unconditioned return of the Rebel States. Thus the furious Union
+Republican, whose harangues against his political opponents almost
+scared his political friends by their violence, has now become the
+shameless betrayer of the people who trusted him. And in all these
+changes of base he has appeared supremely conscious, in his own mind, of
+playing an independent, a consistent, and especially a conscientious
+part.
+
+Indeed, Mr. Johnson's character would be imperfectly described if some
+attention were not paid to his conscience, the purity of which is a
+favorite subject of his own discourse, and the perversity of which is
+the wonder of the rest of mankind. As a public man, his real position is
+similar to that of a commander of an army, who should pass over to the
+ranks of the enemy he was commissioned to fight, and then plead his
+individual convictions of duty as a justification of his treachery. In
+truth, Mr. Johnson's conscience is, like his understanding, a mere form
+or expression of his will. The will of ordinary men is addressed through
+their understanding and conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and
+conscience can be addressed only through his will. He puts intellectual
+principles and the moral law in the possessive case, thinks he pays them
+a compliment and adds to their authority when he makes them the adjuncts
+of his petted pronoun "my"; and things to him are reasonable and right,
+not from any quality inherent in themselves, but because they are made
+so by his determinations. Indeed, he sees hardly anything as it is, but
+almost everything as colored by his own dominant egotism. Thus he is
+never weary of asserting that the people are on his side; yet his method
+of learning the wishes of the people is to scrutinize his own, and, when
+acting out his own passionate impulses, he ever insists that he is
+obeying public sentiment. Of all the wilful men who, by strange chance,
+have found themselves at the head of a constitutional government, he
+most resembles the last Stuart king of England, James II.; and the
+likeness is increased from the circumstance that the American James has,
+in his supple and plausible Secretary of State, one fully competent to
+play the part of Sunderland.
+
+The party which, under the ironical designation of the National Union
+Party, now proposes to take the policy and character of Mr. Johnson
+under its charge, is composed chiefly of Democrats defeated at the
+polls, and Democrats defeated on the field of battle. The few apostate
+Republicans, who have joined its ranks while seeming to lead its
+organization, are of small account. Its great strength is in its
+Southern supporters, and, if it comes into power, it must obey a Rebel
+direction. By the treachery of the President, it will have the executive
+patronage on its side,--for Mr. Johnson's "conscience" is of that
+peculiar kind which finds satisfaction in arraying the interest of
+others against their convictions; and having thus the power to purchase
+support, it will not fail of those means of dividing the North which
+come from corrupting it. The party under which the war for the Union was
+conducted is to be denounced and proscribed as the party of disunion,
+and we are to be edified by addresses on the indissoluble unity of the
+nation by Secessionists, who have hardly yet had time to wash from their
+hands the stains of Union blood. The leading proposition on which this
+conspiracy against the country is to be conducted is the monstrous
+absurdity, that the Rebel States have an inherent, "continuous,"
+unconditioned, constitutional _right_ to form a part of the Federal
+government, when they have once acknowledged the fact of the defeat of
+their inhabitants in an armed attempt to overthrow and subvert it,--a
+proposition which implies that victory paralyzes the powers of the
+victors, that ruin begins when success is assured, that the only effect
+of beating a Southern Rebel in the field is to exalt him into a maker of
+laws for his antagonist.
+
+In the minority Report of the Congressional Joint Committee on
+Reconstruction, which is designed to supply the new party with
+constitutional law, this theory of State Rights is most elaborately
+presented. The ground is taken, that during the Rebellion the States in
+which it prevailed were as "completely competent States of the United
+States as they were before the Rebellion, and were bound by all the
+obligations which the Constitution imposed, and entitled to all its
+privileges"; and that the Rebellion consisted merely in a series of
+"illegal acts of the citizens of such States." On this theory it is
+difficult to find where the guilt of rebellion lies. The States are
+innocent because the Rebellion was a rising of individuals; the
+individuals cannot be very criminal, for it is on their votes that the
+committee chiefly rely to build up the National Union Party. Again, we
+are informed that, in respect to the admission of representatives from
+"such States," Congress has no right or power to ask more than two
+questions. These are: "Have these States organized governments? Are
+these governments republican in form?" The committee proceed to say:
+"How they were formed, under what auspices they were formed, are
+inquiries with which Congress has no concern. The right of the people to
+form a government for themselves has never been questioned." On this
+principle, President Johnson's labors in organizing State governments
+were works of supererogation. At the close of active hostilities the
+Rebel States had organized, though disloyal, governments, as republican
+in form as they were before the war broke out. The only thing,
+therefore, they were required to do was to send their Senators and
+Representatives to Washington. Congress could not have rightfully
+refused to receive them, because all questions as to their being loyal
+or disloyal, and as to the changes which the war had wrought in the
+relations of the States they represented to the Union, were inquiries
+with which Congress had no concern! And here again we have the
+ever-recurring difficulty respecting the "individuals" who were alone
+guilty of the acts of rebellion. "The right of the people," we are
+assured, "to form a government for themselves, has never been
+questioned." But it happens that "the people" here indicated are the
+very individuals who were before pointed out as alone responsible for
+the Rebellion. In the exercise of their right "to form a government for
+themselves," they rebelled; and now, it seems, by the exercise of the
+same right, they can unconditionally return. There is no wrong anywhere:
+it is all "right." The people are first made criminals, in order to
+exculpate the States, and then the innocence of the States is used to
+exculpate the people. When we see such outrages on common sense gravely
+perpetrated by so eminent a lawyer as the one who drew up the
+committee's Report, one is almost inclined to define minds as of two
+kinds, the legal mind and the human mind, and to doubt if there is any
+possible connection in reason between the two. To the human mind it
+appears that the Federal government has spent thirty-five hundred
+millions of dollars, and sacrificed three hundred thousand lives, in a
+contest which the legal mind dissolves into a mere mist of unsubstantial
+phrases; and by skill in the trick of substituting words for things, and
+definitions for events, the legal mind proceeds to show that these words
+and definitions, though scrupulously shielded from any contact with
+realities, are sufficient to prevent the nation from taking ordinary
+precautions against the recurrence of calamities fresh in its bitter
+experience. The phrase "State Rights," translated from legal into human
+language, is found to mean, the power to commit wrongs on individuals
+whom States may desire to oppress, or the power to protect the
+inhabitants of States from the consequences of their own crimes. The
+minority of the committee, indeed, seem to have forgotten that there has
+been any real war, and bring to mind the converted Australian savage,
+whom the missionary could not make penitent for a murder committed the
+day before, because the trifling occurrence had altogether passed from
+his recollection.
+
+In fact, all attempts to discriminate between Rebels and Rebel States,
+to the advantage of the latter, are done in defiance of notorious facts.
+If the Rebellion had been merely a rising of individual citizens of
+States, it would have been an insurrection against the States, as well
+as against the Federal government, and might have been easily put down.
+In that case, there would have been no withdrawal of Southern Senators
+and Representatives from Congress, and therefore no question as to their
+inherent right to return. In Missouri and Kentucky, for example, there
+was civil war, waged by inhabitants of those States against their local
+governments, as well as against the United States; and nobody contends
+that the rights and privileges of those States were forfeited by the
+criminal acts of their citizens. But the real strength of the Rebellion
+consisted in this, that it was not a rebellion _against_ States, but a
+rebellion _by_ States. No loose assemblage of individuals, though
+numbering hundreds of thousands, could long have resisted the pressure
+of the Federal power and the power of the State governments. They would
+have had no means of subsistence except those derived from plunder and
+voluntary contributions, and they would have lacked the military
+organization by which mobs are transformed into formidable armies. But
+the Rebellion being one of States, being virtually decreed by the people
+of States assembled in convention, was sustained by the two tremendous
+governmental powers of taxation and conscription. The willing and the
+unwilling were thus equally placed at the disposition of a strong
+government. The population and wealth of the whole immense region of
+country in which the Rebellion prevailed were at the service of this
+government. So completely was it a rebellion of States, that the
+universal excuse of the minority of original Union men for entering
+heartily into the contest after it had once begun was, that they thought
+it their duty to abide by the decision, and share the fortunes, of their
+respective _States_. Nobody at the South believed at the time the war
+commenced, or during its progress, that his State possessed any
+"continuous" right to a participation in the privileges of the Federal
+Constitution, the obligations of which it had repudiated. When confident
+of success, the Southerner scornfully scouted the mere suspicion of
+entertaining such a degrading notion; when assured of defeat, his only
+thought was to "get his State back into the Union on the best terms that
+could be made." The idea of "conditions of readmission" was as firmly
+fixed in the Southern as in the Northern mind. If the politicians of the
+South now adopt the principle that the Rebel States have not, as States,
+ever altered their relations to the Union, they do it from policy,
+finding that its adoption will give them "better terms" than they ever
+dreamed of getting before the President of the United States taught them
+that it would be more politic to bully than to plead.
+
+In the last analysis, indeed, the theory of the minority of the
+Reconstruction Committee reduces the Rebel States to mere abstractions.
+It is plain that a State, in the concrete, is constituted by that
+portion of the inhabitants who form its legal people; and that, in
+passing back of its government and constitution, we reach a convention
+of the legal people as its ultimate expression. By such conventions the
+acts of secession were passed; and, as far as the people of the Rebel
+States could do it, they destroyed their States considered as organized
+communities forming a part of the United States. The claim of the United
+States to authority over the territory and inhabitants was of course not
+affected by these acts; but in what condition did they place the people?
+Plainly in the condition of rebels, engaged in an attempt to overturn
+the Constitution and government of the United States. As the whole force
+of the people in each of the Rebel communities was engaged in this work,
+the whole of the people were rebels and public enemies. Nothing was
+left, in each case, but an abstract State, without any external body,
+and as destitute of people having a right to enjoy the privileges of the
+Constitution as if the territory had been swept clean of population by a
+pestilence. It is, then, only this abstract State which has a right to
+representation in Congress. But how can there be a right to
+representation when there is nobody to be represented? All this may
+appear puerile, but the puerility is in the premises as well as in the
+logical deductions; and the premises are laid down as indisputable
+constitutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for
+the National Union Party.
+
+The doctrine of the unconditional right of the Rebel States to
+representation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question
+relates to the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly
+these conditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has
+passed both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever
+exacted of defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a
+distinctly "radical" idea in the whole amendment,--nothing that
+President Johnson has not himself, within a comparatively recent period,
+stamped with his high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage?
+No. Does it ordain impartial suffrage? No. Does it proscribe,
+disfranchise, or expatriate the recent armed enemies of the country, or
+confiscate their property? No. It simply ordains that the national debt
+shall be paid and the Rebel debt repudiated; that the civil rights of
+all persons shall be maintained; that Rebels who have added perjury to
+treason shall be disqualified for office; and that the Rebel States
+shall not have their political power in the Union increased by the
+presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights,
+but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on
+voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the
+last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection
+can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against
+Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South
+Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal voters
+in New York? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the South
+should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power in
+the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal
+to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined?
+
+Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid,
+and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below
+the requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still
+denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals,
+bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr
+of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union
+man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the
+Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize
+"conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to drive from power
+that radical party who are daily trampling under foot the Constitution,
+and fast converting a constitutional Republic into a consolidated
+despotism." The terms to which South Carolina is asked to submit, before
+she can be made the equal of Ohio or New York in the Union, are stated
+to be "too degrading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for
+a single instant." When we consider that this "radical party"
+constitutes nearly four fifths of the legal legislature of the nation,
+that it was the party which saved the country from dismemberment while
+Mr. Orr and his friends were notoriously engaged in "trampling the
+Constitution under foot," and that the man who denounces it owes his
+forfeited life to its clemency, the astounding insolence of the
+impeachment touches the sublime. Here is confessed treason inveighing
+against tried loyalty, in the name of the Constitution it has violated
+and the law it has broken! But why does Mr. Orr think the terms of South
+Carolina's restored relations to the Union "too degrading and
+humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant"? Is it
+because he wishes to have the Rebel debt paid? Is it because he desires
+to have the Federal debt repudiated? Is it because he thinks it
+intolerable that a negro should have civil rights? Is it because he
+resents the idea that breakers of oaths, like himself, should be
+disqualified from having another opportunity of forswearing themselves?
+Is it because he considers that a white Rebel freeman of South Carolina
+has a natural right to exercise double the political power of a white
+loyal freeman of Massachusetts? He must return an affirmative answer to
+all these questions in order to make it out that his State will be
+degraded and humiliated by ratifying the amendment; and the necessity of
+the measure is therefore proved by the motives known to prompt the
+attacks of its vilifiers.
+
+The insolence of Mr. Orr is not merely individual, but representative.
+It is the result of Mr. Johnson's attempt "to produce harmony between
+the two sections," by betraying the section to which he owed his
+election. Had it not been for his treachery, there would have been
+little difficulty in settling the terms of peace, so as to avoid all
+causes for future war; but, from the time he quarrelled with Congress,
+he has been the great stirrer-up of disaffection at the South, and the
+virtual leader of the Southern reactionary party. Every man at the South
+who was prominent in the Rebellion, every man at the North who was
+prominent in aiding the Rebellion, is now openly or covertly his
+partisan, and by fawning on him earns the right to defame the
+representatives of the people by whom the Rebellion was put down. Among
+traitors and Copperheads the fear of punishment has been succeeded by
+the hope of revenge; elation is on faces which the downfall of Richmond
+overcast; and a return to the old times, when a united South ruled the
+country by means of a divided North, is confidently expected by the
+whole crew of political bullies and political sycophants whose profit is
+in the abasement of the nation. It is even said that, if the majority of
+the "Rump" Congress cannot be overcome by fair means, it will be by
+foul; and there are noisy partisans of the President who assert that he
+has in him a Cromwellian capacity for dealing with legislative
+assemblies whose notions of the public good clash with his own. In
+short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Congress, a _coup
+d'etat_.
+
+Garret Davis, of Kentucky, was, we believe, the first to announce this
+executive remedy for the "radical" disease of the state, and it has
+since been often prescribed by Democratic politicians as a sovereign
+panacea. General McClernand, indeed, proposed a scheme, simpler even
+than that of executive recognition, by which the Southern Senators and
+Representatives might effect a lodgment in Congress. They should,
+according to him, have gone to Washington, entered the halls of
+legislation, and proceeded to occupy their seats, "peaceably if they
+could, forcibly if they must"; but the record of General McClernand, as
+a military man, was not such as to give to his advice on a question of
+carrying positions by assault a high degree of authority, and, there
+being some natural hesitation in following his counsel, the golden
+opportunity was lost. Mr. Montgomery Blair, who professes his
+willingness to act with any men, "Rebels or any one else," to put down
+the radicals, is never weary of talking to conservative conventions of
+"two Presidents and two Congresses." There can be no doubt that the
+project of a _coup d'etat_ has become dangerously familiar to the
+"conservative" mind, and that the eminent legal gentlemen of the North
+who are publishing opinions affirming the right of the excluded Southern
+representatives to their seats are playing into the hands of the
+desperate gang of unscrupulous politicians who are determined to have
+the right established by force. It is computed that the gain, in the
+approaching elections, of twenty-five districts now represented by Union
+Republicans, will give the Johnson party, in the next Congress, a
+majority of the House of Representatives, should the Southern
+delegations be counted; and it is proposed that the Johnson members
+legally entitled to seats should combine with the Southern pretenders to
+seats, organize as the House of Representatives of the United States,
+and apply to the President for recognition. Should the President comply,
+he would be impeached by an unrecognized House before an "incomplete"
+Senate, and, if convicted, would deny the validity of the proceeding.
+The result would be civil war, in which the name of the Federal
+government would be on the side of the revolutionists. Such is the
+programme which is freely discussed by partisans of the President,
+considered to be high in his favor; and the scheme, it is contended, is
+the logical result of the position he has assumed as to the rights of
+the excluded States to representation. It is certain that the present
+Congress is as much the Congress of the United States as he is the
+President of the United States; but it is well known that he considers
+himself to represent the whole country, while he thinks that Congress
+only represents a portion of it; and he has in his character just that
+combination of qualities, and is placed in just those anomalous
+circumstances, which lead men to the commission of great political
+crimes. The mere hint of the possibility of his attempting a _coup
+d'etat_ is received by some Republicans with a look of incredulous
+surprise; yet what has his administration been to such persons but a
+succession of surprises?
+
+But whatever view may be taken of the President's designs, there can be
+no doubt that the safety, peace, interest, and honor of the country
+depend on the success of the Union Republicans in the approaching
+elections. The loyal nation must see to it that the Fortieth Congress
+shall be as competent to override executive vetoes as the Thirty-Ninth,
+and be equally removed from the peril of being expelled for one more in
+harmony with Executive ideas. The same earnestness, energy, patriotism,
+and intelligence which gave success to the war, must now be exerted to
+reap its fruits and prevent its recurrence. The only danger is, that, in
+some representative districts, the people may be swindled by
+plausibilities and respectabilities; for when, in political contests,
+any great villany is contemplated, there are always found some eminently
+respectable men, with a fixed capital of certain eminently conservative
+phrases, innocently ready to furnish the wolves of politics with
+abundant supplies of sheep's clothing. These dignified dupes are more
+than usually active at the present time; and the gravity of their speech
+is as edifying as its emptiness. Immersed in words, and with no clear
+perception of things, they mistake conspiracy for conservatism. Their
+pet horror is the term "radical"; their ideal of heroic patriotism, the
+spectacle of a great nation which allows itself to be ruined with
+decorum, and dies rather than commit the slightest breach of
+constitutional etiquette. This insensibility to facts and blindness to
+the tendency of events, they call wisdom and moderation. Behind these
+political dummies are the real forces of the Johnson party, men of
+insolent spirit, resolute will, embittered temper, and unscrupulous
+purpose, who clearly know what they are after, and will hesitate at no
+"informality" in the attempt to obtain it. To give these persons
+political power will be to surrender the results of the war, by placing
+the government practically in the hands of those against whom the war
+was waged. No smooth words about "the equality of the States," "the
+necessity of conciliation," "the wickedness of sectional conflicts,"
+will alter the fact, that, in refusing to support Congress, the people
+would set a reward on treachery and place a bounty on treason. "The
+South," says a Mr. Hill of Georgia, in a letter favoring the
+Philadelphia Convention, "sought to save the Constitution out of the
+Union. She failed. Let her now bring her diminished and shattered, but
+united and earnest counsels and energies to save the Constitution in the
+Union." The sort of Constitution the South sought to save by warring
+against the government is the Constitution which she now proposes to
+save by administering it! Is this the tone of pardoned and penitent
+treason? Is this the spirit to build up a "National Union Party"? No;
+but it is the tone and spirit now fashionable in the defeated Rebel
+States, and will not be changed until the autumn elections shall have
+proved that they have as little to expect from the next Congress as from
+the present, and that they must give securities for their future conduct
+before they can be relieved from the penalties incurred by their past.
+
+
+
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Armadale._ A Novel. By WILKIE COLLINS. New York: Harper and Brothers.
+
+Except for the fact that there is nothing at all automatic in his
+inventions, there seems to be no good reason why Mr. Collins should not
+make a perpetual motion. He has a surprising mechanical faculty, and
+great patience and skill in passing the figures he contrives through the
+programme arranged for them. Having read one of his novels, you feel as
+if you had been amused with a puppet-show of rare merit, and you would
+like to have the ingenious mechanician before the curtain. So much
+cleverness, however, seems to be thrown away on the entertainment of a
+single evening, and you sigh for its application to some work of more
+lasting usefulness; and the perpetual motion occurs to you as the thing
+worthiest such powers. Let it be a perpetual literary motion, if the
+public please. Given a remarkable dream and a beautiful bad woman to
+fulfil it; you have but to amplify the vision sufficiently, and your
+beautiful bad woman goes on fulfilling it forever in tens of thousands
+of volumes. As the brother of De Quincey said, when proposing to stand
+on the ceiling, head downwards, and be spun there like a whip-top, thus
+overcoming the attraction of gravitation by the mere rapidity of
+revolution, "If you can keep it up for an instant, you can keep it up
+all day." Alas! it is just at this point that the fatal defect of Mr.
+Collins's mechanism appears. But for the artisan's hand, the complicated
+work would not start at all, and we perceive that, if he lifted it for a
+moment from the crank, the painfully contrived dream would drop to
+pieces, and the beautiful bad woman would come to a jerky stand-still in
+the midst of her most atrocious development. A perpetual literary motion
+is therefore out of the question, so far as Mr. Collins is concerned;
+and we can merely examine his defective machinery, with many a regret
+that a plan so ingenious, and devices so labored and costly, should be
+of no better effect.
+
+We think, indeed, that all his stories are constructed upon a principle
+as false to art as it is false to life. In this world, we have first men
+and women, with certain well-known good and evil passions, and these
+passions are the causes of all the events that happen in the world. We
+doubt if it has occurred to any of our readers to see a set of
+circumstances, even of the most relentless and malignant description,
+grouping themselves about any human being without the agency of his own
+love or hate. Yet this is what happens very frequently in Mr. Collins's
+novels, impoverishing and enfeebling his characters in a surprising
+degree, and reducing them to the condition of juiceless puppets without
+proper will or motion. It is not that they are all wanting in
+verisimilitude. Even the entirely wicked Miss Gwilt is a conceivable
+character; but, being destined merely to fulfil Armadale's dream, she
+loses all freedom of action, and, we must say, takes most clumsy and
+hopeless and long-roundabout methods of accomplishing crimes, to which
+one would have thought a lady of her imputed sagacity would have found
+much shorter cuts. It is amazing and inartistic, however, that after all
+her awkwardness she should fail. Given a blockhead like Armadale, and a
+dreamer like Midwinter, there is no reason in nature, and no reason in
+art, why a lady of Miss Gwilt's advantages should not marry both of
+them; and the author's overruling on this point is more creditable to
+his heart than to his head. These three people are the chief persons of
+the story, and their hands are tied from first to last They are not to
+act out their characters: they are to act out the plot; and the author's
+designs are accomplished in defiance of their several natures. Some of
+the minor persons are not so ruthlessly treated. The Pedgifts, father
+and son, are free agents, and they are admirably true to their instincts
+of upright, astute lawyers, who love best to employ their legal
+shrewdness in a good cause. Their joint triumph over Miss Gwilt is
+probable and natural, and would be a successful point in the book, if it
+were conceivable that she should expose herself to such a defeat by so
+much needless plotting with Mrs. Oldershaw. But to fill so large a
+stage, an immense deal of by-play was necessary, and great numbers of
+people are visibly dragged upon the scene. Some of these accomplish
+nothing in the drama. To what end have we so much of Mr. Brock? Others
+elaborately presented only contribute to the result in the most
+intricate and tedious way; and in Major Milroy's family there is no
+means of discovering that Miss Gwilt is an adventuress, but for Mrs.
+Milroy to become jealous of her and to open her letters.
+
+It cannot, of course, be denied that Mr. Collins's stories are
+interesting; for an infinite number of persons read them through. But it
+is the bare plot that interests, and the disposition of mankind to
+listen to story-telling is such that the idlest _conteur_ can entertain.
+We must demand of literary art, however, that it shall interest in
+people's fortunes by first interesting in people. Can any one of all Mr.
+Collins's readers declare that he sympathizes with the loves of Armadale
+and Neelie Milroy, or actually cares a straw what becomes of either of
+those insipid young persons? Neither is Midwinter one to take hold on
+like or dislike; and Miss Gwilt is interesting only as the capable but
+helpless spider out of which the plot of the story is spun. Pathos there
+is not in the book, and the humor is altogether too serious to laugh at.
+
+
+_Four Years in the Saddle._ By COLONEL HARRY GILMORE. New York: Harper
+and Brothers.
+
+It is sometimes difficult to believe, in reading this book, that it is
+not the production of Major Gahagan of the Ahmednuggar Irregulars, or
+Mr. Barry Lyndon of Castle Lyndon. Being merely a record of personal
+adventure, it does not suggest itself as part of the history of our late
+war, and, but for the recurrence of the familiar names of American
+persons and places, it might pass for the narrative of either of the
+distinguished characters mentioned.
+
+In dealing with events creditable to his own courage and gallantry,
+Colonel Gilmore has the unsparing frankness of Major Gahagan, and it
+must be allowed that there is a remarkable likeness in all the
+adventures of these remarkable men. It is true that Colonel Gilmore does
+not fire upon a file of twenty elephants so as to cut away all their
+trunks by a single shot; but he does kill eleven Yankees by the
+discharge of a cannon which he touches off with a live coal held between
+his thumb and finger. Being made prisoner, he is quite as defiant and
+outrageous as the Guj-puti under similar circumstances: at one time he
+can scarcely restrain himself from throwing into the sea the insolent
+captain of a Federal gunboat; at another time, when handcuffed by order
+of General Sheridan, he spends an hour in cursing his captors. The
+red-hair of the Lord of the White Elephants waved his followers to
+victory; Colonel Gilmore's "hat, with the long black plume upon it," is
+the signal of triumph to his marauders. Both, finally, are loved by the
+ladies, and are alike extravagant in their devotion to the sex. Colonel
+Gilmore, indeed, withholds no touch that can go to make him the hero of
+a dime novel; and there is not a more picturesque and dashing character
+in literature outside of the adventures of Claude Duval. Everywhere we
+behold him waving his steel (as he calls his sword); he wheels before
+our dazzled eyes like a meteor; he charges, and the foe fly like sheep
+before him. And no sooner is he come into town from killing a score or
+two of Yankees, than the ladies--who are all good Union women and have
+just taken the oath of allegiance--crowd to kiss and caress him; or, as
+he puts it in his own vivid language, he receives "a kiss from more than
+one pair of ruby lips, and gives many a hearty hug and kiss in return."
+In his wild way, he takes a pleasure in evoking the tender solicitude of
+the ladies for his safety,--eats a dish of strawberries in a house upon
+which the Yankees are charging to capture him, and remains for some
+minutes after the strawberries are eaten, while the ladies, proffering
+him his arms, are "dancing about, and positively screaming with
+excitement." At another time, when the bullets of the enemy are hissing
+about his ears, he puts on a pretty girl's slipper for her. "Such," he
+remarks, with a pensive air, "are some of the few happy scenes that
+brighten a soldier's life."
+
+Colonel Gilmore, who has the diffidence of Major Gahagan, has also the
+engaging artlessness which lends so great a charm to the personal
+narrative of Mr. Barry Lyndon. He does not reserve from the reader's
+knowledge such of his exploits as stealing the chaplain's whiskey, and
+drinking the peach-brandy of the simple old woman who supposed she was
+offering it to General Lee. "Place him where you may," says Colonel
+Gilmore, "and under no matter what adverse circumstances, you can always
+distinguish a gentleman." He has a great deal of fine feeling, and can
+scarcely restrain his tears at the burning of Chambersburg, after
+setting it on fire. Desiring a memento of a brother officer, he takes a
+small piece of the dead man's skull. It has been supposed that civilized
+soldiers, however brave and resolute, scarcely exulted in the
+remembrance of the lives they had taken; and it is thought to be one of
+the merciful features of modern warfare, that in the vast majority of
+cases the slayer and the slain are unknown to each other. Colonel
+Gilmore has none of the false tenderness which shrinks from a knowledge
+of homicide. On the contrary, he is careful to know when he has killed a
+man; and he recounts, with an exactness revolting to feebler nerves, the
+circumstances and the methods by which he put this or that enemy to
+death.
+
+We think we could hardly admire Colonel Gilmore if he had been of our
+side during the war, and had done to the Rebels the things he professes
+to have done to us. As it is, we trust he will forgive us, if we confess
+that we have not read his narrative with a tranquil stomach, and that we
+think it will impress his Northern readers as the history of a brigand
+who had the good luck to be also a traitor.
+
+
+
+
+RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS.
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+The Structure of Animal Life. Six Lectures delivered at the Brooklyn
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+Professor of Zooelogy and Geology in the Lawrence Scientific School. New
+York. C. Scribner & Co. 8vo. pp. viii., 128. $2.50.
+
+History of the Life and Times of James Madison. By William C. Rives.
+Vol. II. Boston. Little, Brown, & Co. 8vo. pp. xxii., 657. $3.50.
+
+The Physiology of Man; designed to represent the Existing State of
+Physiological Science, as applied to the Functions of the Human Body. By
+Austin Flint, Jr., M. D., Professor of Physiology and Microscopy in the
+Bellevue Medical College, N. Y., and in the Long Island College
+Hospital; Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, etc. Introduction;
+the Blood; Circulation; Respiration. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.
+pp. 502, $4.50.
+
+Poems. By Annie E. Clarke. Philadelphia. J. B. Lippincott & Co. 16mo.
+pp. 146. $1.00.
+
+The Living Forces of the Universe. The Temple and the Worshippers. By
+George W. Thompson. Philadelphia. Howard Challen. 12mo. pp. xxiv., 358.
+$1.75.
+
+Jealousy. By George Sand, Author of "Consuelo," &c. With a Biographical
+Sketch of the Author. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson & Bro. 12mo. pp. 304.
+$2.00.
+
+Stories told to a Child. By Jean Ingelow. Boston. Roberts Brothers.
+18mo. pp. vi., 424, $1.75.
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+Canary Birds. A Manual of Useful and Practical Information for
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+Constitution to the Revolt of the Southern States. By George Lunt. New
+York. D. Appleton & Co. 12mo, pp. xiv., 491. $3.00.
+
+False Pride; or, Two Ways to Matrimony. A Companion to "Family Pride."
+Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson & Bro. 12mo. pp. 265. $2.00.
+
+The Genius of Edmund Burke. By J. L. Batchelder. Chicago. J. L.
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+Letters of Life. By Mrs. L. H. Sigourney. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
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+of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. New York. D. Appleton &
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+Cooke, formerly of General Stuart's Staff. New York. D. Appleton & Co.
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+Introduction and additional Notes. In Two Volumes. Boston. American
+Unitarian Association. 12mo. pp. xcii., 271; iv., 413. $4.50.
+
+St. Martin's Eve. By Mrs. Henry Wood. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson &
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+etc. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson & Bro. 12mo. pp. 437. $2.00.
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+8vo. pp. iv., 256. $2.50.
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+pp. 480. $1.75.
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+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No.
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