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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Oldport Days, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
+
+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: Oldport Days
+
+Author: Thomas Wentworth Higginson
+
+Posting Date: March 23, 2009 [EBook #2418]
+Release Date: December, 2000
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLDPORT DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judy Boss.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: I have closed contractions in the text, e.g., "did
+n't" becoming "didn't" for example;  I have also added the missing
+period after "caress" in line 11 of page 61, and have changed "ever" to
+"over" in line 16 of page 121.
+
+
+
+
+OLDPORT DAYS.
+
+
+BY
+
+THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.
+
+
+
+  BOSTON:
+  LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS.
+  NEW YORK:
+  CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM.
+  1888.
+
+
+
+  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873,
+  BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.,
+  in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
+
+
+  University Press:
+  JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+  OLDPORT IN WINTER
+  OLDPORT WHARVES
+  THE HAUNTED WINDOW
+  A DRIFT-WOOD FIRE
+  AN ARTIST'S CREATION
+  IN A WHERRY
+  MADAM DELIA'S EXPECTATIONS
+  SUNSHINE AND PETRARCH
+  A SHADOW
+  FOOTPATHS
+
+
+
+
+OLDPORT DAYS.
+
+
+
+OLDPORT IN WINTER.
+
+Our August life rushes by, in Oldport, as if we were all shot from the
+mouth of a cannon, and were endeavoring to exchange visiting-cards on
+the way. But in September, when the great hotels are closed, and the
+bronze dogs that guarded the portals of the Ocean House are collected
+sadly in the music pavilion, nose to nose; when the last four-in-hand
+has departed, and a man may drive a solitary horse on the avenue
+without a pang,--then we know that "the season" is over. Winter is yet
+several months away,--months of the most delicious autumn weather that
+the American climate holds. But to the human bird of passage all that
+is not summer is winter; and those who seek Oldport most eagerly for
+two months are often those who regard it as uninhabitable for the other
+ten.
+
+The Persian poet Saadi says that in a certain region of Armenia, where
+he travelled, people never died the natural death. But once a year they
+met on a certain plain, and occupied themselves with recreation, in the
+midst of which individuals of every rank and age would suddenly stop,
+make a reverence to the west, and, setting out at full speed toward
+that part of the desert, be seen no more. It is quite in this fashion
+that guests disappear from Oldport when the season ends. They also are
+apt to go toward the west, but by steamboat. It is pathetic, on
+occasion of each annual bereavement, to observe the wonted looks and
+language of despair among those who linger behind; and it needs some
+fortitude to think of spending the winter near such a Wharf of Sighs.
+
+But we console ourselves. Each season brings its own attractions. In
+summer one may relish what is new in Oldport, as the liveries, the
+incomes, the manners. There is often a delicious freshness about these
+exhibitions; it is a pleasure to see some opulent citizen in his first
+kid gloves. His new-born splendor stands in such brilliant relief
+against the confirmed respectability of the "Old Stone Mill," the only
+thing on the Atlantic shore which has had time to forget its birthday!
+But in winter the Old Mill gives the tone to the society around it; we
+then bethink ourselves of the crown upon our Trinity Church steeple,
+and resolve that the courtesies of a bygone age shall yet linger here.
+Is there any other place in America where gentlemen still take off
+their hats to one another on the public promenade? The hat is here what
+it still is in Southern Europe,--the lineal successor of the sword as
+the mark of a gentleman. It is noticed that, in going from Oldport to
+New York or Boston, one is liable to be betrayed by an over-flourish of
+the hat, as is an Arkansas man by a display of the bowie-knife.
+
+Winter also imparts to these spacious estates a dignity that is
+sometimes wanting in summer. I like to stroll over them during this
+epoch of desertion, just as once, when I happened to hold the keys of a
+church, it seemed pleasant to sit, on a week-day, among its empty pews.
+The silent walls appeared to hold the pure essence of the prayers of a
+generation, while the routine and the ennui had vanished all away. One
+may here do the same with fashion as there with devotion, extracting
+its finer flavors, if such there be, unalloyed by vulgarity or sin. In
+the winter I can fancy these fine houses tenanted by a true nobility;
+all the sons are brave, and all the daughters virtuous. These balconies
+have heard the sighs of passion without selfishness; those cedarn
+alleys have admitted only vows that were never broken. If the occupant
+of the house be unknown, even by name, so much the better. And from
+homes more familiar, what lovely childish faces seem still to gaze from
+the doorways, what graceful Absences (to borrow a certain poet's
+phrase) are haunting those windows!
+
+There is a sense of winter quiet that makes a stranger soon feel at
+home in Oldport, while the prospective stir of next summer precludes
+all feeling of stagnation. Commonly, in quiet places, one suffers from
+the knowledge that everybody would prefer to be unquiet; but nobody has
+any such longing here. Doubtless there are aged persons who deplore the
+good old times when the Oldport mail-bags were larger than those
+arriving at New York. But if it were so now, what memories would there
+be to talk about? If you wish for "Syrian peace, immortal leisure,"--a
+place where no grown person ever walks rapidly along the street, and
+where few care enough for rain to open an umbrella or walk
+faster,--come here.
+
+My abode is on a broad, sunny street, with a few great elms overhead,
+and with large old houses and grass-banks opposite. There is so little
+snow that the outlook in the depth of winter is often merely that of a
+paler and leafless summer, and a soft, springlike sky almost always
+spreads above. Past the window streams an endless sunny panorama (for
+the house fronts the chief thoroughfare between country and
+town),--relics of summer equipages in faded grandeur; great, fragrant
+hay-carts; vast moving mounds of golden straw; loads of crimson onions;
+heaps of pale green cabbages; piles of gray tree-prunings, looking as
+if the patrician trees were sending their superfluous wealth of
+branches to enrich the impoverished orchards of the Poor Farm; wagons
+of sea-weed just from the beach, with bright, moist hues, and dripping
+with sea-water and sea-memories, each weed an argosy, bearing its own
+wild histories. At this season, the very houses move, and roll slowly
+by, looking round for more lucrative quarters next season. Never have I
+seen real estate made so transportable as in Oldport. The purchaser,
+after finishing and furnishing to his fancy, puts his name on the door,
+and on the fence a large white placard inscribed "For sale". Then his
+household arrangements are complete, and he can sit down to enjoy
+himself.
+
+By a side-glance from our window, one may look down an ancient street,
+which in some early epoch of the world's freshness received the name of
+Spring Street. A certain lively lady, addicted to daring Scriptural
+interpretations, thinks that there is some mistake in the current
+versions of Genesis, and that it was Spring Street which was created in
+the beginning, and the heavens and earth at some subsequent period.
+There are houses in Spring Street, and there is a confectioner's shop;
+but it is not often that a sound comes across its rugged pavements,
+save perchance (in summer) the drone of an ancient hand-organ, such as
+might have been devised by Adam to console his Eve when Paradise was
+lost. Yet of late the desecrating hammer and the ear-piercing saw have
+entered that haunt of ancient peace. May it be long ere any such
+invasion reaches those strange little wharves in the lower town, full
+of small, black, gambrel-roofed houses, with projecting eaves that
+might almost serve for piazzas. It is possible for an unpainted wooden
+building to assume, in this climate, a more time-worn aspect than that
+of any stone; and on these wharves everything is so old, and yet so
+stunted, you might fancy that the houses had been sent down there to
+play during their childhood, and that nobody had ever remembered to
+fetch them back.
+
+The ancient aspect of things around us, joined with the softening
+influences of the Gulf Stream, imparts an air of chronic languor to the
+special types of society which here prevail in winter,--as, for
+instance, people of leisure, trades-people living on their summer's
+gains, and, finally, fishermen. Those who pursue this last laborious
+calling are always lazy to the eye, for they are on shore only in lazy
+moments. They work by night or at early dawn, and by day they perhaps
+lie about on the rocks, or sit upon one heel beside a fish-house door.
+I knew a missionary who resigned his post at the Isles of Shoals
+because it was impossible to keep the Sunday worshippers from lying at
+full length on the seats. Our boatmen have the same habit, and there is
+a certain dreaminess about them, in whatever posture. Indeed, they
+remind one quite closely of the German boatman in Uhland, who carried
+his reveries so far as to accept three fees from one passenger.
+
+But the truth is, that in Oldport we all incline to the attitude of
+repose. Now and then a man comes here, from farther east, with the New
+England fever in his blood, and with a pestilent desire to do
+something. You hear of him, presently, proposing that the Town Hall
+should be repainted. Opposition would require too much effort, and the
+thing is done. But the Gulf Stream soon takes its revenge on the
+intruder, and gradually repaints him also, with its own soft and mellow
+tints. In a few years he would no more bestir himself to fight for a
+change than to fight against it.
+
+It makes us smile a little, therefore, to observe that universal
+delusion among the summer visitors, that we spend all winter in active
+preparations for next season. Not so; we all devote it solely to
+meditations on the season past. I observe that nobody in Oldport ever
+believes in any coming summer. Perhaps the tide is turned, we think,
+and people will go somewhere else. You do not find us altering our
+houses in December, or building out new piazzas even in March. We wait
+till the people have actually come to occupy them. The preparation for
+visitors is made after the visitors have arrived. This may not be the
+way in which things are done in what are called "smart business
+places." But it is our way in Oldport.
+
+It is another delusion to suppose that we are bored by this long epoch
+of inactivity. Not at all; we enjoy it. If you enter a shop in winter,
+you will find everybody rejoiced to see you--as a friend; but if it
+turns out that you have come as a customer, people will look a little
+disappointed. It is rather inconsiderate of you to make such demands
+out of season. Winter is not exactly the time for that sort of thing.
+It seems rather to violate the conditions of the truce. Could you not
+postpone the affair till next July? Every country has its customs; I
+observe that in some places, New York for instance, the shopkeepers
+seem rather to enjoy a "field-day" when the sun and the customers are
+out. In Oldport, on the contrary, men's spirits droop at such times,
+and they go through their business sadly. They force themselves to it
+during the summer, perhaps,--for one must make some sacrifices,--but in
+winter it is inappropriate as strawberries and cream.
+
+The same spirit of repose pervades the streets. Nobody ever looks in a
+hurry, or as if an hour's delay would affect the thing in hand. The
+nearest approach to a mob is when some stranger, thinking himself late
+for the train (as if the thing were possible), is tempted to run a few
+steps along the sidewalk. On such an occasion I have seen doors open,
+and heads thrust out. But ordinarily even the physicians drive slowly,
+as if they wished to disguise their profession, or to soothe the nerves
+of some patient who may be gazing from a window.
+
+Yet they are not to be censured, since Death, their antagonist, here
+drives slowly too. The number of the aged among us is surprising, and
+explains some phenomena otherwise strange. You will notice, for
+instance, that there are no posts before the houses in Oldport to which
+horses may be tied. Fashionable visitors might infer that every horse
+is supposed to be attended by a groom. Yet the tradition is, that there
+were once as many posts here as elsewhere, but that they were removed
+to get rid of the multitude of old men who leaned all day against them.
+It obstructed the passing. And these aged citizens, while permitted to
+linger at their posts, were gossiping about men still older, in earthly
+or heavenly habitations, and the sensation of longevity went on
+accumulating indefinitely in their talk. Their very disputes had a
+flavor of antiquity, and involved the reputation of female relatives to
+the third or fourth generation. An old fisherman testified in our
+Police Court, the other day, in narrating the progress of a street
+quarrel; "Then I called him 'Polly Garter,'--that's his grandmother;
+and he called me 'Susy Reynolds,'--that's my aunt that's dead and gone."
+
+In towns like this, from which the young men mostly migrate, the work
+of life devolves upon the venerable and the very young. When I first
+came to Oldport, it appeared to me that every institution was conducted
+by a boy and his grandfather. This seemed the case, for instance, with
+the bank that consented to assume the slender responsibility of my
+deposits. It was further to be observed, that, if the elder official
+was absent for a day, the boy carried on the proceedings unaided; while
+if the boy also wished to amuse himself elsewhere, a worthy neighbor
+from across the way came in to fill the places of both. Seeing this, I
+retained my small hold upon the concern with fresh tenacity; for who
+knew but some day, when the directors also had gone on a picnic, the
+senior depositor might take his turn at the helm? It may savor of
+self-confidence, but it has always seemed to me, that, with one day's
+control of a bank, even in these degenerate times, something might be
+done which would quite astonish the stockholders.
+
+Longer acquaintance has, however, revealed the fact, that these Oldport
+institutions stand out as models of strict discipline beside their
+suburban compeers. A friend of mine declares that he went lately into a
+country bank, nearby, and found no one on duty. Being of opinion that
+there should always be someone behind the counter of a bank, he went
+there himself. Wishing to be informed as to the resources of his
+establishment, he explored desks and vaults, found a good deal of paper
+of different kinds, and some rich veins of copper, but no cashier.
+Going to the door again in some anxiety, he encountered a casual
+school-boy, who kindly told him that he did not know where the
+financial officer might be at the precise moment of inquiry, but that
+half an hour before he was on the wharf, fishing.
+
+Death comes to the aged at last, however, even in Oldport. We have
+lately lost, for instance, that patient old postman, serenest among our
+human antiquities, whose deliberate tread might have imparted a tone of
+repose to Broadway, could any imagination have transferred him thither.
+Through him the correspondence of other days came softened of all
+immediate solicitude. Ere it reached you, friends had died or
+recovered, debtors had repented, creditors grown kind, or your children
+had paid your debts. Perils had passed, hopes were chastened, and the
+most eager expectant took calmly the missive from that tranquillizing
+hand. Meeting his friends and clients with a step so slow that it did
+not even stop rapidly, he, like Tennyson's Mariana, slowly
+
+            "From his bosom drew
+        Old letters."
+
+But a summons came at last, not to be postponed even by him. One day he
+delivered his mail as usual, with no undue precipitation; on the next,
+the blameless soul was himself taken and forwarded on some celestial
+route.
+
+Irreparable would have seemed his loss, did there not still linger
+among us certain types of human antiquity that might seem to disprove
+the fabled youth of America. One veteran I daily meet, of uncertain
+age, perhaps, but with at least that air of brevet antiquity which long
+years of unruffled indolence can give. He looks as if he had spent at
+least half a lifetime on the sunny slope of some beach, and the other
+half in leaning upon his elbows at the window of some sailor
+boarding-house. He is hale and broad, with a head sunk between two
+strong shoulders; his beard falls like snow upon his breast, longer and
+longer each year, while his slumberous thoughts seem to move slowly
+enough to watch it as it grows. I always fancy that these meditations
+have drifted far astern of the times, but are following after, in
+patient hopelessness, as a dog swims behind a boat. What knows he of
+the President's Message? He has just overtaken some remarkable catch of
+mackerel in the year thirty-eight. His hands lie buried fathom-deep in
+his pockets, as if part of his brain lay there to be rummaged; and he
+sucks at his old pipe as if his head, like other venerable hulks, must
+be smoked out at intervals. His walk is that of a sloth, one foot
+dragging heavily behind the other. I meet him as I go to the
+post-office, and on returning, twenty minutes later, I pass him again,
+a little farther advanced. All the children accost him, and I have seen
+him stop--no great retardation indeed--to fondle in his arms a puppy or
+a kitten. Yet he is liable to excitement, in his way; for once, in some
+high debate, wherein he assisted as listener, when one old man on a
+wharf was doubting the assertion of another old man about a certain
+equinoctial gale, I saw my friend draw his right hand slowly and
+painfully from his pocket, and let it fall by his side. It was really
+one of the most emphatic gesticulations I ever saw, and tended
+obviously to quell the rising discord. It was as if the herald at a
+tournament had dropped his truncheon, and the fray must end.
+
+Women's faces are apt to take from old age a finer touch than those of
+men, and poverty does not interfere with this, where there is no actual
+exposure to the elements. From the windows of these old houses there
+often look forth delicate, faded countenances, to which belongs an air
+of unmistakable refinement. Nowhere in America, I fancy, does one see
+such counterparts of the reduced gentlewoman of England,--as described,
+for instance, in "Cranford,"--quiet maiden ladies of seventy, with
+perhaps a tradition of beauty and bellehood, and still wearing always a
+bit of blue ribbon on their once golden curls,--this headdress being
+still carefully arranged, each day, by some handmaiden of sixty, so
+long a house-mate as to seem a sister, though some faint suggestion of
+wages and subordination may be still preserved. Among these ladies, as
+in "Cranford," there is a dignified reticence in respect to
+money-matters, and a courteous blindness to the small economies
+practised by each other. It is not held good breeding, when they meet
+in a shop of a morning, for one to seem to notice what another buys.
+
+These ancient ladies have coats of arms upon their walls, hereditary
+damasks among their scanty wardrobes, store of domestic traditions in
+their brains, and a whole Court Guide of high-sounding names at their
+fingers' ends. They can tell you of the supposed sister of an English
+queen, who married an American officer and dwelt in Oldport; of the
+Scotch Lady Janet, who eloped with her tutor, and here lived in
+poverty, paying her washerwoman with costly lace from her trunks; of
+the Oldport dame who escaped from France at the opening of the
+Revolution, was captured by pirates on her voyage to America, then
+retaken by a privateer and carried into Boston, where she took refuge
+in John Hancock's house. They can describe to you the Malbone Gardens,
+and, as the night wanes and the embers fade, can give the tale of the
+Phantom of Rough Point. Gliding farther and farther into the past, they
+revert to the brilliant historic period of Oldport, the successive
+English and French occupations during our Revolution, and show you
+gallant inscriptions in honor of their grandmothers, written on the
+window-panes by the diamond rings of the foreign officers.
+
+The newer strata of Oldport society are formed chiefly by importation,
+and have the one advantage of a variety of origin which puts
+provincialism out of the question. The mild winter climate and the
+supposed cheapness of living draw scattered families from the various
+Atlantic cities; and, coming from such different sources, these
+visitors leave some exclusiveness behind. The boast of heraldry, the
+pomp of power, are doubtless good things to have in one's house, but
+are cumbrous to travel with. Meeting here on central ground, partial
+aristocracies tend to neutralize each other. A Boston family comes,
+bristling with genealogies, and making the most of its little all of
+two centuries. Another arrives from Philadelphia, equally fortified in
+local heraldries unknown in Boston.
+
+A third from New York brings a briefer pedigree, but more gilded. Their
+claims are incompatible; but there is no common standard, and so
+neither can have precedence. Since no human memory can retain the
+great-grandmothers of three cities, we are practically as well off as
+if we had no great-grandmothers at all.
+
+But in Oldport, as elsewhere, the spice of conversation is apt to be in
+inverse ratio to family tree and income-tax, and one can hear better
+repartees among the boat-builders' shops on Long Wharf than among those
+who have made the grand tour. All the world over, one is occasionally
+reminded of the French officer's verdict on the garrison town where he
+was quartered, that the good society was no better than the good
+society anywhere else, but the bad society was capital. I like, for
+instance, to watch the shoals of fishermen that throng our streets in
+the early spring, inappropriate as porpoises on land, or as Scott's
+pirates in peaceful Kirkwall,--unwieldy, bearded creatures in oil-skin
+suits,--men who have never before seen a basket-wagon or a liveried
+groom and, whose first comments on the daintinesses of fashion are far
+more racy than anything which fashion can say for itself.
+
+The life of our own fishermen and pilots remains active, in its way,
+all winter; and coasting vessels come and go in the open harbor every
+day. The only schooner that is not so employed is, to my eye, more
+attractive than any of them; it is our sole winter guest, this year, of
+all the graceful flotilla of yachts that helped to make our summer
+moonlights so charming. While Europe seems in such ecstasy over the
+ocean yacht-race, there lies at anchor, stripped and dismantled, a
+vessel which was excluded from the match, it is said, simply because
+neither of the three competitors would have had a chance against her. I
+like to look across the harbor at the graceful proportions of this
+uncrowned victor in the race she never ran; and to my eye her laurels
+are the most attractive. She seems a fit emblem of the genius that
+waits, while talent merely wins. "Let me know," said that fine, but
+unappreciated thinker, Brownlee Brown,--"let me know what chances a man
+has passed in contempt; not what he has made, but what he has refused
+to make, reserving himself for higher ends."
+
+All out-door work in winter has a cheerful look, from the triumph of
+caloric it implies; but I know none in which man seems to revert more
+to the lower modes of being than in searching for seaclams. One may
+sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this way, on one of our
+beaches, while the cold wind blows keenly off shore, and the spray
+drifts back like snow over the green and sluggish surge. The men pace
+in and out with the wave, going steadily to and fro like a pendulum,
+ankle-deep in the chilly brine, their steps quickened by hope or
+slackening with despair. Where the maidens and children sport and shout
+in summer, there in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the
+lovely crest of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and is
+valueless if it comes in empty. Really, the position of the clam is the
+more dignified, since he moves only with the wave, and the immortal
+being in fish-boots wades for him.
+
+The harbor and the beach are thus occupied in winter; but one may walk
+for many a mile along the cliffs, and see nothing human but a few
+gardeners, spreading green and white sea-weed as manure upon the lawns.
+The mercury rarely drops to zero here, and there is little snow; but a
+new-fallen drift has just the same virgin beauty as farther inland, and
+when one suddenly comes in view of the sea beyond it, there is a
+sensation of summer softness. The water is not then deep blue, but
+pale, with opaline reflections. Vessels in the far horizon have the
+same delicate tint, as if woven of the same liquid material. A single
+wave lifts itself languidly above a reef,--a white-breasted loon floats
+near the shore,--the sea breaks in long, indolent curves,--the distant
+islands swim in a vague mirage. Along the cliffs hang great organ-pipes
+of ice, distilling showers of drops that glitter in the noonday sun,
+while the barer rocks send up a perpetual steam, giving to the eye a
+sense of warmth, and suggesting the comforts of fire. Beneath, the low
+tide reveals long stretches of golden-brown sea-weed, caressed by the
+lapping wave.
+
+High winds bring a different scene. Sometimes I fancy that in winter,
+with less visible life upon the surface of the water, and less of
+unseen animal life below it, there is yet more that seems like vital
+force in the individual particles of waves. Each separate drop appears
+more charged with desperate and determined life. The lines of surf run
+into each other more brokenly, and with less steady roll. The low sun,
+too, lends a weird and jagged shadow to gallop in before the crest of
+each advancing wave, and sometimes there is a second crest on the
+shoulders of the first, as if there were more than could be contained
+in a single curve. Greens and purples are called forth to replace the
+prevailing blue. Far out at sea, great separate mounds of water rear
+themselves, as if to overlook the tossing plain. Sometimes these move
+onward and subside with their green hue still unbroken, and again they
+curve into detached hillocks of foam, white, multitudinous, side by
+side, not ridged, but moving on like a mob of white horses, neck
+overarching neck, breast crowded against breast.
+
+Across those tumultuous waves I like to watch, after sunset, the
+revolving light; there is something about it so delicate and human. It
+seems to bud or bubble out of the low, dark horizon; a moment, and it
+is not, and then another moment, and it is. With one throb the
+tremulous light is born; with another throb it has reached its full
+size, and looks at you, coy and defiant; and almost in that instant it
+is utterly gone. You cannot conceive yourself to be watching something
+which merely turns on an axis; but it seems suddenly to expand, a
+flower of light, or to close, as if soft petals of darkness clasped it
+in. During its moments of absence, the eye cannot quite keep the memory
+of its precise position, and it often appears a hair-breadth to the
+right or left of the expected spot. This enhances the elfish and
+fantastic look, and so the pretty game goes on, with flickering
+surprises, every night and all night long. But the illusion of the
+seasons is just as coquettish; and when next summer comes to us, with
+its blossoms and its joys, it will dawn as softly out of the darkness
+and as softly give place to winter once more.
+
+
+
+OLDPORT WHARVES.
+
+Everyone who comes to a wharf feels an impulse to follow it down, and
+look from the end. There is a fascination about it. It is the point of
+contact between land and sea. A bridge evades the water, and unites
+land with land, as if there were no obstacle. But a wharf seeks the
+water, and grasps it with a solid hand. It is the sign of a lasting
+friendship; once extended, there it remains; the water embraces it,
+takes it into its tumultuous bosom at high tide, leaves it in peace at
+ebb, rushes back to it eagerly again, plays with it in sunshine, surges
+round it in storm, almost crushing the massive thing. But the pledge
+once given is never withdrawn. Buildings may rise and fall, but a solid
+wharf is almost indestructible. Even if it seems destroyed, its
+materials are all there. This shore might be swept away, these piers be
+submerged or dashed asunder, still every brick and stone would remain.
+Half the wharves of Oldport were ruined in the great storm of 1815. Yet
+not one of them has stirred from the place where it lay; its
+foundations have only spread more widely and firmly; they are a part of
+the very pavement of the harbor, submarine mountain ranges, on one of
+which yonder schooner now lies aground. Thus the wild ocean only
+punished itself, and has been embarrassed for half a century, like many
+another mad profligate, by the wrecks of what it ruined.
+
+Yet the surges are wont to deal very tenderly with these wharves. In
+summer the sea decks them with floating weeds, and studs them with an
+armor of shells. In the winter it surrounds them with a smoother mail
+of ice, and the detached piles stand white and gleaming, like the
+out-door palace of a Russian queen. How softly and eagerly this coming
+tide swirls round them! All day the fishes haunt their shadows; all
+night the phosphorescent water glimmers by them, and washes with long,
+refluent waves along their sides, decking their blackness with a spray
+of stars.
+
+Water seems the natural outlet and discharge for every landscape, and
+when we have followed down this artificial promontory, a wharf, and
+have seen the waves on three sides of us, we have taken the first step
+toward circumnavigating the globe. This is our last terra firma. One
+step farther, and there is no possible foothold but a deck, which tilts
+and totters beneath our feet. A wharf, therefore, is properly neutral
+ground for all. It is a silent hospitality, understood by all nations.
+It is in some sort a thing of universal ownership. Having once built
+it, you must grant its use to everyone; it is no trespass to land upon
+any man's wharf.
+
+The sea, like other beautiful savage creatures, derives most of its
+charm from its reserves of untamed power. When a wild animal is subdued
+to abjectness, all its interest is gone. The ocean is never thus
+humiliated. So slight an advance of its waves would overwhelm us, if
+only the restraining power once should fail, and the water keep on
+rising! Even here, in these safe haunts of commerce, we deal with the
+same salt tide which I myself have seen ascend above these piers, and
+which within half a century drowned a whole family in their home upon
+our Long Wharf.
+
+It is still the same ungoverned ocean which, twice in every twenty-four
+hours, reasserts its right of way, and stops only where it will. At
+Monckton, on the Bay of Fundy, the wharves are built forty feet high,
+and at ebb-tide you may look down on the schooners lying aground upon
+the mud below. In six hours they will be floating at your side. But the
+motions of the tide are as resistless whether its rise be six feet or
+forty; as in the lazy stretching of the caged lion's paw you can see
+all the terrors of his spring.
+
+Our principal wharf, the oldest in the town, has lately been doubled in
+size, and quite transformed in shape, by an importation of broad acres
+from the country. It is now what is called "made land,"--a manufacture
+which has grown so easy that I daily expect to see some enterprising
+contractor set up endwise a bar of railroad iron, and construct a new
+planet at its summit, which shall presently go spinning off into space
+and be called an asteroid. There are some people whom would it be
+pleasant to colonize in that way; but meanwhile the unchanged southern
+side of the pier seems pleasanter, with its boat-builders' shops, all
+facing sunward,--a cheerful haunt upon a winter's day. On the early
+maps this wharf appears as "Queen-Hithe," a name more graceful than its
+present cognomen. "Hithe" or "Hythe" signifies a small harbor, and is
+the final syllable of many English names, as of Lambeth. Hythe is also
+one of those Cinque-Ports of which the Duke of Wellington was warden.
+This wharf was probably still familiarly called Queen-Hithe in 1781,
+when Washington and Rochambeau walked its length bareheaded between the
+ranks of French soldiers; and it doubtless bore that name when Dean
+Berkeley arrived in 1729, and the Rev. Mr. Honyman and all his flock
+closed hastily their prayer-books, and hastened to the landing to
+receive their guest. But it had lost this name ere the days, yet
+remembered by aged men, when the Long Wharf became a market. Beeves
+were then driven thither and tethered, while each hungry applicant
+marked with a piece of chalk upon the creature's side the desired cut;
+when a sufficient portion had been thus secured, the sentence of death
+was issued. Fancy the chalk a live coal, or the beast endowed with
+human consciousness, and no Indian, or Inquisitorial tortures could
+have been more fearful.
+
+It is like visiting the houses at Pompeii, to enter the strange little
+black warehouses which cover some of our smaller wharves. They are so
+old and so small it seems as if some race of pygmies must have built
+them. Though they are two or three stories high, with steep
+gambrel-roofs, and heavily timbered, their rooms are yet so low that a
+man six feet high can hardly stand upright beneath the great
+cross-beams. There is a row of these structures, for instance,
+described on a map of 1762 as "the old buildings on Lopez' Wharf," and
+to these another century has probably brought very little change. Lopez
+was a Portuguese Jew, who came to this place, with several hundred
+others, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He is said to have owned
+eighty square-rigged vessels in this port, from which not one such
+craft now sails. His little counting-room is in the second storey of
+the building; its wall-timbers are of oak, and are still sound; the few
+remaining planks are grained to resemble rosewood and mahogany; the
+fragments of wall-paper are of English make. In the cross-beam, just
+above your head, are the pigeon-holesonce devoted to different vessels,
+whose names are still recorded above them on faded paper,--"Ship
+Cleopatra," "Brig Juno," and the like. Many of these vessels measured
+less than two hundred tons, and it seems as if their owner had built
+his ships to match the size of his counting-room.
+
+A sterner tradition clings around an old building on a remoter wharf;
+for men have but lately died who had seen slaves pass within its doors
+for confinement. The wharf in those days appertained to a distillery,
+an establishment then constantly connected with the slave-trade, rum
+being sent to Africa, and human beings brought back. Occasionally a
+cargo was landed here, instead of being sent to the West Indies or to
+South Carolina, and this building was fitted up for their temporary
+quarters. It is but some twenty-five feet square, and must be less than
+thirty feet in height, yet it is divided into three stories, of which
+the lowest was used for other purposes, and the two upper were reserved
+for slaves. There are still to be seen the barred partitions and
+latticed door, making half the second floor into a sort of cage, while
+the agent's room appears to have occupied the other half. A similar
+latticed door--just such as I have seen in Southern slave-pens--secures
+the foot of the upper stairway. The whole small attic constitutes a
+single room, with a couple of windows, and two additional
+breathing-holes, two feet square, opening on the yard. It makes one
+sick to think of the poor creatures who may once have gripped those
+bars with their hands, or have glared with eager eyes between them; and
+it makes me recall with delight the day when I once wrenched away the
+stocks and chains from the floor of a pen like this, on the St. Mary's
+River in Florida. It is almost forty years since this distillery became
+a mill, and sixty since the slave-trade was abolished. The date "1803"
+is scrawled upon the door of the cage,--the very year when the port of
+Charleston was reopened for slaves, just before the traffic ceased. A
+few years more, and such horrors will seem as remote a memory in South
+Carolina, thank God! as in Rhode Island.
+
+Other wharves are occupied by mast-yards, places that seem like
+play-rooms for grown men, crammed fuller than any old garret with those
+odds and ends in which the youthful soul delights. There are planks and
+spars and timber, broken rudders, rusty anchors, coils of rope, bales
+of sail-cloth, heaps of blocks, piles of chain-cable, great iron
+tar-kettles like antique helmets, strange machines for steaming planks,
+inexplicable little chimneys, engines that seem like dwarf-locomotives,
+windlasses that apparently turn nothing, and incipient canals that lead
+nowhere. For in these yards there seems no particular difference
+between land and water; the tide comes and goes anywhere, and nobody
+minds it; boats are drawn up among burdocks and ambrosia, and the
+platform on which you stand suddenly proves to be something afloat.
+Vessels are hauled upon the ways, each side of the wharf, their poor
+ribs pitiably unclothed, ready for a cumbrous mantua-making of oak and
+iron. On one side, within a floating boom, lies a fleet of masts and
+unhewn logs, tethered uneasily, like a herd of captive sea-monsters,
+rocking in the ripples. A vast shed, that has doubtless looked ready to
+fall for these dozen years spreads over, half the entrance to the
+wharf, and is filled with spars, knee-timber, and planks of fragrant
+wood; its uprights are festooned with all manner of great hawsers and
+smaller ropes, and its dim loft is piled with empty casks and idle
+sails. The sun always seems to shine in a ship-yard; there are apt to
+be more loungers than laborers, and this gives a pleasant air of
+repose; the neighboring water softens all harsher sounds, the foot
+treads upon an elastic carpet of embedded chips, and pleasant resinous
+odors are in the air.
+
+Then there are wharves quite abandoned by commerce, and given over to
+small tenements, filled with families so abundant that they might
+dispel the fears of those alarmists who suspect that children are
+ceasing to be born. Shrill voices resound there--American or Irish, as
+the case may be--through the summer noontides; and the domestic
+clothes-line forever stretches across the paths where imported slaves
+once trod, or rich merchandise lay piled. Some of these abodes are
+nestled in the corners of houses once stately, with large windows and
+carven doorways. Others occupy separate buildings, almost always of
+black, unpainted wood, sometimes with the long, sloping roof of
+Massachusetts, oftener with the quaint "gambrel" of Rhode Island. From
+the busiest point of our main street, I can show you a single cottage,
+with low gables, projecting eaves, and sheltering sweetbrier, that
+seems as if it must have strayed hither, a century or two ago, out of
+some English lane.
+
+Some of the more secluded wharves appear wholly deserted by men and
+women, and are tenanted alone by rats and boys,--two amphibious races;
+either can swim anywhere, or scramble and penetrate everywhere. The
+boys launch some abandoned skiff, and, with an oar for a sail and
+another for a rudder, pass from wharf to wharf; nor would it be
+surprising if the bright-eyed rats were to take similar passage on a
+shingle. Yet, after all, the human juveniles are the more sagacious
+brood. It is strange that people should go to Europe, and seek the
+society of potentates less imposing, when home can endow them with the
+occasional privilege of a nod from an American boy. In these
+sequestered haunts, I frequently meet some urchin three feet high who
+carries with him an air of consummate worldly experience that
+completely overpowers me, and I seem to shrink to the dimensions of Tom
+Thumb. Before his calm and terrible glance all disguises fail. You may
+put on a bold and careless air, and affect to overlook him as you pass;
+but it is like assuming to ignore the existence of the Pope of Rome, or
+of the London Times. He knows better. Grown men are never very
+formidable; they are shy and shamefaced themselves, usually
+preoccupied, and not very observing. If they see a man loitering about,
+without visible aim, they class him as a mild imbecile, and let him go;
+but boys are nature's detectives, and one does not so easily evade
+their scrutinizing eyes. I know full well that, while I study their
+ways, they are noting mine through a clearer lens, and are probably
+taking my measure far better than I take theirs. One instinctively
+shrinks from making a sketch or memorandum while they are by; and if
+caught in the act, one fondly hopes to pass for some harmless
+speculator in real estate, whose pencillings may be only a matter of
+habit, like those casual sums in compound interest which are usually to
+be found scrawled on the margins of the daily papers in Boston
+reading-rooms.
+
+Our wharves are almost all connected by intricate by-ways among the
+buildings; and one almost wishes to be a pirate or a smuggler, for the
+pleasure of eluding the officers of justice through such seductive
+paths. It is, perhaps, to counteract this perilous fascination that our
+new police-office has been established on a wharf. You will see its
+brick tower rising not ungracefully, as you enter the inner harbor; it
+looks the better for being almost windowless, though beauty was not the
+aim of the omission. A curious stranger is said to have asked one of
+our city fathers the reason of this peculiarity. "No use in windows,"
+said the experienced official sadly; "the boys would only break 'em."
+It seems very unjust to assert that there is no subordination in our
+American society; the citizens show deference to the police, and the
+police to the boys.
+
+The ancient aspect of these wharves extends itself sometimes to the
+vessels which lie moored beside them. At yonder pier, for instance, has
+lain for thirteen years a decaying bark, which was suspected of being
+engaged in the slave-trade. She was run ashore and abandoned on Block
+Island, in the winter of 1854, and was afterwards brought in here. Her
+purchaser was offered eight thousand dollars for his bargain, but
+refused it; and here the vessel has remained, paying annual wharf dues
+and charges, till she is worthless. She lies chained at the wharf, and
+the tide rises and falls within her, thus furnishing a convenient
+bathing-house for the children, who also find a perpetual gymnasium in
+the broken shrouds that dangle from her masts. Turner, when he painted
+his "slave-ship," could have asked no better model. There is no name
+upon the stern, and it exhibits merely a carved eagle, with the wings
+clipped and the head knocked off. Only the lower masts remain, which
+are of a dismal black, as are the tops and mizzen cross-trees. Within
+the bulwarks, on each side, stand rows of black blocks, to which the
+shrouds were once attached; these blocks are called by sailors
+"dead-eyes," and each stands in weird mockery, with its three ominous
+holes, like so many human skulls before some palace in Dahomey. Other
+blocks like these swing more ominously yet at the ends of the shrouds,
+that still hang suspended, waving and creaking and jostling in the
+wind. Each year the ropes decay, and soon the repulsive pendants will
+be gone. Not so with the iron belaying-pins, a few of which still stand
+around the mast, so rusted into the iron fife-rail that even the
+persevering industry of the children cannot wrench them out. It seems
+as if some guilty stain must cling to their sides, and hold them in. By
+one of those fitnesses which fortune often adjusts, but which seem
+incredible in art, the wharf is now used on one side for the storage of
+slate, and the hulk is approached through an avenue of gravestones. I
+never find myself in that neighborhood but my steps instinctively seek
+that condemned vessel, whether by day, when she makes a dark foreground
+for the white yachts and the summer waves, or by night, when the storm
+breaks over her desolate deck.
+
+If we follow northward from "Queen-Hithe" along the shore, we pass into
+a region where the ancient wharves of commerce, ruined in 1815, have
+never been rebuilt; and only slender pathways for pleasure voyagers now
+stretch above the submerged foundations. Once the court end of the
+town, then its commercial centre, it is now divided between the
+tenements of fishermen and the summer homes of city households. Still
+the great old houses remain, with mahogany stairways, carved
+wainscoting, and painted tiles; the sea has encroached upon their
+gardens, and only boats like mine approach where English dukes and
+French courtiers once landed. At the head of yonder private wharf, in
+that spacious and still cheerful abode, dwelt the beautiful Robinson
+sisterhood,--the three Quaker belles of Revolutionary days, the memory
+of whose loves might lend romance to this neighborhood forever. One of
+these maidens was asked in marriage by a captain in the English army,
+and was banished by her family to the Narragansett shore, under a flag
+of truce, to avoid him; her lover was afterward killed by a
+cannon-ball, in his tent, and she died unwedded. Another was sought by
+two aspirants, who came in the same ship to woo her, the one from
+Philadelphia, the other from New York. She refused them both, and they
+sailed southward together; but, the wind proving adverse, they
+returned, and one lingered till he won her hand. Still another lover
+was forced into a vessel by his friends, to tear him from the enchanted
+neighborhood; while sailing past the house, he suddenly threw himself
+into the water,--it must have been about where the end of the wharf now
+rests,--that he might be rescued, and carried, a passive Leander, into
+yonder door. The house was first the head-quarters of the English
+commander, then of the French; and the sentinels of De Noailles once
+trod where now croquet-balls form the heaviest ordnance. Peaceful and
+untitled guests now throng in summer where St. Vincents and
+Northumberlands once rustled and glittered; and there is nothing to
+recall those brilliant days except the painted tiles on the chimney,
+where there is a choice society of coquettes and beaux, priests and
+conjurers, beggars and dancers, and every wig and hoop dates back to
+the days of Queen Anne.
+
+Sometimes when I stand upon this pier by night, and look across the
+calm black water, so still, perhaps, that the starry reflections seem
+to drop through it in prolonged javelins of light instead of resting on
+the surface, and the opposite lighthouse spreads its cloth of gold
+across the bay,--I can imagine that I discern the French and English
+vessels just weighing anchor; I see De Lauzun and De Noailles
+embarking, and catch the last sheen upon their lace, the last glitter
+of their swords. It vanishes, and I see only the lighthouse gleam, and
+the dark masts of a sunken ship across the neighboring island. Those
+motionless spars have, after all, a nearer interest, and, as I saw them
+sink, I will tell their tale.
+
+That vessel came in here one day last August, a stately, full-sailed
+bark; nor was it known, till she had anchored, that she was a mass of
+imprisoned fire below. She was the "Trajan," from Rockland, bound to
+New Orleans with a cargo of lime, which took fire in a gale of wind,
+being wet with sea-water as the vessel rolled. The captain and crew
+retreated to the deck, and made the hatches fast, leaving even their
+clothing and provisions below. They remained on deck, after reaching
+this harbor, till the planks grew too hot beneath their feet, and the
+water came boiling from the pumps. Then the vessel was towed into a
+depth of five fathoms, to be scuttled and sunk. I watched her go down.
+Early impressions from "Peter Parley" had portrayed the sinking of a
+vessel as a frightful plunge, endangering all around, like a maelstrom.
+The actual process was merely a subsidence so calm and gentle that a
+child might have stood upon the deck till it sank beneath him, and then
+might have floated away. Instead of a convulsion, it was something
+stately and very pathetic to the imagination. The bark remained almost
+level, the bows a little higher than the stern; and her breath appeared
+to be surrendered in a series of pulsations, as if every gasp of the
+lungs admitted more of the suffocating wave. After each long heave, she
+went visibly a few inches deeper, and then paused. The face of the
+benign Emperor, her namesake, was on the stern; first sank the carven
+beard, then the rather mutilated nose, then the white and staring eyes,
+that gazed blankly over the engulfing waves. The figure-head was Trajan
+again, at full length, with the costume of an Indian hunter, and the
+face of a Roman sage; this image lingered longer, and then vanished,
+like Victor Hugo's Gilliatt, by cruel gradations. Meanwhile the gilded
+name upon the taffrail had slowly disappeared also; but even when the
+ripples began to meet across her deck, still her descent was calm. As
+the water gained, the hidden fire was extinguished, and the smoke, at
+first densely rising, grew rapidly less. Yet when it had stopped
+altogether, and all but the top of the cabin had disappeared, there
+came a new ebullition of steam, like a hot spring, throwing itself
+several feet in air, and then ceasing.
+
+As the vessel went down, several beams and planks came springing
+endwise up the hatchway, like liberated men. But nothing had a stranger
+look to me than some great black casks which had been left on deck.
+These, as the water floated them, seemed to stir and wake, and to
+become gifted with life, and then got into motion and wallowed heavily
+about, like hippopotami or any unwieldy and bewildered beasts. At last
+the most enterprising of them slid somehow to the bulwark, and, after
+several clumsy efforts, shouldered itself over; then others bounced
+out, eagerly following, as sheep leap a wall, and then they all went
+bobbing away, over the dancing waves. For the wind blew fresh
+meanwhile, and there were some twenty sail-boats lying-to with reefed
+sails by the wreck, like so many sea-birds; and when the loose stuff
+began to be washed from the deck, they all took wing at once, to save
+whatever could be picked up,--since at such times, as at a
+conflagration on land, every little thing seems to assume a value,--and
+at last one young fellow steered boldly up to the sinking ship itself,
+sprang upon the vanishing taffrail for one instant, as if resolved to
+be the last on board, and then pushed off again. I never saw anything
+seem so extinguished out of the universe as that great vessel, which
+had towered so colossal above my little boat; it was impossible to
+imagine that she was all there yet, beneath the foaming and indifferent
+waves. No effort has yet been made to raise her; and a dead eagle seems
+to have more in common with the living bird than has now this submerged
+and decaying hulk with the white and winged creature that came sailing
+into our harbor on that summer day.
+
+It shows what conversational resources are always at hand in a seaport
+town, that the boatman with whom I first happened to visit this burning
+vessel had been thrice at sea on ships similarly destroyed, and could
+give all the particulars of their fate. I know no class of uneducated
+men whose talk is so apt to be worth hearing as that of sailors. Even
+apart from their personal adventures and their glimpses at foreign
+lands, they have made observations of nature which are far more careful
+and minute than those of farmers, because the very lives of sailors are
+always at risk. Their voyages have also made them sociable and fond of
+talk, while the pursuits of most men tend to make them silent; and
+their constant changes of scene, though not touching them very deeply,
+have really given a certain enlargement to their minds. A quiet
+demeanor in a seaport town proves nothing; the most inconspicuous man
+may have the most thrilling career to look back upon. With what a
+superb familiarity do these men treat this habitable globe! Cape Horn
+and the Cape of Good Hope are in their phrase but the West Cape and the
+East Cape, merely two familiar portals of their wonted home. With what
+undisguised contempt they speak of the enthusiasm displayed over the
+ocean yacht-race! That any man should boast of crossing the Atlantic in
+a schooner of two hundred tons, in presence of those who have more than
+once reached the Indian Ocean in a fishing-smack of fifty, and have
+beaten in the homeward race the ships in whose company they sailed! It
+is not many years since there was here a fishing-skipper, whose surname
+was "Daredevil," and who sailed from this port to all parts of the
+world, on sealing voyages, in a sloop so small that she was popularly
+said to go under water when she got outside the lights, and never to
+reappear until she reached her port.
+
+And not only those who sail on long voyages, but even our local pilots
+and fishermen, still lead an adventurous and untamed life, less
+softened than any other by the appliances of modern days. In their
+undecked boats they hover day and night along these stormy coasts, and
+at any hour the beating of the long-roll upon the beach may call their
+full manhood into action. Cowardice is sifted and crushed out from
+among them by a pressure so constant; and they are withal truthful and
+steady in their ways, with few vices and many virtues. They are born
+poor, and remain poor, for their work is hard, with more blanks than
+prizes; but their life is a life for a man, and though it makes them
+prematurely old, yet their old age comes peacefully and well. In almost
+all pursuits the advance of years brings something forlorn. It is not
+merely that the body decays, but that men grow isolated and are pushed
+aside; there is no common interest between age and youth. The old
+farmer leads a lonely existence, and ceases to meet his compeers except
+on Sunday; nobody consults him; his experience has been monotonous, and
+his age is apt to grow unsocial. The old mechanic finds his tools and
+his methods superseded by those of younger men. But the superannuated
+fisherman graduates into an oracle; the longer he lives, the greater
+the dignity of his experience; he remembers the great storm, the great
+tide, the great catch, the great shipwreck; and on all emergencies his
+counsel has weight. He still busies himself about the boats too, and
+still sails on sunny days to show the youngsters the best
+fishing-ground. When too infirm for even this, he can at least sun
+himself beside the landing, and, dreaming over inexhaustible memories,
+watch the bark of his own life go down.
+
+
+
+THE HAUNTED WINDOW.
+
+It was always a mystery to me where Severance got precisely his
+combination of qualities. His father was simply what is called a
+handsome man, with stately figure and curly black hair, not without a
+certain dignity of manner, but with a face so shallow that it did not
+even seem to ripple, and with a voice so prosy that, when he spoke of
+the sky, you wished there were no such thing. His mother was a fair,
+little, pallid creature,--wash-blond, as they say of lace,--patient,
+meek, and always fatigued and fatiguing. But Severance, as I first knew
+him, was the soul of activity. He had dark eyes, that had a great deal
+of light in them, without corresponding depth; his hair was dark,
+straight, and very soft; his mouth expressed sweetness, without much
+strength; he talked well; and though he was apt to have a wandering
+look, as if his thoughts were laying a submarine cable to another
+continent, yet the young girls were always glad to have the semblance
+of conversation with him in this. To me he was in the last degree
+lovable. He had just enough of that subtile quality called genius,
+perhaps, to spoil first his companions, and then himself. His words had
+weight with you, though you might know yourself wiser; and if you went
+to give him the most reasonable advice, you were suddenly seized with a
+slight paralysis of the tongue. Thus it was, at any rate, with me. We
+were cemented therefore by the firmest ties,--a nominal seniority on my
+part, and a substantial supremacy on his.
+
+We lodged one summer at an old house in that odd suburb of Oldport
+called "The Point." It is a sort of Artists' Quarter of the town,
+frequented by a class of summer visitors more addicted to sailing and
+sketching than to driving and bowing,--persons who do not object to
+simple fare, and can live, as one of them said, on potatoes and Point.
+Here Severance and I made our summer home, basking in the delicious
+sunshine of the lovely bay. The bare outlines around Oldport sometimes
+dismay the stranger, but soon fascinate. Nowhere does one feel bareness
+so little, because there is no sharpness of perspective; everything
+shimmers in the moist atmosphere; the islands are all glamour and
+mirage; and the undulating hills of the horizon seem each like the
+soft, arched back of some pet animal, and you long to caress them with
+your hand. At last your thoughts begin to swim also, and pass into
+vague fancies, which you also love to caress. Severance and I were
+constantly afloat, body and mind. He was a perfect sailor, and had that
+dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing but the ripple of
+the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself that he was a changed
+man since that voyage in search of health from which he had just
+returned. His mother talked in her humdrum way about heart disease; and
+his father, taking up the strain, bored us about organic lesions, till
+we almost wished he had a lesion himself. Severance ridiculed all this;
+but he grew more and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be laying more
+submarine cables than ever.
+
+When we were not on the water, we both liked to mouse about the queer
+streets and quaint old houses of that region, and to chat with the
+fishermen and their grandmothers. There was one house, however, which
+was very attractive to me,--perhaps because nobody lived in it, and
+which, for that or some other reason, he never would approach. It was a
+great square building of rough gray stone, looking like those sombre
+houses which everyone remembers in Montreal, but which are rare in "the
+States." It had been built many years before by some millionnaire from
+New Orleans, and was left unfinished, nobody knew why, till the garden
+was a wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is the only
+place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow; there
+were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could hear of, for
+the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and retrospective by
+reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion where nobody had ever
+lived; but the ivy clustered round the projecting windows as densely as
+if it had the sins of a dozen generations to hide.
+
+The house stood just above what were commonly called (from their slaty
+color) the Blue Rocks; it seemed the topmost pebble left by some tide
+that had receded,--which perhaps it was. Nurses and children thronged
+daily to these rocks, during the visitors' season, and the fishermen
+found there a favorite lounging-place; but nobody scaled the wall of
+the house save myself, and I went there very often. The gate was
+sometimes opened by Paul, the silent Bavarian gardener, who was master
+of the keys; and there were also certain great cats that were always
+sunning themselves on the steps, and seemed to have grown old and gray
+in waiting for mice that had never come. They looked as if they knew
+the past and the future. If the owl is the bird of Minerva, the cat
+should be her beast; they have the same sleepy air of unfathomable
+wisdom. There was such a quiet and potent spell about the place that
+one could almost fancy these constant animals to be the transformed
+bodies of human visitors who had stayed too long. Who knew what tales
+might be told by these tall, slender birches, clustering so closely by
+the sombre walls?--birches which were but whispering shrubs when the
+first gray stones were laid, and which now reared above the eaves their
+white stems and dark boughs, still whispering and waiting till a few
+more years should show them, across the roof, the topmost blossoms of
+other birches on the other side.
+
+Before the great western doorway spread the outer harbor, whither the
+coasting vessels came to drop anchor at any approach of storm. These
+silent visitors, which arrived at dusk and went at dawn, and from which
+no boat landed, seemed fitting guests before the portals of the silent
+house. I was never tired of watching them from the piazza; but
+Severance always stayed outside the wall. It was a whim of his, he
+said; and once only I got out of him something about the resemblance of
+the house to some Portuguese mansion,--at Madeira, perhaps, or at Rio
+Janeiro, but he did not say,--with which he had no pleasant
+associations. Yet he afterwards seemed to wish to deny this remark, or
+to confuse my impressions of it, which naturally fixed it the better in
+my mind.
+
+I remember well the morning when he was at last coaxed into approaching
+the house. It was late in September, and a day of perfect calm. As we
+looked from the broad piazza, there was a glassy smoothness over all
+the bay, and the hills were coated with a film, or rather a mere
+varnish, inconceivably thin, of haze more delicate than any other
+climate in America can show. Over the water there were white gulls
+flying, lazy and low; schools of young mackerel displayed their white
+sides above the surface; and it seemed as if even a butterfly might be
+seen for miles over that calm expanse. The bay was covered with
+mackerel-boats, and one man sculled indolently across the foreground a
+scarlet skiff. It was so still that every white sail-boat rested where
+its sail was first spread; and though the tide was at half-ebb, the
+anchored boats swung idly different ways from their moorings. Yet there
+was a continuous ripple in the broad sail of some almost motionless
+schooner, and there was a constant melodious plash along the shore.
+From the mouth of the bay came up slowly the premonitory line of bluer
+water, and we knew that a breeze was near.
+
+Severance seemed to rise in spirits as we approached the house, and I
+noticed no sign of shrinking, except an occasional lowering of the
+voice. Seeing this, I ventured to joke him a little on his previous
+reluctance, and he replied in the same strain. I seated myself at the
+corner, and began sketching old Fort Louis, while he strolled along the
+piazza, looking in at the large, vacant windows. As he approached the
+farther end, I suddenly heard him give a little cry of amazement or
+dismay, and, looking up, saw him leaning against the wall, with pale
+face and hands clenched.
+
+A minute sometimes appears a long while; and though I sprang to him
+instantly, yet I remember that it seemed as if, during that instant,
+the whole face of things had changed. The breeze had come, the bay was
+rippled, the sail-boats careened to the wind, fishes and birds were
+gone, and a dark gray cloud had come between us and the sun. Such
+sudden changes are not, however, uncommon after an interval of calm;
+and my only conscious thought at the time was of wonder at the strange
+aspect of my companion.
+
+"What was that?" asked Severance in a bewildered tone. I looked about
+me, equally puzzled. "Not there," he said. "In the window."
+
+I looked in at the window, saw nothing, and said so. There was the
+great empty drawing-room, across which one could see the opposite
+window, and through this the eastern piazza and the garden beyond.
+Nothing more was there. With some persuasion, Severance was induced to
+look in. He admitted that he saw nothing peculiar; but he refused all
+explanation, and we went home.
+
+"Never let me go to that house again," he said abruptly, as we entered
+our own door.
+
+I pointed out to him the absurdity of thus yielding to a nervous
+delusion, which was already in part conquered, and he finally promised
+to revisit the scene with me the next day. To clear all possible
+misgivings from my own mind, I got the key of the house from Paul,
+explored it thoroughly, and was satisfied that no improper visitor had
+recently entered the drawing-room at least, as the windows were
+strongly bolted on the inside, and a large cobweb, heavy with dust,
+hung across the doorway. This did no great credit to Paul's
+stewardship, but was, perhaps, a slight relief to me. Nor could I see a
+trace of anything uncanny outside the house. When Severance went with
+me, next day, the coast was equally clear, and I was glad to have cured
+him so easily.
+
+Unfortunately, it did not last. A few days after, there was a brilliant
+sunset, after a storm, with gorgeous yellow light slanting everywhere,
+and the sun looking at us between bars of dark purple cloud, edged with
+gold where they touched the pale blue sky; all this fading at last into
+a great whirl of gray to the northward, with a cold purple ground. At
+the height of the show, I climbed the wall to my favorite piazza, and
+was surprised to find Severance already there.
+
+He sat facing the sunset, but with his head sunk between his hands. At
+my approach, he looked up, and rose to his feet. "Do not deceive me any
+more," he said, almost savagely, and pointed to the window.
+
+I looked in, and must confess that, for a moment, I too was startled.
+There was a perceptible moment of time during which it seemed as if no
+possible philosophy could explain what appeared in sight. Not that any
+object showed itself within the great drawing-room, but I distinctly
+saw--across the apartment, and through the opposite window--the dark
+figure of a man about my own size, who leaned against the long window,
+and gazed intently on me. Above him spread the yellow sunset light,
+around him the birch-boughs hung and the ivy-tendrils swayed, while
+behind him there appeared a glimmering water-surface, across which
+slowly drifted the tall masts of a schooner. It looked strangely like a
+view I had seen of some foreign harbor,--Amalfi, perhaps,--with a
+vine-clad balcony and a single human figure in the foreground. So real
+and startling was the sight that at first it was not easy to resolve
+the whole scene into its component parts. Yet it was simply such a
+confused mixture of real and reflected images as one often sees from
+the window of a railway carriage, where the mirrored interior seems to
+glide beside the train, with the natural landscape for a background. In
+this case, also, the frame and foliage of the picture were real, and
+all else was reflected; the sunlit bay behind us was reproduced as in a
+camera, and the dark figure was but the full-length image of myself.
+
+It was easy to explain all this to Severance, but he shook his head.
+"So cool a philosopher as yourself," he said, "should remember that
+this image is not always visible. At our last visit, we looked for it
+in vain. When we first saw it, it appeared and disappeared within ten
+minutes. On your mechanical theory it should be other-wise."
+
+This staggered me for a moment. Then the ready solution occurred, that
+the reflection depended on the strength and direction of the light; and
+I proved to him that, in our case, it had appeared and disappeared with
+the sunshine. He was silenced, but evidently not convinced; yet time
+and common-sense, it seemed, would take care of that.
+
+Soon after all this, I was called out of town for a week or two. If
+Severance would go with me, it would doubtless complete the cure, I
+thought; but this he obstinately declined. After my departure, my
+sister wrote, he seemed absolutely to haunt the empty house by the Blue
+Rocks. He undoubtedly went here to sketch, she thought. The house was
+in charge of a real-estate agent,--a retired landscape-painter, whose
+pictures did not sell so profitably as their originals; and her theory
+was, that this agent hoped to make our friend buy the place, and so
+allured him there under pretence of sketching. Moreover, she surmised,
+he was studying some effect of shadow, because, unlike most men, he
+appeared in decent spirits only on cloudy days. It is always so easy to
+fit a man out with a set of ready-made motives! But I drew my own
+conclusions, and was not surprised to hear, soon after, that Severance
+was seriously ill.
+
+This brought me back at once,--sailing down from Providence in an open
+boat, I remember, one lovely moonlight night. Next day I saw Severance,
+who declared that he had suffered from nothing worse than a prolonged
+sick-headache. I soon got out of him all that had happened. He had seen
+the figure in the window every sunny day, he said. Of course he had, if
+he chose to look for it, and I could only smile, though it perhaps
+seemed unkind. But I stopped smiling when he went on to tell that, not
+satisfied with these observations, he had visited the house by
+moonlight also, and had then seen, as he averred, a second figure
+standing beside the first.
+
+Of course, there was no defence against such a theory as this, except
+simply to laugh it down; but it made me very anxious, for it showed
+that he was growing thoroughly morbid. "Either it was pure fancy," I
+said, "or it was Paul the gardener."
+
+But here he was prepared for me. It seemed that, on seeing the two
+figures, Severance had at once left the piazza, and, with an instinct
+of common-sense that was surprising, had crossed the garden, scaled the
+wall, and looked in at the window of Paul's little cottage, where the
+man and his wife were quietly seated at supper, probably after a late
+fishing-trip. "There was another reason," he said; but here he stopped,
+and would give no description of the second figure, which he had,
+however, seen twice again, always by moon-light. He consented to let me
+accompany him the following night.
+
+We accordingly went. It was a calm, clear night, and the moon lay
+brightly on the bay. The distant shores looked low and filmy; a naval
+vessel was in the harbor, and there was a ball on board, with music and
+fire-works; some fishermen were singing in their boats, late as was the
+hour. Severance was absorbed in his own gloomy reveries; and when we
+had crossed the wall, the world seemed left outside, and the glamour of
+the place began to creep over me also. I seemed to see my companion
+relapsing into some phantom realm, beyond power of withdrawal. I
+talked, sang, whistled; but it was all a rather hollow effort, and soon
+ceased. The great house looked gloomy and impenetrable, the moonlight
+appeared sick and sad, the birch-boughs rustled in a dreary way. We
+went up the steps in no jubilant mood.
+
+I crossed the piazza at once, looked in at the farthest window, and saw
+there my own image, though far more faintly than in the sunlight.
+Severance then joined me, and his reflected shape stood by mine.
+Something of the first ghostly impression was renewed, I must confess,
+by this meeting of the two shadows; there was something rather awful in
+the way the bodiless things nodded and gesticulated at each other in
+silence. Still, there was nothing more than this, as Severance was
+compelled to own; and I was trying to turn the whole affair into
+ridicule, when suddenly, without sound or warning, I saw--as distinctly
+as I perceive the words I now write--yet another figure stand at the
+window, gaze steadfastly at us for a moment, and then disappear. It
+was, as I fancied, that of a woman, but was totally enveloped in a very
+full cloak, reaching to the ground, with a peculiarly cut hood, that
+stood erect and seemed half as long as the body of the garment. I had a
+vague recollection of having seen some such costume in a picture.
+
+Of course, I dashed round the corner of the house, threaded the
+birch-trees, and stood on the eastern piazza. No one was there. Without
+losing an instant, I ran to the garden wall and climbed it, as
+Severance had done, to look into Paul's cottage. That worthy was just
+getting into bed, in a state of complicated deshabille, his
+blackbearded head wrapped in an old scarlet handkerchief that made him
+look like a retired pirate in reduced circumstances. He being accounted
+for, I vainly traversed the shrubberies, returned to the western
+piazza, watched awhile uselessly, and went home with Severance, a good
+deal puzzled.
+
+By daylight the whole thing seemed different. That I had seen the
+figure there was no doubt. It was not a reflected image, for we had no
+companion. It was, then, human. After all, thought I, it is a
+commonplace thing enough, this masquerading in a cloak and hood.
+Someone has observed Severance's nocturnal visits, and is amusing
+himself at his expense. The peculiarity was, that the thing was so well
+done, and the figure had such an air of dignity, that somehow it was
+not so easy to make light of it in talking with him.
+
+I went into his room, next day. His sick-headache, or whatever it was,
+had come on again, and he was lying on his bed. Rutherford's strange
+old book on the Second Sight lay open before him. "Look there," he
+said; and I read the motto of a chapter:--
+
+          "In sunlight one,
+          In shadow none,
+          In moonlight two,
+          In thunder two,
+          Then comes Death."
+
+I threw the book indignantly from me, and began to invent doggerel,
+parodying this precious incantation. But Severance did not seem to
+enjoy the joke, and it grows tiresome to enact one's own farce and do
+one's own applauding.
+
+For several days after he was laid up in earnest; but instead of
+getting any mental rest from this, he lay poring over that preposterous
+book, and it really seemed as if his brain were a little disturbed.
+Meanwhile I watched the great house, day and night, sought for
+footsteps, and, by some odd fancy, took frequent observations on the
+gardener and his wife. Failing to get any clew, I waited one day for
+Paul's absence, and made a call upon the wife, under pretence of
+hunting up a missing handkerchief,--for she had been my laundress. I
+found the handsome, swarthy creature, with her six bronzed children
+around her, training up the Madeira vine that made a bower of the whole
+side of her little, black, gambrel-roofed cottage. On learning my
+errand, she became full of sympathy, and was soon emptying her
+bureau-drawers in pursuit of the lost handkerchief. As she opened the
+lowest drawer, I saw within it something which sent all the blood to my
+face for a moment. It was a black cloth cloak, with a stiff hood two
+feet long, of precisely the pattern worn by the unaccountable visitant
+at the window. I turned almost fiercely upon her; but she looked so
+innocent as she stood there, caressing and dusting with her fingers
+what was evidently a pet garment, that it was really impossible to
+denounce her.
+
+"Is that a Bavarian cloak?" said I, trying to be cool and judicial.
+
+Here broke in the eldest boy, named John, aged ten, a native American,
+and a sailor already, whom I had twice fished up from a capsized punt.
+"Mother ain't a Bavarian," quoth the young salt. "Father's a Bavarian;
+mother's a Portegee. Portegees wear them hoods."
+
+"I am a Portuguese, sir, from Fayal," said the woman, prolonging with
+sweet intonation the soft name of her birthplace. "This is my capote,
+she added, taking up with pride the uncouth costume, while the children
+gathered round, as if its vast folds came rarely into sight.
+
+"It has not been unfolded for a year," she said. As she spoke, she
+dropped it with a cry, and a little mouse sprang from the skirts, and
+whisked away into some corner. We found that the little animal had made
+its abode in the heavy woollen, of which three or four thicknesses had
+been eaten through, and then matted together into the softest of nests.
+This contained, moreover, a small family of mouselets, who certainly
+had not taken part in any midnight masquerade. The secret seemed more
+remote than ever, for I knew that there was no other Portuguese family
+in the town, and there was no confounding this peculiar local costume
+with any other.
+
+Returning to Severance's chamber, I said nothing of all this. He was,
+by an odd coincidence, looking over a portfolio of Fayal sketches made
+by himself during his late voyage. Among them were a dozen studies of
+just such capotes as I had seen,--some in profile, completely screening
+the wearer, others disclosing women's faces, old or young. He seemed to
+wish to put them away, however, when I came in. Really, the plot seemed
+to thicken; and it was a little provoking to understand it no better,
+when all the materials seemed close to one's hands.
+
+A day or two later, I was summoned to Boston. Returning thence by the
+stage-coach, we drove from Tiverton, the whole length of the island,
+under one of those wild and wonderful skies which give, better than
+anything in nature, the effect of a field of battle. The heavens were
+filled with ten thousand separate masses of cloud, varying in shade
+from palest gray to iron-black, borne rapidly to and fro by upper and
+lower currents of opposing wind. They seemed to be charging,
+retreating, breaking, recombining, with puffs of what seemed smoke, and
+a few wan sunbeams sometimes striking through for fire. Wherever the
+eye turned, there appeared some flying fragment not seen before; and
+yet in an hour this noiseless Antietam grew still, and a settled leaden
+film overspread the sky, yielding only to some level lines of light
+where the sun went down. Perhaps our driver was looking toward the sky
+more than to his own affairs, for, just as all this ended a wheel gave
+out, and we had to stop in Portsmouth for repairs. By the time we were
+again in motion, the changing wind had brought up a final
+thunder-storm, which broke upon us ere we reached our homes. It was
+rather an uncommon thing, so late in the season; for the lightning,
+like other brilliant visitors, usually appears in Oldport during only a
+month or two of every year.
+
+The coach set me down at my own door, so soaked that I might have
+floated in. I peeped into Severance's room, however, on the way to my
+own. Strange to say, no one was there; yet some one had evidently been
+lying on the bed, and on the pillow lay the old book on the Second
+Sight, open at the very page which had so bewitched him and vexed me. I
+glanced at it mechanically, and when I came to the meaningless jumble,
+"In thunder two," a flash flooded the chamber, and a sudden fear struck
+into my mind. Who knew what insane experiment might have come into that
+boy's head?
+
+With sudden impulse, I went downstairs, and found the whole house
+empty, until a stupid old woman, coming in from the wood-house with her
+apron full of turnips, told me that Severance had been missing since
+nightfall, after being for a week in bed, dangerously ill, and
+sometimes slightly delirious. The family had become alarmed, and were
+out with lanterns, in search of him.
+
+It was safe to say that none of them had more reason to be alarmed than
+I. It was something, however, to know where to seek him. Meeting two
+neighboring fishermen, I took them with me. As we approached the
+well-known wall, the blast blew out our lights, and we could scarcely
+speak. The lightning had grown less frequent, yet sheets of flame
+seemed occasionally to break over the dark, square sides of the house,
+and to send a flickering flame along the ridge-pole and eaves, like a
+surf of light. A surf of water broke also behind us on the Blue Rocks,
+sounding as if it pursued our very footsteps; and one of the men
+whispered hoarsely to me, that a Nantucket brig had parted her cable,
+and was drifting in shore.
+
+As we entered the garden, lights gleamed in the shrubbery. To my
+surprise, it was Paul and his wife, with their two oldest
+children,--these last being quite delighted with the stir, and showing
+so much illumination, in the lee of the house, that it was quite a
+Feast of Lanterns. They seemed a little surprised at meeting us, too;
+but we might as well have talked from Point Judith to Beaver Tail as to
+have attempted conversation there. I walked round the building; but a
+flash of lightning showed nothing on the western piazza save a
+birch-tree, which lay across, blown down by the storm. I therefore went
+inside, with Paul's household, leaving the fishermen without.
+
+Never shall I forget that search. As we went from empty room to room,
+the thunder seemed rolling on the very roof, and the sharp flashes of
+lightning appeared to put out our lamps and then kindle them again. We
+traversed the upper regions, mounting by a ladder to the attic; then
+descended into the cellar and the wine-vault. The thorough bareness of
+the house, the fact that no bright-eyed mice peeped at us from their
+holes, no uncouth insects glided on the walls, no flies buzzed in the
+unwonted lamplight, scarcely a spider slid down his damp and trailing
+web,--all this seemed to enhance the mystery. The vacancy was more
+dreary than desertion: it was something old which had never been young.
+We found ourselves speaking in whispers; the children kept close to
+their parents; we seemed to be chasing some awful Silence from room to
+room; and the last apartment, the great drawing-room, we really seemed
+loath to enter. The less the rest of the house had to show, the more,
+it seemed, must be concentrated there. Even as we entered, a blast of
+air from a broken pane extinguished our last light, and it seemed to
+take many minutes to rekindle it.
+
+As it shone once more, a brilliant lightning-flash also swept through
+the window, and flickered and flickered, as if it would never have
+done. The eldest child suddenly screamed, and pointed with her finger,
+first to one great window and then to its opposite. My eyes
+instinctively followed the successive directions; and the double glance
+gave me all I came to seek, and more than all. Outside the western
+window lay Severance, his white face against the pane, his eyes gazing
+across and past us,--struck down doubtless by the fallen tree, which
+lay across the piazza, and hid him from external view. Opposite him,
+and seen through the eastern window, stood, statue-like, the hooded
+figure, but with the great capote thrown back, showing a sad, eager,
+girlish face, with dark eyes, and a good deal of black hair,--one of
+those faces of peasant beauty such as America never shows,--faces where
+ignorance is almost raised into refinement by its childlike look.
+Contrasted with Severance's wild gaze, the countenance wore an
+expression of pitying forgiveness, almost of calm; yet it told of
+wasting sorrow and the wreck of a life. Gleaming lustrous beneath the
+lightning, it had a more mystic look when the long flash had ceased,
+and the single lantern burned beneath it, like an altar-lamp before a
+shrine.
+
+"It is Aunt Emilia," exclaimed the little girl; and as she spoke, the
+father, turning angrily upon her, dashed the light to the ground, and
+groped his way out without a word of answer. I was too much alarmed
+about Severance to care for aught else, and quickly made my way to the
+western piazza, where I found him stunned by the fallen tree,--injured,
+I feared, internally,--still conscious, but unable to speak.
+
+With the aid of my two companions I got him home, and he was ill for
+several weeks before he died. During his illness he told me all he had
+to tell; and though Paul and his family disappeared next day,--perhaps
+going on board the Nantucket brig, which had narrowly escaped
+shipwreck,--I afterwards learned all the remaining facts from the only
+neighbor in whom they had placed confidence. Severance, while
+convalescing at a country-house in Fayal, had fallen passionately in
+love with a young peasant-girl, who had broken off her intended
+marriage for love of him, and had sunk into a half-imbecile melancholy
+when deserted. She had afterwards come to this country, and joined her
+sister, Paul's wife. Paul had received her reluctantly, and only on
+condition that her existence should be concealed. This was the easier,
+as it was one of her whims to go out only by night, when she had
+haunted the great house, which, she said, reminded her of her own
+island, so that she liked to wear thither the capote which had been the
+pride of her heart at home. On the few occasions when she had caught a
+glimpse of Severance, he had seemed to her, no doubt, as much a phantom
+as she seemed to him. On the night of the storm, they had both sought
+their favorite haunt, unconscious of each other, and the friends of
+each had followed in alarm.
+
+I got traces of the family afterwards at Nantucket and later at
+Narragansett, and had reason to think that Paul was employed, one
+summer, by a farmer on Conanicut; but I was always just too late for
+them; and the money which Severance left, as his only reparation for
+poor Emilia, never was paid. The affair was hushed up, and very few,
+even among the neighbors, knew the tragedy that had passed by them with
+the storm.
+
+After Severance died, I had that temporary feeling of weakened life
+which remains after the first friend or the first love passes, and the
+heart seems to lose its sense of infinity. His father came, and prosed,
+and measured the windows of the empty house, and calculated angles of
+reflection, and poured even death and despair into his crucible of
+commonplace; the mother whined in her feebler way at home; while the
+only brother, a talkative medical student, tried to pooh-pooh it all,
+and sent me a letter demonstrating that Emilia was never in America,
+and that the whole was an hallucination. I cared nothing for his
+theory; it all seemed like a dream to me, and, as all the actors but
+myself are gone, it seems so still. The great house is yet unoccupied,
+and likely to remain so; and he who looks through its western window
+may still be startled by the weird image of himself. As I lingered
+round it, to-day, beneath the winter sunlight, the snow drifted
+pitilessly past its ivied windows, and so hushed my footsteps that I
+scarce knew which was the phantom, myself or my reflection, and
+wondered if the medical student would not argue me out of existence
+next.
+
+This is the end of my story. If I sought for a moral, it would be hard
+to attach one to a thing so slight. It could only be this, that shadow
+and substance are always ready to link themselves, in unexpected ways,
+against the diseased imagination; and that remorse can make the most
+transparent crystal into a mirror for its sin.
+
+
+
+A DRIFT-WOOD FIRE
+
+  "This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
+    Every nighte and alle,
+  Fire and salt and candle-lighte,
+    And Christe receive thy saule."
+                     _A Lyke-Wake Dirge_.
+
+The October days grow rapidly shorter, and brighten with more
+concentrated light. It is but half past five, yet the sun dips redly
+behind Conanicut, the sunset-gun booms from our neighbor's yacht, the
+flag glides down from his mainmast, and the slender pennant, running
+swiftly up the opposite halyards, dances and flickers like a flame, and
+at last perches, with dainty hesitation, at the mast-head. A tint of
+salmon-color, burnished into long undulations of lustre, overspreads
+the shallower waves; but a sober gray begins to steal in beneath the
+sunset rays, and will soon claim even the brilliant foreground for its
+own. Pile a few more fragments of drift-wood upon the fire in the great
+chimney, little maiden, and then couch yourself before it, that I may
+have your glowing childhood as a foreground for those heaped relics of
+shipwreck and despair. You seem, in your scarlet boating-dress, Annie,
+like some bright tropic bird, alit for a moment beside that other bird
+of the tropics, flame.
+
+Thoreau thought that his temperament dated from an earlier period than
+the agricultural, because he preferred woodcraft to gardening; and it
+is also pleasant to revert to the period when men had invented neither
+saws nor axes, but simply picked up their fuel in forests or on
+ocean-shores. Fire is a thing which comes so near us, and combines
+itself so closely with our life, that we enjoy it best when we work for
+it in some way, so that our fuel shall warm us twice, as the country
+people say,--once in the getting, and again in the burning. Yet no work
+seems to have more of the flavor of play in it than that of collecting
+drift-wood on some convenient beach, or than this boat-service of ours,
+Annie, when we go wandering from island to island in the harbor, and
+glide over sea-weedgroves and the habitations of crabs,--or to the
+flowery and ruined bastions of Rose Island,--or to those caves at
+Coaster's Harbor where we played Victor Hugo, and were eaten up in
+fancy by a cuttle-fish. Then we voyaged, you remember, to that further
+cave in, the solid rock, just above low-water-mark, a cell
+unapproachable by land, and high enough for you to stand erect. There
+you wished to play Constance in Marmion, and to be walled up alive, if
+convenient; but as it proved impracticable on that day, you helped me
+to secure some bits of drift-wood instead. Longer voyages brought waifs
+from remoter islands,--whose very names tell, perchance, the changing
+story of mariners long since wrecked,--isles baptized Patience and
+Prudence, Hope and Despair. And other relics bear witness of more
+distant beaches, and of those wrecks which still lie, sentinels of
+ruin, along Brenton's Point and Castle Hill.
+
+To collect drift-wood is like botanizing, and one soon learns to
+recognize the prevailing species, and to look with pleased eagerness
+for new. It is a tragic botany indeed, where, as in enchanted gardens,
+every specimen has a voice, and, as you take each from the ground, you
+expect from it a cry like the mandrake's. And from what a garden it
+comes! As one walks round Brenton's Point after an autumnal storm, it
+seems as if the passionate heaving of the waves had brought wholly new
+tints to the surface, hues unseen even in dreams before, greens and
+purples impossible in serener days. These match the prevailing green
+and purple of the slate-cliffs; and Nature in truth carries such fine
+fitnesses yet further. For, as we tread the delicate seaside turf,
+which makes the farthest point seem merely the land's last bequest of
+emerald to the ocean, we suddenly come upon curved lines of lustrous
+purple amid the grass, rows on rows of bright muscle-shells, regularly
+traced as if a child had played there,--the graceful high-water-mark of
+the terrible storm.
+
+It is the crowning fascination of the sea, the consummation of such
+might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in the
+summer, when our bay is thronged for miles on miles with inch-long
+jelly-fishes,--lovely creatures, in shape like disembodied
+gooseberries, and shot through and through in the sunlight with all
+manner of blue and golden glistenings, and bearing tiny rows of
+fringing oars that tremble like a baby's eyelids. There is less of
+gross substance in them than in any other created thing,--mere water
+and outline, destined to perish at a touch, but seemingly never
+touching, for they float secure, finding no conceivable cradle so soft
+as this awful sea. They are like melodies amid Beethoven's Symphonies,
+or like the songs that wander through Shakespeare, and that seem things
+too fragile to risk near Cleopatra's passion and Hamlet's woe. Thus
+tender is the touch of ocean; and look, how around this piece of oaken
+timber, twisted and torn and furrowed,--its iron bolts snapped across
+as if bitten,--there is yet twined a gay garland of ribbon-weed,
+bearing on its trailing stem a cluster of bright shells, like a
+mermaid's chatelaine.
+
+Thus adorned, we place it on the blaze. As night gathers without, the
+gale rises. It is a season of uneasy winds, and of strange, rainless
+storms, which perplex the fishermen, and indicate rough weather out at
+sea. As the house trembles and the windows rattle, we turn towards the
+fire with a feeling of safety. Representing the fiercest of all
+dangers, it yet expresses security and comfort.
+
+Should a gale tear the roof from over our heads and show the black sky
+alone above us, we should not feel utterly homeless while this fire
+burned,--at least I can recall such a feeling of protection when once
+left suddenly roofless by night in one of the wild gorges of Mount
+Katahdin. There is a positive demonstrative force in an open fire,
+which makes it your fit ally in a storm. Settled and obdurate cold may
+well be encountered by the quiet heat of an invisible furnace. But this
+howling wind might depress one's spirits, were it not met by a force as
+palpable,--the warm blast within answering to the cold blast without.
+The wide chimney then becomes the scene of contest: wind meets wind,
+sparks encounter rain-drops, they fight in the air like the visioned
+soldiers of Attila; sometimes a daring drop penetrates, and dies,
+hissing, on the hearth; and sometimes a troop of sparks may make a
+sortie from the chimney-top. I know not how else we can meet the
+elements by a defiance so magnificent as that from this open hearth;
+and in burning drift-wood, especially, we turn against the enemy his
+own ammunition. For on these fragments three elements have already done
+their work. Water racked and strained the hapless ships, air hunted
+them, and they were thrown at last upon earth, the sternest of all. Now
+fire takes the shattered remnants, and makes them a means of comfort
+and defence.
+
+It has been pointed out by botanists, as one of Nature's most graceful
+retributions, that, in the building of the ship, the apparent balance
+of vegetable forces is reversed, and the herb becomes master of the
+tree, when the delicate, blue-eyed flax, taking the stately pine under
+its protection, stretches over it in cordage, or spreads in sails. But
+more graceful still is this further contest between the great natural
+elements, when this most fantastic and vanishing thing, this delicate
+and dancing flame, subdues all these huge vassals to its will, and,
+after earth and air and water have done their utmost, comes in to
+complete the task, and to be crowned as monarch. "The sea drinks the
+air," said Anacreon, "and the sun the sea." My fire is the child of the
+sun.
+
+I come back from every evening stroll to this gleaming blaze; it is a
+domestic lamp, and shines for me everywhere. To my imagination it burns
+as a central flame among these dark houses, and lights up the whole of
+this little fishing hamlet, humble suburb of the fashionable
+watering-place. I fancy that others too perceive the light, and that
+certain huge visitors are attracted, even when the storm keeps
+neighbors and friends at home. For the slightest presage of foul
+weather is sure to bring to yonder anchorage a dozen silent vessels,
+that glide up the harbor for refuge, and are heard but once, when the
+chain-cable rattles as it runs out, and the iron hand of the anchor
+grasps the rock. It always seems to me that these unwieldy creatures
+are gathered, not about the neighboring lighthouse only, but around our
+ingle-side. Welcome, ye great winged strangers, whose very names are
+unknown! This hearth is comprehensive in its hospitalities; it will
+accept from you either its fuel or its guests; your mariners may warm
+themselves beside it, or your scattered timbers may warm me. Strange
+instincts might be supposed to thrill and shudder in the ribs of ships
+that sail toward the beacon of a drift-wood fire. Morituri salutant. A
+single shock, and all that magnificent fabric may become mere fuel to
+prolong the flame.
+
+Here, beside the roaring ocean, this blaze represents the only
+receptacle more vast than ocean. We say, "unstable as water." But there
+is nothing unstable about the flickering flame; it is persistent and
+desperate, relentless in following its ends. It is the most tremendous
+physical force that man can use. "If drugs fail," said Hippocrates,
+"use the knife; should the knife fail, use fire." Conquered countries
+were anciently given over to fire and sword: the latter could only
+kill, but the other could annihilate. See how thoroughly it does its
+work, even when domesticated: it takes up everything upon the hearth
+and leaves all clean. The Greek proverb says, that "the sea drinks up
+all the sins of the world." Save fire only, the sea is the most
+capacious of all things.
+
+But its task is left incomplete: it only hides its records, while fire
+destroys them. In the Norse Edda, when the gods try their games, they
+find themselves able to out-drink the ocean, but not to eat like the
+flame. Logi, or fire, licks up food and trencher and all. This chimney
+is more voracious than the sea. Give time enough, and all which yonder
+depths contain might pass through this insatiable throat, leaving only
+a few ashes and the memory of a flickering shade,--pulvis et umbra. We
+recognize this when we have anything to conceal. Deep crimes are buried
+in earth, deeper are sunk In water, but the deepest of all are confided
+by trembling men to the profounder secrecy of flame. If every old
+chimney could narrate the fearful deeds whose last records it has
+cancelled, what sighs of undying passion would breathe from its dark
+summit,--what groans of guilt! Those lurid sparks that whirl over
+yonder house-top, tossed aloft as if fire itself could not contain
+them, may be the last embers of some written scroll, one rescued word
+of which might suffice for the ruin of a household, and the crushing of
+many hearts.
+
+But this domestic hearth of ours holds only, besides its drift-wood,
+the peaceful records of the day,--its shreds and fragments and fallen
+leaves. As the ancients poured wine upon their flames, so I pour
+rose-leaves in libation; and each morning contributes the faded petals
+of yesterday's wreaths. All our roses of this season have passed up
+this chimney in the blaze. Their delicate veins were filled with all
+the summer's fire, and they returned to fire once more,--ashes to
+ashes, flame to flame. For holding, with Bettina, that every flower
+which is broken becomes immortal in the sacrifice, I deem it more
+fitting that their earthly part should die by a concentration of that
+burning element which would at any rate be in some form their ending;
+so they have their altar on this bright hearth.
+
+Let us pile up the fire anew with drift-wood, Annie. We can choose at
+random; for our logs came from no single forest. It is considered an
+important branch of skill in the country to know the varieties of
+firewood, and to choose among them well. But to-night we have the whole
+Atlantic shore for our wood-pile, and the Gulf Stream for a teamster.
+Every foreign tree of rarest name may, for aught we know, send its
+treasures to our hearth. Logwood and satinwood may mingle with cedar
+and maple; the old cellar floors of this once princely town are of
+mahogany, and why not our fire? I have a very indistinct impression
+what teak is; but if it means something black and impenetrable and
+nearly indestructible, then there is a piece of it, Annie, on the
+hearth at this moment.
+
+It must be owned, indeed, that timbers soaked long enough in salt-water
+seem almost to lose their capacity of being burnt. Perhaps it was for
+this reason that, in the ancient "lyke-wakes" of the North of England,
+a pinch of salt was placed upon the dead body, as a safeguard against
+purgatorial flames. Yet salt melts ice, and so represents heat, one
+would think; and one can fancy that these fragments should be doubly
+inflammable, by their saline quality, and by the unmerciful rubbing
+which the waves have given them. I have noticed what warmth this
+churning process communicates to the clotted foam that lies in
+tremulous masses among the rocks, holding all the blue of ocean in its
+bubbles. After one's hands are chilled with the water, one can warm
+them in the foam. These drift-wood fragments are but the larger foam of
+shipwrecks.
+
+What strange comrades this flame brings together! As foreign sailors
+from remotest seas may sit and chat side by side, before some
+boarding-house fire in this seaport town, so these shapeless sticks,
+perhaps gathered from far wider wanderings, now nestle together against
+the backlog, and converse in strange dialects as they burn. It is
+written in the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma, that, "as two planks,
+floating on the surface of the mighty receptacle of the waters, meet,
+and having met are separated forever, so do beings in this life come
+together and presently are parted." Perchance this chimney reunites the
+planks, at the last moment, as death must reunite friends.
+
+And with what wondrous voices these strayed wanderers talk to one
+another on the hearth! They bewitch us by the mere fascination of their
+language. Such a delicacy of intonation, yet such a volume of sound.
+The murmur of the surf is not so soft or so solemn. There are the
+merest hints and traceries of tones,--phantom voices, more remote from
+noise than anything which is noise; and yet there is an undertone of
+roar, as from a thousand cities, the cities whence these wild voyagers
+came. Watch the decreasing sounds of a fire as it dies,--for it seems
+cruel to leave it, as we do, to die alone. I watched beside this hearth
+last night. As the fire sank down, the little voices grew stiller and
+more still, and at last there came only irregular beats, at varying
+intervals, as if from a heart that acted spasmodically, or as if it
+were measuring off by ticks the little remnant of time. Then it said,
+"Hush!" two or three times, and there came something so like a sob that
+it seemed human; and then all was still.
+
+If these dying voices are so sweet and subtile, what legends must be
+held untold by yonder fragments that lie unconsumed! Photography has
+familiarized us with the thought that every visible act, since the
+beginning of the world, has stamped itself upon surrounding surfaces,
+even if we have not yet skill to discern and hold the image. And
+especially, in looking on a liquid expanse, such as the ocean in calm,
+one is haunted with these fancies. I gaze into its depths, and wonder
+if no stray reflection has been imprisoned there, still accessible to
+human eyes, of some scene of passion or despair it has witnessed; as
+some maiden visitor at Holyrood Palace, looking in the ancient metallic
+mirror, might start at the thought that perchance some lineament of
+Mary Stuart may suddenly look out, in desolate and forgotten beauty,
+mingled with her own. And if the mere waters of the ocean, satiate and
+wearied with tragedy as they must be, still keep for our fancy such
+records, how much more might we attribute a human consciousness to
+these shattered fragments, each seared by its own special grief.
+
+Yet while they are silent, I like to trace back for these component
+parts of my fire such brief histories as I share. This block, for
+instance, came from the large schooner which now lies at the end of
+Castle Hill Beach, bearing still aloft its broken masts and shattered
+rigging, and with its keel yet stanch, except that the stern-post is
+gone,--so that each tide sweeps in its green harvest of glossy kelp,
+and then tosses it in the hold like hay, desolately tenanting the place
+which once sheltered men. The floating weed, so graceful in its own
+place, looks but dreary when thus confined. On that fearfully cold
+Monday of last winter (January 8, 1866) when the mercury stood at -10
+deg.; even in this mildest corner of New England,--this vessel was
+caught helplessly amid the ice that drifted out of the west passage of
+Narragansett Bay, before the fierce north-wind. They tried to beat into
+the eastern entrance, but the schooner seemed in sinking condition, the
+sails and helm were clogged with ice, and every rope, as an eye-witness
+told me, was as large as a man's body with frozen sleet. Twice they
+tacked across, making no progress; and then, to save their lives, ran
+the vessel on the rocks and got ashore. After they had left her, a
+higher wave swept her off, and drifted her into a little cove, where
+she has ever since remained.
+
+There were twelve wrecks along this shore last winter,--more than
+during any season for a quarter of a century. I remember when the first
+of these lay in great fragments on Graves Point, a schooner having been
+stranded on Cormorant Rocks outside, and there broken in pieces by the
+surf. She had been split lengthwise, and one great side was leaning up
+against the sloping rock, bows on, like some wild sea-creature never
+before beheld of men, and come there but to die. So strong was this
+impression that when I afterwards saw men at work upon the wreck,
+tearing out the iron bolts and chains, it seemed like torturing the
+last moments of a living thing. At my next visit there was no person in
+sight; another companion fragment had floated ashore, and the two lay
+peacefully beside the sailors' graves (which give the name to the
+point), as if they found comfort there. A little farther on there was a
+brig ashore and deserted. A fog came in from the sea; and, as I sat by
+the graves, some unseen passing vessel struck eight bells for noon. For
+a moment I fancied that it came from the empty brig,--a ghostly call,
+to summon phantom sailors.
+
+That smouldering brand, which has alternately gleamed and darkened for
+so many minutes, I brought from Price's Neck last winter, when the
+Brenton's Reef Light-ship went ashore. Yonder the oddly shaped vessel
+rides at anchor now, two miles from land, bearing her lanterns aloft at
+fore and main top. She parted her moorings by night, in the fearful
+storm of October 19, 1865; and I well remember, that, as I walked
+through the streets that wild evening, it seemed dangerous to be out of
+doors, and I tried to imagine what was going on at sea, while at that
+very moment the light-ship was driving on toward me in the darkness. It
+was thus that it happened:--
+
+There had been a heavy gale from the southeast, which, after a few
+hours of lull, suddenly changed in the afternoon to the southwest,
+which is, on this coast, the prevailing direction. Beginning about
+three o'clock, this new wind had risen almost to a hurricane by six,
+and held with equal fury till midnight, after which it greatly
+diminished, though, when I visited the wreck next morning, it was hard
+to walk against the blast. The light-ship went adrift at eight in the
+evening; the men let go another anchor, with forty fathoms of cable;
+this parted also, but the cable dragged, as she drifted in, keeping the
+vessel's head to the wind, which was greatly to her advantage. The
+great waves took her over five lines of reef, on each of which her keel
+grazed or held for a time. She came ashore on Price's Neck at last,
+about eleven.
+
+It was utterly dark; the sea broke high over the ship, even over her
+lanterns, and the crew could only guess that they were near the land by
+the sound of the surf. The captain was not on board, and the mate was
+in command, though his leg had been broken while holding the tiller.
+They could not hear each other's voices, and could scarcely cling to
+the deck. There seemed every chance that the ship would go to pieces
+before daylight. At last one of the crew, named William Martin, a
+Scotchman, thinking, as he afterwards told me, of his wife and three
+children, and of the others on board who had families,--and that
+something must be done, and he might as well do it as anybody,--got a
+rope bound around his waist, and sprang overboard. I asked the mate
+next day whether he ordered Martin to do this, and he said, "No, he
+volunteered it. I would not have ordered him, for I would not have done
+it myself." What made the thing most remarkable was, that the man
+actually could not swim, and did not know how far off the shore was,
+but trusted to the waves to take him thither,--perhaps two hundred
+yards. His trust was repaid. Struggling in the mighty surf, he
+sometimes felt the rocks beneath his feet, sometimes bruised his hands
+against them. At any rate he got on shore alive, and, securing his
+rope, made his way over the moors to the town, and summoned his
+captain, who was asleep in his own house. They returned at once to the
+spot, found the line still fast, and the rest of the crew, four in
+number, lowered the whaleboat, and were pulled to shore by the rope,
+landing safely before daybreak.
+
+When I saw the vessel next morning, she lay in a little cove, stern on,
+not wholly out of water,--steady and upright as in a dry-dock, with no
+sign of serious injury, except that the rudder was gone. She did not
+seem like a wreck; the men were the wrecks. As they lay among the
+rocks, bare or tattered, scarcely able to move, waiting for low tide to
+go on board the vessel, it was like a scene after a battle. They
+appeared too inert, poor fellows, to do anything but yearn toward the
+sun. When they changed position for shelter, from time to time, they
+crept along the rocks, instead of walking. They were like the little
+floating sprays of sea-weed, when you take them from the water and they
+become a mere mass of pulp in your hand. Martin shared in the general
+exhaustion, and no wonder; but he told his story very simply, and
+showed me where he had landed. The feat seemed to me then, and has
+always seemed, almost incredible, even for an expert swimmer. He thus
+summed up the motives for his action: "I thought that God was first,
+and I was next, and if I did the best I could, no man could do more
+than that; so I jumped overboard." It is pleasant to add, that, though
+a poor man, he utterly declined one of those small donations of money
+by which we Anglo-Saxons are wont clumsily to express our personal
+enthusiasms; and I think I appreciated his whole action the more for
+its coming just at the close of a war during which so many had readily
+accepted their award of praise or pay for acts of less intrinsic daring
+than his.
+
+Stir the fire, Annie, with yonder broken fragment of a flag-staff; its
+truck is still remaining, though the flag is gone, and every nation
+might claim it. As you stir, the burning brands evince a remembrance of
+their sea-lost life, the sparks drift away like foam-flakes, the flames
+wave and flap like sails, and the wail of the chimney sings a second
+shipwreck. As the tiny scintillations gleam and scatter and vanish in
+the soot of the chimney-wall, instead of "There goes the parson, and
+there goes the clerk," it must be the captain and the crew we watch. A
+drift-wood fire should always have children to tend it; for there is
+something childlike about it, unlike the steadier glow of walnut logs.
+It has a coaxing, infantine way of playing with the oddly shaped bits
+of wood we give it, and of deserting one to caress with flickering
+impulse another; and at night, when it needs to be extinguished, it is
+as hard to put to rest as a nursery of children, for some bright little
+head is constantly springing up anew, from its pillow of ashes. And, in
+turn, what endless delight children find in the manipulation of a fire!
+
+What a variety of playthings, too, in this fuel of ours; such
+inexplicable pieces, treenails and tholepins, trucks and sheaves, the
+lid of a locker, and a broken handspike. These larger fragments are
+from spars and planks and knees. Some were dropped overboard in this
+quiet harbor; others may have floated from Fayal or Hispaniola,
+Mozambique or Zanzibar. This eagle figure-head, chipped and battered,
+but still possessing highly aquiline features and a single eye, may
+have tangled its curved beak in the vast weed-beds of the Sargasso Sea,
+or dipped it in the Sea of Milk. Tell us your story, O heroic but
+dilapidated bird! and perhaps song or legend may find in it themes that
+shall be immortal.
+
+The eagle is silent, and I suspect, Annie, that he is but a plain,
+home-bred fowl after all. But what shall we say to this piece of plank,
+hung with barnacles that look large enough for the fabled
+barnacle-goose to emerge from? Observe this fragment a little. Another
+piece is secured to it, not neatly, as with proper tools, but clumsily,
+with many nails of different sizes, driven unevenly and with their
+heads battered awry. Wedged clumsily in between these pieces, and
+secured by a supplementary nail, is a bit of broken rope. Let us touch
+that rope tenderly; for who knows what despairing hands may last have
+clutched it when this rude raft was made? It may, indeed, have been the
+handiwork of children, on the Penobscot or the St. Mary's River. But
+its Condition betokens voyages yet longer; and it may just as well have
+come from the stranded "Golden Rule" on Roncador Reef,--that
+picturesque shipwreck where (as a rescued woman told me) the eyes of
+the people in their despair seemed full of sublime resignation, so that
+there was no confusion or outcry, and even gamblers and harlots looked
+death in the face as nobly, for all that could be seen, as the saintly
+and the pure. Or who knows but it floated round Cape Horn, from that
+other wreck, on the Pacific shore, of the "Central America," where the
+rough miners found that there was room in the boats only for their
+wives and their gold; and where, pushing the women off, with a few men
+to row them, the doomed husbands gave a cheer of courage as the ship
+went down.
+
+Here again is a piece of pine wood, cut in notches as for a tally, and
+with every seventh notch the longest; these notches having been cut
+deeply at the beginning, and feebly afterwards, stopping abruptly
+before the end was reached. Who could have carved it? Not a school-boy
+awaiting vacation, or a soldier expecting his discharge; for then each
+tally would have been cut off, instead of added. Nor could it be the
+squad of two soldiers who garrison Rose Island; for their tour of duty
+lasts but a week. There are small barnacles and sea-weed too, which
+give the mysterious stick a sort of brevet antiquity. It has been long
+adrift, and these little barnacles, opening and closing daily their
+minute valves, have kept meanwhile their own register, and with their
+busy fringed fingers have gathered from the whole Atlantic that small
+share of its edible treasures which sufficed for them. Plainly this
+waif has had its experiences. It was Robinson Crusoe's, Annie, depend
+upon it. We will save it from the flames, and when we establish our
+marine museum, nothing save a veritable piece of the North Pole shall
+be held so valuable as this undoubted relic from Juan Fernandez.
+
+But the night deepens, and its reveries must end. With the winter will
+pass away the winter-storms, and summer will bring its own more
+insidious perils. Then the drowsy old seaport will blaze into splendor,
+through saloon and avenue, amidst which many a bright career will end
+suddenly and leave no sign. The ocean tries feebly to emulate the
+profounder tragedies of the shore. In the crowded halls of gay hotels,
+I see wrecks drifting hopelessly, dismasted and rudderless, to be
+stranded on hearts harder and more cruel than Brenton's Reef, yet hid
+in smiles falser than its fleecy foam. What is a mere forsaken ship,
+compared with stately houses from which those whom I first knew in
+their youth and beauty have since fled into midnight and despair?
+
+But one last gleam upon our hearth lights up your innocent eyes, little
+Annie, and dispels the gathering shade. The flame dies down again, and
+you draw closer to my side. The pure moon looks in at the southern
+window, replacing the ruddier glow; while the fading embers lisp and
+prattle to one another, like drowsy children, more and more faintly,
+till they fall asleep.
+
+
+
+AN ARTIST'S CREATION.
+
+When I reached Kenmure's house, one August evening, it was rather a
+disappointment to find that he and his charming Laura had absented
+themselves for twenty-four hours. I had not seen them together since
+their marriage; my admiration for his varied genius and her unvarying
+grace was at its height, and I was really annoyed at the delay. My fair
+cousin, with her usual exact housekeeping, had prepared everything for
+her guest, and then bequeathed me, as she wrote, to Janet and baby
+Marian. It was a pleasant arrangement, for between baby Marian and me
+there existed a species of passion, I might almost say of betrothal,
+ever since that little three-year-old sunbeam had blessed my mother's
+house by lingering awhile in it, six months before. Still I went to bed
+disappointed, though the delightful windows of the chamber looked out
+upon the glimmering bay, and the swinging lanterns at the yard-arms of
+the frigates shone like some softer constellation beneath the brilliant
+sky. The house was so close upon the water that the cool waves seemed
+to plash deliciously against its very basement; and it was a comfort to
+think that, if there were no adequate human greetings that night, there
+would be plenty in the morning, since Marian would inevitably be
+pulling my eyelids apart before sunrise.
+
+It was scarcely dawn when I was roused by a little arm round my neck,
+and waked to think I had one of Raphael's cherubs by my side. Fingers
+of waxen softness were ruthlessly at work upon my eyes, and the little
+form that met my touch felt lithe and elastic, like a kitten's limbs.
+There was just light enough to see the child, perched on the edge of
+the bed, her soft blue dressing-gown trailing over the white
+night-dress, while her black and long-fringed eyes shone through the
+dimness of morning. She yielded gladly to my grasp, and I could fondle
+again the silken hair, the velvety brunette cheek, the plump, childish
+shoulders. Yet sleep still half held me, and when my cherub appeared to
+hold it a cherubic practice to begin the day with a demand for lively
+anecdote, I was fain drowsily to suggest that she might first tell some
+stories to her doll. With the sunny readiness that was a part of her
+nature, she straightway turned to that young lady,--plain Susan
+Halliday, with both cheeks patched, and eyes of different colors,--and
+soon discoursed both her and me into repose.
+
+When I waked again, it was to find the child conversing with the
+morning star, which still shone through the window, scarcely so lucent
+as her eyes, and bidding it go home to its mother, the sun. Another
+lapse into dreams, and then a more vivid awakening, and she had my ear
+at last, and won story after story, requiting them with legends of her
+own youth, "almost a year ago,"--how she was perilously lost, for
+instance, in the small front yard, with a little playmate, early in the
+afternoon, and how they came and peeped into the window, and thought
+all the world had forgotten them. Then the sweet voice, distinct in its
+articulation as Laura's, went straying off into wilder fancies,--a
+chaos of autobiography and conjecture, like the letters of a war
+correspondent. You would have thought her little life had yielded more
+pangs and fears than might have sufficed for the discovery of the North
+Pole; but breakfast-time drew near at last, and Janet's honest voice
+was heard outside the door. I rather envied the good Scotchwoman the
+pleasant task of polishing the smooth cheeks and combing the
+dishevelled silk; but when, a little later, the small maiden was riding
+down stairs in my arms, I envied no one.
+
+At sight of the bread and milk, my cherub was transformed into a hungry
+human child, chiefly anxious to reach the bottom of her porringer. I
+was with her a great deal that day. She gave no manner of trouble: it
+was like having the charge of a floating butterfly, endowed with warm
+arms to clasp, and a silvery voice to prattle. I sent Janet out to
+sail, with the other servants, by way of frolic, and Marian's perfect
+temperament was shown in the way she watched the departing.
+
+"There they go," she said, as she stood and danced at the window. "Now
+they are out of sight."
+
+"What!" I said, "are you pleased to have your friends go?"
+
+"Yes," she answered; "but I shall be pleased-er to see them come back."
+
+Life to her was no alternation between joy and grief, but only between
+joy and delight.
+
+Twilight brought us to an improvised concert. Climbing the piano-stool,
+she went over the notes with her little taper fingers, touching the
+keys in a light, knowing way, that proved her a musician's child. Then
+I must play for her, and let the dance begin. This was a wondrous
+performance on her part, and consisted at first in hopping up and down
+on one spot, with no change of motion, but in her hands. She resembled
+a minute and irrepressible Shaker, or a live and beautiful marionnette.
+Then she placed Janet in the middle of the floor, And performed the
+dance round her, after the manner of Vivien and Merlin. Then came her
+supper, which, like its predecessors, was a solid and absorbing meal;
+then one more fairy story, to magnetize her off, and she danced and
+sang herself up stairs. And if she first came to me in the morning with
+a halo round her head, she seemed still to retain it when I at last
+watched her kneeling in the little bed--perfectly motionless, with her
+hands placed together, and her long lashes sweeping her cheeks--to
+repeat two verses of a hymn which Janet had taught her. My nerves
+quivered a little when I saw that Susan Halliday had also been duly
+prepared for the night, and had been put in the same attitude, so far
+as her jointless anatomy permitted. This being ended, the doll and her
+mistress reposed together, and only an occasional toss of the vigorous
+limbs, or a stifled baby murmur, would thenceforth prove, through the
+darkened hours, that the one figure had in it more of life than the
+other.
+
+On the next morning Kenmure and Laura came back to us, and I walked
+down to receive them at the boat. I had forgotten how striking was
+their appearance, as they stood together. His broad, strong, Saxon
+look, his manly bearing and clear blue eyes, enhanced the fascination
+of her darker beauty.
+
+America is full of the short-lived bloom and freshness of girlhood; but
+it is a rare thing in one's life to see a beauty that really controls
+with a permanent charm. One must remember such personal loveliness, as
+one recalls some particular moonlight or sunset, with a special and
+concentrated joy, which the multiplicity of fainter impressions cannot
+disturb. When in those days we used to read, in Petrarch's one hundred
+and twenty-third sonnet, that he had once beheld on earth angelic
+manners and celestial charms, whose very remembrance was a delight and
+an affliction, since it made all else appear but dream and shadow, we
+could easily fancy that nature had certain permanent attributes which
+accompanied the name of Laura.
+
+Our Laura had that rich brunette beauty before which the mere snow and
+roses of the blonde must always seem wan and unimpassioned. In the
+superb suffusions of her cheek there seemed to flow a tide of passions
+and powers that might have been tumultuous in a meaner woman, but over
+which, in her, the clear and brilliant eyes and the sweet, proud mouth
+presided in unbroken calm. These superb tints implied resources only,
+not a struggle. With this torrent from the tropics in her veins, she
+was the most equable person I ever saw, and had a supreme and delicate
+good-sense, which, if not supplying the place of genius, at least
+comprehended its work. Not intellectually gifted herself, perhaps, she
+seemed the cause of gifts in others, and furnished the atmosphere in
+which all showed their best. With the steady and thoughtful enthusiasm
+of her Puritan ancestors, she combined that charm which is so rare
+among their descendants,--a grace which fascinated the humblest, while
+it would have been just the same in the society of kings. Her person
+had the equipoise and symmetry of her mind. While it had its separate
+points of beauty, each a source of distinct and peculiar pleasure,--as,
+the outline of her temples, the white line that parted her nightblack
+hair, the bend of her wrists, the moulding of her finger-tips,--yet
+these details were lost in the overwhelming sweetness of her presence,
+and the serene atmosphere that she diffused over all human life.
+
+A few days passed rapidly by us. We walked and rode and boated and
+read. Little Marian came and went, a living sunbeam, a self-sufficing
+thing. It was soon obvious that she was far less demonstrative toward
+her parents than toward me; while her mother, gracious to her as to
+all, yet rarely caressed her, and Kenmure, though habitually kind, was
+inclined to ignore her existence, and could scarcely tolerate that she
+should for one instant preoccupy his wife. For Laura he lived, and she
+must live for him. He had a studio, which I rarely entered and Marian
+never, though Laura was almost constantly there; and after the first
+cordiality was past, I observed that their daily expeditions were
+always arranged for only two. The weather was beautiful, and they led
+the wildest outdoor life, cruising all day or all night among the
+islands, regardless of hours, and almost of health. No matter: Kenmure
+liked it, and what he liked she loved. When at home, they were chiefly
+in the studio, he painting, modelling, poetizing perhaps, and she
+inseparably united with him in all. It was very beautiful, this
+unworldly and passionate love, and I could have borne to be omitted in
+their daily plans,--since little Marian was left to me,--save that it
+seemed so strange to omit her also. Besides, there grew to be something
+a little oppressive in this peculiar atmosphere; it was like living in
+a greenhouse.
+
+Yet they always spoke in the simplest way of this absorbing passion, as
+of something about which no reticence was needed; it was too sacred not
+to be mentioned; it would be wrong not to utter freely to all the world
+what was doubtless the best thing the world possessed. Thus Kenmure
+made Laura his model in all his art; not to coin her into wealth or
+fame,--he would have scorned it; he would have valued fame and wealth
+only as instruments for proclaiming her. Looking simply at these two
+lovers, then, it was plain that no human union could be more noble or
+stainless. Yet so far as others were concerned, it sometimes seemed to
+me a kind of duplex selfishness, so profound and so undisguised as to
+make one shudder. "Is it," I asked myself at such moments, "a great
+consecration, or a great crime?" But something must be allowed,
+perhaps, for my own private dis-satisfactions in Marian's behalf.
+
+I had easily persuaded Janet to let me have a peep every night at my
+darling, as she slept; and once I was surprised to find Laura sitting
+by the small white bed. Graceful and beautiful as she always was, she
+never before had seemed to me so lovely, for she never had seemed quite
+like a mother. But I could not demand a sweeter look of tenderness than
+that with which she now gazed upon her child.
+
+Little Marian lay with one brown, plump hand visible from its full
+white sleeve, while the other nestled half hid beneath the sheet,
+grasping a pair of blue morocco shoes, the last acquisition of her
+favorite doll. Drooping from beneath the pillow hung a handful of
+scarlet poppies, which the child had wished to place under her head, in
+the very superfluous project of putting herself to sleep thereby. Her
+soft brown hair was scattered on the sheet, her black lashes lay
+motionless upon the olive cheeks. Laura wished to move her, that I
+might see her the better.
+
+"You will wake her," exclaimed I, in alarm.
+
+"Wake this little dormouse?" Laura lightly answered. "Impossible."
+
+And, twining her arms about her, the young mother lifted the child from
+the bed, three or four times in succession, while the healthy little
+creature remained utterly undisturbed, breathing the same quiet breath.
+I watched Laura with amazement; she seemed transformed.
+
+She gayly returned my eager look, and then, seeming suddenly to
+penetrate its meaning, cast down her eyes, while the color mounted into
+her cheeks. "You thought," she said, almost sternly, "that I did not
+love my child."
+
+"No," I said half untruthfully.
+
+"I can hardly wonder," she continued, more sadly, "for it is only what
+I have said to myself a thousand times. Sometimes I think that I have
+lived in a dream, and one that few share with me. I have questioned
+others, and never yet found a woman who did not admit that her child
+was more to her, in her secret soul, than her husband. What can they
+mean? Such a thought is foreign to my very nature."
+
+"Why separate the two?" I asked.
+
+"I must separate them in thought," she answered, with the air of one
+driven to bay by her own self-reproaching. "I had, like other young
+girls, my dream of love and marriage. Unlike all the rest, I believe, I
+found my visions fulfilled. The reality was more than the imagination;
+and I thought it would be so with my love for my child. The first cry
+of that baby told the difference to my ear. I knew it all from that
+moment; the bliss which had been mine as a wife would never be mine as
+a mother. If I had not known what it was to adore my husband, I might
+have been content with my love for Marian. But look at that exquisite
+creature as she lies there asleep, and then think that I, her mother,
+should desert her if she were dying, for aught I know, at one word from
+him!"
+
+"Your feeling does not seem natural," I said, hardly knowing what to
+answer.
+
+"What good does it serve to know that?" she said, defiantly. "I say it
+to myself every day. Once when she was ill, and was given back to me in
+all the precious helplessness of babyhood, there was such a strange
+sweetness in it, I thought the charm might remain; but it vanished when
+she could run about once more. And she is such a healthy, self-reliant
+little thing," added Laura, glancing toward the bed with a momentary
+look of motherly pride that seemed strangely out of place amid these
+self-denunciations. "I wish her to be so," she added. "The best service
+I can do for her is to teach her to stand alone. And at some day,"
+continued the beautiful woman, her whole face lighting up with
+happiness, "she may love as I have loved."
+
+"And your husband," I said, after a pause,--"does your feeling
+represent his?"
+
+"My husband," she said, "lives for his genius, as he should. You that
+know him, why do you ask?"
+
+"And his heart?" I said, half frightened at my own temerity.
+
+"Heart?" she answered. "He loves me."
+
+Her color mounted higher yet; she had a look of pride, almost of
+haughtiness. All else seemed forgotten; she had turned away from the
+child's little bed, as if it had no existence. It flashed upon me that
+something of the poison of her artificial atmosphere was reaching her
+already.
+
+Kenmure's step was heard in the hall, and, with fire in her eyes, she
+hastened to meet him. I found myself actually breathing more freely
+after the departure of that enchanting woman, in danger of perishing
+inwardly, I said to myself, in an air too lavishly perfumed. Bending
+over Marian, I wondered if it were indeed possible that a perfectly
+healthy life had sprung from that union too intense and too absorbed.
+Yet I had often noticed that the child seemed to wear the temperaments
+of both her parents as a kind of playful disguise, and to peep at you,
+now out of the one, now from the other, showing that she had her own
+individual life behind.
+
+As if by some infantine instinct, the darling turned in her sleep, and
+came unconsciously nearer me. With a half-feeling of self-reproach, I
+drew around my neck, inch by inch, the little arms that tightened with
+a delicious thrill; and so I half reclined there till I myself dozed,
+and the watchful Janet, looking in, warned me away. Crossing the entry
+to my own chamber, I heard Kenmure and Laura down stairs, but I knew
+that I should be superfluous, and felt that I was sleepy.
+
+I had now, indeed, become always superfluous when they were together,
+though never when they were apart. Even they must be separated
+sometimes, and then each sought me, in order to discourse about the
+other. Kenmure showed me every sketch he had ever made of Laura. There
+she was, through all the range of her beauty,--there she was in clay,
+in cameo, in pencil, in water-color, in oils. He showed me also his
+poems, and, at last, a longer one, for which pencil and graver had
+alike been laid aside. All these he kept in a great cabinet she had
+brought with her to their housekeeping; and it seemed to me that he
+also treasured every flower she had dropped, every slender glove she
+had worn, every ribbon from her hair. I could not wonder, seeing his
+passion as it was. Who would not thrill at the touch of some such
+slight memorial of Mary of Scotland, or of Heloise? and what was all
+the regal beauty of the past to him? He found every room adorned when
+she was in it, empty when she had gone,--save that the trace of her was
+still left on everything, and all appeared but as a garment she had
+worn. It seemed that even her great mirror must retain, film over film,
+each reflection of her least movement, the turning of her head, the
+ungloving of her hand. Strange! that, with all this intoxicating
+presence, she yet led a life so free from self, so simple, so absorbed,
+that all trace of consciousness was excluded, and she was as free from
+vanity as her own child.
+
+As we were once thus employed in the studio, I asked Kenmure, abruptly,
+if he never shrank from the publicity he was thus giving Laura. "Madame
+Recamier was not quite pleased," I said, "that Canova had modelled her
+bust, even from imagination. Do you never shrink from permitting
+irreverent eyes to look on Laura's beauty? Think of men as you know
+them. Would you give each of them her miniature, perhaps to go with
+them into scenes of riot and shame?"
+
+"Would to Heaven I could!" said he, passionately. "What else could save
+them, if that did not? God lets his sun shine on the evil and on the
+good, but the evil need it most."
+
+There was a pause; and then I ventured to ask him a question that had
+been many times upon my lips unspoken.
+
+"Does it never occur to you," I said, "that Laura cannot live on earth
+forever?"
+
+"You cannot disturb me about that," he answered, not sadly, but with a
+set, stern look, as if fencing for the hundredth time against an
+antagonist who was foredoomed to be his master in the end. "Laura will
+outlive me; she must outlive me. I am so sure of it that, every time I
+come near her, I pray that I may not be paralyzed, and die outside her
+arms. Yet, in any event, what can I do but what I am doing,--devote my
+whole soul to the perpetuation of her beauty? It is my only dream,--to
+re-create her through art. What else is worth doing? It is for this I
+have tried-through sculpture, through painting, through verse--to
+depict her as she is. Thus far I have failed. Why have I failed? Is it
+because I have not lived a life sufficiently absorbed in her? or is it
+that there is no permitted way by which, after God has reclaimed her,
+the tradition of her perfect loveliness may be retained on earth?"
+
+The blinds of the piazza doorway opened, the sweet sea-air came in, the
+low and level rays of yellow sunset entered as softly as if the breeze
+were their chariot; and softer and stiller and sweeter than light or
+air, little Marian stood on the threshold. She had been in the fields
+with Janet, who had woven for her breeze-blown hair a wreath of the
+wild gerardia blossoms, whose purple beauty had reminded the good
+Scotchwoman of her own native heather. In her arms the child bore, like
+a little gleaner, a great sheaf of graceful golden-rod, as large as her
+grasp could bear. In all the artist's visions he had seen nothing so
+aerial, so lovely; in all his passionate portraitures of his idol, he
+had delineated nothing so like to her. Marian's cheeks mantled with
+rich and wine-like tints, her hair took a halo from the sunbeams, her
+lips parted over the little, milk-white teeth; she looked at us with
+her mother's eyes. I turned to Kenmure to see if he could resist the
+influence.
+
+He scarcely gave her a glance. "Go, Marian," he said, not
+impatiently,--for he was too thoroughly courteous ever to be
+ungracious, even to a child,--but with a steady indifference that cut
+me with more pain than if he had struck her.
+
+The sun dropped behind the horizon, the halo faded from the shining
+hair and every ray of light from the childish face. There came in its
+place that deep, wondering sadness which is more touching than any
+maturer sorrow,--just as a child's illness melts our hearts more than
+that of man or woman, it seems so premature and so plaintive. She
+turned away; it was the very first time I had ever seen the little face
+drawn down, or the tears gathering in the eyes. By some kind
+providence, the mother, coming in flushed and beautiful with walking,
+met Marian on the piazza, and caught the little thing in her arms with
+unwonted tenderness. It was enough for the elastic child. After one
+moment of such bliss she could go to Janet, go anywhere; and when the
+same graceful presence came in to us in the studio, we also could ask
+no more.
+
+We had music and moonlight, and were happy. The atmosphere seemed more
+human, less unreal. Going up stairs at last, I looked in at the
+nursery, and found my pet rather flushed, and I fancied that she
+stirred uneasily. It passed, whatever it was; for next morning she came
+in to wake me, looking, as usual, as if a new heaven and earth had been
+coined purposely for her since she went to sleep. We had our usual long
+and important discourse,--this time tending to protracted narrative, of
+the Mother-Goose description,--until, if it had been possible for any
+human being to be late for breakfast in that house, we should have been
+the offenders. But she ultimately went downstairs on my shoulder, and,
+as Kenmure and Laura were already out rowing, the baby put me in her
+own place, sat in her mother's chair, and ruled me with a rod of iron.
+How wonderful was the instinct by which this little creature, who so
+seldom heard one word of parental severity or parental fondness, knew
+so thoroughly the language of both! Had I been the most depraved of
+children, or the most angelic, I could not have been more sternly
+excluded from the sugar-bowl, or more overwhelmed with compensating
+kisses.
+
+Later on that day, while little Marian was taking the very profoundest
+nap that ever a baby was blessed with, (she had a pretty way of
+dropping asleep in unexpected corners of the house, like a kitten,) I
+somehow strayed into a confidential talk with Janet about her mistress.
+I was rather troubled to find that all her loyalty was for Laura, with
+nothing left for Kenmure, whom, indeed, she seemed to regard as a sort
+of objectionable altar, on which her darlings were being sacrificed.
+When she came to particulars, certain stray fears of my own were
+confirmed. It seemed that Laura's constitution was not fit, Janet
+averred, to bear these irregular hours, early and late; and she
+plaintively dwelt on the untasted oatmeal in the morning, the
+insufficient luncheon, the precarious dinner, the excessive walking and
+boating, the evening damps. There was coming to be a look about Laura
+such as her mother had, who died at thirty. As for Marian,--but here
+the complaint suddenly stopped; it would have required far stronger
+provocation to extract from the faithful soul one word that might seem
+to reflect on Marian's mother.
+
+Another year, and her forebodings had come true. It is needless to
+dwell on the interval. Since then I have sometimes felt a regret almost
+insatiable in the thought that I should have been absent while all that
+gracious loveliness was fading and dissolving like a cloud; and yet at
+other times it has appeared a relief to think that Laura would ever
+remain to me in the fulness of her beauty, not a tint faded, not a
+lineament changed. With all my efforts, I arrived only in time to
+accompany Kenmure home at night, after the funeral service. We paused
+at the door of the empty house,--how empty! I hesitated, but Kenmure
+motioned to me to follow him in.
+
+We passed through the hall and went up stairs. Janet met us at the head
+of the stairway, and asked me if I would go in to look at little
+Marian, who was sleeping. I begged Kenmure to go also but he refused,
+almost savagely, and went on with heavy step into Laura's deserted room.
+
+Almost the moment I entered the child's chamber, she waked up suddenly,
+looked at me, and said, "I know you, you are my friend." She never
+would call me her cousin, I was always her friend. Then she sat up in
+bed, with her eyes wide open, and said, as if stating a problem which
+had been put by for my solution, "I should like to see my mother."
+
+How our hearts are rent by the unquestioning faith of children, when
+they come to test the love that has so often worked what seemed to them
+miracles,--and ask of it miracles indeed! I tried to explain to her the
+continued existence of her mother, and she listened to it as if her
+eyes drank in all that I could say, and more. But the apparent distance
+between earth and heaven baffled her baby mind, as it so often and so
+sadly baffles the thoughts of us elders. I wondered what precise change
+seemed to her to have taken place. This all-fascinating Laura, whom she
+adored, and who had yet never been to her what other women are to their
+darlings,--did heaven seem to put her farther off, or bring her more
+near? I could never know. The healthy child had no morbid questionings;
+and as she had come into the world to be a sunbeam, she must not fail
+of that mission. She was kicking about the bed, by this time, in her
+nightgown, and holding her pink little toes in all sorts of difficult
+attitudes, when she suddenly said, looking me full in the face: "If my
+mother was so high up that she had her feet upon a star, do you think
+that I could see her?"
+
+This astronomical apotheosis startled me for a moment, but I said
+unhesitatingly, "Yes," feeling sure that the lustrous eyes that looked
+in mine could certainly see as far as Dante's, when Beatrice was
+transferred from his side to the highest realm of Paradise. I put my
+head beside hers upon the pillow, and stayed till I thought she was
+asleep.
+
+I then followed Kenmure into Laura's chamber. It was dusk, but the
+after-sunset glow still bathed the room with imperfect light, and he
+lay upon the bed, his hands clenched over his eyes.
+
+There was a deep bow-window where Laura used to sit and watch us,
+sometimes, when we put off in the boat. Her aeolian harp was in the
+casement, breaking its heart in music. A delicate handkerchief was
+lodged between the cushions of the window-seat,--the very handkerchief
+she used to wave, in summer days long gone. The white boats went
+sailing beneath the evening light, children shouted and splashed in the
+water, a song came from a yacht, a steam-whistle shrilled from the
+receding steamer; but she for whom alone those little signs of life had
+been dear and precious would henceforth be as invisible to our eyes as
+if time and space had never held her; and the young moon and the
+evening star seemed but empty things unless they could pilot us to some
+world where the splendor of her loveliness could match their own.
+
+Twilight faded, evening darkened, and still Kenmure lay motionless,
+until his strong form grew in my moody fancy to be like some carving of
+Michel Angelo's, more than like a living man. And when he at last
+startled me by speaking, it was with a voice so far off and so strange,
+it might almost have come wandering down from the century when Michel
+Angelo lived.
+
+"You are right," he said. "I have been living in a fruitless dream. It
+has all vanished. The absurdity of speaking of creative art! With all
+my life-long devotion, I have created nothing. I have kept no memorial
+of her presence, nothing to perpetuate the most beautiful of lives."
+
+Before I could answer, the door came softly open, and there stood in
+the doorway a small white figure, holding aloft a lighted taper of pure
+alabaster. It was Marian in her little night-dress, with the loose blue
+wrapper trailing behind her, let go in the effort to hold carefully the
+doll, Susan Halliday, robed also for the night.
+
+"May I come in?" said the child.
+
+Kenmure was motionless at first: then, looking over his shoulder, said
+merely, "What?"
+
+"Janet said," continued Marian, in her clear and methodical way, "that
+my mother was up in heaven, and would help God hear my prayers at any
+rate; but if I pleased, I could come and say them by you."
+
+A shudder passed over Kenmure; then he turned away, and put his hands
+over his eyes. She waited for no answer, but, putting down the
+candlestick, in her wonted careful manner, upon a chair, she began to
+climb upon the bed, lifting laboriously one little rosy foot, then
+another, still dragging after her, with great effort, the doll.
+Nestling at her father's breast, I saw her kneel.
+
+"Once my mother put her arm round me, when I said my prayers." She made
+this remark, under her breath, less as a suggestion, it seemed, than as
+the simple statement of a fact.
+
+Instantly I saw Kenmure's arm move, and grasp her with that strong and
+gentle touch of his which I had so often noticed in the studio,--a
+touch that seemed quiet as the approach of fate, and equally
+resistless. I knew him well enough to understand that iron adoption.
+
+He drew her toward him, her soft hair was on his breast, she looked
+fearlessly into his eyes, and I could hear the little prayer
+proceeding, yet in so low a whisper that I could not catch one word.
+She was infinitely solemn at such times, the darling; and there was
+always something in her low, clear tone, through all her prayings and
+philosophizings, which was strangely like her mother's voice. Sometimes
+she paused, as if to ask a question, and at every answer I could see
+her father's arm tighten.
+
+The moments passed, the voices grew lower yet, the candle flickered and
+went out, the doll slid to the ground. Marian had drifted away upon a
+vaster ocean than that whose music lulled her from without,--upon that
+sea whose waves are dreams. The night was wearing on, the lights
+gleamed from the anchored vessels, the water rippled serenely against
+the low sea-wall, the breeze blew gently in. Marian's baby breathing
+grew deeper and more tranquil; and as all the sorrows of the weary
+earth might be imagined to exhale themselves in spring through the
+breath of violets, so I prayed that it might be with Kenmure's burdened
+heart, through hers. By degrees the strong man's deeper respirations
+mingled with those of the child, and their two separate beings seemed
+merged and solved into identity, as they slumbered, breast to breast,
+beneath the golden and quiet stars. I passed by without awaking them,
+and I knew that the artist had attained his dream.
+
+
+
+IN A WHERRY.
+
+We have a phrase in Oldport, "What New-Yorkers call poverty: to be
+reduced to a pony phaeton." In consequence of a November gale, I am
+reduced To a similar state of destitution, from a sail-boat to a
+wherry; and, like others of the deserving poor, I have found many
+compensations in my humbler condition. Which is the more enjoyable,
+rowing or sailing? If you sail before the wind, there is the glorious
+vigor of the breeze that fills your sails; you get all of it you have
+room for, and a ship of the line could do no more; indeed, your very
+nearness to the water increases the excitement, since the water swirls
+and boils up, as it unites in your wake, and seems to clutch at the low
+stern of your sail-boat, and to menace the hand that guides the helm.
+Or if you beat to windward, it is as if your boat climbed a liquid
+hill, but did it with bounding and dancing, like a child; there is the
+plash of the lighter ripples against the bow, and the thud of the
+heavier waves, while the same blue water is now transformed to a cool
+jet of white foam over your face, and now to a dark whirlpool in your
+lee. Sailing gives a sense of prompt command, since by a single
+movement of the tiller you effect so great a change of direction or
+transform motion into rest; there is, therefore, a certain magic in it:
+but, on the other hand, there is in rowing a more direct appeal to your
+physical powers; you do not evade or cajole the elements by a cunning
+device of keel and canvas, you meet them man-fashion and subdue them.
+The motion of the oars is like the strong motion of a bird's wings; to
+sail a boat is to ride upon an eagle, but to row is to be an eagle. I
+prefer rowing,--at least till I can afford another sail-boat.
+
+What is a good day for rowing? Almost any day that is good for living.
+Living is not quite agreeable in the midst of a tornado or an
+equinoctial storm, neither is rowing. There are days when rowing is as
+toilsome and exhausting a process as is Bunyan's idea of virtue; while
+there are other days, like the present, when it seems a mere Oriental
+passiveness and the forsaking of works,--just an excuse to Nature for
+being out among her busy things. For even at this stillest of hours
+there is far less repose in Nature than we imagine. What created thing
+can seem more patient than yonder kingfisher on the sea-wall? Yet, as
+we glide near him, we shall see that no creature can be more full of
+concentrated life; all his nervous system seems on edge, every instant
+he is rising or lowering on his feet, the tail vibrates, the neck
+protrudes or shrinks again, the feathers ruffle, the crest dilates; he
+talks to himself with an impatient chirr, then presently hovers and
+dives for a fish, then flies back disappointed. We say "free as birds,"
+but their lives are given over to arduous labors. And so, when our
+condition seems most dreamy, our observing faculties are sometimes
+desperately on the alert, and we find afterwards, to our surprise, that
+we have missed nothing. The best observer in the end is not he who
+works at the microscope or telescope most unceasingly, but he whose
+whole nature becomes sensitive and receptive, drinking in everything,
+like a sponge that saturates itself with all floating vapors and odors,
+though it seems inert and unsuspicious until you press it and it tells
+the tale.
+
+Most men do their work out of doors and their dreaming at home; and
+those whose work is done at home need something like a wherry in which
+to dream out of doors. On a squally day, with the wind northwest, it is
+a dream of action, and to round yonder point against an ebbing tide
+makes you feel as if you were Grant before Richmond; when you put
+about, you gallop like Sheridan, and the winds and waves become a
+cavalry escort. On other days all elements are hushed into a dream of
+peace, and you look out upon those once stormy distances as Landseer's
+sheep look into the mouth of the empty cannon on a dismantled fort.
+These are the days for revery, and your thoughts fly forth, gliding
+without friction over this smooth expanse; or, rather, they are like
+yonder pair of white butterflies that will flutter for an hour just
+above the glassy surface, traversing miles of distance before they
+alight again.
+
+By a happy trait of our midsummer, these various phases of wind and
+water may often be included in a single day. On three mornings out of
+four the wind blows northwest down our bay, then dies to a calm before
+noon. After an hour or two of perfect stillness, you see the line of
+blue ripple coming up from the ocean till it conquers all the paler
+water, and the southwest breeze sets in. This middle zone of calm is
+like the noonday of the Romans, when they feared to speak, lest the
+great god Pan should be awakened. While it lasts, a thin, aerial veil
+drops over the distant hills of Conanicut, then draws nearer and nearer
+till it seems to touch your boat, the very nearest section of space
+being filled with a faint disembodied blueness, like that which fills
+on winter days, in colder regions, the hollows of the snow. Sky and sea
+show but gradations of the same color, and afford but modifications of
+the same element. In this quietness, yonder schooner seems not so much
+to lie at anchor in the water as to anchor the water, so that both
+cease to move; and though faint ripples may come and go elsewhere on
+the surface, the vessel rests in this liquid island of absolute calm.
+For there certainly is elsewhere a sort of motionless movement, as
+Keats speaks of "a little noiseless noise among the leaves," or as the
+summer clouds form and disappear without apparent wind and without
+prejudice to the stillness. A man may lie in the profoundest trance and
+still be breathing, and the very pulsations of the life of nature, in
+these calm hours, are to be read in these changing tints and shadows
+and ripples, and in the mirage-bewildered outlines of the islands in
+the bay. It is this incessant shifting of relations, this perpetual
+substitution of fantastic for real values, this inability to trust your
+own eye or ear unless the mind makes its own corrections,--that gives
+such an inexhaustible attraction to life beside the ocean. The
+sea-change comes to you without your waiting to be drowned. You must
+recognize the working of your own imagination and allow for it. When,
+for instance, the sea-fog settles down around us at nightfall, it
+sometimes grows denser and denser till it apparently becomes more solid
+than the pavements of the town, or than the great globe itself; and
+when the fog-whistles go wailing on through all the darkened hours,
+they seem to be signalling not so much for a lost ship as for a lost
+island.
+
+How unlike are those weird and gloomy nights to this sunny noon, when I
+rest my oars in this sheltered bay, where a small lagoon makes in
+behind Coaster's Harbor Island, and the very last breath and murmur of
+the ocean are left outside! The coming tide steals to the shore in
+waves so light they are a mere shade upon the surface till they break,
+and then die speechless for one that has a voice. And even those rare
+voices are the very most confidential and silvery whispers in which
+Nature ever spoke to man; the faintest summer insect seems resolute and
+assured beside them; and yet it needs but an indefinite multiplication
+of these sounds to make up the thunder of the surf. It is so still that
+I can let the wherry drift idly along the shore, and can watch the life
+beneath the water. The small fry cluster and evade between me and the
+brink; the half-translucent shrimp glides gracefully undisturbed, or
+glances away like a flash if you but touch the surface; the crabs
+waddle or burrow, the smaller species mimicking unconsciously the hue
+of the soft green sea-weed, and the larger looking like motionless
+stones, covered with barnacles and decked with fringing weeds. I am
+acquainted with no better Darwinian than the crab; and however clumsy
+he may be when taken from his own element, he has a free and floating
+motion which is almost graceful in his own yielding and buoyant home.
+It is so with all wild creatures, but especially with those of water
+and air. A gull is not reckoned an especially graceful bird, but yonder
+I see one, snowy white, that has come to fish in this safe lagoon, and
+it dips and rises on its errands as lightly as a butterfly or a
+swallow. Beneath that neighboring causeway the water-rats run over the
+stones, lithe and eager and alert, the body carried low, the head
+raised now and then like a hound's, the tail curving gracefully and
+aiding the poise; now they are running to the water as if to drink, now
+racing for dear life along the edge, now fairly swimming, then devoting
+an interval to reflection, like squirrels, then again searching over a
+pile of sea-weed and selecting some especial tuft, which is carried,
+with long, sinuous leaps, to the unseen nest. Indeed, man himself is
+graceful in his unconscious and direct employments: the poise of a
+fisherman, for instance, the play of his arm, the cast of his line or
+net,--these take the eye as do the stealthy movements of the hunter,
+the fine attitudes of the wood-chopper, the grasp of the sailor on the
+helm. A haystack and a boat are always picturesque objects, and so are
+the men who are at work to build or use them. So is yonder stake-net,
+glistening in the noonday light,--the innumerable meshes drooping in
+soft arches from the high stakes, and the line of floats stretching
+shoreward, like tiny stepping-stones; two or three row-boats are
+gathered round it, with fishermen in red or blue shirts, while one
+white sail-boat hovers near. And I have looked down on our beach in
+spring, at sunset, and watched them drawing nets for the young herring,
+when the rough men looked as graceful as the nets they drew, and the
+horseman who directed might have been Redgauntlet on the Solway Sands.
+
+I suppose it is from this look of natural fitness that a windmill is
+always such an appropriate object by the sea-shore. It is simply a
+four-masted schooner, stranded on a hill-top, and adapting itself to a
+new sphere of duty. It can have needed but a slight stretch of
+invention in some seaman to combine these lofty vans, and throw over
+them a few remodelled sails. The principle of their motion is that by
+which a vessel beats to windward; the miller spreads or reefs his
+sails, like a sailor,--reducing them in a high wind to a mere
+"pigeon-wing" as it is called, two or three feet in length, or in some
+cases even scudding under bare poles. The whole structure vibrates and
+creaks under rapid motion, like a mast; and the angry vans,
+disappointed of progress, are ready to grind to powder all that comes
+within their grasp, as they revolve hopelessly in this sea of air.
+
+When the sun grows hot, I like to take refuge in a sheltered nook
+beside Goat Island Lighthouse, where the wharf shades me, and the
+resonant plash of waters multiplies itself among the dark piles,
+increasing the delicious sense of coolness. While the noonday bells
+ring twelve, I take my rest. Round the corner of the pier the
+fishing-boats come gliding in, generally with a boy asleep forward, and
+a weary man at the helm; one can almost fancy that the boat itself
+looks weary, having been out since the early summer sunrise. In
+contrast to this expression of labor ended, the white pleasure-boats
+seem but to be taking a careless stroll by water; while a skiff full of
+girls drifts idly along the shore, amid laughter and screaming and much
+aimless splash. More resolute and business-like, the boys row their
+boat far up the bay; then I see a sudden gleam of white bodies, and
+then the boat is empty, and the surrounding water is sprinkled with
+black and bobbing heads. The steamboats look busier yet, as they go
+puffing by at short intervals, and send long waves up to my retreat;
+and then some schooner sails in, full of life, with a white ripple
+round her bows, till she suddenly rounds to drops anchor, and is still.
+Opposite me, on the landward side of the bay, the green banks slope to
+the water; on yonder cool piazza there is a young mother who swings her
+baby in the hammock, or a white-robed figure pacing beneath the
+trailing vines. Peace and lotus-eating on shore; on the water, even in
+the stillest noon, there are life and sparkle and continual change.
+
+One of those fishermen whose boats have just glided to their moorings
+is to me a far more interesting person than any of his mates, though he
+is perhaps the only one among them with whom I have never yet exchanged
+a word. There is good reason for it; he has been deaf and dumb since
+boyhood. He is reported to be the boldest sailor among all these daring
+men; he is the last to retreat before the coming storm; the first after
+the storm to venture through the white and whirling channels, between
+dangerous ledges, to which others give a wider berth. I do not wonder
+at this, for think how much of the awe and terror of the tempest must
+vanish if the ears be closed! The ominous undertone of the waves on the
+beach and the muttering thunder pass harmless by him. How infinitely
+strange it must be to have the sight of danger, but not the sound!
+Fancy such a deprivation in war, for instance, where it is the sounds,
+after all, that haunt the memory the longest; the rifle's crack, the
+irregular shots of skirmishers, the long roll of alarm, the roar of
+great guns. This man would have missed them all. Were a broadside from
+an enemy's gunboat to be discharged above his head, he would not hear
+it; he would only recognize, by some jarring of his other senses, the
+fierce concussion of the air.
+
+How much deeper seems his solitude than that of any other "lone fisher
+on the lonely sea"! Yet all such things are comparative; and while the
+others contrast that wave-tossed isolation with the cheeriness of home,
+his home is silent too. He has a wife and children; they all speak, but
+he hears not their prattle or their complaints. He summons them with
+his fingers, as he summons the fishes, and they are equally dumb to
+him. Has he a special sympathy with those submerged and voiceless
+things? Dunfish, in the old newspapers, were often called "dumb'd
+fish"; and they perchance come to him as to one of their kindred. They
+may have learned, like other innocent things, to accept this defect of
+utterance, and even imitate it. I knew a deaf-and-dumb woman whose
+children spoke and heard; but while yet too young for words, they had
+learned that their mother was not to be reached in that way; they never
+cried or complained before her, and when most excited would only
+whisper. Her baby ten months old, if disturbed in the night, would
+creep to her and touch her lips, to awaken her, but would make no noise.
+
+One might fancy that all men who have an agonizing sorrow or a fearful
+secret would be drawn by irresistible attraction into the society of
+the deaf and dumb. What awful passions might not be whispered, what
+terror safely spoken, in the charmed circle round yonder silent
+boat,--a circle whose centre is a human life which has not all the
+susceptibilities of life, a confessional where even the priest cannot
+hear! Would it not relieve sorrow to express itself, even if unheeded?
+What more could one ask than a dumb confidant? and if deaf also, so
+much the safer. To be sure, he would give you neither absolution nor
+guidance; he could render nothing in return, save a look or a clasp of
+the hand; nor can the most gifted or eloquent friendship do much more.
+Ah! but suddenly the thought occurs, suppose that the defect of
+hearing, as of tongue, were liable to be loosed by an overmastering
+emotion, and that by startling him with your hoarded confidence you
+were to break the spell! The hint is too perilous; let us row away.
+
+A few strokes take us to the half-submerged wreck of a lime-schooner
+that was cut to the water's edge, by a collision in a gale, twelve
+months ago. The water kindled the lime, the cable was cut, the vessel
+drifted ashore and sunk, still blazing, at this little beach. When I
+saw her, at sunset, the masts had been cut away, and the flames held
+possession on board. Fire was working away in the cabin, like a live
+thing, and sometimes glared out of the hatchway; anon it clambered
+along the gunwale, like a school-boy playing, and the waves chased it
+as in play; just a flicker of flame, then a wave would reach up to
+overtake it; then the flames would be, or seem to be, where the water
+had been; and finally, as the vessel lay careened, the waves took
+undisturbed possession of the lower gunwale, and the flames of the
+upper. So it burned that day and night; part red with fire, part black
+with soaking; and now twelve months have made all its visible parts
+look dry and white, till it is hard to believe that either fire or
+water has ever touched it. It lies over on its bare knees, and a single
+knee, torn from the others, rests imploringly on the shore, as if that
+had worked its way to land, and perished in act of thanksgiving. At low
+tide, one half the frame is lifted high in air, like a dead tree in the
+forest.
+
+Perhaps all other elements are tenderer in their dealings with what is
+intrusted to them than is the air. Fire, at least, destroys what it has
+ruined; earth is warm and loving, and it moreover conceals; water is at
+least caressing,--it laps the greater part of this wreck with
+protecting waves, covers with sea-weeds all that it can reach, and
+protects with incrusting shells. Even beyond its grasp it tosses soft
+pendants of moss that twine like vine-tendrils, or sway in the wind. It
+mellows harsh colors into beauty, and Ruskin grows eloquent over the
+wave-washed tint of some tarry, weather-beaten boat. But air is
+pitiless: it dries and stiffens all outline, and bleaches all color
+away, so that you can hardly tell whether these ribs belonged to a ship
+or an elephant; and yet there is a certain cold purity in the shapes it
+leaves, and the birds it sends to perch upon these timbers are a more
+graceful company than lobsters or fishes. After all, there is something
+sublime in that sepulture of the Parsees, who erect near every village
+a dokhma, or Tower of Silence, upon whose summit they may bury their
+dead in air.
+
+Thus widely may one's thoughts wander from a summer boat. But the
+season for rowing is a long one, and far outlasts in Oldport the stay
+of our annual guests. Sometimes in autumnal mornings I glide forth over
+water so still, it seems as if saturated by the Indian-summer with its
+own indefinable calm. The distant islands lift themselves on white
+pedestals of mirage; the cloud-shadows rest softly on Conanicut; and
+what seems a similar shadow on the nearer slopes of Fort Adams is in
+truth but a mounted battery, drilling, which soon moves and slides
+across the hazy hill like a cloud.
+
+I hear across nearly a mile of water the faint, Sharp orders and the
+sonorous blare of the trumpet That follows each command; the horsemen
+gallop and wheel; suddenly the band within the fort strikes up for
+guard-mounting, and I have but to shut my eyes to be carried back to
+warlike days that passed by,--was it centuries ago? Meantime, I float
+gradually towards Brenton's Cove; the lawns that reach to the water's
+edge were never so gorgeously green in any summer, and the departure of
+the transient guests gives to these lovely places an air of cool
+seclusion; when fashion quits them, the imagination is ready to move
+in. An agreeable sense of universal ownership comes over the
+winter-staying mind in Oldport. I like to keep up this little semblance
+of habitation on the part of our human birds of passage; it is very
+pleasant to me, and perhaps even pleasanter to them, that they should
+call these emerald slopes their own for a month or two; but when they
+lock the doors in autumn, the ideal key reverts into my hands, and it
+is evident that they have only been "tenants by the courtesy," in the
+fine legal phrase. Provided they stay here long enough to attend to
+their lawns and pay their taxes, I am better satisfied than if these
+estates were left to me the whole year round.
+
+The tide takes the boat nearer to the fort; the horsemen ride more
+conspicuously, with swords and trappings that glisten in the sunlight,
+while the white fetlocks of the horses twinkle in unison as they move.
+One troop-horse without a rider wheels and gallops with the rest, and
+seems to revel in the free motion. Here also the tide reaches or seems
+to reach the very edge of the turf; and when the light battery gallops
+this way, it is as if it were charging on my floating fortress. Upon
+the other side is a scene of peace; and a fisherman sings in his boat
+as he examines the floats of his stake-net, hand over hand. A white
+gull hovers close above him, and a dark one above the horsemen, fit
+emblems of peace and war. The slightest sounds, the rattle of an oar,
+the striking of a hoof against a stone, are borne over the water to an
+amazing distance, as if the calm bay amid its seeming quiet, were
+watchful of the slightest noise. But look! in a moment the surface is
+rippled, the sky is clouded, a swift change comes over the fitful mood
+of the season; the water looks colder and deeper, the greensward
+assumes a chilly darkness, the troopers gallop away to their stables,
+and the fisherman rows home. That indefinable expression which
+separates autumn from summer creeps almost in an instant over all.
+Soon, even upon this Isle of Peace, it will be winter.
+
+Each season, as winter returns, I try in vain to comprehend this
+wonderful shifting of expression that touches even a thing so
+essentially unchanging as the sea. How delicious to all the senses is
+the summer foam above yonder rock; in winter the foam is the same, the
+sparkle as radiant, the hue of the water scarcely altered; and yet the
+effect is, by comparison, cold, heavy, and leaden. It is like that
+mysterious variation which chiefly makes the difference between one
+human face and another; we call it by vague names, and cannot tell in
+what it lies; we only know that when expression changes, all is gone.
+No warmth of color, no perfection of outline can supersede those
+subtile influences which make one face so winning that all human
+affection gravitates to its spell, and another so cold or repellent
+that it dwells forever in loneliness, and no passionate heart draws
+near. I can fancy the ocean beating in vague despair against its shores
+in winter, and moaning, "I am as beautiful, as restless, as untamable
+as ever: why are my cliffs left desolate? why am I not loved as I was
+loved in summer?"
+
+
+
+MADAM DELIA'S EXPECTATIONS.
+
+Madam Delia sat at the door of her show-tent, which, as she discovered
+too late, had been pitched on the wrong side of the Parade. It was
+"Election day" in Oldport, and there must have been a thousand people
+in the public square; there were really more than the four policemen on
+duty could properly attend to, so that half of them had leisure to step
+into Madam Delia's tent, and see little Gerty and the rattlesnakes. It
+was past the appointed hour; but the exhibition had never yet been
+known to open for less than ten spectators, and even the addition of
+the policemen only made eight. So the mistress of the show sat in
+resolute expectation, a little defiant of the human race. It was her
+thirteenth annual tour, and she knew mankind.
+
+Surely there were people enough; surely they had money enough; surely
+they were easily pleased. They gathered in crowds to hear crazy Mrs.
+Green denouncing the city government for sending her to the poorhouse
+in a wagon instead of a carriage. They thronged to inspect the load of
+hay that was drawn by the two horses whose harness had been cut to
+pieces, and then repaired by Denison's Eureka Cement. They all bought
+whips with that unfailing readiness which marks a rural crowd; they
+bought packages of lead-pencils with a dollar so skilfully distributed
+through every six parcels that the oldest purchaser had never found
+more than ten cents in his. They let the man who cured neuralgia rub
+his magic curative on their foreheads, and allowed the man who cleaned
+watch-chains to dip theirs in the purifying powder. They twirled the
+magic arrow, which never by any chance rested at the corner
+compartments where the gold watches and the heavy bracelets were piled,
+but perpetually recurred to the side stations, and indicated only a
+beggarly prize of india-rubber sleeve-buttons. They bought ten cents'
+worth of jewelry, obtaining a mingled treasure of two breast-pins, a
+plain gold ring, an enamelled ring, and "a piece of California gold."
+But still no added prizes in the human lottery fell to the show-tent of
+Madam Delia.
+
+As time went on and the day grew warmer, the crowd grew visibly less
+enterprising, and business flagged. The man with the lifting-machine
+pulled at the handles himself, a gratuitous exhibition before a circle
+of boys now penniless. The man with the metallic polish dipped and
+redipped his own watch-chain. The men at the booths sat down to lunch
+upon the least presentable of their own pies. The proprietor of the
+magic arrow, who had already two large breastpins on his dirty shirt,
+selected from his own board another to grace his coat-collar, as if
+thereby to summon back the waning fortunes of the day. But Madam Delia
+still sat at her post, undaunted. She kept her eye on two sauntering
+militia-men in uniform, but they only read her sign and seated
+themselves on the curbstone, to smoke. Then a stout black soldier came
+in sight; but he turned and sat down at a table to eat oysters, served
+by a vast and smiling matron of his own race. But even this, though
+perhaps the most wholly cheerful exhibition that the day yielded, had
+no charms for Madam Delia. Her own dinner was ordered at the tavern
+after the morning show; and where is the human being who does not
+resent the spectacle of another human being who dines earlier than
+himself?
+
+It grew warmer, so warm that the canvas walls of the tent seemed to
+grasp a certain armful of heat and keep it inexorably in; so warm that
+the out-of-door man was dozing as he leaned against the tent-stake, and
+only recovered himself at the sound of Madam Delia's penetrating voice,
+and again began to summon people in, though there was nobody within
+hearing. It was so warm that Mr. De Marsan, born Bangs, the wedded
+husband of Madam Delia, dozed as he walked up and down the sidewalk,
+and had hardly voice enough to testify, as an unconcerned spectator, to
+the value of the show. Only the unwearied zeal of the showwoman defied
+alike thermometer and neglect, She kept her eye on everything,--on Old
+Bill as he fed the monkeys within, on Monsieur Comstock as he hung the
+trapeze for the performance, on the little girls as they tried to
+peddle their songs, on the sleepy out-of-door man, and on the people
+who did not draw near. If she could, she would have played all the
+parts in her own small company, and would have put the inexhaustible
+nervous energies of her own New England nature (she was born at
+Meddibemps, State of Maine) into all. Apart from this potent stimulus,
+not a soul in the establishment, save little Gerty, possessed any
+energy whatever. Old Bill had unfortunately never learned total
+abstinence from the wild animals among which he had passed his life;
+Monsieur Comstock's brains had chiefly run into his arms and legs; and
+Mr. De Marsan, the nominal head of the establishment, was a peaceful
+Pennsylvanian, who was wont to move as slowly as if he were one of
+those processions that take a certain number of hours to pass a given
+point. This Madam Delia understood and expected; he was an innocent who
+was to be fed, clothed, and directed; but his languor was no excuse for
+the manifest feebleness of the out-of-door man. "That man don't know
+how to talk no more 'n nothin' at all," said Madam Delia reproachfully,
+to the large policeman who stood by her. "He never speaks up bold to
+nobody. Why don't he tell 'em what's inside the tent? I don't want him
+to say no more 'n the truth, but he might tell that. Tell 'em about
+Gerty, you nincum! Tell 'em about the snakes. Tell 'em what Comstock
+is. 'T ain't the real original Comstock" (this to the policeman), "it's
+only another that used to perform with him in Comstock Brothers. This
+one can't swaller, so we leave out the knives."
+
+"Where's t' other?" said the sententious policeman, whose ears were
+always open for suspicious disappearances.
+
+"Didn't you hear?" cried the incredulous lady. "Scattered! Gone! Went
+off one day with a box of snakes and two monkeys. Come, now, you must
+have heard. We had a sight of trouble pay-in' detectives."
+
+"What for a looking fellow was he?" said the policeman.
+
+"Dark complected," was the reply. "Black mustache. He understood his
+business, I tell you now. Swallered five or six knives to onst, and
+give good satisfaction to any audience. It was him that brought us
+Gerty and Anne,--that's the other little girl. I didn't know as they
+was his children, and didn't know as they was, but one day he said he
+got 'em from an old woman in New York, and that was all he knew."
+
+"They're smart," said the man, whom Gerty had just coaxed into paying
+three cents instead of two for Number Six of the "Singer's Journal,"--a
+dingy little sheet, containing a song about a fat policeman, which she
+had brought to his notice.
+
+"You'd better believe it," said Madam Delia, proudly. "At least Gerty
+is; Anne ain't. I tell 'em, Gerty knows enough for both. Anne don't
+know nothin', and what she does know she don't know sartin. All she can
+do is just to hang on: she's the strongest and she does the heavy
+business on the trapeze and parallel bars."
+
+"Is Gerty good on that?" said the public guardian.
+
+"I tell you," said the head of the establishment.--"Go and dress,
+children! Five minutes!"
+
+All this time Madam Delia had been taking occasional fees from the
+tardy audience, had been making change, detecting counterfeit currency,
+and discerning at a glance the impostures of one deceitful boy who
+claimed to have gone out on a check and lost it. At last Stephen Blake
+and his little sister entered, and the house was regarded as full.
+These two revellers had drained deep the cup of "Election-day"
+excitement. They had twirled all the arrows, bought all the jewelry,
+inspected all the colored eggs, blown at all the spirometers, and
+tasted all the egg-pop which the festal day required. These delights
+exhausted, they looked round for other worlds to conquer, saw Madam
+Delia at her tent-door, and were conquered by her.
+
+She did, indeed, look energetic and comely as she sat at the receipt of
+custom, her smooth black hair relieved by gold ear-rings, her cotton
+velvet sack by a white collar, and her dark gingham dress by a cheap
+breastpin and by linen cuffs not very much soiled. The black leather
+bag at her side had a well-to-do look; but all else in the
+establishment looked a little poverty-stricken. The tent was made of
+very worn and soiled canvas, and was but some twenty-five feet square.
+There were no seats, and the spectators sat on the grass. There was a
+very small stage raised some six feet; this was covered with some
+strips of old carpet, and surrounded by a few old and tattered
+curtains. Through their holes you could easily see the lithe brown
+shoulders of the little girls as they put on their professional suits;
+and, on the other side, Monsieur Comstock, scarcely hidden by the
+drapery, leaned against a cross-bar, and rested his chin upon his
+tattooed arms as he counted the spectators. Among these, Mr. De Marsan,
+pacing slowly, distributed copies of this programme:--
+
+  THIRTEENTH ANNUAL TOUR.
+  ----
+  MADAM DELIA'S MUSEUM AND VARIETY COMBINATION-WILL EXHIBIT.
+  ----
+  PROCLAMATION TO THE PUBLIC.--The Proprietors would say that
+  they have abandoned the old and played-out practice of decorating
+  the outer walls of all principal streets with flaming Posters and
+  Handbills, and have adopted the congenial, and they trust
+  successful, plan of advertising with Programmes, giving a full
+  and accurate description as now organized, which will be
+  distributed in Hotels, Saloons, Factories, Workshops, and all
+  private dwellings, by their Special Agents, three days before the
+  exhibition takes place.
+  ----
+       MADAM DELIA WITH HER
+         PET SNAKES.
+         MISS GERTY,
+      THE CHILD WONDER,
+    DANSEUSE AND CONTORTIONIST,
+
+  will appear in her wonderful feats at each performance.
+
+        MONS. COMSTOCK,
+   THE CHAMPION SWORD-SWALLOWER,
+
+  will also exhibit his wonderful power of swallowing Five Swords,
+  measuring from 14 to 22 inches in length.
+
+   It is not so much the beauty of this feat
+        that makes it so remarkable,
+            as its seeming
+            impossibility.
+  ----
+         MASTER BOBBY,
+  THE BANJO SOLOIST AND BURLESQUE.
+  ----
+        COMIC ACROBAT,
+  BY MISS GERTY AND MONS. COMSTOCK.
+  ----
+          MADAM DELIA,
+  THE WONDERFUL AND ORIGINAL SNAKE-TAMER,
+    with her Pets, measuring
+  12 feet in length and weighing 50 lbs.
+      A pet Rattlesnake, 15 years of age, captured
+          on the Prairies of Illinois,--
+              oldest on exhibition.
+  ----
+      In connection with this Exhibition there are
+      ANT-EATERS, AFRICAN MONKEYS, &C.
+    Cosmoramic Stereoscopic Scenes in the United States and
+        other Countries, including a view of
+      the Funeral Procession of President Taylor,
+          which is alone worth the price
+               of admission.
+  ----
+  Exhibition every half-hour, during day and evening.
+        Secure your seats early!
+  ----
+         ADMISSION 20 CENTS.
+  Particular care will be taken and
+  nothing shall occur to offend the most fastidious.
+
+
+Stephen and his little sister strolled about the tent meanwhile. The
+final preparations went slowly on. The few spectators teased the
+ant-eater in one corner, or the first violin in another. One or two
+young farmers' boys were a little uproarious with egg-pop, and danced
+awkward breakdowns at the end of the tent. Then a cracked bell sounded
+and the curtain rose, showing hardly more of the stage than was plainly
+visible before.
+
+Little Gerty, aged ten, came in first, all rumpled gauze and tarnished
+spangles, to sing. In a poor little voice, feebler and shriller than
+the chattering of the monkeys, she sang a song about the "Grecian
+Bend," and enacted the same, walking round and round the stage whirling
+her tawdry finery. Then Anne, aged twelve, came in as a boy and joined
+her. Both the girls had rather pretty features, blue eyes, and tightly
+curling hair; both had pleasing faces; but Anne was solid and
+phlegmatic, while Gerty was keen and flexible as a weasel, and almost
+as thin. Presently Anne went out and reappeared as "Master Bobby" of
+the hills, making love to Gerty in that capacity, through song and
+dance. Then Gerty was transformed by the addition of a single scarf
+into a "Highland Maid," and danced a fling; this quite gracefully, to
+the music of two violins. Exeunt the children and enter "Madam Delia
+and her pets."
+
+The show-woman had laid aside her velvet sack and appeared with bare
+neck and arms. Over her shoulders hung a rattlesnake fifteen feet long,
+while a smaller specimen curled from each hand. The reptiles put their
+cold, triangular faces against hers, they touched her lips, they
+squirmed around her; she tied their tails together in elastic knots
+that soon undid; they reared their heads above her black locks till she
+looked like a stage Medusa, then laid themselves lovingly on her
+shoulder, and hissed at the audience. Then she lay down on the stage
+and pillowed her head on the writhing mass. She opened her black bag
+and took out a tiny brown snake which she placidly transferred to her
+bosom; then turned to a barrel into which she plunged her arm and drew
+out a black, hissing coil of mingled heads and tails. Her keen,
+goodnatured face looked cheerfully at the audience through it all, and
+took away the feeling of disgust, and something of the excitement of
+fear.
+
+The lady and the pets retiring, Gerty's hour of glory came. She hated
+singing and only half enjoyed character dancing, but in posturing she
+was in her glory. Dressed in soiled tights that showed every movement
+of her little body, she threw herself upon the stage with a
+hand-spring, then kissed her hand to the audience, and followed this by
+a back-somerset. Then she touched her head by anslow effort to her
+heels; then turned away, put her palms to the ground, raised her heels
+gradually in the air, and in this inverted position kissed first one
+hand, then the other, to the spectators. Then she crossed the stage in
+a series of somersets, then rolled back like a wheel; then held a hoop
+in her two hands and put her whole slender body through it, limb after
+limb. Then appeared Monsieur Comstock. He threw a hand-spring and gave
+her his feet to stand upon; she grasped them with her hands and
+inverted herself, her feet pointing skyward. Then he resumed the
+ordinary attitude of rational beings and she lay on her back across his
+uplifted palms, which supported her neck and feet; then she curled
+herself backward around his waist, almost touching head and heels.
+Indeed, whatever the snakes had done to Madam Delia, Gerty seemed
+possessed with a wish to do to Monsieur Comstock, all but the kissing.
+Then that eminent foreigner vanished, and the odors of his pipe came
+faintly through the tattered curtain, while Anne entered to help Gerty
+in the higher branches.
+
+A double trapeze--just two horizontal bars suspended at different
+heights by ropes and straps--had been swung from the tent-roof. Gerty
+ascended to the upper bar, hung from it by her hand, then by her knees,
+then by her feet, then sat upon it, leaned slowly backward, suddenly
+dropped, and as some children in the audience shrieked in terror, she
+caught by her feet in the side-ropes and came up smiling. It was a part
+of the play. Then another trapeze was hung, and was set swinging toward
+the first, and Gerty flung herself in triumph, with varied somersets,
+from one to the other, while Anne rattled the banjo below and sang,
+
+  "I fly through the air with the greatest of ease,
+  A daring young man on the flying trapeeze."
+
+Then the child stopped to rest, while all hands were clapped and only
+the unreverberating turf kept the feet from echoing also. People
+flocked in from outside, and Madam Delia was kept busy at the door.
+Then Gerty came down to the lower bar, while Anne ascended the upper,
+and hung to it solidly by her knees. Thus suspended, she put out her
+hands to Gerty, who put her feet into them, and hung head-downward.
+There was a shuddering pause, while the two children clung thus
+dizzily, but the audience had seen enough of peril to lose all fear.
+
+"Those straps are safe?" asked Stephen of Mr. De Marsan.
+
+"Law bless you, yes," replied that pleasant functionary. "Comstock's
+been on 'em."
+
+Precisely as he spoke one of the straps gave downward a little, and
+then rested firm; it was not a half-inch, but it jarred the performers.
+
+"Gerty, I'm slipping," cried Anne. "We shall fall!"
+
+"No, we sha'n't, silly," said the other, quickly. "Hold on. Comstock,
+swing me the rope."
+
+Stephen Blake sprang to the stage and swung her the rope by which they
+had climbed to the upper bar. It fell short and Gerty missed it. Anne
+screamed, and slipped visibly.
+
+"You can't hold," said Gerty. "Let go my feet. Let me drop."
+
+"You'll be killed," called Anne, slipping still more.
+
+"Drop me, I say!" shouted the resolute Gerty, while the whole audience
+rose in excitement. Instantly the hands of the elder girl opened and
+down fell Gerty, headforemost, full twelve feet, striking heavily on
+her shoulder, while Anne, relieved of the weight, recovered easily her
+position and slipped down into Stephen's arms. She threw herself down
+beside the little comrade whose presence of mind had saved at least one
+of them.
+
+"O Gerty, are you killed?" she said.
+
+"I want Delia," gasped the child.
+
+Madam Delia was at her side already, having rushed from the door, where
+a surging host of boys had already swept in gratis. Gerty writhed in
+pain. Stephen felt her collar-bone and found it bent like a horseshoe;
+and she fainted before she could be taken from the stage.
+
+When restored, she was quite exhausted, and lay for days perfectly
+subdued and gentle, sleeping most of the time. During these days she
+had many visitors, and Mr. De Marsan had ample opportunity for the
+simple enjoyments of his life, tobacco and conversation. Stephen Blake
+and his sister came often, and while she brought her small treasures to
+amuse Gerty, he freely pumped the proprietor. Madam Delia had been in
+the snake business, it appeared, since early youth, thirteen years ago.
+She had been in De Marsan's employ for eight years before her marriage,
+and his equal and lawful partner for five years since. At first they
+had travelled as side-show to a circus, but that was not so good.
+
+"The way is, you see," said Mr. De Marsan, "to take a place like
+Providence, that's a good showtown, right along, and pitch your tent
+and live there. Keep-still pays, they say. You'd have to hire a piece
+of ground anywhere, for five or six dollars a day, and it don't cost
+much more by the week. You can board for four or five dollars a week,
+but if you board by the day it's a dollar and a half." To which words
+of practical wisdom Stephen listened with pleased interest. It was not
+so very many years since he had been young enough to wish to run away
+with a circus; and by encouraging these simple confidences, he brought
+round the conversation to the children.
+
+But here he was met by a sheer absence of all information as to their
+antecedents. The original and deceitful Comstock had brought them and
+left them two years before. Madam Delia had received flattering offers
+to take her snakes and Gerty into circuses and large museums, but she
+had refused for the child's own sake. Did Gerty like it? Yes, she would
+like to be posturing all day; she could do anything she saw done; she
+"never needed to be taught nothin'," as Mr. De Marsan asserted with
+vigorous accumulation of negatives. He thought her father or mother
+must have been in the business, she took to it so easily; but she was
+just as smart at school in the winter, and at everything else. Was the
+life good for her? Yes, why not? Rough company and bad language? They
+could hear worse talk every day in the street. "Sometimes a feller
+would come in with too much liquor aboard," the showman admitted, "and
+would begin to talk his nonsense; but Comstock wouldn't ask nothin'
+better than to pitch such a feller out, especially if he should sarce
+the little gals. They were good little gals, and Delia set store by
+'em."
+
+When Stephen and his sister went back that night to their kind
+hostesses, Miss Martha and Miss Amy, the soft hearts of those dear old
+ladies were melted in an instant by the story of Gerty's courage and
+self-sacrifice. They had lived peacefully all their lives in that
+motherly old house by the bay-side, where successive generations had
+lived before them. The painted tiles around the open fire looked as if
+their fops and fine ladies had stepped out of the Spectator and the
+Tatler; the great mahogany chairs looked as hospitable as when the
+French officers were quartered in the house during the Revolution, and
+its Quaker owner, Miss Martha's grand-uncle, had carried out a seat
+that the weary sentinel might sit down. Descended from one of those
+families of Quaker beauties whom De Lauzun celebrated, they bore the
+memory of those romantic lives, as something very sacred, in hearts
+which perhaps held as genuine romances of their own. Miss Martha's
+sweet face was softened by advancing deafness and by that gentle,
+appealing look which comes when mind and memory grow a little dimmer,
+though the loving nature knows no change. "Sister Amy says," she meekly
+confessed, "that I am losing my memory. But I do not care very much.
+There are so few things worth remembering!"
+
+They kept house together in sweet accord, and were indeed trained in
+the neat Quaker ways so thoroughly, that they always worked by the same
+methods. In opinion and emotion they were almost duplicates. Yet the
+world holds no absolute and perfect correspondence, and it is useless
+to affect to conceal--what was apparent to any intimate guest--that
+there was one domestic question on which perfect sympathy was wanting.
+During their whole lives they had never been able to take precisely the
+same view of the best method of grinding Indian meal. Miss Martha
+preferred to have it from a wind-mill; while Miss Amy was too
+conscientious to deny that she thought it better when prepared by a
+water-mill. She said firmly, though gently, that it seemed to her "less
+gritty."
+
+Living their whole lives in this scarcely broken harmony by the margin
+of the bay, they had long built together one castle in the air. They
+had talked of it for many an hour by their evening fire, and they had
+looked from their chamber windows toward the Red Light upon Rose Island
+to see if it were coming true. This vision was, that they were to awake
+some morning after an autumnal storm, and to find an unknown vessel
+ashore behind the house, without name or crew or passengers; only there
+was to be one sleeping child, with aristocratic features and a few
+yards of exquisite embroidery. Years had passed, and their lives were
+waning, without a glimpse of that precious waif of gentle blood. Once
+in an October night Miss Martha had been awakened by a crash, and
+looking out had seen that their pier had been carried away, and that a
+dark vessel lay stranded with her bowsprit in the kitchen window. But
+daylight revealed the schooner Polly Lawton, with a cargo of coal, and
+the dream remained unfulfilled. They had never revealed it, except to
+each other.
+
+Moved by a natural sympathy, Miss Martha went with Stephen to see the
+injured child. Gerty lay asleep on a rather dingy little mattress, with
+Mr. Comstock's overcoat rolled beneath her head. A day's illness will
+commonly make even the coarsest child look refined and interesting; and
+Gerty's physical organization was anything but coarse. Her pretty hair
+curled softly round her head; her delicate profile was relieved against
+the rough, dark pillow; and the tips of her little pink ears could not
+have been improved by art, though they might have been by soap and
+water. Warm tears came into Miss Martha's eyes, which were quickly
+followed from corresponding fountains in Madam Delia's.
+
+"Thy own child?" said or rather signalled Miss Martha, forming the
+letters softly with her lips. Stephen had his own reasons for leaving
+her to ask this question in all ignorance.
+
+"No, ma'am," said the show-woman. "Not much. Adopted."
+
+"Does thee know her parents?" This was similarly signalled.
+
+"No," said Madam Delia, rather coldly.
+
+"Does thee suppose that they were--"
+
+And here Miss Martha stopped, and the color came as suddenly and warmly
+to her cheeks as if Monsieur Comstock had offered to marry her, and to
+settle upon her the snakes as exclusive property. Madam Delia divined
+the question; she had so often found herself trying to guess the social
+position of Gerty's parents.
+
+"I don't know as I know," said she, slowly, "whether you ought to know
+anythin' about it. But I'll tell you what I know. That child's folks,"
+she added, mysteriously, "lived on Quality Hill."
+
+"Lived where?" said Miss Martha, breathless.
+
+"Upper crust," said the other, defining her symbol still further. "No
+middlins to 'em. Genteel as anybody. Just look here!"
+
+Madam Delia unclasped her leather bag, brought forth from it a mass of
+checks and tickets, some bird-seed, a small whip, a dog-collar, and a
+dingy morocco box. This held a piece of an old-fashioned enamelled
+ring, and a fragment of embroidered muslin marked "A."
+
+"She'd lived with me six months before she brought 'em," said the
+show-woman, whispering.
+
+The bit of handkerchief was enough. Was it a dream? thought the dear
+old lady. What the ocean had refused, was this sprite who had lived
+between earth and air to fulfil? Miss Martha bent softly over the
+bedside, resting her clean glove on the only dirty mattress it had ever
+touched, and quietly kissed the child. Then she looked up with a
+radiant face of perfect resolution.
+
+"Mrs. De Marsan," said she, with dignity that was almost solemnity, "I
+wish to adopt this child. No one can doubt thy kindness of heart, but
+thee must see that thee is in no condition to give her suitable care
+and Christian nurture."
+
+"That's a fact," interposed Madam Delia with a pang
+
+"Then thee will give her to me?" asked Miss Martha, firmly.
+
+Madam Delia threw her apron over her face, and choked and sobbed
+beneath it for several minutes. Then reappearing, "It's what I've
+always expected," said she. Then, with a tinge of suspicion, "Would you
+have taken her without the ring and handkerchief?"
+
+"Perhaps I should," said the other, gently. "But that seems to make it
+a clearer call."
+
+"Fair enough," said Madam Delia, submitting. "I ain't denyin' of it."
+Then she reflected and recommenced. "There never was such a smart
+performin' child as that since the world began. She can do just
+anythin', and just as easy! Time and again I might have hired her out
+to a circus, and she glad of the chance, mind you; but no, I would keep
+her safe to home. Then when she showed me the ring and the other
+things, all my expectations altered very sudden; I knowed we couldn't
+keep her, and I began to mistrust that she would somehow find her
+folks. I guess my rathers was that she should, considerin'; but I did
+wish it had been Anne, for she ain't got nothin' better in her than
+just to live genteel."
+
+"But Anne seems a nice child, too," said Miss Martha, consolingly.
+
+"Well, that's just what she is," replied Madam Delia, with some
+contempt. "But what is she for a contortionist? Ask Comstock what she's
+got in her! And how to run the show without Gerty, that's what beats
+me. Why, folks begin to complain already that we advertise swallerin',
+and yet don't swaller. But never you mind, ma'am, you shall have Gerty.
+You shall have her," she added, with a gulp, "if I have to sell out! Go
+ahead!" And again the apron went over her face.
+
+At this point, Gerty waked up with a little murmur, looked up at Miss
+Martha's kind face, and smiled a sweet, childish smile. Half asleep
+still, she put out one thin, muscular little hand, and went to sleep as
+the old lady took it in hers. A kiss awaked her.
+
+"What has thee been dreaming about, my little girl?" said Miss Martha.
+
+"Angels and things, I guess," said the child, somewhat roused.
+
+"Will thee go home with me and live?" said the lady.
+
+"Yes'm," replied Gerty, and went to sleep again.
+
+Two days later she was well enough to ride to Miss Martha's in a
+carriage, escorted by Madam Delia and by Anne, "that dull,
+uninteresting child," as Miss Amy had reluctantly described her, "so
+different from this graceful Adelaide." This romantic name was a rapid
+assumption of the soft-hearted Miss Amy's, but, once suggested, it was
+as thoroughly-fixed as if a dozen baptismal fonts had written it in
+water.
+
+Madam Delia was sustained, up to the time of Gerty's going, by a sense
+of self-sacrifice. But this emotion, like other strong stimulants, has
+its reactions. That remorse for a crime committed in vain, which Dr.
+Johnson thought the acutest of human emotions, is hardly more
+depressing than to discover that we have got beyond our depth in
+virtue, and are in water where we really cannot quite swim,--and this
+was the good woman's position. During her whole wandering though
+blameless life,--in her girlish days, when she charmed snakes at
+Meddibemps, or through her brief time of service as plain Car'line
+Prouty at the Biddeford mills, or when she ran away from her
+step-mother and took refuge among the Indians at Orono, or later, since
+she had joined her fate with that of De Marsan,--she had never been so
+severely tried.
+
+"That child was so smart," she said, beneath the evening canvas, to her
+sympathetic spouse. "I always expected when we got old we'd kinder
+retire on a farm or suthin', and let her and her husband--say Comstock,
+if he was young enough--run the business. And even after she showed us
+the ring and things, I thought likely she'd just come into her property
+somewheres and take care of us. I don't know as I ever thought she'd
+leave us, either way, and there she's gone."
+
+"She won't forget us," said the peaceful proprietor.
+
+"No," said the wife, "but it's lonesome. If it had only been Anne! I
+shall miss Gerty the worst kind. And it'll kill the show!"
+
+And to tell the truth, the show languished. Nothing but the happy
+acquisition of a Chinese giant nearly eight feet high, with slanting
+eyes and a long pigtail,--a man who did penance in his height for the
+undue brevity of his undersized nation,--would have saved the "museum."
+
+Meantime the neat proprieties of orderly life found but a poor disciple
+in Gerty. Her warm heart opened to the dear old ladies; but she found
+nothing familiar in this phantom of herself, this well-dressed little
+girl who, after a rapid convalescence, was introduced at school and
+"meeting" under the name of Adelaide. The school studies did not dismay
+her, but she played the jew's-harp at recess, and danced the clog-dance
+in india-rubbers, to the dismay of the little Misses Grundy, her
+companions. In the calisthenic exercises she threw beanbags with an
+untamed vigor that soon ripped the stitches of the bags, and sowed
+those vegetables in every crack of the school-room floor. There was a
+ladder in the garden, and it was some comfort to ascend it hand over
+hand upon the under side, or to hang by her toes from the upper rung,
+to the terror of her schoolmates.
+
+But she became ashamed of the hardness of her palms, and she grew in
+general weary of her life. Her clothes pinched her, so did her new
+boots; Madam Delia had gone to Providence with the show, and Gerty had
+not so much as seen the new Chinese giant.
+
+Of all days Sunday was the most objectionable, when she had to sit
+still in Friends' Meeting and think how pleasant it would be to hang by
+the knees, head downward, from the parapet of the gallery. She liked
+better the Seamen's Bethel, near by, where there was an aroma of tar
+and tarpaulin that suggested the odors of the show-tent, and where,
+when the Methodist exhorter gave out the hymn, "Howl, howl, ye winds of
+night," the choir rendered it with such vigor that it was like being at
+sea in a northeaster. But each week made her new life harder, until,
+having cried herself asleep one Saturday evening, she rose early the
+next morning for her orisons, which, I regret to say, were as follows:--
+
+"I must get out of this," quoth Gerty, "I must cut and run. I'll make
+it all right for the old ladies, for I'll send 'em Anne. She'll like it
+here first rate."
+
+She hunted up such remnants of her original wardrobe as had been
+thought worth washing and preserving, and having put them on, together
+with a hat whose trimmings had been vehemently burned by Miss Martha,
+she set out to seek her fortune. Of all her new possessions, she took
+only a pair of boots, and those she carried in her hand as she crept
+softly down stairs.
+
+"Save us!" exclaimed Biddy, who had been to a Mission Mass of
+incredible length, and was already sweeping the doorsteps. "Christmas!"
+she added, as a still more pious ejaculation, when the child said,
+"Good by, Biddy, I'm off now."
+
+"Where to, thin?" exclaimed Biddy.
+
+"To Providence," said Gerty. "But don't you tell."
+
+"But ye can't go the morn's mornin'," said Biddy. "It's Sunday and
+there's no cars."
+
+"There's legs," replied the child, briefly, as she closed the door.
+
+"It's much as iver," said the stumpy Hibernian, to herself, as she
+watched the twinkling retreat of those slim, but vigorous little
+members.
+
+They had been Gerty's support too long, in body and estate, for her to
+shrink from trusting them in a walk of a dozen or a score of miles. But
+the locomotion of Stephen's horse was quicker, and she did not get
+seriously tired before being overtaken, and--not without difficulty and
+some hot tears--coaxed back. Fortunately, Madam Delia came down from
+Providence that evening, on a very unexpected visit, and at the
+confidential hour of bedtime the child's heart was opened and made a
+revelation.
+
+"Won't you be mad, if I tell you something?" she said to Madam Delia,
+abruptly.
+
+"No," said the show-woman, with surprise.
+
+"Won't you let Comstock box my ears?"
+
+"I'll box his if he does," was the indignant answer. The gravest
+contest that had ever arisen in the museum was when Monsieur Comstock,
+teased beyond endurance, had thus taken the law into his own hands.
+
+"Well," said Gerty, after a pause, "I ain't a great lady, no more 'n
+nothin'. Them things I brought to you was Anne's."
+
+"Anne's things?" gasped Madam Delia,--"the ring and the piece of a
+handkerchief."
+
+"Yes, 'm," said Gerty, "and I've got the rest." And exploring her
+little trunk, she produced from a slit in the lining the other half of
+the ring, with the name "Anne Deering."
+
+"You naughty, naughty girl!" said Madam Delia. "How did you get 'em
+away from Anne?"
+
+"Coaxed her," said the child.
+
+"Well, how did you make her hush up about it?"
+
+"Told her I'd kill her if she said a single word," said Gerty,
+undauntedly. "I showed her Pa De Marsan's old dirk-knife and told her
+I'd stick it into her if she didn't hush. She was just such a
+'fraid-cat she believed me. She might have known I didn't mean nothin'.
+Now she can have 'em and be a lady. She was always tallkin' about bein'
+a lady, and that put it into my head."
+
+"What did she want to be a lady for?" asked Madam Delia, indignantly.
+
+"Said she wanted to have a parlor and dress tight. I don't want to be
+one of her old ladies. I want to stay with you, Delia, and learn the
+clog-dance." And she threw her arms round the show-woman's neck and
+cried herself to sleep.
+
+Never did the energetic proprietress of a Museum and Variety
+Combination feel a greater exultation than did Madam Delia that night.
+The child's offence was all forgotten in the delight of the discovery
+to which it led. If there had been expectations of social glories to
+accrue to the house of De Marsan through Gerty's social promotion, they
+melted away; and the more substantial delight of still having someone
+to love and to be proud of,--some object of tenderness warmer than
+snakes and within nearer reach than a Chinese giant,--this came in its
+stead. The show, too, was in a manner on its feet again. De Marsan said
+that he would rather have Gerty than a hundred-dollar bill. Madam Delia
+looked forward and saw herself sinking into the vale of years without a
+sigh,--reaching a period when a serpent fifteen feet long would cease
+to charm, or she to charm it,--and still having a source of pride and
+prosperity in this triumphant girl.
+
+The tent was in its glory on the day of Gerty's return; to be sure,
+nothing in particular had been washed except the face of Old Bill, but
+that alone was a marvel compared with which all "Election Day" was
+feeble, and when you add a paper collar, words can say no more.
+Monsieur Comstock also had that "ten times barbered" look which
+Shakespeare ascribes to Mark Antony, and which has belonged to that
+hero's successors in the histrionic profession ever since. His chin was
+unnaturally smooth, his mustache obtrusively perfumed, and nothing but
+the unchanged dirtiness of his hands still linked him, like Antaeus,
+with the earth. De Marsan had intended some personal preparation, but
+had been, as usual, in no hurry, and the appointed moment found him, as
+usual, in his shirt-sleeves. Madam Delia, however, wore a new breastpin
+and gave Gerty another. And the great new attraction, the Chinese
+giant, had put on a black broadcloth coat across his bony shoulders, in
+her honor, and made a vigorous effort to sit up straight, and appear at
+his ease when off duty. He habitually stooped a good deal in private
+life, as if there were no object in being eight feet high, except
+before spectators.
+
+Anne, the placid and imperturbable, was promoted to take the place that
+Gerty had rejected, in the gentle home of the good sisters. The secret
+of her birth, whatever it was, never came to light but, she took
+kindly, as Madam Delia had predicted, to "living genteel," and grew up
+into a well-behaved mediocrity, unregretful of the show-tent. Yet
+probably no one reared within the smell of sawdust ever quite outgrew
+all taste for "the profession," and Anne, even when promoted to good
+society, never missed seeing a performance when her wandering friends
+came by. If I told you under what name Gerty became a star in the
+low-comedy line, after her marriage, you would all recognize it; and if
+you had seen her in "Queen Pippin" or the "Shooting-Star" pantomime,
+you would wish to see her again. Her first child was named after Madam
+Delia, and proved to be a placid little thing, demure enough to have
+been born in a Quaker family, and exhibiting no contortions or
+gymnastics but those common to its years. And you may be sure that the
+retired show-woman found in the duties of brevet-grand-mother a glory
+that quite surpassed her expectations.
+
+
+
+SUNSHINE AND PETRARCH.
+
+Near my summer home there is a little cove or landing by the bay, where
+nothing larger than a boat can ever anchor. I sit above it now, upon
+the steep bank, knee-deep in buttercups, and amid grass so lush and
+green that it seems to ripple and flow instead of waving. Below lies a
+tiny beach, strewn with a few bits of drift-wood and some purple
+shells, and so sheltered by projecting walls that its wavelets plash
+but lightly. A little farther out the sea breaks more roughly over
+submerged rocks, and the waves lift themselves, before breaking, in an
+indescribable way, as if each gave a glimpse through a translucent
+window, beyond which all ocean's depths might be clearly seen, could
+one but hit the proper angle of vision. On the right side of my retreat
+a high wall limits the view, while close upon the left the crumbling
+parapet of Fort Greene stands out into the foreground, its verdant
+scarp so relieved against the blue water that each inward-bound
+schooner seems to sail into a cave of grass. In the middle distance is
+a white lighthouse, and beyond lie the round tower of old Fort Louis
+and the soft low hills of Conanicut.
+
+Behind me an oriole chirrups in triumph amid the birch-trees which wave
+around the house of the haunted window; before me a kingfisher pauses
+and waits, and a darting blackbird shows the scarlet on his wings.
+Sloops and schooners constantly come and go, careening in the wind,
+their white sails taking, if remote enough, a vague blue mantle from
+the delicate air. Sail-boats glide in the distance,--each a mere white
+wing of canvas,--or coming nearer, and glancing suddenly into the cove,
+are put as suddenly on the other tack, and almost in an instant seem
+far away. There is to-day such a live sparkle on the water, such a
+luminous freshness on the grass, that it seems, as is so often the case
+in early June, as if all history were a dream, and the whole earth were
+but the creation of a summer's day.
+
+If Petrarch still knows and feels the consummate beauty of these
+earthly things, it may seem to him some repayment for the sorrows of a
+life-time that one reader, after all this lapse of years, should choose
+his sonnets to match this grass, these blossoms, and the soft lapse of
+these blue waves. Yet any longer or more continuous poem would be out
+of place to-day. I fancy that this narrow cove prescribes the proper
+limits of a sonnet; and when I count the lines of ripple within yonder
+projecting wall, there proves to be room for just fourteen. Nature
+meets our whims with such little fitnesses. The words which build these
+delicate structures of Petrarch's are as soft and fine and
+close-textured as the sands upon this tiny beach, and their monotone,
+if such it be, is the monotone of the neighboring ocean. Is it not
+possible, by bringing such a book into the open air, to separate it
+from the grimness of commentators, and bring it back to life and light
+and Italy?
+
+The beautiful earth is the same as when this poetry and passion were
+new; there is the same sunlight, the same blue water and green grass;
+yonder pleasure-boat might bear, for aught we know, the friends and
+lovers of five centuries ago; Petrarch and Laura might be there, with
+Boccaccio and Fiammetta as comrades, and with Chaucer as their stranger
+guest. It bears, at any rate, if I know its voyagers, eyes as lustrous,
+voices as sweet. With the world thus young, beauty eternal, fancy free,
+why should these delicious Italian pages exist but to be tortured into
+grammatical examples? Is there no reward to be imagined for a
+delightful book that can match Browning's fantastic burial of a tedious
+one? When it has sufficiently basked in sunshine, and been cooled in
+pure salt air, when it has bathed in heaped clover, and been scented,
+page by page, with melilot, cannot its beauty once more blossom, and
+its buried loves revive?
+
+Emboldened by such influences, at least let me translate a sonnet, and
+see if anything is left after the sweet Italian syllables are gone.
+Before this continent was discovered, before English literature
+existed, when Chaucer was a child, these words were written. Yet they
+are to-day as fresh and perfect as these laburnum-blossoms that droop
+above my head. And as the variable and uncertain air comes freighted
+with clover-scent from yonder field, so floats through these long
+centuries a breath of fragrance, the memory of Laura.
+
+          SONNET 129.
+
+      "Lieti fiori e felici."
+    O joyous, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers!
+  'Mid which my queen her gracious footstep sets;
+     O plain, that keep'st her words for amulets
+  And hold'st her memory in thy leafy bowers!
+    O trees, with earliest green of spring-time hours,
+  And spring-time's pale and tender violets!
+      O grove, so dark the proud sun only lets
+  His blithe rays gild the outskirts of your towers!
+    O pleasant country-side! O purest stream,
+  That mirrorest her sweet face, her eyes so clear,
+  And of their living light can catch the beam!
+    I envy you her haunts so close and dear.
+  There is no rock so senseless but I deem
+  It burns with passion that to mine is near.
+
+
+Goethe compared translators to carriers, who convey good wine to
+market, though it gets unaccountably watered by the way. The more one
+praises a poem, the more absurd becomes one's position, perhaps, in
+trying to translate it. If it is so admirable--is the natural
+inquiry,--why not let it alone? It is a doubtful blessing to the human
+race, that the instinct of translation still prevails, stronger than
+reason; and after one has once yielded to it, then each untranslated
+favorite is like the trees round a backwoodsman's clearing, each of
+which stands, a silent defiance, until he has cut it down. Let us try
+the axe again. This is to Laura singing.
+
+          SONNET 134.
+
+  "Quando Amor i begli occhi a terra inchina."
+    When Love doth those sweet eyes to earth incline,
+  And weaves those wandering notes into a sigh
+  Soft as his touch, and leads a minstrelsy
+  Clear-voiced and pure, angelic and divine,
+    He makes sweet havoc in this heart of mine,
+  And to my thoughts brings transformation high,
+  So that I say, "My time has come to die,
+  If fate so blest a death for me design."
+    But to my soul thus steeped in joy the sound
+  Brings such a wish to keep that present heaven,
+  It holds my spirit back to earth as well.
+    And thus I live: and thus is loosed and wound
+  The thread of life which unto me was given
+  By this sole Siren who with us doth dwell.
+
+
+As I look across the bay, there is seen resting over all the hills, and
+even upon every distant sail, an enchanted veil of palest blue, that
+seems woven out of the very souls of happy days,--a bridal veil, with
+which the sunshine weds this soft landscape in summer. Such and so
+indescribable is the atmospheric film that hangs over these poems of
+Petrarch's; there is a delicate haze about the words, that vanishes
+when you touch them, and reappears as you recede. How it clings, for
+instance, around this sonnet!
+
+         SONNET 191.
+
+    "Aura che quelle chiome."
+    Sweet air, that circlest round those radiant tresses,
+  And floatest, mingled with them, fold on fold,
+  Deliciously, and scatterest that fine gold,
+  Then twinest it again, my heart's dear jesses,
+    Thou lingerest on those eyes, whose beauty presses
+  Stings in my heart that all its life exhaust,
+  Till I go wandering round my treasure lost,
+  Like some scared creature whom the night distresses.
+    I seem to find her now, and now perceive
+  How far away she is; now rise, now fall;
+  Now what I wish, now what is true, believe.
+    O happy air! since joys enrich thee all,
+  Rest thee; and thou, O stream too bright to grieve!
+  Why can I not float with thee at thy call?
+
+
+The airiest and most fugitive among Petrarch's love-poems, so far as I
+know,--showing least of that air of earnestness which he has contrived
+to impart to almost all,--is this little ode or madrigal. It is
+interesting to see, from this, that he could be almost conventional and
+courtly in moments when he held Laura farthest aloof; and when it is
+compared with the depths of solemn emotion in his later sonnets, it
+seems like the soft glistening of young birch-leaves against a
+background of pines.
+
+        CANZONE XXIII.
+
+  "Nova angeletta sovra l' ale accorta."
+  A new-born angel, with her wings extended,
+  Came floating from the skies to this fair shore,
+  Where, fate-controlled, I wandered with my sorrows.
+  She saw me there, alone and unbefriended,
+  She wove a silken net, and threw it o'er
+  The turf, whose greenness all the pathway borrows,
+  Then was I captured; nor could fears arise,
+  Such sweet seduction glimmered from her eyes.
+
+Turn from these light compliments to the pure and reverential
+tenderness of a sonnet like this:--
+
+        SONNET 223.
+
+  "Qual donna attende a gloriosa fama."
+    Doth any maiden seek the glorious fame
+  Of chastity, of strength, of courtesy?
+  Gaze in the eyes of that sweet enemy
+  Whom all the world doth as my lady name!
+    How honor grows, and pure devotion's flame,
+  How truth is joined with graceful dignity,
+  There thou mayst learn, and what the path may be
+  To that high heaven which doth her spirit claim;
+    There learn soft speech, beyond all poet's skill,
+  And softer silence, and those holy ways
+  Unutterable, untold by human heart.
+    But the infinite beauty that all eyes doth fill,
+  This none can copy! since its lovely rays
+  Are given by God's pure grace, and not by art.
+
+
+The following, on the other hand, seems to me one of the Shakespearian
+sonnets; the successive phrases set sail, one by one, like a yacht
+squadron; each spreads its graceful wings and glides away. It is hard
+to handle this white canvas without soiling. Macgregor, in the only
+version of this sonnet which I have seen, abandons all attempt at
+rhyme; but to follow the strict order of the original in this respect
+is a part of the pleasant problem which one cannot bear to forego. And
+there seems a kind of deity who presides over this union of languages,
+and who sometimes silently lays the words in order, after all one's own
+poor attempts have failed.
+
+  SONNET 128.
+
+  "O passi sparsi; o pensier vaghi e pronti"
+    O wandering steps! O vague and busy dreams!
+  O changeless memory! O fierce desire!
+  O passion strong! heart weak with its own fire;
+  O eyes of mine! not eyes, but living streams;
+    O laurel boughs! whose lovely garland seems
+  The sole reward that glory's deeds require;
+  O haunted life! delusion sweet and dire,
+  That all my days from slothful rest redeems;
+    O beauteous face! where Love has treasured well
+  His whip and spur, the sluggish heart to move
+  At his least will; nor can it find relief.
+    O souls of love and passion! if ye dwell
+  Yet on this earth, and ye, great Shades of Love!
+  Linger, and see my passion and my grief.
+
+
+Yonder flies a kingfisher, and pauses, fluttering like a butterfly in
+the air, then dives toward a fish, and, failing, perches on the
+projecting wall. Doves from neighboring dove-cotes alight on the
+parapet of the fort, fearless of the quiet cattle who find there a
+breezy pasture. These doves, in taking flight, do not rise from the
+ground at once, but, edging themselves closer to the brink, with a
+caution almost ludicrous in such airy things, trust themselves upon the
+breeze with a shy little hop, and at the next moment are securely on
+the wing.
+
+How the abundant sunlight inundates everything! The great clumps of
+grass and clover are imbedded in it to the roots; it flows in among
+their stalks, like water; the lilac-bushes bask in it eagerly; the
+topmost leaves of the birches are burnished. A vessel sails by with
+plash and roar, and all the white spray along her side is sparkling
+with sunlight. Yet there is sorrow in the world, and it reached
+Petrarch even before Laura died,--when it reached her. This exquisite
+sonnet shows it:--
+
+          SONNET 123.
+
+  "I' vidi in terra angelici costumi."
+    I once beheld on earth celestial graces,
+  And heavenly beauties scarce to mortals known,
+  Whose memory lends nor joy nor grief alone,
+  But all things else bewilders and effaces.
+    I saw how tears had left their weary traces
+  Within those eyes that once like sunbeams shone,
+  I heard those lips breathe low and plaintive moan,
+  Whose spell might once have taught the hills their places.
+    Love, wisdom, courage, tenderness, and truth,
+  Made ill their mourning strains more high and dear
+  Than ever wove sweet sounds for mortal ear;
+    And heaven seemed listening in such saddest ruth
+  The very leaves upon the boughs to soothe,
+  Such passionate sweetness filled the atmosphere.
+
+
+These sonnets are in Petrarch's earlier manner; but the death of Laura
+brought a change. Look at yonder schooner coming down the bay, straight
+toward us; she is hauled close to the wind, her jib is white in the
+sunlight, her larger sails are touched with the same snowy lustre, and
+all the swelling canvas is rounded into such lines of beauty as
+scarcely anything else in the world--hardly even the perfect outlines
+of the human form--can give. Now she comes up into the wind, and goes
+about with a strong flapping of the sails, smiting on the ear at a
+half-mile's distance; then she glides off on the other tack, showing
+the shadowed side of her sails, until she reaches the distant zone of
+haze. So change the sonnets after Laura's death, growing shadowy as
+they recede, until the very last seems to merge itself in the blue
+distance.
+
+          SONNET 251.
+
+  "Gli occhi di ch' io parlai."
+    Those eyes, 'neath which my passionate rapture rose,
+  The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile
+  Could my own soul from its own self beguile,
+  And in a separate world of dreams enclose,
+    The hair's bright tresses, full of golden glows,
+  And the soft lightning of the angelic smile
+  That changed this earth to some celestial isle,
+  Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
+    And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,
+  Left dark without the light I loved in vain,
+  Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;
+    Dead is the source of all my amorous strain,
+  Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
+  And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.
+
+"And yet I live!" What a pause is implied before these words! the
+drawing of a long breath, immeasurably long; like that vast interval of
+heart-beats that precedes Shakespeare's "Since Cleopatra died." I can
+think of no other passage in literature that has in it the same wide
+spaces of emotion.
+
+The following sonnet seems to me the most stately and concentrated in
+the whole volume. It is the sublimity of a despair not to be relieved
+by utterance.
+
+          SONNET 253.
+
+      "Soleasi nel mio cor."
+    She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine,
+  A noble lady in a humble home,
+  And now her time for heavenly bliss has come,
+  'T is I am mortal proved, and she divine.
+    The soul that all its blessings must resign,
+  And love whose light no more on earth finds room
+  Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom,
+  Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine;
+    They weep within my heart; and ears are deaf
+  Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care,
+  And naught remains to me save mournful breath.
+    Assuredly but dust and shade we are,
+  Assuredly desire is blind and brief,
+  Assuredly its hope but ends in death.
+
+
+In a later strain he rises to that dream which is more than earth's
+realities.
+
+        SONNET 261.
+
+  "Levommi il mio pensiero."
+    Dreams bore my fancy to that region where
+  She dwells whom here I seek, but cannot see.
+  'Mid those who in the loftiest heaven be
+  I looked on her, less haughty and more fair.
+    She touched my hand, she said, "Within this sphere,
+  If hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me:
+  I filled thy life with war's wild agony;
+  Mine own day closed ere evening could appear.
+    My bliss no human brain can understand;
+  I wait for thee alone, and that fair veil
+  Of beauty thou dost love shall wear again."
+    Why was she silent then, why dropped my hand
+  Ere those delicious tones could quite avail
+  To bid my mortal soul in heaven remain?
+
+
+It vindicates the emphatic reality and pesonality of Petrarch's love,
+after all, that when from these heights of vision he surveys and
+resurveys his life's long dream, it becomes to him more and more
+definite, as well as more poetic, and is farther and farther from a
+merely vague sentimentalism. In his later sonnets, Laura grows more
+distinctly individual to us; her traits show themselves as more
+characteristic, her temperament more intelligible, her precise
+influence upon Petrarch clearer. What delicate accuracy of delineation
+is seen, for instance, in this sonnet!
+
+          SONNET 314.
+
+  "Dolci durezze e placide repulse."
+    Gentle severity, repulses mild,
+  Full of chaste love and pity sorrowing;
+  Graceful rebukes, that had the power to bring
+  Back to itself a heart by dreams beguiled;
+    A soft-toned voice, whose accents undefiled
+  Held sweet restraints, all duty honoring;
+  The bloom of virtue; purity's clear spring
+  To cleanse away base thoughts and passions wild;
+  Divinest eyes to make a lover's bliss,
+  Whether to bridle in the wayward mind
+  Lest its wild wanderings should the pathway miss,
+    Or else its griefs to soothe, its wounds to bind;
+  This sweet completeness of thy life it is
+  That saved my soul; no other peace I find.
+
+
+In the following sonnet visions multiply upon visions. Would that one
+could transfer into English the delicious way in which the sweet
+Italian rhymes recur and surround and seem to embrace each other, and
+are woven and unwoven and interwoven, like the heavenly hosts that
+gathered around Laura.
+
+          SONNET 302.
+
+        "Gli angeli eletti."
+
+    The holy angels and the spirits blest,
+  Celestial bands, upon that day serene
+  When first my love went by in heavenly mien,
+  Came thronging, wondering at the gracious guest.
+    "What light is here, in what new beauty drest?"
+  They said among themselves; "for none has seen
+  Within this age come wandering such a queen
+  From darkened earth into immortal rest."
+    And she, contented with her new-found bliss,
+  Ranks with the purest in that upper sphere,
+  Yet ever and anon looks back on this,
+  To watch for me, as if for me she stayed.
+  So strive, my thoughts, lest that high path I miss.
+  I hear her call, and must not be delayed.
+
+These odes and sonnets are all but parts of one symphony, leading us
+through a passion strengthened by years and only purified by death,
+until at last the graceful lay becomes an anthem and a Nunc dimittis.
+In the closing sonnets Petrarch withdraws from the world, and they seem
+like voices from a cloister, growing more and more solemn till the door
+is closed. This is one of the last:--
+
+          SONNET 309.
+
+  "Dicemi spesso il mio fidato speglio."
+    Oft by my faithful mirror I am told,
+  And by my mind outworn and altered brow,
+  My earthly powers impaired and weakened now,
+  "Deceive thyself no more, for thou art old!"
+    Who strives with Nature's laws is over-bold,
+  And Time to his commandments bids us bow.
+  Like fire that waves have quenched, I calmly vow
+  In life's long dream no more my sense to fold.
+    And while I think, our swift existence flies,
+  And none can live again earth's brief career,
+  Then in my deepest heart the voice replies
+    Of one who now has left this mortal sphere,
+  But walked alone through earthly destinies,
+  And of all women is to fame most dear.
+
+
+How true is this concluding line! Who can wonder that women prize
+beauty, and are intoxicated by their own fascinations, when these
+fragile gifts are yet strong enough to outlast all the memories of
+statesmanship and war? Next to the immortality of genius is that which
+genius may confer upon the object of its love. Laura, while she lived,
+was simply one of a hundred or a thousand beautiful and gracious
+Italian women; she had her loves and aversions, joys and griefs; she
+cared dutifully for her household, and embroidered the veil which
+Petrarch loved; her memory appeared as fleeting and unsubstantial as
+that woven tissue. After five centuries we find that no armor of that
+iron age was so enduring. The kings whom she honored, the popes whom
+she revered are dust, and their memory is dust, but literature is still
+fragrant with her name. An impression which has endured so long is
+ineffaceable; it is an earthly immortality.
+
+"Time is the chariot of all ages to carry men away, and beauty cannot
+bribe this charioteer." Thus wrote Petrarch in his Latin essays; but
+his love had wealth that proved resistless and for Laura the chariot
+stayed.
+
+
+
+A SHADOW.
+
+I shall always remember one winter evening, a little before
+Christmas-time, when I took a long, solitary walk in the outskirts of
+the town. The cold sunset had left a trail of orange light along the
+horizon, the dry snow tinkled beneath my feet, and the early stars had
+a keen, clear lustre that matched well with the sharp sound and the
+frosty sensation. For some time I had walked toward the gleam of a
+distant window, and as I approached, the light showed more and more
+clearly through the white curtains of a little cottage by the road. I
+stopped, on reaching it, to enjoy the suggestion of domestic
+cheerfulness in contrast with the dark outside. I could not see the
+inmates, nor they me; but something of human sympathy came from that
+steadfast ray.
+
+As I looked, a film of shade kept appearing and disappearing with
+rhythmic regularity in a corner of the window, as if some one might be
+sitting in a low rocking-chair close by. Presently the motion ceased,
+and suddenly across the curtain came the shadow of a woman. She raised
+in her arms the shadow of a baby, and kissed it; then both disappeared,
+and I walked on.
+
+What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, so
+traced as to endure forever? In this picture of mine, the group
+actually moved upon the canvas. The curtains that hid it revealed it.
+The ecstasy of human love passed in brief, intangible panorama before
+me. It was something seen, yet unseen; airy, yet solid; a type, yet a
+reality; fugitive, yet destined to last in my memory while I live. It
+said more to me than would any Madonna of Raphael's, for his mother
+never kisses her child. I believe I have never passed over that road
+since then, never seen the house, never heard the names of its
+occupants. Their character, their history, their fate, are all unknown.
+But these two will always stand for me as disembodied types of
+humanity,--the Mother and the Child; they seem nearer to me than my
+immediate neighbors, yet they are as ideal and impersonal as the
+goddesses of Greece or as Plato's archetypal man.
+
+I know not the parentage of that child, whether black or white, native
+or foreign, rich or poor. It makes no difference. The presence of a
+baby equalizes all social conditions. On the floor of some Southern
+hut, scarcely so comfortable as a dog-kennel, I have seen a dusky woman
+look down upon her infant with such an expression of delight as painter
+never drew. No social culture can make a mother's face more than a
+mother's, as no wealth can make a nursery more than a place where
+children dwell. Lavish thousands of dollars on your baby-clothes, and
+after all the child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That
+becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the
+poorest home.
+
+I know not what triumph or despair may have come and gone through that
+wayside house since then, what jubilant guests may have entered, what
+lifeless form passed out. What anguish or what sin may have come
+between that woman and that child; through what worlds they now wander,
+and whether separate or in each other's arms,--this is all unknown.
+Fancy can picture other joys to which the first happiness was but the
+prelude, and, on the other hand, how easy to imagine some special
+heritage of human woe and call it theirs!
+
+  "I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,
+    Lord of thy house and hospitality;
+  And Grief, uneasy lover, might not rest
+    Save when he sat within the touch of thee."
+
+Nay, the foretaste of that changed fortune may have been present, even
+in the kiss. Who knows what absorbing emotion, besides love's immediate
+impulse, may have been uttered in that shadowy embrace? There may have
+been some contrition for ill-temper or neglect, or some triumph over
+ruinous temptation, or some pledge of immortal patience, or some
+heart-breaking prophecy of bereavement. It may have been simply an act
+of habitual tenderness, or it may have been the wild reaction toward a
+neglected duty; the renewed self-consecration of the saint, or the joy
+of the sinner that repenteth. No matter. She kissed the baby. The
+feeling of its soft flesh, the busy struggle of its little arms between
+her hands, the impatient pressure of its little feet against her
+knees,--these were the same, whatever the mood or circumstance beside.
+They did something to equalize joy and sorrow, honor and shame.
+Maternal love is love, whether a woman be a wife or only a mother. Only
+a mother!
+
+The happiness beneath that roof may, perhaps, have never reached so
+high a point as at that precise moment of my passing. In the coarsest
+household, the mother of a young child is placed on a sort of pedestal
+of care and tenderness, at least for a time. She resumes something of
+the sacredness and dignity of the maiden. Coleridge ranks as the purest
+of human emotions that of a husband towards a wife who has a baby at
+her breast,--"a feeling how free from sensual desire, yet how different
+from friendship!" And to the true mother however cultivated, or however
+ignorant, this period of early parentage is happier than all else, in
+spite of its exhausting cares. In that delightful book, the "Letters"
+of Mrs. Richard Trench (mother of the well-known English writer), the
+most agreeable passage is perhaps that in which, after looking back
+upon a life spent in the most brilliant society of Europe, she gives
+the palm of happiness to the time when she was a young mother. She
+writes to her god-daughter: "I believe it is the happiest time of any
+woman's life, who has affectionate feelings, and is blessed with
+healthy and well-disposed children. I know at least that neither the
+gayeties and boundless hopes of early life, nor the more grave pursuits
+and deeper affections of later years, are by any means comparable in my
+recollection with the serene, yet lively pleasure of seeing my children
+playing on the grass, enjoying their little temperate supper, or
+repeating 'with holy look' their simple prayers, and undressing for
+bed, growing prettier for every part of their dress they took off, and
+at last lying down, all freshness and love, in complete happiness, and
+an amiable contest for mamma's last kiss."
+
+That kiss welcomed the child into a world where joy predominates. The
+vast multitude of human beings enjoy existence and wish to live. They
+all have their earthly life under their own control. Some religions
+sanction suicide; the Christian Scriptures nowhere explicitly forbid
+it; and yet it is a rare thing. Many persons sigh for death when it
+seems far off, but the desire vanishes when the boat upsets, or the
+locomotive runs off the track, or the measles set in. A wise physician
+once said to me: "I observe that every one wishes to go to heaven, but
+I observe that most people are willing to take a great deal of very
+disagreeable medicine first." The lives that one least envies--as of
+the Digger Indian or the outcast boy in the city--are yet sweet to the
+living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say
+with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The
+flashing speed of the swallow in the air, the cool play of the minnow
+in the water, the dance of twin butterflies round a thistle-blossom,
+the thundering gallop of the buffalo across the prairie, nay, the
+clumsy walk of the grizzly bear; it were doubtless enough to reward
+existence, could we have joy like such as these, and ask no more. This
+is the hearty physical basis of animated life, and as step by step the
+savage creeps up to the possession of intellectual manhood, each
+advance brings with it new sorrow and new joy, with the joy always in
+excess.
+
+There are many who will utterly disavow this creed that life is
+desirable in itself. A fair woman in a ball-room, exquisitely dressed,
+and possessed of all that wealth could give, once declared to me her
+belief--and I think honestly--that no person over thirty was
+consciously happy, or would wish to live, but for the fear of death.
+There could not even be pleasure in contemplating one's children, she
+asserted, since they were living in such a world of sorrow. Asking the
+opinion, within half an hour, of another woman as fair and as favored
+by fortune, I found directly the opposite verdict. "For my part I can
+truly say," she answered, "that I enjoy every moment I live." The
+varieties of temperament and of physical condition will always afford
+us these extremes; but the truth lies between them, and most persons
+will endure many sorrows and still find life sweet.
+
+And the mother's kiss welcomes the child into a world where good
+predominates as well as joy. What recreants must we be, in an age that
+has abolished slavery in America and popularized the governments of all
+Europe, if we doubt that the tendency of man is upward! How much that
+the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a
+too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury or make one's
+children rich! In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment
+always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud
+an heroic deed. A courageous woman, who had traversed alone, on
+benevolent errands, the worst parts of New York told me that she never
+felt afraid except in the solitudes of the country; wherever there was
+a crowd, she found a protector.
+
+A policeman of great experience once spoke to me with admiration of the
+fidelity of professional thieves to each other, and the risks they
+would run for the women whom they loved; when "Bristol Bill" was
+arrested, he said, there was found upon the burglar a set of false
+keys, not quite finished, by which he would certainly, within
+twenty-four hours, have had his mistress out of jail. Parent-Duchatelet
+found always the remains of modesty among the fallen women of Paris
+hospitals; and Mayhew, amid the London outcasts, says that he thinks
+better of human nature every day. Even among politicians, whom it is
+our American fashion to revile as the chief of sinners, there is less
+of evil than of good.
+
+In Wilberforce's "Memoirs" there is an account of his having once asked
+Mr. Pitt whether his long experience as Prime Minister had made him
+think well or ill of his fellow-men. Mr. Pitt answered, "Well"; and his
+successor, Lord Melbourne, being asked the same question, answered,
+after a little reflection, "My opinion is the same as that of Mr. Pitt."
+
+Let us have faith. It was a part of the vigor of the old Hebrew
+tradition to rejoice when a man-child was born into the world; and the
+maturer strength of nobler ages should rejoice over a woman-child as
+well. Nothing human is wholly sad, until it is effete and dying out.
+Where there is life there is promise. "Vitality is always hopeful," was
+the verdict of the most refined and clear-sighted woman who has yet
+explored the rough mining villages of the Rocky Mountains. There is apt
+to be a certain coarse virtue in rude health; as the Germanic races
+were purest when least civilized, and our American Indians did not
+unlearn chastity till they began to decay. But even where vigor and
+vice are found together, they still may hold a promise for the next
+generation. Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness. Parisian
+wickedness is not so discouraging merely because it is wicked, as from
+a suspicion that it is draining the life-blood of the nation. A mob of
+miners or of New York bullies may be uncomfortable neighbors, and may
+make a man of refinement hesitate whether to stop his ears or to feel
+for his revolver; but they hold more promise for the coming generations
+than the line which ends in Madame Bovary or the Vicomte de Camors.
+
+But behind that cottage curtain, at any rate, a new and prophetic life
+had begun. I cannot foretell that child's future, but I know something
+of its past. The boy may grow up into a criminal, the woman into an
+outcast, yet the baby was beloved. It came "not in utter nakedness." It
+found itself heir of the two prime essentials of existence,--life and
+love. Its first possession was a woman's kiss; and in that heritage the
+most important need of its career was guaranteed. "An ounce of mother,"
+says the Spanish proverb, "is worth a pound of clergy." Jean Paul says
+that in life every successive influence affects us less and less, so
+that the circumnavigator of the globe is less influenced by all the
+nations he has seen than by his nurse. Well may the child imbibe that
+reverence for motherhood which is the first need of man. Where woman is
+most a slave, she is at least sacred to her son. The Turkish Sultan
+must prostrate himself at the door of his mother's apartments, and were
+he known to have insulted her, it would make his throne tremble. Among
+the savage African Touaricks, if two parents disagree, it is to the
+mother that the child's obedience belongs. Over the greater part of the
+earth's surface, the foremost figures in all temples are the Mother and
+Child. Christian and Buddhist nations, numbering together two thirds of
+the world's population, unite in this worship. Into the secrets of the
+ritual that baby in the window had already received initiation.
+
+And how much spiritual influence may in turn have gone forth from that
+little one! The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the
+moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it
+is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New
+social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. The London
+costermonger told Mayhew that he thought every man would like his son
+or daughter to have a better start in the world than his own. After
+all, there is no tonic like the affections. Philosophers express wonder
+that the divine laws should give to some young girl, almost a child,
+the custody of an immortal soul. But what instruction the baby brings
+to the mother! She learns patience, self-control, endurance; her very
+arm grows strong, so that she can hold the dear burden longer than the
+father can. She learns to understand character, too, by dealing with
+it. "In training my first children," said a wise mother to me, "I
+thought that all were born just the same, and that I was wholly
+responsible for what they should become. I learned by degrees that each
+had a temperament of its own, which I must study before I could teach
+it." And thus, as the little ones grow older, their dawning instincts
+guide those of the parents; their questions suggest new answers, and to
+have loved them is a liberal education.
+
+For the height of heights is love. The philosopher dries into a
+skeleton like that he investigates, unless love teaches him. He is
+blind among his microscopes, unless he sees in the humblest human soul
+a revelation that dwarfs all the world beside. While he grows gray in
+ignorance among his crucibles, every girlish mother is being
+illuminated by every kiss of her child. That house is so far sacred,
+which holds within its walls this new-born heir of eternity. But to
+dwell on these high mysteries would take us into depths beyond the
+present needs of mother or of infant, and it is better that the greater
+part of the baby-life should be that of an animated toy.
+
+Perhaps it is well for all of us that we should live mostly on the
+surfaces of things and should play with life, to avoid taking it too
+hard. In a nursery the youngest child is a little more than a doll, and
+the doll is a little less than a child. What spell does fancy weave on
+earth like that which the one of these small beings performs for the
+other? This battered and tattered doll, this shapeless, featureless,
+possibly legless creature, whose mission it is to be dragged by one
+arm, or stood upon its head in the bathing-tub, until it finally
+reverts to the rag-bag whence it came,--what an affluence of breathing
+life is thrown around it by one touch of dawning imagination! Its
+little mistress will find all joy unavailing without its sympathetic
+presence, will confide every emotion to its pen-and-ink ears, and will
+weep passionate tears if its extremely soiled person is pricked when
+its clothes are mended. What psychologist, what student of the human
+heart, has ever applied his subtile analysis to the emotions of a child
+toward her doll?
+
+I read lately the charming autobiography of a little girl of eight
+years, written literally from her own dictation. Since "Pet Marjorie" I
+have seen no such actual self-revelation on the part of a child. In the
+course of her narration she describes, with great precision and
+correctness, the travels of the family through Europe in the preceding
+year, assigning usually the place of importance to her doll, who
+appears simply as "My Baby." Nothing can be more grave, more accurate,
+more serious than the whole history, but nothing in it seems quite so
+real and alive as the doll. "When we got to Nice, I was sick. The next
+morning the doctor came, and he said I had something that was very much
+like scarlet fever. Then I had Annie take care of baby, and keep her
+away, for I was afraid she would get the fever. She used to cry to come
+to me, but I knew it wouldn't be good for her."
+
+What firm judgment is here, what tenderness without weakness, what
+discreet motherhood! When Christmas came, it appears that baby hung up
+her stocking with the rest. Her devoted parent had bought for her a
+slate with a real pencil. Others provided thimble and scissors and
+bodkin and a spool of thread, and a travelling-shawl with a strap, and
+a cap with tarletan ruffles. "I found baby with the cap on, early in
+the morning, and she was so pleased she almost jumped out of my arms."
+Thus in the midst of visits to the Coliseum and St. Peter's, the drama
+of early affection goes always on. "I used to take her to hear the
+band, in the carriage, and she went everywhere I did." But the love of
+all dolls, as of other pets, must end with a tragedy, and here it
+comes. "The next place we went to was Lucerne. There was a lovely lake
+there, but I had a very sad time. One day I thought I'd take baby down
+to breakfast, and, as I was going up stairs, my foot slipped and baby
+broke her head. And O, I felt so bad! and I cried out, and I ran up
+stairs to Annie, and mamma came, and O, we were all so sorry! And mamma
+said she thought I could get another head, but I said, 'It won't be the
+same baby.' And mamma said, maybe we could make it seem so."
+
+At this crisis the elder brother and sister departed for Mount Righi.
+"They were going to stay all night, and mamma and I stayed at home to
+take care of each other. I felt very bad about baby and about their
+going, too. After they went, mamma and I thought we would go to the
+little town and see what we could find." After many difficulties, a
+waxen head was discovered. "Mamma bought it, and we took it home and
+put it on baby; but I said it wasn't like my real baby, only it was
+better than having no child at all!"
+
+This crushing bereavement, this reluctant acceptance of a child by
+adoption, to fill the vacant heart,--how real and formidable is all
+this rehearsal of the tragedies of maturer years! I knew an instance in
+which the last impulse of ebbing life was such a gush of imaginary
+motherhood.
+
+A dear friend of mine, whose sweet charities prolong into a third
+generation the unbounded benevolence of old Isaac Hopper, used to go at
+Christmas-time with dolls and other gifts to the poor children on
+Randall's Island. Passing the bed of a little girl whom the physician
+pronounced to be unconscious and dying, the kind visitor insisted on
+putting a doll into her arms. Instantly the eyes of the little invalid
+opened, and she pressed the gift eagerly to her heart, murmuring over
+it and caressing it. The matron afterwards wrote that the child died
+within two hours, wearing a happy face, and still clinging to her
+new-found treasure.
+
+And beginning with this transfer of all human associations to a doll,
+the child's life interfuses itself readily among all the affairs of the
+elders. In its presence, formality vanishes, the most oppressive
+ceremonial is a little relieved when children enter. Their influence is
+pervasive and irresistible, like that of water, which adapts itself to
+any landscape,--always takes its place, welcome or unwelcome,--keeps
+its own level and seems always to have its natural and proper margin.
+
+
+Out of doors how children mingle with nature, and seem to begin just
+where birds and butterflies leave off! Leigh Hunt, with his delicate
+perceptions, paints this well: "The voices of children seem as natural
+to the early morning as the voice of the birds. The suddenness, the
+lightness, the loudness, the sweet confusion, the sparkling gayety,
+seem alike in both. The sudden little jangle is now here and now there;
+and now a single voice calls to another, and the boy is off like the
+bird." So Heine, with deeper thoughtfulness, noticed the "intimacy with
+the trees" of the little wood-gatherer in the Hartz Mountains; soon the
+child whistled like a linnet, and the other birds all answered him;
+then he disappeared in the thicket with his bare feet and his bundle of
+brushwood.
+
+"Children," thought Heine, "are younger than we, and can still remember
+the time when they were trees or birds, and can therefore understand
+and speak their language; but we are grown old, and have too many
+cares, and too much jurisprudence and bad poetry in our heads."
+
+But why go to literature for a recognition of what one may see by
+opening one's eyes? Before my window there is a pool, two rods square,
+that is haunted all winter by children,--clearing away the snow of many
+a storm, if need be, and mining downward till they strike the ice. I
+look this morning from the window, and the pond is bare. In a moment I
+happen to look again, and it is covered with a swarm of boys; a great
+migrating flock has settled upon it, as if swooping down from parts
+unknown to scream and sport themselves here. The air is full of their
+voices; they have all tugged on their skates instantaneously, as it
+were by magic. Now they are in a confused cluster, now they sweep round
+and round in a circle, now it is broken into fragments and as quickly
+formed again; games are improvised and abandoned; there seems to be no
+plan or leader, but all do as they please, and yet somehow act in
+concert, and all chatter all the time. Now they have alighted, every
+one, upon the bank of snow that edges the pond, each scraping a little
+hollow in which to perch. Now every perch is vacant again, for they are
+all in motion; each moment increases the jangle of shrill
+voices,--since a boy's outdoor whisper to his nearest crony is as if he
+was hailing a ship in the offing,--and what they are all saying can no
+more be made out than if they were a flock of gulls or blackbirds. I
+look away from the window once more, and when I glance out again there
+is not a boy in sight. They have whirled away like snowbirds, and the
+little pool sleeps motionless beneath the cheerful wintry sun. Who but
+must see how gradually the joyous life of the animal rises through
+childhood into man,--since the soaring gnats, the glancing fishes, the
+sliding seals are all represented in this mob of half-grown boyhood
+just released from school.
+
+If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the
+whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No
+circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has
+that possession. It is a freemasonry. Wherever one goes, there are the
+little brethren and sisters of the mystic tie. No diversity of race or
+tongue makes much difference. A smile speaks the universal language.
+"If I value myself on anything," said the lonely Hawthorne, "it is on
+having a smile that children love." They are such prompt little beings;
+they require so little prelude; hearts are won in two minutes, at that
+frank period, and so long as you are true to them they will be true to
+you. They need no argument, no bribery. They have a hearty appetite for
+gifts, no doubt, but it is not for these that they love the giver. Take
+the wealth of the world and lavish it with counterfeited affection: I
+will win all the children's hearts away from you by empty-handed love.
+The gorgeous toys will dazzle them for an hour; then their instincts
+will revert to their natural friends. In visiting a house where there
+are children I do not like to take them presents: it is better to
+forego the pleasure of the giving than to divide the welcome between
+yourself and the gift. Let that follow after you are gone.
+
+It is an exaggerated compliment to women when we ascribe to them alone
+this natural sympathy with childhood. It is an individual, not a sexual
+trait, and is stronger in many men than in many women. It is nowhere
+better exhibited in literature than where the happy Wilhelm Meister
+takes his boy by the hand, to lead him "into the free and lordly
+world." Such love is not universal among the other sex, though men, in
+that humility which so adorns their natures, keep up the pleasing
+fiction that it is. As a general rule any little girl feels some
+glimmerings of emotion towards anything that can pass for a doll, but
+it does not follow that, when grown older, she will feel as ready an
+instinct toward every child. Try it. Point out to a woman some bundle
+of blue-and-white or white-and-scarlet in some one's arms at the next
+street corner. Ask her, "Do you love that baby?" Not one woman in three
+will say promptly, "Yes." The others will hesitate, will bid you wait
+till they are nearer, till they can personally inspect the little thing
+and take an inventory of its traits; it may be dirty, too; it may be
+diseased. Ah! but this is not to love children, and you might as well
+be a man. To love children is to love childhood, instinctively, at
+whatever distance, the first impulse being one of attraction, though it
+may be checked by later discoveries. Unless your heart commands at
+least as long a range as your eye, it is not worth much. The dearest
+saint in my calendar never entered a railway car that she did not look
+round for a baby, which, when discovered, must always be won at once
+into her arms. If it was dirty, she would have been glad to bathe it;
+if ill, to heal it. It would not have seemed to her anything worthy the
+name of love, to seek only those who were wholesome and clean. Like the
+young girl in Holmes's most touching poem, she would have claimed as
+her own the outcast child whom nurses and physicians had abandoned.
+
+    "'Take her, dread Angel! Break in love
+      This bruised reed and make it thine!'
+    No voice descended from above,
+      But Avis answered, 'She is mine!'"
+
+When I think of the self-devotion which the human heart can contain--of
+those saintly souls that are in love with sorrow, and that yearn to
+shelter all weakness and all grief--it inspires an unspeakable
+confidence that there must also be an instinct of parentage beyond this
+human race, a heart of hearts, cor cordium. As we all crave something
+to protect, so we long to feel ourselves protected. We are all infants
+before the Infinite; and as I turned from that cottage window to the
+resplendent sky, it was easy to fancy that mute embrace, that shadowy
+symbol of affection, expanding from the narrow lattice till it touched
+the stars, gathering every created soul into the armsof Immortal Love.
+
+
+
+FOOTPATHS.
+
+All round the shores of the island where I dwell there runs a winding
+path. It is probably as old as the settlement of the country, and has
+been kept open with pertinacious fidelity by the fishermen whose right
+of way it represents. In some places, as between Fort Adams and Castle
+Hill, it exists in its primitive form, an irregular track above rough
+cliffs, whence you look down upon the entrance to the harbor and watch
+the white-sailed schooners that glide beneath. Elsewhere the high-road
+has usurped its place, and you have the privilege of the path without
+its charm. Along our eastern cliffs it runs for some miles in the rear
+of beautiful estates, whose owners have seized on it, and graded it,
+and gravelled it, and made stiles for it, and done for it everything
+that landscape-gardening could do, while leaving it a footpath still.
+You walk there with croquet and roses on the one side, and with
+floating loons and wild ducks on the other. In remoter places the path
+grows wilder, and has ramifications striking boldly across the
+peninsula through rough moorland and among great ledges of rock, where
+you may ramble for hours, out of sight of all but some sportsman with
+his gun, or some truant-boy with dripping water-lilies. There is always
+a charm to me in the inexplicable windings of these wayward tracks; yet
+I like the path best where it is nearest the ocean. There, while
+looking upon blue sea and snowy sails and floating gulls, you may yet
+hear on the landward side the melodious and plaintive drawl of the
+meadow-lark, most patient of summer visitors, and, indeed, lingering on
+this island almost the whole year round.
+
+But who cares whither a footpath leads? The charm is in the path
+itself, its promise of something that the high-road cannot yield. Away
+from habitations, you know that the fisherman, the geologist, the
+botanist may have been there, or that the cows have been driven home
+and that somewhere there are bars and a milk-pail. Even in the midst of
+houses, the path suggests school-children with their luncheon-baskets,
+or workmen seeking eagerly the noonday interval or the twilight rest. A
+footpath cannot be quite spoiled, so long as it remains such; you can
+make a road a mere avenue for fast horses or showy women, but this
+humbler track keeps its simplicity, and if a queen comes walking
+through it, she comes but as a village maid. On Sunday, when it is not
+etiquette for our fashionables to drive, but only to walk along the
+cliffs, they seem to wear a more innocent and wholesome aspect in that
+novel position; I have seen a fine lady pause under such circumstances
+and pick a wild-flower; she knew how to do it. A footpath has its own
+character, while that of the high-road is imposed upon it by those who
+dwell beside it or pass over it; indeed, roads become picturesque only
+when they are called lanes and make believe that they are but paths.
+
+The very irregularity of a footpath makes half its charm. So much of
+loitering and indolence and impulse have gone to its formation, that
+all which is stiff and military has been left out. I observed that the
+very dikes of the Southern rice plantations did not succeed in being
+rectilinear, though the general effect was that of Tennyson's "flowery
+squares." Even the country road, which is but an enlarged footpath, is
+never quite straight, as Thoreau long since observed, noting it with
+his surveyor's eye. I read in his unpublished diary: "The law that
+plants the rushes in waving lines along the edge of a pond, and that
+curves the pond shore itself, incessantly beats against the straight
+fences and highways of men, and makes them conform to the line of
+beauty at last." It is this unintentional adaptation that makes a
+footpath so indestructible. Instead of striking across the natural
+lines, it conforms to them, nestles into the hollow, skirts the
+precipice, avoids the morass. An unconscious landscape-gardener, it
+seeks the most convenient course, never doubting that grace will
+follow. Mitchell, at his "Edgewood" farm, wishing to decide on the most
+picturesque avenue to his front door, ordered a heavy load of stone to
+be hauled across the field, and bade the driver seek the easiest
+grades, at whatever cost of curvature. The avenue followed the path so
+made.
+
+When a footpath falls thus unobtrusively into its place, all natural
+forces seem to sympathize with it, and help it to fulfil its destiny.
+Once make a well-defined track through a wood, and presently the
+overflowing brooks seek it for a channel, the obstructed winds draw
+through it, the fox and woodchuck travel by it, the catbird and robin
+build near it, the bee and swallow make a high-road of its convenient
+thoroughfare. In winter the first snows mark it with a white line; as
+you wander through you hear the blue-jay's cry, and see the hurrying
+flight of the sparrow; the graceful outlines of the leafless bushes are
+revealed, and the clinging bird's-nests, "leaves that do not fall,"
+give happy memories of summer homes. Thus Nature meets man half-way.
+The paths of the wild forest and of the rural neighborhood are not at
+all the same thing; indeed, a "spotted trail," marked only by the
+woodman's axe-marks on the trees, is not a footpath. Thoreau, who is
+sometimes foolishly accused of having sought to be a mere savage,
+understood this distinction well. "A man changes by his presence," he
+says in his unpublished diary, "the very nature of the trees. The
+poet's is not a logger's path, but a woodman's,--the logger and pioneer
+have preceded him, and banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses
+which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized nature for him. For a
+permanent residence, there can be no comparison between this and the
+wilderness. Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodsmen and
+rustics; that is, a selvaggia and its inhabitants salvages." What
+Thoreau loved, like all men of healthy minds, was the occasional
+experience of untamed wildness. "I love to see occasionally," he adds,
+"a man from whom the usnea (lichen) hangs as gracefully as from a
+spruce."
+
+Footpaths bring us nearer both to nature and to man. No high-road, not
+even a lane, conducts to the deeper recesses of the wood, where you
+hear the wood-thrush. There are a thousand concealed fitnesses in
+nature, rhymed correspondences of bird and blossom, for which you must
+seek through hidden paths; as when you come upon some black brook so
+palisaded with cardinal-flowers as to seem "a stream of sunsets"; or
+trace its shadowy course till it spreads into some forest-pool, above
+which that rare and patrician insect, the Agrion dragon-fly, flits and
+hovers perpetually, as if the darkness and the cool had taken wings.
+The dark brown pellucid water sleeps between banks of softest moss;
+white stars of twin-flowers creep close to the brink, delicate sprays
+of dewberry trail over it, and the emerald tips of drooping leaves
+forever tantalize the still surface. Above these the slender, dark-blue
+insect waves his dusky wings, like a liberated ripple of the brook, and
+takes the few stray sunbeams on his lustrous form. Whence came the
+correspondence between this beautiful shy creature and the moist, dark
+nooks, shot through with stray and transitory sunlight, where it
+dwells? The analogy is as unmistakable as that between the scorching
+heats of summer and the shrill cry of the cicada. They suggest
+questions that no savant can answer, mysteries that wait, like Goethe's
+secret of morphology, till a sufficient poet can be born. And we,
+meanwhile, stand helpless in their presence, as one waits beside the
+telegraphic wire, while it hums and vibrates, charged with all
+fascinating secrets, above the heads of a wondering world.
+
+It is by the presence of pathways on the earth that we know it to be
+the habitation of man; in the barest desert, they open to us a common
+humanity. It is the absence of these that renders us so lonely on the
+ocean, and makes us glad to watch even the track of our own vessel. But
+on the mountain-top, how eagerly we trace out the "road that brings
+places together," as Schiller says. It is the first thing we look for;
+till we have found it, each scattered village has an isolated and
+churlish look, but the glimpse of a furlong of road puts them all in
+friendly relations. The narrower the path, the more domestic and
+familiar it seems.
+
+The railroad may represent the capitalist or the government; the
+high-road indicates what the surveyor or the county commissioners
+thought best; but the footpath shows what the people needed. Its
+associations are with beauty and humble life,--the boy with his dog,
+the little girl with her fagots, the pedler with his pack; cheery
+companions they are or ought to be.
+
+    "Jog on, jog on the footpath way,
+    And merrily hent the stile-a:
+    A merry heart goes all the day,
+    Your sad one tires in a mile-a."
+
+The footpath takes you across the farms and behind the houses; you are
+admitted to the family secrets and form a personal acquaintance. Even
+if you take the wrong path, it only leads you "across-lots" to some man
+ploughing, or some old woman picking berries,--perhaps a very spicy
+acquaintance, whom the road would never have brought to light. If you
+are led astray in the woods, that only teaches you to observe landmarks
+more closely, or to leave straws and stakes for tokens, like a gypsy's
+patteran, to show the ways already traversed. There is a healthy vigor
+in the mind of the boy who would like of all things to be lost in the
+woods, to build a fire out of doors, and sleep under a tree or in a
+haystack. Civilization is tiresome and enfeebling, unless we
+occasionally give it the relish of a little outlawry, and approach, in
+imagination at least, the zest of a gypsy life. The records of
+pedestrian journeys, the Wanderjahre and memoirs of good-for-noth-ings,
+and all the delightful German forest literature,--these belong to the
+footpath side of our nature. The passage I best remember in all Bayard
+Taylor's travels is the ecstasy of his Thuringian forester, who said:
+"I recall the time when just a sunny morning made me so happy that I
+did not know what to do with myself. One day in spring, as I went
+through the woods and saw the shadows of the young leaves upon the
+moss, and smelt the buds of the firs and larches, and thought to
+myself, 'All thy life is to be spent in the splendid forest,'I actually
+threw myself down and rolled in the grass like a dog, over and over,
+crazy with joy."
+
+It is the charm of pedestrian journeys that they convert the grandest
+avenues to footpaths. Through them alone we gain intimate knowledge of
+the people, and of nature, and indeed of ourselves. It is easy to hurry
+too fast for our best reflections, which, as the old monk said of
+perfection, must be sought not by flying, but by walking, "Perfectionis
+via non pervolanda sed perambulanda." The thoughts that the railway
+affords us are dusty thoughts; we ask the news, read the journals,
+question our neighbor, and wish to know what is going on because we are
+a part of it. It is only in the footpath that our minds, like our
+bodies, move slowly, and we traverse thought, like space, with a
+patient thoroughness. Rousseau said that he had never experienced so
+much, lived so truly, and been so wholly himself, as during his travels
+on foot.
+
+What can Hawthorne mean by saying in his English diary that "an
+American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian
+and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of Giant
+Despair, from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country"? So
+much of the charm of American pedestrianism lies in the by-paths! For
+instance, the whole interior of Cape Ann, beyond Gloucester, is a
+continuous woodland, with granite ledges everywhere cropping out,
+around which the high-road winds, following the curving and indented
+line of the sea, and dotted here and there with fishing hamlets. This
+whole interior is traversed by a network of footpaths, rarely passable
+for a wagon, and not always for a horse, but enabling the pedestrian to
+go from any one of these villages to any other, in a line almost
+direct, and always under an agreeable shade. By the longest of these
+hidden ways, one may go from Pigeon Cove to Gloucester, ten miles,
+without seeing a public road. In the little inn at the former village
+there used to hang an old map of this whole forest region, giving a
+chart of some of these paths, which were said to date back to the first
+settlement of the country. One of them, for instance, was called on the
+map "Old Road from Sandy Bay to Squam Meeting-house through the Woods";
+but the road is now scarcely even a bridle-path, and the most faithful
+worshipper could not seek Squam Meeting-house in the family chaise.
+Those woods have been lately devastated; but when I first knew that
+region, it was as good as any German forest.
+
+Often we stepped almost from the edge of the sea into some gap in the
+woods; there seemed hardly more than a rabbit-track, yet presently we
+met some wayfarer who had crossed the Cape by it. A piny dell gave some
+vista of the broad sea we were leaving, and an opening in the woods
+displayed another blue sea-line before; the encountering breezes
+interchanged odor of berry-bush and scent of brine; penetrating farther
+among oaks and chestnuts, we came upon some little cottage, quaint and
+sheltered as any Spenser drew; it was built on no high-road, and turned
+its vine-clad gable away from even the footpath.
+
+Then the ground rose and we were surprised by a breeze from a new
+quarter; perhaps we climbed trees to look for landmarks, and saw only,
+still farther in the woods, some great cliff of granite or the derrick
+of an unseen quarry. Three miles inland, as I remember, we found the
+hearthstones of a vanished settlement; then we passed a swamp with
+cardinal-flowers; then a cathedral of noble pines, topped with
+crow's-nests. If we had not gone astray by this time, we presently
+emerged on Dogtown Common, an elevated table-land, over-spread with
+great boulders as with houses, and encircled with a girdle of green
+woods and an outer girdle of blue sea. I know of nothing more wild than
+that gray waste of boulders; it is a natural Salisbury Plain, of which
+icebergs and ocean-currents were the Druidic builders; in that
+multitude of couchant monsters there seems a sense of suspended life;
+you feel as if they must speak and answer to each other in the silent
+nights, but by day only the wandering sea-birds seek them, on their way
+across the Cape, and the sweet-bay and green fern embed them in a
+softer and deeper setting as the years go by. This is the "height of
+ground" of that wild footpath; but as you recede farther from the outer
+ocean and approach Gloucester, you come among still wilder ledges,
+unsafe without a guide, and you find in one place a cluster of deserted
+houses, too difficult of access to remove even their materials, so that
+they are left to moulder alone. I used to wander in those woods, summer
+after summer, till I had made my own chart of their devious tracks, and
+now when I close my eyes in this Oldport midsummer, the soft Italian
+air takes on something of a Scandinavian vigor; for the incessant roll
+of carriages I hear the tinkle of the quarryman's hammer and the
+veery's song; and I long for those perfumed and breezy pastures, and
+for those promontories of granite where the fresh water is nectar and
+the salt sea has a regal blue.
+
+I recall another footpath near Worcester, Massachusetts; it leads up
+from the low meadows into the wildest region of all that vicinity,
+Tatesset Hill. Leaving behind you the open pastures where the cattle
+lie beneath the chestnut-trees or drink from the shallow brook, you
+pass among the birches and maples, where the woodsman's shanty stands
+in the clearing, and the raspberry-fields are merry with children's
+voices. The familiar birds and butterflies linger below with them, and
+in the upper and more sacred depths the wood-thrush chants his litany
+and the brown mountain butterflies hover among the scented vines.
+Higher yet rises the "Rattlesnake Ledge," spreading over one side of
+the summit a black avalanche of broken rock, now overgrown with
+reindeer-moss and filled with tufts of the smaller wild geranium. Just
+below this ledge,--amid a dark, dense track of second-growth forest,
+masked here and there with grape-vines, studded with rare orchises, and
+pierced by a brook that vanishes suddenly where the ground sinks away
+and lets the blue distance in,--there is a little monument to which the
+footpath leads, and which always seemed to me as wild a memorial of
+forgotten superstition as the traveller can find amid the forests of
+Japan.
+
+It was erected by a man called Solomon Pearson (not to give his name
+too closely), a quiet, thoughtful farmer, long-bearded, low-voiced, and
+with that aspect of refinement which an ideal life brings forth even in
+quite uninstructed men. At the height of the "Second Advent" excitement
+this man resolved to build for himself upon these remote rocks a house
+which should escape the wrath to come, and should endure even amid a
+burning and transformed earth. Thinking, as he had once said to me,
+that, "if the First Dispensation had been strong enough to endure,
+there would have been no need of a Second," he resolved to build for
+his part something which should possess permanence at least. And there
+still remains on that high hillside the small beginning that he made.
+
+There are four low stone walls, three feet thick, built solidly
+together without cement, and without the trace of tools. The end-walls
+are nine feet high (the sides being lower) and are firmly united by a
+strong iron ridge-pole, perhaps fifteen feet long, which is imbedded at
+each end in the stone. Other masses of iron lie around unused, in
+sheets, bars, and coils, brought with slow labor by the builder from
+far below. The whole building was designed to be made of stone and
+iron. It is now covered with creeping vines and the debris of the
+hillside; but though its construction had been long discontinued when I
+saw it, the interior was still kept scrupulously clean through the care
+of this modern Solomon, who often visited his shrine.
+
+An arch in the terminal wall admits the visitor to the small roofless
+temple, and he sees before him, imbedded in the centre of the floor, a
+large smooth block of white marble, where the deed of this spot of land
+was to be recorded, in the hope to preserve it even after the globe
+should have been burned and renewed. But not a stroke of this
+inscription was ever cut, and now the young chestnut boughs droop into
+the uncovered interior, and shy forest-birds sing fearlessly among
+them, having learned that this house belongs to God, not man. As if to
+reassure them, and perhaps in allusion to his own vegetarian habits,
+the architect has spread some rough plaster at the head of the
+apartment and marked on it in bold characters, "Thou shalt not kill."
+Two slabs outside, a little way from the walls, bear these
+inscriptions, "Peace on Earth," "Good-Will to Men." When I visited it,
+the path was rough and so obstructed with bushes that it was hard to
+comprehend how it had afforded passage for these various materials; it
+seemed more as if some strange architectural boulder had drifted from
+some Runic period and been stranded there. It was as apt a confessional
+as any of Wordsworth's nooks among the Trossachs; and when one thinks
+how many men are wearing out their souls in trying to conform to the
+traditional mythologies of others, it seems nobler in this man to have
+reared upon that lonely hill the unfinished memorial of his own.
+
+I recall another path which leads from the Lower Saranac Lake, near
+"Martin's," to what the guides call, or used to call, "The
+Philosopher's Camp" at Amperzand. On this oddly named lake, in the
+Adirondack region, a tract of land was bought by Professor Agassiz and
+his friends, who made there a summer camping-ground, and with one
+comrade I once sought the spot. I remember with what joy we left the
+boat,--so delightful at first, so fatiguing at last; for I cannot, with
+Mr. Murray, call it a merit in the Adirondacks that you never have to
+walk,--and stepped away into the free forest. We passed tangled swamps,
+so dense with upturned trees and trailing mosses that they seemed to
+give no opening for any living thing to pass, unless it might be the
+soft and silent owl that turned its head almost to dislocation in
+watching us, ere it flitted vaguely away. Farther on, the deep, cool
+forest was luxurious with plumy ferns; we trod on moss-covered roots,
+finding the emerald steps so soft we scarcely knew that we were
+ascending; every breath was aromatic; there seemed infinite healing in
+every fragrant drop that fell upon our necks from the cedar boughs. We
+had what I think the pleasantest guide for a daylight tramp,--one who
+has never before passed over that particular route, and can only pilot
+you on general principles till he gladly, at last, allows you to pilot
+him. When we once got the lead we took him jubilantly on, and beginning
+to look for "The Philosopher's Camp," found ourselves confronted by a
+large cedar-tree on the margin of a wooded lake. This was plainly the
+end of the path. Was the camp then afloat? Our escort was in that state
+of hopeless ignorance of which only lost guides are capable. We scanned
+the green horizon and the level water, without glimpse of human abode.
+It seemed an enchanted lake, and we looked about the tree-trunk for
+some fairy horn, that we might blow it. That failing, we tried three
+rifle-shots, and out from the shadow of an island, on the instant,
+there glided a boat, which bore no lady of the lake, but a red-shirted
+woodsman. The artist whom we sought was on that very island, it seemed,
+sketching patiently while his guides were driving the deer.
+
+This artist was he whose "Procession of the Pines" had identified his
+fame with that delightful forest region. He it was who had laid out
+with artistic taste "The Philosopher's Camp," and who was that season
+still awaiting philosophers as well as deer. He had been there for a
+month, alone with the guides, and declared that Nature was pressing
+upon him to an extent that almost drove him wild. His eyes had a
+certain remote and questioning look that belongs to imaginative men who
+dwell alone. It seemed an impertinence to ask him to come out of his
+dream and offer us dinner; but his instincts of hospitality failed not,
+and the red-shirted guide was sent to the camp, which was, it seemed,
+on the other side of the lake, to prepare our meal, while we bathed. I
+am thus particular in speaking of the dinner, not only because such is
+the custom of travellers, but also because it was the occasion of an
+interlude which I shall never forget. As we were undressing for our
+bath upon the lonely island, where the soft, pale water almost lapped
+our feet, and the deep, wooded hills made a great amphitheatre for the
+lake, our host bethought himself of something neglected in his
+instructions.
+
+"Ben!" vociferated he to the guide, now rapidly receding. Ben paused on
+his oars.
+
+"Remember to bo-o-oil the venison, Ben!" shouted the pensive artist,
+while all the slumbering echoes arose to applaud this culinary
+confidence.
+
+"And, Ben!" he added, imploringly, "don't forget the dumplings!" Upon
+this, the loons, all down the lake, who had hitherto been silent, took
+up the strain with vehemence, hurling their wild laughter at the
+presumptuous mortal who thus dared to invade their solitudes with
+details as trivial as Mr. Pickwick's tomato-sauce. They repeated it
+over and over to each other, till ten square miles of loons must have
+heard the news, and all laughed together; never was there such an
+audience; they could not get over it, and two hours after, when we had
+rowed over to the camp and dinner had been served, this irreverent and
+invisible chorus kept bursting out, at all points of the compass, with
+scattered chuckles of delight over this extraordinary bill of fare.
+Justice compels me to add that the dumplings were made of Indian-meal,
+upon a recipe devised by our artist; the guests preferred the venison,
+but the host showed a fidelity to his invention that proved him to be
+indeed a dweller in an ideal world.
+
+Another path that comes back to memory is the bare trail that we
+followed over the prairies of Nebraska, in 1856, when the Missouri
+River was held by roving bands from the Slave States, and Freedom had
+to seek an overland route into Kansas. All day and all night we rode
+between distant prairie-fires, pillars of evening light and of morning
+cloud, while sometimes the low grass would burn to the very edge of the
+trail, so that we had to hold our breath as we galloped through.
+Parties of armed Missourians were sometimes seen over the prairie
+swells, so that we had to mount guard at nightfall; Free-State
+emigrants, fleeing from persecution, continually met us; and we
+sometimes saw parties of wandering Sioux, or passed their great
+irregular huts and houses of worship. I remember one desolate prairie
+summit on which an Indian boy sat motionless on horseback; his bare red
+legs clung closely to the white sides of his horse; a gorgeous sunset
+was unrolled behind him, and he might have seemed the last of his race,
+just departing for the hunting-grounds of the blest. More often the
+horizon showed no human outline, and the sun set cloudless, and
+elongated into pear-shaped outlines, as behind ocean-waves. But I
+remember best the excitement that filled our breasts when we approached
+spots where the contest for a free soil had already been sealed with
+blood. In those days, as one went to Pennsylvania to study coal
+formations, or to Lake Superior for copper, so one went to Kansas for
+men. "Every footpath on this planet," said a rare thinker, "may lead to
+the door of a hero," and that trail into Kansas ended rightly at the
+tent-door of John Brown.
+
+And later, who that knew them can forget the picket-paths that were
+worn throughout the Sea Islands of South Carolina,--paths that wound
+along the shores of creeks or through the depths of woods, where the
+great wild roses tossed their airy festoons above your head, and the
+brilliant lizards glanced across your track, and your horse's ears
+suddenly pointed forward and his pace grew uneasy as he snuffed the
+presence of something you could not see. At night you had often to ride
+from picket to picket in dense darkness, trusting to the horse to find
+his way, or sometimes dismounting to feel with your hands for the
+track, while the great Southern fire-flies offered their floating
+lanterns for guidance, and the hoarse "Chuck-will's-widow" croaked
+ominously from the trees, and the great guns of the siege of Charleston
+throbbed more faintly than the drumming of a partridge, far away. Those
+islands are everywhere so intersected by dikes and ledges and winding
+creeks as to form a natural military region, like La Vendee and yet two
+plantations that are twenty miles asunder by the road will sometimes be
+united by a footpath which a negro can traverse in two hours. These
+tracks are limited in distance by the island formation, but they assume
+a greater importance as you penetrate the mainland; they then join
+great States instead of mere plantations, and if you ask whither one of
+them leads, you are told "To Alabama," or "To Tennessee."
+
+Time would fail to tell of that wandering path which leads to the Mine
+Mountain near Brattleborough, where you climb the high peak at last,
+and perhaps see the showers come up the Connecticut till they patter on
+the leaves beneath you, and then, swerving, pass up the black ravine
+and leave you unwet. Or of those among the White Mountains, gorgeous
+with great red lilies which presently seem to take flight in a cloud of
+butterflies that match their tints,--paths where the balsamic air
+caresses you in light breezes, and masses of alder-berries rise above
+the waving ferns. Or of the paths that lead beside many a little New
+England stream, whose bank is lost to sight in a smooth green slope of
+grape-vine: the lower shoots rest upon the quiet water, but the upper
+masses are crowned by a white wreath of alder-blooms; beside them grow
+great masses of wild-roses, and the simultaneous blossoms and berries
+of the gaudy nightshade. Or of those winding tracks that lead here and
+there among the flat stones of peaceful old graveyards, so entwined
+with grass and flowers that every spray of sweetbrier seems to tell
+more of life than all the accumulated epitaphs can tell of death.
+
+And when the paths that one has personally traversed are exhausted,
+memory holds almost as clearly those which the poets have trodden for
+us,--those innumerable by-ways of Shakespeare, each more real than any
+high-road in England; or Chaucer's
+
+           "Little path I found
+    Of mintes full and fennell greene";
+
+or Spenser's
+
+           "Pathes and alleies wide
+    With footing worne";
+
+or the path of Browning's "Pippa"
+
+      "Down the hillside, up the glen,
+      Love me as I love!"
+
+or the weary tracks by which "Little Nell" wandered; or the haunted way
+in Sydney Dobell's ballad,
+
+     "Ravelstone, Ravelstone,
+      The merry path that leads
+      Down the golden morning hills,
+   And through the silver meads";
+
+or the few American paths that genius has yet idealized; that where
+Hawthorne's "David Swan" slept, or that which Thoreau found upon the
+banks of Walden Pond, or where Whittier parted with his childhood's
+playmate on Ramoth Hill. It is not heights, or depths, or spaces that
+make the world worth living in; for the fairest landscape needs still
+to be garlanded by the imagination,--to become classic with noble deeds
+and romantic with dreams.
+
+Go where we please in nature, we receive in proportion as we give. Ivo,
+the old Bishop of Chartres, wrote, that "neither the secret depth of
+woods nor the tops of mountains make man blessed, if he has not with
+him solitude of mind, the sabbath of the heart, and tranquillity of
+conscience." There are many roads, but one termination; and Plato says,
+in his "Republic," that the point where all paths meet is the soul's
+true resting-place and the journey's end.
+
+
+
+The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Oldport Days, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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