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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oldport Days by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
+#2 in our series by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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+Oldport Days
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+by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
+
+December, 2000  [Etext #2418]
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+Note: I have closed contractions in the text, e.g., "did n't"
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+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 oquettish; 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 October19, 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 &aelig;olian 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,-- o 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 The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oldport Days by Thomas
+Wentworth Higginson .
+
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