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Title:  Passages from an Old Volume of Life

Author:  Oliver W. Holmes

July, 2001  [Etext #2706]
[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]

Project Gutenberg Passages from an Old Volume of Life, by Holmes
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Etext prepared for Gutenberg by David Widger, < widger@cecomet.net >





PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE.


A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS


BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES




CONTENTS:
     BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER
     MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN"
     THE INEVITABLE TRIAL
     CINDERS FROM ASHES
     THE PULPIT AND THE PEW






BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER.

(September, 1861.)

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman
populace.  It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs.  They must have
something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at.  We must have
something to eat, and the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up.  If we are rich, we can lay down our
carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip
to Europe sine die.  If we live in a small way, there are at least
new dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense
with.  If the young Zouave of the family looks smart in his new
uniform, its respectable head is content, though he himself grow
seedy as a caraway-umbel late in the season.  He will cheerfully calm
the perturbed nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in place of
buying a new one, if only the Lieutenant's jaunty cap is what it
should be.  We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic economy of
the time.  Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else
we do without.

How this war is simplifying our mode of being!  We live on our
emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be
nourished by his fever.  Our ordinary mental food has become
distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other
times, are now absolutely repulsive.

All this change in our manner of existence implies that we have
experienced some very profound impression, which will sooner or later
betray itself in permanent effects on the minds and bodies of many
among us.  We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the frequency
with which diseases of the heart were noticed as the consequence of
the terrible emotions produced by the scenes of the great French
Revolution.  Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was
the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected to the
severest penances and schooled in the most painful doctrines.  They
all became consumptive soon after their entrance, so that, in the
course of his ten years' attendance, all the inmates died out two or
three times, and were replaced by new ones.  He does not hesitate to
attribute the disease from which they suffered to those depressing
moral influences to which they were subjected.

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances of the nervous
system as a consequence of the war excitement in non-combatants.
Take the first trifling example which comes to our recollection.  A
sad disaster to the Federal army was told the other day in the
presence of two gentlemen and a lady.  Both the gentlemen complained
of a sudden feeling at the epigastrium, or, less learnedly, the pit
of the stomach, changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about
the knees.  The lady had a "grande revolution," as French patients
say, --went home, and kept her bed for the rest of the day.  Perhaps
the reader may smile at the mention of such trivial indispositions,
but in more sensitive natures death itself follows in some cases from
no more serious cause.  An old, gentleman fell senseless in fatal
apoplexy, on hearing of Napoleon's return from Elba.  One of our
early friends, who recently died of the same complaint, was thought
to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the excitements of
the time.

We all know what the war fever is in our young men,--what a devouring
passion it becomes in those whom it assails.  Patriotism is the fire
of it, no doubt, but this is fed with fuel of all sorts.  The love of
adventure, the contagion of example, the fear of losing the chance of
participating in the great events of the time, the desire of personal
distinction, all help to produce those singular transformations which
we often witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into the
most ardent of our soldiers.  But something of the same fever in a
different form reaches a good many non-combatants, who have no
thought of losing a drop of precious blood belonging to themselves or
their families.  Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost
universal; they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the
marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character.
Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business.
They stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public
places.  We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the
volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke out.  It
was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew
pale before the red light of the terrible present.  Meeting the same
author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his
pen at the same time that we had closed his book.  He could not write
about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it,
while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its
great sacrifice.

Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had
fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic
dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were
new, until he felt as if he were an idiot.  Who did not do just the
same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush
of the fever is over?  Another person always goes through the side
streets on his way for the noon extra,--he is so afraid somebody will
meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin-
board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the
newspaper.

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself
in our minds in spite of all we can do.  The same trains of thought
go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the
supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show.  Now, if
a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it
will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it
once a week for twenty years.  This accounts for the ages we seem to
have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more
generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or
any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image
of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as
through all those which we have already turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these!  Yet,
not wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking
from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something
wrong, we cannot at first think what,--and then groping our way about
through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the
misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but
which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of
the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful.  Many have the
feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with
is, after all, only a dream,--if they will rub their eyes briskly
enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all
their supposed grief is unreal.  This attempt to cajole ourselves out
of an ugly fact always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have
been indulging in the dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for
their especial use.

Watch one of them.  He does not feel quite well,--at least, he
suspects himself of indisposition.  Nothing serious,--let us just rub
our fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us
rubs his hands, and all will be right.  He rubs them with that
peculiar twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect.  No!
all is not quite right yet.  Ah!  it is our head that is not set on
just as it ought to be.  Let us settle that where it should be, and
then we shall certainly be in good trim again.  So he pulls his head
about as an old lady adjusts her cap, and passes his fore-paw over it
like a kitten washing herself.  Poor fellow!  It is not a fancy, but
a fact, that he has to deal with.  If he could read the letters at
the head of the sheet, he would see they were Fly-Paper. --So with
us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we dream!  Perhaps
very young persons may not understand this; as we grow older, our
waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up
of old habits.  The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it
will be had, and it will be read.  To this all else must give place.
If we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite
of after-dinner nap or evening somnolence.  If it finds us in
company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment
and the story by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this generation of
Americans.  Our own nearest relation in the ascending line remembers
the Revolution well.  How should she forget it?  Did she not lose her
doll, which was left behind, when she was carried out of Boston,
about that time growing uncomfortable by reason of cannon-balls
dropping in from the neighboring heights at all hours,--in token of
which see the tower of Brattle Street Church at this very day?  War
in her memory means '76.  As for the brush of 1812, "we did not think
much about that"; and everybody knows that the Mexican business did
not concern us much, except in its political relations.  No!  war is
a new thing to all of us who are not in the last quarter of their
century.  We are learning many strange matters from our fresh
experience.  And besides, there are new conditions of existence which
make war as it is with us very different from war as it has been.

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact that the whole
nation is now penetrated by the ramifications of a network of iron
nerves which flash sensation and volition backward and forward to and
from towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs of a single
living body.  The second is the vast system of iron muscles which, as
it were, move the limbs of the mighty organism one upon another.
What was the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment in Baltimore
on the 19th of April but a contraction and extension of the arm of
Massachusetts with a clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it?

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the power of
instantaneous action, keeps us always alive with excitement.  It is
not a breathless courier who comes back with the report from an army
we have lost sight of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells
us all we are to know for a week of some great engagement, but almost
hourly paragraphs, laden with truth or falsehood as the case may be,
making us restless always for the last fact or rumor they are
telling.  And so of the movements of our armies.  To-night the stout
lumbermen of Maine are encamped under their own fragrant pines.  In a
score or two of hours they are among the tobacco-fields and the
slave-pens of Virginia.  The war passion burned like scattered coals
of fire in the households of Revolutionary times; now it rushes all
through the land like a flame over the prairie.  And this instant
diffusion of every fact and feeling produces another singular effect
in the equalizing and steadying of public opinion.  We may not be
able to see a month ahead of us; but as to what has passed a week
afterwards it is as thoroughly talked out and judged as it would have
been in a whole season before our national nervous system was
organized.

    "As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea,
     Thou only teachest all that man can be!"

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a Phi Beta Kappa poem
of long ago, which we liked better before we read Mr. Cutler's
beautiful prolonged lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that
Society.

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good-will towards all mankind,
we have felt twinges of conscience about the passage,--especially
when one of our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as much to
build and keep as a college, and that every port-hole we could stop
would give us a new professor.  Now we begin to think that there was
some meaning in our poor couplet.  War has taught us, as nothing else
could, what we can be and are.  It has exalted our manhood and our
womanhood, and driven us all back upon our substantial human
qualities, for a long time more or less kept out of sight by the
spirit of commerce, the love of art, science, or literature, or other
qualities not belonging to all of us as men and women.

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away the petty social
distinctions which keep generous souls apart from each other, than
the preaching of the Beloved Disciple himself would do.  We are
finding out that not only "patriotism is eloquence," but that heroism
is gentility.  All ranks are wonderfully equalized under the fire of
a masked battery.  The plain artisan or the rough fireman, who faces
the lead and iron like a man, is the truest representative we can
show of the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt.  And if one of our fine
gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and stands by the other,
shoulder to shoulder, or leads him on to the attack, he is as
honorable in our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his
hands were soiled with labor.

Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles
(the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his
supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the,
"bloated aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid,
undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an
aptitude for learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours,
subvirates of an organizable base as they often are, count as full
men, if their courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so
loosely about their slender figures.

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running under
our windows.  A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to the
water's edge, and fired many times over the river.  We asked a
bystander, who looked like a fisherman, what that was for.  It was to
"break the gall," he said, and so bring the drowned person to the
surface.  A strange physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur;
but that is not our present point.  A good many extraordinary objects
do really come to the surface when the great guns of war shake the
waters, as when they roared over Charleston harbor.

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its
dishonorable grave.  But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had
been covered with the waves of prosperity, came up also.  And all
sorts of unexpected and unheard-of things, which had lain unseen
during our national life of fourscore years, came up and are coming
up daily, shaken from their bed by the concussions of the artillery
bellowing around us.

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable
not unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of
Revolutionary times had died out from among us.  They talked about
our own Northern people as the English in the last centuries used to
talk about the French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be
remembered, called one Englishman good for five of them.  As Napoleon
spoke of the English, again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these
persons affected to consider the multitude of their countrymen as
unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself the
value of liberty in working upon gold, and Nathaniel Greene fitted
himself to shape armies in the labor of forging iron.
These persons have learned better now.  The bravery of our free
working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but not
drowned.  The hands which had been busy conquering the elements had
only to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were as
ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they
had been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest
ice, to hammer brute matter into every shape civilization can ask
for.

Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in
new shapes,--that we are one people.  It is easy to say that a man is
a man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through
our bones and marrow.  The camp is deprovincializing us very fast.
Brave Winthrop, marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a
little startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed
men of the Eighth Massachusetts.  It takes all the nonsense out of
everybody, or ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a
country is distributed over its surface.  And then, just as we are
beginning to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as
of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty-
ninth, to show us that continental provincialism is as bad as that of
Coos County, New Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief.  When
the masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in
his heart that God takes better care of him than of his
"Congregationalist" Colonel?  Does any man really suppose, that, of a
score of noble young fellows who have just laid down their lives for
their country, the Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss,
and the Homoousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of
everlasting woe?  War not only teaches what man can be, but it
teaches also what he must not be.  He must not be a bigot and a fool
in the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet
which calls to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts:
to do his duty, and trust his Maker.  Let our brave dead come back
from the fields where they have fallen for law and liberty, and if
you will follow them to their graves, you will find out what the
Broad Church means; the narrow church is sparing of its exclusive
formulae over the coffins wrapped in the flag which the fallen heroes
had defended!  Very little comparatively do we hear at such times of
the dogmas on which men differ; very much of the faith and trust in
which all sincere Christians can agree.  It is a noble lesson, and
nothing less noisy than the voice of cannon can teach it so that it
shall be heard over all the angry cries of theological disputants.

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity of our friends, and
to get at their principles of judgment.  Perhaps most, of us, will
agree that our faith in domestic prophets has been diminished by the
experience of the last six months.  We had the notable predictions
attributed to the Secretary of State, which so unpleasantly refused
to fulfil themselves.  We were infested at one time with a set of
ominous-looking seers, who shook their heads and muttered obscurely
about some mighty preparations that were making to substitute the
rule of the minority for that of the majority.  Organizations were
darkly hinted at; some thought our armories would be seized; and
there are not wanting ancient women in the neighboring University
town who consider that the country was saved by the intrepid band of
students who stood guard, night after night, over the G. R. cannon
and the pile of balls in the Cambridge Arsenal.

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best prophecies are
those which the sages remember after the event prophesied of has come
to pass, and remind us that they have made long ago.  Those who, are
rash enough to predict publicly beforehand commonly give us what they
hope, or what they fear, or some conclusion from an abstraction of
their own, or some guess founded on private information not half so
good as what everybody gets who reads the papers,--never by any
possibility a word that we can depend on, simply because there are
cobwebs of contingency between every to-day and to-morrow that no
field-glass can penetrate when fifty of them lie woven one over
another.  Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge.  Say that
you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly supposed, but, on
the other hand, that they may prove to be even stronger than is
anticipated.  Say what you like,--only don't be too peremptory and
dogmatic; we know that wiser men than you have been notoriously
deceived in their predictions in this very matter.

     Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis.

Let that be your model; and remember, on peril of your reputation as
a prophet, not to put a stop before or after the nunquam.

There are two or three facts connected with time, besides that
already referred to, which strike us very forcibly in their relation
to the great events passing around us.  We spoke of the long period
seeming to have elapsed since this war began.  The buds were then
swelling which held the leaves that are still green.  It seems as old
as Time himself.  We cannot fail to observe how the mind brings
together the scenes of to-day and those of the old Revolution.  We
shut up eighty years into each other like the joints of a pocket-
telescope.  When the young men from Middlesex dropped in Baltimore
the other day, it seemed to bring Lexington and the other Nineteenth
of April close to us.  War has always been the mint in which the
world's history has been coined, and now every day or week or month
has a new medal for us.  It was Warren that the first impression bore
in the last great coinage; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face
hardly seems fresher than the old.  All battle-fields are alike in
their main features.  The young fellows who fell in our earlier
struggle seemed like old men to us until within these few months; now
we remember they were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they
go to the fight; it seems as if the grass of our bloody hillside was
crimsoned but yesterday, and the cannon-ball imbedded in the church-
tower would feel warm, if we laid our hand upon it.

Nay, in this our quickened life we feel that all the battles from
earliest time to our own day, where Right and Wrong have grappled,
are but one great battle, varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs
upon the field of conflict.  The issues seem to vary, but it is
always a right against a claim, and, however the struggle of the hour
may go, a movement onward of the campaign, which uses defeat as well
as victory to serve its mighty ends.  The very implements of our
warfare change less than we think.  Our bullets and cannonballs have
lengthened into bolts like those which whistled out of old arbalests.
Our soldiers fight with weapons, such as are pictured on the walls of
Theban tombs, wearing a newly invented head-gear as old as the days
of the Pyramids.

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is making us wiser,
and, we trust, better.  Wiser, for we are learning our weakness, our
narrowness, our selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and
shame.  Better, because all that is noble in men and women is
demanded by the time, and our people are rising to the standard the
time calls for.  For this is the question the hour is putting to each
of us: Are you ready, if need be, to sacrifice all that you have and
hope for in this world, that the generations to follow you may
inherit a whole country whose natural condition shall be peace, and
not a broken province which must live under the perpetual threat, if
not in the constant presence, of war and all that war brings with it?
If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles may be lost, but the
campaign and its grand object must be won.

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions to mortals.  We
are not abruptly asked to give up all that we most care for, in view
of the momentous issues before us.  Perhaps we shall never be asked
to give up all, but we have already been called upon to part with
much that is dear to us, and should be ready to yield the rest as it
is called for.  The time may come when even the cheap public print
shall be a burden our means cannot support, and we can only listen in
the square that was once the marketplace to the voices of those who
proclaim defeat or victory.  Then there will be only our daily food
left.  When we have nothing to read and nothing to eat, it will be a
favorable moment to offer a compromise.  At present we have all that
nature absolutely demands,--we can live on bread and the newspaper.






MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

In the dead of the night which closed upon the bloody field of
Antietam, my household was startled from its slumbers by the loud
summons of a telegraphic messenger.  The air had been heavy all day
with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thousands had walked
the streets with throbbing hearts, in dread anticipation of the
tidings any hour might bring.

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was admitted.  I took
the envelope from his hand, opened it, and read:


HAGERSTOWN 17th

To__________ H ______

Capt H______ wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at
Keedysville

WILLIAM G. LEDUC


Through the neck,--no bullet left in wound.  Windpipe, food-pipe,
carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable vessels,
a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,--
ought to kill at once, if at all.  Thought not mortal, or not thought
mortal,--which was it?  The first; that is better than the second
would be.  -"Keedysville, a post-office, Washington Co., Maryland."
Leduc?  Leduc?  Don't remember that name.  The boy is waiting for his
money.  A dollar and thirteen cents.  Has nobody got thirteen cents?
Don't keep that boy waiting,--how do we know what messages he has got
to carry?

The boy had another message to carry.  It was to the father of
Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, informing him that his son was
grievously wounded in the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough,
a town a few miles this side of Keedysville.  This I learned the next
morning from the civil and attentive officials at the Central
Telegraph Office.

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant to leave in the
quarter past two o'clock train, taking with him Dr. George H. Gay, an
accomplished and energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question
or pressing emergency.  I agreed to accompany them, and we met in the
cars.  I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in having companions whose
society would be a pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my
own, and whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad to claim.

It is of the journey which we began together, and which I finished
apart, that I mean to give my "Atlantic" readers an account.  They
must let me tell my story in my own way, speaking of many little
matters that interested or amused me, and which a certain leisurely
class of elderly persons, who sit at their firesides and never
travel, will, I hope, follow with a kind of interest.  For, besides
the main object of my excursion, I could not help being excited by
the incidental sights and occurrences of a trip which to a commercial
traveller or a newspaper-reporter would seem quite commonplace and
undeserving of record.  There are periods in which all places and
people seem to be in a conspiracy to impress us with their
individuality, in which every ordinary locality seems to assume a
special significance and to claim a particular notice, in which every
person we meet is either an old acquaintance or a character; days in
which the strangest coincidences are continually happening, so that
they get to be the rule, and not the exception.  Some might naturally
think that anxiety and the weariness of a prolonged search after a
near relative would have prevented my taking any interest in or
paying any regard to the little matters around me.  Perhaps it had
just the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused stimulus upon the
attention.  When all the faculties are wide-awake in pursuit of a
single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they
are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many
collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his
sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with
such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story
where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.

Be that as it may,--though I set out with a full and heavy heart,
though many times my blood chilled with what were perhaps needless
and unwise fears, though I broke through all my habits without
thinking about them, which is almost as hard in certain circumstances
as for one of our young fellows to leave his sweetheart and go into a
Peninsular campaign, though I did not always know when I was hungry
nor discover that I was thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and
inward tremor underlying all the outward play of the senses and the
mind, yet it is the simple truth that I did look out of the car-
windows with an eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance
of strange sights and singular people, that I did act much as persons
act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity, and from time to time
even laugh very much as others do who are attacked with a convulsive
sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars.  A communicative
friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a
railroad journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and
in itself agreeable.  "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my
motto.  Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be
magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts
shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing
patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the
grains of sand in Chladni's famous experiment,--fresh ideas coming up
to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in
a farmer's wagon,--all this without volition, the mechanical impulse
alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying
certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,--many times, I
say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this
delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend,
cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me
and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed
the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on
the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my
hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of
my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling
themselves full of fresh juices.  My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness
produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be
the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless
inebriety in what we know as sea-sickness.  Where the horizon opened
widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid
movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant
ones.  Looking from a right-hand window, for instance, the fences
close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant
hills not only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast
with the fences near at hand as if they were moving forward, or to
the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel
revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-
established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them.
We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated.  The
traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience
of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found
"his warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the
offices of the great city hotels.  The unheralded guest who is
honored by mere indifference may think himself blessed with singular
good-fortune.  If the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly
contemptuous in his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal
favor.  The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the
door of a bishop's palace, the most icy reception that a country
cousin ever received at the city mansion of a mushroom millionaire,
is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms
you to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno
vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his dog's-eared
register.  I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this
uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met with more
than one exception to the rule.  Officials become brutalized, I
suppose, as a matter of course.  One cannot expect an office clerk to
embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a
telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message
he receives for transmission.  Still, humanity is not always totally
extinguished in these persons.  I discovered a youth in a telegraph
office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant
in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive
questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will
not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars
with sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole
side of the car maybe made transparent.  New Jersey is, to the
apprehension of a traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a
State.  Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud of a
battle-field.  Peach-trees are common, and champagne-orchards.
Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by, feeling their way along like
blind men led by dogs.  I had a mighty passion come over me to be the
captain of one,--to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened
by storms,--to float where I could not sink,--to navigate where there
is no shipwreck,--to lie languidly on the deck and govern the huge
craft by a word or the movement of a finger: there was something of
railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has not often envied a
cobbler in his stall?

The boys cry the "N'-York Heddle," instead of "Herald "; I remember
that years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther
end of the dumb-bell suburb.  A bridge has been swept away by a rise
of the waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river.  Her
physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would
say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the
town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman's
dress that trails on the sidewalk.  The New Ironsides lies at one of
the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as
they rise, like the walls of a hock-glass.

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would
be heard of, if anywhere in this region.  His lieutenant-colonel was
there, gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son
of the house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier,
brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever.  A fourth bed
was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of
him, though inquiries had been made in the towns from and through
which the father had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel.
And so my search is, like a "Ledger" story, to be continued.

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon-train for
Baltimore.  Our company was gaining in number as it moved onwards.
We had found upon the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the
wife of one of our most spirited Massachusetts officers, the brave
Colonel of the __th Regiment, going to seek her wounded husband at
Middletown, a place lying directly in our track.  She was the light
of our party while we were together on our pilgrimage, a fair,
gracious woman, gentle, but courageous,


          ---"ful plesant and amiable of port,
               ---estatelich of manere,
          And to ben holden digne of reverence."

On the road from Philadelphia, I found in the same car with our party
Dr.  William Hunt of Philadelphia, who had most kindly and faithfully
attended the Captain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at
Ball's Bluff, which came very near being mortal.  He was going upon
an errand of mercy to the wounded, and found he had in his
memorandum-book the name of our lady's husband, the Colonel, who had
been commended to his particular attention.

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a solitary sentry
keeping guard over a short railroad bridge.  It was the first
evidence that we were approaching the perilous borders, the marches
where the North and the South mingle their angry hosts, where the
extremes of our so-called civilization meet in conflict, and the
fierce slave-driver of the Lower Mississippi stares into the stern
eyes of the forest-feller from the banks of the Aroostook.  All the
way along, the bridges were guarded more or less strongly.  In a vast
country like ours, communications play a far more complex part than
in Europe, where the whole territory available for strategic purposes
is so comparatively limited.  Belgium, for instance, has long been
the bowling-alley where kings roll cannon-balls at each other's
armies; but here we are playing the game of live ninepins without any
alley.

We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, as we were too late
for the train to Frederick.  At the Eutaw House, where we found both
comfort and courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled the
evening hours for us in the most agreeable manner.  We devoted some
time to procuring surgical and other articles, such as might be
useful to our friends, or to others, if our friends should not need
them.  In the morning, I found myself seated at the breakfast-table
next to General Wool.  It did not surprise me to find the General
very far from expansive.  With Fort McHenry on his shoulders and
Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and the weight of a military
department loading down his social safety-valves, I thought it a
great deal for an officer in his trying position to select so very
obliging and affable an aid as the gentleman who relieved him of the
burden of attending to strangers.

We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Frederick.  As we stood
waiting on the platform, a telegraphic message was handed in silence
to my companion.  Sad news: the lifeless body of the son he was
hastening to see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore.  It was
no time for empty words of consolation: I knew what he had lost, and
that now was not the time to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear
it, felt as women feel it.

Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me as the friend of a
beloved relative of my own, who was with him during a severe illness
in Switzerland; and for whom while living, and for whose memory when
dead, he retained the warmest affection.  Since that the story of his
noble deeds of daring, of his capture and escape, and a brief visit
home before he was able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name
familiar to many among us, myself among the number.  His memory has
been honored by those who had the largest opportunity of knowing his
rare promise, as a man of talents and energy of nature.  His
abounding vitality must have produced its impression on all who met
him; there was a still fire about him which any one could see would
blaze up to melt all difficulties and recast obstacles into
implements in the mould of an heroic will.  These elements of his
character many had the chance of knowing; but I shall always
associate him with the memory of that pure and noble friendship which
made me feel that I knew him before I looked upon his face, and added
a personal tenderness to the sense of loss which I share with the
whole community.

Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the companions with whom I
set out on my journey.

In one of the cars, at the same station, we met General Shriver of
Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose name is synonymous with a
hearty welcome to all whom he can aid by his counsel and his
hospitality.  He took great pains to give us all the information we
needed, and expressed the hope, which was afterwards fulfilled, to
the great gratification of some of us, that we should meet again when
he should return to his home.

There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip to Frederick,
except our passing a squad of Rebel prisoners, whom I missed seeing,
as they flashed by, but who were said to be a most forlorn-looking
crowd of scarecrows.  Arrived at the Monocacy River, about three
miles this side of Frederick, we came to a halt, for the railroad
bridge had been blown up by the Rebels, and its iron pillars and
arches were lying in the bed of the river.  The unfortunate wretch
who fired the train was killed by the explosion, and lay buried hard
by, his hands sticking out of the shallow grave into which he had
been huddled.  This was the story they told us, but whether true or
not I must leave to the correspondents of "Notes and Queries " to
settle.

There was a great confusion of carriages and wagons at the stopping-
place of the train, so that it was a long time before I could get
anything that would carry us.  At last I was lucky enough to light on
a sturdy wagon, drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and driven by
James Grayden, with whom I was destined to have a somewhat continued
acquaintance.  We took up a little girl who had been in Baltimore
during the late Rebel inroad.  It made me think of the time when my
own mother, at that time six years old, was hurried off from Boston,
then occupied by the British soldiers, to Newburyport, and heard the
people saying that "the redcoats were coming, killing and murdering
everybody as they went along."  Frederick looked cheerful for a place
that had so recently been in an enemy's hands.  Here and there a
house or shop was shut up, but the national colors were waving in all
directions, and the general aspect was peaceful and contented.  I saw
no bullet-marks or other sign of the fighting which had gone on in
the streets.  The Colonel's lady was taken in charge by a daughter of
that hospitable family to which we had been commended by its head,
and I proceeded to inquire for wounded officers at the various
temporary hospitals.

At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, I heard mention of
an officer in an upper chamber, and, going there, found Lieutenant
Abbott, of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with
what looked like typhoid fever.  While there, who should come in but
the almost ubiquitous Lieutenant Wilkins, of the same Twentieth, whom
I had met repeatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and who
was just from the battle-ground.  He was going to Boston in charge of
the body of the lamented Dr. Revere, the Assistant Surgeon of the
regiment, killed on the field.  From his lips I learned something of
the mishaps of the regiment.  My Captain's wound he spoke of as less
grave than at first thought; but he mentioned incidentally having
heard a story recently that he was killed,--a fiction, doubtless,--a
mistake,--a palpable absurdity,--not to be remembered or made any
account of.  Oh no! but what dull ache is this in that obscurely
sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the nervous centre
called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself until a
great grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the non-
conductors which isolate it from ordinary impressions?  I talked
awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who lay prostrate, feeble, but
soldier-like and uncomplaining, carefully waited upon by a most
excellent lady, a captain's wife, New England born, loyal as the
Liberty on a golden ten-dollar piece, and of lofty bearing enough to
have sat for that goddess's portrait.  She had stayed in Frederick
through the Rebel inroad, and kept the star-spangled banner where it
would be safe, to unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off
from the pavement of the town.

Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentleman, occupying a small
chamber, and filling it with his troubles.  When he gets well and
plump, I know he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help
smiling in the midst of my sympathy for him.  He had been a well-
favored man, he said, sweeping his hand in a semicircle, which
implied that his acute-angled countenance had once filled the goodly
curve he described.  He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look upon.
Weakness had made him querulous, as it does all of us, and he piped
his grievances to me in a thin voice, with that finish of detail
which chronic invalidism alone can command.  He was starving,--he
could not get what he wanted to eat.  He was in need of stimulants,
and he held up a pitiful two-ounce phial containing three
thimblefuls--of brandy,--his whole stock of that encouraging article.
Him I consoled to the best of my ability, and afterwards, in some
slight measure, supplied his wants.  Feed this poor gentleman up, as
these good people soon will, and I should not know him, nor he
himself.  We are all egotists in sickness and debility.  An animal
has been defined as "a stomach ministered to by organs;" and the
greatest man comes very near this simple formula after a month or two
of fever and starvation.

James Grayden and his team pleased me well enough, and so I made a
bargain with him to take us, the lady and myself, on our further
journey as far as Middletown.  As we were about starting from the
front of the United States Hotel, two gentlemen presented themselves
and expressed a wish to be allowed to share our conveyance.  I looked
at them and convinced myself that they were neither Rebels in
disguise, nor deserters, nor camp-followers, nor miscreants, but
plain, honest men on a proper errand.  The first of them I will pass
over briefly.  He was a young man of mild and modest demeanor,
chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment, which he was going to rejoin.
He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had the misfortune to
know little more than what I had learned from Southey's "Life of
Wesley."  and from the exquisite hymns we have borrowed from its
rhapsodists.  The other stranger was a New Englander of respectable
appearance, with a grave, hard, honest, hay-bearded face, who had
come to serve the sick and wounded on the battle-field and in its
immediate neighborhood.  There is no reason why I should not mention
his name, but I shall content myself with calling him the
Philanthropist.

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable bays, with James
Grayden their driver, the gentle lady, whose serene patience bore up
through all delays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist,
and myself, the teller of this story.

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck at once upon the
trail from the great battle-field.  The road was filled with
straggling and wounded soldiers.  All who could travel on foot,--
multitudes with slight wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face,
--were told to take up their beds,--alight burden or none at all,--
and walk.  Just as the battle-field sucks everything into its red
vortex for the conflict, so does it drive everything off in long,
diverging rays after the fierce centripetal forces have met and
neutralized each other.  For more than a week there had been sharp
fighting all along this road.  Through the streets of Frederick,
through Crampton's Gap, over South Mountain, sweeping at last the
hills and the woods that skirt the windings of the Antietam, the long
battle had travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their
path through our fields and villages.  The slain of higher condition,
"embalmed" and iron-cased, were sliding off on the railways to their
far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and
committed hastily to the earth; the gravely wounded were cared for
hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed a little way along to the
neighboring villages; while those who could walk were meeting us, as
I have said, at every step in the road.  It was a pitiable sight,
truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief,
that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my
feelings more than the sight of this great caravan of maimed
pilgrims.  The companionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock
of their suffering; it was next to impossible to individualize it,
and so bring it home, as one can do with a single broken limb or
aching wound.  Then they were all of the male sex, and in the
freshness or the prime of their strength.  Though they tramped so
wearily along, yet there was rest and kind nursing in store for them.
These wounds they bore would be the medals they would show their
children and grandchildren by and by.  Who would not rather wear his
decorations beneath his uniform than on it?

Yet among them were figures which arrested our attention and
sympathy.  Delicate boys, with more spirit than strength, flushed
with fever or pale with exhaustion or haggard with suffering, dragged
their weary limbs along as if each step would exhaust their slender
store o£ strength.  At the roadside sat or lay others, quite spent
with their journey.  Here and there was a house at which the
wayfarers would stop, in the hope, I fear often vain, of getting
refreshment; and in one place was a clear, cool spring, where the
little bands of the long procession halted for a few moments, as the
trains that traverse the desert rest by its fountains.  My companions
had brought a few peaches along with them, which the Philanthropist
bestowed upon the tired and thirsty soldiers with a satisfaction
which we all shared.  I had with me a small flask of strong waters,
to be used as a medicine in case of inward grief.  From this, also,
he dispensed relief, without hesitation, to a poor fellow who looked
as if he needed it.  I rather admired the simplicity with which he
applied my limited means of solace to the first-comer who wanted it
more than I; a genuine benevolent impulse does not stand on ceremony,
and had I perished of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I
should not have reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any more
than I grudged my other ardent friend the two dollars and more which
it cost me to send the charitable message he left in my hands.

It was a lovely country through which we were riding.  The hillsides
rolled away into the distance, slanting up fair and broad to the sun,
as one sees them in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at
Lanesborough, for instance, or in the many-hued mountain chalice at
the bottom of which the Shaker houses of Lebanon have shaped
themselves like a sediment of cubical crystals.  The wheat was all
garnered, and the land ploughed for a new crop.  There was Indian
corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins warming their yellow carapaces
in the sunshine like so many turtles; only in a single instance did I
notice some wretched little miniature specimens in form and hue not
unlike those colossal oranges of our cornfields.  The rail fences
were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of extinguished fires showed
the use to which they had been applied.  The houses along the road
were not for the most part neatly kept; the garden fences were poorly
built of laths or long slats, and very rarely of trim aspect.  The
men of this region seemed to ride in the saddle very generally,
rather than drive.  They looked sober and stern, less curious and
lively than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features familiar
to us in the countenance of the late John Tyler, our accidental
President, was frequently met with.  The women were still more
distinguishable from our New England pattern.  Soft, sallow,
succulent, delicately finished about the mouth and firmly shaped
about the chin, dark-eyed, full-throated, they looked as if they had
been grown in a land of olives.  There was a little toss in their
movement, full of muliebrity.  I fancied there was something more of
the duck and less of the chicken about them, as compared with the
daughters of our leaner soil; but these are mere impressions caught
from stray glances, and if there is any offence in them, my fair
readers may consider them all retracted.

At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in the fields,
unburied, not grateful to gods or men.  I saw no bird of prey, no
ill-omened fowl, on my way to the carnival of death, or at the place
where it had been held.  The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera,
the "twa corbies" of the ghastly ballad, are all from Nature,
doubtless; but no black wing was spread over these animal ruins, and
no call to the banquet pierced through the heavy-laden and sickening
air.

Full in the middle of the road, caring little for whom or what they
met, came long strings of army wagons, returning empty from the front
after supplies.  James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they
had a little rather run into a fellow than not.  I liked the looks of
these equipages and their drivers; they meant business.  Drawn by
mules mostly, six, I think, to a wagon, powdered well with dust,
wagon, beast, and driver, they came jogging along the road, turning
neither to right nor left,--some driven by bearded, solemn white men,
some by careless, saucy-looking negroes, of a blackness like that of
anthracite or obsidian.  There seemed to be nothing about them, dead
or alive, that was not serviceable.  Sometimes a mule would give out
on the road; then he was left where he lay, until by and by he would
think better of it, and get up, when the first public wagon that came
along would hitch him on, and restore him to the sphere of duty.

It was evening when we got to Middletown.  The gentle lady who had
graced our homely conveyance with her company here left us.  She
found her husband, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quarters,
well cared for, very weak from the effects of the fearful operation
he had been compelled to undergo, but showing calm courage to endure
as he had shown manly energy to act.  It was a meeting full of
heroism and tenderness, of which I heard more than there is need to
tell.  Health to the brave soldier, and peace to the household over
which so fair a spirit presides!

Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent surgical director of
the hospitals of the place, took me in charge.  He carried me to the
house of a worthy and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed
Church, where I was to take tea and pass the night.  What became of
the Moravian chaplain I did not know; but my friend the
Philanthropist had evidently made up his mind to adhere to my
fortunes.  He followed me, therefore, to the house of the "Dominie."
as a newspaper correspondent calls my kind host, and partook of the
fare there furnished me.  He withdrew with me to the apartment
assigned for my slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow where
I waked and tossed.  Nay, I do affirm that he did, unconsciously, I
believe, encroach on that moiety of the couch which I had flattered
myself was to be my own through the watches of the night, and that I
was in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be gradually,
but irresistibly, expelled from the bed which I had supposed destined
for my sole possession.  As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the
Philanthropist clave unto me.  "Whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge."  A really kind, good man, full of
zeal, determined to help somebody, and absorbed in his one thought,
he doubted nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, on a
purely benevolent errand.  When he reads this, as I hope he will, let
him be assured of my esteem and respect; and if he gained any
accommodation from being in my company, let me tell him that I
learned a lesson from his active benevolence.  I could, however, have
wished to hear him laugh once before we parted, perhaps forever.  He
did not, to the best of my recollection, even smile during the whole
period that we were in company.  I am afraid that a lightsome
disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose
benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are
always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions
of sympathy.  Working philanthropy is a practical specialty,
requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with its peculiar
sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies,
an organizing and art ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a
constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold,
of hunger, and of watching.  Philanthropists are commonly grave,
occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose.  Their expansive
social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only
through its legitimate pistons and cranks.  The tighter the boiler,
the less it whistles and sings at its work.  When Dr. Waterhouse, in
1780, travelled with Howard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and
hospitals, he found his temper and manners very different from what
would have been expected.

My benevolent companion having already made a preliminary exploration
of the hospitals of the place, before sharing my bed with him, as
above mentioned, I joined him in a second tour through them.  The
authorities of Middletown are evidently leagued with the surgeons of
that place, for such a break-neck succession of pitfalls and chasms I
have never seen in the streets of a civilized town.  It was getting
late in the evening when we began our rounds.  The principal
collections of the wounded were in the churches.  Boards were laid
over the tops of the pews, on these some straw was spread, and on
this the wounded lay, with little or no covering other than such
scanty clothes as they had on.  There were wounds of all degrees of
severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs.  Most of the sufferers
were hurt in the limbs, some had undergone amputation, and all had, I
presume, received such attention as was required.  Still, it was but
a rough and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hospitals
suggested.  I could not help thinking the patients must be cold; but
they were used to camp life, and did not complain.  The men who
watched were not of the soft-handed variety of the race.  One of them
was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed.  I saw one poor
fellow who had been shot through the breast; his breathing was
labored, and he was tossing, anxious and restless.  The men were
debating about the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I
happened there at the right moment to see that he was well narcotized
for the night.  Was it possible that my Captain could be lying on the
straw in one of these places?  Certainly possible, but not probable;
but as the lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind of
thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated.  Many times as
I went from hospital to hospital in my wanderings, I started as some
faint resemblance,-the shade of a young man's hair, the outline of
his half-turned face,--recalled the presence I was in search of.  The
face would turn towards me, and the momentary illusion would pass
away, but still the fancy clung to me.  There was no figure huddled
up on its rude couch, none stretched at the roadside, none toiling
languidly along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambulance,
that I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that for which I was
making my pilgrimage to the battlefield.

"There are two wounded Secesh,"  said my companion.  I walked to the
bedside of the first, who was an officer, a lieutenant, if I remember
right, from North Carolina.  He was of good family, son of a judge in
one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, gentle,
intelligent.  One moment's intercourse with such an enemy, lying
helpless and wounded among strangers, takes away all personal
bitterness towards those with whom we or our children have been but a
few hours before in deadly strife.  The basest lie which the
murderous contrivers of this Rebellion have told is that which tries
to make out a difference of race in the men of the North and South.
It would be worth a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though
the great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened with the
best blood of the land.  My Rebel was of slight, scholastic habit,
and spoke as one accustomed to tread carefully among the parts of
speech.  It made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the
humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his forefathers and
the crime of his rulers had set in barbarous conflict against others
of like training with his own,--a man who, but for the curse which
our generation is called on to expiate, would have taken his part in
the beneficent task of shaping the intelligence and lifting the moral
standard of a peaceful and united people.

On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having engaged James Grayden and
his team, I set out with the Chaplain and the Philanthropist for
Keedysville.  Our track lay through the South Mountain Gap, and led
us first to the town of Boonsborough, where, it will be remembered,
Colonel Dwight had been brought after the battle.  We saw the
positions occupied in the battle of South Mountain, and many traces
of the conflict.  In one situation a group of young trees was marked
with shot, hardly one having escaped.  As we walked by the side of
the wagon, the Philanthropist left us for a while and climbed a hill,
where, along the line of a fence, he found traces of the most
desperate fighting.  A ride of some three hours brought us to
Boonsborough, where I roused the unfortunate army surgeon who had
charge of the hospitals, and who was trying to get a little sleep
after his fatigues and watchings.  He bore this cross very
creditably, and helped me to explore all places where my soldier
might be lying among the crowds of wounded.  After the useless
search, I resumed my journey, fortified with a note of introduction
to Dr. Letterman; also with a bale of oakum which I was to carry to
that gentleman, this substance being employed as a substitute for
lint.  We were obliged also to procure a pass to Keedysville from the
Provost Marshal of Boonsborough.  As we came near the place, we
learned that General McClellan's head quarters had been removed from
this village some miles farther to the front.

On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a familiar face and
figure blocked the way, like one of Bunyan's giants.  The tall form
and benevolent countenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged
to the excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay of Chelsea, who, like my
Philanthropist, only still more promptly, had come to succor the
wounded of the great battle.  It was wonderful to see how his single
personality pervaded this torpid little village; he seemed to be the
centre of all its activities.  All my questions he answered clearly
and decisively, as one who knew everything that was going on in the
place.  But the one question I had come five hundred miles to ask,--
Where is Captain H.?--he could not answer.  There were some thousands
of wounded in the place, he told me, scattered about everywhere.  It
would be a long job to hunt up my Captain; the only way would be to
go to every house and ask for him.  Just then a medical officer came
up.

"Do you know anything of Captain H. of the Massachusetts Twentieth?"

"Oh yes; he is staying in that house.  I saw him there, doing very
well."

A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept them to myself.
Now, then, for our twice-wounded volunteer, our young centurion whose
double-barred shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon.  Let us
observe the proprieties, however; no swelling upward of the mother,--
no hysterica passio,  we do not like scenes.  A calm salutation,
--then swallow and hold hard.  That is about the programme.

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and whitewashed.
A little yard before it, with a gate swinging.  The door of the
cottage ajar,--no one visible as yet.  I push open the door and
enter.  An old woman, Margaret Kitzmuller her name proves to be, is
the first person I see.

"Captain H. here? "

"Oh no, sir,--left yesterday morning for Hagerstown,--in a milk-
cart."

The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking ancient woman, answers
questions with a rising inflection, and gives a good account of the
Captain, who got into the vehicle without assistance, and was in
excellent spirits.  Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as the
terminus of the Cumberland Valley Railroad, and was on his way to
Philadelphia, via Chambersburg and Harrisburg, if he were not already
in the hospitable home of Walnut Street, where his friends were
expecting him.

I might follow on his track or return upon my own; the distance was
the same to Philadelphia through Harrisburg as through Baltimore.
But it was very difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of
conveyance to Hagerstown; and, on the other hand, I had James Grayden
and his wagon to carry me back to Frederick.  It was not likely that
I should overtake the object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six
hours start, even if I could procure a conveyance that day.  In the
mean time James was getting impatient to be on his return, according
to the direction of his employers.  So I decided to go back with him.

But there was the great battle-field only about three miles from
Keedysville, and it was impossible to go without seeing that.  James
Grayden's directions were peremptory, but it was a case for the
higher law.  I must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours,
such as would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and enforce it by a
personal motive.  I did this handsomely, and succeeded without
difficulty.  To add brilliancy to my enterprise, I invited the
Chaplain and the Philanthropist to take a free passage with me.

We followed the road through the village for a space, then turned off
to the right, and wandered somewhat vaguely, for want of precise
directions, over the hills.  Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide
creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the name of which
we did not then know, but which must have been the Antietam.  At one
point we met a party, women among them, bringing off various trophies
they had picked up on the battlefield.  Still wandering along, we
were at last pointed to a hill in the distance, a part of the summit
of which was covered with Indian corn.  There, we were told, some of
the fiercest fighting of the day had been done.  The fences were
taken down so as to make a passage across the fields, and the tracks
worn within the last few days looked like old roads.  We passed a
fresh grave under a tree near the road.  A board was nailed to the
tree, bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of Gardiner,
of a New Hampshire regiment.

On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party carrying picks
and spades.  "How many?  "Only one." The dead were nearly all buried,
then, in this region of the field of strife.  We stopped the wagon,
and, getting out, began to look around us.  Hard by was a large pile
of muskets, scores, if not hundreds, which had been picked up, and
were guarded for the Government.  A long ridge of fresh gravel rose
before us.  A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscription,
the first part of which was, I believe, not correct: "The Rebel
General Anderson and 80 Rebels are buried in this hole." Other
smaller ridges were marked with the number of dead lying under them.
The whole ground was strewed with fragments of clothing, haversacks,
canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of
paper, portions of bread and meat.  I saw two soldiers' caps that
looked as though their owners had been shot through the head.  In
several places I noticed dark red patches where a pool of blood had
curdled and caked, as some poor fellow poured his life out on the
sod.  I then wandered about in the cornfield.  It surprised me to
notice, that, though there was every mark of hard fighting having
taken place here, the Indian corn was not generally trodden down.
One of our cornfields is a kind of forest, and even when fighting,
men avoid the tall stalks as if they were trees.  At the edge of this
cornfield lay a gray horse, said to have belonged to a Rebel colonel,
who was killed near the same place.  Not far off were two dead
artillery horses in their harness.  Another had been attended to by a
burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him but his last bed-
clothes were too short, and his legs stuck out stark and stiff from
beneath the gravel coverlet.  It was a great pity that we had no
intelligent guide to explain to us the position of that portion of
the two armies which fought over this ground.  There was a shallow
trench before we came to the cornfield, too narrow for a road, as I
should think, too elevated for a water-course, and which seemed to
have been used as a rifle-pit.  At any rate, there had been hard
fighting in and about it.  This and the cornfield may serve to
identify the part of the ground we visited, if any who fought there
should ever look over this paper.  The opposing tides of battle must
have blended their waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform
were mingled with the "garments rolled in blood" torn from our own
dead and wounded soldiers.  I picked up a Rebel canteen, and one of
our own,--but there was something repulsive about the trodden and
stained relics of the stale battle-field.  It was like the table of
some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away disgusted from
its broken fragments and muddy heeltaps.  A bullet or two, a button,
a brass plate from a soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos
of my visit, with a letter which I picked up, directed to Richmond,
Virginia, its seal unbroken.  "N. C. Cleveland County.  E. Wright to
J. Wright."  On the other side, "A few lines from W. L. Vaughn."  who
has just been writing for the wife to her husband, and continues on
his own account.  The postscript, "tell John that nancy's folks are
all well and has a verry good Little Crop of corn a growing."  I
wonder, if, by one of those strange chances of which I have seen so
many, this number or leaf of the "Atlantic" will not sooner or later
find its way to Cleveland County, North Carolina, and E. Wright,
widow of James Wright, and Nancy's folks, get from these sentences
the last glimpse of husband and friend as he threw up his arms and
fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam?  I will keep this stained
letter for them until peace comes back, if it comes in my time, and
my pleasant North Carolina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital will,
perhaps look these poor people up, and tell them where to send for
it.

On the battle-field I parted with my two companions, the Chaplain and
the Philanthropist.  They were going to the front, the one to find
his regiment, the other to look for those who needed his assistance.
We exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, the horses'
heads were turned homewards, my two companions went their way, and I
saw them no more.  On my way back, I fell into talk with James
Grayden.  Born in England, Lancashire; in this country since be was
four years old.  Had nothing to care for but an old mother; didn't
know what he should do if he lost her.  Though so long in this
country, he had all the simplicity and childlike lightheartedness
which belong to the Old World's people.  He laughed at the smallest
pleasantry, and showed his great white English teeth; he took a joke
without retorting by an impertinence; he had a very limited curiosity
about all that was going on; he had small store of information; he
lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me.  His quiet animal
nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my recurring fits of anxiety,
and I liked his frequent "'Deed I don't know, sir."  better than I
have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other
very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the
second time.  Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded
Colonel and his lady.  She gave me a most touching account of all the
suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he
succeeded in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper
means of transportation of the wounded after the battle.  It occurred
to me, while at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for
the first time in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family
with whom the Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth,
educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating
talk.  He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous
Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold
in the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional
pinch from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of
those frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch
Dumollard, who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged
into the light of day.  He had a good deal to say, too, about the
Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations,
mercurial and the rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the
"sudabit multum."  and others,--also of our New York Professor
Carnochan's handiwork, a specimen of which I once admired at the New
York College.  But the doctor was not in a happy frame of mind, and
seemed willing to forget the present in the past: things went wrong,
somehow, and the time was out of joint with him.

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, offered me half his own
wide bed, in the house of Dr. Baer, for my second night in
Middletown.  Here I lay awake again another night.  Close to the
house stood an ambulance in which was a wounded Rebel officer,
attended by one of their own surgeons.  He was calling out in a loud
voice, all night long, as it seemed to me, "Doctor!  Doctor!  Driver!
Water!" in loud, complaining tones, I have no doubt of real
suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent patience which was
the almost universal rule.

The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here an odd coincidence,
trivial, but having its interest as one of a series.  The Doctor and
myself lay in the bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on
the sofa, At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the
Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, on the bureau,
just where I could put my hand upon it.  I was the last of the three
to rise in the morning, and on looking for my pretty match-box, I
found it was gone.  This was rather awkward,--not on account of the
loss, but of the unavoidable fact that one of my fellow-lodgers must
have taken it.  I must try to find out what it meant.

"By the way, Doctor, have you seen anything of a little plaid-pattern
match-box?"

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his own huge surprise
and my great gratification, pulled out two match-boxes exactly alike,
both printed with the Macpherson plaid.  One was his, the other mine,
which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for his own,
thrusting it into his pocket, where it found its twin-brother from
the same workshop.  In memory of which event, we exchanged boxes,
like two Homeric heroes.

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some supposed cases
of plagiarism of which I will mention one where my name figured.
When a little poem called "The Two Streams " was first printed, a
writer in the New York "Evening Post" virtually accused the author of
it of borrowing the thought from a baccalaureate sermon of President
Hopkins of Williamstown, and printed a quotation from that discourse,
which, as I thought, a thief or catch-poll might well consider as
establishing a fair presumption that it was so borrowed.  I was at
the same time wholly unconscious of ever having met with the
discourse or the sentence which the verses were most like, nor do I
believe I ever had seen or heard either.  Some time after this,
happening to meet my eloquent cousin, Wendell Phillips, I mentioned
the fact to him, and he told me that he had once used the special
image said to be borrowed, in a discourse delivered at Williamstown.
On relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he informed me that
he too, had used the image,--perhaps referring to his poem called
"The Twins."  He thought Tennyson had used it also.  The parting of
the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a passage
attributed to "M. Loisne," printed in the "Boston Evening Transcript"
for October 23, 1859.  Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks
of the showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going to the
Atlantic, one to the Pacific.  I found the image running loose in my
mind, without a halter.  It suggested itself as an illustration of
the will, and I worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School
Atlas. --The spores of a great many ideas are floating about in the
atmosphere.  We no more know where all the growths of our mind came
from, than where the lichens which eat the names off from the
gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth.  The two match-
boxes were just alike, but neither was a plagiarism.

In the morning I took to the same wagon once more, but, instead of
James Grayden, I was to have for my driver a young man who spelt his
name "Phillip Ottenheimer" and whose features at once showed him to
be an Israelite.  I found him agreeable enough, and disposed to talk.
So I asked him many questions about his religion, and got some
answers that sound strangely in Christian ears.  He was from
Wittenberg, and had been educated in strict Jewish fashion.  From his
childhood he had read Hebrew, but was not much of a scholar
otherwise.  A young person of his race lost caste utterly by marrying
a Christian.  The Founder of our religion was considered by the
Israelites to have been "a right smart man and a great doctor."  But
the horror with which the reading of the New Testament by any young
person of their faith would be regarded was as great, I judged by his
language, as that of one of our straitest sectaries would be, if he
found his son or daughter perusing the "Age of Reason."

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of its clustered spires
struck me very much, so that I was not surprised to find "Fair-View"
laid down about this point on a railroad map.  I wish some wandering
photographer would take a picture of the place, a stereoscopic one,
if possible, to show how gracefully, how charmingly, its group of
steeples nestles among the Maryland hills.  The town had a poetical
look from a distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there.
The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might perhaps be
considered as confirming my remote impression.  It bore these words:
"Miss Ogle, Past, Present, and Future."  On arriving, I visited
Lieutenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, his
neighbor, sharing between them as my parting gift what I had left of
the balsam known to the Pharmacopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici.  I
took advantage of General Shriver's always open door to write a
letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered hospitality.
The railroad bridge over the Monocacy had been rebuilt since I passed
through Frederick, and we trundled along over the track toward
Baltimore.

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw House, where I had
ordered all communications to be addressed, to find no telegraphic
message from Philadelphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had
arrived at the former place, "wound doing well in good spirits
expects to leave soon for Boston."  After all, it was no great
matter; the Captain was, no doubt, snugly lodged before this in the
house called Beautiful, at * * * * Walnut Street, where that "grave
and beautiful damsel named Discretion" had already welcomed him,
smiling, though "the water stood in her eyes," and had "called out
Prudence, Piety, and Charity, who, after a little more discourse with
him, had him into the family."

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all gone but one, the
lady of an officer from Boston, who was most amiable and agreeable,
and whose benevolence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the
invalids I had left suffering at Frederick.  General Wool still
walked the corridors, inexpansive, with Fort McHenry on his
shoulders, and Baltimore in his breeches-pocket, and his courteous
aid again pressed upon me his kind offices.  About the doors of the
hotel the news-boys cried the papers in plaintive, wailing tones, as
different from the sharp accents of their Boston counterparts as a
sigh from the southwest is from a northeastern breeze.  To understand
what they said was, of course, impossible to any but an educated ear,
and if I made out "Starr" and "Clipp'rr," it was because I knew
beforehand what must be the burden of their advertising coranach.

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday the twenty-third,
there beyond question to meet my Captain, once more united to his
brave wounded companions under that roof which covers a household of
as noble hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies.  Back River,
Bush River, Gunpowder Creek,--lives there the man with soul so dead
that his memory has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the
same envelopes with their meaningless localities?  But the
Susquehanna,--the broad, the beautiful, the historical, the poetical
Susquehanna,--the river of Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the
shores where

    "Aye those sunny mountains half-way down
     Would echo flageolet from some romantic town,"--

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who has made it
lovely to the imagination as well as to the eye, and so identified
his fame with the noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame
forever?"  The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the
fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes
him, sitting in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like
Arion's dolphin,--also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-
backs in the season, and ducks of lower degree at other periods.

At Philadelphia again at last!  Drive fast, O colored man and
brother, to the house called Beautiful, where my Captain lies sore
wounded, waiting for the sound of the chariot wheels which bring to
his bedside the face and the voice nearer than any save one to his
heart in this his hour of pain and weakness!  Up a long street with
white shutters and white steps to all the houses.  Off at right
angles into another long street with white shutters and white steps
to all the houses.  Off again at another right angle into still
another long street with white shutters and white steps to all the
houses.  The natives of this city pretend to know one street from
another by some individual differences of aspect; but the best way
for a stranger to distinguish the streets he has been in from others
is to make a cross or other mark on the white shutters.

This corner-house is the one.  Ring softly,--for the Lieutenant-
Colonel lies there with a dreadfully wounded arm, and two sons of the
family, one wounded like the Colonel, one fighting with death in the
fog of a typhoid fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least
sound you can make.  I entered the house, but no cheerful smile met
me.  The sufferers were each of them thought to be in a critical
condition.  The fourth bed, waiting its tenant day after day, was
still empty.  Not a word from my Captain.

Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank within me.  Had he
been taken ill on the road, perhaps been attacked with those
formidable symptoms which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds
that seemed to be doing well enough, and was his life ebbing away in
some lonely cottage, nay, in some cold barn or shed, or at the
wayside, unknown, uncared for?  Somewhere between Philadelphia and
Hagerstown, if not at the latter town, he must be, at any rate.  I
must sweep the hundred and eighty miles between these places as one
would sweep a chamber where a precious pearl had been dropped.  I
must have a companion in my search, partly to help me look about, and
partly because I was getting nervous and felt lonely.  Charley said
he would go with me,--Charley, my Captain's beloved friend, gentle,
but full of spirit and liveliness, cultivated, social, affectionate,
a good talker, a most agreeable letter-writer, observing, with large
relish of life, and keen sense of humor.  He was not well enough to
go, some of the timid ones said; but he answered by packing his
carpet-bag, and in an hour or two we were on the Pennsylvania Central
Railroad in full blast for Harrisburg.

I should have been a forlorn creature but for the presence of my
companion.  In his delightful company I half forgot my anxieties,
which, exaggerated as they may seem now, were not unnatural after
what I had seen of the confusion and distress that had followed the
great battle, nay, which seem almost justified by the recent
statement that "high officers" were buried after that battle whose
names were never ascertained.  I noticed little matters, as usual.
The road was filled in between the rails with cracked stones, such as
are used for macadamizing streets.  They keep the dust down, I
suppose, for I could not think of any other use for them.  By and by
the glorious valley which stretches along through Chester and
Lancaster Counties opened upon us.  Much as I had heard of the
fertile regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uniform
luxuriance of this region astonished me.  The grazing pastures were
so green, the fields were under such perfect culture, the cattle
looked so sleek, the houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample,
the fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was told that
this region was called the England of Pennsylvania.  The people whom
we saw were, like the cattle, well nourished; the young women looked
round and wholesome.

"Grass makes girls."  I said to my companion, and left him to work
out my Orphic saying, thinking to myself, that as guano makes grass,
it was a legitimate conclusion that Ichaboe must be a nursery of
female loveliness.

As the train stopped at the different stations, I inquired at each if
they had any wounded officers.  None as yet; the red rays of the
battle-field had not streamed off so far as this.  Evening found us
in the cars; they lighted candles in spring-candle-sticks; odd enough
I thought it in the land of oil-wells and unmeasured floods of
kerosene.  Some fellows turned up the back of a seat so as to make it
horizontal, and began gambling, or pretending to gamble; it looked as
if they were trying to pluck a young countryman; but appearances are
deceptive, and no deeper stake than "drinks for the crowd" seemed at
last to be involved.  But remembering that murder has tried of late
years to establish itself as an institution in the cars, I was less
tolerant of the doings of these "sportsmen " who tried to turn our
public conveyance into a travelling Frascati.  They acted as if they
were used to it, and nobody seemed to pay much attention to their
manoeuvres.

We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the evening, and attempted
to find our way to the Jones House, to which we had been commended.
By some mistake, intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have
been, or purely accidental, we went to the Herr House instead.  I
entered my name in the book, with that of my companion.  A plain,
middle-aged man stepped up, read it to himself in low tones, and
coupled to it a literary title by which I have been sometimes known.
He proved to be a graduate of Brown University, and had heard a
certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered there a good many years ago.
I remembered it, too; Professor Goddard, whose sudden and singular
death left such lasting regret, was the Orator.  I recollect that
while I was speaking a drum went by the church, and how I was
disgusted to see all the heads near the windows thrust out of them,
as if the building were on fire.  Cedat armis toga.  The clerk in the
office, a mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite in his
manners, and did all he could to make us comfortable.  He was of a
literary turn, and knew one of his guests in his character of author.
At tea, a mild old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next us.
He, too, had come hunting after his son, a lieutenant in a
Pennsylvania regiment.  Of these, father and son, more presently.

After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief medical officer of the
hospitals in the place, who was staying at the Brady House.  A
magnificent old toddy-mixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect,
as all grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to dive
through the features of men to the bottom of their souls and pockets
to see whether they are solvent to the amount of sixpence, answered
my question by a wave of one hand, the other being engaged in
carrying a dram to his lips.  His superb indifference gratified my
artistic feeling more than it wounded my personal sensibilities.
Anything really superior in its line claims my homage, and this man
was the ideal bartender, above all vulgar passions, untouched by
commonplace sympathies, himself a lover of the liquid happiness he
dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all those lesser
felicities conferred by love or fame or wealth or any of the
roundabout agencies for which his fiery elixir is the cheap, all-
powerful substitute.

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the evening, not having
slept for I don't know how many nights.

"Take my card up to him, if you please."  This way, sir."

A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not expected to be
as affable, when attacked in his bed, as a French Princess of old
time at her morning receptions.  Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I
entered, without effusion, but without rudeness.  His thick, dark
moustache was chopped off square at the lower edge of the upper lip,
which implied a decisive, if not a peremptory, style of character.

I am Dr. So-and-So of Hubtown, looking after my wounded son.  (I gave
my name and said Boston, of course, in reality.)

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in my face, his features
growing cordial.  Then he put out his hand, and good-humoredly
excused his reception of me.  The day before, as he told me, he had
dismissed from the service a medical man hailing from ******,
Pennsylvania, bearing my last name, preceded by the same two
initials; and he supposed, when my card came up, it was this
individual who was disturbing his slumbers.  The coincidence was so
unlikely a priori, unless some forlorn parent without antecedents had
named, a child after me, that I could not help cross-questioning the
Doctor, who assured me deliberately that the fact was just as he had
said, even to the somewhat unusual initials.  Dr. Wilson very kindly
furnished me all the information in his power, gave me directions for
telegraphing to Chambersburg, and showed every disposition to serve
me.

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, white-haired old
gentleman in a very happy state.  He had just discovered his son, in
a comfortable condition, at the United States Hotel.  He thought that
he could probably give us some information which would prove
interesting.  To the United States Hotel we repaired, then, in
company with our kind-hearted old friend, who evidently wanted to see
me as happy as himself.  He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and
presently came down to conduct us there.

Lieutenant P________ , of the Pennsylvania __th, was a very fresh,
bright-looking young man, lying in bed from the effects of a recent
injury received in action.  A grape-shot, after passing through a
post and a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not
penetrating or breaking.  He had good news for me.

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers had passed through
Harrisburg, going East.  He had conversed in the bar-room of this
hotel with one of them, who was wounded about the shoulder (it might
be the lower part of the neck), and had his arm in a sling.  He
belonged to the Twentieth Massachusetts; the Lieutenant saw that be
was a Captain, by the two bars on his shoulder-strap.  His name was
my family-name; he was tall and youthful, like my Captain.  At four
o'clock he left in the train for Philadelphia.  Closely questioned,
the Lieutenant's evidence was as round, complete, and lucid as a
Japanese sphere of rock-crystal.

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS!  The Lord's name be praised!  The dead pain in the
semilunar ganglion (which I must remind my reader is a kind of
stupid, unreasoning brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to
man and beast, which aches in the supreme moments of life, as when
the dam loses her young ones, or the wild horse is lassoed) stopped
short.  There was a feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or
cut a strangling garter,--only it was all over my system.  What more
could I ask to assure me of the Captain's safety?  As soon as the
telegraph office opens tomorrow morning we will send a message to our
friends in Philadelphia, and get a reply, doubtless, which will
settle the whole matter.

The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the message was sent
accordingly.  In due time, the following reply was received:
"Phil Sept 24 I think the report you have heard that W [the Captain]
has gone East must be an error we have not seen or heard of him here
M L H"

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI!  He could not have passed through Philadelphia
without visiting the house called Beautiful, where he had been so
tenderly cared for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those
whom he loved were lying in grave peril of life or limb.  Yet he did
pass through Harrisburg, going East, going to Philadelphia, on his
way home.  Ah, this is it!  He must have taken the late night-train
from Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to reach home.
There is such a train, not down in the guide-book, but we were
assured of the fact at the Harrisburg depot.  By and by came the
reply from Dr. Wilson's telegraphic message: nothing had been heard
of the Captain at Chambersburg.  Still later, another message came
from our Philadelphia friend, saying that he was seen on Friday last
at the house of Mrs.  K________, a well-known Union lady in
Hagerstown.  Now this could not be true, for he did not leave
Keedysville until Saturday; but the name of the lady furnished a clew
by which we could probably track him.  A telegram was at once sent to
Mrs.  K_______, asking information.  It was transmitted immediately,
but when the answer would be received was uncertain, as the
Government almost monopolized the line.  I was, on the whole, so well
satisfied that the Captain had gone East, that, unless something were
heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the late train
leaving a little after midnight for Philadelphia.

This same morning we visited several of the temporary hospitals,
churches and school-houses, where the wounded were lying.  In one of
these, after looking round as usual, I asked aloud, "Any
Massachusetts men here?"  Two bright faces lifted themselves from
their pillows and welcomed me by name.  The one nearest me was
private John B. Noyes of Company B, Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of
my old college class-tutor, now the reverend and learned Professor of
Hebrew, etc., in Harvard University.  His neighbor was Corporal
Armstrong of the same Company.  Both were slightly wounded, doing
well.  I learned then and since from Mr. Noyes that they and their
comrades were completely overwhelmed by the attentions of the good
people of Harrisburg,--that the ladies brought them fruits and
flowers, and smiles, better than either,--and that the little boys of
the place were almost fighting for the privilege of doing their
errands.  I am afraid there will be a good many hearts pierced in
this war that will have no bulletmark to show.

There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we thought a visit to
Camp Curtin might lighten some of them.  A rickety wagon carried us
to the camp, in company with a young woman from Troy, who had a
basket of good things with her for a sick brother.  "Poor boy! he
will be sure to die," she said.  The rustic sentries uncrossed their
muskets and let us in.  The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with
hills, spacious, well kept apparently, but did not present any
peculiar attraction for us.  The visit would have been a dull one,
had we not happened to get sight of a singular-looking set of human
beings in the distance.  They were clad in stuff of different hues,
gray and brown being the leading shades, but both subdued by a
neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize the variegated apparel of
travel-stained vagabonds.  They looked slouchy, listless, torpid,--an
ill-conditioned crew, at first sight, made up of such fellows as an
old woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a broomstick.  Yet
these were estrays from the fiery army which has given our generals
so much trouble,--"Secesh prisoners," as a bystander told us.  A talk
with them might be profitable and entertaining.  But they were
tabooed to the common visitor, and it was necessary to get inside of
the line which separated us from them.

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to whom we were
referred.  Look a man calmly through the very centre of his pupils
and ask him for anything with a tone implying entire conviction that
he will grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the thing
asked, were it to commit hari-kari.  The Captain acceded to my
postulate, and accepted my friend as a corollary.  As one string of
my own ancestors was of Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say
that my new friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam galiots,
broad in the beam, capacious in the hold, and calculated to carry a
heavy cargo rather than to make fast time.  He must have been in
politics at some time or other, for he made orations to all the
"Secesh," in which he explained to them that the United States
considered and treated them like children, and enforced upon them the
ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels attempting to do anything
against such a power as that of the National Government.

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened me, it interfered
somewhat with my little plans of entering into frank and friendly
talk with some of these poor fellows, for whom I could not help
feeling a kind of human sympathy, though I am as venomous a hater of
the Rebellion as one is like to find under the stars and stripes.  It
is fair to take a man prisoner.  It is fair to make speeches to a
man.  But to take a man prisoner and then make speeches to him while
in durance is not fair.

I began a few pleasant conversations, which would have come to
something but for the reason assigned.

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, and a black clay
pipe in his mouth.  He was a Scotchman from Ayr, dour enough, and
little disposed to be communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa
Briggs," and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of "Burrns."  He
professed to feel no interest in the cause for which he was fighting,
and was in the army, I judged, only from compulsion.  There was a
wild-haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features enough, who
looked as if he might be about seventeen, as he said he was.  I give
my questions and his answers literally.

"What State do you come from?"

"Georgy."

"What part of Georgia?"

"Midway."

--[How odd that is!  My father was settled for seven years as pastor
over the church at Midway, Georgia, and this youth is very probably a
grandson or great grandson of one of his parishioners.]

"Where did you go to church when you were at home?"

"Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life."

"What did you do before you became a soldier?"

"Nothin'."

"What do you mean to do when you get back?"

"Nothin'."

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this poor human weed,
this dwarfed and etiolated soul, doomed by neglect to an existence
but one degree above that of the idiot?

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in his gray coat,--
one button gone, perhaps to make a breastpin for some fair traitorous
bosom.  A short, stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the
"subject race" by any obvious meanderings of the sangre azul on his
exposed surfaces.  He did not say much, possibly because he was
convinced by the statements and arguments of the Dutch captain.  He
had on strong, iron-heeled shoes, of English make, which he said cost
him seventeen dollars in Richmond.

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to several of the
prisoners, what they were fighting for.  One answered, "For our
homes."  Two or three others said they did not know, and manifested
great indifference to the whole matter, at which another of their
number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and muttered opinions strongly
derogatory to those who would not stand up for the cause they had
been fighting for.  A feeble; attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel
uniform, if such it could be called, stood by without showing any
sign of intelligence.  It was cutting very close to the bone to carve
such a shred of humanity from the body politic to make a soldier of.

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, and I stopped the
party.  "That is the true Southern type," I said to my companion.  A
young fellow, a little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a
perfectly smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high features, and
a fine, almost feminine mouth, stood at the opening of his tent, and
as we turned towards him fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at
the loose canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwilling to
talk.  He was from Mississippi, he said, had been at Georgetown
College, and was so far imbued with letters that even the name of the
literary humility before him was not new to his ears.  Of course I
found it easy to come into magnetic relation with him, and to ask him
without incivility what he was fighting for.  "Because I like the
excitement of it,"  he answered.  I know those fighters with women's
mouths and boys' cheeks.  One such from the circle of my own friends,
sixteen years old, slipped away from his nursery, and dashed in
under, an assumed name among the red-legged Zouaves, in whose company
he got an ornamental bullet-mark in one of the earliest conflicts of
the war.

"Did you ever see a genuine Yankee?" said my Philadelphia friend to
the young Mississippian.

"I have shot at a good many of them,"  he replied, modestly, his
woman's mouth stirring a little, with a pleasant, dangerous smile.

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the conversation, as his
ancestors used to put theirs into the scale, when they were buying
furs of the Indians by weight,--so much for the weight of a hand, so
much for the weight of a foot.  It deranged the balance of our
intercourse; there was no use in throwing a fly where a paving-stone
had just splashed into the water, and I nodded a good-by to the boy-
fighter, thinking how much pleasanter it was for my friend the
Captain to address him with unanswerable arguments and crushing
statements in his own tent than it would be to meet him upon some
remote picket station and offer his fair proportions to the quick eye
of a youngster who would draw a bead on him before he had time to say
dunder and blixum.

We drove back to the town.  No message.  After dinner still no
message.  Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army Hospital Inspector, is in town, they
say.  Let us hunt him up,--perhaps he can help us.

We found him at the Jones House.  A gentleman of large proportions,
but of lively temperament, his frame knit in the North, I think, but
ripened in Georgia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his
broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least possible tilt
on one side,--a sure sign of exuberant vitality in a mature and
dignified person like him, business-like in his ways, and not to be
interrupted while occupied with another, but giving himself up
heartily to the claimant who held him for the time.  He was so
genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it seemed as if the clouds,
which had been thick all the morning, broke away as we came into his
presence, and the sunshine of his large nature filled the air all
around us.  He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were his own
private affair.  In ten minutes he had a second telegraphic message
on its way to Mrs. K at Hagerstown, sent through the Government
channel from the State Capitol,--one so direct and urgent that I
should be sure of an answer to it, whatever became of the one I had
sent in the morning.

While this was going on, we hired a dilapidated barouche, driven by
an odd young native, neither boy nor man, "as a codling when 't is
almost an apple,"  who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who
smiled faintly at our pleasantries, always with a certain reserve of
suspicion, and a gleam of the shrewdness that all men get who live in
the atmosphere of horses.  He drove us round by the Capitol grounds,
white with tents, which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly
scrawls in huge letters, thus: THE SEVEN BLOOMSBURY BROTHERS, DEVIL'S
HOLE, and similar inscriptions.  Then to the Beacon Street of
Harrisburg, which looks upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common,
and shows a long front of handsome houses with fair gardens.  The
river is pretty nearly a mile across here, but very shallow now.  The
codling told us that a Rebel spy had been caught trying its fords a
little while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin with a heavy ball
chained to his leg,--a popular story, but a lie, Dr. Wilson said.  A
little farther along we came to the barkless stump of the tree to
which Mr. Harris, the Cecrops of the city named after him, was tied
by the Indians for some unpleasant operation of scalping or roasting,
when he was rescued by friendly savages, who paddled across the
stream to save him.  Our youngling pointed out a very respectable-
looking stone house as having been "built by the Indians" about those
times.  Guides have queer notions occasionally.

I was at Niagara just when Dr. Rae arrived there with his companions
and dogs and things from his Arctic search after the lost navigator.

"Who are those?" I said to my conductor.

"Them?" he answered.  "Them's the men that's been out West, out to
Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Franklin."

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House or Hotel, or
whatever it is called, seems most worth notice.  Its facade is
imposing, with a row of stately columns, high above which a broad
sign impends, like a crag over the brow of a lofty precipice.  The
lower floor only appeared to be open to the public.  Its tessellated
pavement and ample courts suggested the idea of a temple where great
multitudes might kneel uncrowded at their devotions; but from
appearances about the place where the altar should be, I judged,
that, if one asked the officiating priest for the cup which cheers
and likewise inebriates, his prayer would not be unanswered.  The
edifice recalled to me a similar phenomenon I had once looked upon,--
the famous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua.  It was the same thing in Italy
and America: a rich man builds himself a mausoleum, and calls it a
place of entertainment.  The fragrance of innumerable libations and
the smoke of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall ascend day and
night through the arches of his funereal monument.  What are the poor
dips which flare and flicker on the crowns of spikes that stand at
the corners of St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to this
perpetual offering of sacrifice?

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching.  The telegraph office
would presently close, and as yet there were no tidings from
Hagerstown.  Let us step over and see for ourselves.  A message!  A
message!

"Captain H.  still here leaves seven to-morrow for Harrisburg Penna
Is doing well
Mrs HK--."

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came soon afterwards to the
hotel.

We shall sleep well to-night; but let us sit awhile with nubiferous,
or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall
gently narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for
slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall.  For now the over-
tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that
which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy
pavement, makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense
of all its inmost fibres.  Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild,
pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with
us.  He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and
ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should
not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me
to be.  His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge,
uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the
intellectual faculties, such as all writers are supposed to possess
in abounding measure.  While I fell short of his ideal in this
respect, he was pleased to say that he found me by no means the
remote and inaccessible personage he had imagined, and that I had
nothing of the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a modest
consciousness of most abundantly deserving.

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thursday.  The train from
Hagerstown was due at 11.15 A. M: We took another ride behind the
codling, who showed us the sights of yesterday over again.  Being in
a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the varying aspects of the
town-pumps and other striking objects which we had once inspected, as
seen by the different lights of evening and morning.  After this, we
visited the school-house hospital.  A fine young fellow, whose arm
had been shattered, was just falling into the spasms of lock-jaw.
The beads of sweat stood large and round on his flushed and
contracted features.  He was under the effect of opiates,--why not
(if his case was desperate, as it seemed to be considered) stop his
sufferings with chloroform?  It was suggested that it might shorten
life.  "What then?" I said.  "Are a dozen additional spasms worth
living for?"

The time approached for the train to arrive from Hagerstown, and we
went to the station.  I was struck, while waiting there, with what
seemed to me a great want of care for the safety of the people
standing round.  Just after my companion and myself had stepped off
the track, I noticed a car coming quietly along at a walk, as one may
say, without engine, without visible conductor, without any person
heralding its approach, so silently, so insidiously, that I could not
help thinking how very near it came to flattening out me and my
match-box worse than the Ravel pantomimist and his snuff-box were
flattened out in the play.  The train was late,--fifteen minutes,
half an hour late, and I began to get nervous, lest something had
happened.  While I was looking for it, out started a freight-train,
as if on purpose to meet the cars I was expecting, for a grand smash-
up.  I shivered at the thought, and asked an employee of the road,
with whom I had formed an acquaintance a few minutes old, why there
should not be a collision of the expected train with this which was
just going out.  He smiled an official smile, and answered that they
arranged to prevent that, or words to that effect.

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment when a collision
did occur, just out of the city, where I feared it, by which at least
eleven persons were killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed
and crippled!

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing worse.  The
expected train came in so quietly that I was almost startled to see
it on the track.  Let us walk calmly through the cars, and look
around us.

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my Captain;
there saw I him, even my first-born, whom I had sought through many
cities.

"How are you, Boy?"

"How are you, Dad?"


Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed among us
Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently disguising those
natural impulses that made Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep
aloud so that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, nay,
which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he
fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence of
all the women.  But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling
fast with sweet tears, while the windows through which it looks are
undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture.

These are times in which we cannot live solely for selfish joys or
griefs.  I had not let fall the hand I held, when a sad, calm voice
addressed me by name.  I fear that at the moment I was too much
absorbed in my own feelings; for certainly at any other time.
I should have yielded myself without stint to the sympathy which this
meeting might well call forth.

"You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom I brought to see you
once in Boston?"

"I do remember him well."

"He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown.  I am carrying his body
back with me on this train.  He was my only child.  If you could come
to my house,--I can hardly call it my home now,--it would be a
pleasure to me."

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was the author of a "New
System of Latin Paradigms," a work showing extraordinary scholarship
and capacity.  It was this book which first made me acquainted with
him, and I kept him in my memory, for there was genius in the youth.
Some time afterwards he came to me with a modest request to be
introduced to President Felton, and one or two others, who would aid
him in a course of independent study he was proposing to himself.  I
was most happy to smooth the way for him, and he came repeatedly
after this to see me and express his satisfaction in the
opportunities for study he enjoyed at Cambridge.  He was a dark,
still, slender person, always with a trance-like remoteness, a mystic
dreaminess of manner, such as I never saw in any other youth.
Whether he heard with difficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly
on an alien thought, I could not say; but his answer would often be
behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a few words spoken
under his breath, as if he had been trained in sick men's chambers.
For such a young man, seemingly destined for the inner life of
contemplation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural.  Yet he spoke
to me of his intention to offer himself to his country, and his blood
must now be reckoned among the precious sacrifices which will make
her soil sacred forever.  Had he lived, I doubt not that he would
have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years.  He has done
better, for he has died that unborn generations may attain the hopes
held out to our nation and to mankind.

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place where my wounded
soldier was lying, and then calmly turned my back upon him to come
once more round by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the
same region I had left!  No mysterious attraction warned me that the
heart warm with the same blood as mine was throbbing so near my own.
I thought of that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides
unconsciously by Evangeline upon the great river.  Ah, me! if that
railroad crash had been a few hours earlier, we two should never have
met again, after coming so close to each other!

The source of my repeated disappointments was soon made clear enough.
The Captain had gone to Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at
once for Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as I
took it for granted he certainly would.  But as he walked languidly
along, some ladies saw him across the street, and seeing, were moved
with pity, and pitying, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to
accept their invitation and rest awhile beneath their hospitable
roof.  The mansion was old, as the dwellings of gentlefolks should
be; the ladies were some of them young, and all were full of
kindness; there were gentle cares, and unasked luxuries, and pleasant
talk, and music-sprinklings from the piano, with a sweet voice to
keep them company,--and all this after the swamps of the
Chickahominy, the mud and flies of Harrison's Landing, the dragging
marches, the desperate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting
ambulance, the log-house, and the rickety milk--cart!  Thanks,
uncounted thanks to the angelic ladies whose charming attentions
detained him from Saturday to Thursday, to his great advantage and my
infinite bewilderment!  As for his wound, how could it do otherwise
than well under such hands?  The bullet had gone smoothly through,
dodging everything but a few nervous branches, which would come right
in time and leave him as well as ever.

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house
of the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my
kind companion.  The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction
to these benignant Philadelphia households.  Many things reminded me
that I was no longer in the land of the Pilgrims.  On the table were
Kool Slaa and Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed
with such quiet, simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was
literally ignorant of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean
which was employed in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous
farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop
known to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features.  He
also approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young
maiden whom we passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach.
But he was so good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a
lucifer, he accepted it as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside
of that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all
the country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers.
Measured by its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at
the head of our economic civilization.  It provides for the comforts
and conveniences, and many of the elegances of life, more
satisfactorily than any American city, perhaps than any other city
anywhere.  Many of its characteristics are accounted for to some
extent by its geographical position.  It is the great neutral centre
of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the South and the
keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits, and result
in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric brown.  It
lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out Franklin and
Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its famous
water-works.  In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was with
a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial
fountain.  Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole
and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own
heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism.  But in the place of
"Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and the old house where Robert
Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public
restaurant.  A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the
Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a
single bound,--an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us,
than was ever before constructed.  The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the
Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes.  It had an
air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level
of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the
rectangular city.  Philadelphia will never be herself again until
another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new
palladium.  She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly
shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple,
remembering the glories of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not
charm, a weary soul, and such a vacant hour there was on this same
Friday evening.  The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably
ventilated.  As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty
buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through
an open semicircular window a bright solitary star looked me calmly
in the eyes.  It was a strange intrusion of the vast eternities
beckoning from the infinite spaces.  I called the attention of one of
my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was irresistibly droll, and Arcturus,
or Aldebaran, or whatever the blazing luminary may have been, with
all his revolving worlds, sailed uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York.
Mr. Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore
Railroad, had already called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious
look on his face which implied that he knew how to do me a service
and meant to do it.  Sure enough, when we got to the depot, we found
a couch spread for the Captain, and both of us were passed on to New
York with no visits, but those of civility, from the conductor.  The
best thing I saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown,
I think, but I am not quite sure.  There was more genius in it than
in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,--each length being of
a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of
the trees had grown.  I trust some friend will photograph or
stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of
Frederick, already referred to, as mementos of my journey.

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the respectably dressed
people whom I met in the cars, and had been in contact with them at
some time or other.  Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us,
forming a group by themselves.  Presently one addressed me by name,
and, on inquiry, I found him to be the gentleman who was with me in
the pulpit as Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa poem,
one delivered at New Haven.  The party were very courteous and
friendly, and contributed in various ways to our comfort.

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only about a thousand
people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes
and then before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show.
Suppose that I should really wish; some time or other, to get away
from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where
should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their
pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them was not a neighbor.

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's Bluff accident,
the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and myself had reposed for a night
on our homeward journey at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were
lodged on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously.  We were not so
peculiarly fortunate this time, the house being really very full.
Farther from the flowers and nearer to the stars,--to reach the
neighborhood of which last the per ardua of three or four flights of
stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well.

The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however.  It is a giant
corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth cork, which, by some divine
judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position.
This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with
cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called
conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other
Sisyphus.

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody that lives in it
feels that it is his property,--at least, as much as it is anybody's.
My Broadway, in particular, I love almost as I used to love my
Boulevards.  I went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day
that we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleasure-grounds
the citizens had been arranging for us, and which I had not yet seen.
The Central Park is an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as
to form ridges which will give views and hollows that will hold
water.  The hips and elbows and other bones of Nature stick out here
and there in the shape of rocks which give character to the scenery,
and an unchangeable, unpurchasable look to a landscape that without
them would have been in danger of being fattened by art and money out
of all its native features.  The roads were fine, the sheets of water
beautiful, the bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their
deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's winter
coat.  I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or
singeing.  I was delighted with my new property,--but it cost me four
dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of
the fashionable quarter.  What it will be by and by depends on
circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as
Brookline is central to Boston.

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably arranged, but
remote pleasure-ground and our Common, with its batrachian pool, but
between his Excentric Park and our finest suburban scenery, between
its artificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Jamaica
Pond.  I say this not invidiously, but in justice to the beauties
which surround our own metropolis.  To compare the situations of any
dwellings in either of the great cities with those which look upon
the Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back Bay, would be
to take an unfair advantage of Fifth Avenue and Walnut Street.
St. Botolph's daughter dresses in plainer clothes than her more
stately sisters, but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a
diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be ashamed of.

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of September, we took the cars
for home.  Vacant lots, with Irish and pigs; vegetable-gardens;
straggling houses; the high bridge; villages, not enchanting; then
Stamford : then NORWALK.  Here, on the sixth of May, 1853, I passed
close on the heels of the great disaster.  But that my lids were
heavy on that morning, my readers would probably have had no further
trouble with me.  Two of my friends saw the car in which they rode
break in the middle and leave them hanging over the abyss.  From
Norwalk to Boston, that day's journey of two hundred miles was a long
funeral procession.

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its ashes with all its
phoenix-egg domes,--bubbles of wealth that broke, ready to be blown
again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes
cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that
look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for
balls,--romantic with West Rock and its legends,--cursed with a
detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so
murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be
the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,--with its
neat carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-
dormitories, its vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows;
Hartford, substantial, well-bridged, many--steepled city,--every
conical spire an extinguisher of some nineteenth-century heresy; so
onward, by and across the broad, shallow Connecticut,--dull red road
and dark river woven in like warp and woof by the shuttle of the
darting engine; then Springfield, the wide-meadowed, well-feeding,
horse-loving, hot-summered, giant-treed town,--city among villages,
village among cities; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of
crossing railroad-bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, breathing fire
and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled in their dens; Framingham, fair
cup-bearer, leaf-cinctured Hebe of the deep-bosomed Queen sitting by
the seaside on the throne of the Six Nations.  And now I begin to
know the road, not by towns, but by single dwellings; not by miles,
but by rods.  The poles of the great magnet that draws in all the
iron tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must be near at
hand, for here are crossings, and sudden stops, and screams of
alarmed engines heard all around.  The tall granite obelisk comes
into view far away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp against
the sky; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East Cambridge flaunt
their smoky banners up in the thin air; and now one fair bosom of the
three-pilled city, with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itself, as
when many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half-open chlamys
before her worshippers.

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that looks out on the
waters and towards the western sun!  Let the joyous light shine in
upon the pictures that hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set
with the names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, in
whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only when it is held
cheap by the side of honor and of duty.  Lay him in his own bed, and
let him sleep off his aches and weariness.  So comes down another
night over this household, unbroken by any messenger of evil
tidings,--a night of peaceful rest and grateful thoughts; for this
our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is
found.






THE INEVITABLE TRIAL

[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the
4th of July, 1863.]

It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's
birth, to recall whatever is happiest and noblest in our past
history, and to join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the
heroes, the men of thought and the men of action, to whom that
history owes its existence.  In other years this pleasing office may
have been all that was required of the holiday speaker.  But to-day,
when the very life of the nation is threatened, when clouds are thick
about us, and men's hearts are throbbing with passion, or failing
with fear, it is the living question of the hour, and not the dead
story of the past, which forces itself into all minds, and will find
unrebuked debate in all assemblies.

In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who
sincerely love their country and mean to do their duty to her
disappoint the hopes and expectations of those who are actively
working in her cause.  They seem to have lost whatever moral force
they may have once possessed, and to go drifting about from one
profitless discontent to another, at a time when every citizen is
called upon for cheerful, ready service.  It is because their minds
are bewildered, and they are no longer truly themselves.  Show them
the path of duty, inspire them with hope for the future, lead them
upwards from the turbid stream of events to the bright, translucent
springs of eternal principles, strengthen their trust in humanity and
their faith in God, and you may yet restore them to their manhood and
their country.

At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious
recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should try to judge the weak
and wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously.  The
conditions in which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find
themselves are new and unprovided for.  Our quiet burghers and
farmers are in the position of river-boats blown from their moorings
out upon a vast ocean, where such a typhoon is raging as no mariner
who sails its waters ever before looked upon.  If their beliefs
change with the veering of the blast, if their trust in their fellow-
men, and in the course of Divine Providence, seems well-nigh
shipwrecked, we must remember that they were taken unawares, and
without the preparation which could fit them to struggle with these
tempestuous elements.  In times like these the faith is the man; and
they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special duty to
those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in speech,
feeble in effort, and purposeless in aim.

Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,--that self-
government is the natural condition of an adult society, as
distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary
arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences;
that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every
child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the
best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the
two claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves
and divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union;
that the contest in which we are engaged is one of principles
overlaid by circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we
study the movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the
moral nature of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the
study; that all honest persons with average natural sensibility, with
respectable understanding, educated in the school of northern
teaching, will have eventually to range themselves in the armed or
unarmed host which fights or pleads for freedom, as against every
form of tyranny; if not in the front rank now, then in the rear rank
by and by;--assuming these propositions, as many, perhaps most of us,
are ready to do, and believing that the more they are debated before
the public the more they will gain converts, we owe it to the timid
and the doubting to keep the great questions of the time in unceasing
and untiring agitation.  They must be discussed, in all ways
consistent with the public welfare, by different classes of thinkers;
by priests and laymen; by statesmen and simple voters; by moralists
and lawyers; by men of science and uneducated hand-laborers; by men
of facts and figures, and by men of theories and aspirations; in the
abstract and in the concrete; discussed and rediscussed every month,
every week, every day, and almost every hour, as the telegraph tells
us of some new upheaval or subsidence of the rocky base of our
political order.

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions
of the great body of loyal citizens.  They may do nothing toward
changing the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to
believe, who follow politics as a trade.  They may have no hold upon
that class of persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as
other persons are wanting in an ear for music.  But for the honest,
vacillating minds, the tender consciences supported by the tremulous
knees of an infirm intelligence, the timid compromisers who are
always trying to curve the straight lines and round the sharp angles
of eternal law, the continual debate of these living questions is the
one offered means of grace and hope of earthly redemption.  And thus
a true, unhesitating patriot may be willing to listen with patience
to arguments which he does not need, to appeals which have no special
significance for him, in the hope that some less clear in mind or
less courageous in temper may profit by them.

As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth
day of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of
American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have
to indulge in public rejoicings.  If the war in which we are engaged
is an accidental one, which might have been avoided but for our
fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if
it is hopeless, and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty
and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to
do it; if our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted,
and giving place to an irresponsible tyranny; if we are moving in the
narrow circles which are to ingulf us in national ruin,--then we had
better sing a dirge, and leave this idle assemblage, and hush the
noisy cannon which are reverberating through the air, and tear down
the scaffolds which are soon to blaze with fiery symbols; for it is
mourning and not joy that should cover the land; there should be
silence, and not the echo of noisy gladness, in our streets; and the
emblems with which we tell our nation's story and prefigure its
future should be traced, not in fire, but in ashes.

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable
result of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that
swept away the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no
mean, unworthy end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere,
for humanity, for the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless,
but only growing to such dimensions that the world shall remember the
final triumph of right throughout all time; if there is no safe and
honorable peace for us but a peace proclaimed from the capital of
every revolted province in the name of the sacred, inviolable Union;
if the fear of tyranny is a phantasm, conjured up by the imagination
of the weak, acted on by the craft of the cunning; if so far from
circling inward to the gulf of our perdition, the movement of past
years is reversed, and every revolution carries us farther and
farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by God's blessing, we
shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of the
accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make
them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's
discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant
festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of
our harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to
inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about
unblamed, making day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have
come a little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come.  The
disease of the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough
chirurgery of war was its only remedy.

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse
into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if
this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have
gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the
glories of the millennium.  If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his
heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr.
Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous
Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver
tones of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth
the billows of contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had
been lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening
scowl of rebellion,--we might have been spared this dread season of
convulsion.  All this is but simple Martha's faith, without the
reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst been here, my brother had
not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling,
who believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride
their waves.  It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent
to continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts
its own bubbles.  If this is true of all the narrower manifestations
of human progress, how much more must it be true of those broad
movements in the intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all
mankind?  But in the more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more
familiar than that there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many
individual minds at once, so that genius comes in clusters, and
shines rarely as a single star.  You may trace a common motive and
force in the pyramid-builders of the earliest recorded antiquity, in
the evolution of Greek architecture, and in the sudden springing up
of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following centuries,
growing out of the soil with stem and bud and blossom, like flowers
of stone whose seeds might well have been the flaming aerolites cast
over the battlements of heaven.  You may see the same law showing
itself in the brief periods of glory which make the names of Pericles
and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in the painters,
the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the authors of
the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this century
following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of
Cowper and the song of Hayley.  You may accept the fact as natural,
that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the
same reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren
arrived independently of each other at the great law of the
diminution of gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier
and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched
them into the outer darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of
the dim, unseen Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and
Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in
parallel paths to the same end.  You see why Patrick Henry, in
Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were startling the crown
officials with the same accents of liberty, and why the Mecklenburg
Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the Province of
Massachusetts.  This law of simultaneous intellectual movement,
recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay and by
Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable to
that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the
present conflict.

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of
this or that enthusiast or fanatic.  It was the consequence of a
movement in mass of two different forms of civilization in different
directions, and the men to whom it was attributed were only those who
represented it most completely, or who talked longest and loudest
about it.  Long before the accents of those famous statesmen referred
to ever resounded in the halls of the Capitol, long before the
"Liberator" opened its batteries, the controversy now working itself
out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted.  Washington warned
his countrymen of the danger of sectional divisions, well knowing the
line of cleavage that ran through the seemingly solid fabric.
Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land for its
sins against a just God.  Andrew Jackson announced a quarter of a
century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution would be
slavery.  De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating insight
which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that the
Union was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests, but
through the change of character it was bringing about in the people
of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more
than half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious
effect of the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully
justifying itself in the sight of his descendants, that "by an
inevitable chain of causes and effects, Providence punishes national
sins by national calamities."  The Virginian romancer pictured the
far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching as the
prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of Jerusalem, and the
strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year when the curtain
should rise on the yet unopened drama.

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who
warned us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted
what was the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally
rupture.  The descendants of the men "daily exercised in tyranny,"
the "petty tyrants" as their own leading statesmen called them long
ago, came at length to love the institution which their fathers had
condemned while they tolerated.  It is the fearful realization of
that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up with eager
nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have
their natures become changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the
realm of darkness.

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a
sudden harvest of crime.  Violence stalked into the senate-chamber,
theft and perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally,
openly organized conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious
entrance into a chief stronghold of the Union.  That the principle
which underlay these acts of fraud and violence should be irrevocably
recorded with every needed sanction, it pleased God to select a chief
ruler of the false government to be its Messiah to the listening
world.  As with Pharaoh, the Lord hardened his heart, while he opened
his mouth, as of old he opened that of the unwise animal ridden by
cursing Balaam.  Then spake Mr. "Vice-President" Stephens those
memorable words which fixed forever the theory of the new social
order.  He first lifted a degraded barbarism to the dignity of a
philosophic system.  He first proclaimed the gospel of eternal
tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved for the
western Palestine.  Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth!
The corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized
inequality of races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men
protect women and children, but that the strong may claim the
authority of Nature and of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt,
to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in perpetual
ignorance, to blast with hereditary curses throughout all time, the
bronzed foundling of the New World, upon whose darkness has dawned
the star of the occidental Bethlehem!

After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave
States, we read in the "Richmond Examiner":  "The establishment of
the Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole
course of the mistaken civilization of the age.  For  'Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery,
Subordination, and Government."

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to
look for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency
in dividing the country.  Match the two broken pieces of the Union,
and you will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself
half across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its
splintery projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely
according to the limitations of particular States, but as a county or
other limited section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery.
Add to this the official statement made in 1862, that "there is not
one regiment or battalion, or even company of men, which was
organized in or derived from the Free States or Territories,
anywhere, against the Union"; throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens's
explicit declaration in the speech referred to, and we will consider
the evidence closed for the present on this count of the indictment.

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of
fracture, this precise statement, testimony from so many sources,
extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of
slavery, a priori, and its actual influence as shown by the facts,
few will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed
its course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on
the white subjects of its corrupting dominion.  Northern acquiescence
or even sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily
on the consciences of its supporters.  Many profess to think that
Northern fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing
the black dye of slavery in regions which would but for that have
washed themselves free of its stain in tears of penitence.  It is a
delusion and a snare to trust in any such false and flimsy reasons
where there is enough and more than enough in the institution itself
to account for its growth.  Slavery gratifies at once the love of
power, the love of money, and the love of ease; it finds a victim for
anger who cannot smite back his oppressor; and it offers to all,
without measure, the seductive privileges which the Mormon gospel
reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible of Mahomet
only dares promise to the saints in heaven.

Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that
the same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and
the leading champion of aggressive liberty.  The mob of Jerusalem was
not satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross
also for the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its
conservative traditions!  It is asserted that the fault was quite as
much on our side as on the other; that our agitators and abolishers
kindled the flame for which the combustibles were all ready on the
other side of the border.  If these men could have been silenced, our
brothers had not died.

Who are the persons that use this argument?  They are the very ones
who are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right
of free discussion.  At a time when every power the nation can summon
is needed to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their
force upon its foes,--when a false traitor at home may lose us a
battle by a word, and a lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its
daily or weekly stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim
upon the liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to
deal with government, with leaders, with every measure, however
urgent, in any terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his
own soldiers, and assail the only men who have any claim at all to
rule over the country, as the very ones who are least worthy to be
obeyed.  If these opposition members of society are to have their way
now, they cannot find fault with those persons who spoke their minds
freely in the past on that great question which, as we have agreed,
underlies all our present dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards
reformers.  They are never general favorites.  They are apt to
interfere with vested rights and time-hallowed interests.  They often
wear an unlovely, forbidding aspect.  Their office corresponds to
that of Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material
nuisances.  It is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she
employs for this duty.  It is not the bird of paradise and the
nightingale, but the fowl of dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to
which is entrusted the sacred duty of eliminating the substances that
infect the air.  And the force of obvious analogy teaches us not to
expect all the qualities which please the general taste in those
whose instincts lead them to attack the moral nuisances which poison
the atmosphere of society.  But whether they please us in all their
aspects or not, is not the question.  Like them or not, they must and
will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.  They may be
unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are
alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses as soon
as they are dead, and often to help them to die.  To quarrel with
them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but
far from profitable.  They grow none the less vigorously for being
trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the
stones of court-yard pavements.  If you strike at one of their heads
with the bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the
seedcapsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal
thoughts which will spring up in a crop just like the original
martyr.  They chased one of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery,
from St. Louis, and shot him at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June
just passed, the Governor of Missouri, chairman of the Committee on
Emancipation, introduced to the Convention an Ordinance for the final
extinction of Slavery!  They hunted another through the streets of a
great Northern city in 1835; and within a few weeks a regiment of
colored soldiers, many of them bearing the marks of the slave-
driver's whip on their backs, marched out before a vast multitude
tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the streets of the
same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and Liberty!

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at
their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action.  It is
charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with
them, as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed
characters set before them.  In all questions involving duty, we act
from sentiments.  Religion springs from them, the family order rests
upon them, and in every community each act involving a relation
between any two of its members implies the recognition or the denial
of a sentiment.  It is true that men often forget them or act against
their bidding in the keen competition of business and politics.  But
God has not left the hard intellect of man to work out its devices
without the constant presence of beings with gentler and purer
instincts.  The breast of woman is the ever-rocking cradle of the
pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or later steal their way
into the mind of her sterner companion; which will by and by emerge
in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last thunder forth in
the edicts of its law-givers and masters.  Woman herself borrows half
her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and childhood,
that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the picture of
wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our home."  To
quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively attack
abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the
sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is
merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural
sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the
other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally
inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics.  For
what is meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his
convictions of what is right and expedient regulate the community so
far as his fractional share of the government extends.  If one has
come to the conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular
institution or statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it
is to be expected that he will choose to be represented by those who
share his belief, and who will in their wider sphere do all they
legitimately can to get rid of the wrong in which they find
themselves and their constituents involved.  To prevent opinion from
organizing itself under political forms may be very desirable, but it
is not according to the theory or practice of self-government.  And
if at last organized opinions become arrayed in hostile shape against
each other, we shall find that a just war is only the last inevitable
link in a chain of closely connected impulses of which the original
source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and uncorrupted souls
the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing through various
forms, has found its final expression in the use of material force.
Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the statute the
thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender
conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks
upon the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of
infancy.  "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou
ordained strength, because of thine enemies."

The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the
order of Nature and the Being who established it.  Unless the law of
moral progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were
dethroned, it would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the
human conscience against a system, the legislation relating to which,
in the words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the
Montesquieu of our laws, presents "such unparalleled atrocities as to
show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted."  Until
the infinite selfishness of the powers that hate and fear the
principles of free government swallowed up their convenient virtues,
that system was hissed at by all the old-world civilization.  While
in one section of our land the attempt has been going on to lift it
out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the sphere of the
world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the protest
of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow louder and stronger
until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces.  The
moral uprising of the North came with the logical precision of
destiny; the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to
erect a slave empire followed with fated certainty; and the only
question left for us of the North was, whether we should suffer the
cause of the Nation to go by default, or maintain its existence by
the argument of cannon and musket, of bayonet and sabre.

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or
unworthy purpose.  It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the
preservation of our national existence.  The first direct movement
towards it was a civil request on the part of certain Southern
persons, that the Nation would commit suicide, without making any
unnecessary trouble about it.  It was answered, with sentiments of
the highest consideration, that there were constitutional and other
objections to the Nation's laying violent hands upon itself.  It was
then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone, that the Nation would
be so obliging as to abstain from food until the natural consequences
of that proceeding should manifest themselves.  All this was done as
between a single State and an isolated fortress; but it was not South
Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast conspiracy
uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of
treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the doors
were opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle
their wild natures to frenzy, was the sight of flowing blood.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated
beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of
malice aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled
purpose into the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the
torch which was literally to launch the first missile, figuratively,
to "fire the southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was
given into the trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the
wretched incendiary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with
the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus.  The first gun that spat its
iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote every loyal American full in the
face.  As when the foul witch used to torture her miniature image,
the person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on his
waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the smoking fortress
was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the
representative.  Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of
the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad
had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his
mother's Bible.  Insult could go no farther, for over those battered
walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and
most hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a
nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest
object of love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its
waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course
of events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few
please themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war";
if under any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the
violence of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of
a mortal combat, in which we must either die or give the last and
finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter,
Florida would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf,
and Virginia the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake.  Half our navy
would have anchored under the guns of these suddenly alienated
fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at their peaks.
"Old Ironsides" herself would have perhaps sailed out of Annapolis
harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis shaped for her figure-head at
Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of secession, and his was no
fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the red-handed conspiracy.
With all the great fortresses, with half the ships and warlike
material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the
traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States
have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now
triumphant faction?  Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
fire,--have been in the day of trial?  Into whose hands would the
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the
nation as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in
spite of the volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered
the roar of the first gun at Sumter?  Worse than all, are we
permitted to doubt that in the very bosom of the North itself there
was a serpent, coiled but not sleeping, which only listened for the
first word that made it safe to strike, to bury its fangs in the
heart of Freedom, and blend its golden scales in close embrace with
the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.  Who would not wish that he
were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious
warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be found far north of
the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own streets,
against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were to
defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we
had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to
furnish the means for its commission.  It would have been to placard
ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race
the proud labor-thieves called us.  It would have been to die as a
nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights
into the hands of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere,
and to humanity.  You have only to see who are our friends and who
are our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we
are combating.  We know too well that the British aristocracy is not
with us.  We know what the West End of London wishes may be result of
this controversy.  The two halves of this Union are the two blades of
the shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will
sooner or later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny.  How
they would exult if they could but break the rivet that makes of the
two blades one resistless weapon!  The man who of all living
Americans had the best opportunity of knowing how the fact stood,
wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great Britain did, in the
most terrible moment of our domestic trial in struggling with a
monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly
and at once assume our inability to master it, and then become the
only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect way
possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict
made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the
evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at
the Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not
less than those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he
occupied the same position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn
Republic.

"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our
national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied
that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high
places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people,"
he adds, "everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause
is that of free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the
people against an oligarchy."  These are the words of the Minister to
Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage
paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most
seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the
historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life
into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially
of British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such
terms of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded.  We had,
no doubt, very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at
least, in a strife which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its
cause, arrayed upon one side the supporters of an institution she was
supposed to hate in earnest, and on the other its assailants.  We had
forgotten what her own poet, one of the truest and purest of her
children, had said of his countrymen, in words which might well have
been spoken by the British Premier to the American Ambassador asking
for some evidence of kind feeling on the part of his government:

    "Alas I expect it not.  We found no bait
     To tempt us in thy country.  Doing good,
     Disinterested good, is not our trade."

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest
lines.  We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why
they are our enemies.  Three bending statues bear up that gilded
seat, which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and
consecrated wrongs so long associated with its history, is still
venerated as the throne.  One of these supports is the pensioned
church; the second is the purchased army; the third is the long-
suffering people.  Whenever the third caryatid comes to life and
walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe will be filled
with the broken furniture of palaces.  No wonder that our ministers
find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic split
into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing
in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be
pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that
broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights.  We
know our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political
and social progress.  The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John
Bright have both been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man
of the people has been true to the cause of the people.  That deep
and generous thinker, who, more than any of her philosophical
writers, represents the higher thought of England, John Stuart Mill,
has spoken for us in tones to which none but her sordid hucksters and
her selfish land-graspers can refuse to listen.  Count Gasparin and
Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from liberal France; France, the
country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations embodied themselves for
us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.  Italy,--would you know
on which side the rights of the people and the hopes of the future
are to be found in this momentous conflict, what surer test, what
ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager sympathy of the
Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling many, and the
dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the heroic
Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is
granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the
nation, and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of
mankind, for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as
against oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither
the unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may
still be that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be
abandoned.  Is it too much to say that whether the war is hopeless or
not for the North depends chiefly on the answer to the question,
whether the North has virtue and manhood enough to persevere in the
contest so long as its resources hold out?  But how much virtue and
manhood it has can never be told until they are tried, and those who
are first to doubt the prevailing existence of these qualities are
not commonly themselves patterns of either.  We have a right to trust
that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to give up a just
and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown to be
unattainable for want of material agencies.  What was the end to be
attained by accepting the gage of battle?  It was to get the better
of our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps
which we should then consider necessary to our present and future
safety.  The more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must
it be subdued.  It may not even have been desirable, as Mr.  Mill
suggested long since, that the victory over the rebellion should have
been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to develop the true
meaning of the conflict, to bring out the full strength of the
revolted section, and to exhaust the means which would have served it
for a still more desperate future effort.  We cannot complain that
our task has proved too easy.  We give our Southern army,--for we
must remember that it is our army, after all, only in a state of
mutiny,--we give our Southern army credit for excellent spirit and
perseverance in the face of many disadvantages.  But we have a few
plain facts which show the probable course of events; the gradual but
sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of the
boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even
of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting
with their long lines of bayonets,--may God grant them victory!--the
progress of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold
and currency at Richmond and Washington.  If the index-hands of force
and credit continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where
will the Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth
of the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources
of our opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than
our own.  The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but
runs as freely as ever when its last grains are about to fall.  The
merchant wears as bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a
bankrupt, as he wore at the height of his fortunes.  If Colonel
Grierson found the Confederacy "a mere shell," so far as his
equestrian excursion carried him, how can we say how soon the shell
will collapse?  It seems impossible that our own dissensions can
produce anything more than local disturbances, like the Morristown
revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his faithful
Massachusetts soldiers.  But in a rebellious state dissension is
ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the
pressure on every inch of the containing surface.  Now we know the
tremendous force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern
people.  There are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can
trust the evidence which reaches us, who have been recruited with
packs of blood-hounds, and drilled, as it were, with halters around
their necks.  We know what is the bitterness of those who have
escaped this bloody harvest of the remorseless conspirators; and from
that we can judge of the elements of destruction incorporated with
many of the seemingly solid portions of the fabric of the rebellion.
The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason from the laws of
human nature as to what must be the feelings of the people of the
South to their Northern neighbors.  It is impossible that the love of
the life which they have had in common, their glorious recollections,
their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans, their mingled
blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and protected by
it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the same
outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical
organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred
and eternal alienation.  Men do not change in this way, and we may be
quite sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or
other prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which
the plotters have managed with such consummate skill.  It is hardly
to be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in
Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of
deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the
enemies," as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels
to the prison-cells of Paul and Silas.  But there is no need of
depending on the aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or
be they few; there is material power enough in the North, if there be
the will to use it, to overrun and by degrees to recolonize the
South, and it is far from impossible that some such process may be a
part of the mechanism of its new birth, spreading from various
centres of organization, on the plan which Nature follows when she
would fill a half-finished tissue with blood-vessels or change a
temporary cartilage into bone.

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say
absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of
those whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of
discouragement.  Can we make a safe and honorable peace as the
quarrel now stands?  As honor comes before safety, let us look at
that first.  We have undertaken to resent a supreme insult, and have
had to bear new insults and aggressions, even to the direct menace of
our national capital.  The blood which our best and bravest have shed
will never sink into the ground until our wrongs are righted, or the
power to right them is shown to be insufficient.  If we stop now, all
the loss of life has been butchery; if we carry out the intention
with which we first resented the outrage, the earth drinks up the
blood of our martyrs, and the rose of honor blooms forever where it
was shed.  To accept less than indemnity for the past, so far as the
wretched kingdom of the conspirators can afford it, and security for
the future, would discredit us in our own eyes and in the eyes of
those who hate and long to be able to despise us.  But to reward the
insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the surrender of our
fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on the banks of
the national river,--and this and much more would surely be demanded
of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a level with
the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open to
be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that
would be safe and lasting?  We could have an armistice, no doubt,
long enough for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken
bones to knit together.  But could we expect a solid, substantial,
enduring peace, in which the grass would have time to grow in the
war-paths, and the bruised arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon
rusted in our State arsenal, sleeping with their tompions in their
mouths, like so many sucking lambs?  It is not the question whether
the same set of soldiers would be again summoned to the field.  Let
us take it for granted that we have seen enough of the miseries of
warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented with militia
musters and sham-fights.  The question is whether we could leave our
children and our children's children with any secure trust that they
would not have to go through the very trials we are enduring,
probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated form.

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is
established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace
possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who
already call the Southern whites their masters.  We know what the
prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those
people have been for generations, and what they are like to be after
a long and bitter warfare.  We know what their tone is to the people
of the North; if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are
schoolmasters who will teach us to our heart's content.  We see how
easily their social organization adapts itself to a state of warfare.
They breed a superior order of men for leaders, an ignorant
commonalty ready to follow them as the vassals of feudal times
followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen, who, unless this war
changes them from chattels to human beings, will continue to add
vastly to their military strength in raising their food, in building
their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in fact,
except, it may be, the handling of weapons.  The institution
proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not
merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human
instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of
the desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah.
They call themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North,
yet there is as much difference between their Christianity and that
of Wesley or of Channing, as between creeds that in past times have
vowed mutual extermination.  Still we must not call them barbarians
because they cherish an institution hostile to civilization.  Their
highest culture stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark
background of ignorance against which it is seen; but it would be
injustice to deny that they have always shone in political science,
or that their military capacity makes them most formidable
antagonists, and that, however inferior they may be to their Northern
fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature and science, the
social elegances and personal graces lend their outward show to the
best circles among their dominant class.

Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,--our
neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands
of miles,--but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce,
intolerant, fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual
standing army; hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his
swarthy boy to hate the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile
nation on our frontier is incompatible with our peaceful development?
Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced labor, multiplied by the
breaking up of new cottonfields, and in due time by the reopening of
the slave-trade, will go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses,
to fit out navies.  The old Saracens, fanatics for a religion which
professed to grow by conquest, were a nation of predatory and
migrating warriors.  The Southern people, fanatics for a system
essentially aggressive, conquering, wasting, which cannot remain
stationary, but must grow by alternate appropriations of labor and of
land, will come to resemble their earlier prototypes.  Already, even,
the insolence of their language to the people of the North is a close
imitation of the style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics
affected toward all the nations of Europe.  What the "Christian dogs"
were to the followers of Mahomet, the "accursed Yankees," the
"Northern mud-sills" are to the followers of the Southern Moloch.
The accomplishments which we find in their choicer circles were
prefigured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the long train
of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the Crescent.  In
all branches of culture, their heathen predecessors went far beyond
them.  The schools of mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian
teachers.  The heavens declare the glory of the Oriental astronomers,
as Algorab and Aldebaran repeat their Arabic names to the students of
the starry firmament.  The sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of
the nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Industry, could
show nothing fairer than the court which copies the Moorish palace
that crowns the summit of Granada.  Yet this was the power which
Charles the Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had
to break like a potter's vessel; these were the people whom Spain had
to utterly extirpate from the land where they had ruled for centuries

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous
Afrit of Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will
be to you what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin
shattered their armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their
broken strength upon the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms.
Prepare for the possible fate of Christian Spain; for a slave-market
in Philadelphia; for the Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds
consecrated by the domestic virtues of a long line of Presidents and
their exemplary families.  Remember the ages of border warfare
between England and Scotland, closed at last by the union of the two
kingdoms.  Recollect the hunting of the deer on the Cheviot hills,
and all that it led to; then think of the game which the dogs will
follow open-mouthed across our Southern border, and all that is like
to follow which the child may rue that is unborn; think of these
possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are
ready to make a peace which will give you such a neighbor; which may
betray your civilization as that of half the Peninsula was given up
to the Moors; which may leave your fair border provinces to be
crushed under the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left to be trodden
down by the Duke of Alva!

No!  no!  fellow-citizens!  We must fight in this quarrel until one
side or the other is exhausted.  Rather than suffer all that we have
poured out of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance,
to have been expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question,
an unfinished conflict, an unavenged insult, an unrighted wrong, a
stained escutcheon, a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an
unheroic memory to the descendants of those who have always claimed
that their fathers were heroes; rather than do all this, it were
hardly an American exaggeration to say, better that the last man and
the last dollar should be followed by the last woman and the last
dime, the last child and the last copper!

There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a
mere irresponsible tyranny.  If there are any who really believe that
our present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and
family, that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become
ABRAHAM, DEI GRATIA REX,--they cannot have duly pondered his letter
of June 12th, in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a
rustic lover called upon by an anxious parent to explain his
intentions.  The force of his argument is not at all injured by the
homeliness of his illustrations.  The American people are not much
afraid that their liberties will be usurped.  An army of legislators
is not very likely to throw away its political privileges, and the
idea of a despotism resting on an open ballot-box, is like that of
Bunker Hill Monument built on the waves of Boston Harbor.  We know
pretty well how much of sincerity there is in the fears so
clamorously expressed, and how far they are found in company with
uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the nation.  We have
learned to put a true value on the services of the watch-dog who bays
the moon, but does not bite the thief!

The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands
are wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it
that would be very unsightly in fair weather.  No thoroughly loyal
man, however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such
as emergencies always give rise to.  If any half-loyal man forgets
his code of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become
obnoxious to the peremptory justice which takes the place of slower
forms in all centres of conflagration, there is no sympathy for him
among the soldiers who are risking their lives for us; perhaps there
is even more satisfaction than when an avowed traitor is caught and
punished.  For of all men who are loathed by generous natures, such
as fill the ranks of the armies of the Union, none are so thoroughly
loathed as the men who contrive to keep just within the limits of the
law, while their whole conduct provokes others to break it; whose
patriotism consists in stopping an inch short of treason, and whose
political morality has for its safeguard a just respect for the
jailer and the hangman!  The simple preventive against all possible
injustice a citizen is like to suffer at the hands of a government
which in its need and haste must of course commit many errors, is to
take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly help the
enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the war.  When the
clamor against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens who can
claim this negative merit, it may be listened to.  When it comes from
those who have done what they could to serve their country, it will
receive the attention it deserves.  Doubtless there may prove to be
wrongs which demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for
changing the essential principle of our self-governing system is a
figment which its contrivers laugh over among themselves.  Do the
citizens of Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the
strict legality of an executive act meant in good faith for their
protection against the invader?  We are all citizens of Harrisburg,
all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with
the enemy at work in our own harbors, we begin to understand the
difference between a good and bad citizen; the man that helps and the
man that hinders; the man who, while the pirate is in sight,
complains that our anchor is dragging in his mud, and the man who
violates the proprieties, like our brave Portland brothers, when they
jumped on board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable,
and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus act that lodged
twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in
the whirlpool of national destruction.  If our borders are invaded,
it is only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to
rouse his slumbering mettle.  If our property is taxed, it is only to
teach us that liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for.
We are pouring out the most generous blood of our youth and manhood;
alas! this is always the price that must be paid for the redemption
of a people.  What have we to complain of, whose granaries are
choking with plenty, whose streets are gay with shining robes and
glittering equipages, whose industry is abundant enough to reap all
its overflowing harvest, yet sure of employment and of its just
reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an inexhaustible mine of
fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores of heat and power,
imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all the inhabitants
and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered ages, whose
rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over beds of
golden sand,--what have we to complain of?

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do
and bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne
over and over again for their form of government?  Could England, in
her wars with Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must
we faint under the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.?  Was
she content to negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and
that paid in depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin
with our national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par,
and the "five-twenty" war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the
amount of nearly two hundred millions, without any check to the flow
of the current pressing inwards against the doors of the Treasury?
Except in those portions of the country which are the immediate seat
of war, or liable to be made so, and which, having the greatest
interest not to become the border states of hostile nations, can best
afford to suffer now, the state of prosperity and comfort is such as
to astonish those who visit us from other countries.  What are war
taxes to a nation which, as we are assured on good authority, has
more men worth a million now than it had worth ten thousand dollars
at the close of the Revolution,--whose whole property is a hundred
times, and whose commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred times,
what it was then?  But we need not study Mr. Still's pamphlet and
"Thompson's Bank-Note Reporter" to show us what we know well enough,
that, so far from having occasion to tremble in fear of our impending
ruin, we must rather blush for our material prosperity.  For the
multitudes who are unfortunate enough to be taxed for a million or
more, of course we must feel deeply, at the same time suggesting that
the more largely they report their incomes to the tax-gatherer, the
more consolation they will find in the feeling that they have served
their country.  But,--let us say it plainly,--it will not hurt our
people to be taught that there are other things to be cared for
besides money-making and money-spending; that the time has come when
manhood must assert itself by brave deeds and noble thoughts; when
womanhood must assume its most sacred office, "to warn, to comfort,"
and, if need be, "to command," those whose services their country
calls for.  This Northern section of the land has become a great
variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the long-extended
counter.  We have grown rich for what?  To put gilt bands on
coachmen's hats?  To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks
which the toiling artisans of France can send us?  To look through
plate-glass windows, and pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the
black ones? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two
below its old minimum?  to color meerschaums?  to flaunt in laces,
and sparkle in diamonds?  to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust?
to float through life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the
avenues to the beaches, and back again from the beaches to the
avenues?  Was it for this that the broad domain of the Western
hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by civilization?--for this,
that Time, the father of empires, unbound the virgin zone of this
youngest of his daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil
of her forests, to the rude embrace of the adventurous Colonist?  All
this is what we see around us, now, now while we are actually
fighting this great battle, and supporting this great load of
indebtedness.  Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of
Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement,
For Sale or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed, as she
sings,

    "Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!"

till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to
buy bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the
platform of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because
none will pay them; till there are no peaches in the windows at
twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples
selling at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but
three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these
changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of
exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;--but
till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are
emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over
our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is
carrying us farther and farther, every hour, out of the influence of
the great failing which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin
which was our fatal inheritance!

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we
are just leaving.

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our
Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock
in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of
South Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United
States.  Its ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty
years, shaped and cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation.  Its
wad was the charter of our national existence.  Its muzzle was
pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our national
sovereignty.  As the echoes of its thunder died away, the telegraph
clicked one word through every office of the land.  That word was
WAR!

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is
claimed by its true parents.  This war has eaten its way backward
through all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the
infinitesimals of ordinances and statutes; through all the
casuistries of divines, experts in the differential calculus of
conscience and duty; until it stands revealed to all men as the
natural and inevitable conflict of two incompatible forms of
civilization, one or the other of which must dominate the central
zone of the continent, and eventually claim the hemisphere for its
development.

We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms
which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as
above all special enactments.  We have come to that solid substratum
acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise:  "Necessity itself
which reduces things to the mere right of Nature."  The old rules
which were enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as
meaningless "as moonlight on the dial of the day."  We have followed
precedents as long as they could guide us; now we must make
precedents for the ages which are to succeed us.

If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent, the
current prices of United States stocks show that we value our
nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth.  If we feel that
we are paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us
recall those grand words of Samuel Adams:

"I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it
were revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to
perish, and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his
liberty!"

What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he
said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will
be done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,--because my will is
Thine.  We want the virile energy of determination which made the
oath of Andrew Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint
that the recording angel might have entered it unquestioned among the
prayers of the faithful.

War is a grim business.  Two years ago our women's fingers were busy
making "Havelocks."  It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made
half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of
inexperience and illusion.  We know now what War means, and we cannot
look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there
is some great and noble principle behind it.  It makes little
difference what we thought we were fighting for at first; we know
what we are fighting for now, and what we are fighting against.

We are fighting for our existence.  We say to those who would take
back their several contributions to that undivided unity which we
call the Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal;
you cannot reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible!  There are
rights, possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties,
acquired, retained, called into existence in virtue of the principle
of absolute solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic
whole, which cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties
can claim as its own, which perish out of its living frame when the
wild forces of rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must
defend, or confess self-government itself a failure.

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national
existence reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on
which it was written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those
chances which the necessities of war entail upon every human
arrangement, but still the venerable charter of our wide Republic.

We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother
cause of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms.  Whether we know it
or not, whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against
the system that has proved the source of all those miseries which the
author of the Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate.
And this ought to make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully.
There were Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to die,
wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from
the hands of infidels.  The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine!
He rose from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred years ago.
He is crucified wherever his brothers are slain without cause; he
lies buried wherever man, made in his Maker's image, is entombed in
ignorance lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Master
gave him!  This is our Holy War, and we must fight it against that
great General who will bring to it all the powers with which he
fought against the Almighty before he was cast down from heaven.  He
has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him; he has
bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he has
engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the
profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler
natures by motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we
pity as we ought always to pity the error of those who know not what
they do.  Against him or for him we are all called upon to declare
ourselves.  There is no neutrality for any single true-born American.
If any seek such a position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse
points them to their place in the antechamber of the Halls of
Despair,--

               --With that ill band
     Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
     Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
     Were only."

               --Fame of them the world hath none
     Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both.
     Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."

We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve
him against the enemies of civilization.  We must make and keep the
great river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the
forefoot of the wild, untamable rebellion.  We must not be too nice
in the choice of our agents.  Non eget Mauri jaculis,--no African
bayonets wanted,--was well enough while we did not yet know the might
of that desperate giant we had to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,--
white or black,--is the safer motto now; for a good soldier, like a
good horse, cannot be of a bad color.  The iron-skins, as well as the
iron-clads, have already done us noble service, and many a mother
will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will welcome back the war-
worn husband, whose smile would never again have gladdened his home,
but that, cold in the shallow trench of the battle-field, lies the
half-buried form of the unchained bondsman whose dusky bosom sheathes
the bullet which would else have claimed that darling as his
country's sacrifice

We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise.  It
may be long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and
humblings we may have to pass before the full strength of the nation
is duly arrayed and led to victory.  We must be patient, as our
fathers were patient; even in our worst calamities, we must remember
that defeat itself may be a gain where it costs our enemy more in
relation to his strength than it costs ourselves.  But if, in the
inscrutable providence of the Almighty, this generation is
disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we have not
virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a nation of
sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those who
vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her
assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women
of the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union,
you have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed
their blood for your temporal salvation.  They bore your nation's
emblems bravely through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay,
their own bodies are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with
sabre-cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country until
their dust becomes a portion of the soil which they defended.  In
every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying
struggle.  Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the
clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds
with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them.  By those
wounds of living heroes, by those graves of fallen martyrs, by the
hopes of your children, and the claims of your children's children
yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of
violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, for the
sake of men everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory of
God and the advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls
upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil
report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great
war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress
in the councils of earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that
fell from the wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme,
over all her ancient inheritance, every fortress, every capital,
every ship, and this warring land is once more a, United Nation!






CINDERS FROM THE ASHES.

The personal revelations contained in my report of certain breakfast-
table conversations were so charitably listened to and so good-
naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming over-
communicative.  Still, I should never have ventured to tell the
trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my brief
story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining
figure that trod the same path with me for a time, or crossed it,
leaving a momentary or lasting brightness in its track.  I remember
that, in furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its
dull aspect as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead
and bureau.  "Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to
the key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the furnisher.  It
was done, and that one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment
as the evening star glorifies the dusky firmament.  So, my loving
reader,--and to none other can such table-talk as this be addressed,-
-I hope there will be lustre enough in one or other of the names with
which I shall gild my page to redeem the dulness of all that is
merely personal in my recollections.

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by
infantine loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by
the great forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and
deodauds, and by the long willow stick by the aid of which the good
old body, now stricken in years and unwieldy in person could
stimulate the sluggish faculties or check the mischievous sallies of
the child most distant from his ample chair,--a school where I think
my most noted schoolmate was the present Bishop of Delaware, became
the pupil of Master William Biglow.  This generation is not familiar
with his title to renown, although he fills three columns and a half
in Mr. Duyckinck's "Cyclopaedia of American Literature."  He was a
humorist hardly robust enough for more than a brief local
immortality. I am afraid we were an undistinguished set, for I do not
remember anybody near a bishop in dignity graduating from our
benches.

At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the
"Port School," because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the
College.  This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being
much of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as
compared with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the
many beautiful mansions that have sprung up along Main Street,
Harvard Street, and Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except
the "Dana House" and the "Opposition House" and the "Clark House,"
these roads were almost all the way bordered by pastures until we
reached the "stores" of Main Street, or were abreast of that forlorn
"First Row" of Harvard Street.  We called the boys of that locality
"Port-chucks."  They called us "Cambridge-chucks," but we got along
very well together in the main.

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular
loveliness. I once before referred to her as "the golden blonde," but
did not trust myself to describe her charms.  The day of her
appearance in the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys
as the appearance of Miranda was to Caliban.  Her abounding natural
curls were so full of sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her
smile and her voice were so all-subduing, that half our heads were
turned.  Her fascinations were everywhere confessed a few years
afterwards; and when I last met her, though she said she was a
grandmother, I questioned her statement, for her winning looks and
ways would still have made her admired in any company.

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very
small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet,
reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however,
beginning to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer
years.  One of these two boys was destined to be widely known, first
in literature, as author of one of the most popular books of its time
and which is freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer;
a man who, if his countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the
national councils.  Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore
and bears; he found it famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of
unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray
hereditary and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of
my own age.  She came with the reputation of being "smart," as we
should have called it, clever as we say nowadays.  This was Margaret
Fuller, the only one among us who, like "Jean Paul," like "The Duke,"
like "Bettina," has slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to
which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as
"Margaret."  Her air to her schoolmates was marked by a certain
stateliness and distance, as if she had other thoughts than theirs
and was not of them.  She was a great student and a great reader of
what she used to call "naw-vels."  I remember her so well as she
appeared at school and later, that I regret that she had not been
faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day of her best looks.
None know her aspect who have not seen her living.  Margaret, as I
remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complexioned,
with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used
to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.  A remarkable
point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating
in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare
to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the
ophidian who tempted our common mother.  Her talk was affluent,
magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but
surpassing the talk of women in breadth and audacity.  Her face
kindled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and,
as I once saw her in a fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-
treatment of a relative, showed itself capable of something
resembling what Milton calls the viraginian aspect.

Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a
celebrity as Margaret.  I remember being greatly awed once, in our
school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions.  Some
themes were brought home from the school for examination by my
father, among them one of hers.  I took it up with a certain emulous
interest (for I fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say
a five-dollar one, at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery)
and read the first words.

"It is a trite remark," she began.

I stopped.  Alas! I did not know what trite meant.  How could I ever
judge Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her
superiority?  I doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would
have been, at about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over
these ashes for cinders with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a
decent peruke!

After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I
was to enter college.  It seemed advisable to give me a year of
higher training, and for that end some public school was thought to
offer advantages.  Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us.
We had been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries.  Some
Boston boys of well-known and distinguished parentage had been
scholars there very lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd
Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who
fulfilled their promise.

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of
quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was
not.  Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it
is true; but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of
the exceptional kind.  I had tendencies in the direction of
flageolets and octave flutes.  I had a pistol and a gun, and popped
at everything that stirred, pretty nearly, except the house-cat.
Worse than this, I would buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments,
putting it meantime in the barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of
ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall; for no
maternal or other female eyes would explore the cavity of that dread
implement in search of contraband commodities.

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and
preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning
of the autumn.

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little
modernized from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged
soberly along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the
seat of learning, some twenty miles away.  Up the old West Cambridge
road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering
tree and swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a
colossal conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the
finest of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great
square boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was
ringing through the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the
bright lake, then darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous
murder done by its lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its
oddly named village centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic
speech had it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for
its hops; so at last into the hallowed borders of the academic town.

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just
at the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very
worthy professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable,
exemplary, but thought by certain experts to be a little questionable
in the matter of homoousianism, or some such doctrine.  There was a
great rock that showed its round back in the narrow front yard.  It
looked cold and hard; but it hinted firmness and indifference to the
sentiments fast struggling to get uppermost in my youthful bosom; for
I was not too old for home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my
fond companions had to leave me at last.  I saw it go down the
declivity that sloped southward, then climb the next ascent, then
sink gradually until the window in the back of it disappeared like an
eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to some widowed heart.

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy
but time.  Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy.  There
was an ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very
deaf, rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other
murmurous fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy
gentlewoman of the poor-relation variety.  She comforted me, I well
remember, but not with apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons.
She went in her benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda-
powder, mingled the same in water, and encouraged me to drink the
result.  It might be a specific for seasickness, but it was not for
home-sickness.  The fiz was a mockery, and the saline refrigerant
struck a colder chill to my despondent heart.  I did not disgrace
myself, however, and a few days cured me, as a week on the water
often cures seasickness.

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who
began to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the
conditions surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be
one of the most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met
in my life.  My room-mate came later.  He was the son of a clergyman
in a neighboring town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many
clergymen's sons at Andover.  He and I went in harness together as
well as most boys do, I suspect; and I have no grudge against him,
except that once, when I was slightly indisposed, he administered to
me,--with the best intentions, no doubt,--a dose of Indian pills,
which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr.  Morrissey would
say,--not quite into eternity, but so near it that I perfectly
remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had come to my
senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word
of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which so
brings realities home to the imagination, that "I never should look
any whiter when I was laid out as a corpse."  After my room-mate and
I had been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen
and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close
literary neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article,
signed by him, in the last number of the "Galaxy."  Does it not
sometimes seem as if we were all marching round and round in a
circle, like the supernumeraries who constitute the "army" of a
theatre, and that each of us meets and is met by the same and only
the same people, or their doubles, twice, thrice, or a little
oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts off its
borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare
and uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge,
since the piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to
balance the ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added
to "Harvard Hall."  Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--
the principal and his assistant.  Two others presided in separate
rooms, one of them the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent
and lovable man, who looked kindly on me, and for whom I always
cherished a sincere regard, a clergyman's son, too, which privilege I
did not always find the warrant of signal virtues; but no matter
about that here, and I have promised myself to be amiable.

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these
words:

          YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the
budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me
with its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal
apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth,
with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a
singularly malignant scowl.  Many years afterwards he committed an
act of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a
madhouse.  His delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under
the desk, not at all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and
harmless pastime.  Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally
devoid of pleasure and profit, I managed to get a seat by another
boy, the son of a very distinguished divine.  He was bright enough,
and more select in his choice of recreations, at least during school
hours, than my late homicidal neighbor.  But the principal called me
up presently, and cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion.
Could it be so?  If the son of that boy's father could not be
trusted, what boy in Christendom could?  It seemed like the story of
the youth doomed to be slain by a lion before reaching a certain age,
and whose fate found him out in the heart of the tower where his
father had shut him up for safety.  Here was I, in the very dove's
nest of Puritan faith, and out of one of its eggs a serpent had been
hatched and was trying to nestle in my bosom!  I parted from him,
however, none the worse for his companionship so far as I can
remember.

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover one has acquired
great distinction among the scholars of the land.  One day I observed
a new boy in a seat not very far from my own.  He was a little
fellow, as I recollect him, with black hair and very bright black
eyes, when at length I got a chance to look at them.  Of all the new-
comers during my whole year he was the only one whom the first glance
fixed in my memory, but there he is now, at this moment, just as he
caught my eye on the morning of his entrance.  His head was between
his hands (I wonder if he does not sometimes study in that same
posture nowadays!) and his eyes were fastened to his book as if he
had been reading a will that made him heir to a million.  I feel sure
that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not find fault with me for
writing his name under this inoffensive portrait.  Thousands of faces
and forms that I have known more or less familiarly have faded from
my remembrance, but this presentment of the youthful student, sitting
there entranced over the page of his text-book,--the child-father of
the distinguished scholar that was to be,--is not a picture framed
and hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its walls, there to
remain so long as they hold together.

My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not quite so free of
speech as myself, perhaps, but with qualities that promised a noble
manhood, and ripened into it in due season.  His name was Phinehas
Barnes, and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in the
State of Maine, something will be heard to his advantage from any
honest and intelligent citizen of that Commonwealth who answers the
question.  This was one of two or three friendships that lasted.
There were other friends and classmates, one of them a natural
humorist of the liveliest sort, who would have been quarantined in
any Puritan port, his laugh was so potently contagious.

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I remember best was
Professor Moses Stuart.  His house was nearly opposite the one in
which I resided and I often met him and listened to him in the chapel
of the Seminary.  I have seen few more striking figures in my life
than his, as I remember it.  Tall, lean, with strong, bold features,
a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, expressive lips, great
solemnity and impressiveness of voice and manner, he was my early
model of a classic orator.  His air was Roman, his neck long and bare
like Cicero's, and his toga,--that is his broadcloth cloak,--was
carried on his arm, whatever might have been the weather, with such a
statue-like rigid grace that he might have been turned into marble as
he stood, and looked noble by the side of the antiques of the
Vatican.

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic handkerchief bundling
his throat, and his face "festooned"--as I heard Hillard say once,
speaking of one of our College professors--in folds and wrinkles.
Ill health gives a certain common character to all faces, as Nature
has a fixed course which she follows in dismantling a human
countenance: the noblest and the fairest is but a death's-head
decently covered over for the transient ceremony of life, and the
drapery often falls half off before the procession has passed.

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the
Professors.  He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and
lived to be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-
heterodoxy, as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and
then,--just as old doctors grow to be sparing of the more
exasperating drugs in their later days.  He had manipulated the
mysteries of the Infinite so long and so exhaustively, that he would
have seemed more at home among the mediaeval schoolmen than amidst
the working clergy of our own time.

All schools have their great men, for whose advent into life the
world is waiting in dumb expectancy.  In due time the world seizes
upon these wondrous youth, opens the shell of their possibilities
like the valves of an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are
for the most part heard of no more.  We had two great men, grown up
both of them.  Which was the more awful intellectual power to be
launched upon society, we debated.  Time cut the knot in his rude
fashion by taking one away early, and padding the other with
prosperity so that his course was comparatively noiseless and
ineffective.  We had our societies, too; one in particular, "The
Social Fraternity," the dread secrets of which I am under a lifelong
obligation never to reveal.  The fate of William Morgan, which the
community learned not long after this time, reminds me of the danger
of the ground upon which I am treading.

There were various distractions to make the time not passed in study
a season of relief.  One good lady, I was told, was in the habit of
asking students to her house on Saturday afternoons and praying with
and for them.  Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded
by spiritual exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the
heroic sport of football were followed with some spirit.

A slight immature boy finds his materials of though and enjoyment in
very shallow and simple sources.  Yet a kind of romance gilds for me
the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in
contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such
mingled and lasting impressions.  I looked across the valley to the
hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded
seclusion as a village paradise.  I tripped lightly down the long
northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up
again, repeating sed revocare gradum.  I wandered' in the autumnal
woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much wondering at that vast
embankment, which we young philosophers believed with the vulgar to
be of aboriginal workmanship, not less curious, perhaps, since we
call it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies.  The little
Shawshine was our swimming-school, and the great Merrimack, the right
arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morning stroll.  At
home we had the small imp to make us laugh at his enormities, for he
spared nothing in his talk, and was the drollest little living
protest against the prevailing solemnities of the locality.  It did
not take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing that this
is apt to be so with young people.  What else could have made us
think it great sport to leave our warm beds in the middle of winter
and "camp out,"--on the floor of our room,--with blankets disposed
tent-wise, except the fact that to a boy a new discomfort in place of
an old comfort is often a luxury.

More exciting occupation than any of these was to watch one of the
preceptors to see if he would not drop dead while he was praying.  He
had a dream one night that he should, and looked upon it as a
warning, and told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to come
and visit him in turn, as one whom they were soon to lose.  More than
one boy kept his eye on him during his public devotions, possessed by
the same feeling the man had who followed Van Amburgh about with the
expectation, let us not say the hope, of seeing the lion bite his
head off sooner or later.

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to Haverhill with
my room-mate, and how he led me to the mighty bridge over the
Merrimack which defied the ice-rafts of the river; and to the old
meetinghouse, where, in its porch, I saw the door of the ancient
parsonage, with the bullet-hole in it through which Benjamin Rolfe,
the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708.
What a vision it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on
the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great
city!--for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or
a fantastic natural effect I hate to inquire too nicely.

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader who may have
survived so far cares to know, included a translation from Virgil,
out of which I remember this couplet, which had the inevitable
cockney rhyme of beginners:

    "Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm
     The boiling ocean trembled into calm."

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the case of Mary,
Queen of Scots, which he treated argumentatively and I rhetorically
and sentimentally.  My sentences were praised and his conclusions
adopted.  Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, held
in the large hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly enough from the roof,
suspended by iron rods.  Subject, Fancy.  Treatment, brief but
comprehensive, illustrating the magic power of that brilliant faculty
in charming life into forgetfulness of all the ills that flesh is
heir to,--the gift of Heaven to every condition and every clime, from
the captive in his dungeon to the monarch on his throne; from the
burning sands of the desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles,
from--but I forget myself.

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover.  I went from the
Academy to Harvard College, and did not visit the sacred hill again
for a long time.

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been at Andover , for
many years, I took the cars at noon, and in an hour or a little more
found myself at the station,--just at the foot of the hill.  My first
pilgrimage was to the old elm, which I remembered so well as standing
by the tavern, and of which they used to tell the story that it held,
buried in it by growth, the iron rings put round it in the old time
to keep the Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks.  I then
began the once familiar toil of ascending the long declivity.
Academic villages seem to change very slowly.  Once in a hundred
years the library burns down with all its books.  A new edifice or
two may be put up, and a new library begun in the course of the same
century; but these places are poor, for the most part, and cannot
afford to pull down their old barracks.

These sentimental journeys to old haunts must be made alone.  The
story of them must be told succinctly.  It is like the opium-smoker's
showing you the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss,
empty of the precious extract which has given him his dream.

I did not care much for the new Academy building on my right, nor for
the new library building on my left.  But for these it was surprising
to see how little the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed.
The Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and the stage-
coach landed its passengers at the Mansion House as of old.  The pale
brick seminary buildings were behind me on the left, looking as if
"Hollis" and "Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,--
carried there in the night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the
Santa Casa.  Away to my left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak,
bare old Academy building; and in front of me stood unchanged the
shallow oblong white house where I lived a year in the days of James
Monroe and of John Quincy Adams.

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered among the places he
knew so well.  I went to the front of the house.  There was the great
rock showing its broad back in the front yard.  I used to crack nuts
on that, whispered the small ghost.  I looked in at the upper window
in the farther part of the house.  I looked out of that on four long
changing seasons, said the ghost.  I should have liked to explore
farther, but, while I was looking, one came into the small garden, or
what used to be the garden, in front of the house, and I desisted
from my investigation and went on my way.  The apparition that put me
and my little ghost to flight had a dressing-gown on its person and a
gun in its hand.  I think it was the dressing-gown, and not the gun,
which drove me off.

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be Shipman's, after
passing what I think used to be Jonathan Leavitt's bookbindery, and
here is the back road that will lead me round by the old Academy
building.

Could I believe my senses when I found that it was turned into a
gymnasium, and heard the low thunder of ninepin balls, and the crash
of tumbling pins from those precincts?  The little ghost said, Never!
It cannot be.  But it was.  " Have they a billiard-room in the upper
story?" I asked myself.  "Do the theological professors take a hand
at all-fours or poker on weekdays, now and then, and read the secular
columns of the 'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoralized for
the moment, it is plain; but now that I have recovered from the
shock, I must say that the fact mentioned seems to show a great
advance in common sense from the notions prevailing in my time.

I sauntered,--we, rather, my ghost and I,--until we came to a broken
field where there was quarrying and digging going on,--our old base-
ball ground, hard by the burial-place.  There I paused; and if any
thoughtful boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that another has
sown with memories of the time when he was young shall follow my
footsteps, I need not ask him to rest here awhile, for he will be
enchained by the noble view before him.  Far to the north and west
the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their summits in along
encircling ridge of pale blue waves.  The day was clear, and every
mound and peak traced its outline with perfect definition against the
sky.  This was a sight which had more virtue and refreshment in it
than any aspect of nature that I had looked upon, I am afraid I must
say for years.  I have been by the seaside now and then, but the sea
is constantly busy with its own affairs, running here and there,
listening to what the winds have to say and getting angry with them,
always indifferent, often insolent, and ready to do a mischief to
those who seek its companionship.  But these still, serene,
unchanging mountains,--Monadnock, Kearsarge,--what memories that name
recalls!--and the others, the dateless Pyramids of New England, the
eternal monuments of her ancient race, around which cluster the homes
of so many of her bravest and hardiest children,--I can never look at
them without feeling that, vast and remote and awful as they are,
there is a kind of inward heat and muffled throb in their stony
cores, that brings them into a vague sort of sympathy with human
hearts.  It is more than a year since I have looked on those blue
mountains, and they "are to me as a feeling " now, and have been ever
since.

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial-ground.  It was
thinly tenanted as I remember it, but now populous with the silent
immigrants of more than a whole generation.  There lay the dead I had
left, the two or three students of the Seminary; the son of the
worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom in those days hearts
were still aching, and by whose memory the house still seemed
haunted.  A few upright stones were all that I recollect.  But now,
around them were the monuments of many of the dead whom I remembered
as living.  I doubt if there has been a more faithful reader of these
graven stones than myself for many a long day.  I listened to more
than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had often heard as they
thundered their doctrines down upon me from the throne-like desk.
Now they spoke humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from
an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's Concordance, but
there was an eloquence in their voices the listening chapel had never
known.  There were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but
none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hallows the
resting-place of one of the children of the very learned Professor
Robinson: "Is it well with the child?  And she answered, It is well."

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood of Hamlet, two old
men, as my little ghost called them, appeared on the scene to answer
to the gravedigger and his companion.  They christened a mountain or
two for me, "Kearnsarge" among the rest, and revived some old
recollections, of which the most curious was "Basil's Cave."  The
story was recent, when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or
Buzzell, or whatever his name might have been, a member of the
Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally extravagant, and of more or less
lawless habits.  He had commanded a cave to be secretly dug, and
furnished it sumptuously, and there with his companions indulged in
revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated locality had never
looked upon.  How much truth there was in it all I will not pretend
to say, but I seem to remember stamping over every rock that sounded
hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was once Basil's
Cave.

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I sought a shelter
under which to partake of the hermit fare I had brought with me.
Following the slope of the hill northward behind the cemetery, I
found a pleasant clump of trees grouped about some rocks, disposed so
as to give a seat, a table, and a shade.  I left my benediction on
this pretty little natural caravansera, and a brief record on one of
its white birches, hoping to visit it again on some sweet summer or
autumn day.

Two scenes remained to look upon,--the Shawshine River and the Indian
Ridge.  The streamlet proved to have about the width with which it
flowed through my memory.  The young men and the boys were bathing in
its shallow current, or dressing and undressing upon its banks as in
the days of old; the same river, only the water changed; "The same
boys, only the names and the accidents of local memory different," I
whispered to my little ghost.

The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I expected of it.  It is
well worth a long ride to visit.  The lofty wooded bank is a mile and
a half in extent, with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general
running nearly parallel with it, one of them still longer.  These
singular formations are supposed to have been built up by the eddies
of conflicting currents scattering sand and gravel and stones as they
swept over the continent.  But I think they pleased me better when I
was taught that the Indians built them; and while I thank Professor
Hitchcock, I sometimes feel as if I should like to found a chair to
teach the ignorance of what people do not want to know.

"Two tickets to Boston."  I said to the man at the station.

But the little ghost whispered, "When you leave this place you leave
me behind you."

"One ticket to Boston, if you please.  Good by, little ghost."

I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around the well-remembered
scenes I traversed on that day, and that, whenever I revisit them, I
shall find him again as my companion.






THE PULPIT AND THE PEW.

The priest is dead for the Protestant world.  Luther's inkstand did
not kill the devil, but it killed the priest, at least for us: He is
a loss in many respects to be regretted.  He kept alive the spirit of
reverence.  He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhuman in
their nature, and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and
their defence against the strong.  If one end of religion is to make
men happier in this world as well as in the next, mankind lost a
great source of happiness when the priest was reduced to the common
level of humanity, and became only a minister.  Priest, which was
presbyter, corresponded to senator, and was a title to respect and
honor.  Minister is but the diminutive of magister, and implies an
obligation to render service.

It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine
mission they should have the power of casting out devils and talking
in strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink
poisons with impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and
they should recover.  The Roman Church claims some of these powers
for its clergy and its sacred objects to this day.  Miracles, it is
professed, are wrought by them, or through them, as in the days of
the apostles.  Protestantism proclaims that the age of such
occurrences as the apostles witnessed is past.  What does it know
about miracles?  It knows a great many records of miracles, but this
is a different kind of knowledge.

The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his
eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities,
but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still,
in the Roman Church.  Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault
with, but it has a very real meaning.  "The essential point in the
notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our
intercourse with God, without being necessary or beneficial to us
morally,--an unreasonable, immoral, spiritual necessity."  He did not
mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities
which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a
special power, quite independent of his personal character, which
could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of him went a virtue,
as from the hem of his Master's raiment, to those with whom his
sacred office brought him in contact.

It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a
tangible personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator
between them and the heavenly powers.  Sympathy can do much for the
sorrowing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking
directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the
channel of communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is
the privilege of those who looked and those who still look up to a
priesthood.  It has been said, and many who have walked the hospitals
or served in the dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the
assertion, that the Roman Catholics know how to die.  The same thing
is less confidently to be said of Protestants.  How frequently is the
story told of the most exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how
common is it to read in the lives of the most exemplary Protestant
ministers, that they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last
days!  The blessing of the viaticum is unknown to them.  Man is
essentially an idolater,--that is, in bondage to his imagination,--
for there is no more harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin
word imago.  He wants a visible image to fix his thought, a scarabee
or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time
what these were to the ancient Egyptians.  He wants a vicegerent of
the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on his last
journey.  Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity
would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on the
block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"?

It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize
the American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood.  The
history of the Congregationalists in New England would show us how
this change has gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall
open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of
the rostrum, and the clergyman take on the character of a popular
lecturer who deals with every kind of subject, including religion.

Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a
right to be proud of our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers among the
clergy.  They were ready to do and to suffer anything for their
faith, and a faith which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief
which leaves nothing worth being a hero for.  Only let us be fair,
and not defend the creed of Mohammed because it nurtured brave men
and enlightened scholars, or refrain from condemning polygamy in our
admiration of the indomitable spirit and perseverance of the Pilgrim
Fathers of Mormonism, or justify an inhuman belief, or a cruel or
foolish superstition, because it was once held or acquiesced in by
men whose nobility of character we heartily recognize.  The New
England clergy can look back to a noble record, but the pulpit has
sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may sometimes find it
worth its while to listen to one even in our own days.

>From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers
have furnished the highest type of character to the people among whom
they have lived.  They have lost to a considerable extent the
position of leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked
upon as representatives of their congregations, they represent what
is best among those of whom they are the speaking organs.  We have a
right to expect them to be models as well as teachers of all that
makes the best citizens for this world and the next, and they have
not been, and are not in these later days unworthy of their high
calling.  They have worked hard for small earthly compensation.  They
have been the most learned men the country had to show, when learning
was a scarce commodity.  Called by their consciences to self-denying
labors, living simply, often half-supported by the toil of their own
hands, they have let the light, such light as shone for them, into
the minds of our communities as the settler's axe let the sunshine
into their log-huts and farm-houses.

Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a
few instances will illustrate.  Often, as was just said, they toiled
like day-laborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small
inclosures of land, for the New England soil is not one that "laughs
when tickled with a hoe," but rather one that sulks when appealed to
with that persuasive implement.  The father of the eminent Boston
physician whose recent loss is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt
Clarke, forty-two years pastor of the small fold in the town of
Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical example of this union of the two
callings, and it would be hard to find a story of a more wholesome
and useful life, within a limited and isolated circle, than that
which the pious care of one of his children commemorated.  Sometimes
the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward of Stratford-on-Avon,
in old England, joined the practice of medicine to the offices of his
holy profession.  Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of "The Day of
Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard College,
were instances of this twofold service.  In politics their influence
has always been felt, and in many cases their drums ecclesiastic have
beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it ever
sounded in the slumbering camp.  Samuel Cooper sat in council with
the leaders of the Revolution in Boston.  The three Northampton-born
brothers Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and,
when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty.  In later
days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics into their
pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times
still more recent.

The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office,
tended, to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of
aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days
when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at
present.  Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence,
as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember
the last of the "fair, white, curly" wigs, as it graced the imposing
figure of the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can
testify.  They were not only learned in the history of the past, but
they were the interpreters of the prophecy, and announced coming
events with a confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau
warns us of a coming storm.  The numbers of the book of Daniel and
the visions of the Revelation were not too hard for them.  In the
commonplace book of the Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the
following record, made, as it appears, about the year 1773:
"Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichrist, after
many things had been said upon the subject, the Doctor began to warm,
and uttered himself after this manner: 'Tell your children to tell
their children that in the year 1866 something notable will happen in
the church; tell them the old man says so.'"

The "old man" came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if
we consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870.  In 1864
the Pope issued the "Syllabus of Errors," which "must be considered
by Romanists--as an infallible official document, and which arrays
the papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and
religious freedom."  The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to
be the bishop of bishops, and immediately after this began the
decisive movement of the party known as the "Old Catholics."  In the
exact year looked forward to by the New England prophet, 1866, the
evacuation of Rome by the French and the publication of "Ecce Homo"
appear to be the most remarkable events having Special relation to
the religious world.  Perhaps the National Council of the
Congregationalists, held at Boston in 1865, may be reckoned as one of
the occurrences which the oracle just missed.

The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later
period.  "In half a century," said the venerable Dr. Porter of
Conway, New Hampshire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews,
Mohammedans, Unitarians, or Methodists."  The half-century has more
than elapsed, and the prediction seems to stand in need of an
extension, like many other prophetic utterances.

The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of
Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul
in two thousand would be saved.  Seeing a knot of his parishioners in
debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that
they were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected
one, the population being just two thousand, and that opinion was
divided whether it would be the minister or one of his deacons.  The
story may or may not be literally true, but it illustrates the
popular belief of those days, that the clergyman saw a good deal
farther into the councils of the Almighty than his successors could
claim the power of doing.

The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied
accomplishments of some of the New England clergy.  The face of the
Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks
upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression
which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience
of eternity.  The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription:"
Ezroe Stiles, 1766.  Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de
Killingworth."  Both were noted scholars and philosophers.  The hand-
lens before me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by
the Reverend John Prince of Salem, an earlier student of science in
the town since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute.
Jeremy Belknap holds an honored place in that unpretending row of
local historians.  And in the pages of his "History of New Hampshire"
may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable
man, in many respects, among all the older clergymen preacher,
lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer,
colonist, legislator in state and national governments, and only not
seated on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he
declined the office when Washington offered it to him.  This manifold
individual was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in
Essex County, Massachusetts,--the Reverend Manasseh Cutler.  These
reminiscences from surrounding objects came up unexpectedly, of
themselves: and have a right here, as showing how wide is the range
of intelligence in the clerical body thus accidentally represented in
a single library making no special pretensions.

It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added
that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities.
Mather Byles's facetie are among the colonial classic reminiscences.
But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles.  True
humor is an outgrowth of character.  It is never found in greater
perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors.  Dr.
Sprague's "Annals of the American Pulpit" tells many stories of our
old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences."  He
has not recorded the following, which is to be found in Miss Larned's
excellent and most interesting History of Windham County,
Connecticut.  The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of
Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700.  He was not old, it is
true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers.  The
"sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the
drollery of its expressions.  A specimen or two may dispose the
reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of
mind.  "If unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would
feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak."  Some of his
ministerial associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called
on a visit of admonition to the offending clergyman.  " Mr. Dwight
received their reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his
faults, and promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after
returning thanks for the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that
they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never kick
in the stables of everlasting salvation.'"

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old
ministers in one's veins.  An English bishop proclaimed the fact
before an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not
ashamed to say that he had a son who was a doctor.  Very kind that
was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience must have
felt.  Perhaps he was not ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, "the beloved
physician," or even of the teachings which came from the lips of one
who was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter.  So a New-Englander,
even if he were a bishop, need not be ashamed to say that he
consented to have an ancestor who was a minister.  On the contrary,
he has a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good
instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library where he
bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than
one of his father's or grandfather's folios.  What are the names of
ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory as
illustrating these advantages?  Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens
Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth,
James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all
ministers' boys.  John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the
clergyman after whom he was named.  George Ticknor was next door to
such a descent, for his father was a deacon.  This is a group which
it did not take a long or a wide search to bring together.

Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to
exercise a good deal of authority in the communities to which they
belonged.  The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a
tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation.  Republicanism levels
in religion as in everything.  It might have been expected,
therefore, that soon after civil liberty had been established there
would be conflicts between the traditional, authority of the minister
and the claims of the now free and independent congregation.  So it
was, in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, for which
the reader is indebted to Miss Lamed's book, before cited.

The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in
the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret,
Connecticut.  Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the
Windham "Herald," in all the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with
all the emphasis of italics and small capitals.  Was it not time, he
said, for people to look about them and see whether "such despotism
was founded in Scripture, in reason, in policy, or on the rights of
man!  A minister, by his vote, by his single voice, may negative the
unanimous vote of the church!  Are ministers composed of finer clay
than the rest of mankind, that entitles them to this preeminence?
Does a license to preach transform a man into a higher order of
beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern?  Are the laity
an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to be
governed?  Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to
such degrading vassalage and abject submission?  Reason, common
sense, and the Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that
they are all born free and equal; that every member of a church or
Christian congregation must be on the same footing in respect of
church government, and that the CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one
the power to negative the vote of all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE
NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND REPUGNANT TO THE WORD OF GOD."

The Reverend Mr.  Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing
him to be "destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound
judgment, honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat's-paw,
the infamous tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock,
and a ragamuffin."

No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and
no clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses
Welch.  The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that
last two or three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels
by assertion of their special dignities or privileges.  The public is
better bred than to carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms
which political brawlers would hardly think admissible.  The minister
of religion is generally treated with something more than respect; he
is allowed to say undisputed what would be sharply controverted in
anybody else.  Bishop Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been
discussing a religious subject with a friend who was not convinced by
his arguments.  "Wait till you hear me from the pulpit," he said;
"there you cannot answer me."  The preacher--if I may use an image
which would hardly have suggested itself to him--has his hearer's
head in chancery, and can administer punishment ad libitum.  False
facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images,
borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a
word of comment or a look of disapprobation.

One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen
has lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren
invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been
sharply criticised for so doing.  The layman, who sits silent in his
pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of
questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged
eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious
teacher.  It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote
these words: "I am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient,
and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern
divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as
well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage
to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to
be nothing but a mere trick."

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend
Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the
college yard.  But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried
out earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of
those judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so
largely attributable to the clergy.

Perhaps no, laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the
doctors.  The old reproach against physicians, that where there were
three of them together there were two atheists, had a real
significance, but not that which was intended by the sharp-tongued
ecclesiastic who first uttered it.  Undoubtedly there is a strong
tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce
disbelief in that figment of tradition and diseased human imagination
which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of
cruel and ignorant ages.  It is impossible, or at least very
difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of
Nature--whose diary is the book he reads oftenest--to heal wounds, to
expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given
conditions,--it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where
wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain,
where sleep never comes with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where
the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity
for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children
of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow.  The Deity has
often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt,
frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity.


On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as
well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,--led
upward by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought
before his own eyes.  So it was that Galen gave utterance to that
psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been
ashamed of; and if this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain
of devotion, we need not be surprised to find so many devout
Christian worshippers among the crowd of medical "atheists."

No two professions should come into such intimate and cordial
relations as those to which belong the healers of the body and the
headers of the mind.  There can be no more fatal mistake than that
which brings them into hostile attitudes with reference to each
other, both having in view the welfare of their fellow-creatures.
But there is a territory always liable to be differed about between
them.  There are patients who never tell their physician the grief
which lies at the bottom of their ailments.  He goes through his
accustomed routine with them, and thinks he has all the elements
needed for his diagnosis.  But he has seen no deeper into the breast
than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than the wrist.  A wise
and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient's bedside,--not with
the professional look on his face which suggests the undertaker and
the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a sympathetic voice,
with tact, with patience, waiting for the right moment,--will
surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow,
the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily
symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul
is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the world.
And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over-sensitive
natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual
exercises until their best confessor would be a sagacious and
wholesome-minded physician.

Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants
that he is subject to what are known to the records of insanity as
hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blasphemy in his
ears, and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to
be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire.  Suppose that his mental
conflicts, after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last
reduce him to a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking
his own life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by knife,
halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up
his mind to commit suicide.  Is not this a manifest case of insanity,
in the form known as melancholia?  Would not any prudent physician
keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a
dangerous state of, at least, partial mental alienation?  Yet this is
an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in
"Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart has been found in thousands
of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruction, which
came so near taking place in the hero of the allegory.  Now the
wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible
and the Treatise of "De Imitatione Christi," the best-known religious
work of Christendom.  If Bunyan and his contemporary, Sydenham, had
met in consultation over the case of Christian at the time when be
was meditating self-murder, it is very possible that there might have
been a difference of judgment.  The physician would have one
advantage in such a consultation.  He would pretty certainly have
received a Christian education, while the clergyman would probably
know next to nothing of the laws or manifestations of mental or
bodily disease.  It does not seem as if any theological student was
really prepared for his practical duties until he had learned
something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all, had
become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an
insane asylum.

It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to
the divine in the same light as the divine stands to the physician,
so far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to
the other's profession.  Many physicians know a great deal more about
religious matters than they do about medicine.  They have read the
Bible ten times as much as they ever read any medical author.  They
have heard scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which they
have listened.  They often hear much better preaching than the
average minister, for he hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler
men and a variety of them.  They have now and then been distinguished
in theology as well as in their own profession.  The name of Servetus
might call up unpleasant recollections, but that of another medical
practitioner may be safely mentioned.  "It was not till the middle of
the last century that the question as to the authorship of the
Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discerning criticism.
The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might have
supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation."  This
layman was "Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal
College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV."  The quotation
is from the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the
Bible," which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed
clergyman.  The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor
by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on
Tar-water," and the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman
whose sands of life"----but let us be fair, if not generous, and
remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit
of introducing the practice of inoculation into America.  The
professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going, Bible-
reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects
included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be
expected to know of medicine.  To say, as has been said not long
since, that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the
latter as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the
idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says
it.  What a set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and
be, if, after a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a
person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any
opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or trying
to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do
not believe, or only half believe, what he preaches.  But pews
without heads in them are a still more depressing spectacle.  He may
convince the doubter and reform the profligate.  But he cannot
produce any change on pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the
more wood he sees as he looks along his floor and galleries, the less
his chance of being useful.  It is natural that in times like the
present changes of faith and of place of worship should be far from
infrequent.  It is not less natural that there should be regrets on
one side and gratification on the other, when such changes occur.  It
even happens occasionally that the regrets become aggravated into
reproaches, rarely from the side which receives the new accessions,
less rarely from the one which is left.  It is quite conceivable that
the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should
look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence.
It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a
pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike
in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members
who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error.  But within the
Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that
it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to another.

So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to
happen a great deal oftener than they do.  All the larger bodies of
Christians should be constantly exchanging members.  All men are born
with conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally
with the idol-worshippers or the idol-breakers.  Some wear their
fathers' old clothes, and some will have a new suit.  One class of
men must have their faith hammered in like a nail, by authority;
another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument.
Members of one of these classes often find themselves fixed by
circumstances in the other.  The late Orestes A.  Brownson used to
preach at one time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper
room, where some of them got from him their first lesson about the
substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing with the books
they hold sacred.  But after a time Mr.  Brownson found he had
mistaken his church, and went over to the Roman Catholic
establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one
of the most stalwart champions.  Nature is prolific and ambidextrous.
While this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the ancient
faith, another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying
just as hard to provide a new church for the future.  One was driving
the sheep into the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the
bars that kept them out of the new pasture.  Neither of these
powerful men could do the other's work, and each had to find the task
for which he was destined.

The "old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls it, carries many
who would steer by the wake of their vessel.  But there are many
others who do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having
their eyes fixed on the light-house in the distance before them.  In
less figurative language, there are multitudes of persons who are
perfectly contented with the old formulae of the church with which
they and their fathers before them have been and are connected, for
the simple reason that they fit, like old shoes, because they have
been worn so long, and mingled with these, in the most conservative
religious body, are here and there those who are restless in the
fetters of a confession of faith to which they have pledged
themselves without believing in it.  This has been true of the
Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more or
less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson, stood alone in
wishing the church were well rid of it.  In fact, it has happened to
the present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles summarily
disposed of by one of the most zealous members of the American branch
of that communion, in a verb of one syllable, more familiar to the
ears of the forecastle than to those of the vestry.

But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons
among the so-called "liberal" denominations who are uneasy for want
of a more definite ritual and a more formal organization than they
find in their own body.  Now, the rector or the minister must be well
aware that there are such cases, and each of them must be aware that
there are individuals under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by
argument, and who really belong by all their instincts to another
communion.  It seems as if a thoroughly honest, straight-collared
clergyman would say frankly to his restless parishioner: "You do not
believe the central doctrines of the church which you are in the
habit of attending.  You belong properly to Brother A.'s or Brother
B.'s fold, and it will be more manly and probably more profitable for
you to go there than to stay with us."  And, again, the rolling-
collared clergyman might be expected to say to this or that uneasy
listener: "You are longing for a church which will settle your
beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the task, to
which you seem to be unequal, of working out your own salvation with
fear and trembling.  Go over the way to Brother C.'s or Brother D.'s;
your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a back-board which will
keep you straight and make you comfortable."  Patients are not the
property of their physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers.

As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will
adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers.  But they do
not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world
all before them to choose their creed from, like other persons.  They
are sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are
supposed to have heard preached from their childhood.  They cannot
defend themselves, for various good reasons.  If they did, one would
have to say he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at
last to feel about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners'
children do about candy.  Another would have to own that he got his
religious belief, not from his father, but from his mother.  That
would account for a great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins
sweetens, or at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the
motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark
survives only as the seal of immunity.  Another would plead atavism,
and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as
some do their complexion or their temper.  Others would be compelled
to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that
which they naturally inherited.  No man can be expected to go thus
into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-
bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face,
as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in
the light of a new generation.  Common delicacy would prevent him
from saying that he did not get his faith from his father, but from
somebody else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother
Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned against total
abstinence.

It is always the right, and may sometimes be the duty, of the layman
to call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors,
not only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of
which they are the intellectual and moral product.  This is
especially true when the authority of great names is fallen back upon
as a defence of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld.
It may be very important to show that the champions of this or that
set of dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs,
while others retain their vitality, held certain general notions
which vitiated their conclusions.  And in proportion to the eminence
of such champions, and the frequency with which their names are
appealed to as a bulwark of any particular creed or set of doctrines,
is it urgent to show into what obliquities or extravagances or
contradictions of thought they have been betrayed.

In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just
and proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the
witchcraft delusion.  It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf
the common beliefs of their time.  It would be an extenuation of
their acts that, not many years before, the great and good
magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of
prisoners accused of witchcraft.  To fall back on the errors of the
time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro
conscientace: The houses they dwelt in may have had some weak or
decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any
rate.  It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used
in holding up the roofs over our own heads.  Still more, if one of
our ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the
best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it
if we can.  And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a
warning and not as a guide.

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking up the writings of
Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay.  The "Edwardsian"
theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the
denomination to which he belonged.  One or more churches bear his
name, and it is thrown into the scale of theological belief as if it
added great strength to the party which claims him.  That he was a
man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not
questioned, nor that be was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a
proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a
palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment.  But
it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with
his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied
in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was
tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so
remarkable a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed his
inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions.  When he
presents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too
frequent exceptions, "are young vipers, and are infinitely more
hateful than vipers;" when he gives the most frightful detailed
description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and
women mad to think of prepared for "the bulk of mankind;" when he
cruelly pictures a future in which parents are to sing hallelujahs of
praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they
are to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to say that the man
who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and
expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed
with which his name is associated.  What heathenism has ever
approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny?  It is
not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the
name of Christian pessimism.

If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some
appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in
catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of
relief from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in
the newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy
because they could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines.
Whether this be so or not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan
Edwards does at this day carry a certain authority with it for many
persons, so that anything he believed gains for them some degree of
probability from that circumstance.  It would, therefore, be of much
interest to know whether he was trustworthy in his theological
speculations, and whether he ever changed his belief with reference
to any of the great questions above alluded to.

Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years
ago that a certain M. Babinet, a scientific Frenchman of note, had
predicted a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we
live by the collision with it of a great comet then approaching us,
or some such occurrence.  There is no doubt that this prediction
produced anxiety and alarm in many timid persons.  It became a very
interesting question with them who this M. Babinet might be.  Was he
a sound observer, who had made other observations and predictions
which had proved accurate?  Or was he one of those men who are always
making blunders for other people to correct?  Is he known to have
changed his opinion as to the approaching disastrous event?

So long as there were any persons made anxious by this prediction, so
long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and
his nation, and his race, and the home of mankind, with all its
monuments, were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly
shivered into fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence
that this prophet of evil was a man who held many extravagant and
even monstrous opinions.  Still more satisfactory would it be if it
could be shown that he had reconsidered his predictions, and declared
that he could not abide by his former alarming conclusions.  And we
should think very ill of any astronomer who would not rejoice for the
sake of his fellow-creatures, if not for his own, to find the
threatening presage invalidated in either or both of the ways just
mentioned, even though he had committed himself to M.  Babinet's dire
belief.

But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a
planet and its inhabitants to the infinite catastrophe which shall
establish a mighty world of eternal despair?  And which is it most
desirable for mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of
the threat of M.  Babinet, or those of the other infinitely more
terrible comminations, so far as they rest on the authority of
Jonathan Edwards?

The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of the
writings of Edwards, with reference to the essay he had in
contemplation, when, on speaking of the subject to a very
distinguished orthodox divine, this gentleman mentioned the existence
of a manuscript of Edwards which had been held back from the public
on account of some opinions or tendencies it contained, or was
suspected of containing "High Arianism" was the exact expression he
used with reference to it.  On relating this fact to an illustrious
man of science, whose name is best known to botanists, but is justly
held in great honor by the orthodox body to which he belongs, it
appeared that he, too, had heard of such a manuscript, and the
questionable doctrine associated with it in his memory was
Sabellianism.  It was of course proper in the writer of an essay on
Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged existence of such a
manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have
been exercised as that which led, the editor of his collected works
to suppress the language Edwards had used about children.

This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and
one of the professors in the theological school at Andover, and
finally to the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason,
had been withheld from publication for more than a century.  Its
title is "Observations concerning the Scripture OEconomy of the
Trinity and Covenant of Redemption.  By Jonathan Edwards."  It
contains thirty-six pages and a half, each small page having about
two hundred words.  The pages before the reader will be found to
average about three hundred and twenty-five words.  An introduction
and an appendix by the editor, Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the
contents to nearly a hundred pages, but these additions, and the
circumstance that it is bound in boards, must not lead us to overlook
the fact that the little volume is nothing more than a pamphlet in
book's clothing.

A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the
arrangements entered into by the three persons of the Trinity, in as
bald and matter-of-fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the
author had been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership
between three retail tradesmen.  But, lest a layman's judgment might
be considered insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer
to one of the most learned of our theological experts,--the same who
once informed a church dignitary, who had been attempting to define
his theological position, that he was a Eutychian,--a fact which he
seems to have been no more aware of than M. Jourdain was conscious
that he had been speaking prose all his life.  The treatise appeared
to this professor anti-trinitarian, not in the direction of
Unitarianism, however, but of Tritheism.  Its anthropomorphism
affected him like blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense
of "great disgust," which its whole character might well excite in
the unlearned reader.

All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work
of Edwards referred to by the present writer in his previous essay.
The tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by
Dr. Bushnell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer never
heard until after his own essay was already printed.  The manuscript
of the "Observations" was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us
in his introduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend
William T. Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his brother,
the Reverend Dr. Sereno E. Dwight.

But the reference of the present writer was to another production of
the great logician, thus spoken of in a quotation from "the
accomplished editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'" to be found in
Professor Smyth's introduction :

"It has long been a matter of private information that Professor
Edwards A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an published
manuscript of Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two thirds as
long as his treatise on the will.  As few have ever seen the
manuscript, its contents are only known by vague reports....  It is
said that it contains a departure from his published views on the
Trinity and a modification of the view of original sin.  One account
of it says that the manuscript leans toward Sabellianism, and that it
even approaches Pelagianism."

It was to this "suppressed" manuscript the present writer referred,
and not to the slender brochure recently given to the public.  He is
bound, therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be
still in doubt with reference to Edwards's theological views, it
would be necessary to submit this manuscript, and all manuscripts of
his which have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if
possible, so that all could form their own opinion about it or them.

The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an
eternity of unimaginable horrors for "the bulk of mankind."  His
authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects
great numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Stall: "Je n'y
crois pas, mais je les crains."  This belief is one which it is
infinitely desirable to the human race should be shown to be
possibly, probably, or certainly erroneous.  It is, therefore,
desirable in the interest of humanity that any force the argument in
its favor may derive from Edwards's authority should be weakened by
showing that he was capable of writing most unwisely, and if it
should be proved that he changed his opinions, or ran into any
"heretical" vagaries, by using these facts against the validity of
his judgment.  That he was capable of writing most unwisely has been
sufficiently shown by the recent publication of his "Observations."
Whether he, anywhere contradicted what were generally accepted as his
theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed into heresies,
the public will never rest satisfied until it sees and interprets for
itself everything that is open to question which may be contained in
his yet unpublished manuscripts.  All this is not in the least a
personal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his studies of
Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable sources
sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have been
familiar to many, that there was unpublished matter bearing on the
opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been
toiling.  And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as
Edwards has been considered, so good a man as he is recognized to
have been, had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think
of children as vipers, and of parents as shouting hallelujahs while
their lost darlings were being driven into the flames, where is the
theologian who would not rejoice to hope so with him or who would be
willing to tell his wife or his daughter that he did not?

The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant
communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists.
The Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by
a cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised
enjoyment of earthly comforts, and a short confession of faith.  His
theory of the universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a
Father with all the true paternal attributes, of man that he is
destined to come into harmony with the key-note of divine order, of
this earth that it is a training school for a better sphere of
existence.  The Christian pessimist in his most typical manifestation
is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit,
in the minor key, to undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to
insist on a more extended list of articles of belief.  His theory of
the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea
of the Creator is that of a ruler whose pardoning power is subject to
the veto of what is called "justice;" his notion of man is that he is
born a natural hater of God and goodness, and that his natural
destiny is eternal misery.  The line dividing these two great classes
zigzags its way through the religious community, sometimes following
denominational layers and cleavages, sometimes going, like a
geological fracture, through many different strata.  The natural
antagonists of the religious pessimists are the men of science,
especially the evolutionists, and the poets.  It was but a
conditioned prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was in Milton's mind
when he sang, in one of the divinest of his strains, that

                    "Hell itself will pass away,
     And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day."

And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after
giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life
as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding,
despairing, on the verge of self-murder,--painted it with an
originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him
with the great authors of all time,--kind Nature, after this gift,
sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman, whose songs have
done more to humanize the hard theology of Scotland than all the
rationalistic sermons that were ever preached.  Our own Whittier has
done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit than Burns,
for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New
England belongs.  Let me sweeten these closing paragraphs of an essay
not meaning to hold a word of bitterness with a passage or two from
the lay-preacher who is listened to by a larger congregation than any
man who speaks from the pulpit.  Who will not hear his words with
comfort and rejoicing when he speaks of "that larger hope which,
secretly cherished from the times of Origen and Duns Scotus to those
of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utterance in the noblest
poem of the age?"

It is Tennyson's "In Memoriam" to which he refers, and from which he
quotes four verses, of which this is the last:

    "Behold!  we know not anything
     I can but trust that good shall fall
     At last,--far off,--at last, to all,
     And every winter change to spring."

If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and
the rapidly growing change of opinion renders unnecessary any further
effort to humanize "the Gospel of dread tidings;" if any believe the
doctrines of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster
divines are so far obsolete as to require no further handling; if
there are any who thank these subjects have lost their interest for
living souls ever since they themselves have learned to stay at home
on Sundays, with their cakes and ale instead of going to meeting,
--not such is Mr.  Whittier's opinion, as we may infer from his
recent beautiful poem, "The Minister's Daughter."  It is not science
alone that the old Christian pessimism has got to struggle with, but
the instincts of childhood, the affections of maternity, the
intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the philanthropist,
--in short, human nature and the advance of civilization.  The pulpit
has long helped the world, and is still one of the chief defences
against the dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now, as
it always has been in its best representation, of all love and honor.
But many of its professed creeds imperatively demand revision, and
the pews which call for it must be listened to, or the preacher will
by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes.





End of Project Gutenberg Passages from an Old Volume of Life, by Holmes