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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Backlog Studies, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Backlog Studies
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: August 29, 2016 [EBook #3134]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BACKLOG STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+BACKLOG STUDIES
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+
+FIRST STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New England; the
+hearth has gone out; the family has lost its center; age ceases to be
+respected; sex is only distinguished by a difference between millinery
+bills and tailors' bills; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young
+are not allowed to eat mince-pies at ten o'clock at night; half a cheese
+is no longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see in
+front of the coals a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl,
+with many a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with
+one hand, turns from time to time; scarce are the gray-haired sires who
+strop their razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney-corner.
+A good many things have gone out with the fire on the hearth.
+
+I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished
+with the hearth. A good degree of purity and considerable happiness are
+possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all
+passing through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified
+as we are dried up and wasted away. Of course the family is gone, as an
+institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round
+a "register." But you might just as well try to bring it up by hand, as
+without the rallying-point of a hearthstone. Are there any homesteads
+nowadays? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do
+to change their clothes? People hire houses as they would a masquerade
+costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little fictitious
+stone-front splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many
+people live in houses that do not fit them. I should almost as soon
+think of wearing another person's clothes as his house; unless I could
+let it out and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own
+character and taste. But we have fallen into the days of conformity. It
+is no wonder that people constantly go into their neighbors' houses by
+mistake, just as, in spite of the Maine law, they wear away each other's
+hats from an evening party. It has almost come to this, that you might
+as well be anybody else as yourself.
+
+Am I mistaken in supposing that this is owing to the discontinuance of
+big chimneys, with wide fireplaces in them? How can a person be attached
+to a house that has no center of attraction, no soul in it, in the
+visible form of a glowing fire, and a warm chimney, like the heart in
+the body? When you think of the old homestead, if you ever do, your
+thoughts go straight to the wide chimney and its burning logs. No wonder
+that you are ready to move from one fireplaceless house into another.
+But you have something just as good, you say. Yes, I have heard of
+it. This age, which imitates everything, even to the virtues of
+our ancestors, has invented a fireplace, with artificial, iron, or
+composition logs in it, hacked and painted, in which gas is burned, so
+that it has the appearance of a wood-fire. This seems to me blasphemy.
+Do you think a cat would lie down before it? Can you poke it? If
+you can't poke it, it is a fraud. To poke a wood-fire is more solid
+enjoyment than almost anything else in the world. The crowning human
+virtue in a man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do not know how any
+virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gas-log. What a sense of
+insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of
+gathering about it. With this center of untruthfulness, what must the
+life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of
+ten thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother,
+more beautiful and younger than her beautified daughters, will rouge;
+perhaps the young ladies will make wax-work. A cynic might suggest
+as the motto of modern life this simple legend,--"just as good as
+the real." But I am not a cynic, and I hope for the rekindling of
+wood-fires, and a return of the beautiful home light from them. If
+a wood-fire is a luxury, it is cheaper than many in which we indulge
+without thought, and cheaper than the visits of a doctor, made necessary
+by the want of ventilation of the house. Not that I have anything
+against doctors; I only wish, after they have been to see us in a way
+that seems so friendly, they had nothing against us.
+
+My fireplace, which is deep, and nearly three feet wide, has a broad
+hearthstone in front of it, where the live coals tumble down, and a
+pair of gigantic brass andirons. The brasses are burnished, and shine
+cheerfully in the firelight, and on either side stand tall shovel and
+tongs, like sentries, mounted in brass. The tongs, like the two-handed
+sword of Bruce, cannot be wielded by puny people. We burn in it hickory
+wood, cut long. We like the smell of this aromatic forest timber, and
+its clear flame. The birch is also a sweet wood for the hearth, with
+a sort of spiritual flame and an even temper,--no snappishness. Some
+prefer the elm, which holds fire so well; and I have a neighbor who uses
+nothing but apple-tree wood,--a solid, family sort of wood, fragrant
+also, and full of delightful suggestions. But few people can afford to
+burn up their fruit trees. I should as soon think of lighting the fire
+with sweet-oil that comes in those graceful wicker-bound flasks from
+Naples, or with manuscript sermons, which, however, do not burn well, be
+they never so dry, not half so well as printed editorials.
+
+Few people know how to make a wood-fire, but everybody thinks he or
+she does. You want, first, a large backlog, which does not rest on the
+andirons. This will keep your fire forward, radiate heat all day, and
+late in the evening fall into a ruin of glowing coals, like the last
+days of a good man, whose life is the richest and most beneficent at the
+close, when the flames of passion and the sap of youth are burned out,
+and there only remain the solid, bright elements of character. Then
+you want a forestick on the andirons; and upon these build the fire of
+lighter stuff. In this way you have at once a cheerful blaze, and the
+fire gradually eats into the solid mass, sinking down with increasing
+fervor; coals drop below, and delicate tongues of flame sport along the
+beautiful grain of the forestick. There are people who kindle a fire
+underneath. But these are conceited people, who are wedded to their own
+way. I suppose an accomplished incendiary always starts a fire in the
+attic, if he can. I am not an incendiary, but I hate bigotry. I don't
+call those incendiaries very good Christians who, when they set fire to
+the martyrs, touched off the fagots at the bottom, so as to make them
+go slow. Besides, knowledge works down easier than it does up. Education
+must proceed from the more enlightened down to the more ignorant strata.
+If you want better common schools, raise the standard of the colleges,
+and so on. Build your fire on top. Let your light shine. I have seen
+people build a fire under a balky horse; but he wouldn't go, he'd be a
+horse-martyr first. A fire kindled under one never did him any good. Of
+course you can make a fire on the hearth by kindling it underneath, but
+that does not make it right. I want my hearthfire to be an emblem of the
+best things.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It must be confessed that a wood-fire needs as much tending as a pair of
+twins. To say nothing of fiery projectiles sent into the room, even by
+the best wood, from the explosion of gases confined in its cells, the
+brands are continually dropping down, and coals are being scattered
+over the hearth. However much a careful housewife, who thinks more
+of neatness than enjoyment, may dislike this, it is one of the chief
+delights of a wood-fire. I would as soon have an Englishman without
+side-whiskers as a fire without a big backlog; and I would rather have
+no fire than one that required no tending,--one of dead wood that
+could not sing again the imprisoned songs of the forest, or give out in
+brilliant scintillations the sunshine it absorbed in its growth. Flame
+is an ethereal sprite, and the spice of danger in it gives zest to the
+care of the hearth-fire. Nothing is so beautiful as springing, changing
+flame,--it was the last freak of the Gothic architecture men to
+represent the fronts of elaborate edifices of stone as on fire, by
+the kindling flamboyant devices. A fireplace is, besides, a private
+laboratory, where one can witness the most brilliant chemical
+experiments, minor conflagrations only wanting the grandeur of cities on
+fire. It is a vulgar notion that a fire is only for heat. A chief value
+of it is, however, to look at. It is a picture, framed between the
+jambs. You have nothing on your walls, by the best masters (the poor
+masters are not, however, represented), that is really so fascinating,
+so spiritual. Speaking like an upholsterer, it furnishes the room.
+And it is never twice the same. In this respect it is like the
+landscape-view through a window, always seen in a new light, color, or
+condition. The fireplace is a window into the most charming world I ever
+had a glimpse of.
+
+Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation. I am not scientific enough
+to despise it, and have no taste for a winter residence on Mount
+Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even by
+boiling. They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction
+in being well dressed which religion cannot give. There is certainly a
+satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be
+found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace. The hot air of a furnace is
+a sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only intense sunshine, like that
+bottled in Lacrimae Christi. Besides this, the eye is delighted, the
+sense of smell is regaled by the fragrant decomposition, and the ear is
+pleased with the hissing, crackling, and singing,--a liberation of
+so many out-door noises. Some people like the sound of bubbling in a
+boiling pot, or the fizzing of a frying-spider. But there is nothing
+gross in the animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth,
+not even if chestnuts are roasting in the ashes. All the senses are
+ministered to, and the imagination is left as free as the leaping
+tongues of flame.
+
+The attention which a wood-fire demands is one of its best
+recommendations. We value little that which costs us no trouble to
+maintain. If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private
+corporate action, or act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support of
+customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we do. Not
+that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper
+regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we already have
+so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter
+of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for
+gratitude. Many people shut it out of their houses as if it were an
+enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of
+color, and plant trees to shut it away from the mouldering house. All
+the animals know better than this, as well as the more simple races of
+men; the old women of the southern Italian coasts sit all day in the sun
+and ply the distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on the south side
+of a New England barn; the slow tortoise likes to take the sun upon his
+sloping back, soaking in color that shall make him immortal when the
+imperishable part of him is cut up into shell ornaments. The capacity
+of a cat to absorb sunshine is only equaled by that of an Arab or an
+Ethiopian. They are not afraid of injuring their complexions.
+
+White must be the color of civilization; it has so many natural
+disadvantages. But this is politics. I was about to say that, however it
+may be with sunshine, one is always grateful for his wood-fire, because
+he does not maintain it without some cost.
+
+Yet I cannot but confess to a difference between sunlight and the light
+of a wood-fire. The sunshine is entirely untamed. Where it rages most
+freely it tends to evoke the brilliancy rather than the harmonious
+satisfactions of nature. The monstrous growths and the flaming colors
+of the tropics contrast with our more subdued loveliness of foliage and
+bloom. The birds of the middle region dazzle with their contrasts of
+plumage, and their voices are for screaming rather than singing. I
+presume the new experiments in sound would project a macaw's voice
+in very tangled and inharmonious lines of light. I suspect that the
+fiercest sunlight puts people, as well as animals and vegetables, on
+extremes in all ways. A wood-fire on the hearth is a kindler of the
+domestic virtues. It brings in cheerfulness, and a family center, and,
+besides, it is artistic. I should like to know if an artist could ever
+represent on canvas a happy family gathered round a hole in the floor
+called a register. Given a fireplace, and a tolerable artist could
+almost create a pleasant family round it. But what could he conjure out
+of a register? If there was any virtue among our ancestors,--and they
+labored under a great many disadvantages, and had few of the aids which
+we have to excellence of life,--I am convinced they drew it mostly from
+the fireside. If it was difficult to read the eleven commandments by the
+light of a pine-knot, it was not difficult to get the sweet spirit
+of them from the countenance of the serene mother knitting in the
+chimney-corner.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial in
+its effulgence. I have never been upon a throne,--except in moments of a
+traveler's curiosity, about as long as a South American dictator remains
+on one,--but I have no idea that it compares, for pleasantness, with a
+seat before a wood-fire. A whole leisure day before you, a good novel
+in hand, and the backlog only just beginning to kindle, with uncounted
+hours of comfort in it, has life anything more delicious? For "novel"
+you can substitute "Calvin's Institutes," if you wish to be virtuous
+as well as happy. Even Calvin would melt before a wood-fire. A great
+snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading
+the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great chestnut-tops, piled
+up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the
+hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your
+sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness by making it a
+necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by the fire.
+
+To deliberately sit down in the morning to read a novel, to enjoy
+yourself, is this not, in New England (I am told they don't read much
+in other parts of the country), the sin of sins? Have you any right to
+read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the
+day in some employment that is called practical? Have you any right to
+enjoy yourself at all until the fag-end of the day, when you are
+tired and incapable of enjoying yourself? I am aware that this is the
+practice, if not the theory, of our society,--to postpone the delights
+of social intercourse until after dark, and rather late at night, when
+body and mind are both weary with the exertions of business, and when
+we can give to what is the most delightful and profitable thing in life,
+social and intellectual society, only the weariness of dull brains and
+over-tired muscles. No wonder we take our amusements sadly, and that so
+many people find dinners heavy and parties stupid. Our economy leaves no
+place for amusements; we merely add them to the burden of a life already
+full. The world is still a little off the track as to what is really
+useful.
+
+I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or
+anything else which is good and requires a fresh mind; and I take it
+that nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. I
+suppose it is necessary that business should be transacted; though the
+amount of business that does not contribute to anybody's comfort or
+improvement suggests the query whether it is not overdone. I know that
+unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't
+know what success is. There is a man, whom we all know, who built a
+house that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and furnished it for
+another like sum, who does not know anything more about architecture,
+or painting, or books, or history, than he cares for the rights of those
+who have not so much money as he has. I heard him once, in a foreign
+gallery, say to his wife, as they stood in front of a famous picture
+by Rubens: "That is the Rape of the Sardines!" What a cheerful world it
+would be if everybody was as successful as that man! While I am reading
+my book by the fire, and taking an active part in important transactions
+that may be a good deal better than real, let me be thankful that
+a great many men are profitably employed in offices and bureaus and
+country stores in keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions
+among mankind, so much of which is made to appear to the women at home
+as "business." I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men
+in this world that is not held in disrepute. When the time comes that
+I have to prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be
+remembered in my favor that I made this admission. If it is true, as a
+witty conservative once said to me, that we never shall have peace in
+this country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to be
+rectus in curia early.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon
+other scenes. We like to read of the small, bare room, with cobwebbed
+ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of genius sits with
+his magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and enchantment.
+I think the open fire does not kindle the imagination so much as it
+awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling embers and ashy
+grayness, rather than the future. People become reminiscent and even
+sentimental in front of it. They used to become something else in those
+good old days when it was thought best to heat the poker red hot before
+plunging it into the mugs of flip. This heating of the poker has been
+disapproved of late years, but I do not know on what grounds; if one
+is to drink bitters and gins and the like, such as I understand as good
+people as clergymen and women take in private, and by advice, I do not
+know why one should not make them palatable and heat them with his own
+poker. Cold whiskey out of a bottle, taken as a prescription six times
+a day on the sly, is n't my idea of virtue any more than the social
+ancestral glass, sizzling wickedly with the hot iron. Names are so
+confusing in this world; but things are apt to remain pretty much the
+same, whatever we call them.
+
+Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it widens and grows deep and
+cavernous. The back and the jambs are built up of great stones, not
+always smoothly laid, with jutting ledges upon which ashes are apt to
+lie. The hearthstone is an enormous block of trap rock, with a surface
+not perfectly even, but a capital place to crack butternuts on. Over
+the fire swings an iron crane, with a row of pot-hooks of all lengths
+hanging from it. It swings out when the housewife wants to hang on
+the tea-kettle, and it is strong enough to support a row of pots, or a
+mammoth caldron kettle on occasion. What a jolly sight is this fireplace
+when the pots and kettles in a row are all boiling and bubbling over
+the flame, and a roasting spit is turning in front! It makes a person
+as hungry as one of Scott's novels. But the brilliant sight is in the
+frosty morning, about daylight, when the fire is made. The coals are
+raked open, the split sticks are piled up in openwork criss-crossing, as
+high as the crane; and when the flame catches hold and roars up through
+the interstices, it is like an out-of-door bonfire. Wood enough is
+consumed in that morning sacrifice to cook the food of a Parisian family
+for a year. How it roars up the wide chimney, sending into the air the
+signal smoke and sparks which announce to the farming neighbors another
+day cheerfully begun! The sleepiest boy in the world would get up in his
+red flannel nightgown to see such a fire lighted, even if he dropped
+to sleep again in his chair before the ruddy blaze. Then it is that the
+house, which has shrunk and creaked all night in the pinching cold of
+winter, begins to glow again and come to life. The thick frost melts
+little by little on the small window-panes, and it is seen that the gray
+dawn is breaking over the leagues of pallid snow. It is time to blow out
+the candle, which has lost all its cheerfulness in the light of day. The
+morning romance is over; the family is astir; and member after member
+appears with the morning yawn, to stand before the crackling, fierce
+conflagration. The daily round begins. The most hateful employment ever
+invented for mortal man presents itself: the "chores" are to be done.
+The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that
+to-day is like yesterday, but he believes to-morrow will be different.
+And yet enough for him, for the day, is the wading in the snowdrifts, or
+the sliding on the diamond-sparkling crust. Happy, too, is he, when the
+storm rages, and the snow is piled high against the windows, if he can
+sit in the warm chimney-corner and read about Burgoyne, and General
+Fraser, and Miss McCrea, midwinter marches through the wilderness,
+surprises of wigwams, and the stirring ballad, say, of the Battle of the
+Kegs:--
+
+   "Come, gallants, attend and list a friend
+   Thrill forth harmonious ditty;
+   While I shall tell what late befell
+   At Philadelphia city."
+
+
+I should like to know what heroism a boy in an old New England
+farmhouse--rough-nursed by nature, and fed on the traditions of the old
+wars did not aspire to. "John," says the mother, "You'll burn your head
+to a crisp in that heat." But John does not hear; he is storming the
+Plains of Abraham just now. "Johnny, dear, bring in a stick of wood."
+How can Johnny bring in wood when he is in that defile with Braddock,
+and the Indians are popping at him from behind every tree? There is
+something about a boy that I like, after all.
+
+The fire rests upon the broad hearth; the hearth rests upon a great
+substruction of stone, and the substruction rests upon the cellar. What
+supports the cellar I never knew, but the cellar supports the family.
+The cellar is the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its dark,
+cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes. Bogies guard
+the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical sprites sit astride
+the cider-barrels ranged along the walls. The feeble flicker of the
+tallow-candle does not at all dispel, but creates, illusions, and
+magnifies all the rich possibilities of this underground treasure-house.
+When the cellar-door is opened, and the boy begins to descend into the
+thick darkness, it is always with a heart-beat as of one started upon
+some adventure. Who can forget the smell that comes through the opened
+door;--a mingling of fresh earth, fruit exhaling delicious aroma,
+kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor of barrels, a sort of ancestral
+air,--as if a door had been opened into an old romance. Do you like it?
+Not much. But then I would not exchange the remembrance of it for a good
+many odors and perfumes that I do like.
+
+It is time to punch the backlog and put on a new forestick.
+
+
+
+
+
+SECOND STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The log was white birch. The beautiful satin bark at once kindled into
+a soft, pure, but brilliant flame, something like that of naphtha. There
+is no other wood flame so rich, and it leaps up in a joyous, spiritual
+way, as if glad to burn for the sake of burning. Burning like a clear
+oil, it has none of the heaviness and fatness of the pine and the
+balsam. Woodsmen are at a loss to account for its intense and yet
+chaste flame, since the bark has no oily appearance. The heat from it
+is fierce, and the light dazzling. It flares up eagerly like young love,
+and then dies away; the wood does not keep up the promise of the
+bark. The woodsmen, it is proper to say, have not considered it in its
+relation to young love. In the remote settlements the pine-knot is still
+the torch of courtship; it endures to sit up by. The birch-bark has
+alliances with the world of sentiment and of letters. The most poetical
+reputation of the North American Indian floats in a canoe made of it;
+his picture-writing was inscribed on it. It is the paper that nature
+furnishes for lovers in the wilderness, who are enabled to convey a
+delicate sentiment by its use, which is expressed neither in their ideas
+nor chirography. It is inadequate for legal parchment, but does very
+well for deeds of love, which are not meant usually to give a perfect
+title. With care, it may be split into sheets as thin as the Chinese
+paper. It is so beautiful to handle that it is a pity civilization
+cannot make more use of it. But fancy articles manufactured from it are
+very much like all ornamental work made of nature's perishable seeds,
+leaves, cones, and dry twigs,--exquisite while the pretty fingers are
+fashioning it, but soon growing shabby and cheap to the eye. And yet
+there is a pathos in "dried things," whether they are displayed as
+ornaments in some secluded home, or hidden religiously in bureau drawers
+where profane eyes cannot see how white ties are growing yellow and ink
+is fading from treasured letters, amid a faint and discouraging perfume
+of ancient rose-leaves.
+
+The birch log holds out very well while it is green, but has not
+substance enough for a backlog when dry. Seasoning green timber or men
+is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let us say,
+country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing in a more
+complicated civilization. City life is a severe trial. One man is struck
+with a dry-rot; another develops season-cracks; another shrinks and
+swells with every change of circumstance. Prosperity is said to be more
+trying than adversity, a theory which most people are willing to accept
+without trial; but few men stand the drying out of the natural sap
+of their greenness in the artificial heat of city life. This, be it
+noticed, is nothing against the drying and seasoning process; character
+must be put into the crucible some time, and why not in this world? A
+man who cannot stand seasoning will not have a high market value in any
+part of the universe. It is creditable to the race, that so many men and
+women bravely jump into the furnace of prosperity and expose themselves
+to the drying influences of city life.
+
+The first fire that is lighted on the hearth in the autumn seems to
+bring out the cold weather. Deceived by the placid appearance of the
+dying year, the softness of the sky, and the warm color of the foliage,
+we have been shivering about for days without exactly comprehending what
+was the matter. The open fire at once sets up a standard of comparison.
+We find that the advance guards of winter are besieging the house. The
+cold rushes in at every crack of door and window, apparently signaled
+by the flame to invade the house and fill it with chilly drafts and
+sarcasms on what we call the temperate zone. It needs a roaring fire
+to beat back the enemy; a feeble one is only an invitation to the
+most insulting demonstrations. Our pious New England ancestors were
+philosophers in their way. It was not simply owing to grace that
+they sat for hours in their barnlike meeting-houses during the winter
+Sundays, the thermometer many degrees below freezing, with no fire,
+except the zeal in their own hearts,--a congregation of red noses and
+bright eyes. It was no wonder that the minister in the pulpit warmed up
+to his subject, cried aloud, used hot words, spoke a good deal of the
+hot place and the Person whose presence was a burning shame, hammered
+the desk as if he expected to drive his text through a two-inch plank,
+and heated himself by all allowable ecclesiastical gymnastics. A few of
+their followers in our day seem to forget that our modern churches are
+heated by furnaces and supplied with gas. In the old days it would
+have been thought unphilosophic as well as effeminate to warm the
+meeting-houses artificially. In one house I knew, at least, when it was
+proposed to introduce a stove to take a little of the chill from the
+Sunday services, the deacons protested against the innovation. They said
+that the stove might benefit those who sat close to it, but it would
+drive all the cold air to the other parts of the church, and freeze the
+people to death; it was cold enough now around the edges. Blessed days
+of ignorance and upright living! Sturdy men who served God by resolutely
+sitting out the icy hours of service, amid the rattling of windows and
+the carousal of winter in the high, windswept galleries! Patient women,
+waiting in the chilly house for consumption to pick out his victims, and
+replace the color of youth and the flush of devotion with the hectic
+of disease! At least, you did not doze and droop in our over-heated
+edifices, and die of vitiated air and disregard of the simplest
+conditions of organized life. It is fortunate that each generation
+does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our
+ancestors barbarous. It is something also that each age has its choice
+of the death it will die. Our generation is most ingenious. From our
+public assembly-rooms and houses we have almost succeeded in excluding
+pure air. It took the race ages to build dwellings that would keep out
+rain; it has taken longer to build houses air-tight, but we are on the
+eve of success. We are only foiled by the ill-fitting, insincere work of
+the builders, who build for a day, and charge for all time.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+When the fire on the hearth has blazed up and then settled into steady
+radiance, talk begins. There is no place like the chimney-corner for
+confidences; for picking up the clews of an old friendship; for taking
+note where one's self has drifted, by comparing ideas and prejudices
+with the intimate friend of years ago, whose course in life has lain
+apart from yours. No stranger puzzles you so much as the once close
+friend, with whose thinking and associates you have for years been
+unfamiliar. Life has come to mean this and that to you; you have fallen
+into certain habits of thought; for you the world has progressed in
+this or that direction; of certain results you feel very sure; you
+have fallen into harmony with your surroundings; you meet day after day
+people interested in the things that interest you; you are not in the
+least opinionated, it is simply your good fortune to look upon the
+affairs of the world from the right point of view. When you last saw
+your friend,--less than a year after you left college,--he was the most
+sensible and agreeable of men; he had no heterodox notions; he agreed
+with you; you could even tell what sort of a wife he would select, and
+if you could do that, you held the key to his life.
+
+Well, Herbert came to visit me the other day from the antipodes. And
+here he sits by the fireplace. I cannot think of any one I would rather
+see there, except perhaps Thackery; or, for entertainment, Boswell; or
+old, Pepys; or one of the people who was left out of the Ark. They were
+talking one foggy London night at Hazlitt's about whom they would most
+like to have seen, when Charles Lamb startled the company by declaring
+that he would rather have seen Judas Iscariot than any other person
+who had lived on the earth. For myself, I would rather have seen Lamb
+himself once, than to have lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great
+delight, has not changed; I should know him anywhere,--the same serious,
+contemplative face, with lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,--the
+same cheery laugh and clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is
+nothing so winning as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged
+in all outward essentials, is not only gratifying, but valuable as a
+testimony to nature's success in holding on to a personal identity,
+through the entire change of matter that has been constantly taking
+place for so many years. I know very well there is here no part of the
+Herbert whose hand I had shaken at the Commencement parting; but it is
+an astonishing reproduction of him,--a material likeness; and now for
+the spiritual.
+
+Such a wide chance for divergence in the spiritual. It has been such
+a busy world for twenty years. So many things have been torn up by the
+roots again that were settled when we left college. There were to be no
+more wars; democracy was democracy, and progress, the differentiation
+of the individual, was a mere question of clothes; if you want to be
+different, go to your tailor; nobody had demonstrated that there is
+a man-soul and a woman-soul, and that each is in reality only a
+half-soul,--putting the race, so to speak, upon the half-shell. The
+social oyster being opened, there appears to be two shells and only one
+oyster; who shall have it? So many new canons of taste, of criticism,
+of morality have been set up; there has been such a resurrection of
+historical reputations for new judgment, and there have been so many
+discoveries, geographical, archaeological, geological, biological, that
+the earth is not at all what it was supposed to be; and our philosophers
+are much more anxious to ascertain where we came from than whither we
+are going. In this whirl and turmoil of new ideas, nature, which has
+only the single end of maintaining the physical identity in the body,
+works on undisturbed, replacing particle for particle, and preserving
+the likeness more skillfully than a mosaic artist in the Vatican; she
+has not even her materials sorted and labeled, as the Roman artist has
+his thousands of bits of color; and man is all the while doing his
+best to confuse the process, by changing his climate, his diet, all his
+surroundings, without the least care to remain himself. But the mind?
+
+It is more difficult to get acquainted with Herbert than with an entire
+stranger, for I have my prepossessions about him, and do not find him
+in so many places where I expect to find him. He is full of criticism
+of the authors I admire; he thinks stupid or improper the books I most
+read; he is skeptical about the "movements" I am interested in; he has
+formed very different opinions from mine concerning a hundred men and
+women of the present day; we used to eat from one dish; we could n't
+now find anything in common in a dozen; his prejudices (as we call
+our opinions) are most extraordinary, and not half so reasonable as
+my prejudices; there are a great many persons and things that I am
+accustomed to denounce, uncontradicted by anybody, which he defends; his
+public opinion is not at all my public opinion. I am sorry for him. He
+appears to have fallen into influences and among a set of people foreign
+to me. I find that his church has a different steeple on it from my
+church (which, to say the truth, hasn't any). It is a pity that such a
+dear friend and a man of so much promise should have drifted off into
+such general contrariness. I see Herbert sitting here by the fire,
+with the old look in his face coming out more and more, but I do not
+recognize any features of his mind,--except perhaps his contrariness;
+yes, he was always a little contrary, I think. And finally he surprises
+me with, "Well, my friend, you seem to have drifted away from your old
+notions and opinions. We used to agree when we were together, but I
+sometimes wondered where you would land; for, pardon me, you showed
+signs of looking at things a little contrary."
+
+I am silent for a good while. I am trying to think who I am. There was
+a person whom I thought I knew, very fond of Herbert, and agreeing with
+him in most things. Where has he gone? and, if he is here, where is the
+Herbert that I knew?
+
+If his intellectual and moral sympathies have all changed, I wonder if
+his physical tastes remain, like his appearance, the same. There has
+come over this country within the last generation, as everybody knows,
+a great wave of condemnation of pie. It has taken the character of a
+"movement!" though we have had no conventions about it, nor is any one,
+of any of the several sexes among us, running for president against it.
+It is safe almost anywhere to denounce pie, yet nearly everybody eats
+it on occasion. A great many people think it savors of a life abroad to
+speak with horror of pie, although they were very likely the foremost
+of the Americans in Paris who used to speak with more enthusiasm of
+the American pie at Madame Busque's than of the Venus of Milo. To talk
+against pie and still eat it is snobbish, of course; but snobbery, being
+an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things.
+To affect dislike of pie is something. We have no statistics on the
+subject, and cannot tell whether it is gaining or losing in the country
+at large. Its disappearance in select circles is no test. The amount of
+writing against it is no more test of its desuetude, than the number of
+religious tracts distributed in a given district is a criterion of its
+piety. We are apt to assume that certain regions are substantially free
+of it. Herbert and I, traveling north one summer, fancied that we could
+draw in New England a sort of diet line, like the sweeping curves on the
+isothermal charts, which should show at least the leading pie sections.
+Journeying towards the White Mountains, we concluded that a line passing
+through Bellows Falls, and bending a little south on either side, would
+mark northward the region of perpetual pie. In this region pie is to
+be found at all hours and seasons, and at every meal. I am not sure,
+however, that pie is not a matter of altitude rather than latitude, as
+I find that all the hill and country towns of New England are full of
+those excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who
+would feel ready to sink in mortification through their scoured kitchen
+floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house. The
+absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible even.
+Without it the housekeepers are as distracted as the boarding-house
+keeper, who declared that if it were not for canned tomato, she should
+have nothing to fly to. Well, in all this great agitation I find Herbert
+unmoved, a conservative, even to the under-crust. I dare not ask him
+if he eats pie at breakfast. There are some tests that the dearest
+friendship may not apply.
+
+"Will you smoke?" I ask.
+
+"No, I have reformed."
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"The fact is, that when we consider the correlation of forces, the
+apparent sympathy of spirit manifestations with electric conditions, the
+almost revealed mysteries of what may be called the odic force, and the
+relation of all these phenomena to the nervous system in man, it is not
+safe to do anything to the nervous system that will--"
+
+"Hang the nervous system! Herbert, we can agree in one thing: old
+memories, reveries, friendships, center about that:--is n't an open
+wood-fire good?"
+
+"Yes," says Herbert, combatively, "if you don't sit before it too long."
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+The best talk is that which escapes up the open chimney and cannot be
+repeated. The finest woods make the best fire and pass away with the
+least residuum. I hope the next generation will not accept the reports
+of "interviews" as specimens of the conversations of these years of
+grace.
+
+But do we talk as well as our fathers and mothers did? We hear wonderful
+stories of the bright generation that sat about the wide fireplaces
+of New England. Good talk has so much short-hand that it cannot be
+reported,--the inflection, the change of voice, the shrug, cannot be
+caught on paper. The best of it is when the subject unexpectedly
+goes cross-lots, by a flash of short-cut, to a conclusion so suddenly
+revealed that it has the effect of wit. It needs the highest culture and
+the finest breeding to prevent the conversation from running into mere
+persiflage on the one hand--its common fate--or monologue on the
+other. Our conversation is largely chaff. I am not sure but the former
+generation preached a good deal, but it had great practice in fireside
+talk, and must have talked well. There were narrators in those days who
+could charm a circle all the evening long with stories. When each day
+brought comparatively little new to read, there was leisure for
+talk, and the rare book and the in-frequent magazine were thoroughly
+discussed. Families now are swamped by the printed matter that comes
+daily upon the center-table. There must be a division of labor, one
+reading this, and another that, to make any impression on it. The
+telegraph brings the only common food, and works this daily miracle,
+that every mind in Christendom is excited by one topic simultaneously
+with every other mind; it enables a concurrent mental action, a burst
+of sympathy, or a universal prayer to be made, which must be, if we
+have any faith in the immaterial left, one of the chief forces in modern
+life. It is fit that an agent so subtle as electricity should be the
+minister of it.
+
+When there is so much to read, there is little time for conversation;
+nor is there leisure for another pastime of the ancient firesides,
+called reading aloud. The listeners, who heard while they looked into
+the wide chimney-place, saw there pass in stately procession the events
+and the grand persons of history, were kindled with the delights of
+travel, touched by the romance of true love, or made restless by tales
+of adventure;--the hearth became a sort of magic stone that could
+transport those who sat by it to the most distant places and times, as
+soon as the book was opened and the reader began, of a winter's night.
+Perhaps the Puritan reader read through his nose, and all the little
+Puritans made the most dreadful nasal inquiries as the entertainment
+went on. The prominent nose of the intellectual New-Englander
+is evidence of the constant linguistic exercise of the organ for
+generations. It grew by talking through. But I have no doubt that
+practice made good readers in those days. Good reading aloud is almost
+a lost accomplishment now. It is little thought of in the schools. It is
+disused at home. It is rare to find any one who can read, even from the
+newspaper, well. Reading is so universal, even with the uncultivated,
+that it is common to hear people mispronounce words that you did not
+suppose they had ever seen. In reading to themselves they glide over
+these words, in reading aloud they stumble over them. Besides, our
+every-day books and newspapers are so larded with French that the
+ordinary reader is obliged marcher a pas de loup,--for instance.
+
+The newspaper is probably responsible for making current many words with
+which the general reader is familiar, but which he rises to in the
+flow of conversation, and strikes at with a splash and an unsuccessful
+attempt at appropriation; the word, which he perfectly knows, hooks him
+in the gills, and he cannot master it. The newspaper is thus widening
+the language in use, and vastly increasing the number of words which
+enter into common talk. The Americans of the lowest intellectual class
+probably use more words to express their ideas than the similar class
+of any other people; but this prodigality is partially balanced by the
+parsimony of words in some higher regions, in which a few phrases of
+current slang are made to do the whole duty of exchange of ideas; if
+that can be called exchange of ideas when one intellect flashes forth
+to another the remark, concerning some report, that "you know how it is
+yourself," and is met by the response of "that's what's the matter," and
+rejoins with the perfectly conclusive "that's so." It requires a high
+degree of culture to use slang with elegance and effect; and we are yet
+very far from the Greek attainment.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The fireplace wants to be all aglow, the wind rising, the night heavy
+and black above, but light with sifting snow on the earth, a background
+of inclemency for the illumined room with its pictured walls, tables
+heaped with books, capacious easy-chairs and their occupants,--it needs,
+I say, to glow and throw its rays far through the crystal of the broad
+windows, in order that we may rightly appreciate the relation of the
+wide-jambed chimney to domestic architecture in our climate. We fell to
+talking about it; and, as is usual when the conversation is professedly
+on one subject, we wandered all around it. The young lady staying with
+us was roasting chestnuts in the ashes, and the frequent explosions
+required considerable attention. The mistress, too, sat somewhat alert,
+ready to rise at any instant and minister to the fancied want of this or
+that guest, forgetting the reposeful truth that people about a fireside
+will not have any wants if they are not suggested. The worst of them,
+if they desire anything, only want something hot, and that later in the
+evening. And it is an open question whether you ought to associate with
+people who want that.
+
+I was saying that nothing had been so slow in its progress in the
+world as domestic architecture. Temples, palaces, bridges, aqueducts,
+cathedrals, towers of marvelous delicacy and strength, grew to
+perfection while the common people lived in hovels, and the richest
+lodged in the most gloomy and contracted quarters. The dwelling-house
+is a modern institution. It is a curious fact that it has only improved
+with the social elevation of women. Men were never more brilliant in
+arms and letters than in the age of Elizabeth, and yet they had no
+homes. They made themselves thick-walled castles, with slits in the
+masonry for windows, for defense, and magnificent banquet-halls for
+pleasure; the stone rooms into which they crawled for the night were
+often little better than dog-kennels. The Pompeians had no comfortable
+night-quarters. The most singular thing to me, however, is that,
+especially interested as woman is in the house, she has never done
+anything for architecture. And yet woman is reputed to be an ingenious
+creature.
+
+HERBERT. I doubt if woman has real ingenuity; she has great
+adaptability. I don't say that she will do the same thing twice
+alike, like a Chinaman, but she is most cunning in suiting herself to
+circumstances.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Oh, if you speak of constructive, creative ingenuity,
+perhaps not; but in the higher ranges of achievement--that of
+accomplishing any purpose dear to her heart, for instance--her ingenuity
+is simply incomprehensible to me.
+
+HERBERT. Yes, if you mean doing things by indirection.
+
+THE MISTRESS. When you men assume all the direction, what else is left
+to us?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Did you ever see a woman refurnish a house?
+
+THE YOUNG LADY STAYING WITH US. I never saw a man do it, unless he was
+burned out of his rookery.
+
+HERBERT. There is no comfort in new things.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER (not noticing the interruption). Having set her mind
+on a total revolution of the house, she buys one new thing, not too
+obtrusive, nor much out of harmony with the old. The husband scarcely
+notices it, least of all does he suspect the revolution, which she
+already has accomplished. Next, some article that does look a little
+shabby beside the new piece of furniture is sent to the garret, and its
+place is supplied by something that will match in color and effect. Even
+the man can see that it ought to match, and so the process goes on, it
+may be for years, it may be forever, until nothing of the old is left,
+and the house is transformed as it was predetermined in the woman's
+mind. I doubt if the man ever understands how or when it was done; his
+wife certainly never says anything about the refurnishing, but quietly
+goes on to new conquests.
+
+THE MISTRESS. And is n't it better to buy little by little, enjoying
+every new object as you get it, and assimilating each article to your
+household life, and making the home a harmonious expression of your own
+taste, rather than to order things in sets, and turn your house, for the
+time being, into a furniture ware-room?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Oh, I only spoke of the ingenuity of it.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I never can get acquainted with more than
+one piece of furniture at a time.
+
+HERBERT. I suppose women are our superiors in artistic taste, and I
+fancy that I can tell whether a house is furnished by a woman or a
+man; of course, I mean the few houses that appear to be the result of
+individual taste and refinement,--most of them look as if they had been
+furnished on contract by the upholsterer.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Woman's province in this world is putting things to
+rights.
+
+HERBERT. With a vengeance, sometimes. In the study, for example. My
+chief objection to woman is that she has no respect for the newspaper,
+or the printed page, as such. She is Siva, the destroyer. I have noticed
+that a great part of a married man's time at home is spent in trying to
+find the things he has put on his study-table.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Herbert speaks with the bitterness of a bachelor shut
+out of paradise. It is my experience that if women did not destroy the
+rubbish that men bring into the house, it would become uninhabitable,
+and need to be burned down every five years.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I confess women do a great deal for the appearance of
+things. When the mistress is absent, this room, although everything is
+here as it was before, does not look at all like the same place; it is
+stiff, and seems to lack a soul. When she returns, I can see that her
+eye, even while greeting me, takes in the situation at a glance.
+While she is talking of the journey, and before she has removed her
+traveling-hat, she turns this chair and moves that, sets one piece of
+furniture at a different angle, rapidly, and apparently unconsciously,
+shifts a dozen little knick-knacks and bits of color, and the room is
+transformed. I couldn't do it in a week.
+
+THE MISTRESS. That is the first time I ever knew a man admit he couldn't
+do anything if he had time.
+
+HERBERT. Yet with all their peculiar instinct for making a home, women
+make themselves very little felt in our domestic architecture.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Men build most of the houses in what might be called the
+ready-made-clothing style, and we have to do the best we can with them;
+and hard enough it is to make cheerful homes in most of them. You will
+see something different when the woman is constantly consulted in the
+plan of the house.
+
+HERBERT. We might see more difference if women would give any attention
+to architecture. Why are there no women architects?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Want of the ballot, doubtless. It seems to me that here
+is a splendid opportunity for woman to come to the front.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. They have no desire to come to the front; they would
+rather manage things where they are.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. If they would master the noble art, and put their
+brooding taste upon it, we might very likely compass something in our
+domestic architecture that we have not yet attained. The outside of our
+houses needs attention as well as the inside. Most of them are as ugly
+as money can build.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. What vexes me most is, that women, married women, have
+so easily consented to give up open fires in their houses.
+
+HERBERT. They dislike the dust and the bother. I think that women rather
+like the confined furnace heat.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Nonsense; it is their angelic virtue of submission. We
+wouldn't be hired to stay all-day in the houses we build.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. That has a very chivalrous sound, but I know there will
+be no reformation until women rebel and demand everywhere the open fire.
+
+HERBERT. They are just now rebelling about something else; it seems to
+me yours is a sort of counter-movement, a fire in the rear.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I'll join that movement. The time has come when woman must
+strike for her altars and her fires.
+
+HERBERT. Hear, hear!
+
+THE MISTRESS. Thank you, Herbert. I applauded you once, when you
+declaimed that years ago in the old Academy. I remember how eloquently
+you did it.
+
+HERBERT. Yes, I was once a spouting idiot.
+
+Just then the door-bell rang, and company came in. And the company
+brought in a new atmosphere, as company always does, something of the
+disturbance of out-doors, and a good deal of its healthy cheer. The
+direct news that the thermometer was approaching zero, with a hopeful
+prospect of going below it, increased to liveliness our satisfaction in
+the fire. When the cider was heated in the brown stone pitcher, there
+was difference of opinion whether there should be toast in it; some
+were for toast, because that was the old-fashioned way, and others were
+against it, "because it does not taste good" in cider. Herbert said
+there, was very little respect left for our forefathers.
+
+More wood was put on, and the flame danced in a hundred fantastic
+shapes. The snow had ceased to fall, and the moonlight lay in silvery
+patches among the trees in the ravine. The conversation became worldly.
+
+
+
+
+
+THIRD STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Herbert said, as we sat by the fire one night, that he wished he had
+turned his attention to writing poetry like Tennyson's.
+
+The remark was not whimsical, but satirical. Tennyson is a man of
+talent, who happened to strike a lucky vein, which he has worked with
+cleverness. The adventurer with a pickaxe in Washoe may happen upon like
+good fortune. The world is full of poetry as the earth is of "pay-dirt;"
+one only needs to know how to "strike" it. An able man can make himself
+almost anything that he will. It is melancholy to think how many epic
+poets have been lost in the tea-trade, how many dramatists (though
+the age of the drama has passed) have wasted their genius in great
+mercantile and mechanical enterprises. I know a man who might have been
+the poet, the essayist, perhaps the critic, of this country, who chose
+to become a country judge, to sit day after day upon a bench in
+an obscure corner of the world, listening to wrangling lawyers and
+prevaricating witnesses, preferring to judge his fellow-men rather than
+enlighten them.
+
+It is fortunate for the vanity of the living and the reputation of the
+dead, that men get almost as much credit for what they do not as for
+what they do. It was the opinion of many that Burns might have excelled
+as a statesman, or have been a great captain in war; and Mr. Carlyle
+says that if he had been sent to a university, and become a trained
+intellectual workman, it lay in him to have changed the whole course of
+British literature! A large undertaking, as so vigorous and dazzling a
+writer as Mr. Carlyle must know by this time, since British
+literature has swept by him in a resistless and widening flood, mainly
+uncontaminated, and leaving his grotesque contrivances wrecked on the
+shore with other curiosities of letters, and yet among the richest of
+all the treasures lying there.
+
+It is a temptation to a temperate man to become a sot, to hear what
+talent, what versatility, what genius, is almost always attributed to a
+moderately bright man who is habitually drunk. Such a mechanic, such a
+mathematician, such a poet he would be, if he were only sober; and
+then he is sure to be the most generous, magnanimous, friendly soul,
+conscientiously honorable, if he were not so conscientiously drunk. I
+suppose it is now notorious that the most brilliant and promising men
+have been lost to the world in this way. It is sometimes almost painful
+to think what a surplus of talent and genius there would be in the world
+if the habit of intoxication should suddenly cease; and what a slim
+chance there would be for the plodding people who have always had
+tolerably good habits. The fear is only mitigated by the observation
+that the reputation of a person for great talent sometimes ceases with
+his reformation.
+
+It is believed by some that the maidens who would make the best wives
+never marry, but remain free to bless the world with their impartial
+sweetness, and make it generally habitable. This is one of the mysteries
+of Providence and New England life. It seems a pity, at first sight,
+that all those who become poor wives have the matrimonial chance, and
+that they are deprived of the reputation of those who would be good
+wives were they not set apart for the high and perpetual office of
+priestesses of society. There is no beauty like that which was spoiled
+by an accident, no accomplishments--and graces are so to be envied as
+those that circumstances rudely hindered the development of. All
+of which shows what a charitable and good-tempered world it is,
+notwithstanding its reputation for cynicism and detraction.
+
+Nothing is more beautiful than the belief of the faithful wife that her
+husband has all the talents, and could, if he would, be distinguished in
+any walk in life; and nothing will be more beautiful--unless this is
+a very dry time for signs--than the husband's belief that his wife is
+capable of taking charge of any of the affairs of this confused planet.
+There is no woman but thinks that her husband, the green-grocer, could
+write poetry if he had given his mind to it, or else she thinks small
+beer of poetry in comparison with an occupation or accomplishment purely
+vegetable. It is touching to see the look of pride with which the
+wife turns to her husband from any more brilliant personal presence or
+display of wit than his, in the perfect confidence that if the world
+knew what she knows, there would be one more popular idol. How she
+magnifies his small wit, and dotes upon the self-satisfied look in his
+face as if it were a sign of wisdom! What a councilor that man would
+make! What a warrior he would be! There are a great many corporals
+in their retired homes who did more for the safety and success of
+our armies in critical moments, in the late war, than any of the
+"high-cock-a-lorum" commanders. Mrs. Corporal does not envy the
+reputation of General Sheridan; she knows very well who really won Five
+Forks, for she has heard the story a hundred times, and will hear it a
+hundred times more with apparently unabated interest. What a general
+her husband would have made; and how his talking talent would shine in
+Congress!
+
+HERBERT. Nonsense. There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken
+the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own
+mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and
+specifications of her own. That knowledge, however, she ordinarily keeps
+to herself, and she enters into a league with her husband, which he was
+never admitted to the secret of, to impose upon the world. In nine out
+of ten cases he more than half believes that he is what his wife tells
+him he is. At any rate, she manages him as easily as the keeper does the
+elephant, with only a bamboo wand and a sharp spike in the end. Usually
+she flatters him, but she has the means of pricking clear through his
+hide on occasion. It is the great secret of her power to have him think
+that she thoroughly believes in him.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY STAYING WITH Us. And you call this hypocrisy? I have
+heard authors, who thought themselves sly observers of women, call it
+so.
+
+HERBERT. Nothing of the sort. It is the basis on which society rests,
+the conventional agreement. If society is about to be overturned, it is
+on this point. Women are beginning to tell men what they really think of
+them; and to insist that the same relations of downright sincerity and
+independence that exist between men shall exist between women and men.
+Absolute truth between souls, without regard to sex, has always been the
+ideal life of the poets.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Yes; but there was never a poet yet who would bear to have
+his wife say exactly what she thought of his poetry, any more than
+he would keep his temper if his wife beat him at chess; and there is
+nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.
+
+HERBERT. Well, women know how to win by losing. I think that the reason
+why most women do not want to take the ballot and stand out in the open
+for a free trial of power, is that they are reluctant to change the
+certain domination of centuries, with weapons they are perfectly
+competent to handle, for an experiment. I think we should be better
+off if women were more transparent, and men were not so systematically
+puffed up by the subtle flattery which is used to control them.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Deliver me from transparency. When a woman takes that guise,
+and begins to convince me that I can see through her like a ray of
+light, I must run or be lost. Transparent women are the truly dangerous.
+There was one on ship-board [Mandeville likes to say that; he has just
+returned from a little tour in Europe, and he quite often begins his
+remarks with "on the ship going over;" the Young Lady declares that
+he has a sort of roll in his chair, when he says it, that makes her
+sea-sick] who was the most innocent, artless, guileless, natural bunch
+of lace and feathers you ever saw; she was all candor and helplessness
+and dependence; she sang like a nightingale, and talked like a nun.
+There never was such simplicity. There was n't a sounding-line on board
+that would have gone to the bottom of her soulful eyes. But she managed
+the captain and all the officers, and controlled the ship as if she had
+been the helm. All the passengers were waiting on her, fetching this
+and that for her comfort, inquiring of her health, talking about her
+genuineness, and exhibiting as much anxiety to get her ashore in safety,
+as if she had been about to knight them all and give them a castle
+apiece when they came to land.
+
+THE MISTRESS. What harm? It shows what I have always said, that the
+service of a noble woman is the most ennobling influence for men.
+
+MANDEVILLE. If she is noble, and not a mere manager. I watched this
+woman to see if she would ever do anything for any one else. She never
+did.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Did you ever see her again? I presume Mandeville has
+introduced her here for some purpose.
+
+MANDEVILLE. No purpose. But we did see her on the Rhine; she was the
+most disgusted traveler, and seemed to be in very ill humor with her
+maid. I judged that her happiness depended upon establishing controlling
+relations with all about her. On this Rhine boat, to be sure, there was
+reason for disgust. And that reminds me of a remark that was made.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Oh!
+
+MANDEVILLE. When we got aboard at Mayence we were conscious of a
+dreadful odor somewhere; as it was a foggy morning, we could see no
+cause of it, but concluded it was from something on the wharf. The
+fog lifted, and we got under way, but the odor traveled with us, and
+increased. We went to every part of the vessel to avoid it, but in vain.
+It occasionally reached us in great waves of disagreeableness. We had
+heard of the odors of the towns on the Rhine, but we had no idea that
+the entire stream was infected. It was intolerable.
+
+The day was lovely, and the passengers stood about on deck holding their
+noses and admiring the scenery. You might see a row of them leaning over
+the side, gazing up at some old ruin or ivied crag, entranced with the
+romance of the situation, and all holding their noses with thumb and
+finger. The sweet Rhine! By and by somebody discovered that the odor
+came from a pile of cheese on the forward deck, covered with a canvas;
+it seemed that the Rhinelanders are so fond of it that they take it
+with them when they travel. If there should ever be war between us
+and Germany, the borders of the Rhine would need no other defense from
+American soldiers than a barricade of this cheese. I went to the stern
+of the steamboat to tell a stout American traveler what was the origin
+of the odor he had been trying to dodge all the morning. He looked more
+disgusted than before, when he heard that it was cheese; but his only
+reply was: "It must be a merciful God who can forgive a smell like
+that!"
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+The above is introduced here in order to illustrate the usual effect
+of an anecdote on conversation. Commonly it kills it. That talk must be
+very well in hand, and under great headway, that an anecdote thrown in
+front of will not pitch off the track and wreck. And it makes little
+difference what the anecdote is; a poor one depresses the spirits,
+and casts a gloom over the company; a good one begets others, and the
+talkers go to telling stories; which is very good entertainment in
+moderation, but is not to be mistaken for that unwearying flow of
+argument, quaint remark, humorous color, and sprightly interchange of
+sentiments and opinions, called conversation.
+
+The reader will perceive that all hope is gone here of deciding whether
+Herbert could have written Tennyson's poems, or whether Tennyson could
+have dug as much money out of the Heliogabalus Lode as Herbert did. The
+more one sees of life, I think the impression deepens that men, after
+all, play about the parts assigned them, according to their mental and
+moral gifts, which are limited and preordained, and that their entrances
+and exits are governed by a law no less certain because it is hidden.
+Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do;
+but nearly every one who tries his powers touches the walls of his being
+occasionally, and learns about how far to attempt to spring. There are
+no impossibilities to youth and inexperience; but when a person has
+tried several times to reach high C and been coughed down, he is quite
+content to go down among the chorus. It is only the fools who keep
+straining at high C all their lives.
+
+Mandeville here began to say that that reminded him of something that
+happened when he was on the--
+
+But Herbert cut in with the observation that no matter what a man's
+single and several capacities and talents might be, he is controlled by
+his own mysterious individuality, which is what metaphysicians call the
+substance, all else being the mere accidents of the man. And this is the
+reason that we cannot with any certainty tell what any person will do or
+amount to, for, while we know his talents and abilities, we do not know
+the resulting whole, which is he himself. THE FIRE-TENDER. So if you
+could take all the first-class qualities that we admire in men and
+women, and put them together into one being, you wouldn't be sure of the
+result?
+
+HERBERT. Certainly not. You would probably have a monster. It takes a
+cook of long experience, with the best materials, to make a dish "taste
+good;" and the "taste good" is the indefinable essence, the resulting
+balance or harmony which makes man or woman agreeable or beautiful or
+effective in the world.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. That must be the reason why novelists fail so lamentably
+in almost all cases in creating good characters. They put in real
+traits, talents, dispositions, but the result of the synthesis is
+something that never was seen on earth before.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Oh, a good character in fiction is an inspiration.
+We admit this in poetry. It is as true of such creations as Colonel
+Newcome, and Ethel, and Beatrix Esmond. There is no patchwork about
+them.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Why was n't Thackeray ever inspired to create a noble
+woman?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. That is the standing conundrum with all the women. They
+will not accept Ethel Newcome even. Perhaps we shall have to admit that
+Thackeray was a writer for men.
+
+HERBERT. Scott and the rest had drawn so many perfect women that
+Thackeray thought it was time for a real one.
+
+THE MISTRESS. That's ill-natured. Thackeray did, however, make ladies.
+If he had depicted, with his searching pen, any of us just as we are, I
+doubt if we should have liked it much.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That's just it. Thackeray never pretended to make ideals,
+and if the best novel is an idealization of human nature, then he was
+not the best novelist. When I was crossing the Channel--
+
+THE MISTRESS. Oh dear, if we are to go to sea again, Mandeville, I move
+we have in the nuts and apples, and talk about our friends.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+There is this advantage in getting back to a wood-fire on the hearth,
+that you return to a kind of simplicity; you can scarcely imagine any
+one being stiffly conventional in front of it. It thaws out formality,
+and puts the company who sit around it into easy attitudes of mind and
+body,--lounging attitudes,--Herbert said.
+
+And this brought up the subject of culture in America, especially as to
+manner. The backlog period having passed, we are beginning to have in
+society people of the cultured manner, as it is called, or polished
+bearing, in which the polish is the most noticeable thing about the man.
+Not the courtliness, the easy simplicity of the old-school gentleman, in
+whose presence the milkmaid was as much at her ease as the countess,
+but something far finer than this. These are the people of unruffled
+demeanor, who never forget it for a moment, and never let you forget it.
+Their presence is a constant rebuke to society. They are never "jolly;"
+their laugh is never anything more than a well-bred smile; they
+are never betrayed into any enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a sign of
+inexperience, of ignorance, of want of culture. They never lose
+themselves in any cause; they never heartily praise any man or woman
+or book; they are superior to all tides of feeling and all outbursts
+of passion. They are not even shocked at vulgarity. They are simply
+indifferent. They are calm, visibly calm, painfully calm; and it is
+not the eternal, majestic calmness of the Sphinx either, but a rigid,
+self-conscious repression. You would like to put a bent pin in their
+chair when they are about calmly to sit down.
+
+A sitting hen on her nest is calm, but hopeful; she has faith that her
+eggs are not china. These people appear to be sitting on china eggs.
+Perfect culture has refined all blood, warmth, flavor, out of them. We
+admire them without envy. They are too beautiful in their manners to be
+either prigs or snobs. They are at once our models and our despair. They
+are properly careful of themselves as models, for they know that if they
+should break, society would become a scene of mere animal confusion.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I think that the best-bred people in the world are the
+English.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. You mean at home.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That's where I saw them. There is no nonsense about a
+cultivated English man or woman. They express themselves sturdily and
+naturally, and with no subservience to the opinions of others. There's a
+sort of hearty sincerity about them that I like. Ages of culture on the
+island have gone deeper than the surface, and they have simpler and
+more natural manners than we. There is something good in the full, round
+tones of their voices.
+
+HERBERT. Did you ever get into a diligence with a growling English-man
+who had n't secured the place he wanted?
+
+[Mandeville once spent a week in London, riding about on the tops of
+omnibuses.]
+
+THE MISTRESS. Did you ever see an English exquisite at the San Carlo,
+and hear him cry "Bwavo"?
+
+MANDEVILLE. At any rate, he acted out his nature, and was n't afraid to.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I think Mandeville is right, for once. The men of the
+best culture in England, in the middle and higher social classes,
+are what you would call good fellows,--easy and simple in manner,
+enthusiastic on occasion, and decidedly not cultivated into the smooth
+calmness of indifference which some Americans seem to regard as the sine
+qua non of good breeding. Their position is so assured that they do not
+need that lacquer of calmness of which we were speaking.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Which is different from the manner acquired by those who
+live a great deal in American hotels?
+
+THE MISTRESS. Or the Washington manner?
+
+HERBERT. The last two are the same.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Not exactly. You think you can always tell if a man
+has learned his society carriage of a dancing-master. Well, you cannot
+always tell by a person's manner whether he is a habitui of hotels or
+of Washington. But these are distinct from the perfect polish and
+politeness of indifferentism.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Daylight disenchants. It draws one from the fireside, and dissipates the
+idle illusions of conversation, except under certain conditions. Let us
+say that the conditions are: a house in the country, with some forest
+trees near, and a few evergreens, which are Christmas-trees all winter
+long, fringed with snow, glistening with ice-pendants, cheerful by
+day and grotesque by night; a snow-storm beginning out of a dark
+sky, falling in a soft profusion that fills all the air, its dazzling
+whiteness making a light near at hand, which is quite lost in the
+distant darkling spaces.
+
+If one begins to watch the swirling flakes and crystals, he soon gets an
+impression of infinity of resources that he can have from nothing else
+so powerfully, except it be from Adirondack gnats. Nothing makes one
+feel at home like a great snow-storm. Our intelligent cat will quit the
+fire and sit for hours in the low window, watching the falling snow
+with a serious and contented air. His thoughts are his own, but he is in
+accord with the subtlest agencies of Nature; on such a day he is charged
+with enough electricity to run a telegraphic battery, if it could be
+utilized. The connection between thought and electricity has not been
+exactly determined, but the cat is mentally very alert in certain
+conditions of the atmosphere. Feasting his eyes on the beautiful
+out-doors does not prevent his attention to the slightest noise in the
+wainscot. And the snow-storm brings content, but not stupidity, to all
+the rest of the household.
+
+I can see Mandeville now, rising from his armchair and swinging his long
+arms as he strides to the window, and looks out and up, with, "Well, I
+declare!" Herbert is pretending to read Herbert Spencer's tract on the
+philosophy of style but he loses much time in looking at the Young Lady,
+who is writing a letter, holding her portfolio in her lap,--one of her
+everlasting letters to one of her fifty everlasting friends. She is one
+of the female patriots who save the post-office department from being
+a disastrous loss to the treasury. Herbert is thinking of the great
+radical difference in the two sexes, which legislation will probably
+never change; that leads a woman always, to write letters on her lap and
+a man on a table,--a distinction which is commended to the notice of the
+anti-suffragists.
+
+The Mistress, in a pretty little breakfast-cap, is moving about the room
+with a feather-duster, whisking invisible dust from the picture-frames,
+and talking with the Parson, who has just come in, and is thawing the
+snow from his boots on the hearth. The Parson says the thermometer is 15
+deg., and going down; that there is a snowdrift across the main church
+entrance three feet high, and that the house looks as if it had gone
+into winter quarters, religion and all. There were only ten persons at
+the conference meeting last night, and seven of those were women; he
+wonders how many weather-proof Christians there are in the parish,
+anyhow.
+
+The Fire-Tender is in the adjoining library, pretending to write; but
+it is a poor day for ideas. He has written his wife's name about eleven
+hundred times, and cannot get any farther. He hears the Mistress tell
+the Parson that she believes he is trying to write a lecture on the
+Celtic Influence in Literature. The Parson says that it is a first-rate
+subject, if there were any such influence, and asks why he does n't take
+a shovel and make a path to the gate. Mandeville says that, by George!
+he himself should like no better fun, but it wouldn't look well for a
+visitor to do it. The Fire-Tender, not to be disturbed by this sort of
+chaff, keeps on writing his wife's name.
+
+Then the Parson and the Mistress fall to talking about the soup-relief,
+and about old Mrs. Grumples in Pig Alley, who had a present of one of
+Stowe's Illustrated Self-Acting Bibles on Christmas, when she had n't
+coal enough in the house to heat her gruel; and about a family behind
+the church, a widow and six little children and three dogs; and he did
+n't believe that any of them had known what it was to be warm in
+three weeks, and as to food, the woman said, she could hardly beg cold
+victuals enough to keep the dogs alive.
+
+The Mistress slipped out into the kitchen to fill a basket with
+provisions and send it somewhere; and when the Fire-Tender brought in
+a new forestick, Mandeville, who always wants to talk, and had been
+sitting drumming his feet and drawing deep sighs, attacked him.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Speaking about culture and manners, did you ever notice how
+extremes meet, and that the savage bears himself very much like the sort
+of cultured persons we were talking of last night?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. In what respect?
+
+MANDEVILLE. Well, you take the North American Indian. He is never
+interested in anything, never surprised at anything. He has by nature
+that calmness and indifference which your people of culture have
+acquired. If he should go into literature as a critic, he would scalp
+and tomahawk with the same emotionless composure, and he would do
+nothing else.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Then you think the red man is a born gentleman of the
+highest breeding?
+
+MANDEVILLE. I think he is calm.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. How is it about the war-path and all that?
+
+MANDEVILLE. Oh, these studiously calm and cultured people may have
+malice underneath. It takes them to give the most effective "little
+digs;" they know how to stick in the pine-splinters and set fire to
+them.
+
+HERBERT. But there is more in Mandeville's idea. You bring a red man
+into a picture-gallery, or a city full of fine architecture, or into
+a drawing-room crowded with objects of art and beauty, and he is
+apparently insensible to them all. Now I have seen country people,--and
+by country people I don't mean people necessarily who live in the
+country, for everything is mixed in these days,--some of the best people
+in the world, intelligent, honest, sincere, who acted as the Indian
+would.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Herbert, if I did n't know you were cynical, I should say
+you were snobbish.
+
+HERBERT. Such people think it a point of breeding never to speak of
+anything in your house, nor to appear to notice it, however beautiful it
+may be; even to slyly glance around strains their notion of etiquette.
+They are like the countryman who confessed afterwards that he could
+hardly keep from laughing at one of Yankee Hill's entertainments.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Do you remember those English people at our house in
+Flushing last summer, who pleased us all so much with their apparent
+delight in everything that was artistic or tasteful, who explored the
+rooms and looked at everything, and were so interested? I suppose that
+Herbert's country relations, many of whom live in the city, would have
+thought it very ill-bred.
+
+MANDEVILLE. It's just as I said. The English, the best of them, have
+become so civilized that they express themselves, in speech and action,
+naturally, and are not afraid of their emotions.
+
+THE PARSON. I wish Mandeville would travel more, or that he had stayed
+at home. It's wonderful what a fit of Atlantic sea-sickness will do for
+a man's judgment and cultivation. He is prepared to pronounce on art,
+manners, all kinds of culture. There is more nonsense talked about
+culture than about anything else.
+
+HERBERT. The Parson reminds me of an American country minister I once
+met walking through the Vatican. You could n't impose upon him with any
+rubbish; he tested everything by the standards of his native place, and
+there was little that could bear the test. He had the sly air of a man
+who could not be deceived, and he went about with his mouth in a pucker
+of incredulity. There is nothing so placid as rustic conceit. There was
+something very enjoyable about his calm superiority to all the treasures
+of art.
+
+MANDEVILLE. And the Parson reminds me of another American minister, a
+consul in an Italian city, who said he was going up to Rome to have a
+thorough talk with the Pope, and give him a piece of his mind. Ministers
+seem to think that is their business. They serve it in such small pieces
+in order to make it go round.
+
+THE PARSON. Mandeville is an infidel. Come, let's have some music;
+nothing else will keep him in good humor till lunch-time.
+
+THE MISTRESS. What shall it be?
+
+THE PARSON. Give us the larghetto from Beethoven's second symphony.
+
+The Young Lady puts aside her portfolio. Herbert looks at the young
+lady. The Parson composes himself for critical purposes. Mandeville
+settles himself in a chair and stretches his long legs nearly into the
+fire, remarking that music takes the tangles out of him.
+
+After the piece is finished, lunch is announced. It is still snowing.
+
+
+
+
+
+FOURTH STUDY
+
+It is difficult to explain the attraction which the uncanny and even
+the horrible have for most minds. I have seen a delicate woman half
+fascinated, but wholly disgusted, by one of the most unseemly of
+reptiles, vulgarly known as the "blowing viper" of the Alleghanies. She
+would look at it, and turn away with irresistible shuddering and the
+utmost loathing, and yet turn to look at it again and again, only to
+experience the same spasm of disgust. In spite of her aversion, she must
+have relished the sort of electric mental shock that the sight gave her.
+
+I can no more account for the fascination for us of the stories of
+ghosts and "appearances," and those weird tales in which the dead are
+the chief characters; nor tell why we should fall into converse about
+them when the winter evenings are far spent, the embers are glazing over
+on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in the
+house. At such times one's dreams become of importance, and people like
+to tell them and dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the
+known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that ghostly region which
+in certain states of the mind we feel to be more real than that we see.
+
+Recently, when we were, so to say, sitting around the borders of the
+supernatural late at night, MANDEVILLE related a dream of his which he
+assured us was true in every particular, and it interested us so much
+that we asked him to write it out. In doing so he has curtailed it, and
+to my mind shorn it of some of its more vivid and picturesque features.
+He might have worked it up with more art, and given it a finish
+which the narration now lacks, but I think best to insert it in its
+simplicity. It seems to me that it may properly be called,
+
+
+A NEW "VISION OF SIN"
+
+In the winter of 1850 I was a member of one of the leading colleges of
+this country. I was in moderate circumstances pecuniarily, though I was
+perhaps better furnished with less fleeting riches than many others.
+I was an incessant and indiscriminate reader of books. For the solid
+sciences I had no particular fancy, but with mental modes and habits,
+and especially with the eccentric and fantastic in the intellectual and
+spiritual operations, I was tolerably familiar. All the literature of
+the supernatural was as real to me as the laboratory of the chemist,
+where I saw the continual struggle of material substances to evolve
+themselves into more volatile, less palpable and coarse forms. My
+imagination, naturally vivid, stimulated by such repasts, nearly
+mastered me. At times I could scarcely tell where the material ceased
+and the immaterial began (if I may so express it); so that once and
+again I walked, as it seemed, from the solid earth onward upon an
+impalpable plain, where I heard the same voices, I think, that Joan
+of Arc heard call to her in the garden at Domremy. She was inspired,
+however, while I only lacked exercise. I do not mean this in any literal
+sense; I only describe a state of mind. I was at this time of spare
+habit, and nervous, excitable temperament. I was ambitious, proud, and
+extremely sensitive. I cannot deny that I had seen something of the
+world, and had contracted about the average bad habits of young men who
+have the sole care of themselves, and rather bungle the matter. It is
+necessary to this relation to admit that I had seen a trifle more of
+what is called life than a young man ought to see, but at this period
+I was not only sick of my experience, but my habits were as correct as
+those of any Pharisee in our college, and we had some very favorable
+specimens of that ancient sect.
+
+Nor can I deny that at this period of my life I was in a peculiar mental
+condition. I well remember an illustration of it. I sat writing late one
+night, copying a prize essay,--a merely manual task, leaving my thoughts
+free. It was in June, a sultry night, and about midnight a wind arose,
+pouring in through the open windows, full of mournful reminiscence, not
+of this, but of other summers,--the same wind that De Quincey heard at
+noonday in midsummer blowing through the room where he stood, a mere
+boy, by the side of his dead sister,--a wind centuries old. As I wrote
+on mechanically, I became conscious of a presence in the room, though I
+did not lift my eyes from the paper on which I wrote. Gradually I came
+to know that my grandmother--dead so long ago that I laughed at
+the idea--was in the room. She stood beside her old-fashioned
+spinning-wheel, and quite near me. She wore a plain muslin cap with a
+high puff in the crown, a short woolen gown, a white and blue checked
+apron, and shoes with heels. She did not regard me, but stood facing the
+wheel, with the left hand near the spindle, holding lightly between the
+thumb and forefinger the white roll of wool which was being spun and
+twisted on it. In her right hand she held a small stick. I heard the
+sharp click of this against the spokes of the wheel, then the hum of the
+wheel, the buzz of the spindles as the twisting yarn was teased by the
+whirl of its point, then a step backwards, a pause, a step forward and
+the running of the yarn upon the spindle, and again a backward step,
+the drawing out of the roll and the droning and hum of the wheel, most
+mournfully hopeless sound that ever fell on mortal ear. Since childhood
+it has haunted me. All this time I wrote, and I could hear distinctly
+the scratching of the pen upon the paper. But she stood behind me (why
+I did not turn my head I never knew), pacing backward and forward by the
+spinning-wheel, just as I had a hundred times seen her in childhood in
+the old kitchen on drowsy summer afternoons. And I heard the step, the
+buzz and whirl of the spindle, and the monotonous and dreary hum of the
+mournful wheel. Whether her face was ashy pale and looked as if it might
+crumble at the touch, and the border of her white cap trembled in the
+June wind that blew, I cannot say, for I tell you I did NOT see her. But
+I know she was there, spinning yarn that had been knit into hose years
+and years ago by our fireside. For I was in full possession of my
+faculties, and never copied more neatly and legibly any manuscript than
+I did the one that night. And there the phantom (I use the word out
+of deference to a public prejudice on this subject) most persistently
+remained until my task was finished, and, closing the portfolio,
+I abruptly rose. Did I see anything? That is a silly and ignorant
+question. Could I see the wind which had now risen stronger, and drove
+a few cloud-scuds across the sky, filling the night, somehow, with a
+longing that was not altogether born of reminiscence?
+
+In the winter following, in January, I made an effort to give up the
+use of tobacco,--a habit in which I was confirmed, and of which I have
+nothing more to say than this: that I should attribute to it almost all
+the sin and misery in the world, did I not remember that the old Romans
+attained a very considerable state of corruption without the assistance
+of the Virginia plant.
+
+On the night of the third day of my abstinence, rendered more nervous
+and excitable than usual by the privation, I retired late, and later
+still I fell into an uneasy sleep, and thus into a dream, vivid,
+illuminated, more real than any event of my life. I was at home, and
+fell sick. The illness developed into a fever, and then a delirium set
+in, not an intellectual blank, but a misty and most delicious wandering
+in places of incomparable beauty. I learned subsequently that our
+regular physician was not certain to finish me, when a consultation was
+called, which did the business. I have the satisfaction of knowing that
+they were of the proper school. I lay sick for three days.
+
+On the morning of the fourth, at sunrise, I died. The sensation was not
+unpleasant. It was not a sudden shock. I passed out of my body as one
+would walk from the door of his house. There the body lay,--a blank,
+so far as I was concerned, and only interesting to me as I was rather
+entertained with watching the respect paid to it. My friends stood about
+the bedside, regarding me (as they seemed to suppose), while I, in
+a different part of the room, could hardly repress a smile at their
+mistake, solemnized as they were, and I too, for that matter, by
+my recent demise. A sensation (the word you see is material and
+inappropriate) of etherealization and imponderability pervaded me, and
+I was not sorry to get rid of such a dull, slow mass as I now perceived
+myself to be, lying there on the bed. When I speak of my death, let me
+be understood to say that there was no change, except that I passed out
+of my body and floated to the top of a bookcase in the corner of the
+room, from which I looked down. For a moment I was interested to see my
+person from the outside, but thereafter I was quite indifferent to
+the body. I was now simply soul. I seemed to be a globe, impalpable,
+transparent, about six inches in diameter. I saw and heard everything as
+before. Of course, matter was no obstacle to me, and I went easily and
+quickly wherever I willed to go. There was none of that tedious process
+of communicating my wishes to the nerves, and from them to the muscles.
+I simply resolved to be at a particular place, and I was there. It was
+better than the telegraph.
+
+It seemed to have been intimated to me at my death (birth I half incline
+to call it) that I could remain on this earth for four weeks after my
+decease, during which time I could amuse myself as I chose.
+
+I chose, in the first place, to see myself decently buried, to stay by
+myself to the last, and attend my own funeral for once. As most of those
+referred to in this true narrative are still living, I am forbidden to
+indulge in personalities, nor shall I dare to say exactly how my death
+affected my friends, even the home circle. Whatever others did, I sat
+up with myself and kept awake. I saw the "pennies" used instead of the
+"quarters" which I should have preferred. I saw myself "laid out," a
+phrase that has come to have such a slang meaning that I smile as I
+write it. When the body was put into the coffin, I took my place on the
+lid.
+
+I cannot recall all the details, and they are commonplace besides. The
+funeral took place at the church. We all rode thither in carriages,
+and I, not fancying my place in mine, rode on the outside with the
+undertaker, whom I found to be a good deal more jolly than he looked to
+be. The coffin was placed in front of the pulpit when we arrived. I
+took my station on the pulpit cushion, from which elevation I had an
+admirable view of all the ceremonies, and could hear the sermon.
+How distinctly I remember the services. I think I could even at this
+distance write out the sermon. The tune sung was of--the usual country
+selection,--Mount Vernon. I recall the text. I was rather flattered
+by the tribute paid to me, and my future was spoken of gravely and as
+kindly as possible,--indeed, with remarkable charity, considering that
+the minister was not aware of my presence. I used to beat him at chess,
+and I thought, even then, of the last game; for, however solemn the
+occasion might be to others, it was not so to me. With what interest
+I watched my kinsfolks, and neighbors as they filed past for the last
+look! I saw, and I remember, who pulled a long face for the occasion
+and who exhibited genuine sadness. I learned with the most dreadful
+certainty what people really thought of me. It was a revelation never
+forgotten.
+
+Several particular acquaintances of mine were talking on the steps as we
+passed out.
+
+"Well, old Starr's gone up. Sudden, was n't it? He was a first-rate
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, queer about some things; but he had some mighty good streaks,"
+said another. And so they ran on.
+
+Streaks! So that is the reputation one gets during twenty years of life
+in this world. Streaks!
+
+After the funeral I rode home with the family. It was pleasanter than
+the ride down, though it seemed sad to my relations. They did not
+mention me, however, and I may remark, that although I stayed about
+home for a week, I never heard my name mentioned by any of the family.
+Arrived at home, the tea-kettle was put on and supper got ready. This
+seemed to lift the gloom a little, and under the influence of the tea
+they brightened up and gradually got more cheerful. They discussed the
+sermon and the singing, and the mistake of the sexton in digging
+the grave in the wrong place, and the large congregation. From the
+mantel-piece I watched the group. They had waffles for supper,--of which
+I had been exceedingly fond, but now I saw them disappear without a
+sigh.
+
+For the first day or two of my sojourn at home I was here and there at
+all the neighbors, and heard a good deal about my life and character,
+some of which was not very pleasant, but very wholesome, doubtless, for
+me to hear. At the expiration of a week this amusement ceased to be such
+for I ceased to be talked of. I realized the fact that I was dead and
+gone.
+
+By an act of volition I found myself back at college. I floated into my
+own room, which was empty. I went to the room of my two warmest friends,
+whose friendship I was and am yet assured of. As usual, half a dozen
+of our set were lounging there. A game of whist was just commencing. I
+perched on a bust of Dante on the top of the book-shelves, where I could
+see two of the hands and give a good guess at a third. My particular
+friend Timmins was just shuffling the cards.
+
+"Be hanged if it is n't lonesome without old Starr. Did you cut? I
+should like to see him lounge in now with his pipe, and with feet on the
+mantel-piece proceed to expound on the duplex functions of the soul."
+
+"There--misdeal," said his vis-a-vis. "Hope there's been no misdeal for
+old Starr."
+
+"Spades, did you say?" the talk ran on, "never knew Starr was sickly."
+
+"No more was he; stouter than you are, and as brave and plucky as he was
+strong. By George, fellows,--how we do get cut down! Last term little
+Stubbs, and now one of the best fellows in the class."
+
+"How suddenly he did pop off,--one for game, honors easy,--he was good
+for the Spouts' Medal this year, too."
+
+"Remember the joke he played on Prof. A., freshman year?" asked another.
+
+"Remember he borrowed ten dollars of me about that time," said Timmins's
+partner, gathering the cards for a new deal.
+
+"Guess he is the only one who ever did," retorted some one.
+
+And so the talk went on, mingled with whist-talk, reminiscent of me, not
+all exactly what I would have chosen to go into my biography, but on the
+whole kind and tender, after the fashion of the boys. At least I was in
+their thoughts, and I could see was a good deal regretted,--so I passed
+a very pleasant evening. Most of those present were of my society, and
+wore crape on their badges, and all wore the usual crape on the left
+arm. I learned that the following afternoon a eulogy would be delivered
+on me in the chapel.
+
+The eulogy was delivered before members of our society and others,
+the next afternoon, in the chapel. I need not say that I was present.
+Indeed, I was perched on the desk within reach of the speaker's hand.
+The apotheosis was pronounced by my most intimate friend, Timmins, and
+I must say he did me ample justice. He never was accustomed to "draw it
+very mild" (to use a vulgarism which I dislike) when he had his head,
+and on this occasion he entered into the matter with the zeal of a true
+friend, and a young man who never expected to have another occasion
+to sing a public "In Memoriam." It made my hair stand on
+end,--metaphorically, of course. From my childhood I had been extremely
+precocious. There were anecdotes of preternatural brightness, picked
+up, Heaven knows where, of my eagerness to learn, of my adventurous,
+chivalrous young soul, and of my arduous struggles with chill penury,
+which was not able (as it appeared) to repress my rage, until I entered
+this institution, of which I had been ornament, pride, cynosure, and
+fair promising bud blasted while yet its fragrance was mingled with the
+dew of its youth. Once launched upon my college days, Timmins went
+on with all sails spread. I had, as it were, to hold on to the pulpit
+cushion. Latin, Greek, the old literatures, I was perfect master of; all
+history was merely a light repast to me; mathematics I glanced at, and
+it disappeared; in the clouds of modern philosophy I was wrapped but not
+obscured; over the field of light literature I familiarly roamed as
+the honey-bee over the wide fields of clover which blossom white in the
+Junes of this world! My life was pure, my character spotless, my name
+was inscribed among the names of those deathless few who were not born
+to die!
+
+It was a noble eulogy, and I felt before he finished, though I had
+misgivings at the beginning, that I deserved it all. The effect on the
+audience was a little different. They said it was a "strong" oration,
+and I think Timmins got more credit by it than I did. After the
+performance they stood about the chapel, talking in a subdued tone, and
+seemed to be a good deal impressed by what they had heard, or perhaps by
+thoughts of the departed. At least they all soon went over to Austin's
+and called for beer. My particular friends called for it twice. Then
+they all lit pipes. The old grocery keeper was good enough to say that
+I was no fool, if I did go off owing him four dollars. To the credit of
+human nature, let me here record that the fellows were touched by this
+remark reflecting upon my memory, and immediately made up a purse and
+paid the bill,--that is, they told the old man to charge it over to
+them. College boys are rich in credit and the possibilities of life.
+
+It is needless to dwell upon the days I passed at college during this
+probation. So far as I could see, everything went on as if I were there,
+or had never been there. I could not even see the place where I had
+dropped out of the ranks. Occasionally I heard my name, but I must say
+that four weeks was quite long enough to stay in a world that had pretty
+much forgotten me. There is no great satisfaction in being dragged up to
+light now and then, like an old letter. The case was somewhat different
+with the people with whom I had boarded. They were relations of mine,
+and I often saw them weep, and they talked of me a good deal at
+twilight and Sunday nights, especially the youngest one, Carrie, who was
+handsomer than any one I knew, and not much older than I. I never used
+to imagine that she cared particularly for me, nor would she have done
+so, if I had lived, but death brought with it a sort of sentimental
+regret, which, with the help of a daguerreotype, she nursed into quite a
+little passion. I spent most of my time there, for it was more congenial
+than the college.
+
+But time hastened. The last sand of probation leaked out of the glass.
+One day, while Carrie played (for me, though she knew it not) one of
+Mendelssohn's "songs without words," I suddenly, yet gently, without
+self-effort or volition, moved from the house, floated in the air, rose
+higher, higher, by an easy, delicious, exultant, yet inconceivably rapid
+motion. The ecstasy of that triumphant flight! Groves, trees, houses,
+the landscape, dimmed, faded, fled away beneath me. Upward mounting, as
+on angels' wings, with no effort, till the earth hung beneath me a round
+black ball swinging, remote, in the universal ether. Upward mounting,
+till the earth, no longer bathed in the sun's rays, went out to my
+sight, disappeared in the blank. Constellations, before seen from afar,
+I sailed among stars, too remote for shining on earth, I neared, and
+found to be round globes flying through space with a velocity only
+equaled by my own. New worlds continually opened on my sight; newfields
+of everlasting space opened and closed behind me.
+
+For days and days--it seemed a mortal forever--I mounted up the great
+heavens, whose everlasting doors swung wide. How the worlds and systems,
+stars, constellations, neared me, blazed and flashed in splendor, and
+fled away! At length,--was it not a thousand years?--I saw before me,
+yet afar off, a wall, the rocky bourn of that country whence travelers
+come not back, a battlement wider than I could guess, the height of
+which I could not see, the depth of which was infinite. As I approached,
+it shone with a splendor never yet beheld on earth. Its solid substance
+was built of jewels the rarest, and stones of priceless value. It
+seemed like one solid stone, and yet all the colors of the rainbow were
+contained in it. The ruby, the diamond, the emerald, the carbuncle,
+the topaz, the amethyst, the sapphire; of them the wall was built up in
+harmonious combination. So brilliant was it that all the space I floated
+in was full of the splendor. So mild was it and so translucent, that I
+could look for miles into its clear depths.
+
+Rapidly nearing this heavenly battlement, an immense niche was disclosed
+in its solid face. The floor was one large ruby. Its sloping sides were
+of pearl. Before I was aware I stood within the brilliant recess. I say
+I stood there, for I was there bodily, in my habit as I lived; how, I
+cannot explain. Was it the resurrection of the body? Before me rose, a
+thousand feet in height, a wonderful gate of flashing diamond. Beside
+it sat a venerable man, with long white beard, a robe of light gray,
+ancient sandals, and a golden key hanging by a cord from his waist. In
+the serene beauty of his noble features I saw justice and mercy had met
+and were reconciled. I cannot describe the majesty of his bearing or the
+benignity of his appearance. It is needless to say that I stood before
+St. Peter, who sits at the Celestial Gate.
+
+I humbly approached, and begged admission. St. Peter arose, and regarded
+me kindly, yet inquiringly.
+
+"What is your name?" asked he, "and from what place do you come?"
+
+I answered, and, wishing to give a name well known, said I was from
+Washington, United States. He looked doubtful, as if he had never heard
+the name before.
+
+"Give me," said he, "a full account of your whole life."
+
+I felt instantaneously that there was no concealment possible; all
+disguise fell away, and an unknown power forced me to speak absolute and
+exact truth. I detailed the events of my life as well as I could,
+and the good man was not a little affected by the recital of my early
+trials, poverty, and temptation. It did not seem a very good life when
+spread out in that presence, and I trembled as I proceeded; but I plead
+youth, inexperience, and bad examples.
+
+"Have you been accustomed," he said, after a time, rather sadly, "to
+break the Sabbath?"
+
+I told him frankly that I had been rather lax in that matter, especially
+at college. I often went to sleep in the chapel on Sunday, when I was
+not reading some entertaining book. He then asked who the preacher was,
+and when I told him, he remarked that I was not so much to blame as he
+had supposed.
+
+"Have you," he went on, "ever stolen, or told any lie?"
+
+I was able to say no, except admitting as to the first, usual college
+"conveyances," and as to the last, an occasional "blinder" to the
+professors. He was gracious enough to say that these could be overlooked
+as incident to the occasion.
+
+"Have you ever been dissipated, living riotously and keeping late
+hours?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+This also could be forgiven me as an incident of youth.
+
+"Did you ever," he went on, "commit the crime of using intoxicating
+drinks as a beverage?"
+
+I answered that I had never been a habitual drinker, that I had never
+been what was called a "moderate drinker," that I had never gone to a
+bar and drank alone; but that I had been accustomed, in company with
+other young men, on convivial occasions to taste the pleasures of the
+flowing bowl, sometimes to excess, but that I had also tasted the
+pains of it, and for months before my demise had refrained from liquor
+altogether. The holy man looked grave, but, after reflection, said this
+might also be overlooked in a young man.
+
+"What," continued he, in tones still more serious, "has been your
+conduct with regard to the other sex?"
+
+I fell upon my knees in a tremor of fear. I pulled from my bosom
+a little book like the one Leperello exhibits in the opera of "Don
+Giovanni." There, I said, was a record of my flirtation and inconstancy.
+I waited long for the decision, but it came in mercy.
+
+"Rise," he cried; "young men will be young men, I suppose. We shall
+forgive this also to your youth and penitence."
+
+"Your examination is satisfactory, he informed me," after a pause; "you
+can now enter the abodes of the happy."
+
+Joy leaped within me. We approached the gate. The key turned in the
+lock. The gate swung noiselessly on its hinges a little open. Out
+flashed upon me unknown splendors. What I saw in that momentary gleam
+I shall never whisper in mortal ears. I stood upon the threshold, just
+about to enter.
+
+"Stop! one moment," exclaimed St. Peter, laying his hand on my shoulder;
+"I have one more question to ask you."
+
+I turned toward him.
+
+"Young man, did you ever use tobacco?"
+
+"I both smoked and chewed in my lifetime," I faltered, "but..."
+
+"THEN TO HELL WITH YOU!" he shouted in a voice of thunder.
+
+Instantly the gate closed without noise, and I was flung, hurled, from
+the battlement, down! down! down! Faster and faster I sank in a dizzy,
+sickening whirl into an unfathomable space of gloom. The light faded.
+Dampness and darkness were round about me. As before, for days and days
+I rose exultant in the light, so now forever I sank into thickening
+darkness,--and yet not darkness, but a pale, ashy light more fearful.
+
+In the dimness, I at length discovered a wall before me. It ran up and
+down and on either hand endlessly into the night. It was solid, black,
+terrible in its frowning massiveness.
+
+Straightway I alighted at the gate,--a dismal crevice hewn into the
+dripping rock. The gate was wide open, and there sat-I knew him at once;
+who does not?--the Arch Enemy of mankind. He cocked his eye at me in an
+impudent, low, familiar manner that disgusted me. I saw that I was not
+to be treated like a gentleman.
+
+"Well, young man," said he, rising, with a queer grin on his face, "what
+are you sent here for?"
+
+"For using tobacco," I replied.
+
+"Ho!" shouted he in a jolly manner, peculiar to devils, "that's what
+most of 'em are sent here for now."
+
+Without more ado, he called four lesser imps, who ushered me within.
+What a dreadful plain lay before me! There was a vast city laid out in
+regular streets, but there were no houses. Along the streets were places
+of torment and torture exceedingly ingenious and disagreeable. For miles
+and miles, it seemed, I followed my conductors through these horrors,
+Here was a deep vat of burning tar. Here were rows of fiery ovens. I
+noticed several immense caldron kettles of boiling oil, upon the rims
+of which little devils sat, with pitchforks in hand, and poked down the
+helpless victims who floundered in the liquid. But I forbear to go into
+unseemly details. The whole scene is as vivid in my mind as any earthly
+landscape.
+
+After an hour's walk my tormentors halted before the mouth of an
+oven,--a furnace heated seven times, and now roaring with flames. They
+grasped me, one hold of each hand and foot. Standing before the blazing
+mouth, they, with a swing, and a "one, two, THREE...."
+
+I again assure the reader that in this narrative I have set down nothing
+that was not actually dreamed, and much, very much of this wonderful
+vision I have been obliged to omit.
+
+Haec fabula docet: It is dangerous for a young man to leave off the use
+of tobacco.
+
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I wish I could fitly celebrate the joyousness of the New England winter.
+Perhaps I could if I more thoroughly believed in it. But skepticism
+comes in with the south wind. When that begins to blow, one feels the
+foundations of his belief breaking up. This is only another way of
+saying that it is more difficult, if it be not impossible, to freeze out
+orthodoxy, or any fixed notion, than it is to thaw it out; though it is
+a mere fancy to suppose that this is the reason why the martyrs, of all
+creeds, were burned at the stake. There is said to be a great relaxation
+in New England of the ancient strictness in the direction of toleration
+of opinion, called by some a lowering of the standard, and by others a
+raising of the banner of liberality; it might be an interesting inquiry
+how much this change is due to another change,--the softening of the New
+England winter and the shifting of the Gulf Stream. It is the fashion
+nowadays to refer almost everything to physical causes, and this hint is
+a gratuitous contribution to the science of metaphysical physics.
+
+The hindrance to entering fully into the joyousness of a New England
+winter, except far inland among the mountains, is the south wind. It
+is a grateful wind, and has done more, I suspect, to demoralize society
+than any other. It is not necessary to remember that it filled the
+silken sails of Cleopatra's galley. It blows over New England every few
+days, and is in some portions of it the prevailing wind. That it brings
+the soft clouds, and sometimes continues long enough to almost deceive
+the expectant buds of the fruit trees, and to tempt the robin from the
+secluded evergreen copses, may be nothing; but it takes the tone out of
+the mind, and engenders discontent, making one long for the tropics; it
+feeds the weakened imagination on palm-leaves and the lotus. Before we
+know it we become demoralized, and shrink from the tonic of the sudden
+change to sharp weather, as the steamed hydropathic patient does from
+the plunge. It is the insidious temptation that assails us when we are
+braced up to profit by the invigorating rigor of winter.
+
+Perhaps the influence of the four great winds on character is only a
+fancied one; but it is evident on temperament, which is not altogether a
+matter of temperature, although the good old deacon used to say, in his
+humble, simple way, that his third wife was a very good woman, but her
+"temperature was very different from that of the other two." The north
+wind is full of courage, and puts the stamina of endurance into a
+man, and it probably would into a woman too if there were a series of
+resolutions passed to that effect. The west wind is hopeful; it has
+promise and adventure in it, and is, except to Atlantic voyagers
+America-bound, the best wind that ever blew. The east wind is
+peevishness; it is mental rheumatism and grumbling, and curls one up in
+the chimney-corner like a cat. And if the chimney ever smokes, it smokes
+when the wind sits in that quarter. The south wind is full of longing
+and unrest, of effeminate suggestions of luxurious ease, and perhaps we
+might say of modern poetry,--at any rate, modern poetry needs a change
+of air. I am not sure but the south is the most powerful of the winds,
+because of its sweet persuasiveness. Nothing so stirs the blood in
+spring, when it comes up out of the tropical latitude; it makes men
+"longen to gon on pilgrimages."
+
+I did intend to insert here a little poem (as it is quite proper to do
+in an essay) on the south wind, composed by the Young Lady Staying With
+Us, beginning,--
+
+   "Out of a drifting southern cloud
+   My soul heard the night-bird cry,"
+
+but it never got any farther than this. The Young Lady said it was
+exceedingly difficult to write the next two lines, because not only
+rhyme but meaning had to be procured. And this is true; anybody can
+write first lines, and that is probably the reason we have so many
+poems which seem to have been begun in just this way, that is, with a
+south-wind-longing without any thought in it, and it is very fortunate
+when there is not wind enough to finish them. This emotional poem, if
+I may so call it, was begun after Herbert went away. I liked it,
+and thought it was what is called "suggestive;" although I did not
+understand it, especially what the night-bird was; and I am afraid I
+hurt the Young Lady's feelings by asking her if she meant Herbert by the
+"night-bird,"--a very absurd suggestion about two unsentimental people.
+She said, "Nonsense;" but she afterwards told the Mistress that there
+were emotions that one could never put into words without the danger
+of being ridiculous; a profound truth. And yet I should not like to say
+that there is not a tender lonesomeness in love that can get comfort out
+of a night-bird in a cloud, if there be such a thing. Analysis is the
+death of sentiment.
+
+But to return to the winds. Certain people impress us as the winds do.
+Mandeville never comes in that I do not feel a north-wind vigor and
+healthfulness in his cordial, sincere, hearty manner, and in his
+wholesome way of looking at things. The Parson, you would say, was the
+east wind, and only his intimates know that his peevishness is only a
+querulous humor. In the fair west wind I know the Mistress herself, full
+of hope, and always the first one to discover a bit of blue in a cloudy
+sky. It would not be just to apply what I have said of the south wind to
+any of our visitors, but it did blow a little while Herbert was here.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+In point of pure enjoyment, with an intellectual sparkle in it, I
+suppose that no luxurious lounging on tropical isles set in tropical
+seas compares with the positive happiness one may have before a great
+woodfire (not two sticks laid crossways in a grate), with a veritable
+New England winter raging outside. In order to get the highest
+enjoyment, the faculties must be alert, and not be lulled into a mere
+recipient dullness. There are those who prefer a warm bath to a brisk
+walk in the inspiring air, where ten thousand keen influences minister
+to the sense of beauty and run along the excited nerves. There are,
+for instance, a sharpness of horizon outline and a delicacy of color
+on distant hills which are wanting in summer, and which convey to one
+rightly organized the keenest delight, and a refinement of enjoyment
+that is scarcely sensuous, not at all sentimental, and almost passing
+the intellectual line into the spiritual.
+
+I was speaking to Mandeville about this, and he said that I was drawing
+it altogether too fine; that he experienced sensations of pleasure in
+being out in almost all weathers; that he rather liked to breast a north
+wind, and that there was a certain inspiration in sharp outlines and
+in a landscape in trim winter-quarters, with stripped trees, and, as it
+were, scudding through the season under bare poles; but that he must say
+that he preferred the weather in which he could sit on the fence by
+the wood-lot, with the spring sun on his back, and hear the stir of the
+leaves and the birds beginning their housekeeping.
+
+A very pretty idea for Mandeville; and I fear he is getting to have
+private thoughts about the Young Lady. Mandeville naturally likes the
+robustness and sparkle of winter, and it has been a little suspicious to
+hear him express the hope that we shall have an early spring.
+
+I wonder how many people there are in New England who know the glory and
+inspiration of a winter walk just before sunset, and that, too, not only
+on days of clear sky, when the west is aflame with a rosy color, which
+has no suggestion of languor or unsatisfied longing in it, but on dull
+days, when the sullen clouds hang about the horizon, full of threats of
+storm and the terrors of the gathering night. We are very busy with
+our own affairs, but there is always something going on out-doors worth
+looking at; and there is seldom an hour before sunset that has not some
+special attraction. And, besides, it puts one in the mood for the cheer
+and comfort of the open fire at home.
+
+Probably if the people of New England could have a plebiscitum on their
+weather, they would vote against it, especially against winter. Almost
+no one speaks well of winter. And this suggests the idea that most
+people here were either born in the wrong place, or do not know what is
+best for them. I doubt if these grumblers would be any better satisfied,
+or would turn out as well, in the tropics. Everybody knows our
+virtues,--at least if they believe half we tell them,--and for delicate
+beauty, that rare plant, I should look among the girls of the New
+England hills as confidently as anywhere, and I have traveled as far
+south as New Jersey, and west of the Genesee Valley. Indeed, it would be
+easy to show that the parents of the pretty girls in the West emigrated
+from New England. And yet--such is the mystery of Providence--no one
+would expect that one of the sweetest and most delicate flowers that
+blooms, the trailing arbutus, would blossom in this inhospitable
+climate, and peep forth from the edge of a snowbank at that.
+
+It seems unaccountable to a superficial observer that the thousands
+of people who are dissatisfied with their climate do not seek a more
+congenial one--or stop grumbling. The world is so small, and all parts
+of it are so accessible, it has so many varieties of climate, that one
+could surely suit himself by searching; and, then, is it worth while to
+waste our one short life in the midst of unpleasant surroundings and in
+a constant friction with that which is disagreeable? One would suppose
+that people set down on this little globe would seek places on it most
+agreeable to themselves. It must be that they are much more content with
+the climate and country upon which they happen, by the accident of their
+birth, than they pretend to be.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Home sympathies and charities are most active in the winter. Coming
+in from my late walk,--in fact driven in by a hurrying north wind that
+would brook no delay,--a wind that brought snow that did not seem to
+fall out of a bounteous sky, but to be blown from polar fields,--I
+find the Mistress returned from town, all in a glow of philanthropic
+excitement.
+
+There has been a meeting of a woman's association for Ameliorating the
+Condition of somebody here at home. Any one can belong to it by paying
+a dollar, and for twenty dollars one can become a life Ameliorator,--a
+sort of life assurance. The Mistress, at the meeting, I believe,
+"seconded the motion" several times, and is one of the Vice-Presidents;
+and this family honor makes me feel almost as if I were a president
+of something myself. These little distinctions are among the sweetest
+things in life, and to see one's name officially printed stimulates
+his charity, and is almost as satisfactory as being the chairman of a
+committee or the mover of a resolution. It is, I think, fortunate, and
+not at all discreditable, that our little vanity, which is reckoned
+among our weaknesses, is thus made to contribute to the activity of our
+nobler powers. Whatever we may say, we all of us like distinction; and
+probably there is no more subtle flattery than that conveyed in the
+whisper, "That's he," "That's she."
+
+There used to be a society for ameliorating the condition of the Jews;
+but they were found to be so much more adept than other people in
+ameliorating their own condition that I suppose it was given up.
+Mandeville says that to his knowledge there are a great many people
+who get up ameliorating enterprises merely to be conspicuously busy in
+society, or to earn a little something in a good cause. They seem
+to think that the world owes them a living because they are
+philanthropists. In this Mandeville does not speak with his usual
+charity. It is evident that there are Jews, and some Gentiles, whose
+condition needs ameliorating, and if very little is really accomplished
+in the effort for them, it always remains true that the charitable reap
+a benefit to themselves. It is one of the beautiful compensations of
+this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping
+himself.
+
+OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR. Why is it that almost all philanthropists and
+reformers are disagreeable?
+
+I ought to explain who our next-door neighbor is. He is the person who
+comes in without knocking, drops in in the most natural way, as his wife
+does also, and not seldom in time to take the after-dinner cup of tea
+before the fire. Formal society begins as soon as you lock your doors,
+and only admit visitors through the media of bells and servants. It is
+lucky for us that our next-door neighbor is honest.
+
+THE PARSON. Why do you class reformers and philanthropists together?
+Those usually called reformers are not philanthropists at all. They are
+agitators. Finding the world disagreeable to themselves, they wish to
+make it as unpleasant to others as possible.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That's a noble view of your fellow-men.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Well, granting the distinction, why are both apt to be
+unpleasant people to live with?
+
+THE PARSON. As if the unpleasant people who won't mind their own
+business were confined to the classes you mention! Some of the best
+people I know are philanthropists,--I mean the genuine ones, and not the
+uneasy busybodies seeking notoriety as a means of living.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. It is not altogether the not minding their own
+business. Nobody does that. The usual explanation is, that people with
+one idea are tedious. But that is not all of it. For few persons
+have more than one idea,--ministers, doctors, lawyers, teachers,
+manufacturers, merchants,--they all think the world they live in is the
+central one.
+
+MANDEVILLE. And you might add authors. To them nearly all the life of
+the world is in letters, and I suppose they would be astonished if they
+knew how little the thoughts of the majority of people are occupied with
+books, and with all that vast thought circulation which is the vital
+current of the world to book-men. Newspapers have reached their present
+power by becoming unliterary, and reflecting all the interests of the
+world.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I have noticed one thing, that the most popular persons in
+society are those who take the world as it is, find the least fault, and
+have no hobbies. They are always wanted to dinner.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. And the other kind always appear to me to want a dinner.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. It seems to me that the real reason why reformers and
+some philanthropists are unpopular is, that they disturb our serenity
+and make us conscious of our own shortcomings. It is only now and then
+that a whole people get a spasm of reformatory fervor, of investigation
+and regeneration. At other times they rather hate those who disturb
+their quiet.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Professional reformers and philanthropists are
+insufferably conceited and intolerant.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Everything depends upon the spirit in which a reform or a
+scheme of philanthropy is conducted.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I attended a protracted convention of reformers of a certain
+evil, once, and had the pleasure of taking dinner with a tableful of
+them. It was one of those country dinners accompanied with green tea.
+Every one disagreed with every one else, and you would n't wonder at
+it, if you had seen them. They were people with whom good food wouldn't
+agree. George Thompson was expected at the convention, and I remember
+that there was almost a cordiality in the talk about him, until one
+sallow brother casually mentioned that George took snuff,--when a chorus
+of deprecatory groans went up from the table. One long-faced maiden in
+spectacles, with purple ribbons in her hair, who drank five cups of tea
+by my count, declared that she was perfectly disgusted, and did n't
+want to hear him speak. In the course of the meal the talk ran upon the
+discipline of children, and how to administer punishment. I was quite
+taken by the remark of a thin, dyspeptic man who summed up the matter
+by growling out in a harsh, deep bass voice, "Punish 'em in love!" It
+sounded as if he had said, "Shoot 'em on the spot!"
+
+THE PARSON. I supposed you would say that he was a minister. There is
+another thing about those people. I think they are working against the
+course of nature. Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She
+perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue. There's a split in
+my thumb-nail that has been scrupulously continued for many years, not
+withstanding all my efforts to make the nail resume its old regularity.
+You see the same thing in trees whose bark is cut, and in melons that
+have had only one summer's intimacy with squashes. The bad traits in
+character are passed down from generation to generation with as much
+care as the good ones. Nature, unaided, never reforms anything.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Is that the essence of Calvinism?
+
+THE PARSON. Calvinism has n't any essence, it's a fact.
+
+MANDEVILLE. When I was a boy, I always associated Calvinism and calomel
+together. I thought that homeopathy--similia, etc.--had done away with
+both of them.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR (rising). If you are going into theology, I'm off..
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I fear we are not getting on much with the joyousness of winter. In
+order to be exhilarating it must be real winter. I have noticed that the
+lower the thermometer sinks the more fiercely the north wind rages, and
+the deeper the snow is, the higher rise the spirits of the community.
+The activity of the "elements" has a great effect upon country folk
+especially; and it is a more wholesome excitement than that caused by
+a great conflagration. The abatement of a snow-storm that grows to
+exceptional magnitude is regretted, for there is always the half-hope
+that this will be, since it has gone so far, the largest fall of snow
+ever known in the region, burying out of sight the great fall of 1808,
+the account of which is circumstantially and aggravatingly thrown in our
+way annually upon the least provocation. We all know how it reads: "Some
+said it began at daylight, others that it set in after sunrise; but
+all agree that by eight o'clock Friday morning it was snowing in heavy
+masses that darkened the air."
+
+The morning after we settled the five--or is it seven?--points
+of Calvinism, there began a very hopeful snow-storm, one of those
+wide-sweeping, careering storms that may not much affect the city,
+but which strongly impress the country imagination with a sense of the
+personal qualities of the weather,--power, persistency, fierceness, and
+roaring exultation. Out-doors was terrible to those who looked out of
+windows, and heard the raging wind, and saw the commotion in all the
+high tree-tops and the writhing of the low evergreens, and could not
+summon resolution to go forth and breast and conquer the bluster. The
+sky was dark with snow, which was not permitted to fall peacefully
+like a blessed mantle, as it sometimes does, but was blown and rent and
+tossed like the split canvas of a ship in a gale. The world was taken
+possession of by the demons of the air, who had their will of it. There
+is a sort of fascination in such a scene, equal to that of a tempest at
+sea, and without its attendant haunting sense of peril; there is no fear
+that the house will founder or dash against your neighbor's cottage,
+which is dimly seen anchored across the field; at every thundering onset
+there is no fear that the cook's galley will upset, or the screw break
+loose and smash through the side, and we are not in momently expectation
+of the tinkling of the little bell to "stop her." The snow rises in
+drifting waves, and the naked trees bend like strained masts; but so
+long as the window-blinds remain fast, and the chimney-tops do not go,
+we preserve an equal mind. Nothing more serious can happen than the
+failure of the butcher's and the grocer's carts, unless, indeed, the
+little news-carrier should fail to board us with the world's daily
+bulletin, or our next-door neighbor should be deterred from coming to
+sit by the blazing, excited fire, and interchange the trifling, harmless
+gossip of the day. The feeling of seclusion on such a day is sweet, but
+the true friend who does brave the storm and come is welcomed with a
+sort of enthusiasm that his arrival in pleasant weather would never
+excite. The snow-bound in their Arctic hulk are glad to see even a
+wandering Esquimau.
+
+On such a day I recall the great snow-storms on the northern New England
+hills, which lasted for a week with no cessation, with no sunrise or
+sunset, and no observation at noon; and the sky all the while dark with
+the driving snow, and the whole world full of the noise of the rioting
+Boreal forces; until the roads were obliterated, the fences covered,
+and the snow was piled solidly above the first-story windows of the
+farmhouse on one side, and drifted before the front door so high that
+egress could only be had by tunneling the bank.
+
+After such a battle and siege, when the wind fell and the sun struggled
+out again, the pallid world lay subdued and tranquil, and the scattered
+dwellings were not unlike wrecks stranded by the tempest and half buried
+in sand. But when the blue sky again bent over all, the wide expanse of
+snow sparkled like diamond-fields, and the chimney signal-smokes could
+be seen, how beautiful was the picture! Then began the stir abroad,
+and the efforts to open up communication through roads, or fields, or
+wherever paths could be broken, and the ways to the meeting-house
+first of all. Then from every house and hamlet the men turned out with
+shovels, with the patient, lumbering oxen yoked to the sleds, to break
+the roads, driving into the deepest drifts, shoveling and shouting as
+if the severe labor were a holiday frolic, the courage and the hilarity
+rising with the difficulties encountered; and relief parties, meeting at
+length in the midst of the wide white desolation, hailed each other as
+chance explorers in new lands, and made the whole country-side ring with
+the noise of their congratulations. There was as much excitement and
+healthy stirring of the blood in it as in the Fourth of July, and
+perhaps as much patriotism. The boy saw it in dumb show from the
+distant, low farmhouse window, and wished he were a man. At night there
+were great stories of achievement told by the cavernous fireplace;
+great latitude was permitted in the estimation of the size of particular
+drifts, but never any agreement was reached as to the "depth on a
+level." I have observed since that people are quite as apt to agree upon
+the marvelous and the exceptional as upon simple facts.
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+By the firelight and the twilight, the Young Lady is finishing a letter
+to Herbert,--writing it, literally, on her knees, transforming thus the
+simple deed into an act of devotion. Mandeville says that it is bad for
+her eyes, but the sight of it is worse for his eyes. He begins to doubt
+the wisdom of reliance upon that worn apothegm about absence conquering
+love.
+
+Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent,
+as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable. Mandeville
+begins to wish he were in New South Wales.
+
+I did intend to insert here a letter of Herbert's to the Young
+Lady,--obtained, I need not say, honorably, as private letters which get
+into print always are,--not to gratify a vulgar curiosity, but to show
+how the most unsentimental and cynical people are affected by the master
+passion. But I cannot bring myself to do it. Even in the interests
+of science one has no right to make an autopsy of two loving hearts,
+especially when they are suffering under a late attack of the one
+agreeable epidemic.
+
+All the world loves a lover, but it laughs at him none the less in his
+extravagances. He loses his accustomed reticence; he has something of
+the martyr's willingness for publicity; he would even like to show the
+sincerity of his devotion by some piece of open heroism. Why should he
+conceal a discovery which has transformed the world to him, a secret
+which explains all the mysteries of nature and humanity? He is in that
+ecstasy of mind which prompts those who were never orators before to
+rise in an experience-meeting and pour out a flood of feeling in the
+tritest language and the most conventional terms. I am not sure that
+Herbert, while in this glow, would be ashamed of his letter in print,
+but this is one of the cases where chancery would step in and protect
+one from himself by his next friend. This is really a delicate matter,
+and perhaps it is brutal to allude to it at all.
+
+In truth, the letter would hardly be interesting in print. Love has a
+marvelous power of vivifying language and charging the simplest words
+with the most tender meaning, of restoring to them the power they had
+when first coined. They are words of fire to those two who know their
+secret, but not to others. It is generally admitted that the best
+love-letters would not make very good literature. "Dearest," begins
+Herbert, in a burst of originality, felicitously selecting a word whose
+exclusiveness shuts out all the world but one, and which is a whole
+letter, poem, confession, and creed in one breath. What a weight of
+meaning it has to carry! There may be beauty and wit and grace and
+naturalness and even the splendor of fortune elsewhere, but there is one
+woman in the world whose sweet presence would be compensation for the
+loss of all else. It is not to be reasoned about; he wants that one; it
+is her plume dancing down the sunny street that sets his heart beating;
+he knows her form among a thousand, and follows her; he longs to run
+after her carriage, which the cruel coachman whirls out of his sight. It
+is marvelous to him that all the world does not want her too, and he is
+in a panic when he thinks of it. And what exquisite flattery is in that
+little word addressed to her, and with what sweet and meek triumph she
+repeats it to herself, with a feeling that is not altogether pity for
+those who still stand and wait. To be chosen out of all the available
+world--it is almost as much bliss as it is to choose. "All that long,
+long stage-ride from Blim's to Portage I thought of you every moment,
+and wondered what you were doing and how you were looking just that
+moment, and I found the occupation so charming that I was almost sorry
+when the journey was ended." Not much in that! But I have no doubt the
+Young Lady read it over and over, and dwelt also upon every moment, and
+found in it new proof of unshaken constancy, and had in that and the
+like things in the letter a sense of the sweetest communion. There is
+nothing in this letter that we need dwell on it, but I am convinced that
+the mail does not carry any other letters so valuable as this sort.
+
+I suppose that the appearance of Herbert in this new light unconsciously
+gave tone a little to the evening's talk; not that anybody mentioned
+him, but Mandeville was evidently generalizing from the qualities
+that make one person admired by another to those that win the love of
+mankind.
+
+MANDEVILLE. There seems to be something in some persons that wins them
+liking, special or general, independent almost of what they do or say.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Why, everybody is liked by some one.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I'm not sure of that. There are those who are friendless,
+and would be if they had endless acquaintances. But, to take the case
+away from ordinary examples, in which habit and a thousand circumstances
+influence liking, what is it that determines the world upon a personal
+regard for authors whom it has never seen?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Probably it is the spirit shown in their writings.
+
+THE MISTRESS. More likely it is a sort of tradition; I don't believe
+that the world has a feeling of personal regard for any author who was
+not loved by those who knew him most intimately.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Which comes to the same thing. The qualities, the
+spirit, that got him the love of his acquaintances he put into his
+books.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That does n't seem to me sufficient. Shakespeare has put
+everything into his plays and poems, swept the whole range of human
+sympathies and passions, and at times is inspired by the sweetest spirit
+that ever man had.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. No one has better interpreted love.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Yet I apprehend that no person living has any personal
+regard for Shakespeare, or that his personality affects many,--except
+they stand in Stratford church and feel a sort of awe at the thought
+that the bones of the greatest poet are so near them.
+
+THE PARSON. I don't think the world cares personally for any mere man or
+woman dead for centuries.
+
+MANDEVILLE. But there is a difference. I think there is still rather a
+warm feeling for Socrates the man, independent of what he said, which is
+little known. Homer's works are certainly better known, but no one cares
+personally for Homer any more than for any other shade.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Why not go back to Moses? We've got the evening before us
+for digging up people.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Moses is a very good illustration. No name of antiquity
+is better known, and yet I fancy he does not awaken the same kind of
+popular liking that Socrates does.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Fudge! You just get up in any lecture assembly and
+propose three cheers for Socrates, and see where you'll be. Mandeville
+ought to be a missionary, and read Robert Browning to the Fijis.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. How do you account for the alleged personal regard for
+Socrates?
+
+THE PARSON. Because the world called Christian is still more than half
+heathen.
+
+MANDEVILLE. He was a plain man; his sympathies were with the people; he
+had what is roughly known as "horse-sense," and he was homely. Franklin
+and Abraham Lincoln belong to his class. They were all philosophers of
+the shrewd sort, and they all had humor. It was fortunate for Lincoln
+that, with his other qualities, he was homely. That was the last
+touching recommendation to the popular heart.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Do you remember that ugly brown-stone statue of St.
+Antonio by the bridge in Sorrento? He must have been a coarse saint,
+patron of pigs as he was, but I don't know any one anywhere, or the
+homely stone image of one, so loved by the people.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Ugliness being trump, I wonder more people don't win.
+Mandeville, why don't you get up a "centenary" of Socrates, and put up
+his statue in the Central Park? It would make that one of Lincoln in
+Union Square look beautiful.
+
+THE PARSON. Oh, you'll see that some day, when they have a museum there
+illustrating the "Science of Religion."
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Doubtless, to go back to what we were talking of,
+the world has a fondness for some authors, and thinks of them with an
+affectionate and half-pitying familiarity; and it may be that this
+grows out of something in their lives quite as much as anything in
+their writings. There seems to be more disposition of personal liking
+to Thackeray than to Dickens, now both are dead,--a result that would
+hardly have been predicted when the world was crying over Little Nell,
+or agreeing to hate Becky Sharp.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. What was that you were telling about Charles Lamb,
+the other day, Mandeville? Is not the popular liking for him somewhat
+independent of his writings?
+
+MANDEVILLE. He is a striking example of an author who is loved. Very
+likely the remembrance of his tribulations has still something to do
+with the tenderness felt for him. He supported no dignity and permitted
+a familiarity which indicated no self-appreciation of his real rank in
+the world of letters. I have heard that his acquaintances familiarly
+called him "Charley."
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a relief to know that! Do you happen to know what
+Socrates was called?
+
+MANDEVILLE. I have seen people who knew Lamb very well. One of them told
+me, as illustrating his want of dignity, that as he was going home late
+one night through the nearly empty streets, he was met by a roystering
+party who were making a night of it from tavern to tavern. They fell
+upon Lamb, attracted by his odd figure and hesitating manner, and,
+hoisting him on their shoulders, carried him off, singing as they went.
+Lamb enjoyed the lark, and did not tell them who he was. When they were
+tired of lugging him, they lifted him, with much effort and difficulty,
+to the top of a high wall, and left him there amid the broken bottles,
+utterly unable to get down. Lamb remained there philosophically in the
+enjoyment of his novel adventure, until a passing watchman rescued him
+from his ridiculous situation.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. How did the story get out?
+
+MANDEVILLE. Oh, Lamb told all about it next morning; and when asked
+afterwards why he did so, he replied that there was no fun in it unless
+he told it.
+
+
+
+
+
+SIXTH STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The King sat in the winter-house in the ninth month, and there was a
+fire on the hearth burning before him.... When Jehudi had read three or
+four leaves he cut it with the penknife.
+
+That seems to be a pleasant and home-like picture from a not very remote
+period,--less than twenty-five hundred years ago, and many centuries
+after the fall of Troy. And that was not so very long ago, for Thebes,
+in the splendid streets of which Homer wandered and sang to the kings
+when Memphis, whose ruins are older than history, was its younger rival,
+was twelve centuries old when Paris ran away with Helen.
+
+I am sorry that the original--and you can usually do anything with
+the "original"--does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant
+picture. I should like to believe that Jehoiakim--for that was the
+singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone--had just
+received the Memphis "Palimpsest," fifteen days in advance of the date
+of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that
+monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read. I should like to have seen
+it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis, and Necho
+was organizing his campaign against Carchemish. If Jehoiakim took the
+"Attic Quarterly," he might have read its comments on the banishment
+of the Alcmaeonida, and its gibes at Solon for his prohibitory laws,
+forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and
+interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail
+the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with
+contributions from two rising poets,--a lyric of love by Sappho, and an
+ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, with an editorial note explaining that
+the Maces was not responsible for the sentiments of the poem.
+
+But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before the backlog in his
+winter-house had other things to think of. For Nebuchadnezzar was coming
+that way with the chariots and horses of Babylon and a great crowd of
+marauders; and the king had not even the poor choice whether he would
+be the vassal of the Chaldean or of the Egyptian. To us, this is only
+a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic
+spaces. It was no doubt a vulgar enough scene of war and plunder. The
+great captains of that age went about to harry each other's territories
+and spoil each other's cities very much as we do nowadays, and for
+similar reasons;--Napoleon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the Small in
+Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, Great Scott in Mexico! Men have not
+changed much;--The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-garden in the third
+month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. He cut
+the leaves of "Scribner's Monthly" with his penknife, and thought of
+Jehoiakim.
+
+That seems as real as the other. In the garden, which is a room of the
+house, the tall callas, rooted in the ground, stand about the fountain;
+the sun, streaming through the glass, illumines the many-hued flowers. I
+wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy-bug on his passion-vine, and
+if he had any way of removing the scale-bug from his African acacia? One
+would like to know, too, how he treated the red spider on the Le Marque
+rose. The record is silent. I do not doubt he had all these insects in
+his winter-garden, and the aphidae besides; and he could not smoke them
+out with tobacco, for the world had not yet fallen into its second stage
+of the knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden tobacco-plant.
+
+I confess that this little picture of a fire on the hearth so many
+centuries ago helps to make real and interesting to me that somewhat
+misty past. No doubt the lotus and the acanthus from the Nile grew in
+that winter-house, and perhaps Jehoiakim attempted--the most difficult
+thing in the world the cultivation of the wild flowers from Lebanon.
+Perhaps Jehoiakim was interested also, as I am through this ancient
+fireplace,--which is a sort of domestic window into the ancient
+world,--in the loves of Bernice and Abaces at the court of the Pharaohs.
+I see that it is the same thing as the sentiment--perhaps it is the
+shrinking which every soul that is a soul has, sooner or later, from
+isolation--which grew up between Herbert and the Young Lady Staying With
+Us. Jeremiah used to come in to that fireside very much as the Parson
+does to ours. The Parson, to be sure, never prophesies, but he grumbles,
+and is the chorus in the play that sings the everlasting ai ai of "I
+told you so!" Yet we like the Parson. He is the sprig of bitter herb
+that makes the pottage wholesome. I should rather, ten times over,
+dispense with the flatterers and the smooth-sayers than the grumblers.
+But the grumblers are of two sorts,--the healthful-toned and the
+whiners. There are makers of beer who substitute for the clean bitter of
+the hops some deleterious drug, and then seek to hide the fraud by some
+cloying sweet. There is nothing of this sickish drug in the Parson's
+talk, nor was there in that of Jeremiah, I sometimes think there is
+scarcely enough of this wholesome tonic in modern society. The Parson
+says he never would give a child sugar-coated pills. Mandeville says he
+never would give them any. After all, you cannot help liking Mandeville.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+We were talking of this late news from Jerusalem. The Fire-Tender was
+saying that it is astonishing how much is telegraphed us from the East
+that is not half so interesting. He was at a loss philosophically to
+account for the fact that the world is so eager to know the news of
+yesterday which is unimportant, and so indifferent to that of the day
+before which is of some moment.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I suspect that it arises from the want of imagination.
+People need to touch the facts, and nearness in time is contiguity. It
+would excite no interest to bulletin the last siege of Jerusalem in a
+village where the event was unknown, if the date was appended; and yet
+the account of it is incomparably more exciting than that of the siege
+of Metz.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. The daily news is a necessity. I cannot get along without
+my morning paper. The other morning I took it up, and was absorbed in
+the telegraphic columns for an hour nearly. I thoroughly enjoyed the
+feeling of immediate contact with all the world of yesterday, until
+I read among the minor items that Patrick Donahue, of the city of New
+York, died of a sunstroke. If he had frozen to death, I should have
+enjoyed that; but to die of sunstroke in February seemed inappropriate,
+and I turned to the date of the paper. When I found it was printed in
+July, I need not say that I lost all interest in it, though why the
+trivialities and crimes and accidents, relating to people I never knew,
+were not as good six months after date as twelve hours, I cannot say.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. You know that in Concord the latest news, except
+a remark or two by Thoreau or Emerson, is the Vedas. I believe the
+Rig-Veda is read at the breakfast-table instead of the Boston journals.
+
+THE PARSON. I know it is read afterward instead of the Bible.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That is only because it is supposed to be older. I have
+understood that the Bible is very well spoken of there, but it is not
+antiquated enough to be an authority.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. There was a project on foot to put it into the
+circulating library, but the title New in the second part was considered
+objectionable.
+
+HERBERT. Well, I have a good deal of sympathy with Concord as to the
+news. We are fed on a daily diet of trivial events and gossip, of
+the unfruitful sayings of thoughtless men and women, until our mental
+digestion is seriously impaired; the day will come when no one will be
+able to sit down to a thoughtful, well-wrought book and assimilate its
+contents.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I doubt if a daily newspaper is a necessity, in the higher
+sense of the word.
+
+THE PARSON. Nobody supposes it is to women,--that is, if they can see
+each other.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Don't interrupt, unless you have something to say; though
+I should like to know how much gossip there is afloat that the minister
+does not know. The newspaper may be needed in society, but how quickly
+it drops out of mind when one goes beyond the bounds of what is called
+civilization. You remember when we were in the depths of the woods last
+summer how difficult it was to get up any interest in the files of late
+papers that reached us, and how unreal all the struggle and turmoil of
+the world seemed. We stood apart, and could estimate things at their
+true value.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Yes, that was real life. I never tired of the guide's
+stories; there was some interest in the intelligence that a deer had
+been down to eat the lily-pads at the foot of the lake the night before;
+that a bear's track was seen on the trail we crossed that day; even
+Mandeville's fish-stories had a certain air of probability; and how to
+roast a trout in the ashes and serve him hot and juicy and clean, and
+how to cook soup and prepare coffee and heat dish-water in one tin-pail,
+were vital problems.
+
+THE PARSON. You would have had no such problems at home. Why will people
+go so far to put themselves to such inconvenience? I hate the woods.
+Isolation breeds conceit; there are no people so conceited as those who
+dwell in remote wildernesses and live mostly alone.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I feel humble in the presence of mountains,
+and in the vast stretches of the wilderness.
+
+THE PARSON. I'll be bound a woman would feel just as nobody would expect
+her to feel, under given circumstances.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I think the reason why the newspaper and the world it
+carries take no hold of us in the wilderness is that we become a kind of
+vegetable ourselves when we go there. I have often attempted to improve
+my mind in the woods with good solid books. You might as well offer a
+bunch of celery to an oyster. The mind goes to sleep: the senses and the
+instincts wake up. The best I can do when it rains, or the trout won't
+bite, is to read Dumas's novels. Their ingenuity will almost keep a man
+awake after supper, by the camp-fire. And there is a kind of unity about
+them that I like; the history is as good as the morality.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I always wondered where Mandeville got his historical
+facts.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Mandeville misrepresents himself in the woods. I heard him
+one night repeat "The Vision of Sir Launfal"--(THE FIRE-TENDER. Which
+comes very near being our best poem.)--as we were crossing the lake, and
+the guides became so absorbed in it that they forgot to paddle, and sat
+listening with open mouths, as if it had been a panther story.
+
+THE PARSON. Mandeville likes to show off well enough. I heard that he
+related to a woods' boy up there the whole of the Siege of Troy. The
+boy was very much interested, and said "there'd been a man up there that
+spring from Troy, looking up timber." Mandeville always carries the news
+when he goes into the country.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I'm going to take the Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer;
+it's the nearest to anything like news we've had from his pulpit in ten
+years. But, seriously, the boy was very well informed. He'd heard of
+Albany; his father took in the "Weekly Tribune," and he had a partial
+conception of Horace Greeley.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I never went so far out of the world in America yet that
+the name of Horace Greeley did n't rise up before me. One of the first
+questions asked by any camp-fire is, "Did ye ever see Horace?"
+
+HERBERT. Which shows the power of the press again. But I have often
+remarked how little real conception of the moving world, as it is,
+people in remote regions get from the newspaper. It needs to be read in
+the midst of events. A chip cast ashore in a refluent eddy tells no tale
+of the force and swiftness of the current.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I don't exactly get the drift of that last remark; but
+I rather like a remark that I can't understand; like the landlady's
+indigestible bread, it stays by you.
+
+HERBERT. I see that I must talk in words of one syllable. The newspaper
+has little effect upon the remote country mind, because the remote
+country mind is interested in a very limited number of things. Besides,
+as the Parson says, it is conceited. The most accomplished scholar will
+be the butt of all the guides in the woods, because he cannot follow a
+trail that would puzzle a sable (saple the trappers call it).
+
+THE PARSON. It's enough to read the summer letters that people write
+to the newspapers from the country and the woods. Isolated from the
+activity of the world, they come to think that the little adventures of
+their stupid days and nights are important. Talk about that being real
+life! Compare the letters such people write with the other contents of
+the newspaper, and you will see which life is real. That's one reason I
+hate to have summer come, the country letters set in.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I should like to see something the Parson does n't hate to
+have come.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Except his quarter's salary; and the meeting of the American
+Board.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I don't see that we are getting any nearer the solution
+of the original question. The world is evidently interested in events
+simply because they are recent.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I have a theory that a newspaper might be published at
+little cost, merely by reprinting the numbers of years before, only
+altering the dates; just as the Parson preaches over his sermons.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. It's evident we must have a higher order of
+news-gatherers. It has come to this, that the newspaper furnishes
+thought-material for all the world, actually prescribes from day to day
+the themes the world shall think on and talk about. The occupation of
+news-gathering becomes, therefore, the most important. When you think of
+it, it is astonishing that this department should not be in the hands
+of the ablest men, accomplished scholars, philosophical observers,
+discriminating selectors of the news of the world that is worth thinking
+over and talking about. The editorial comments frequently are able
+enough, but is it worth while keeping an expensive mill going to grind
+chaff? I sometimes wonder, as I open my morning paper, if nothing did
+happen in the twenty-four hours except crimes, accidents, defalcations,
+deaths of unknown loafers, robberies, monstrous births,--say about the
+level of police-court news.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I have even noticed that murders have deteriorated; they
+are not so high-toned and mysterious as they used to be.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. It is true that the newspapers have improved vastly
+within the last decade.
+
+HERBERT. I think, for one, that they are very much above the level of
+the ordinary gossip of the country.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. But I am tired of having the under-world still occupy
+so much room in the newspapers. The reporters are rather more alert for
+a dog-fight than a philological convention. It must be that the good
+deeds of the world outnumber the bad in any given day; and what a good
+reflex action it would have on society if they could be more fully
+reported than the bad! I suppose the Parson would call this the
+Enthusiasm of Humanity.
+
+THE PARSON. You'll see how far you can lift yourself up by your
+boot-straps.
+
+HERBERT. I wonder what influence on the quality (I say nothing of
+quantity) of news the coming of women into the reporter's and editor's
+work will have.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. There are the baby-shows; they make cheerful reading.
+
+THE MISTRESS. All of them got up by speculating men, who impose upon the
+vanity of weak women.
+
+HERBERT. I think women reporters are more given to personal details
+and gossip than the men. When I read the Washington correspondence I am
+proud of my country, to see how many Apollo Belvederes, Adonises, how
+much marble brow and piercing eye and hyacinthine locks, we have in the
+two houses of Congress.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. That's simply because women understand the personal
+weakness of men; they have a long score of personal flattery to pay off
+too.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I think women will bring in elements of brightness,
+picturesqueness, and purity very much needed. Women have a power
+of investing simple ordinary things with a charm; men are bungling
+narrators compared with them.
+
+THE PARSON. The mistake they make is in trying to write, and especially
+to "stump-speak," like men; next to an effeminate man there is nothing
+so disagreeable as a mannish woman.
+
+HERBERT. I heard one once address a legislative committee. The knowing
+air, the familiar, jocular, smart manner, the nodding and winking
+innuendoes, supposed to be those of a man "up to snuff," and au fait in
+political wiles, were inexpressibly comical. And yet the exhibition
+was pathetic, for it had the suggestive vulgarity of a woman in man's
+clothes. The imitation is always a dreary failure.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Such women are the rare exceptions. I am ready to defend
+my sex; but I won't attempt to defend both sexes in one.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I have great hope that women will bring into the
+newspaper an elevating influence; the common and sweet life of society
+is much better fitted to entertain and instruct us than the exceptional
+and extravagant. I confess (saving the Mistress's presence) that the
+evening talk over the dessert at dinner is much more entertaining and
+piquant than the morning paper, and often as important.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I think the subject had better be changed.
+
+MANDEVILLE. The person, not the subject. There is no entertainment
+so full of quiet pleasure as the hearing a lady of cultivation and
+refinement relate her day's experience in her daily rounds of calls,
+charitable visits, shopping, errands of relief and condolence. The
+evening budget is better than the finance minister's.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. That's even so. My wife will pick up more news in six
+hours than I can get in a week, and I'm fond of news.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I don't mean gossip, by any means, or scandal. A woman of
+culture skims over that like a bird, never touching it with the tip of a
+wing. What she brings home is the freshness and brightness of life. She
+touches everything so daintily, she hits off a character in a sentence,
+she gives the pith of a dialogue without tediousness, she mimics without
+vulgarity; her narration sparkles, but it does n't sting. The picture
+of her day is full of vivacity, and it gives new value and freshness to
+common things. If we could only have on the stage such actresses as we
+have in the drawing-room!
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. We want something more of this grace, sprightliness,
+and harmless play of the finer life of society in the newspaper.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder Mandeville does n't marry, and become a
+permanent subscriber to his embodied idea of a newspaper.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. Perhaps he does not relish the idea of being unable to
+stop his subscription.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Parson, won't you please punch that fire, and give us
+more blaze? we are getting into the darkness of socialism.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Herbert returned to us in March. The Young Lady was spending the winter
+with us, and March, in spite of the calendar, turned out to be a winter
+month. It usually is in New England, and April too, for that matter. And
+I cannot say it is unfortunate for us. There are so many topics to be
+turned over and settled at our fireside that a winter of ordinary length
+would make little impression on the list. The fireside is, after all,
+a sort of private court of chancery, where nothing ever does come to a
+final decision. The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen
+one's own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does
+believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and
+defence. A man left to himself drifts about like a boat on a calm lake;
+it is only when the wind blows that the boat goes anywhere.
+
+Herbert said he had been dipping into the recent novels written by
+women, here and there, with a view to noting the effect upon literature
+of this sudden and rather overwhelming accession to it. There was a good
+deal of talk about it evening after evening, off and on, and I can only
+undertake to set down fragments of it.
+
+HERBERT. I should say that the distinguishing feature of the literature
+of this day is the prominence women have in its production. They figure
+in most of the magazines, though very rarely in the scholarly and
+critical reviews, and in thousands of newspapers; to them we are
+indebted for the oceans of Sunday-school books, and they write the
+majority of the novels, the serial stories, and they mainly pour out the
+watery flood of tales in the weekly papers. Whether this is to result in
+more good than evil it is impossible yet to say, and perhaps it would be
+unjust to say, until this generation has worked off its froth, and women
+settle down to artistic, conscientious labor in literature.
+
+THE MISTRESS. You don't mean to say that George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell,
+and George Sand, and Mrs. Browning, before her marriage and severe
+attack of spiritism, are less true to art than contemporary men
+novelists and poets.
+
+HERBERT. You name some exceptions that show the bright side of the
+picture, not only for the present, but for the future. Perhaps genius
+has no sex; but ordinary talent has. I refer to the great body of
+novels, which you would know by internal evidence were written by women.
+They are of two sorts: the domestic story, entirely unidealized, and as
+flavorless as water-gruel; and the spiced novel, generally immoral in
+tendency, in which the social problems are handled, unhappy marriages,
+affinity and passional attraction, bigamy, and the violation of the
+seventh commandment. These subjects are treated in the rawest manner,
+without any settled ethics, with little discrimination of eternal right
+and wrong, and with very little sense of responsibility for what is set
+forth. Many of these novels are merely the blind outbursts of a nature
+impatient of restraint and the conventionalities of society, and are as
+chaotic as the untrained minds that produce them.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Don't you think these novels fairly represent a social
+condition of unrest and upheaval?
+
+HERBERT. Very likely; and they help to create and spread abroad the
+discontent they describe. Stories of bigamy (sometimes disguised by
+divorce), of unhappy marriages, where the injured wife, through an
+entire volume, is on the brink of falling into the arms of a sneaking
+lover, until death kindly removes the obstacle, and the two souls, who
+were born for each other, but got separated in the cradle, melt and
+mingle into one in the last chapter, are not healthful reading for maids
+or mothers.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Or men.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. The most disagreeable object to me in modern literature
+is the man the women novelists have introduced as the leading character;
+the women who come in contact with him seem to be fascinated by his
+disdainful mien, his giant strength, and his brutal manner. He is broad
+across the shoulders, heavily moulded, yet as lithe as a cat; has an
+ugly scar across his right cheek; has been in the four quarters of the
+globe; knows seventeen languages; had a harem in Turkey and a Fayaway in
+the Marquesas; can be as polished as Bayard in the drawing-room, but is
+as gloomy as Conrad in the library; has a terrible eye and a withering
+glance, but can be instantly subdued by a woman's hand, if it is not
+his wife's; and through all his morose and vicious career has carried a
+heart as pure as a violet.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Don't you think the Count of Monte Cristo is the elder
+brother of Rochester?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. One is a mere hero of romance; the other is meant for a
+real man.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I don't see that the men novel-writers are better than the
+women.
+
+HERBERT. That's not the question; but what are women who write so large
+a proportion of the current stories bringing into literature? Aside
+from the question of morals, and the absolutely demoralizing manner
+of treating social questions, most of their stories are vapid and weak
+beyond expression, and are slovenly in composition, showing neither
+study, training, nor mental discipline.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Considering that women have been shut out from the
+training of the universities, and have few opportunities for the wide
+observation that men enjoy, isn't it pretty well that the foremost
+living writers of fiction are women?
+
+HERBERT. You can say that for the moment, since Thackeray and Dickens
+have just died. But it does not affect the general estimate. We
+are inundated with a flood of weak writing. Take the Sunday-school
+literature, largely the product of women; it has n't as much character
+as a dried apple pie. I don't know what we are coming to if the presses
+keep on running.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. We are living, we are dwelling, in a grand and awful
+time; I'm glad I don't write novels.
+
+THE PARSON. So am I.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I tried a Sunday-school book once; but I made the good
+boy end in the poorhouse, and the bad boy go to Congress; and the
+publisher said it wouldn't do, the public wouldn't stand that sort of
+thing. Nobody but the good go to Congress.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Herbert, what do you think women are good for?
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. That's a poser.
+
+HERBERT. Well, I think they are in a tentative state as to literature,
+and we cannot yet tell what they will do. Some of our most brilliant
+books of travel, correspondence, and writing on topics in which their
+sympathies have warmly interested them, are by women. Some of them are
+also strong writers in the daily journals.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I 'm not sure there's anything a woman cannot do as well as
+a man, if she sets her heart on it.
+
+THE PARSON. That's because she's no conscience.
+
+CHORUS. O Parson!
+
+THE PARSON. Well, it does n't trouble her, if she wants to do anything.
+She looks at the end, not the means. A woman, set on anything, will walk
+right through the moral crockery without wincing. She'd be a great deal
+more unscrupulous in politics than the average man. Did you ever see a
+female lobbyist? Or a criminal? It is Lady Macbeth who does not falter.
+Don't raise your hands at me! The sweetest angel or the coolest devil is
+a woman. I see in some of the modern novels we have been talking of the
+same unscrupulous daring, a blindness to moral distinctions, a constant
+exaltation of a passion into a virtue, an entire disregard of the
+immutable laws on which the family and society rest. And you ask lawyers
+and trustees how scrupulous women are in business transactions!
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Women are often ignorant of affairs, and, besides, they
+may have a notion often that a woman ought to be privileged more than
+a man in business matters; but I tell you, as a rule, that if men
+would consult their wives, they would go a deal straighter in business
+operations than they do go.
+
+THE PARSON. We are all poor sinners. But I've another indictment against
+the women writers. We get no good old-fashioned love-stories from them.
+It's either a quarrel of discordant natures one a panther, and the other
+a polar bear--for courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway
+accident; or a long wrangle of married life between two unpleasant
+people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart. I suppose,
+by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful
+uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have no doubt that the
+majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried. But
+it's easier to find a dodo than a new and good love-story.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I suppose the old style of plot is exhausted. Everything in
+man and outside of him has been turned over so often that I should think
+the novelists would cease simply from want of material.
+
+THE PARSON. Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new
+creation, and combinations are simply endless. Even if we did not have
+new material in the daily change of society, and there were only a
+fixed number of incidents and characters in life, invention could not be
+exhausted on them. I amuse myself sometimes with my kaleidoscope, but
+I can never reproduce a figure. No, no. I cannot say that you may not
+exhaust everything else: we may get all the secrets of a nature into a
+book by and by, but the novel is immortal, for it deals with men.
+
+The Parson's vehemence came very near carrying him into a sermon; and
+as nobody has the privilege of replying to his sermons, so none of the
+circle made any reply now.
+
+Our Next Door mumbled something about his hair standing on end, to hear
+a minister defending the novel; but it did not interrupt the general
+silence. Silence is unnoticed when people sit before a fire; it would be
+intolerable if they sat and looked at each other.
+
+The wind had risen during the evening, and Mandeville remarked, as they
+rose to go, that it had a spring sound in it, but it was as cold as
+winter. The Mistress said she heard a bird that morning singing in the
+sun a spring song, it was a winter bird, but it sang.
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTH STUDY
+
+
+We have been much interested in what is called the Gothic revival. We
+have spent I don't know how many evenings in looking over Herbert's
+plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his vain efforts to cover
+with Gothic roofs the vast number of large rooms which the Young Lady
+draws in her sketch of a small house.
+
+I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is capable of infinite
+modification, so that every house built in that style may be as
+different from every other house as one tree is from every other, can be
+adapted to our modern uses, and will be, when artists catch its spirit
+instead of merely copying its old forms. But just now we are taking the
+Gothic very literally, as we took the Greek at one time, or as we should
+probably have taken the Saracenic, if the Moors had not been colored.
+Not even the cholera is so contagious in this country as a style of
+architecture which we happen to catch; the country is just now broken
+out all over with the Mansard-roof epidemic.
+
+And in secular architecture we do not study what is adapted to our
+climate any more than in ecclesiastic architecture we adopt that which
+is suited to our religion.
+
+We are building a great many costly churches here and there, we
+Protestants, and as the most of them are ill adapted to our forms of
+worship, it may be necessary and best for us to change our religion in
+order to save our investments. I am aware that this would be a grave
+step, and we should not hasten to throw overboard Luther and the right
+of private judgment without reflection. And yet, if it is necessary to
+revive the ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not in its spirit (that
+we nowhere do), but in the form which served another age and another
+faith, and if, as it appears, we have already a great deal of money
+invested in this reproduction, it may be more prudent to go forward than
+to go back. The question is, "Cannot one easier change his creed than
+his pew?"
+
+I occupy a seat in church which is an admirable one for reflection, but
+I cannot see or hear much that is going on in what we like to call the
+apse. There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column, right in
+front of me, and I am as much protected from the minister as Old Put's
+troops were from the British, behind the stone wall at Bunker's Hill. I
+can hear his voice occasionally wandering round in the arches overhead,
+and I recognize the tone, because he is a friend of mine and an
+excellent man, but what he is saying I can very seldom make out. If
+there was any incense burning, I could smell it, and that would be
+something. I rather like the smell of incense, and it has its holy
+associations. But there is no smell in our church, except of bad
+air,--for there is no provision for ventilation in the splendid and
+costly edifice. The reproduction of the old Gothic is so complete that
+the builders even seem to have brought over the ancient air from one
+of the churches of the Middle Ages,--you would declare it had n't been
+changed in two centuries.
+
+I am expected to fix my attention during the service upon one man, who
+stands in the centre of the apse and has a sounding-board behind him in
+order to throw his voice out of the sacred semicircular space (where the
+altar used to stand, but now the sounding-board takes the place of
+the altar) and scatter it over the congregation at large, and send it
+echoing up in the groined roof I always like to hear a minister who is
+unfamiliar with the house, and who has a loud voice, try to fill the
+edifice. The more he roars and gives himself with vehemence to the
+effort, the more the building roars in indistinguishable noise and
+hubbub. By the time he has said (to suppose a case), "The Lord is in
+his holy temple," and has passed on to say, "let all the earth keep
+silence," the building is repeating "The Lord is in his holy temple"
+from half a dozen different angles and altitudes, rolling it and
+growling it, and is not keeping silence at all. A man who understands
+it waits until the house has had its say, and has digested one passage,
+before he launches another into the vast, echoing spaces. I am expected,
+as I said, to fix my eye and mind on the minister, the central point
+of the service. But the pillar hides him. Now if there were several
+ministers in the church, dressed in such gorgeous colors that I could
+see them at the distance from the apse at which my limited income
+compels me to sit, and candles were burning, and censers were swinging,
+and the platform was full of the sacred bustle of a gorgeous ritual
+worship, and a bell rang to tell me the holy moments, I should not mind
+the pillar at all. I should sit there, like any other Goth, and enjoy
+it. But, as I have said, the pastor is a friend of mine, and I like
+to look at him on Sunday, and hear what he says, for he always says
+something worth hearing. I am on such terms with him, indeed we all are,
+that it would be pleasant to have the service of a little more social
+nature, and more human. When we put him away off in the apse, and set
+him up for a Goth, and then seat ourselves at a distance, scattered
+about among the pillars, the whole thing seems to me a trifle unnatural.
+Though I do not mean to say that the congregations do not "enjoy their
+religion" in their splendid edifices which cost so much money and are
+really so beautiful.
+
+A good many people have the idea, so it seems, that Gothic architecture
+and Christianity are essentially one and the same thing. Just as many
+regard it as an act of piety to work an altar cloth or to cushion a
+pulpit. It may be, and it may not be.
+
+Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us a valuable religious
+experience, bringing out many of the Christian virtues. It may have
+had its origin in pride, but it is all being overruled for our good. Of
+course I need n't explain that it is the thirteenth century ecclesiastic
+Gothic that is epidemic in this country; and I think it has attacked the
+Congregational and the other non-ritual churches more violently than any
+others. We have had it here in its most beautiful and dangerous forms. I
+believe we are pretty much all of us supplied with a Gothic church now.
+Such has been the enthusiasm in this devout direction, that I should not
+be surprised to see our rich private citizens putting up Gothic churches
+for their individual amusement and sanctification. As the day will
+probably come when every man in Hartford will live in his own mammoth,
+five-story granite insurance building, it may not be unreasonable to
+expect that every man will sport his own Gothic church. It is beginning
+to be discovered that the Gothic sort of church edifice is fatal to
+the Congregational style of worship that has been prevalent here in
+New England; but it will do nicely (as they say in Boston) for private
+devotion.
+
+There isn't a finer or purer church than ours any where, inside and
+outside Gothic to the last. The elevation of the nave gives it even that
+"high-shouldered" appearance which seemed more than anything else to
+impress Mr. Hawthorne in the cathedral at Amiens. I fancy that for
+genuine high-shoulderness we are not exceeded by any church in the city.
+Our chapel in the rear is as Gothic as the rest of it,--a beautiful
+little edifice. The committee forgot to make any more provision for
+ventilating that than the church, and it takes a pretty well-seasoned
+Christian to stay in it long at a time. The Sunday-school is held there,
+and it is thought to be best to accustom the children to bad air before
+they go into the church. The poor little dears shouldn't have the
+wickedness and impurity of this world break on them too suddenly. If the
+stranger noticed any lack about our church, it would be that of a spire.
+There is a place for one; indeed, it was begun, and then the builders
+seem to have stopped, with the notion that it would grow itself from
+such a good root. It is a mistake however, to suppose that we do not
+know that the church has what the profane here call a "stump-tail"
+appearance. But the profane are as ignorant of history as they are of
+true Gothic. All the Old World cathedrals were the work of centuries.
+That at Milan is scarcely finished yet; the unfinished spires of the
+Cologne cathedral are one of the best-known features of it. I doubt if
+it would be in the Gothic spirit to finish a church at once. We can tell
+cavilers that we shall have a spire at the proper time, and not a minute
+before. It may depend a little upon what the Baptists do, who are to
+build near us. I, for one, think we had better wait and see how high the
+Baptist spire is before we run ours up. The church is everything that
+could be desired inside. There is the nave, with its lofty and beautiful
+arched ceiling; there are the side aisles, and two elegant rows of stone
+pillars, stained so as to be a perfect imitation of stucco; there is
+the apse, with its stained glass and exquisite lines; and there is an
+organ-loft over the front entrance, with a rose window. Nothing was
+wanting, so far as we could see, except that we should adapt ourselves
+to the circumstances; and that we have been trying to do ever since. It
+may be well to relate how we do it, for the benefit of other inchoate
+Goths.
+
+It was found that if we put up the organ in the loft, it would hide the
+beautiful rose window. Besides, we wanted congregational singing, and
+if we hired a choir, and hung it up there under the roof, like a cage of
+birds, we should not have congregational singing. We therefore left
+the organ-loft vacant, making no further use of it than to satisfy our
+Gothic cravings. As for choir,--several of the singers of the church
+volunteered to sit together in the front side-seats, and as there was no
+place for an organ, they gallantly rallied round a melodeon,--or perhaps
+it is a cabinet organ,--a charming instrument, and, as everybody knows,
+entirely in keeping with the pillars, arches, and great spaces of a real
+Gothic edifice. It is the union of simplicity with grandeur, for which
+we have all been looking. I need not say to those who have ever heard a
+melodeon, that there is nothing like it. It is rare, even in the finest
+churches on the Continent. And we had congregational singing. And it
+went very well indeed. One of the advantages of pure congregational
+singing, is that you can join in the singing whether you have a voice
+or not. The disadvantage is, that your neighbor can do the same. It is
+strange what an uncommonly poor lot of voices there is, even among good
+people. But we enjoy it. If you do not enjoy it, you can change your
+seat until you get among a good lot.
+
+So far, everything went well. But it was next discovered that it was
+difficult to hear the minister, who had a very handsome little desk in
+the apse, somewhat distant from the bulk of the congregation; still, we
+could most of us see him on a clear day. The church was admirably built
+for echoes, and the centre of the house was very favorable to them. When
+you sat in the centre of the house, it sometimes seemed as if three or
+four ministers were speaking.
+
+It is usually so in cathedrals; the Right Reverend So-and-So is
+assisted by the very Reverend Such-and-Such, and the good deal Reverend
+Thus-and-Thus, and so on. But a good deal of the minister's voice
+appeared to go up into the groined arches, and, as there was no one up
+there, some of his best things were lost. We also had a notion that some
+of it went into the cavernous organ-loft. It would have been all right
+if there had been a choir there, for choirs usually need more preaching,
+and pay less heed to it, than any other part of the congregation. Well,
+we drew a sort of screen over the organ-loft; but the result was not
+as marked as we had hoped. We next devised a sounding-board,--a sort of
+mammoth clamshell, painted white,--and erected it behind the minister.
+It had a good effect on the minister. It kept him up straight to his
+work. So long as he kept his head exactly in the focus, his voice
+went out and did not return to him; but if he moved either way, he was
+assailed by a Babel of clamoring echoes. There was no opportunity for
+him to splurge about from side to side of the pulpit, as some do. And if
+he raised his voice much, or attempted any extra flights, he was liable
+to be drowned in a refluent sea of his own eloquence. And he could
+hear the congregation as well as they could hear him. All the coughs,
+whispers, noises, were gathered in the wooden tympanum behind him, and
+poured into his ears.
+
+But the sounding-board was an improvement, and we advanced to bolder
+measures; having heard a little, we wanted to hear more. Besides, those
+who sat in front began to be discontented with the melodeon. There are
+depths in music which the melodeon, even when it is called a cabinet
+organ, with a colored boy at the bellows, cannot sound. The melodeon was
+not, originally, designed for the Gothic worship. We determined to have
+an organ, and we speculated whether, by erecting it in the apse, we
+could not fill up that elegant portion of the church, and compel the
+preacher's voice to leave it, and go out over the pews. It would of
+course do something to efface the main beauty of a Gothic church; but
+something must be done, and we began a series of experiments to test the
+probable effects of putting the organ and choir behind the minister. We
+moved the desk to the very front of the platform, and erected behind
+it a high, square board screen, like a section of tight fence round the
+fair-grounds. This did help matters. The minister spoke with more ease,
+and we could hear him better. If the screen had been intended to stay
+there, we should have agitated the subject of painting it. But this was
+only an experiment.
+
+Our next move was to shove the screen back and mount the volunteer
+singers, melodeon and all, upon the platform,--some twenty of them
+crowded together behind the minister. The effect was beautiful. It
+seemed as if we had taken care to select the finest-looking people in
+the congregation,--much to the injury of the congregation, of course, as
+seen from the platform. There are few congregations that can stand
+this sort of culling, though ours can endure it as well as any; yet it
+devolves upon those of us who remain the responsibility of looking as
+well as we can.
+
+The experiment was a success, so far as appearances went, but when the
+screen went back, the minister's voice went back with it. We could not
+hear him very well, though we could hear the choir as plain as day. We
+have thought of remedying this last defect by putting the high screen in
+front of the singers, and close to the minister, as it was before. This
+would make the singers invisible,--"though lost to sight, to memory
+dear,"--what is sometimes called an "angel choir," when the singers (and
+the melodeon) are concealed, with the most subdued and religious effect.
+It is often so in cathedrals.
+
+This plan would have another advantage. The singers on the platform, all
+handsome and well dressed, distract our attention from the minister,
+and what he is saying. We cannot help looking at them, studying all the
+faces and all the dresses. If one of them sits up very straight, he is
+a rebuke to us; if he "lops" over, we wonder why he does n't sit up; if
+his hair is white, we wonder whether it is age or family peculiarity; if
+he yawns, we want to yawn; if he takes up a hymn-book, we wonder if he
+is uninterested in the sermon; we look at the bonnets, and query if that
+is the latest spring style, or whether we are to look for another; if
+he shaves close, we wonder why he doesn't let his beard grow; if he has
+long whiskers, we wonder why he does n't trim 'em; if she sighs, we feel
+sorry; if she smiles, we would like to know what it is about. And,
+then, suppose any of the singers should ever want to eat fennel, or
+peppermints, or Brown's troches, and pass them round! Suppose the
+singers, more or less of them, should sneeze!
+
+Suppose one or two of them, as the handsomest people sometimes will,
+should go to sleep! In short, the singers there take away all our
+attention from the minister, and would do so if they were the homeliest
+people in the world. We must try something else.
+
+It is needless to explain that a Gothic religious life is not an idle
+one.
+
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTH STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Perhaps the clothes question is exhausted, philosophically. I cannot
+but regret that the Poet of the Breakfast-Table, who appears to have
+an uncontrollable penchant for saying the things you would like to
+say yourself, has alluded to the anachronism of "Sir Coeur de Lion
+Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit."
+
+A great many scribblers have felt the disadvantage of writing after
+Montaigne; and it is impossible to tell how much originality in others
+Dr. Holmes has destroyed in this country. In whist there are some men
+you always prefer to have on your left hand, and I take it that
+this intuitive essayist, who is so alert to seize the few remaining
+unappropriated ideas and analogies in the world, is one of them.
+
+No doubt if the Plantagenets of this day were required to dress in a
+suit of chain-armor and wear iron pots on their heads, they would be as
+ridiculous as most tragedy actors on the stage. The pit which recognizes
+Snooks in his tin breastplate and helmet laughs at him, and Snooks
+himself feels like a sheep; and when the great tragedian comes
+on, shining in mail, dragging a two-handed sword, and mouths the
+grandiloquence which poets have put into the speech of heroes, the
+dress-circle requires all its good-breeding and its feigned love of the
+traditionary drama not to titter.
+
+If this sort of acting, which is supposed to have come down to us from
+the Elizabethan age, and which culminated in the school of the Keans,
+Kembles, and Siddonses, ever had any fidelity to life, it must have
+been in a society as artificial as the prose of Sir Philip Sidney. That
+anybody ever believed in it is difficult to think, especially when we
+read what privileges the fine beaux and gallants of the town took behind
+the scenes and on the stage in the golden days of the drama. When a part
+of the audience sat on the stage, and gentlemen lounged or reeled across
+it in the midst of a play, to speak to acquaintances in the audience,
+the illusion could not have been very strong.
+
+Now and then a genius, like Rachel as Horatia, or Hackett as
+Falstaff, may actually seem to be the character assumed by virtue of a
+transforming imagination, but I suppose the fact to be that getting
+into a costume, absurdly antiquated and remote from all the habits and
+associations of the actor, largely accounts for the incongruity and
+ridiculousness of most of our modern acting. Whether what is called the
+"legitimate drama" ever was legitimate we do not know, but the advocates
+of it appear to think that the theatre was some time cast in a
+mould, once for all, and is good for all times and peoples, like the
+propositions of Euclid. To our eyes the legitimate drama of to-day is
+the one in which the day is reflected, both in costume and speech, and
+which touches the affections, the passions, the humor, of the present
+time. The brilliant success of the few good plays that have been written
+out of the rich life which we now live--the most varied, fruitful, and
+dramatically suggestive--ought to rid us forever of the buskin-fustian,
+except as a pantomimic or spectacular curiosity.
+
+We have no objection to Julius Caesar or Richard III. stalking about in
+impossible clothes, and stepping four feet at a stride, if they want to,
+but let them not claim to be more "legitimate" than "Ours" or "Rip Van
+Winkle." There will probably be some orator for years and years to come,
+at every Fourth of July, who will go on asking, Where is Thebes? but
+he does not care anything about it, and he does not really expect an
+answer. I have sometimes wished I knew the exact site of Thebes, so that
+I could rise in the audience, and stop that question, at any rate. It is
+legitimate, but it is tiresome.
+
+If we went to the bottom of this subject, I think we should find that
+the putting upon actors clothes to which they are unaccustomed makes
+them act and talk artificially, and often in a manner intolerable.
+
+An actor who has not the habits or instincts of a gentleman cannot be
+made to appear like one on the stage by dress; he only caricatures and
+discredits what he tries to represent; and the unaccustomed clothes and
+situation make him much more unnatural and insufferable than he would
+otherwise be. Dressed appropriately for parts for which he is fitted,
+he will act well enough, probably. What I mean is, that the clothes
+inappropriate to the man make the incongruity of him and his part more
+apparent. Vulgarity is never so conspicuous as in fine apparel, on or
+off the stage, and never so self-conscious. Shall we have, then, no
+refined characters on the stage? Yes; but let them be taken by men
+and women of taste and refinement and let us have done with this
+masquerading in false raiment, ancient and modern, which makes nearly
+every stage a travesty of nature and the whole theatre a painful
+pretension. We do not expect the modern theatre to be a place of
+instruction (that business is now turned over to the telegraphic
+operator, who is making a new language), but it may give amusement
+instead of torture, and do a little in satirizing folly and kindling
+love of home and country by the way.
+
+This is a sort of summary of what we all said, and no one in particular
+is responsible for it; and in this it is like public opinion. The
+Parson, however, whose only experience of the theatre was the endurance
+of an oratorio once, was very cordial in his denunciation of the stage
+altogether.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Yet, acting itself is delightful; nothing so entertains
+us as mimicry, the personation of character. We enjoy it in private.
+I confess that I am always pleased with the Parson in the character of
+grumbler. He would be an immense success on the stage. I don't know but
+the theatre will have to go back into the hands of the priests, who once
+controlled it.
+
+THE PARSON. Scoffer!
+
+MANDEVILLE. I can imagine how enjoyable the stage might be, cleared of
+all its traditionary nonsense, stilted language, stilted behavior, all
+the rubbish of false sentiment, false dress, and the manners of
+times that were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living
+characters, who speak the thought of to-day, with the wit and culture
+that are current to-day. I've seen private theatricals, where all the
+performers were persons of cultivation, that....
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. So have I. For something particularly cheerful, commend
+me to amateur theatricals. I have passed some melancholy hours at them.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That's because the performers acted the worn stage plays,
+and attempted to do them in the manner they had seen on the stage. It is
+not always so.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got into
+a mannerism which is well described as stagey, and is supposed to
+be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a
+recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse from
+within, and not with the purpose of saying anything, but of turning out
+a piece of literary work. That's the reason we have so much poetry
+that impresses one like sets of faultless cabinet-furniture made by
+machinery.
+
+THE PARSON. But you need n't talk of nature or naturalness in acting or
+in anything. I tell you nature is poor stuff. It can't go alone. Amateur
+acting--they get it up at church sociables nowadays--is apt to be as
+near nature as a school-boy's declamation. Acting is the Devil's art.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Do you object to such innocent amusement?
+
+MANDEVILLE. What the Parson objects to is, that he isn't amused.
+
+THE PARSON. What's the use of objecting? It's the fashion of the day to
+amuse people into the kingdom of heaven.
+
+HERBERT. The Parson has got us off the track. My notion about the stage
+is, that it keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of the world; the
+stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience. Assumed dress
+on the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes people no more
+constrained and self-conscious than it does off the stage.
+
+THE MISTRESS. What sarcasm is coming now?
+
+HERBERT. Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good
+clothes yet. The majority do not wear them with ease. People who only
+put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial
+feeling.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so
+difficult to get hold of his congregation.
+
+HERBERT. I don't know how else to account for the formality and vapidity
+of a set "party," where all the guests are clothed in a manner to
+which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid
+self-consciousness. The same people, who know each other perfectly
+well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary
+apparel. But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of
+people together who rarely "dress up." It seems impossible to make the
+conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane
+helplessness. Especially is this true in the country, where people have
+not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the
+city have. It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that
+we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress.
+Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this clothes panic prevails in
+the older societies.
+
+THE PARSON. Don't. We've heard it; about its being one of the
+Englishman's thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to dinner
+without a dress-coat, and all that.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat
+a dinner would dress for that, the principal event of the day, and do
+respectful and leisurely justice to it.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. It has always seemed singular to me that men who work
+so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should take so
+little leisure to enjoy either.
+
+MANDEVILLE. If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief
+clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is the same
+with the dinners.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk about clothes ran into the
+question of dress-reform, and ran out, of course. You cannot converse on
+anything nowadays that you do not run into some reform. The Parson says
+that everybody is intent on reforming everything but himself. We are all
+trying to associate ourselves to make everybody else behave as we do.
+Said--
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Dress reform! As if people couldn't change their clothes
+without concert of action. Resolved, that nobody should put on a clean
+collar oftener than his neighbor does. I'm sick of every sort of reform.
+I should like to retrograde awhile. Let a dyspeptic ascertain that he
+can eat porridge three times a day and live, and straightway he insists
+that everybody ought to eat porridge and nothing else. I mean to get
+up a society every member of which shall be pledged to do just as he
+pleases.
+
+THE PARSON. That would be the most radical reform of the day. That
+would be independence. If people dressed according to their means, acted
+according to their convictions, and avowed their opinions, it would
+revolutionize society.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. I should like to walk into your church some Sunday and
+see the changes under such conditions.
+
+THE PARSON. It might give you a novel sensation to walk in at any time.
+And I'm not sure but the church would suit your retrograde ideas.
+It's so Gothic that a Christian of the Middle Ages, if he were alive,
+couldn't see or hear in it.
+
+HERBERT. I don't know whether these reformers who carry the world on
+their shoulders in such serious fashion, especially the little fussy
+fellows, who are themselves the standard of the regeneration they seek,
+are more ludicrous than pathetic.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. Pathetic, by all means. But I don't know that they
+would be pathetic if they were not ludicrous. There are those reform
+singers who have been piping away so sweetly now for thirty years, with
+never any diminution of cheerful, patient enthusiasm; their hair growing
+longer and longer, their eyes brighter and brighter, and their faces, I
+do believe, sweeter and sweeter; singing always with the same
+constancy for the slave, for the drunkard, for the snufftaker, for the
+suffragist,--"There'sa-good-time-com-ing-boys (nothing offensive is
+intended by 'boys,' it is put in for euphony, and sung pianissimo, not
+to offend the suffragists), it's-almost-here." And what a brightening up
+of their faces there is when they say, "it's-al-most-here," not doubting
+for a moment that "it's" coming tomorrow; and the accompanying melodeon
+also wails its wheezy suggestion that "it's-al-most-here," that
+"good-time" (delayed so long, waiting perhaps for the invention of the
+melodeon) when we shall all sing and all play that cheerful instrument,
+and all vote, and none shall smoke, or drink, or eat meat, "boys." I
+declare it almost makes me cry to hear them, so touching is their faith
+in the midst of a jeer-ing world.
+
+HERBERT. I suspect that no one can be a genuine reformer and not be
+ridiculous. I mean those who give themselves up to the unction of the
+reform.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Does n't that depend upon whether the reform is large or
+petty?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I should say rather that the reforms attracted to them
+all the ridiculous people, who almost always manage to become the most
+conspicuous. I suppose that nobody dare write out all that was ludicrous
+in the great abolition movement. But it was not at all comical to those
+most zealous in it; they never could see--more's the pity, for thereby
+they lose much--the humorous side of their performances, and that is why
+the pathos overcomes one's sense of the absurdity of such people.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. It is lucky for the world that so many are willing to be
+absurd.
+
+HERBERT. Well, I think that, in the main, the reformers manage to look
+out for themselves tolerably well. I knew once a lean and faithful agent
+of a great philanthropic scheme, who contrived to collect every year for
+the cause just enough to support him at a good hotel comfortably.
+
+THE MISTRESS. That's identifying one's self with the cause.
+
+MANDEVILLE. You remember the great free-soil convention at Buffalo, in
+1848, when Van Buren was nominated. All the world of hope and discontent
+went there, with its projects of reform. There seemed to be no doubt,
+among hundreds that attended it, that if they could get a resolution
+passed that bread should be buttered on both sides, it would be so
+buttered. The platform provided for every want and every woe.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I remember. If you could get the millennium by
+political action, we should have had it then.
+
+MANDEVILLE. We went there on the Erie Canal, the exciting and
+fashionable mode of travel in those days. I was a boy when we began the
+voyage. The boat was full of conventionists; all the talk was of what
+must be done there. I got the impression that as that boat-load went
+so would go the convention; and I was not alone in that feeling. I
+can never be grateful enough for one little scrubby fanatic who was on
+board, who spent most of his time in drafting resolutions and reading
+them privately to the passengers. He was a very enthusiastic, nervous,
+and somewhat dirty little man, who wore a woolen muffler about his
+throat, although it was summer; he had nearly lost his voice, and could
+only speak in a hoarse, disagreeable whisper, and he always carried
+a teacup about, containing some sticky compound which he stirred
+frequently with a spoon, and took, whenever he talked, in order to
+improve his voice. If he was separated from his cup for ten minutes, his
+whisper became inaudible. I greatly delighted in him, for I never saw
+any one who had so much enjoyment of his own importance. He was fond
+of telling what he would do if the convention rejected such and such
+resolutions. He'd make it hot for them. I did n't know but he'd make
+them take his mixture. The convention had got to take a stand on
+tobacco, for one thing. He'd heard Gid-dings took snuff; he'd see.
+When we at length reached Buffalo he took his teacup and carpet-bag of
+resolutions and went ashore in a great hurry. I saw him once again in
+a cheap restaurant, whispering a resolution to another delegate, but he
+did n't appear in the convention. I have often wondered what became of
+him.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Probably he's consul somewhere. They mostly are.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. After all, it's the easiest thing in the world to sit
+and sneer at eccentricities. But what a dead and uninteresting world it
+would be if we were all proper, and kept within the lines! Affairs would
+soon be reduced to mere machinery. There are moments, even days, when
+all interests and movements appear to be settled upon some universal
+plan of equilibrium; but just then some restless and absurd person
+is inspired to throw the machine out of gear. These individual
+eccentricities seem to be the special providences in the general human
+scheme.
+
+HERBERT. They make it very hard work for the rest of us, who are
+disposed to go along peaceably and smoothly.
+
+MANDEVILLE. And stagnate. I 'm not sure but the natural condition
+of this planet is war, and that when it is finally towed to
+its anchorage--if the universe has any harbor for worlds out of
+commission--it will look like the Fighting Temeraire in Turner's
+picture.
+
+HERBERT. There is another thing I should like to understand: the
+tendency of people who take up one reform, perhaps a personal
+regeneration in regard to some bad habit, to run into a dozen other
+isms, and get all at sea in several vague and pernicious theories and
+practices.
+
+MANDEVILLE. Herbert seems to think there is safety in a man's being
+anchored, even if it is to a bad habit.
+
+HERBERT. Thank you. But what is it in human nature that is apt to carry
+a man who may take a step in personal reform into so many extremes?
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Probably it's human nature.
+
+HERBERT. Why, for instance, should a reformed drunkard (one of the
+noblest examples of victory over self) incline, as I have known the
+reformed to do, to spiritism, or a woman suffragist to "pantarchism"
+(whatever that is), and want to pull up all the roots of society, and
+expect them to grow in the air, like orchids; or a Graham-bread disciple
+become enamored of Communism?
+
+MANDEVILLE. I know an excellent Conservative who would, I think, suit
+you; he says that he does not see how a man who indulges in the theory
+and practice of total abstinence can be a consistent believer in the
+Christian religion.
+
+HERBERT. Well, I can understand what he means: that a person is bound
+to hold himself in conditions of moderation and control, using and not
+abusing the things of this world, practicing temperance, not retiring
+into a convent of artificial restrictions in order to escape the full
+responsibility of self-control. And yet his theory would certainly wreck
+most men and women. What does the Parson say?
+
+THE PARSON. That the world is going crazy on the notion of individual
+ability. Whenever a man attempts to reform himself, or anybody else,
+without the aid of the Christian religion, he is sure to go adrift, and
+is pretty certain to be blown about by absurd theories, and shipwrecked
+on some pernicious ism.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I think the discussion has touched bottom.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+I never felt so much the value of a house with a backlog in it as during
+the late spring; for its lateness was its main feature. Everybody was
+grumbling about it, as if it were something ordered from the tailor, and
+not ready on the day. Day after day it snowed, night after night it blew
+a gale from the northwest; the frost sunk deeper and deeper into the
+ground; there was a popular longing for spring that was almost a prayer;
+the weather bureau was active; Easter was set a week earlier than the
+year before, but nothing seemed to do any good. The robins sat under the
+evergreens, and piped in a disconsolate mood, and at last the bluejays
+came and scolded in the midst of the snow-storm, as they always do scold
+in any weather. The crocuses could n't be coaxed to come up, even with
+a pickaxe. I'm almost ashamed now to recall what we said of the weather
+only I think that people are no more accountable for what they say of
+the weather than for their remarks when their corns are stepped on.
+
+We agreed, however, that, but for disappointed expectations and the
+prospect of late lettuce and peas, we were gaining by the fire as much
+as we were losing by the frost. And the Mistress fell to chanting the
+comforts of modern civilization.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER said he should like to know, by the way, if our
+civilization differed essentially from any other in anything but its
+comforts.
+
+HERBERT. We are no nearer religious unity.
+
+THE PARSON. We have as much war as ever.
+
+MANDEVILLE. There was never such a social turmoil.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. The artistic part of our nature does not appear to have
+grown.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. We are quarreling as to whether we are in fact
+radically different from the brutes.
+
+HERBERT. Scarcely two people think alike about the proper kind of human
+government.
+
+THE PARSON. Our poetry is made out of words, for the most part, and not
+drawn from the living sources.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. And Mr. Cumming is uncorking his seventh phial. I never
+felt before what barbarians we are.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Yet you won't deny that the life of the average man is
+safer and every way more comfortable than it was even a century ago.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. But what I want to know is, whether what we call
+our civilization has done any thing more for mankind at large than to
+increase the ease and pleasure of living? Science has multiplied wealth,
+and facilitated intercourse, and the result is refinement of manners and
+a diffusion of education and information. Are men and women essentially
+changed, however? I suppose the Parson would say we have lost faith, for
+one thing.
+
+MANDEVILLE. And superstition; and gained toleration.
+
+HERBERT. The question is, whether toleration is anything but
+indifference.
+
+THE PARSON. Everything is tolerated now but Christian orthodoxy.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of
+external achievements, but I take it that real progress ought to be in
+man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what he can
+produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years ago.
+The best paintings are several centuries old. We study the finest
+architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are Shakespeare,
+Homer, Isaiah, and David. The latest of the arts, music, culminated in
+composition, though not in execution, a century ago.
+
+THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the
+civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for
+the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically
+incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take a
+long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is growth
+toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has
+reached his height, some other genius will still more profoundly and
+delicately express the highest thoughts.
+
+HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed
+by the Calliope.
+
+THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add church-bells and cannon to
+the orchestra.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer
+express ourselves with the bass-drum; there used to be the whole of the
+Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.
+
+MANDEVILLE. We certainly have made great progress in one art,--that of
+war.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. And in the humane alleviations of the miseries of war.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted
+advance in the comforts and refinements of society is the facility
+with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external
+accidents of their lives are changed. We have always kept a fringe of
+barbarism on our shifting western frontier; and I think there never was
+a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.
+
+THE YOUNG LADY. That is because women were absent.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. But women are not absent in London and New York, and
+they are conspicuous in the most exceptionable demonstrations of social
+anarchy. Certainly they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there was a city
+widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization. No city was
+so beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well ordered for the comfort
+of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of
+pandemonium of savagery. Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed
+its own monuments of civilization. I don't mean to say that there was
+no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded
+it, but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how
+little restraint all the material civilization was to the beast.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that
+pretty much all you have been saying is in effect untrue. Not one of
+you would be willing to change our civilization for any other. In your
+estimate you take no account, it seems to me, of the growth of charity.
+
+MANDEVILLE. And you might add a recognition of the value of human life.
+
+THE MISTRESS. I don't believe there was ever before diffused everywhere
+such an element of good-will, and never before were women so much
+engaged in philanthropic work.
+
+THE PARSON. It must be confessed that one of the best signs of the times
+is woman's charity for woman. That certainly never existed to the same
+extent in any other civilization.
+
+MANDEVILLE. And there is another thing that distinguishes us, or is
+beginning to. That is, the notion that you can do something more with a
+criminal than punish him; and that society has not done its duty when
+it has built a sufficient number of schools for one class, or of decent
+jails for another.
+
+HERBERT. It will be a long time before we get decent jails.
+
+MANDEVILLE. But when we do they will begin to be places of education and
+training as much as of punishment and disgrace. The public will provide
+teachers in the prisons as it now does in the common schools.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. The imperfections of our methods and means of selecting
+those in the community who ought to be in prison are so great, that
+extra care in dealing with them becomes us. We are beginning to learn
+that we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infallible justice. Perhaps
+half those who are convicted of crimes are as capable of reformation as
+half those transgressors who are not convicted, or who keep inside the
+statutory law.
+
+HERBERT. Would you remove the odium of prison?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. No; but I would have criminals believe, and society
+believe, that in going to prison a man or woman does not pass an
+absolute line and go into a fixed state.
+
+THE PARSON. That is, you would not have judgment and retribution begin
+in this world.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Don't switch us off into theology. I hate to go up in a
+balloon, or see any one else go.
+
+HERBERT. Don't you think there is too much leniency toward crime and
+criminals, taking the place of justice, in these days?
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. There may be too much disposition to condone the crimes
+of those who have been considered respectable.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. That is, scarcely anybody wants to see his friend hung.
+
+MANDEVILLE. I think a large part of the bitterness of the condemned
+arises from a sense of the inequality with which justice is
+administered. I am surprised, in visiting jails, to find so few
+respectable-looking convicts.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. Nobody will go to jail nowadays who thinks anything of
+himself.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. When society seriously takes hold of the reformation
+of criminals (say with as much determination as it does to carry an
+election) this false leniency will disappear; for it partly springs from
+a feeling that punishment is unequal, and does not discriminate enough
+in individuals, and that society itself has no right to turn a man over
+to the Devil, simply because he shows a strong leaning that way. A part
+of the scheme of those who work for the reformation of criminals is
+to render punishment more certain, and to let its extent depend upon
+reformation. There is no reason why a professional criminal, who won't
+change his trade for an honest one, should have intervals of freedom in
+his prison life in which he is let loose to prey upon society. Criminals
+ought to be discharged, like insane patients, when they are cured.
+
+OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a wonder to me, what with our multitudes of statutes
+and hosts of detectives, that we are any of us out of jail. I never
+come away from a visit to a State-prison without a new spasm of fear and
+virtue. The faculties for getting into jail seem to be ample. We want
+more organizations for keeping people out.
+
+MANDEVILLE. That is the sort of enterprise the women are engaged in, the
+frustration of the criminal tendencies of those born in vice. I believe
+women have it in their power to regenerate the world morally.
+
+THE PARSON. It's time they began to undo the mischief of their mother.
+
+THE MISTRESS. The reason they have not made more progress is that they
+have usually confined their individual efforts to one man; they are now
+organizing for a general campaign.
+
+THE FIRE-TENDER. I'm not sure but here is where the ameliorations of the
+conditions of life, which are called the comforts of this civilization,
+come in, after all, and distinguish the age above all others. They have
+enabled the finer powers of women to have play as they could not in a
+ruder age. I should like to live a hundred years and see what they will
+do.
+
+HERBERT. Not much but change the fashions, unless they submit themselves
+to the same training and discipline that men do.
+
+I have no doubt that Herbert had to apologize for this remark afterwards
+in private, as men are quite willing to do in particular cases; it is
+only in general they are unjust. The talk drifted off into general and
+particular depreciation of other times. Mandeville described a picture,
+in which he appeared to have confidence, of a fight between an Iguanodon
+and a Megalosaurus, where these huge iron-clad brutes were represented
+chewing up different portions of each other's bodies in a forest of the
+lower cretaceous period. So far as he could learn, that sort of thing
+went on unchecked for hundreds of thousands of years, and was typical of
+the intercourse of the races of man till a comparatively recent period.
+There was also that gigantic swan, the Plesiosaurus; in fact, all the
+early brutes were disgusting. He delighted to think that even the lower
+animals had improved, both in appearance and disposition.
+
+The conversation ended, therefore, in a very amicable manner, having
+been taken to a ground that nobody knew anything about.
+
+
+
+
+
+NINTH STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+Can you have a backlog in July? That depends upon circumstances.
+
+In northern New England it is considered a sign of summer when the
+housewives fill the fireplaces with branches of mountain laurel, and,
+later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too,
+the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression,
+which has not sufficient vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at the
+front door. This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which has
+no other means of gratifying itself.
+
+In the most rigid circumstances, the graceful nature of woman thus
+discloses itself in these mute expressions of an undeveloped taste. You
+may never doubt what the common flowers growing along the pathway to the
+front door mean to the maiden of many summers who tends them;--love and
+religion, and the weariness of an uneventful life. The sacredness of the
+Sabbath, the hidden memory of an unrevealed and unrequited affection,
+the slow years of gathering and wasting sweetness, are in the smell
+of the pink and the sweet-clover. These sentimental plants breathe
+something of the longing of the maiden who sits in the Sunday evenings
+of summer on the lonesome front doorstone, singing the hymns of the
+saints, and perennial as the myrtle that grows thereby.
+
+Yet not always in summer, even with the aid of unrequited love and
+devotional feeling, is it safe to let the fire go out on the hearth, in
+our latitude. I remember when the last almost total eclipse of the sun
+happened in August, what a bone-piercing chill came over the world.
+Perhaps the imagination had something to do with causing the chill from
+that temporary hiding of the sun to feel so much more penetrating
+than that from the coming on of night, which shortly followed. It
+was impossible not to experience a shudder as of the approach of the
+Judgment Day, when the shadows were flung upon the green lawn, and we
+all stood in the wan light, looking unfamiliar to each other. The
+birds in the trees felt the spell. We could in fancy see those spectral
+camp-fires which men would build on the earth, if the sun should slow
+its fires down to about the brilliancy of the moon. It was a great
+relief to all of us to go into the house, and, before a blazing
+wood-fire, talk of the end of the world.
+
+In New England it is scarcely ever safe to let the fire go out; it is
+best to bank it, for it needs but the turn of a weather-vane at any
+hour to sweep the Atlantic rains over us, or to bring down the chill of
+Hudson's Bay. There are days when the steam ship on the Atlantic glides
+calmly along under a full canvas, but its central fires must always be
+ready to make steam against head-winds and antagonistic waves. Even
+in our most smiling summer days one needs to have the materials of a
+cheerful fire at hand. It is only by this readiness for a change that
+one can preserve an equal mind. We are made provident and sagacious by
+the fickleness of our climate. We should be another sort of people if
+we could have that serene, unclouded trust in nature which the Egyptian
+has. The gravity and repose of the Eastern peoples is due to the
+unchanging aspect of the sky, and the deliberation and regularity of the
+great climatic processes. Our literature, politics, religion, show
+the effect of unsettled weather. But they compare favorably with the
+Egyptian, for all that.
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+You cannot know, the Young Lady wrote, with what longing I look back to
+those winter days by the fire; though all the windows are open to this
+May morning, and the brown thrush is singing in the chestnut-tree, and
+I see everywhere that first delicate flush of spring, which seems too
+evanescent to be color even, and amounts to little more than a suffusion
+of the atmosphere. I doubt, indeed, if the spring is exactly what it
+used to be, or if, as we get on in years [no one ever speaks of "getting
+on in years" till she is virtually settled in life], its promises and
+suggestions do not seem empty in comparison with the sympathies and
+responses of human friendship, and the stimulation of society. Sometimes
+nothing is so tiresome as a perfect day in a perfect season.
+
+I only imperfectly understand this. The Parson says that woman is always
+most restless under the most favorable conditions, and that there is no
+state in which she is really happy except that of change. I suppose this
+is the truth taught in what has been called the "Myth of the Garden."
+Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which
+continually destroys and re-creates. She is the experimenter and the
+suggester of new combinations. She has no belief in any law of eternal
+fitness of things. She is never even content with any arrangement of her
+own house. The only reason the Mistress could give, when she
+rearranged her apartment, for hanging a picture in what seemed the most
+inappropriate place, was that it had never been there before. Woman has
+no respect for tradition, and because a thing is as it is is sufficient
+reason for changing it. When she gets into law, as she has come into
+literature, we shall gain something in the destruction of all our vast
+and musty libraries of precedents, which now fetter our administration
+of individual justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not
+so sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken
+poetry of nature; being less poetical, and having less imagination, they
+are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make less failures in
+business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for their flowers
+which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part with a leaf or a
+blossom from their family. They love the flowers for themselves. A woman
+raises flowers for their use. She is destruct-ion in a conservatory.
+She wants the flowers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, for the
+Lord on Easter day, for the ornamentation of her house. She delights in
+the costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She never sees a flower but she
+has an intense but probably sinless desire to pick it.
+
+It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been
+thwarted by the accidental superior strength of man. Whatever she has
+obtained has been by craft, and by the same coaxing which the sun uses
+to draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees. I am not surprised to learn
+that she has become tired of indulgences, and wants some of the original
+rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to which she
+has been denied and subjected, and especially her condition among the
+primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a platform of
+grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is not, unless a
+better civilization has wrought a change in her behalf, permitted to eat
+people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed
+by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything
+wanting to this picture of the degradation of woman? By a refinement of
+cruelty she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries who are
+sent out by--what to her must seem a new name for Tantalus--the American
+Board.
+
+I suppose the Young Lady expressed a nearly universal feeling in her
+regret at the breaking up of the winter-fireside company. Society needs
+a certain seclusion and the sense of security. Spring opens the doors
+and the windows, and the noise and unrest of the world are let in. Even
+a winter thaw begets a desire to travel, and summer brings longings
+innumerable, and disturbs the most tranquil souls. Nature is, in fact, a
+suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions
+of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven. The summer in
+these latitudes is a campaign of sentiment and a season, for the most
+part, of restlessness and discontent. We grow now in hot-houses roses
+which, in form and color, are magnificent, and appear to be full of
+passion; yet one simple June rose of the open air has for the Young
+Lady, I doubt not, more sentiment and suggestion of love than a
+conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as
+it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which
+are so often like the peach-blossom of the Judas-tree, unsatisfying by
+reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more
+limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse
+by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if
+some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from in-doors
+to out-doors. Her secret, if secret she has, which I do not at all know,
+is shared by the birds and the new leaves and the blossoms on the fruit
+trees. If we lived elsewhere, in that zone where the poets pretend
+always to dwell, we might be content, perhaps I should say drugged, by
+the sweet influences of an unchanging summer; but not living elsewhere,
+we can understand why the Young Lady probably now looks forward to the
+hearthstone as the most assured center of enduring attachment.
+
+If it should ever become the sad duty of this biographer to write of
+disappointed love, I am sure he would not have any sensational story to
+tell of the Young Lady. She is one of those women whose unostentatious
+lives are the chief blessing of humanity; who, with a sigh heard only
+by herself and no change in her sunny face, would put behind her all the
+memories of winter evenings and the promises of May mornings, and give
+her life to some ministration of human kindness with an assiduity that
+would make her occupation appear like an election and a first choice.
+The disappointed man scowls, and hates his race, and threatens
+self-destruction, choosing oftener the flowing bowl than the dagger, and
+becoming a reeling nuisance in the world. It would be much more manly in
+him to become the secretary of a Dorcas society.
+
+I suppose it is true that women work for others with less expectation
+of reward than men, and give themselves to labors of self-sacrifice with
+much less thought of self. At least, this is true unless woman goes into
+some public performance, where notoriety has its attractions, and mounts
+some cause, to ride it man-fashion, when I think she becomes just as
+eager for applause and just as willing that self-sacrifice should
+result in self-elevation as man. For her, usually, are not those
+unbought--presentations which are forced upon firemen, philanthropists,
+legislators, railroad-men, and the superintendents of the moral
+instruction of the young. These are almost always pleasing and
+unexpected tributes to worth and modesty, and must be received with
+satisfaction when the public service rendered has not been with a view
+to procuring them. We should say that one ought to be most liable to
+receive a "testimonial" who, being a superintendent of any sort, did not
+superintend with a view to getting it. But "testimonials" have become
+so common that a modest man ought really to be afraid to do his simple
+duty, for fear his motives will be misconstrued. Yet there are instances
+of very worthy men who have had things publicly presented to them. It
+is the blessed age of gifts and the reward of private virtue. And the
+presentations have become so frequent that we wish there were a little
+more variety in them. There never was much sense in giving a gallant
+fellow a big speaking-trumpet to carry home to aid him in his
+intercourse with his family; and the festive ice-pitcher has become a
+too universal sign of absolute devotion to the public interest. The lack
+of one will soon be proof that a man is a knave. The legislative cane
+with the gold head, also, is getting to be recognized as the sign of the
+immaculate public servant, as the inscription on it testifies, and the
+steps of suspicion must ere-long dog him who does not carry one. The
+"testimonial" business is, in truth, a little demoralizing, almost as
+much so as the "donation;" and the demoralization has extended even to
+our language, so that a perfectly respectable man is often obliged to
+see himself "made the recipient of" this and that. It would be much
+better, if testimonials must be, to give a man a barrel of flour or a
+keg of oysters, and let him eat himself at once back into the ranks of
+ordinary men.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+We may have a testimonial class in time, a sort of nobility here in
+America, made so by popular gift, the members of which will all be able
+to show some stick or piece of plated ware or massive chain, "of which
+they have been the recipients." In time it may be a distinction not to
+belong to it, and it may come to be thought more blessed to give than
+to receive. For it must have been remarked that it is not always to the
+cleverest and the most amiable and modest man that the deputation comes
+with the inevitable ice-pitcher (and "salver to match"), which has in it
+the magic and subtle quality of making the hour in which it is received
+the proudest of one's life. There has not been discovered any method of
+rewarding all the deserving people and bringing their virtues into the
+prominence of notoriety. And, indeed, it would be an unreasonable world
+if there had, for its chief charm and sweetness lie in the excellences
+in it which are reluctantly disclosed; one of the chief pleasures
+of living is in the daily discovery of good traits, nobilities, and
+kindliness both in those we have long known and in the chance passenger
+whose way happens for a day to lie with ours. The longer I live the more
+I am impressed with the excess of human kindness over human hatred, and
+the greater willingness to oblige than to disoblige that one meets at
+every turn. The selfishness in politics, the jealousy in letters,
+the bickering in art, the bitterness in theology, are all as nothing
+compared to the sweet charities, sacrifices, and deferences of private
+life. The people are few whom to know intimately is to dislike. Of
+course you want to hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your powers
+of discrimination bright, and to save yourself from becoming a mere mush
+of good-nature; but perhaps it is well to hate some historical person
+who has been dead so long as to be indifferent to it. It is more
+comfortable to hate people we have never seen. I cannot but think that
+Judas Iscariot has been of great service to the world as a sort of
+buffer for moral indignation which might have made a collision nearer
+home but for his utilized treachery. I used to know a venerable and most
+amiable gentleman and scholar, whose hospitable house was always overrun
+with wayside ministers, agents, and philanthropists, who loved their
+fellow-men better than they loved to work for their living; and he, I
+suspect, kept his moral balance even by indulgence in violent but most
+distant dislikes. When I met him casually in the street, his first
+salutation was likely to be such as this: "What a liar that Alison was!
+Don't you hate him?" And then would follow specifications of historical
+inveracity enough to make one's blood run cold. When he was thus
+discharged of his hatred by such a conductor, I presume he had not a
+spark left for those whose mission was partly to live upon him and other
+generous souls.
+
+Mandeville and I were talking of the unknown people, one rainy night by
+the fire, while the Mistress was fitfully and interjectionally playing
+with the piano-keys in an improvising mood. Mandeville has a good deal
+of sentiment about him, and without any effort talks so beautifully
+sometimes that I constantly regret I cannot report his language. He has,
+besides, that sympathy of presence--I believe it is called magnetism
+by those who regard the brain as only a sort of galvanic battery--which
+makes it a greater pleasure to see him think, if I may say so, than to
+hear some people talk.
+
+It makes one homesick in this world to think that there are so many rare
+people he can never know; and so many excellent people that scarcely any
+one will know, in fact. One discovers a friend by chance, and cannot but
+feel regret that twenty or thirty years of life maybe have been spent
+without the least knowledge of him. When he is once known, through him
+opening is made into another little world, into a circle of culture
+and loving hearts and enthusiasm in a dozen congenial pursuits, and
+prejudices perhaps. How instantly and easily the bachelor doubles his
+world when he marries, and enters into the unknown fellowship of the to
+him continually increasing company which is known in popular language as
+"all his wife's relations."
+
+Near at hand daily, no doubt, are those worth knowing intimately, if one
+had the time and the opportunity. And when one travels he sees what a
+vast material there is for society and friendship, of which he can never
+avail himself. Car-load after car-load of summer travel goes by one at
+any railway-station, out of which he is sure he could choose a score of
+life-long friends, if the conductor would introduce him. There are
+faces of refinement, of quick wit, of sympathetic kindness,--interesting
+people, traveled people, entertaining people,--as you would say in
+Boston, "nice people you would admire to know," whom you constantly meet
+and pass without a sign of recognition, many of whom are no doubt your
+long-lost brothers and sisters. You can see that they also have their
+worlds and their interests, and they probably know a great many "nice"
+people. The matter of personal liking and attachment is a good deal due
+to the mere fortune of association. More fast friendships and pleasant
+acquaintanceships are formed on the Atlantic steamships between those
+who would have been only indifferent acquaintances elsewhere, than one
+would think possible on a voyage which naturally makes one as selfish as
+he is indifferent to his personal appearance. The Atlantic is the only
+power on earth I know that can make a woman indifferent to her personal
+appearance.
+
+Mandeville remembers, and I think without detriment to himself, the
+glimpses he had in the White Mountains once of a young lady of whom
+his utmost efforts could give him no further information than her name.
+Chance sight of her on a passing stage or amid a group on some mountain
+lookout was all he ever had, and he did not even know certainly whether
+she was the perfect beauty and the lovely character he thought her. He
+said he would have known her, however, at a great distance; there was to
+her form that command of which we hear so much and which turns out to be
+nearly all command after the "ceremony;" or perhaps it was something in
+the glance of her eye or the turn of her head, or very likely it was a
+sweet inherited reserve or hauteur that captivated him, that filled
+his days with the expectation of seeing her, and made him hasten to the
+hotel-registers in the hope that her name was there recorded. Whatever
+it was, she interested him as one of the people he would like to know;
+and it piqued him that there was a life, rich in friendships, no doubt,
+in tastes, in many noblenesses, one of thousands of such, that must be
+absolutely nothing to him,--nothing but a window into heaven momentarily
+opened and then closed. I have myself no idea that she was a countess
+incognito, or that she had descended from any greater heights than those
+where Mandeville saw her, but I have always regretted that she went her
+way so mysteriously and left no glow, and that we shall wear out the
+remainder of our days without her society. I have looked for her name,
+but always in vain, among the attendants at the rights-conventions,
+in the list of those good Americans presented at court, among those
+skeleton names that appear as the remains of beauty in the morning
+journals after a ball to the wandering prince, in the reports of railway
+collisions and steamboat explosions. No news comes of her. And so
+imperfect are our means of communication in this world that, for
+anything we know, she may have left it long ago by some private way.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The lasting regret that we cannot know more of the bright, sincere, and
+genuine people of the world is increased by the fact that they are all
+different from each other. Was it not Madame de Sevigne who said she
+had loved several different women for several different qualities? Every
+real person--for there are persons as there are fruits that have no
+distinguishing flavor, mere gooseberries--has a distinct quality, and
+the finding it is always like the discovery of a new island to the
+voyager. The physical world we shall exhaust some day, having a written
+description of every foot of it to which we can turn; but we shall never
+get the different qualities of people into a biographical dictionary,
+and the making acquaintance with a human being will never cease to be an
+exciting experiment. We cannot even classify men so as to aid us much in
+our estimate of them. The efforts in this direction are ingenious, but
+unsatisfactory. If I hear that a man is lymphatic or nervous-sanguine, I
+cannot tell therefrom whether I shall like and trust him. He may produce
+a phrenological chart showing that his knobby head is the home of all
+the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies are represented by holes
+in his cranium, and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as
+disagreeable as if phrenology had not been invented. I feel sometimes
+that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity. Its charts are almost as
+misleading concerning character as photographs. And photography may be
+described as the art which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like
+genius. The heavy-jowled man with shallow cerebrum has only to incline
+his head so that the lying instrument can select a favorable focus, to
+appear in the picture with the brow of a sage and the chin of a poet.
+Of all the arts for ministering to human vanity the photographic is the
+most useful, but it is a poor aid in the revelation of character. You
+shall learn more of a man's real nature by seeing him walk once up the
+broad aisle of his church to his pew on Sunday, than by studying his
+photograph for a month.
+
+No, we do not get any certain standard of men by a chart of their
+temperaments; it will hardly answer to select a wife by the color of her
+hair; though it be by nature as red as a cardinal's hat, she may be
+no more constant than if it were dyed. The farmer who shuns all the
+lymphatic beauties in his neighborhood, and selects to wife the most
+nervous-sanguine, may find that she is unwilling to get up in the winter
+mornings and make the kitchen fire. Many a man, even in this scientific
+age which professes to label us all, has been cruelly deceived in
+this way. Neither the blondes nor the brunettes act according to the
+advertisement of their temperaments. The truth is that men refuse to
+come under the classifications of the pseudo-scientists, and all our
+new nomenclatures do not add much to our knowledge. You know what to
+expect--if the comparison will be pardoned--of a horse with certain
+points; but you wouldn't dare go on a journey with a man merely upon the
+strength of knowing that his temperament was the proper mixture of the
+sanguine and the phlegmatic. Science is not able to teach us concerning
+men as it teaches us of horses, though I am very far from saying that
+there are not traits of nobleness and of meanness that run through
+families and can be calculated to appear in individuals with absolute
+certainty; one family will be trusty and another tricky through all
+its members for generations; noble strains and ignoble strains are
+perpetuated. When we hear that she has eloped with the stable-boy and
+married him, we are apt to remark, "Well, she was a Bogardus." And when
+we read that she has gone on a mission and has died, distinguishing
+herself by some extraordinary devotion to the heathen at Ujiji, we think
+it sufficient to say, "Yes, her mother married into the Smiths." But
+this knowledge comes of our experience of special families, and stands
+us in stead no further.
+
+If we cannot classify men scientifically and reduce them under a kind
+of botanical order, as if they had a calculable vegetable development,
+neither can we gain much knowledge of them by comparison. It does not
+help me at all in my estimate of their characters to compare Mandeville
+with the Young Lady, or Our Next Door with the Parson. The wise man does
+not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparison of
+his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many
+people, evoked as it is by many qualities. When Mandeville goes into
+my garden in June I can usually find him in a particular bed of
+strawberries, but he does not speak disrespectfully of the others.
+When Nature, says Mandeville, consents to put herself into any sort of
+strawberry, I have no criticisms to make, I am only glad that I have
+been created into the same world with such a delicious manifestation of
+the Divine favor. If I left Mandeville alone in the garden long enough,
+I have no doubt he would impartially make an end of the fruit of all the
+beds, for his capacity in this direction is as all-embracing as it is in
+the matter of friendships. The Young Lady has also her favorite patch of
+berries. And the Parson, I am sorry to say, prefers to have them picked
+for him the elect of the garden--and served in an orthodox manner. The
+straw-berry has a sort of poetical precedence, and I presume that no
+fruit is jealous of it any more than any flower is jealous of the rose;
+but I remark the facility with which liking for it is transferred to the
+raspberry, and from the raspberry (not to make a tedious enumeration) to
+the melon, and from the melon to the grape, and the grape to the pear,
+and the pear to the apple. And we do not mar our enjoyment of each by
+comparisons.
+
+Of course it would be a dull world if we could not criticise our
+friends, but the most unprofitable and unsatisfactory criticism is that
+by comparison. Criticism is not necessarily uncharitableness, but a
+wholesome exercise of our powers of analysis and discrimination. It is,
+however, a very idle exercise, leading to no results when we set the
+qualities of one over against the qualities of another, and disparage by
+contrast and not by independent judgment. And this method of procedure
+creates jealousies and heart-burnings innumerable.
+
+Criticism by comparison is the refuge of incapables, and especially is
+this true in literature. It is a lazy way of disposing of a young poet
+to bluntly declare, without any sort of discrimination of his defects
+or his excellences, that he equals Tennyson, and that Scott never wrote
+anything finer. What is the justice of damning a meritorious novelist
+by comparing him with Dickens, and smothering him with thoughtless and
+good-natured eulogy? The poet and the novelist may be well enough,
+and probably have qualities and gifts of their own which are worth the
+critic's attention, if he has any time to bestow on them; and it is
+certainly unjust to subject them to a comparison with somebody else,
+merely because the critic will not take the trouble to ascertain what
+they are. If, indeed, the poet and novelist are mere imitators of
+a model and copyists of a style, they may be dismissed with such
+commendation as we bestow upon the machines who pass their lives in
+making bad copies of the pictures of the great painters. But the critics
+of whom we speak do not intend depreciation, but eulogy, when they say
+that the author they have in hand has the wit of Sydney Smith and the
+brilliancy of Macaulay. Probably he is not like either of them, and may
+have a genuine though modest virtue of his own; but these names
+will certainly kill him, and he will never be anybody in the popular
+estimation. The public finds out speedily that he is not Sydney Smith,
+and it resents the extravagant claim for him as if he were an impudent
+pretender. How many authors of fair ability to interest the world have
+we known in our own day who have been thus sky-rocketed into notoriety
+by the lazy indiscrimination of the critic-by-comparison, and then have
+sunk into a popular contempt as undeserved! I never see a young aspirant
+injudiciously compared to a great and resplendent name in literature,
+but I feel like saying, My poor fellow, your days are few and full
+of trouble; you begin life handicapped, and you cannot possibly run a
+creditable race.
+
+I think this sort of critical eulogy is more damaging even than that
+which kills by a different assumption, and one which is equally common,
+namely, that the author has not done what he probably never intended
+to do. It is well known that most of the trouble in life comes from our
+inability to compel other people to do what we think they ought, and it
+is true in criticism that we are unwilling to take a book for what it
+is, and credit the author with that. When the solemn critic, like a
+mastiff with a ladies' bonnet in his mouth, gets hold of a light piece
+of verse, or a graceful sketch which catches the humor of an hour for
+the entertainment of an hour, he tears it into a thousand shreds. It
+adds nothing to human knowledge, it solves none of the problems of
+life, it touches none of the questions of social science, it is not a
+philosophical treatise, and it is not a dozen things that it might have
+been. The critic cannot forgive the author for this disrespect to him.
+This isn't a rose, says the critic, taking up a pansy and rending it; it
+is not at all like a rose, and the author is either a pretentious idiot
+or an idiotic pretender. What business, indeed, has the author to send
+the critic a bunch of sweet-peas, when he knows that a cabbage would be
+preferred,--something not showy, but useful?
+
+A good deal of this is what Mandeville said and I am not sure that it
+is devoid of personal feeling. He published, some years ago, a little
+volume giving an account of a trip through the Great West, and a very
+entertaining book it was. But one of the heavy critics got hold of it,
+and made Mandeville appear, even to himself, he confessed, like an
+ass, because there was nothing in the volume about geology or mining
+prospects, and very little to instruct the student of physical
+geography. With alternate sarcasm and ridicule, he literally basted
+the author, till Mandeville said that he felt almost like a depraved
+scoundrel, and thought he should be held up to less execration if he had
+committed a neat and scientific murder.
+
+But I confess that I have a good deal of sympathy with the critics.
+Consider what these public tasters have to endure! None of us, I fancy,
+would like to be compelled to read all that they read, or to take into
+our mouths, even with the privilege of speedily ejecting it with a
+grimace, all that they sip. The critics of the vintage, who pursue their
+calling in the dark vaults and amid mouldy casks, give their opinion,
+for the most part, only upon wine, upon juice that has matured and
+ripened into development of quality. But what crude, unrestrained,
+unfermented--even raw and drugged liquor, must the literary taster put
+to his unwilling lips day after day!
+
+
+
+
+
+TENTH STUDY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was my good fortune once to visit a man who remembered the rebellion
+of 1745. Lest this confession should make me seem very aged, I will add
+that the visit took place in 1851, and that the man was then one hundred
+and thirteen years old. He was quite a lad before Dr. Johnson drank Mrs.
+Thrale's tea. That he was as old as he had the credit of being, I have
+the evidence of my own senses (and I am seldom mistaken in a person's
+age), of his own family, and his own word; and it is incredible that so
+old a person, and one so apparently near the grave, would deceive about
+his age.
+
+The testimony of the very aged is always to be received without
+question, as Alexander Hamilton once learned. He was trying a land-title
+with Aaron Burr, and two of the witnesses upon whom Burr relied were
+venerable Dutchmen, who had, in their youth, carried the surveying
+chains over the land in dispute, and who were now aged respectively one
+hundred and four years and one hundred and six years. Hamilton gently
+attempted to undervalue their testimony, but he was instantly put down
+by the Dutch justice, who suggested that Mr. Hamilton could not be aware
+of the age of the witnesses.
+
+My old man (the expression seems familiar and inelegant) had indeed an
+exaggerated idea of his own age, and sometimes said that he supposed he
+was going on four hundred, which was true enough, in fact; but for the
+exact date, he referred to his youngest son,--a frisky and humorsome
+lad of eighty years, who had received us at the gate, and whom we had at
+first mistaken for the veteran, his father. But when we beheld the old
+man, we saw the difference between age and age. The latter had settled
+into a grizzliness and grimness which belong to a very aged and stunted
+but sturdy oak-tree, upon the bark of which the gray moss is thick and
+heavy. The old man appeared hale enough, he could walk about, his sight
+and hearing were not seriously impaired, he ate with relish, and his
+teeth were so sound that he would not need a dentist for at least
+another century; but the moss was growing on him. His boy of eighty
+seemed a green sapling beside him.
+
+He remembered absolutely nothing that had taken place within thirty
+years, but otherwise his mind was perhaps as good as it ever was, for he
+must always have been an ignoramus, and would never know anything if
+he lived to be as old as he said he was going on to be. Why he was
+interested in the rebellion of 1745 I could not discover, for he of
+course did not go over to Scotland to carry a pike in it, and he only
+remembered to have heard it talked about as a great event in the Irish
+market-town near which he lived, and to which he had ridden when a boy.
+And he knew much more about the horse that drew him, and the cart in
+which he rode, than he did about the rebellion of the Pretender.
+
+I hope I do not appear to speak harshly of this amiable old man, and if
+he is still living I wish him well, although his example was bad in some
+respects. He had used tobacco for nearly a century, and the habit has
+very likely been the death of him. If so, it is to be regretted. For
+it would have been interesting to watch the process of his gradual
+disintegration and return to the ground: the loss of sense after sense,
+as decaying limbs fall from the oak; the failure of discrimination, of
+the power of choice, and finally of memory itself; the peaceful wearing
+out and passing away of body and mind without disease, the natural
+running down of a man. The interesting fact about him at that time was
+that his bodily powers seemed in sufficient vigor, but that the mind
+had not force enough to manifest itself through his organs. The complete
+battery was there, the appetite was there, the acid was eating the zinc;
+but the electric current was too weak to flash from the brain. And yet
+he appeared so sound throughout, that it was difficult to say that
+his mind was not as good as it ever had been. He had stored in it very
+little to feed on, and any mind would get enfeebled by a century's
+rumination on a hearsay idea of the rebellion of '45.
+
+It was possible with this man to fully test one's respect for age, which
+is in all civilized nations a duty. And I found that my feelings were
+mixed about him. I discovered in him a conceit in regard to his long
+sojourn on this earth, as if it were somehow a credit to him. In the
+presence of his good opinion of himself, I could but question the real
+value of his continued life, to himself or to others. If he ever had any
+friends he had outlived them, except his boy; his wives--a century of
+them--were all dead; the world had actually passed away for him. He hung
+on the tree like a frost-nipped apple, which the farmer has neglected to
+gather. The world always renews itself, and remains young. What relation
+had he to it?
+
+I was delighted to find that this old man had never voted for George
+Washington. I do not know that he had ever heard of him. Washington may
+be said to have played his part since his time. I am not sure that he
+perfectly remembered anything so recent as the American Revolution. He
+was living quietly in Ireland during our French and Indian wars, and he
+did not emigrate to this country till long after our revolutionary and
+our constitutional struggles were over. The Rebellion Of '45 was the
+great event of the world for him, and of that he knew nothing.
+
+I intend no disrespect to this man,--a cheerful and pleasant enough
+old person,--but he had evidently lived himself out of the world, as
+completely as people usually die out of it. His only remaining value
+was to the moralist, who might perchance make something out of him.
+I suppose if he had died young, he would have been regretted, and his
+friends would have lamented that he did not fill out his days in the
+world, and would very likely have called him back, if tears and prayers
+could have done so. They can see now what his prolonged life amounted
+to, and how the world has closed up the gap he once filled while he
+still lives in it.
+
+A great part of the unhappiness of this world consists in regret for
+those who depart, as it seems to us, prematurely. We imagine that if
+they would return, the old conditions would be restored. But would it be
+so? If they, in any case, came back, would there be any place for them?
+The world so quickly readjusts itself after any loss, that the return
+of the departed would nearly always throw it, even the circle most
+interested, into confusion. Are the Enoch Ardens ever wanted?
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A popular notion akin to this, that the world would have any room for
+the departed if they should now and then return, is the constant
+regret that people will not learn by the experience of others, that one
+generation learns little from the preceding, and that youth never will
+adopt the experience of age. But if experience went for anything, we
+should all come to a standstill; for there is nothing so discouraging to
+effort. Disbelief in Ecclesiastes is the mainspring of action. In that
+lies the freshness and the interest of life, and it is the source of
+every endeavor.
+
+If the boy believed that the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition
+of power were what the old man says they are, the world would very soon
+be stagnant. If he believed that his chances of obtaining either were as
+poor as the majority of men find them to be, ambition would die within
+him. It is because he rejects the experience of those who have preceded
+him, that the world is kept in the topsy-turvy condition which we all
+rejoice in, and which we call progress.
+
+And yet I confess I have a soft place in my heart for that rare
+character in our New England life who is content with the world as he
+finds it, and who does not attempt to appropriate any more of it to
+himself than he absolutely needs from day to day. He knows from the
+beginning that the world could get on without him, and he has never had
+any anxiety to leave any result behind him, any legacy for the world to
+quarrel over.
+
+He is really an exotic in our New England climate and society, and his
+life is perpetually misunderstood by his neighbors, because he shares
+none of their uneasiness about getting on in life. He is even called
+lazy, good-for-nothing, and "shiftless,"--the final stigma that we put
+upon a person who has learned to wait without the exhausting process of
+laboring.
+
+I made his acquaintance last summer in the country, and I have not in
+a long time been so well pleased with any of our species. He was a man
+past middle life, with a large family. He had always been from boyhood
+of a contented and placid mind, slow in his movements, slow in his
+speech. I think he never cherished a hard feeling toward anybody, nor
+envied any one, least of all the rich and prosperous about whom he liked
+to talk. Indeed, his talk was a good deal about wealth, especially about
+his cousin who had been down South and "got fore-handed" within a few
+years. He was genuinely pleased at his relation's good luck, and pointed
+him out to me with some pride. But he had no envy of him, and he evinced
+no desire to imitate him. I inferred from all his conversation about
+"piling it up" (of which he spoke with a gleam of enthusiasm in his
+eye), that there were moments when he would like to be rich himself; but
+it was evident that he would never make the least effort to be so, and I
+doubt if he could even overcome that delicious inertia of mind and body
+called laziness, sufficiently to inherit.
+
+Wealth seemed to have a far and peculiar fascination for him, and I
+suspect he was a visionary in the midst of his poverty. Yet I suppose he
+had--hardly the personal property which the law exempts from execution.
+He had lived in a great many towns, moving from one to another with his
+growing family, by easy stages, and was always the poorest man in the
+town, and lived on the most niggardly of its rocky and bramble-grown
+farms, the productiveness of which he reduced to zero in a couple of
+seasons by his careful neglect of culture. The fences of his hired
+domain always fell into ruins under him, perhaps because he sat on
+them so much, and the hovels he occupied rotted down during his placid
+residence in them. He moved from desolation to desolation, but carried
+always with him the equal mind of a philosopher. Not even the occasional
+tart remarks of his wife, about their nomadic life and his serenity in
+the midst of discomfort, could ruffle his smooth spirit.
+
+He was, in every respect, a most worthy man, truthful, honest,
+temperate, and, I need not say, frugal; and he had no bad
+habits,--perhaps he never had energy enough to acquire any. Nor did
+he lack the knack of the Yankee race. He could make a shoe, or build
+a house, or doctor a cow; but it never seemed to him, in this brief
+existence, worth while to do any of these things. He was an excellent
+angler, but he rarely fished; partly because of the shortness of days,
+partly on account of the uncertainty of bites, but principally because
+the trout brooks were all arranged lengthwise and ran over so much
+ground. But no man liked to look at a string of trout better than he
+did, and he was willing to sit down in a sunny place and talk about
+trout-fishing half a day at a time, and he would talk pleasantly and
+well too, though his wife might be continually interrupting him by a
+call for firewood.
+
+I should not do justice to his own idea of himself if I did not add that
+he was most respectably connected, and that he had a justifiable though
+feeble pride in his family. It helped his self-respect, which no ignoble
+circumstances could destroy. He was, as must appear by this time, a most
+intelligent man, and he was a well-informed man; that is to say, he read
+the weekly newspapers when he could get them, and he had the average
+country information about Beecher and Greeley and the Prussian war
+("Napoleon is gettin' on't, ain't he?"), and the general prospect of
+the election campaigns. Indeed, he was warmly, or rather luke-warmly,
+interested in politics. He liked to talk about the inflated currency,
+and it seemed plain to him that his condition would somehow be improved
+if we could get to a specie basis. He was, in fact, a little troubled
+by the national debt; it seemed to press on him somehow, while his
+own never did. He exhibited more animation over the affairs of the
+government than he did over his own,--an evidence at once of his
+disinterestedness and his patriotism. He had been an old abolitionist,
+and was strong on the rights of free labor, though he did not care to
+exercise his privilege much. Of course he had the proper contempt for
+the poor whites down South. I never saw a person with more correct
+notions on such a variety of subjects. He was perfectly willing that
+churches (being himself a member), and Sunday-schools, and missionary
+enterprises should go on; in fact, I do not believe he ever opposed
+anything in his life. No one was more willing to vote town taxes and
+road-repairs and schoolhouses than he. If you could call him spirited at
+all, he was public-spirited.
+
+And with all this he was never very well; he had, from boyhood, "enjoyed
+poor health." You would say he was not a man who would ever catch
+anything, not even an epidemic; but he was a person whom diseases would
+be likely to overtake, even the slowest of slow fevers. And he was n't
+a man to shake off anything. And yet sickness seemed to trouble him no
+more than poverty. He was not discontented; he never grumbled. I am not
+sure but he relished a "spell of sickness" in haying-time.
+
+An admirably balanced man, who accepts the world as it is, and evidently
+lives on the experience of others. I have never seen a man with less
+envy, or more cheerfulness, or so contented with as little reason for
+being so. The only drawback to his future is that rest beyond the grave
+will not be much change for him, and he has no works to follow him.
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+This Yankee philosopher, who, without being a Brahmin, had, in an
+uncongenial atmosphere, reached the perfect condition of Nirvina,
+reminded us all of the ancient sages; and we queried whether a world
+that could produce such as he, and could, beside, lengthen a man's years
+to one hundred and thirteen, could fairly be called an old and
+worn-out world, having long passed the stage of its primeval poetry and
+simplicity. Many an Eastern dervish has, I think, got immortality
+upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary sojourner in
+Massachusetts. It is a common notion that the world (meaning the people
+in it) has become tame and commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and
+epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his argumentative way, dissents from
+this entirely. He says that the world is more complex, varied, and a
+thousand times as interesting as it was in what we call its youth, and
+that it is as fresh, as individual and capable of producing odd and
+eccentric characters as ever. He thought the creative vim had not in any
+degree abated, that both the types of men and of nations are as sharply
+stamped and defined as ever they were.
+
+Was there ever, he said, in the past, any figure more clearly cut and
+freshly minted than the Yankee? Had the Old World anything to show more
+positive and uncompromising in all the elements of character than the
+Englishman? And if the edges of these were being rounded off, was there
+not developing in the extreme West a type of men different from all
+preceding, which the world could not yet define? He believed that the
+production of original types was simply infinite.
+
+Herbert urged that he must at least admit that there was a freshness of
+legend and poetry in what we call the primeval peoples that is wanting
+now; the mythic period is gone, at any rate.
+
+Mandeville could not say about the myths. We couldn't tell what
+interpretation succeeding ages would put upon our lives and history and
+literature when they have become remote and shadowy. But we need not go
+to antiquity for epigrammatic wisdom, or for characters as racy of the
+fresh earth as those handed down to us from the dawn of history. He
+would put Benjamin Franklin against any of the sages of the mythic or
+the classic period. He would have been perfectly at home in ancient
+Athens, as Socrates would have been in modern Boston. There might have
+been more heroic characters at the siege of Troy than Abraham Lincoln,
+but there was not one more strongly marked individually; not one his
+superior in what we call primeval craft and humor. He was just the man,
+if he could not have dislodged Priam by a writ of ejectment, to have
+invented the wooden horse, and then to have made Paris the hero of some
+ridiculous story that would have set all Asia in a roar.
+
+Mandeville said further, that as to poetry, he did not know much
+about that, and there was not much he cared to read except parts of
+Shakespeare and Homer, and passages of Milton. But it did seem to him
+that we had men nowadays, who could, if they would give their minds to
+it, manufacture in quantity the same sort of epigrammatic sayings and
+legends that our scholars were digging out of the Orient. He did not
+know why Emerson in antique setting was not as good as Saadi. Take for
+instance, said Mandeville, such a legend as this, and how easy it would
+be to make others like it:
+
+The son of an Emir had red hair, of which he was ashamed, and wished
+to dye it. But his father said: "Nay, my son, rather behave in such a
+manner that all fathers shall wish their sons had red hair."
+
+This was too absurd. Mandeville had gone too far, except in the opinion
+of Our Next Door, who declared that an imitation was just as good as an
+original, if you could not detect it. But Herbert said that the closer
+an imitation is to an original, the more unendurable it is. But nobody
+could tell exactly why.
+
+The Fire-Tender said that we are imposed on by forms. The nuggets of
+wisdom that are dug out of the Oriental and remote literatures would
+often prove to be only commonplace if stripped of their quaint setting.
+If you gave an Oriental twist to some of our modern thought, its value
+would be greatly enhanced for many people.
+
+I have seen those, said the Mistress, who seem to prefer dried fruit to
+fresh; but I like the strawberry and the peach of each season, and for
+me the last is always the best.
+
+Even the Parson admitted that there were no signs of fatigue or decay in
+the creative energy of the world; and if it is a question of Pagans, he
+preferred Mandeville to Saadi.
+
+
+
+
+
+ELEVENTH STUDY
+
+
+It happened, or rather, to tell the truth, it was contrived,--for I have
+waited too long for things to turn up to have much faith in "happen,"
+that we who have sat by this hearthstone before should all be together
+on Christmas eve. There was a splendid backlog of hickory just beginning
+to burn with a glow that promised to grow more fiery till long past
+midnight, which would have needed no apology in a loggers' camp,--not so
+much as the religion of which a lady (in a city which shall be nameless)
+said, "If you must have a religion, this one will do nicely."
+
+There was not much conversation, as is apt to be the case when people
+come together who have a great deal to say, and are intimate enough to
+permit the freedom of silence. It was Mandeville who suggested that we
+read something, and the Young Lady, who was in a mood to enjoy her own
+thoughts, said, "Do." And finally it came about that the Fire Tender,
+without more resistance to the urging than was becoming, went to his
+library, and returned with a manuscript, from which he read the story of
+
+
+MY UNCLE IN INDIA
+
+Not that it is my uncle, let me explain. It is Polly's uncle, as I
+very well know, from the many times she has thrown him up to me, and
+is liable so to do at any moment. Having small expectations myself, and
+having wedded Polly when they were smaller, I have come to feel the full
+force, the crushing weight, of her lightest remark about "My Uncle in
+India." The words as I write them convey no idea of the tone in which
+they fall upon my ears. I think it is the only fault of that estimable
+woman, that she has an "uncle in India" and does not let him quietly
+remain there. I feel quite sure that if I had an uncle in Botany Bay, I
+should never, never throw him up to Polly in the way mentioned. If
+there is any jar in our quiet life, he is the cause of it; all along of
+possible "expectations" on the one side calculated to overawe the other
+side not having expectations. And yet I know that if her uncle in India
+were this night to roll a barrel of "India's golden sands," as I feel
+that he any moment may do, into our sitting-room, at Polly's feet, that
+charming wife, who is more generous than the month of May, and who has
+no thought but for my comfort in two worlds, would straightway make
+it over to me, to have and to hold, if I could lift it, forever and
+forever. And that makes it more inexplicable that she, being a woman,
+will continue to mention him in the way she does.
+
+In a large and general way I regard uncles as not out of place in this
+transitory state of existence. They stand for a great many possible
+advantages. They are liable to "tip" you at school, they are resources
+in vacation, they come grandly in play about the holidays, at which
+season mv heart always did warm towards them with lively expectations,
+which were often turned into golden solidities; and then there is always
+the prospect, sad to a sensitive mind, that uncles are mortal, and, in
+their timely taking off, may prove as generous in the will as they
+were in the deed. And there is always this redeeming possibility in a
+niggardly uncle. Still there must be something wrong in the character of
+the uncle per se, or all history would not agree that nepotism is such a
+dreadful thing.
+
+But, to return from this unnecessary digression, I am reminded that the
+charioteer of the patient year has brought round the holiday time. It
+has been a growing year, as most years are. It is very pleasant to see
+how the shrubs in our little patch of ground widen and thicken and bloom
+at the right time, and to know that the great trees have added a laver
+to their trunks. To be sure, our garden,--which I planted under Polly's
+directions, with seeds that must have been patented, and I forgot to
+buy the right of, for they are mostly still waiting the final
+resurrection,--gave evidence that it shared in the misfortune of the
+Fall, and was never an Eden from which one would have required to have
+been driven. It was the easiest garden to keep the neighbor's pigs and
+hens out of I ever saw. If its increase was small its temptations
+were smaller, and that is no little recommendation in this world of
+temptations. But, as a general thing, everything has grown, except our
+house. That little cottage, over which Polly presides with grace enough
+to adorn a palace, is still small outside and smaller inside; and if it
+has an air of comfort and of neatness, and its rooms are cozy and sunny
+by day and cheerful by night, and it is bursting with books, and not
+unattractive with modest pictures on the walls, which we think do well
+enough until my uncle--(but never mind my uncle, now),--and if, in the
+long winter evenings, when the largest lamp is lit, and the chestnuts
+glow in embers, and the kid turns on the spit, and the house-plants are
+green and flowering, and the ivy glistens in the firelight, and Polly
+sits with that contented, far-away look in her eyes that I like to see,
+her fingers busy upon one of those cruel mysteries which have delighted
+the sex since Penelope, and I read in one of my fascinating law-books,
+or perhaps regale ourselves with a taste of Montaigne,--if all this is
+true, there are times when the cottage seems small; though I can never
+find that Polly thinks so, except when she sometimes says that she does
+not know where she should bestow her uncle in it, if he should suddenly
+come back from India.
+
+There it is, again. I sometimes think that my wife believes her uncle
+in India to be as large as two ordinary men; and if her ideas of him are
+any gauge of the reality, there is no place in the town large enough
+for him except the Town Hall. She probably expects him to come with his
+bungalow, and his sedan, and his palanquin, and his elephants, and his
+retinue of servants, and his principalities, and his powers, and his
+ha--(no, not that), and his chowchow, and his--I scarcely know what
+besides.
+
+Christmas eve was a shiny cold night, a creaking cold night, a placid,
+calm, swingeing cold night.
+
+Out-doors had gone into a general state of crystallization. The
+snow-fields were like the vast Arctic ice-fields that Kane looked on,
+and lay sparkling under the moonlight, crisp and Christmasy, and all
+the crystals on the trees and bushes hung glistening, as if ready, at a
+breath of air, to break out into metallic ringing, like a million silver
+joy-bells. I mentioned the conceit to Polly, as we stood at the window,
+and she said it reminded her of Jean Paul. She is a woman of most
+remarkable discernment.
+
+Christmas is a great festival at our house in a small way. Among the
+many delightful customs we did not inherit from our Pilgrim Fathers,
+there is none so pleasant as that of giving presents at this season.
+It is the most exciting time of the year. No one is too rich to receive
+something, and no one too poor to give a trifle. And in the act of
+giving and receiving these tokens of regard, all the world is kin for
+once, and brighter for this transient glow of generosity. Delightful
+custom! Hard is the lot of childhood that knows nothing of the visits
+of Kriss Kringle, or the stockings hung by the chimney at night; and
+cheerless is any age that is not brightened by some Christmas gift,
+however humble. What a mystery of preparation there is in the preceding
+days, what planning and plottings of surprises! Polly and I keep up the
+custom in our simple way, and great is the perplexity to express the
+greatest amount of affection with a limited outlay. For the excellence
+of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value. As we
+stood by the window that night, we wondered what we should receive this
+year, and indulged in I know not what little hypocrisies and deceptions.
+
+I wish, said Polly, "that my uncle in India would send me a camel's-hair
+shawl, or a string of pearls, each as big as the end of my thumb."
+
+"Or a white cow, which would give golden milk, that would make butter
+worth seventy-five cents a pound," I added, as we drew the curtains, and
+turned to our chairs before the open fire.
+
+It is our custom on every Christmas eve--as I believe I have somewhere
+said, or if I have not, I say it again, as the member from Erin might
+remark--to read one of Dickens's Christmas stories. And this night,
+after punching the fire until it sent showers of sparks up the chimney,
+I read the opening chapter of "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," in my best
+manner, and handed the book to Polly to continue; for I do not so much
+relish reading aloud the succeeding stories of Mr. Dickens's annual
+budget, since he wrote them, as men go to war in these days, by
+substitute. And Polly read on, in her melodious voice, which is almost
+as pleasant to me as the Wasser-fluth of Schubert, which she often plays
+at twilight; and I looked into the fire, unconsciously constructing
+stories of my own out of the embers. And her voice still went on, in a
+sort of running accompaniment to my airy or fiery fancies.
+
+"Sleep?" said Polly, stopping, with what seemed to me a sort of crash,
+in which all the castles tumbled into ashes.
+
+"Not in the least," I answered brightly, "never heard anything more
+agreeable." And the reading flowed on and on and on, and I looked
+steadily into the fire, the fire, fire, fi....
+
+Suddenly the door opened, and into our cozy parlor walked the most
+venerable personage I ever laid eyes on, who saluted me with great
+dignity. Summer seemed to have burst into the room, and I was conscious
+of a puff of Oriental airs, and a delightful, languid tranquillity. I
+was not surprised that the figure before me was clad in full turban,
+baggy drawers, and a long loose robe, girt about the middle with a rich
+shawl. Followed him a swart attendant, who hastened to spread a rug upon
+which my visitor sat down, with great gravity, as I am informed they
+do in farthest Ind. The slave then filled the bowl of a long-stemmed
+chibouk, and, handing it to his master, retired behind him and began to
+fan him with the most prodigious palm-leaf I ever saw. Soon the fumes of
+the delicate tobacco of Persia pervaded the room, like some costly aroma
+which you cannot buy, now the entertainment of the Arabian Nights is
+discontinued.
+
+Looking through the window I saw, if I saw anything, a palanquin at our
+door, and attendant on it four dusky, half-naked bearers, who did not
+seem to fancy the splendor of the night, for they jumped about on the
+snow crust, and I could see them shiver and shake in the keen air. Oho!
+thought! this, then, is my uncle from India!
+
+"Yes, it is," now spoke my visitor extraordinary, in a gruff, harsh
+voice.
+
+"I think I have heard Polly speak of you," I rejoined, in an attempt
+to be civil, for I did n't like his face any better than I did his
+voice,--a red, fiery, irascible kind of face.
+
+"Yes I've come over to O Lord,--quick, Jamsetzee, lift up that
+foot,--take care. There, Mr. Trimings, if that's your name, get me a
+glass of brandy, stiff."
+
+I got him our little apothecary-labeled bottle and poured out enough to
+preserve a whole can of peaches. My uncle took it down without a wink,
+as if it had been water, and seemed relieved. It was a very pleasant
+uncle to have at our fireside on Christmas eve, I felt.
+
+At a motion from my uncle, Jamsetzee handed me a parcel which I saw
+was directed to Polly, which I untied, and lo! the most wonderful
+camel's-hair shawl that ever was, so fine that I immediately drew it
+through my finger-ring, and so large that I saw it would entirely cover
+our little room if I spread it out; a dingy red color, but splendid
+in appearance from the little white hieroglyphic worked in one corner,
+which is always worn outside, to show that it cost nobody knows how many
+thousands of dollars.
+
+"A Christmas trifle for Polly. I have come home--as I was saying when
+that confounded twinge took me--to settle down; and I intend to make
+Polly my heir, and live at my ease and enjoy life. Move that leg a
+little, Jamsetzee."
+
+I meekly replied that I had no doubt Polly would be delighted to see her
+dear uncle, and as for inheriting, if it came to that, I did n't know
+any one with a greater capacity for that than she.
+
+"That depends," said the gruff old smoker, "how I like ye. A fortune,
+scraped up in forty years in Ingy, ain't to be thrown away in a minute.
+But what a house this is to live in!"; the uncomfortable old relative
+went on, throwing a contemptuous glance round the humble cottage. "Is
+this all of it?"
+
+"In the winter it is all of it," I said, flushing up; "but in the
+summer, when the doors and windows are open, it is as large as anybody's
+house. And," I went on, with some warmth, "it was large enough just
+before you came in, and pleasant enough. And besides," I said, rising
+into indignation, "you can not get anything much better in this city
+short of eight hundred dollars a year, payable first days of January,
+April, July, and October, in advance, and my salary...."
+
+"Hang your salary, and confound your impudence and your seven-by-nine
+hovel! Do you think you have anything to say about the use of my money,
+scraped up in forty years in Ingy? THINGS HAVE GOT TO BE CHANGED!" he
+burst out, in a voice that rattled the glasses on the sideboard.
+
+I should think they were. Even as I looked into the little fireplace it
+enlarged, and there was an enormous grate, level with the floor, glowing
+with seacoal; and a magnificent mantel carved in oak, old and brown; and
+over it hung a landscape, wide, deep, summer in the foreground with all
+the gorgeous coloring of the tropics, and beyond hills of blue and far
+mountains lying in rosy light. I held my breath as I looked down the
+marvelous perspective. Looking round for a second, I caught a glimpse of
+a Hindoo at each window, who vanished as if they had been whisked off by
+enchantment; and the close walls that shut us in fled away. Had cohesion
+and gravitation given out? Was it the "Great Consummation" of the year
+18-? It was all like the swift transformation of a dream, and I pinched
+my arm to make sure that I was not the subject of some diablerie.
+
+The little house was gone; but that I scarcely minded, for I had
+suddenly come into possession of my wife's castle in Spain. I sat in a
+spacious, lofty apartment, furnished with a princely magnificence. Rare
+pictures adorned the walls, statues looked down from deep niches,
+and over both the dark ivy of England ran and drooped in graceful
+luxuriance. Upon the heavy tables were costly, illuminated volumes;
+luxurious chairs and ottomans invited to easy rest; and upon the ceiling
+Aurora led forth all the flower-strewing daughters of the dawn in
+brilliant frescoes. Through the open doors my eyes wandered into
+magnificent apartment after apartment. There to the south, through
+folding-doors, was the splendid library, with groined roof, colored
+light streaming in through painted windows, high shelves stowed with
+books, old armor hanging on the walls, great carved oaken chairs about a
+solid oaken table, and beyond a conservatory of flowers and plants with
+a fountain springing in the center, the splashing of whose waters I
+could hear. Through the open windows I looked upon a lawn, green with
+close-shaven turf, set with ancient trees, and variegated with parterres
+of summer plants in bloom. It was the month of June, and the smell of
+roses was in the air.
+
+I might have thought it only a freak of my fancy, but there by the
+fireplace sat a stout, red-faced, puffy-looking man, in the ordinary
+dress of an English gentleman, whom I had no difficulty in recognizing
+as my uncle from India.
+
+"One wants a fire every day in the year in this confounded climate,"
+remarked that amiable old person, addressing no one in particular.
+
+I had it on my lips to suggest that I trusted the day would come when he
+would have heat enough to satisfy him, in permanent supply. I wish now
+that I had.
+
+I think things had changed. For now into this apartment, full of the
+morning sunshine, came sweeping with the air of a countess born, and a
+maid of honor bred, and a queen in expectancy, my Polly, stepping with
+that lofty grace which I always knew she possessed, but which she never
+had space to exhibit in our little cottage, dressed with that elegance
+and richness that I should not have deemed possible to the most Dutch
+duchess that ever lived, and, giving me a complacent nod of recognition,
+approached her uncle, and said in her smiling, cheery way, "How is the
+dear uncle this morning?" And, as she spoke, she actually bent down and
+kissed his horrid old cheek, red-hot with currie and brandy and all the
+biting pickles I can neither eat nor name, kissed him, and I did not
+turn into stone.
+
+"Comfortable as the weather will permit, my darling!"--and again I did
+not turn into stone.
+
+"Wouldn't uncle like to take a drive this charming morning?" Polly
+asked.
+
+Uncle finally grunted out his willingness, and Polly swept away again to
+prepare for the drive, taking no more notice of me than if I had been a
+poor assistant office lawyer on a salary. And soon the carriage was at
+the door, and my uncle, bundled up like a mummy, and the charming Polly
+drove gayly away.
+
+How pleasant it is to be married rich, I thought, as I arose and
+strolled into the library, where everything was elegant and prim and
+neat, with no scraps of paper and piles of newspapers or evidences of
+literary slovenness on the table, and no books in attractive disorder,
+and where I seemed to see the legend staring at me from all the walls,
+"No smoking." So I uneasily lounged out of the house. And a magnificent
+house it was, a palace, rather, that seemed to frown upon and bully
+insignificant me with its splendor, as I walked away from it towards
+town.
+
+And why town? There was no use of doing anything at the dingy office.
+Eight hundred dollars a year! It wouldn't keep Polly in gloves, let
+alone dressing her for one of those fashionable entertainments to which
+we went night after night. And so, after a weary day with nothing in
+it, I went home to dinner, to find my uncle quite chirruped up with
+his drive, and Polly regnant, sublimely engrossed in her new world of
+splendor, a dazzling object of admiration to me, but attentive and even
+tender to that hypochondriacal, gouty old subject from India.
+
+Yes, a magnificent dinner, with no end of servants, who seemed to
+know that I couldn't have paid the wages of one of them, and plate and
+courses endless. I say, a miserable dinner, on the edge of which seemed
+to sit by permission of somebody, like an invited poor relation, who
+wishes he had sent a regret, and longing for some of those nice little
+dishes that Polly used to set before me with beaming face, in the dear
+old days.
+
+And after dinner, and proper attention to the comfort for the night of
+our benefactor, there was the Blibgims's party. No long, confidential
+interviews, as heretofore, as to what she should wear and what I should
+wear, and whether it would do to wear it again. And Polly went in one
+coach, and I in another. No crowding into the hired hack, with all the
+delightful care about tumbling dresses, and getting there in good order;
+and no coming home together to our little cozy cottage, in a pleasant,
+excited state of "flutteration," and sitting down to talk it all over,
+and "Was n't it nice?" and "Did I look as well as anybody?" and "Of
+course you did to me," and all that nonsense. We lived in a grand way
+now, and had our separate establishments and separate plans, and I used
+to think that a real separation couldn't make matters much different.
+Not that Polly meant to be any different, or was, at heart; but, you
+know, she was so much absorbed in her new life of splendor, and perhaps
+I was a little old-fashioned.
+
+I don't wonder at it now, as I look back. There was an army of
+dressmakers to see, and a world of shopping to do, and a houseful of
+servants to manage, and all the afternoon for calls, and her dear, dear
+friend, with the artless manners and merry heart of a girl, and the
+dignity and grace of a noble woman, the dear friend who lived in the
+house of the Seven Gables, to consult about all manner of important
+things. I could not, upon my honor, see that there was any place for me,
+and I went my own way, not that there was much comfort in it.
+
+And then I would rather have had charge of a hospital ward than take
+care of that uncle. Such coddling as he needed, such humoring of whims.
+And I am bound to say that Polly could n't have been more dutiful to him
+if he had been a Hindoo idol. She read to him and talked to him, and
+sat by him with her embroidery, and was patient with his crossness, and
+wearied herself, that I could see, with her devoted ministrations.
+
+I fancied sometimes she was tired of it, and longed for the old homely
+simplicity. I was. Nepotism had no charms for me. There was nothing that
+I could get Polly that she had not. I could surprise her with no little
+delicacies or trifles, delightedly bought with money saved for the
+purpose. There was no more coming home weary with office work and being
+met at the door with that warm, loving welcome which the King of England
+could not buy. There was no long evening when we read alternately from
+some favorite book, or laid our deep housekeeping plans, rejoiced in a
+good bargain or made light of a poor one, and were contented and merry
+with little. I recalled with longing my little den, where in the
+midst of the literary disorder I love, I wrote those stories for the
+"Antarctic" which Polly, if nobody else, liked to read. There was
+no comfort for me in my magnificent library. We were all rich and in
+splendor, and our uncle had come from India. I wished, saving his soul,
+that the ship that brought him over had foundered off Barnegat Light. It
+would always have been a tender and regretful memory to both of us. And
+how sacred is the memory of such a loss!
+
+Christmas? What delight could I have in long solicitude and ingenious
+devices touching a gift for Polly within my means, and hitting the
+border line between her necessities and her extravagant fancy? A drove
+of white elephants would n't have been good enough for her now, if each
+one carried a castle on his back.
+
+"--and so they were married, and in their snug cottage lived happy ever
+after."--It was Polly's voice, as she closed the book.
+
+"There, I don't believe you have heard a word of it," she said half
+complainingly.
+
+"Oh, yes, I have," I cried, starting up and giving the fire a jab with
+the poker; "I heard every word of it, except a few at the close I was
+thinking"--I stopped, and looked round.
+
+"Why, Polly, where is the camel's-hair shawl?"
+
+"Camel's-hair fiddlestick! Now I know you have been asleep for an hour."
+
+And, sure enough, there was n't any camel's-hair shawl there, nor any
+uncle, nor were there any Hindoos at our windows.
+
+And then I told Polly all about it; how her uncle came back, and we were
+rich and lived in a palace and had no end of money, but she didn't seem
+to have time to love me in it all, and all the comfort of the little
+house was blown away as by the winter wind. And Polly vowed, half in
+tears, that she hoped her uncle never would come back, and she wanted
+nothing that we had not, and she wouldn't exchange our independent
+comfort and snug house, no, not for anybody's mansion. And then and
+there we made it all up, in a manner too particular for me to mention;
+and I never, to this day, heard Polly allude to My Uncle in India.
+
+And then, as the clock struck eleven, we each produced from the place
+where we had hidden them the modest Christmas gifts we had prepared for
+each other, and what surprise there was! "Just the thing I needed." And,
+"It's perfectly lovely." And, "You should n't have done it." And, then,
+a question I never will answer, "Ten? fifteen? five? twelve?" "My dear,
+it cost eight hundred dollars, for I have put my whole year into it, and
+I wish it was a thousand times better."
+
+And so, when the great iron tongue of the city bell swept over the snow
+the twelve strokes that announced Christmas day, if there was anywhere a
+happier home than ours, I am glad of it!
+
+
+
+
+
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