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+Project Gutenberg's From the Easy Chair, series 3, by George William Curtis
+
+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: From the Easy Chair, series 3
+
+Author: George William Curtis
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2011 [EBook #36090]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM THE EASY CHAIR, SERIES 3 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, Broward County Libraries and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: George William Curtis]
+
+
+
+
+FROM THE
+
+EASY CHAIR
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
+
+_THIRD SERIES_
+
+[Illustration]
+
+NEW YORK
+
+HARPER AND BROTHERS
+
+MDCCCXCIV
+
+Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                      PAGE
+
+    HAWTHORNE AND BROOK FARM                                             1
+    BEECHER IN HIS PULPIT AFTER THE DEATH OF LINCOLN                    20
+    KILLING DEER                                                        28
+    AUTUMN DAYS                                                         37
+    FROM COMO TO MILAN DURING THE WAR OF 1848                           43
+    HERBERT SPENCER ON THE YANKEE                                       56
+    HONOR                                                               65
+    JOSEPH WESLEY HARPER                                                72
+    REVIEW OF UNION TROOPS, 1865                                        78
+    APRIL, 1865                                                         88
+    WASHINGTON IN 1867                                                  94
+    RECEPTION TO THE JAPANESE AMBASSADORS AT THE WHITE HOUSE           102
+    THE MAID AND THE WIT                                               112
+    THE DEPARTURE OF THE _GREAT EASTERN_                               120
+    CHURCH STREET                                                      127
+    HISTORIC BUILDINGS                                                 140
+    THE BOSTON MUSIC HALL                                              151
+    PUBLIC BENEFACTORS                                                 162
+    MR. TIBBINS'S NEW-YEAR'S CALL                                      169
+    THE NEW ENGLAND SABBATH                                            178
+    THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS, 1884                          185
+    REFORM CHARITY                                                     193
+    BICYCLE RIDING FOR CHILDREN                                        204
+    THE DEAD BIRD UPON CYRILLA'S HAT AN ENCOURAGEMENT OF "SLARTER"     210
+    CHEAPENING HIS NAME                                                214
+    CLERGYMEN'S SALARIES                                               221
+
+
+
+
+HAWTHORNE AND BROOK FARM
+
+
+In his preface to the _Marble Faun_, as before in that to _The
+Blithedale Romance_, Hawthorne complained that there was no romantic
+element in American life; or, as he expressed it, "There is as yet no
+such Faery-land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness,
+one cannot tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange
+enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of
+their own." This he says in _The Blithedale_ preface, and then adds
+that, to obviate this difficulty and supply a proper scene for his
+figures, "the author has ventured to make free with his old and
+affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm as being certainly the most
+romantic episode of his own life, essentially a day-dream, and yet a
+fact, and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and
+reality." Probably a genuine Brook-Farmer doubts whether Hawthorne
+remembered the place and his life there very affectionately, in the
+usual sense of that word, and although in sending the book to one of
+them, at least, he said that it was not to be considered a picture of
+actual life or character. "Do not read it as if it had anything to do
+with Brook Farm [which essentially it has not], but merely for its own
+story and characters," yet it is plain that it is a very faithful
+picture of the kind of impression that the enterprise made upon him.
+
+Strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority
+upon "the romantic episode" of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart
+more than he whose faith and hope and energy were all devoted to its
+development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent
+record, have never done so, and it is already so much of a thing of the
+past that it will probably never be done. But the memory of the place
+and of the time has been recently pleasantly refreshed by the lecture of
+Mr. Emerson and the _Note-Book_ of Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson, whose mind
+and heart are ever hospitable, was one of the chief, indeed the
+chiefest, figure in this country of the famous intellectual
+"Renaissance" of twenty-five years ago, which, as is generally the case,
+is historically known by its nickname of "Transcendentalism," a
+spiritual fermentation from which some of the best modern influences of
+this country have proceeded.
+
+In his late lecture upon the general subject, Mr. Emerson says that the
+mental excitement began to take practical form nearly thirty years ago,
+when Dr. Channing counselled with George Ripley upon the practicability
+of bringing thoughtful and cultivated people together and forming a
+society that should be satisfactory. "That good attempt," says Emerson,
+with a sly smile, "ended in an oyster supper with excellent wines." But
+a little later it was revived under better auspices, and as Brook Farm
+made a name which will not be forgotten. Mr. Emerson was never a
+resident, but he was sometimes a visitor and guest, and the more ardent
+minds of the romantic colony were always much under his influence. With
+his sensitively humorous eye he seizes upon some of the ludicrous
+aspects of the scene and reports them with arch gravity. "The ladies
+again," he says, "took cold on washing-days, and it was ordained that
+the gentlemen shepherds should hang out the clothes, which they
+punctually did; but a great anachronism followed in the evening, for
+when they began to dance the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their
+pockets." And again: "One hears the frequent statement of the country
+members that one man was ploughing all day and another was looking out
+of the window all day--perhaps drawing his picture, and they both
+received the same wages."
+
+In Hawthorne's just published _Note-Book_ he records a great deal of his
+daily experience at Brook Farm. But he was never truly at home there.
+Hawthorne lived in the very centre of the Transcendental revival, and he
+was the friend of many of its leaders, but he was never touched by its
+spirit. He seems to have been as little affected by the great
+intellectual influences of his time as Charles Lamb in England. The
+Custom-house had become intolerable to him. He was obliged to do
+something. The enterprise at Brook Farm seemed to him to promise
+Arcadia. But he forgot that the kingdom of heaven is within you, and
+when he went to the tranquil banks of the Charles he found himself in a
+barn-yard shovelling manure, and not at all in Arcadia. "Before
+breakfast I went out to the barn and began to chop hay for the cattle,
+and with such 'righteous vehemence,' as Mr. Ripley says, did I labor,
+that in the space of ten minutes I broke the machine. Then I brought
+wood and replenished the fires, and finally went down to breakfast and
+ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast Mr. Ripley put a
+four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand
+was called a pitchfork, and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar
+weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure."
+
+Hawthorne was a sturdy and resolute man, and any heap of manure that he
+attacked must yield; but he had not come to Arcadia to sweat and blister
+his hands, and his blank and amused disappointment is evident. He had a
+subtle and pervasive humor, but no spirits. He sees the pleasantness of
+the place and the beauty of the crops, having knowledge of them and a
+new interest in them; and he has a quiet conscience because he feels
+that he is really doing some of the manual work of the world; but he is
+always a spectator, a critic. He went to Brook Farm as he might have
+gone to an anchorite's cell; but the fervor that warms and adorns the
+cold bare rock he does not have, and the mere consciousness of
+well-doing is a chilly abstraction. "I do not believe that I should be
+patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way
+of life. I fear it is time for me, sod-compelling as I am, to take the
+field again. Even my Custom-house experience was not such a thraldom and
+weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the
+world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally
+brutified!" Very soon, of course, the pilgrim to Arcadia escapes from
+the manure-yard, and declares as he runs that it was not he, it was a
+spectre of him, who milked and hoed and toiled in the sun. Hawthorne
+remained at Brook Farm but a few months, and after he left he never
+returned thither, even for a visit.
+
+_The Blithedale Romance_ shows that he was not unmindful of its poetic
+aspect; but his genius was stirring in him, and he felt that he could
+not work hard with his hands and write also. So he went off, and never
+came back; and although he may have remembered certain persons kindly,
+his memory of the place and of his life there could not have been very
+affectionate. Probably there were other diaries kept at Brook Farm;
+certainly there were many and many letters written thence, in which
+still lie, and will forever lie, buried the material for its history.
+But it is likely to become a tradition only, and upon its finer side
+more and more unreal, because of such sketches as those of Hawthorne.
+The most comical part of the whole was its impression--that is, such
+impression as it made, and without exaggerating its extent or importance
+upon the steady old conservatism of Boston, which was of the most
+inflexible and antediluvian type. The enterprise was the more appalling
+because it seemed somehow to be a natural product of the spirit of
+society there. The hen of the tri-mountain had herself hatched this
+inexpressible duckling. Dr. Channing, indeed, was the honored
+intellectual chief; the culture of Boston had owed much to the liberal
+theology; old Dr. Beecher had battered that theology in vain; but the
+liberality of Boston was like the British Whiggery of the last century:
+it was more intelligent and more patrician than Toryism itself.
+
+Mr. Emerson, as we said, was practically the head--or, at least, the
+accepted representative--of the new movement. His discourses before the
+Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, his address to the divinity
+students, and his noble Dartmouth oration, followed by his lectures in
+Boston and his _Nature_ had set the barn-yard--not offensively to retain
+the metaphor of the hen--into the most resonant cackle, in the midst of
+Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon, and there was universal thunder.
+The pulpits which Dr. Beecher had assaulted, and which had watched him
+serenely, when they heard Parker thought that the very foundations of
+things were going. The most distinguished chanticleers went to Mr.
+Emerson's lectures, and when asked if they understood him, shook their
+stately combs and replied, with caustic superiority, "No; but our
+daughters do." And when the experiment began at Brook Farm there was no
+doubt in conservative circles that for their sins this offshoot of
+Bedlam was permitted in the neighborhood. What it was, what it was meant
+to be, was inexplicable. Are they fools, knaves, madmen, or mere
+sentimentalists?... Is this Coleridge and Southey again with their
+Pantisocracy and Susquehanna Paradise? Is it a vast nursery of
+infidelity; and is it true that "the abbé or religieux" sacrifices white
+oxen to Jupiter in the back parlor? What may not be true, since it is
+within Theodore Parker's parish, and his house, crammed with books, and
+modest under the pines, is only a mile away?
+
+These extraordinary and vague and hostile impressions were not relieved
+by the appearance of such votaries of the new shrine as appeared in the
+staid streets and halls of the city. There is always a certain amount of
+oddity latent in society, which rushes into such an enterprise as a
+natural vent, and in youth itself there is a similar latent and
+boundless protest against the friction and apparent unreason of the
+existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise this was
+everywhere observable. The freedom of the anti-slavery reform and its
+discussions had developed the "come-outers," who bore testimony at all
+times and places against Church and State. Mr. Emerson mentions an
+apostle of the gospel of love and no money, who preached zealously, but
+never gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the
+protestants against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious
+metaphysics upon milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder
+was to injure the maternal instincts of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee
+cannibalism, and the destruction of the tender germ of life; to swallow
+an oyster was to mask murder. A still selecter circle denounced the
+chains that shackled the tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the
+body. Profanity, they said, is not the use of forcible and picturesque
+words; it is the abuse of such to express base passions and emotions. So
+indecency cannot be affirmed of the model of all grace, the human body.
+The fig-leaf is the sign of the fall. Man returning to Paradise will
+leave it behind. The priests of this faith, therefore, felt themselves
+called upon to rebuke true profanity and indecency by sitting at their
+front doors upon Sunday morning with no other clothes than that of the
+fig-leaf period, tranquilly but loudly conversing in the most
+stupendous oaths, by way of conversational chiaro-oscuro, while a
+deluded world went shuddering to church.
+
+These were the harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time
+was like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every
+appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were
+regarded as the rule, and as the logical masquerade of this foul fiend
+Transcendentalism, which was evidently unappeasable, and was about to
+devour manner, morals, religion, and common-sense. If Father Lamson or
+Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and
+the non-resistants pleaded that those protestants had as good a right to
+speak as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was
+probably inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly-minded enough to
+understand it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And
+what was to be said--for you could not call them old dotards--when the
+younger protestants of the time came walking through the sober streets
+of Boston and seated themselves in concert-halls and lecture-rooms with
+hair parted in the middle and falling to their shoulders, and clad in
+garments such as no human being ever wore before--garments which seemed
+to be a compromise between the blouse of the Paris workman and the
+_peignoir_ of a possible sister? For tailoring underwent the sage
+revision to which the whole philosophy of life was subjected, and one
+ardent youth, asserting that the human form itself suggested the proper
+shape of its garments, caused trousers to be constructed that closely
+fitted the leg, and bore his testimony to the truth in coarse crash
+breeches.
+
+These were the ludicrous aspects of the intellectual and moral
+fermentation or agitation that was called Transcendentalism. And these
+were foolishly accepted by many as its chief and only signs. It was
+supposed that the folly was complete at Brook Farm, and it was
+indescribably ludicrous to observe reverend doctors and other dons
+coming out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going as
+dainty ladies hold their skirts and daintily step from stone to stone in
+a muddy street, lest they be soiled. The dons seemed to doubt whether
+the mere contact had not smirched them. But droll in itself, it was a
+thousandfold droller when Theodore Parker came through the woods and
+described it. With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and
+his nasal voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was
+truly laughable, yet all with infinite _bonhommie_ and a genuine
+superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and
+as excellent a mimic as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher.
+On Sundays a party always went from Brook Farm to Mr. Parker's little
+country church. He was there just exactly what he was afterwards, when
+he preached to thousands of eager people at the Boston Music Hall--the
+same plain, simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal
+friends. They loved him and were proud of him; and his geniality and
+tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books, his
+jovial manliness and sturdy independence, drew to him all ages and sexes
+and conditions.
+
+The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There
+were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most æsthetic culture and
+accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers, the
+industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they
+associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some
+extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of
+high _esprit de corps_--at least in the earlier or golden age of the
+colony. There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the
+founding of an earthly paradise upon a New England farm is no pastime.
+But with the best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry
+and devotion, there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of
+method, and the economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But
+there were never such witty potato patches and such sparkling cornfields
+before or since. The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the
+music of Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and
+bright as any brilliant midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of it
+all was one figure, the practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not
+drawn to the enterprise by any spiritual attraction, but was hired at
+good wages to superintend the work, and who always seemed to be
+regarding the whole affair with a most good-natured wonder as a
+prodigious masquerade. Indeed, the description which Hawthorne gives of
+him at a real masquerade of the farmers in the woods depicts his
+attitude towards Brook Farm itself: "And apart, with a shrewd Yankee
+observation of the scene, stands our friend Orange, a thick-set, sturdy
+figure, enjoying the fun well enough, yet rather laughing with a
+perception of its nonsensicalness than at all entering into the spirit
+of the thing." That, indeed, was very much the attitude of Hawthorne
+himself towards Brook Farm and many other aspects of human life.
+
+But beneath all the glancing colors, the lights and shadows of its
+surface, it was a simple, honest, practical effort for wiser forms of
+life than those in which we find ourselves. The criticism of science,
+the sneer of literature, the complaint of experience is that man is a
+miserably half-developed being, the proof of which is the condition of
+human society, in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the
+enjoyment cloys and disappoints, and the very want of labor poisons the
+enjoyment. Man is made body and soul. The health of each requires
+reasonable exercise. If every man did his share of the muscular work of
+the world no other man would be overwhelmed with it. The man who does
+not work imposes the necessity of harder toil upon him who does. Thereby
+the first steals from the last the opportunity of mental culture, and at
+last we reach a world of pariahs and patricians, with all the
+inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround us. Bound fast by the
+brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through
+justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition.
+
+That some such generous and noble thought inspired this effort at
+practical Christianity is most probable. The Brook-Farmers did not
+interpret the words, "The poor ye have always with ye" to mean, "We must
+keep always some of you poor." They found the practical Christian in him
+who said to his neighbor, "Friend, come up higher." But apart from any
+precise and defined intention, it was certainly a very alluring
+prospect: that of life in a pleasant country, taking exercise in useful
+toil, and surrounded with the most interesting and accomplished people.
+Compared with other efforts upon which time and money and industry are
+lavished, measured by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by California
+gold-washing, by oil-boring, and by the Stock Exchange, Brook Farm was
+certainly a very reasonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the hope
+and aid of generous men and women. The friendships that were formed
+there were enduring. The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy with
+what is most useful to men, the kind patience and constant charity that
+were fostered there, have been no more lost than grain dropped upon the
+field. It is to the Transcendentalism that seemed to so many good souls
+both wicked and absurd that some of the best influences of American life
+to-day are due. The spirit that was concentrated at Brook Farm is
+diffused but not lost. As an organized effort, after many downward
+changes, it failed; but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the
+Cottage, when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright
+humor; when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the circle for a night
+or day; when those who may not be named publicly brought beauty and wit
+and social sympathy to the feast; when the practical possibilities of
+life seemed fairer, and life and character were touched ineffaceably
+with good influence, cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm,
+and remember with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days at Brook Farm.
+
+
+
+
+BEECHER IN HIS PULPIT AFTER THE DEATH OF LINCOLN
+
+
+"Cross the Fulton Ferry and follow the crowd" was the direction which
+was said to have been given humorously by Mr. Beecher himself to a
+pilgrim who asked how to find his church in Brooklyn. The Easy Chair
+remembered it on the Sunday morning after the return of the Fort Sumter
+party; and crossing at an early hour in the beautiful spring day, he
+stepped ashore and followed the crowd up the street. That at so early an
+hour the current would set strongly towards the church he did not
+believe. But he was mistaken. At the corner of Hicks Street the throng
+turned and pushed along with hurrying eagerness as if they were already
+too late, although it was but a little past nine o'clock. The street
+was disagreeable like a street upon the outskirts of a city, but the
+current turned from it again in two streams, one flowing to the rear and
+the other to the front of Plymouth Church. The Easy Chair drifted along
+with the first, and as he went around the corner observed just before
+him a low brick tower, below which was an iron gate.
+
+The gate was open, and we all passed rapidly in, going through a low
+passage smoothly paved and echoing, with a fountain of water midway and
+a chained mug--a kind thought for the wayfarer--and that little cheap
+charity seemed already an indication of the humane spirit which
+irradiates the image of Plymouth Church. The low passage brought us all
+to the narrow walk by the side of the church, and to the back door of
+the building. The crowd was already tossing about all the doors. The
+street in front of the building was full, and occasionally squads of
+enterprising devotees darted out and hurried up to the back door to
+compare the chances of getting in.
+
+The Easy Chair pushed forward, and was shown by a courteous usher to a
+convenient seat. The church is a large white building, with a gallery on
+both sides, two galleries in front, and an organ-loft and choir just
+behind the pulpit. It is spacious and very light, with four long windows
+on each side. The seats upon the floor converge towards the pulpit,
+which is a platform with a mahogany desk, and there are no columns. The
+view of the speaker is unobstructed from every part. The plain white
+walls and entire absence of architectural ornamentation inevitably
+suggest the bare cold barns of meeting-houses in early New England. But
+this house is of a very cheerful, comfortable, and substantial aspect.
+
+There were already dense crowds wedged about all the doors upon the
+inside. The seats of the pew-holders were protected by the ushers, the
+habit being, as the Easy Chair understood, for the holders who do not
+mean to attend any service to notify the ushers that they may fill the
+seats. Upon the outside of the pews along the aisles there are chairs
+which can be turned down, enabling two persons to be seated side by
+side, yet with a space for passage between, so that the aisle is not
+wholly choked. On this Sunday the duties of the ushers were very
+difficult and delicate, for the pressure was extraordinary. There was
+still more than an hour before the beginning of the service, but the
+building was rapidly filling; and everybody who sank into a seat from
+which he was sure that he could not be removed wore an edifying
+expression of beaming contentment which must have been rather
+exasperating to those who were standing and struggling and dreadfully
+squeezed around the doors.
+
+Presently the seats were all full. The multitude seemed to be solid
+above and below, but still the new-comers tried to press in. The
+platform was fringed by the legs of those who had been so lucky as to
+find seats there. There was loud talking and scuffling, and even
+occasionally a little cry at the doors. One boy struggled desperately in
+the crowd for his life, or breath. The ushers, courteous to the last,
+smiled pitifully upon their own efforts to put ten gallons into a pint
+pot. As the hour of service approached a small door under the choir and
+immediately behind the mahogany desk upon the platform opened quietly,
+and Mr. Beecher entered. He stood looking at the crowd for a little
+time, without taking off his outer coat, then advanced to the edge of
+the platform and gave some directions about seats. He indicated with his
+hands that the people should pack more closely. The ushers evidently
+pleaded for the pew-holders who had not arrived; but the preacher
+replied that they could not get in, and the seats should be filled that
+the service might proceed in silence. Then he removed his coat, sat
+down, and opened the Hymn-Book, while the organ played. The impatient
+people meantime had climbed up to the window-sills from the outside, and
+the great white church was like a hive, with the swarming bees hanging
+in clusters upon the outside.
+
+The service began with an invocation. It was followed by a hymn, by the
+reading of a chapter in the Bible, and a prayer. The congregation joined
+in singing; and the organ, skilfully and firmly played, prevented the
+lagging which usually spoils congregational singing. The effect was
+imposing. The vast volume filled the building with solid sound. It
+poured out at the open windows and filled the still morning air of the
+city with solemn melody. Far upon every side those who sat at home in
+solitary chambers heard the great voice of praise. Then amid the hush of
+the vast multitude the preacher, overpowered by emotion, prayed
+fervently for the stricken family and the bereaved nation. There was
+more singing, before which Mr. Beecher appealed to those who were
+sitting to sit closer, and for once to be incommoded that some more of
+the crowd might get in; and as the wind blew freshly from the open
+windows, he reminded the audience that a handkerchief laid upon the head
+would prevent the sensitive from taking cold. Then opening the Bible he
+read the story of Moses going up to Pisgah, and took the verses for his
+text.
+
+The sermon was written, and he read calmly from the manuscript. Yet at
+times, rising upon the flood of feeling, he shot out a solemn adjuration
+or asserted an opinion with a fiery emphasis that electrified the
+audience into applause. His action was intense but not dramatic; and the
+demeanor of the preacher was subdued and sorrowful. He did not attempt
+to speak in detail of the President's character or career. He drew the
+bold outline in a few words, and leaving that task to a calmer and
+fitter moment, spoke of the lessons of the hour. The way of his death
+was not to be deplored; the crime itself revealed to the dullest the
+ghastly nature of slavery; it was a blow not at a man, but at the people
+and their government; it had utterly failed; and, finally, though dead
+the good man yet speaketh. The discourse was brief, fitting, forcible,
+and tender with emotion. It was a manly sorrow and sympathy that cast
+its spell upon the great audience, and it was good to be there. When
+words have a man behind them, says a wise man, they are eloquent. There
+was another hymn before the benediction, a peal of pious triumph, which
+poured out of the heart of the congregation, and seemed to lift us all
+up, up into the sparkling, serene, inscrutable heaven.
+
+
+
+
+KILLING DEER
+
+
+"What shall he have that kill'd the deer?" sang the foresters in Arden.
+If you are in the wild woods of the Adirondacks you lie behind a log or
+rock by which the animal is likely to pass; you scarcely breathe as you
+wait with your hand grasping your rifle. The slow hours drag by, and you
+are very wet, or the gnats and mosquitoes sting, or you are hungry,
+cramped, or generally uncomfortable--but hark! What's that? A slight
+rustle! You are all alert. Your heart beats. Your hands tingle.
+Breathlessly you stare towards the sound. And then--nothing. A twig
+dropped.
+
+Ah well! that's nothing. Very cautiously you stretch the leg which has
+the most stitch in it lest you should alarm the deer. The position and
+the progress of affairs are a little monotonous; but if the day that
+counts one glorious nibble is a day well spent, how much more so that
+which gives you the chance of a deer! 'St! A slight but decided crashing
+beyond the wood. A faint, startled, hurrying sound; and the next moment,
+erect, alive in every hair, the proud antlers quivering, the eye wild
+but soft, the form firm and exquisitely agile, the buck bounds into
+view. Crack you go, you poor miserable skulker behind a rotten log, and
+off he goes, the dappled noble of the forest!
+
+Perhaps you hit him and kill him. You outwit him and murder him. Well,
+in Venice the bravos hid in dark doorways and stabbed the gallants
+hieing home from love and lady. Anybody can stab in the dark, or shoot
+from an ambush. To kill an animal for sport is wretched enough; but if
+you talk of manliness and use other fine words, be at least fair. Give
+him a chance. Put your two legs, your two arms, a knife, and your human
+wit against his four legs, greater strength, antlers, and want of brain.
+Then is the contest fair. You who seek his life for fun give him a
+chance at yours for self-defence. The sylvan shades approve the equal
+strife; and if you fall you are at least not disgraced.
+
+If you are a deer-stalker you creep up stealthily to find them feeding,
+and if you can creep near enough, you blaze away. I hope that you have
+seen Doyle's picture of you, a company of you, scrambling up the side of
+a hill hoping to catch the prey over the brow. But you will not do it.
+They are off, the blithe beauties, and you may get up from your stomachs
+as soon as you choose.
+
+Or you may hunt in a deer preserve with drivers and hounds. You pass
+beyond the thicket in which they lurk, leaving the drivers to urge them
+forth. You emerge upon sunny open spaces waving with thin, long, dry
+grass, tufted with thick shrubs, and dotted with convenient mossy rocks.
+Here is a favorite path of the flying deer, and you post yourself
+expectant behind a rock. How calm and lovely the brilliant October day!
+How the mass of the foliage shines in the clear sunlight! How every
+prospect pleases, and only man is--hark, again! They are coming. Lie
+low. Still as death. Oh! the beauties! There they are! And one glorious
+chief of chiefs darts straight and swift towards your ambush. Just
+beyond is the covert. He believes that safety is there. The quiet sunny
+nooks in which he shall lie and feed, the pleasant shades at noon, the
+leafy lair--they are all there a hundred rods before. Press on! press
+on! oh delicate, swift feet! He is not man who does not follow you with
+human sympathy. Innocence, purity, helplessness, they skim the sunny
+space with you. Too late! A sharp, mean sound, the bounding falters, the
+panting racer falls. The dogs and men rush on. They slay the hapless
+victim. 'Tis a noble sport! 'Tis a manly business!
+
+Lately I saw two deer, two stately bucks. It was a solitary, sunny
+opening upon which I suddenly came. They were lying at the edge of the
+wood, and rose with a startled spring, for an instant looked, and with
+one bound, as if they would leap over the tree tops, were lost in the
+thicket. The grace and charm they gave to the wood were indescribable.
+Into the remotest gloom they sent a flash of sunlight. Nothing fierce,
+or treacherous, or repulsive, consorts with the image of a deer, and
+when they vanished the whole wood was peopled with their lovely forms.
+If I had gone back to dinner dragging a mangled body along the wood
+road, or carrying the piteous burden in a wagon, how could that sunlit
+beech wood ever again be so sylvan sweet and Arcadian? The tranquil,
+secluded, happy scene would have been blood-stained. It would have been
+a fantastic remorse, but how could I have justified the killing of the
+deer?
+
+No. I have not killed deer in the Adirondacks, nor moose at Moosehead. I
+do not quarrel with those who have; and I hope they are as satisfied as
+I am. One day I hope to reach those pleasant places, but I hope to see
+deer, not to kill them. I am content that other people should slay my
+venison as well as my beef; and I shall not pretend to find any sport in
+the shambles, whether in the outskirts of the city or in the mountain
+valleys. I do not insist upon killing the chickens that I eat, nor the
+partridges, nor the quail. The noble art of Venery is a fine term to
+describe the butcher's business. A man who sees a heron streaming
+through the tranquil summer sky and only wishes for his gun, or who sees
+the beautiful bound of a deer in the woods with no other wish than that
+of killing it, I do not envy, as I do not envy the farmer slaughtering
+pigs. The bravest and most robust manhood is not necessarily developed
+nor proved either by sticking pins into grasshoppers or firing shot into
+deer.
+
+"Ah yes! but you treat it too seriously," says young Nimrod. "It is not
+a matter of reason, but of feeling and excitement. As you lie in your
+ambush and hear suddenly the shouting of the drivers, the barking of the
+dogs, the crackling and rustling of boughs and leaves, you cannot help
+the intense excitement. Your blood burns, your nerves tingle, your ears
+quiver, your eyes leap from your head, and, upon my honor, sir, when our
+best sportsman saw the deer near him last year in Maine, he fixed his
+eyes steadily upon him, but such was his nervous twitter that he pointed
+his rifle straight into the ground and fired. He wounded the ground
+severely, but the deer escaped. What is the use of talking to him about
+butchery? Nothing in the world interests or charms him so much as
+hunting. Besides, you get used to it. It is not pleasant, probably, for
+the tyro, who is a surgical student, to see men's legs and arms cut off.
+You could not see it without shuddering, perhaps not without sickening
+and fainting. But there must be surgeons, and how long would it be
+before you would actually enjoy it?
+
+"There. Hark! tally ho, tantivity! Is not the language rich with
+metaphors derived from the hunt? Does not literature ring with hunting
+songs and choruses and glees? Is it not all inwrought with romance and
+poetry? Waken, lords and ladies gay! The baying hound, the winding horn,
+the scarlet huntsman, the flying fox, the streaming, flashing dash
+across the country--they are of the very essence of the life and
+civilization from which we spring. They are the soul of the 'Merrie
+England' which is our chief tradition. Come, come! to the Adirondacks!
+to Moosehead!
+
+    "'All nature smiles to usher in
+      The jocund Queen of morn,
+    And huntsmen with the day begin
+      To wind the mellow horn!'"
+
+Yes, the horn winds far and sweet in story and song, until it becomes
+the horn of elf-land faintly blowing, and man is a carnivorous animal
+who feeds on flesh. But butchers and fishermen are provided to supply
+the market. Is the carnivorous formation of man a reason that boys
+should stone birds or men shoot deer, that we should bait dogs and fight
+cocks and kill scared pigeons, not for food, but for fun? Foxes may be a
+pest that should be exterminated, like bears in a frontier country. But
+when a country is so advanced in settlement and civilization that
+prosperous gentlemen dress themselves gayly in scarlet coats and
+buckskin breeches, and ride blooded horses, and follow costly packs of
+hounds across country hunting a frightened fox, the fox is no longer a
+pest, and the riders are not frontiersmen and honest settlers; they are
+butchers, not for a lawful purpose, but for pleasure. Yes; the law
+solemnly takes life, but the judge who should take life for sport--!
+
+Nimrod, despite the winding horn, the human relation to domestic animals
+that serve us is still barbarous. No man can see what treatment a noble
+horse, straining and struggling to do his best, often receives from his
+owner, without wincing at the fate that abandons so fine a creature to
+so ignoble and cruel a tormentor. But the kindly hand of civilization
+has at last reached the animals. In Cincinnati there is a statue newly
+raised to their protector. They will never know him, but the American
+list of worthies is incomplete in which the name of Henry Bergh is not
+"writ large."
+
+
+
+
+AUTUMN DAYS
+
+
+The "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" comes long before the
+maples are crimson and the birches yellow. The splendor of the summer is
+very brief. If it be really hot, July is not over before you may see the
+leaves slightly shrivelling, and the woods have a half-crisp, curdled
+aspect. The intense heat of the year gives a sense of violent and rapid
+struggle, as if all the natural processes were wonderfully accelerated
+by an access of fever, and the long cool repose of convalescence follows
+in the clear, bright autumn days.
+
+The enjoyment of these things is a kind of test of character. If a man
+found himself ceasing to take pleasure in the moon and flowers and
+children--if the red leaf of the fall gave him the same emotion as the
+green leaf of the spring--he might well feel that he was old and his
+heart worn out.
+
+The finest sight is the autumn of age, like that of the year. Some men
+shrivel and dry up as they grow old. Some become coarse, or cynical, or
+sad. Some, after a noble promise and even a full flowering, ripen no
+fruit at all, and leave only a few reluctant and blighted results. Some
+stand covered with "nurly" balls, hard, dry, and useless. Others are
+stripped and bare. But a genial, golden age has all the qualities of a
+warm October day. There is soft repose upon the landscape. No harsh
+winds blow, no sharp chills freeze. The distance on all sides is
+delicate and lost in luminous haze. Behind, it is romantic and fair;
+before, it is beautiful and alluring. On all the misty hill-tops visible
+summer seems to linger. The fields are crimson and yellow with the
+riches of the orchard; the purple grape glistens kindly, and the golden
+pumpkin lies comfortably under the stooks of dry corn. In the woods the
+light winds shake the trees and the dropping nuts patter upon the
+fallen leaves. Along the road the profuse golden-rod waves its bright
+spray, and the cool, scentless asters gleam like pallid stars. The heat
+is so honest that the round earth seems to bask in it with conscious
+joy. That shining sky hides no lightning. It hangs serenely over--a
+visible benediction. Night and day the barn doors stand wide open, and
+the great barn is bursting with its heaped treasures. The wagons come
+and go, and the beat of the flail begins. Bright and beautiful and
+abundant is the cheery scene, but there is a pervading sense of
+accomplishment. The cattle graze in the pastures, and in the meadows
+where the growth is over. The harvest fields will clearly do no more.
+The green of June has faded into the russet of October, and even the
+gorgeous leaves burn, a hectic hue, upon the landscape. The earth has
+done its work for the year, and there is a feeling of gathering in, of
+closing the doors, and of going to rest.
+
+When the autumn of a man's life is thus sweet and fruitful and serene,
+we see how outward nature merely hints and foreshows its master. In
+great, visible, palpable operations and results it images the fine and
+unmarked processes that go on in man. And yet, by its unfailing method,
+its annual return, the regular spring and bud and flower and fruit, it
+is a ceaseless, silent monitor. Measured by our own lives, how touching
+the fidelity of the year! Who is not rebuked by the honest apple-tree in
+his own garden? The plums are more like us. They are almost infallibly
+stung by the curculio. But how many a man who fights the curculio with
+all his fortune is himself stung all over by selfishness and pride! We
+might well be ashamed to walk in the woods. The mute obedience of the
+trees ought to be too impressive for us. Yes, in the long autumn nights
+they wrestle and roar. Their mighty voice thunders out and smites the
+heart of the awakening sleeper. But will you claim that it is their
+protest against the inevitable law, that they too are rebellious and
+forgetful and disdainful as we are? It seems to me only piercingly sad
+in its wildest tumult. It is the blind king feeling for his peers and
+crying out when he does not find them. "Lords of the world" shout the
+autumn woods, tossing their branches and groping blindly in the
+air--"men and women who are the latest born, the Benjamins of heaven,
+who are set over us to subdue and govern, ye alone, in all the wide
+creation, are false and heedless! What man of you all is as true and
+noble for a man as the oak upon your hill-top for an oak? The oak obeys
+every law, regularly increases and develops, stretches its shady arms of
+blessing, proudly wears its leafy coronal, and drops abundant acorns for
+future oaks as faithful; but who of ye all does not violate the law of
+your life--so that we, if we follow you, would be so death-struck with
+dry-rot that the trees would fail upon every hand and the earth become a
+desert!"
+
+So wail and roar the storm-swept autumn woods. In the late October
+nights you may awaken, when the world is lost in the mystery of
+darkness, and hear that appealing cry. Time and civilization have slain
+the dryads and sweet sylvan populace, as Herod slew the innocents. But
+although common-sense has buried them, the imagination will not let them
+die. They survive in other forms, and with other voices they speak to
+us--not as the spirits of the trees, but as their conscious life, they
+yet whisper, and our hearts listen. Let the hickories and pine-trees
+preach to us a little in these warm October afternoons. A stately elm is
+the archbishop of my green diocese. In full canonicals he stands
+sublime. His flowing robes fill the blithe air with sacred grace. The
+light west winds and watery south are his fresh young deacons, his
+ecclesiastical aides-de-camp. He rules the landscape round. And I--this
+penitent old Easy Chair--attend devoutly when I hear the eloquent
+rustling of his voice--as the neighbors of Saint George Herbert, of
+Bemerton, used to stop their ploughs in the furrow and bow, with
+uncovered head, while the sound of his chapel-bell tinkled in the air.
+
+
+
+
+FROM COMO TO MILAN DURING THE WAR OF 1848.
+
+
+As the afternoon was ending--walking from Lago Maggiore and the Lake of
+Lugano to the Lake of Como--we passed a shrine at which a mother and
+children were kneeling and chanting the Ave Maria, and an ass with
+loaded panniers jogged slowly by. The vesper bells began to ring from an
+old church-tower upon a mountain-side, while far over the rounding tops
+of orange and fig trees in the warm-descending vale a triangle of
+dark-blue water was the first glimpse of Como. My knees bent a little,
+not with fatigue, but with reverence, as if I were again entering the
+very court and heart of Italy. A group of girls, less timorous or more
+interested than the crowd upon the Lugano Lake shore, asked us if there
+were any news--if France were coming to help Italy. But ours, alas! were
+not the beautiful feet upon the mountains. We could only say "nothing"
+and "good-bye."
+
+At Santa Croce we came out in full view of the lake, upon which lay the
+splendor of sunset, and, taking a path which we were told would shorten
+the journey, we lost our way upon a huge hill-side. But as we reached
+the summit the full moon rose from behind the heights upon the opposite
+shores of Como, and a handsome Italian boy showed us a straight path to
+Cadenabia upon the margin of the lake. I gave him a silver trifle, and
+he wished us "felice viaggio" with his black eyes and his musical lips;
+and leaving him like a shepherd boy of the purer Arcadia of the hills,
+we descended rapidly into a vineyard, and so came to the shore.
+
+It was a moment of mingled twilight and moonlight. A glittering path lay
+from the Cadenabia shore to the Villa Melzi opposite; and, hailing an
+old boatman, we glided up that golden way to the vine-clustered balcony
+which I knew at Bellagio under the moon. The air was calm and bland.
+The water was oily and gleaming. The mountains stood around us dusky and
+vast in the ghostly light as we went silently over the lake.
+
+We landed, and took tea upon the balcony at the hotel whose only rival
+in Europe for romantic picturesqueness is the _Trois Couronnes_ at Vevey
+upon the Lake of Geneva. The "magic casement" of Keats's "Ode to a
+Nightingale" was ours at Bellagio. The lake murmured with music
+everywhere. We saw the boats full of people singing choruses, then
+talking and laughing as they floated away. The sound of instruments, the
+throb of strings, the sad, mellow peal of horns, filled the air; and
+long after midnight a band was still playing in the village. About
+midnight Edmund and Frank bathed in the lake. Their figures were white
+as marble in the black water, and they struck the calm into sparkles of
+splendor as they swam out....
+
+The boat which we took to descend the lake to the town of Como had three
+rowers. The chief, whom I remembered from last year, groaned bitterly
+over the war, because there were so few strangers.
+
+"Trade, you see, is conservative," said I to Edmund.
+
+"Como is conservatism itself," he tranquilly replied.
+
+"We live upon the strangers," continued Giovanni Battista, the boatman,
+with a simplicity and truthfulness that made us laugh; "and this year
+nobody comes. The Italians are driven away, and the foreigners are
+frightened."
+
+He had not been to Como for two months, although his business is plying
+upon the lake, and his winter depends upon his summer. "The war is bad
+for all of us," he said, "and after all the Germans are back again."
+
+... Farther on, and nearer Como, the shore is covered with handsome
+villas, of which the most remarkable for beauty and fame are Madame
+Pasta's, a magnificent estate, and Taglioni's, which is not yet
+finished, and the stately Odescalchi. As we passed Madame Pasta's the
+old boatman shrugged his shoulders and trilled with his voice. "That's
+the way the money came there," he said, contemptuously. He was clearly
+of opinion that only the decaying and decayed families whose names he
+had heard all his life, and whose ancestors his fathers knew, were to be
+spoken of with praise.
+
+"Whose villa is that?" asked I.
+
+"Eh! che! nobody's," he replied; "if it were anybody's we should know."
+
+At five o'clock we rounded the point over which I had stood upon the
+height the year before on a still September afternoon hearing the girls
+sing in a boat below, and so came to the shore at Como.
+
+Everywhere there was an air of consternation. The Austrians had just
+re-occupied the town, and the streets were full of the "hated
+barbarians," rattling about with long swords and standing on guard at
+the doors of public buildings. The walls bristled with military notices.
+Among others I read one exhorting all well-disposed people to surrender
+arms of every kind by a certain day at a place named. The people seemed
+to be stupefied, and gazed in dull wonder upon the soldiers.
+
+Out of the square, ringing with Austrian sabres, we stepped into the
+Duomo, dim and lofty and hushed, untouched by revolutions or triumphs. A
+few inodorous sinners were kneeling and praying. They were very poor and
+ignorant. But this was their palace, and they looked as if they knew
+that the great Emperor of the barbarians had not one more gorgeous or
+solemn.
+
+We tried to secure seats in the post for Milan. There was no place. We
+applied at the offices of public and private diligences. It was still
+impossible. The evening was cool and clear, and we considered. The
+distance to Milan was but eight hours of our walking, and we were making
+a walking tour. And although we had scarcely bargained for a promenade
+over the plains of Lombardy in an August sun--yet this perfect moon?
+Should we turn back without seeing the Goths encamped around the most
+glorious of Gothic cathedrals?
+
+It was nine o'clock when we shouldered our knapsacks and set forth. The
+dwellers in romantic Como, standing at their doors, looked wonderingly
+upon the four pedestrians marching in regular resolute tramp along the
+streets, evidently moving upon Milan. The small children plainly thought
+us a part of the imperial and royal army. "Here come the Austrians,"
+whispered one boy to another, as he gazed at the gray wide-awakes and
+knapsacks.
+
+The mild Francis looked at him with the air of an army which would
+respect persons and property so long as it was unmolested, and wished
+the boy so soft a _buona notte_ that he smiled gently, and I am sure his
+dreams were not disturbed.
+
+We passed out of the gate of Como full against the round rising moon,
+and took the broad hard highway for Milan. We passed a few wagons loaded
+with the furniture of some fugitive rolling slowly along. As we pushed
+on, the idea of penetrating by night and on foot into a country at war
+was stimulating and novel. But what consciousness of war could survive
+in the deep peace of that night? The fields were covered with high corn,
+and the hard straight road went before us in dim perspective. There
+were no other travellers. Two or three empty vetturas or a wine cart
+straggled lazily by, the little bells upon the horses tinkling, and the
+drivers fast asleep. Nor were the villages many. As we passed a group of
+half a dozen houses a fellow was sleeping soundly upon a bench at a
+door. When we broke in upon the silence of night by asking the name of
+the village, he sprang up nimbly and limped rapidly out of sight as if
+the question had been a pistol-shot and had wounded him. Everybody was
+nervous "in questo momento." Towards midnight we stopped at a house
+which should have been near the point at which we meant to sleep until
+sunrise, and roused an old lady who shrilly chirped and twittered her
+terror through the slide in the door. But satisfying her that we were
+neither Croats nor cannibals, she told us that we were yet a mile or two
+from Balasina.
+
+It was now twelve o'clock, and the land seemed sunk in a sleep of death.
+There was no sound but our own echoes as we entered the dreary, dismal
+village, which, like all Italian villages, is merely a dirty street
+bordered with gloomy houses. They looked so hopeless with their grim
+stone fronts, high-barred windows out of reach, and huge gates, as if
+expecting nothing but hostility, that when we stopped before the inn we
+felt like the wretched wights who beheld the dungeons of an ogre; and
+when Edmund exclaimed in what seemed a terrible voice, so still was the
+night, "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" we started as if he had
+joked in church. Then the vision of a pleasant inn hung for a moment in
+our minds, and the sense of the preposterous contrast awakened a loud
+peal of laughter which died away echoing among those houses which were
+as hospitable as sea-crags. While we stood debating, a group of
+peasants, with their jackets slung over their shoulders, passed
+spectrally by, staring steadily at us, as if they would not be unwilling
+to strike a final blow for the kingdom of Italy.
+
+They disappeared, and we struck a resounding blow upon the door of the
+albergo, and another and another. After a while there was a sound of
+stealthily unbarring window-shutters, followed by a voice demanding the
+reason of the tumult. We explained that we were friends who wanted beds
+for the night. No, that was impossible, "the voice replied far up the
+height;" there were no beds, and we had better push on to the next
+tavern. We expostulated in many tongues with the dimly-visioned head
+that now appeared, pleading that we were strangers from a far country
+who were very tired and sleepy. The head disappeared for a few moments
+and we heard a low colloquy. Then the great gate of the albergo swung
+sullenly open, and we stepped into a dim court, and the dimly-visioned
+face became a face like a dull razor, it was so thin-featured and
+stupid. The man asked us to stop, and, stepping aside, he called a
+woman's name, then stood waiting, his wretched dozing face illuminated
+by the weak lustre of a long-wicked tallow-candle which he held.
+Presently he moved on along the windows of the court conversing with an
+invisible within the house. When those murmuring arrangements were
+made, he led us up a dirty stone staircase, trying to open various doors
+with keys that did not fit the locks; and finally, after a desperate
+wrestle with one, he swore fiercely in a thin, wiry voice that made the
+blood run cold, and then smashed the door of the chamber, carrying away
+wood-work and lock together. It was a vast room of immense discomfort,
+and after barricading the disabled door with tables and chairs, we lay
+down and fell asleep upon beds which could furnish no dreams.
+
+In the morning we ate grapes and peaches, and finding a wagon which we
+could hire, we bribed our pedestrian consciences and bowled over the
+beautiful road to Milan as republicans, reluctantly confessing that the
+imperial and royal post-roads were the best in the world.
+
+"Yes--but not for the public benefit," said the mild Francis; "they are
+for the quicker transport of troops and artillery to oppress the
+people."
+
+Silent, broken-hearted Milan! No, not yet visibly broken-hearted, for
+the Cathedral sparkled pure and lofty in the rare, blue summer air. It
+was the morning of the Feast of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary, to
+whom the Cathedral is dedicated, and was therefore high festival. But
+the people had little aspect of joy. We stopped at the gate, and sat in
+the steady glare of the sun while our passports were closely inspected.
+Outside the city wall lay a wilderness of tree trunks, which had been
+levelled in expectation of a siege by the Austrians. They were useless
+now; and groups of soldiers in gray slouched hats and black plumes--a
+kind of Robin Hood uniform--were clustered idly and curiously about the
+gate. They looked worn and red and wasted, and I fancied had taken part
+in the fight of the burning day which had made almost as many idiots as
+corpses in the Austrian army.
+
+Within the city the streets were broken up, and the paving-stones
+designed for barricades were merely roughly laid back again in their
+places. In the long vista of the streets there was no shop open. The
+only signs of traffic were the stands of the fruit-merchants shaded by
+gayly-striped awnings, and covered with piles of glowing fruit.
+Multitudes of brightly-dressed people strolled idly and curiously up and
+down, and a company of sappers and miners marched by without music, but
+carrying their implements and their soiled accoutrements. They were
+dirty and draggled, like a corps marching across a battle-field to dig a
+hopeless ditch. There were no carriages moving; there was no noise, no
+hurry, no excitement, only that scuffling murmur which makes the silence
+of a great city spectral. The stately Milanese women walked finely by.
+Their long black hair was drawn away from the forehead and folded in
+massive plaits; and the black veil that hung from the back of the head
+was partly gathered over the arm. Queen-like they walked, carrying the
+bright-colored fan which was raised to shield their eyes from the sun,
+or languidly waved against their bosoms. Forms of the Orient or of
+Spain, the imagination touched them with pathetic dignity--matrons of a
+lost country.
+
+
+
+
+HERBERT SPENCER ON THE YANKEE
+
+
+It was a very distinguished and agreeable company that greeted Mr.
+Herbert Spencer at dinner, and the speaking was capital. His own address
+was an interesting paper, in which he preached "the gospel of
+relaxation." In an interview published some time before, he had made
+some incisive criticisms upon American life and character, and in his
+dinner address he said that he was going to find fault.
+
+"The Redcoats all talk to us like uncles or pedagogues," exclaimed
+Americus, impatiently. "What business have they to lecture us in this
+style? We are quite old enough to take care of ourselves, and quite able
+to run this continent without any instruction from Englishmen. Suppose
+that some American guest in England should say to his hosts that he
+wanted to give them some good advice, and point out to them a few of
+their defects, and then proceed to pat them on the head with patronizing
+praise, don't you think there would be a storm? If strangers like us,
+very well; if they don't like us, very well. It is a matter of supreme
+indifference to us."
+
+Why, then, Americus, do we ask them how they like us? And why should the
+people of one country scornfully decline to hear the comments of
+sensible people of other countries? Every man is, or ought to be, glad
+to receive intelligent counsel, and to see his life from other points of
+view than his own. Why should not the citizen be equally sensible? We
+did not ask De Tocqueville to come and see us and analyze our political
+institutions and their operations. We did not ask Von Holst to write our
+constitutional history. But De Tocqueville and Von Holst have laid us
+and all other lovers of popular constitutional liberty under great
+obligations. Both of them have written better books of their kind about
+us than any American has written.
+
+It is absurd to snarl that we don't care what they say, and that they
+had better stay at home and not lecture us. When Dickens stung us with
+the satire of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, he was not only accused of
+ingratitude--as if a man were bound to find no fault with any abuse, and
+not to criticise any tendency, in a country where he had been kindly
+welcomed--but he was told to look at home, and assured that if he wanted
+to depict outrageous evils and ridiculous people he had only to portray
+his beloved England. That was said with a fine air of indignation. But
+what else was Dickens doing all his life? What are his books, in this
+point of view, but a prolonged arraignment of the abuses and of the
+absurd social types of his native England? But when Henry James, Jun.,
+draws a good-natured and shrewd sketch of the American girl abroad in
+Daisy Miller, although it is plainly intended to show to conventional
+Europe that the American girl is misjudged, we petulantly wonder why he
+could not choose another type to illustrate.
+
+The observations of intelligent foreign critics are no more hostile than
+the American criticisms which they confirm. When, for instance, after a
+very intelligent recognition of the material advantages of this country,
+Mr. Spencer says that if there had been another and higher progress
+commensurate with the material advance there would be nothing to wish,
+he says nothing which very many Americans have not felt and said, and he
+adds an improvement from history which had occurred to many Americans,
+and had been strongly stated by them, that while the republics of the
+Middle Ages surrounded themselves with material splendor, their liberty
+decayed. And what is this but a contemporary statement of the old truth
+which Goldsmith put into memorable verse a hundred years ago,
+
+    "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
+    Where wealth accumulates and men decay."
+
+Mr. Spencer's further remarks that under the forms of freedom we may
+lose its substance, and that in some ways, which he points out, we are
+losing it, is the burden of the warning of many an intelligent American,
+which does not need the old illustration of Cæsar's introduction of the
+empire under republican forms, nor the warning of Burke, that "ambition,
+though it has ever the same general views, has not at all times the same
+means nor the same particular objects." So when Mr. Spencer says that
+paper constitutions will not work as they are intended to work, and that
+the real basis and bulwark of national greatness and of progressive
+liberty is character and not education, he says what every thoughtful
+American perceives and believes. He does not say, indeed, what many
+Americans know, and what explains the emphasis with which we insist upon
+education, that the perception of the desirability of general education
+is in itself an evidence of character. Education alone may not save a
+people from political trouble, but constitutional liberty will not be
+maintained by an ignorant people.
+
+That our good-nature is a kind of moral indifference which is really a
+defect of character is another of Mr. Spencer's observations which is a
+corroboration of much American comment upon American life. It has an
+explanation in the conditions of that life for which Mr. Spencer does
+not make allowance. But his remark is only that of the railroad
+traveller last summer which this Easy Chair recorded. In a new
+country--if an American without incurring the penalty of high-treason
+may call this a new country--everybody must good-humoredly help
+everybody else, and make the best of everything.
+
+Perhaps Mr. Spencer has not heard the story of the American gentleman
+travelling in a certain part of the country, who was quartered in a
+hotel, in a room of which the window opened upon the piazza where his
+fellow-citizens sat tilted back in chairs, talking, reading the
+newspapers, and expectorating. There was no shade or shutter to the
+window. The traveller, desiring to change his dress, for want of any
+other curtain hung a shirt over the window to secure his seclusion. But
+a watchful fellow-citizen chanced to see the unwonted attempt to escape
+the public eye, and the traveller was surprised in the most intimate
+stage of his change of raiment to see the improvised curtain suddenly
+torn away, and a face thrust inquiringly into the window with the
+remark, "I jess wanted to see what you're so---- private about." The
+case was an extreme one, and a laugh was certainly a better recourse
+than a revolver.
+
+In everything that involves a principle, as Mr. Spencer truly says,
+there is profound wisdom in Hamlet's phrase, "Greatly to find quarrel in
+a straw." But this again is only a new face of the old wisdom _obsta
+principiis_. For a straw shows which way the wind blows. How can a
+sensible American quarrel with the shrewd and kindly insight of a quiet
+Englishman who, when he is asked his opinion, shows that he agrees with
+the asker? At the dinner Mr. Spencer did not speak as an Englishman, or
+a critic, or a cynic, but as a philosopher. The end of all our study and
+endeavor, he said, should be complete living. We do not learn for
+learning's sake, we are not self-denying for the sake of self-denial,
+but all is for fuller and richer living. Intemperate devotion to work of
+any kind, like all intemperance, weakens the power of right living. In
+America, as in England, there is this absorbing passion for work.
+Therefore, in the interest of a better and more truly efficient life,
+let us heed the gospel of relaxation and recreation.
+
+It was, as he said, an unconventional after-dinner speech, and Carl
+Schurz very happily cited the speaker himself as a striking
+illustration--as striking as any Yankee--of the consequences of
+disregarding his own doctrine of the desirability of recreation for a
+completer life. But it was not an English uncle "tipping" his bumptious
+American nephew with good advice, nor a pedagogue lecturing us upon our
+follies and defects, nor a supercilious foreigner condescending. It was
+a thoughtful guest of our own kindred, of the same high and generous
+purpose that we attribute to the best of our countrymen, comparing notes
+in the most friendly way, and speaking to us not distinctively as
+Americans so much as men living in America. If any American of
+corresponding standing with Mr. Spencer should go to England and speak
+to Englishmen after dinner in the same simple and friendly way, they
+would be very foolish fellows if they listened with any less courtesy
+and heed than we have listened to Mr. Spencer.
+
+
+
+
+HONOR
+
+
+These are very precious words of Lovelace:
+
+    "I could not love thee, dear, so much,
+      Loved I not honor more."
+
+And Francis First's message to his mother after Pavia, "All is lost but
+honor," is in the same key. Yet honor has been as much travestied as
+liberty, and the crimes committed in its name are as many. Falstaff's is
+a sharp antistrophe: "What is in that word honor? What is that honor?
+Air." But for that whiff of air how many noble lives have been
+sacrificed!
+
+Alexander Hamilton knew his own time, and he decided that his refusal of
+Burr's challenge would be regarded as cowardly, and destroy his prestige
+and influence. We may say that a morally greater man would nevertheless
+have dared to refuse it, but we must also consider that Hamilton knew
+the popular estimate of his own standard of life, and would naturally
+test his conduct by that standard. He was a soldier and a man of the
+world of the eighteenth century. Dr. Nott, the echoes of whose famous
+sermon on Hamilton's death still linger in tradition, might have
+declined to fight and been justified. He was a clergyman, and popular
+feeling excused him from resorting to the field of honor. But it is very
+doubtful if it would have excused Hamilton.
+
+He might have urged that Burr had no right to make his demand. But
+Hamilton knew that he had spoken most strongly of Burr, and he knew that
+Burr knew it. He thought Burr an unprincipled and dangerous fellow, and
+he said so plainly. But there was the familiar preface to Hamilton's
+explanation of the charges against him as Secretary of the Treasury.
+Could he take the lofty height of moral principle? Or could he stand
+upon the technical punctilio of the duel? His honor, by which he meant
+the consistency of his life and the standards that he acknowledged,
+seemed to him to allow him no alternative, and he was slain by the
+necessity of what is unquestionably a false sense of honor.
+
+A man's honor, in the sense that we may attribute to the lines of
+Lovelace, is his most precious possession. But it is something which is
+wholly in his own keeping, and is not at the mercy or whim of another.
+He can soil it, but except himself the whole world cannot smirch it. If
+a man had told Dr. Channing that he lied, or had dashed a glass of wine
+in his face, the honor of Dr. Channing would still have remained
+unsullied, not because he was a minister, but because of a reason which
+is equally applicable to all other men--because of his moral rectitude
+and courage. That a ribald tongue railed at him for lying when he had
+spoken the truth could not affect him except with pity or wonder. Even
+if the charge were true and he had told a lie, he would, indeed, have
+soiled his own honor, but the railer would not have touched it.
+
+This view assumes that honor is something else than notoriety, which in
+turn is something very different from fame or character. Notoriety is
+current familiarity with a man's name, which is given by much mention of
+it arising from any kind of conduct. Reputation is favorable notoriety
+as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds
+or noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind. But honor is
+absolutely individual and personal. It is conscious and willing loyalty
+to the highest inward leading. It is that quality which cannot be
+insulted. This is the sublime instinct of which Lovelace sings. I could
+not so much love thee, Lucasta, purest of the pure, if I did not love
+purity more. _Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis amica veritas._
+
+The ordinary talk about honor is a parody of this spiritual loyalty. A
+man seizes another by the nose at a public table, or he slaps his face
+in the street, or he tells him in the sacred precincts of the club that
+he lies, or he posts him as a coward, or he insults his wife or
+daughter--such a man invites summary retaliation, and he generally gets
+it. But there is no question of honor involved. "Suppose your nose
+pulled at the opera," said a gentleman at the club, discussing the
+ethics of honor--"your nose, you know," he said, with horror, and
+unconsciously holding his own forward--"what could be a more unspeakable
+insult?" "Yes," answered his protagonist; "but does a man carry his
+honor in his nose?" Nature has provided instincts and weapons for the
+defence of our noses. But she has not made the nose the citadel of
+honor, nor has she left honor at the mercy of a sot who may choose to
+drench it with wine.
+
+There was a quarrel the other day between two men, one of whom had said
+that the way in which the other had done something was not the way of a
+gentleman; the other replied that he would not stand being called
+ungentlemanly. There was a closing and grappling, and then one whipped
+out a pistol and began firing at the other, who took to the street, and
+most naturally but inconsiderately dodged behind innocent citizens in
+the street to avoid the bullets. The pursuer fired as opportunity
+served, while the pursued dashed into a hotel to borrow a pistol to
+return the broadside. Stanley might have seen such a performance in the
+Mmjumbo regions on the shores of Lake Nyanza or the banks of the
+Zambesi, but what had it to do with honor? Is that what Lovelace loved
+more than Lucasta? Is that what King Francis--more's the pity if this
+were the thing--did not lose at Pavia!
+
+Our honor is solely in our own keeping. To have your nose pulled is not
+to be dishonored, but so to behave that it deserves pulling. But,
+Alcibiades of the clubs, remember that it is not the pulling which makes
+the dishonor.
+
+    "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
+    But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
+
+And Cassius also says what bears a very different interpretation from
+that which he designed:
+
+    "Well, honor is the subject of my story.
+    I cannot tell what you and other men
+    Think of this life; but, for my single self,
+    I had as lief not be, as live to be
+    In awe of such a thing as I myself."
+
+Fear of yourself, fear of your own rebuke, fear of betraying your
+consciousness of your duty and not doing it--that is the fear which
+Lovelace loved better than Lucasta; that is the fear which Francis,
+having done his duty, saved, and justly called it honor.
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH WESLEY HARPER
+
+
+Often during the long and sorrowful days of the war, as the Easy Chair
+wound its slow way to its corner, it heard a quiet greeting, and,
+looking up, saw a friend standing aside upon the steps, calm, unhurried,
+and the greeting was followed by the significant and challenging
+question, "Well?" The tone was tender and tranquil, and conveyed all the
+meaning of many words: "Where are we now? What will come of this last
+news? How, when, and where will the bitter struggle end?" Then stepping
+out upon one of the bridges that connect the tower of the staircase with
+the various floors of the huge buildings in which this MAGAZINE is
+prepared, the Easy Chair and its friend conversed. There was a singular
+sagacity and justice in all that the calm friend said, and the most
+truculent opponent of the cause to which his hopes and faith were given
+would have heard nothing acrid or exasperating from his lips, even in
+the darkest hour of the struggle. As they parted and the Easy Chair
+resumed its way, it was with a soothed and cheerful conviction that
+whatever might happen to states and nations, nothing could shake the
+power of steadfast, manly character.
+
+During the same day or any other, if it chanced to move into some other
+part of the buildings, whether in the artists', the engravers', or the
+editor's room; in the bindery, the press-rooms, the folding-rooms, the
+composing-rooms, or in the counting-room, the Easy Chair encountered
+that same friendly, serene presence which had yet its voice of authority
+upon occasion, but which seemed to pervade all the rooms like sunshine.
+And upon all who met him that friend made the same impression. To every
+one, editor, printer, errand-boy, unknown visitor, or distinguished
+guest, he was so simply courteous and kind that he controlled without
+commanding; and in other days, when he had been the head of the most
+turbulent work-room, he had kept the peace without an oath or a blow. It
+was the man, not his clothes or his condition, that this man regarded.
+It was as natural for him to stop in the street and talk with an old
+black woman whom he knew as with the most renowned author whose works he
+published. When Oliver Goldsmith lay in his coffin the poor women who
+had known him sat weeping upon the stairs of the house. And so when this
+true gentleman died, even the old pie-woman who sells cakes and apples
+through the buildings left her traffic for a day, and, clad in her sad
+best, stood, tearful at his funeral.
+
+It was not strange, therefore, that when the fire of twenty years ago
+seemed to have destroyed everything and to have ruined him and his
+partners, the quality of the man appeared reflectively in the feeling
+that was shown towards him by those who see us all without disguise.
+When the misfortune was supposed to be complete the domestics in his
+family assembled, apparently by a common feeling, to consider how they
+could express their sympathy; and as he returned home at evening he was
+met by one of them whom they had chosen, to tell him that they had all
+agreed to continue their service at reduced wages, or for no wages at
+all, until he should recover from the heavy loss. "I stood everything
+very well up to that time," he said to a friend who tells the story to
+the Easy Chair, and who had asked him if it were true, "but that broke
+me down." And the tears were in his eyes as he said it.
+
+Of course every one who, during the last forty-five years, has been
+familiar with this publishing house, knows that the Easy Chair is
+speaking of Joseph Wesley Harper, the third of the four brothers by whom
+the house was founded, and who recently died in the sixty-ninth year of
+his age. He was so truly modest, he avoided publicity so
+unostentatiously, that the Easy Chair almost feels as if it were doing
+wrong to mention him here with praise; so hard is it to believe that his
+eyes will not rest upon these lines with all the old kind appreciation.
+But it is a sermon or a poem which none of us can spare, the life of a
+man who in very great prosperity kept not only the true heart of a
+child, but the humble heart that owned no inferior. We are judged
+usually by our public successes, by the esteem of distinguished persons.
+But the real test of character is the feeling of those before whom we
+play no part. What does the nurse in the nursery think of us, or the
+porter in the store, or the butcher-boy? If a man's children confide in
+him, if all whom he employs at home or in his business feel that he is
+full of thought and sympathy for them as for brethren, if those who meet
+him perceive the charm of his urbanity, and as they draw nearer and know
+him better, honor and love him more and more, we can be very sure that
+he has the noblest human qualities, whose influence will be a possession
+to us forever.
+
+Such was the friend whom for so many years in its little labors upon
+these pages the Easy Chair has constantly seen, and whom it will see no
+more; and as it meditates, not sadly, but with the sober cheerfulness
+which his own serene faith in the divine order could not but inspire,
+upon that good life now peacefully ended, it feels how truly Wesley
+Harper will always be remembered by those who knew him well.
+
+    "The wise who soar but never roam,
+    True to the kindred points of heaven and home."
+
+
+
+
+REVIEW OF UNION TROOPS
+
+1865
+
+
+The victorious armies had marched home and into history. The two days of
+review at the end of May was a spectacle not likely to be forgotten by
+those who saw it or did not see it. It belonged to that series of events
+for which there is no precedence, because there never was before a
+continental republic. Like every remarkable occurrence in these
+remarkable days of ours, the disbanding of the armies of the East and
+West, and their quiet absorption into the mass of the people, is a
+spectacle which has another illustration to the extreme practicability
+of a popular government. Usually the return of the victorious army is
+dreaded by its country somewhat as its advance is by the enemy, and
+government provides other wars to employ it. But our men are citizens
+who have been defending their own rights. It is their own government
+they have been maintaining. The endeavor to represent the government as
+a power different from the people and dangerous to their liberty has
+failed several times during the war, and will always fail so long as the
+broadest base of the government is jealously guarded. And nothing is
+more honorable to human nature, nothing so truly vindicates the wisdom
+of our institutions and the faith that supports them, than that during
+the Civil War, of which the event seemed sometimes doubtful, there has
+not been even the suspicion of a desire upon the part of any popular
+general to seize power and dictate to the authorities. Indeed, in the
+only instance in which such a whisper was breathed the suggestion was
+known to come from the politicians who surrounded the general, and not
+from himself.
+
+The review was, according to all reports, a noble sight. The Army of the
+Potomac, which, often baffled, at last struck the crowning blow of the
+war, and the Army of the West, whose history is immortal, poured through
+the capital amid the shouts and exultation of thousands of spectators,
+and marched, with the inspiring clash and peal of martial music, before
+the President, the Lieutenant-General, and the notable civilians all the
+day. The Western Army had with them the spoils of war: large red
+roosters and fighting-cocks, tied on to the backs of mules; cows,
+donkeys, and goats came also. The army moved as though Washington were
+but a village upon the road of its march through Georgia or the
+Carolinas. The critical spectators thought they observed the Western men
+were of a finer physique and more entirely American, and the Eastern of
+a stricter military drill. The slouched hat was worn by the officers and
+men of the West, the French kepi by the more showy Eastern officers.
+Sherman himself, the hero of the magnificent campaign which the Richmond
+papers said was merely the flight of an arrow through the air--but which
+literally pierced the rebellion to the heart--was saluted by the
+grandest acclamations. History will rank him with the really great
+soldiers. His men are very proud of him--how could they help it?--and if
+for a moment there was wonder at his arrangements with Johnson, there is
+no man now so poor as to doubt his sincerity or question his patriotism.
+
+It would have been pleasant if, with the other heroes, the eager, proud
+crowd could have seen General Thomas, the soldier who, by indomitable
+tenacity, saved the day at Chickamauga and destroyed the rebel army
+before Nashville; but he was on duty elsewhere.
+
+As the armies passed it must have been impossible to forget--as in
+reading of the spectacle we constantly remember--the disbanding of the
+army of the Revolution. The soldiers at the review are only a part of
+the men now in arms, yet they were about two hundred thousand. Since the
+war began there have been many more than a million in the armies. During
+the Revolution (as we learn from Professor G. W. Greene's very
+interesting volume on the Revolution), there were altogether in the
+service 239,791 regulars in the Continental army and 56,163 of the
+militia, and the sufferings of that early army are not to be described.
+"During the first winter soldiers thought it hard that they should have
+nothing to cook their food with; but they found, before the close, that
+it was harder still to have nothing to cook." Few Americans have ever
+known what it was to suffer for want of clothing; but thousands, as the
+war went on, saw their garments falling by piecemeal from around them,
+till scarce a shred remained to cover their nakedness. They made long
+marches without shoes, staining the frozen ground with the blood from
+their feet. They fought battles with guns which were hardly safe to bear
+half a charge of powder. They fought, or marched, or worked at the
+intrenchments all day, and laid them down at night with but one blanket
+to three men.
+
+Mr. Greene tells us that the condition of the officers was hardly better
+than that of the men. They, too, had suffered cold and hunger; they,
+too, had been compelled to do duty without sufficient clothing, to march
+and watch and fight without sufficient food. We are told of a dinner
+where no officer was admitted who had a whole pair of pantaloons, and of
+all who were invited there was not one who did not establish his claims
+for admission.
+
+The treatment of the army of the Revolution by the Continental Congress
+was unworthy the fame of that body which Lord Chatham so loftily praised
+to Dr. Franklin. The army was disbanded stealthily, "as if the nation
+were afraid to look their deliverers in the face; all through the summer
+of 1783 furloughs were granted freely, and the ranks gradually thinned.
+Then on the 18th of October a final proclamation was issued for their
+discharge. On the 2d of November Washington issued his final orders from
+Rocky Hill, near Princeton. On the 3d they were disbanded. There was no
+formal leave-taking. Each regiment, each company, went when it chose.
+Men who had stood side by side in battle, who had shared the same tent
+in summer, the same hut in winter, parted, never to meet again. Some
+still had homes, and, therefore, definite hopes. But hundreds knew not
+whither to go.... For a few days taverns and streets were crowded. For
+weeks soldiers were to be seen on every road, or lingering bewildered
+about public places, like men who were at a loss to know what to do with
+themselves. There were no ovations for them as they came back, toilworn
+before their time, to the places that had once known them; no ringing of
+bells; no eager opening of hospitable doors. The country was tired of
+the war, tired of the sound of the drum and fife; anxious to get back to
+sowing and reaping, to buying and selling, and town meetings, and
+general elections."
+
+These were the veterans of one of the most glorious and important wars
+in the progress of the race. Yet the men who were so unhandsomely
+suffered to depart from the service were also grudgingly paid when they
+were released. "Their claims were disputed inch by inch. Money which
+should have been given cheerfully as a righteous debt was doled out with
+a reluctant hand as a degrading charity."
+
+It is refreshing to turn from the page of this melancholy historian to
+the newspaper of to-day, and read that the men who have received the
+jubilant ovation of the review are not only to be paid in full and at
+once, as the most sacred of national debts, but that the most strenuous
+effort will be made to employ them by preference in the public offices
+to which they may be fitted, while private persons will bear in mind the
+same just and generous purpose. Indeed, there is no forgetfulness of the
+soldiers of to-day. The sense of their vital service to the country is
+universal and commanding. They will be honored heroes while they live,
+and our children shall be proud that we cherish them.
+
+It is not easy even yet, although the victors have returned and are
+disbanded, fully to comprehend that the war is over and the country
+saved. But it is so, and the living and the dead are joined in a
+glorious remembrance. How many an eye must have grown dim, swimming in
+tears as it gazed on the splendid pageant because of the brave and
+beautiful who had shared the peril and the long, long doubt and
+struggle, but not the triumph of victory and return. The victory is won;
+the country is saved; but at what inestimable cost! Four years ago
+Theodore Winthrop fell at Great Bethel, on a summer morning, and those
+that loved him learned that the war had begun. Three years ago, on a
+winter evening, Joseph Curtis sank dead from his horse at
+Fredericksburg, and Theodore Parkman perished at Princeton on an autumn
+day. Two years ago, on a soft midsummer night, Robert Shaw fell upon the
+ramparts of Wagner, and was "buried with his niggers." Eight months ago,
+in the Shenandoah Valley, Charles Lowell died at Cedar Creek, in the
+very shock of victory. They were five only, all young, and they gave
+gladly for us all that makes life glad and beautiful. Yet how many as
+young and brave and beloved as they have died like them, and, like
+them, are remembered and mourned! They, too, let us believe, smile
+still above us, and bend over us with serene joy at this happy time. Let
+their sweet memory hallow our jubilee! Let us take care that our lives
+are worthy their glorious death.
+
+
+
+
+APRIL, 1865
+
+
+A most genial and friendly letter to the Easy Chair, dated simply
+"Home," and speaking tenderly of the late President, reminds us that our
+loss is a blow to every home in the country. This peculiar personal
+affection for Mr. Lincoln was so evident that every orator spoke of it,
+and with an emotion that attends a private sorrow. No tribute could be
+so pathetic and so suggestive of the character of the man who had more
+deeply endeared himself to the heart and fixed himself in the confidence
+of the American people than any man in our history. Among the
+inscriptions that were displayed during the days of mourning in the city
+there was one hung upon a shop that was touching in its very baldness:
+"Alas! alas! our father Abraham is dead." That was the feeling in all
+true hearts and homes. It was a feeling which no Cæsar, no Charlemagne,
+no Napoleon ever inspired. The Netherlands wept with a sorrow as sore
+for the Prince of Orange, France bewailed with romantic grief the death
+of Henry IV. But the people of England and France were comparatively
+few, and the relation between the victims and the mourners was that of
+prince and subjects. Our leader was one of the poorest of the people. He
+was great in their greatness. They felt with him and for him as one of
+themselves, and in his fall, more truly than Rome in that of Cæsar, we
+all fell down.
+
+The month of April, 1865, was curiously eventful in the annals of this
+country. General Grant moved upon the enemy's works, and Petersburg and
+Richmond fell. He pursued and fought the retreating army, and the rebel
+commander-in-chief surrendered. In the very jubilee of a national joy
+the President was murdered. While yet his body was borne across the
+country by the reverent hands of a nation, his murderer was tracked,
+brought to bay, shot, and buried in a nameless spot to protect his
+corpse from wild popular fury. In the midst of the tragical days General
+Sherman, whom, only last month, the Easy Chair was celebrating as so
+skilful and resistless a soldier, instead of summoning Johnston to a
+surrender upon the terms granted to Lee, allowed himself to sign
+recognition of the rebel government and to open a future political
+discord, while he was yet able to prescribe the simple surrender of an
+army. The shock of disappointment and regret was universal. The
+authorities unanimously disapproved his convention. The
+Lieutenant-General went immediately to the front, and the month that had
+opened with President Lincoln trusted and beloved, with Davis defended
+by Lee and his army in the rebel capital, and Sherman confronted by
+Johnston, and Mobile holding out, closed with the rebel capital in
+possession of the government, Lee a paroled prisoner, his army
+disbanded, Davis a skulking fugitive, Johnston and his army paroled
+prisoners, Mobile captured, President Lincoln dead, President Johnson
+at the head of the government, and the assassin dead and buried.
+
+Through such a succession of great events this country had never as
+rapidly passed. It swept the scale of emotion. From the height of joy
+triumphant it sank to the very depths of sorrow, from confidence and
+pride in a military leader it passed to humiliating amazement, yet not
+for a moment paused in its work or shook in its purpose, and was never
+so calm, so strong, so grand, as in that tumult of emotion.
+
+Every man who has been proud of his country hitherto has now profounder
+cause for pride. Our system has been tried in every way; it rises
+purified from the fire. No one man is essential to her, however deeply
+beloved, however generously trusted. The history of the war from May,
+1861, to May, 1865, proves that she cannot be hopelessly bereaved. The
+sceptics who have sneered, the timid who have feared, the shrewd who
+have doubted, must now see that the principles of popular government
+have been amply vindicated. We have only clearly to understand and
+fearlessly to trust these principles, and the future, like the past, is
+secure.
+
+In the earlier days of the war a sagacious foreign observer, resident in
+the country, said that he feared we were making a mistake perilous to
+the American principle. The suspension of the habeas corpus he thought a
+very dangerous political, however necessary a military, experiment it
+might be. But he was answered by another European, who had been a
+political pupil of Cavour's, that, unlike such an act in other
+countries, it was here done by the people themselves, and they must be
+trusted in it, or else the whole American experiment failed. Such power
+must be used, he said; the crucial test is the way in which it is used.
+If the people cannot use it in a way which shall be permanently
+harmless, then they are not capable of self-government. Oh, wise young
+judge! In the whole world no heart will be more sincerely glad, no face
+more bright with joy, or sadder with sorrow, at the strange April news
+from America than yours!
+
+What a May day! Stricken as all hearts are, what a May day! Budding and
+blooming on every hand, on every hill-side and meadow and wood, flushing
+and glittering with the lavish beauty of the spring softly gliding over
+grieving hearts, and with her royal touch healing our varied sorrow,
+came the Queen of May, for whom the people sighed and the land yearned,
+came the well-beloved, the long-desired, palms in her hand and doves
+flying before her; and the name of that May-day Queen was Peace.
+
+
+
+
+WASHINGTON IN 1867
+
+
+The gay young European diplomatist, accustomed to the charms of the
+great foreign capitals--London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, and the scores of
+small but delightful cities--probably regards an attachment to the
+embassy of his country in the United States as a Boeotian exile. But
+when, eagerly curious to see the capital of this remote region, he is
+dumped in the railroad-shed at Washington, and emerges upon the
+depthless mud or blinding dust of the city, upon its hackmen and
+porters, greedy of his last penny, and upon its general hopelessness of
+aspect, it is not difficult to imagine how his heart sinks and how
+bitter the exile seems.
+
+To the independent native of the country, however, Washington as a city
+is simply exasperating and ridiculous. Its one truly magnificent
+building, the Capitol, seems to have absorbed everything else. Like a
+huge wen, it has apparently sucked up all the life of the other
+buildings. Feeble, shapeless, ineffective, they huddle along the sides
+of the vast avenues, and, however closely they stand, give nothing but
+the impression of a straggling and clumsy village. Then there is the
+eternal absurdity of the plan. It is not only a straggling and clumsy
+village, but it is utterly dislocated. Washington is laid out upon the
+plan of cart-wheels within cart-wheels. The stranger is always going
+wrong. You meet him, say, near the junction of some avenue with some
+Fourth and a Half Street north. He has the expression of a
+long-confirmed but mild lunatic; and after gazing at you blandly and
+inquiringly for a moment, he says, "I am trying to find the corner of
+Ninth and Fifteenth streets." Of course he is; we all are in Washington.
+The folly would be evident elsewhere, but in Washington it is the most
+natural effort possible. There is but one reply to the candid and
+inquiring fellow-maniac: "My dear sir, I have not the remotest
+conception where I am, or where anything is." There is a fond delusion
+that the city radiates from the Capitol. Nothing is more fallacious.
+Washington is a system of hubs, and a consequent combination of
+radiations.
+
+The depression arising from arrival and the problem of streets is hardly
+relieved by arrival at Willard's. The entrance to that hotel is a
+cigar-shop, a newspaper-stand, and a loafing-room. You press through to
+the office. But what is man that an American landlord should regard him?
+The house is full, has been full, will be full. A few crisp words inform
+you that by-and-by, some time, perhaps, possibly, you may be stowed away
+in the seventh story, and allowed to pay four or five dollars a day. The
+moderation of the landlords is always a subject of wonder and gratitude.
+It seems a matter of mere grace and good-will that they do not charge
+twenty dollars a night, with the privilege of making your own bed.
+
+"Whew!" cried Don Giovanni when, arriving at the capital of this
+country, he was made to undergo these initiatory steps, "will you please
+to tell me one single particular in which travel in Europe is not
+incomparably more agreeable and comfortable than in this country?" And
+he went on to compare the universal comfort and courtesy of foreign
+travel, sadly to the disadvantage of the home of the brave. "Certainly
+there is no country in which the guest upon reaching his hotel is
+treated with such laughable condescension as in this. A wretched hole of
+a room, shabbily furnished, the dirty walls and a suspicious bed, with a
+quart of water and a pocket-handkerchief of a towel, for which he is to
+pay four or five dollars or more daily, is awarded to the humbly
+expectant visitor as a high favor. A great American hotel is a
+penitentiary for travellers, and the gentlemen at the office are the
+lofty turnkeys and lord high-constables. A self-respecting man will
+travel here as little as possible."
+
+"There is no doubt that much travel at home is a discipline," replied
+the Easy Chair.
+
+"Yes," continued the indignant Don. "If you are known personally to the
+gentlemanly gentleman who dispenses chambers you may be tolerably
+quartered. But if you are merely one of the herd who have the temerity
+to arrive by steamer or car, you may thank your stars if you are
+graciously permitted to leave your luggage in the hall and to have a
+room by-and-by."
+
+Now the Easy Chair humbly hopes that all gentlemanly gentlemen concerned
+will not understand him as making these remarks. They all proceeded from
+the person named, who is alone responsible. The Easy Chair has not quite
+come to the end of his travels; and would he malign the gentlemanly and
+accommodating? He desires to state distinctly that if he could not open
+the window of his room, it was merely because he had a foolish wish for
+fresh air; and if he could not turn round, it was because of the
+inordinate size of his trunk; and if his fingers went through the towel,
+it was because his manner was rude towards a chamber ornament so
+delicate and small; and if the sheets of the bed were not wholly fresh,
+it was because the gentlemanly and accomplished chamber-maiden lady was
+of a nobly economical turn of mind; and if the bell would not ring, it
+was because some former guest had been so little able to restrain
+himself as to pull it down. Indeed, there was nothing which did not
+admit of the fullest explanation. It is only the unreasonable who would
+complain of paying four or five dollars a day for such accommodations.
+"Let me tell you, sir," whispered the gentlemanly gentleman at a certain
+office to a bewildered person who had been ordered up to a burrow in the
+seventh story, "you are very lucky to get in at all." But the bewildered
+traveller's face, it is asserted, was not so humbly grateful as
+circumstances demanded.
+
+Washington itself merely multiplies the impression of Willard's.
+Everything is feverish and transitory. The fine houses are rented by
+senators, by representatives, by foreign ministers, by army and navy
+officers, by families from other cities. They are taken for a season.
+Those who occupy them have no permanent interest in the city. The rule
+is almost universal. The Capitol, the White House, the departments, the
+public buildings are all full of men who came yesterday and are going
+to-morrow. Washington is a huge perch. All this tumult of twittering is
+from birds upon the wing, who have lighted for a moment only. Even the
+noisiest crows, the most solemn owls, are but for a day, or for two
+years, or four years, or for six years.
+
+There is a certain permanent population of the military and naval
+bureaus, over whose heads the storms of fashion and politics roar and
+break like tempests that toss the surface of the sea far above the
+placid monsters and coral insects of the deep. And there are a few
+memorial office-holders--quiet men, who have grown old in certain ruts
+in which they can run with a facility that is absolutely essential. They
+feel that they have become part of the government. The very oldest
+senators and representatives excite in their breasts a kind of
+compassionate sympathy as mere boys and tyros. And like heirs of old
+royal lines long since superseded, who cherish a secret conviction that
+modern times are a mere delusion and progress an absurd infatuation, and
+who are sure that some day the world will discover what a huge mistake
+it made in not continuing to be governed by the extinct line, and so
+return to its allegiance, the faithful plodders in the official ruts do
+still believe that the party, whatever it was, which appointed them is
+the Heaven-appointed ruler of the country, and that when the froth of
+the present moment is blown away, the clear, deep, sound good old times
+will be again discerned. The droll old Jacobites! They drink to the king
+over the water. They might as well drink to the king with his head off!
+
+
+
+
+RECEPTION TO THE JAPANESE AMBASSADORS AT THE WHITE HOUSE
+
+
+Herr Teufelsdrockh informs those who read his famous book, the _Tailor
+Sewer Over; or, the Philosophy of Clothes_, that Mr. Pellum announces,
+among other canons regulating human apparel, that it is permitted to
+mankind, under certain conditions, to wear white waistcoats. But it now
+appears that, under certain conditions also, straw-colored gloves are
+not only permissible, but imperative. When a Japanese ambassador
+appears, and the white flag with the orb of day in its centre is
+unfurled, straw-color, as to the hands, is the only wear. Therefore,
+when the reception was to take place in Washington the deeply initiated
+held hands of that mystic color. The only chagrin was that nobody
+seemed to know the significant fact nor to care for it; and one
+honorable gentleman asked with interest whether it would not be
+extremely orthodox to wear a straw-hat. But these levities were ill
+becoming the august occasion.
+
+The feast of the straw-colored gloves in honor of the Japanese
+ambassadors fell upon an evening when the poetic policeman thought of
+every belle who stepped from her carriage,
+
+    "The bleak winds of March
+    Made her tremble and shiver."
+
+But he thought it only; he did not say it. Yet the bleak wind of the
+cold night had little chance at the guests, for a pavilion was laid to
+the very curb-stone, and everybody stepped out into friendly shelter.
+Then up the steep stairs, just as the illustrious guests were passing
+from the cloak-room to the hall. As they entered it the crowd, swelling
+upward from the door below, made for the ladies' room, or for the little
+hole in a corner into which the gentlemen were to thrust their coats,
+in the vague hope that they might be recovered. Some of the Japs who at
+a later hour were buffeting the crowd and struggling towards the
+aperture must have been impressed, if they were philosophers, with the
+fact that a nation of so many happy contrivances as they fondly believe
+us to be has not yet learned how to take charge of overcoats at public
+feasts. It would not be very difficult to avoid the fierce crush at the
+cloak-room; but it is not avoided, and it is as good-humored as it is
+disagreeable and unnecessary.
+
+But who cared for the crush at the door of the opera-house on a Jenny
+Lind night, when coat skirts strewed the pavement, and the most
+elaborately tied cravats were undone? Not otherwise was this pressure
+when the door was passed and the pretty hall entered. Was this also an
+opera? And had the curtain risen? For the first impression of the
+brilliant scene was that of the trilling and warbling of canaries in
+clusters of cages hung high overhead, and for a moment giving a sense of
+enchanted gardens and rose bowers upon Bendermere's stream. Was this
+impression disturbed when from their tiring-room the nymphs and dames
+emerged powdered, beflowered, effulgent? There were toilets of all
+kinds. There were even ladies in bonnets, as if they had run in
+neighborly to hobnob an hour with Iwakura. There were others in the very
+extreme of fashion. There was every kind of tasteful and rich and
+beautiful and plain and grotesque attire. And now and then behold! the
+ineffable calm of the lady--not one, but many--of whom Mr. Emerson tells
+the excellent story that she said to feel herself perfectly well dressed
+imparted a tranquil happiness that religion itself could not bestow.
+
+The hall was very light, draped and festooned simply with the American
+and two Japanese flags intertwined, the whole giving a certain gauzy
+effect, which was pretty, if not fairy-like nor magnificent. Upon a
+little platform at the end of the hall stood the guest and other
+distinguished ministers. The space in the middle of the hall, between
+improvised columns, was kept clear for some time, so that the picture
+was charming. The throng pressed slowly up one side of the room towards
+the platform, and, passing across it in front of the various members of
+the embassy, were received by the Secretary of State and the Japanese
+minister, and by the latter presented to Iwakura. He was dressed, with
+all his associates, in the sad sables with which Western nations mourn
+their own gayety. Instead of some glittering cloth of gold, in which,
+whatever the fact may have been at the White House, we might have
+expected an ambassador from Zipango or El Dorado to be arrayed, we had
+the familiar and useful black broadcloth coat and trousers of
+civilization. But when Sir Philip Sidney, in flowered velvet, was
+presented to the great William of Orange, William was clad in a plain
+serge coat, and Sir Philip probably did not know it, or forgot it. And
+as the gallant Sidneys at this feast were presented to the chief
+ambassador, they doubtless saw the man and not his clothes.
+
+Iwakura is about fifty years old; not a large man; of great dignity and
+serenity of character and manners, with a high-bred and elegant air,
+and a face of clear intelligence and refinement. He bowed courteously to
+every guest, with a subtile distance of salutation without offence which
+is peculiar to many men of high self-respect. Hand-shaking is the most
+religiously observed of all the social rites in Washington, and
+especially and amusingly by the diplomatic corps, who evidently
+constrain themselves to observe punctually this sacred habit; but
+Iwakura did not offer his hand, yet did not refuse to engage in the
+ceremony when it was unavoidable. Beyond him in the line were the chief
+ladies of the occasion, the wives of the Vice-President, of the
+Secretary of State, of the Speaker, and of the other secretaries. It was
+simply a republican court, recalling the days when President Washington
+and his wife stood upon a slightly raised dais at the end of the hall,
+there being about those three inches of monarchy left at the beginning
+of the republic, before Thomas Jefferson, alighting from his horse,
+hitched him by the bridle to the fence, and then went into the Capitol
+to be inaugurated President.
+
+Descending from the immediate presence, the guests gathered in lines
+along the hall, or slowly promenaded, engaged in watching and in
+criticising each other. Meanwhile the band played, and the canaries,
+excited by the music and the lights, sang loud and clear. Not so sweetly
+sang the gossips, as they whispered and exclaimed at each other's fresh
+oddity or extravagance of attire. Gently, good gossips! gently! for even
+at this moment is the Scripture fulfilled, and ye who judge are judged.
+"In a world where Martin Farquhar Tupper passes to the thirty-seventh
+edition," said Thackeray, in a company of authors, "let us all think
+small-beer of ourselves." When to the eye of men the dress of the fairer
+sex is altogether bewildering, and certainly not, as Professor
+Teufelsdrockh would say, unbeautiful, why should the good gossip
+invidiously discriminate? Peace, peace! The sober matron at whom you
+smile wears the plain dress because she preferred to pay her boy's
+college bills with the money that would have arrayed her in Parisian
+robes had he stayed at home. And you, dear madam, daughter of
+Fortunatus and heiress of his purse, you wear those ponderous diamonds
+and nudge your neighbors to look and laugh with you.
+
+Hark the soft prelude of the waltz. What is the mysterious pathos of
+that long pulsing strain? Why is that measure, moving to which the joy
+and the hope of youth celebrate their triumph, of all measures the most
+passionately sad? One after another the partners glide into the dance.
+They swim, they float, they circle, they move in music and to music. And
+what is this, and who is here? this comet, this meteor of a couple, who
+come pumping and dashing through the throng. Are her hands really laid
+upon his shoulders? Do his hands clasp her elbows, or is it an
+extraordinary dream? No wonder that Japan draws to the edge of the dais
+and gazes in wonder, for America also looks on in amazement. The amused
+incredulity of the foreign guests as they watch the dancing is
+interesting to see. Iwakura regards the scene with smiling gravity. To
+him the spectacle seems a thousandfold more against nature than the
+vision of a woman voting can possibly be to the most conservative
+American. Yet the ambassador will find that the loveliest woman may
+waltz with a man and still be womanly, and the conservative American may
+go and do likewise. The fashions of a time and the traditions of a
+nation are not the final laws of nature, and even Horatio's philosophy
+does not exhaust the things in heaven and earth that are yet to be.
+
+The ambassadors are still gazing, the band is still playing, and the
+birds are still singing over the happy dancers as we come away. There is
+a desperate but brief struggle at the orifice in the corner, whence, to
+our delight, our coats emerge. We have a glimpse into the ladies'
+tiring-room, where, like bright-winged birds, they are pluming
+themselves for flight. Upon the steep staircase, where they stand
+waiting for their carriages, there is tranquillity and order, so
+excellent are the arrangements. Scores of sentences are left in
+fragments upon the stairs, for in the midst of a remark the cry
+resounds, "The Honorable Mr. Iago's carriage, Mrs. Bluebeard's, The
+Ambassador from San Salvador, Mr. Smith-Jones's carriage!" And instantly
+the bright-winged birds are flown, and rose-buds and violets go home to
+happy dreams.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAID AND THE WIT
+
+
+The fabled stream that sank from sight, and emerged far away, still
+flowing, is an image of the course of all progress. The argument which
+establishes the reason and the benefit of reform does not, therefore, at
+once establish it, still less complete it. There are obstructions,
+delays, disappearances; but still the stream flows, seen or unseen,
+still it swells, and reappearing far beyond where it vanished, moves
+brimming to the sea.
+
+The Lady Mavourneen, who, coming to us straight from Paris, found here a
+courteous regard for women, which she said that after a life's residence
+she had not found in France, was only just to Americans. Nowhere is
+there such instinctive and universal consideration for the gentler sex,
+notwithstanding the occasional spectacle of the woman standing in the
+elevated railroad car, and the necessity under which the elderly wit
+found himself in the omnibus, when, seeing a comely young woman
+standing, he said to his son sitting in his lap, "My son, why don't you
+get up and give the lady your seat?"
+
+Despite such gayety in the omnibus, and such devout reading of the
+newspapers in the elevated cars that the devotees cannot see women
+standing, even those women, if they are travelled, would agree that,
+upon the whole, in no civilized country have they encountered more
+deference to the sex as such than in America. Yet the courtesy is that
+of a clever as well as polite people. If the comely maid in the omnibus
+had suddenly and sweetly asked the elderly wit whether he was a true
+American, and believed that taxation and representation should go
+together, he would have promptly replied, "Yes, ma'am." But if she had
+then whipped out her logical rapier and thrust at him the question, "Are
+you, then, in favor of giving me a vote?" his cleverness and his
+courtesy would have blended in his reply, "Madam, when women demand it,
+they will have it." It is the universal reply of the ingenious patriot
+who is aware that the argument is against him, but who is still
+unconvinced. The stream of logic sinks in the sands of his scepticism,
+but it will reappear still further on, flowing with a fuller current
+towards its goal.
+
+If the omnibus were a convenient ground for such bouts of argument, the
+maid has plenty of other keen rapiers in reserve with which she would
+pierce his courteous incredulity. One of the sharpest would be the
+rejoinder of inquiry whether it was the general custom of Legislatures
+to wait until everybody interested in a reform asked for it before
+granting it. Having inserted the point of the weapon, she would turn it
+around, to the great inconvenience of the elderly wit, by further asking
+specifically whether imprisonment for debt was abolished because poor
+debtors as a body requested it or because it was deemed best in the
+general interest that it should be abolished, or whether hanging for
+stealing a leg of mutton was renounced because the hapless thieves
+demanded it, or because Romilly showed that humanity and the welfare of
+society and of respect for law required it.
+
+The comely maid, once aroused, would not spare him, and while declining
+to occupy his son's seat, she would challenge him to say whether the
+slave-trade was stopped and the West Indian slaves emancipated by
+England because the slaves petitioned, or because Parliament thought
+such reforms desirable for the interests of England. That inquiry,
+doubtless, she would have pushed more closely home, and there would have
+been no escape for the nimble wit except in some happy and elusive
+epigram. Nothing would have followed. He would have lifted his hat
+courteously as the lady smiled and left the omnibus. The stream of logic
+would have disappeared. But its volume would have been stronger, and
+when it reappeared, it would have been flowing nearer its goal.
+
+The comely maid recently smiled, probably as if she saw the
+reappearance, when she learned that venerable Yale, even before
+venerable Harvard, had opened her post-graduate courses upon absolutely
+the same conditions to women as to men. This is not co-education; far
+from it; it is as far as eleven o'clock from twelve. Still less is it
+co-suffrage. No, indeed; it is as different as the blossom of May from
+the fruit of September. It means no more than that the good sense of
+Yale, perceiving that there is a goodly company of women actually
+devoted to higher studies, and not perceiving anything unwomanly or
+undesirable in larger knowledge and stricter intellectual training,
+invites Hypatia and Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitchell to avail
+themselves of her opportunities and resources to prosecute their
+studies, and recognizes that in a modern world of larger and juster
+views, which permits women to use every industrial faculty to the
+utmost, and to own property and dispose of it, it is useless longer to
+insist with chivalry that woman is a goddess "too bright and good," or
+with the Orient that she is a slave in this world and a houri in the
+next.
+
+As for the logic of such an invitation, Yale is doubtless indifferent.
+She invites women to study not with her under-graduates, but with her
+post-graduates. Probably she recoils with instinctive conservatism from
+the vision of a possible Hypatia seated among her faculty in a
+professorial chair. That might do in Alexandria in the fifth century.
+But in New Haven in the nineteenth, or even the twentieth--? She recoils
+still further from the prospect of covoting. Elizabeth Tudor was a
+creditable head of a kingdom and a fellow-counsellor of state with
+Burleigh and Walsingham. But does it follow that a Connecticut woman
+possessed of great estates should have a voice in the disposition of her
+property? Probably Yale would agree that when all such amply endowed
+women unite in asking for such a voice, it might be worth while to
+consider. Meanwhile she opens the hospitable doors of her post-graduate
+intellectual treasury, and every woman who will may enter and share the
+riches.
+
+Oliver asked for more, but not until he had consumed his portion. The
+comely maid of the omnibus smiles as she sees those treasury doors
+hospitably opening. She seems perhaps to see the stream of logic at once
+vanishing and reappearing. If a woman may mingle wisely with
+post-graduates, why not with under--but no. Something, she would say
+with womanly good sense, may be left to time and the inevitable sequence
+of events. Shall all be done at once, and the sound seed be spurned
+because it must be planted and grow and ripen before there is a harvest?
+In this Columbian year shall we think that nothing was gained when
+Columbus reached San Salvador, as we used to be taught, or Watling
+Island, or Grand Turk, or Samana, among which bewildered knowledge now
+doubtfully gropes--because he had not reached the continent, and because
+he believed it to be the old and not a new India?
+
+That comely damsel, with her face towards the morning, says, quietly,
+with Durandarte, "Patience, and shuffle the cards." One glance at the
+woman in the Athens of Pericles and at woman in the New Haven of
+President Dwight answers the question which the nimble elderly wit
+eluded.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEPARTURE OF THE _GREAT EASTERN_.
+
+
+I saw the _Great Eastern_ sail away. The afternoon was exquisite--one of
+the cool, clear, perfect days that followed the storm in the middle of
+August; and it seemed to hang over the great ship like a cordial smile.
+But it was the only smile the poor Leviathan received. There was a
+Christian resignation in her departure. The big ship, like Falstaff, "'a
+made a finer end and went away, an it had been any christom child: 'a
+parted even just between" four and five, "ev'n at turning o' the tide."
+But as when a prince is born, and the bells are rung, and the cannon
+fired, and the city is illuminated, and with music and shouting the
+people swarm the streets--and when the same prince, grown to be a bad
+king and tyrant, dies, outcast and contemned, with never a tear to fall
+nor a bell to toll for him--even such was the coming and the going of
+the _Great Eastern_.
+
+I remember also the June afternoon when she arrived, and at the same
+hour. The city was excited as London used to be by the news of a famous
+victory. It was reported early in the morning that she was below, and
+public expectation, which had been feeding upon print and picture of
+her, was despatching the population to the Battery, to the wharves, to
+the excursion boats, and wherever she could be seen. At four o'clock you
+could see, off Staten Island, a pyramid of towering masts above all
+other masts. She looked a mighty admiral; and as she came up the bay,
+attended by the little boats--for all other craft are little beside
+her--you could easily remember the approach of Columbus to the shore and
+the canoes of curious savages that darted and swarmed around his ship.
+Her very size gave her a kind of superiority: the silence of her
+progress was full of majesty.
+
+The shores teemed with people. The heights of Staten Island twinkled
+and fluttered with the gay toilets of the spectators that covered them.
+The Jersey shores were alive. The Battery looked white with human faces.
+The piers upon the river, the decks of vessels in the stream, and the
+windows and roofs of the buildings that commanded the water, were
+crowded with eager watchers. But the prettiest sight was the convoy of
+every kind that attended the surprising guest. Yachts, sloops,
+schooners, steamers, and tow-boats, large and small, moved down towards
+her, came out from the shore, sailed round her, sailed beside her,
+crossed her bows, followed her, so that the bay was bewitched with
+excitement. Cannon roared, bells rang, flags waved, and the crowd
+huzzaed welcome.
+
+Through all the great ship glided majestically on. In response to each
+fresh salute of steam-whistle the bell was touched upon the deck--it was
+the quiet nod or smile of a prince in reply to the noisy complimenting
+of a Common Council. There was an air of dignity and of grandeur in the
+size and movement of the ship; and as the public was not disappointed
+in her size, but found that she really looked as large as she had been
+described and represented; and as every circumstance of her arrival was
+propitious, so that she slipped quietly into her dock, like a
+ferry-boat--it may fairly be claimed that the _Great Eastern_ had
+already won the hearty regard of the New York public.
+
+How she lost it--is it not all related in indignant reports and letters
+and caricatures? How she dared to charge a dollar for admission--how
+hapless sailors lost their lives--how she went to Cape May--and there
+black night rushes down upon the tale. After a visit of forty-nine days,
+in which she had unhappily, but too surely, worn out her welcome, she
+prepares to depart. But at the last moment petty suits almost detain
+her. She shakes them off, however, and with them the cables that bound
+her to our shore. She slips into the stream. She promptly points her
+head down the bay. It is a lovely afternoon--it is the same river full
+of craft--there are the wharves, the windows, the roofs--but where, oh!
+where are the people? She fires her departing gun. A few loiterers, whom
+chance or business has called to the water-side, look up for a moment as
+she goes by. Idle boys upon the wharves joke and jeer at her. Where are
+the wolves, naughty boys? How dare you cry bald-head? Everything in the
+river and the city slouches in the every-day costume of habit. There are
+no gala garments, no fluttering flags, and merry bells, and booming
+guns, and cheering crowds. The _Great Eastern_ is going away--who cares?
+She will never come back--so much the better! Alas! the poor old King of
+yesterday is dying, and there is no one to close his eyes. No; the
+courtiers are booted and spurred to dash away the moment the breath is
+out of his body and salute the young Prince, the next Sensation, who
+shall rule the realm for a day.
+
+When she came in I saw her come up the bay. I saw her come down as she
+departed. In the distance, blending with the spires of the city and the
+lesser masts, there was the towering cluster rising above all. I
+listened for the guns. I looked for the attendant craft. There were
+neither, except a brief salute from the Cunarder in port. But the bay of
+New York will be watched for many a year before so grand and stately a
+sight will be seen again as that great ship making her way through the
+Narrows to the sea. When she entered the bay she seemed majestic and
+conciliatory; as she left it, she was majestic and disdainful. Yet this
+was only the impression of a moment and of the distance. As she neared
+the forts at the Narrows entirely alone, with no accompanying steam or
+sail vessel, with all the hard luck of her life behind her and following
+her even to the latest hour of her stay in America, with the fact that
+she had utterly lost all hold upon public interest made glaringly
+palpable by the absolute loneliness of her departure, she yet fired a
+proud salute as she swept out of the upper bay--a stern farewell that
+echoed coldly from unanswering shores--and with the stars and stripes
+floating at her peak, magnificent and majestic, the _Great Eastern_
+departed.
+
+Gradually, as she passed far down the lower bay, she returned into the
+same hazy vastness that I remembered when I first saw her--in which, in
+the memories of all who saw her, she will forever remain.
+
+
+
+
+CHURCH STREET
+
+
+On the earliest of the really spring-like mornings as the Easy Chair
+turned into Church Street it could not help perceiving that in some
+romantic ways the New-Yorker has the advantage of the Londoner and
+Parisian. Church Street does not, indeed, seem at the first mention to
+be a promising domain of romance, nor a fond haunt of the Muses. Indeed,
+it must not be denied that it has an unsavory name; and when the city
+loiterer recalls Wapping, or a May morning on the Seine quais, he will
+smile at Church Street as a field of romance, and the Easy Chair grants
+him absolution. London, perhaps, does not strike the American
+imagination, or, let us more truly say, the imagination of the
+travelling American, as a romantic city. That citizen of the world
+reserves for himself Venice, Constantinople, Grand Cairo. Yet if after
+his arrival he will buy Peter Cunningham's _Hand-book for London_ at the
+nearest book-store, and turn its pages slowly, he will discover that for
+him, an American, he is in a very romantic city indeed. Mr. Hepworth
+Dixon's _Tower of London_ will show him how copious a sermon may be
+preached from one romantic text. Of course he can be expected to have no
+feeling but pity for the unfortunates who fill the streets, and whose
+fate it was to be born Britishers. Yet, let him reflect that it was not
+their fault, and except for that precise unhappy fact of being
+Britishers, which causes all the mischief, their parents too would have
+lived elsewhere.
+
+Then the American citizen of the world, pitying England, will cross to
+France, to another country, a new world, and in Paris will breathe more
+freely as being at last in the metropolis of the globe--always excepting
+New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, or Chicago, as the case may
+be. If he opens _Galignani's Guide_, the excellent and well-informed
+traveller will immediately discover that he is in another romantic city,
+and that there is something more to see and consider than the bal
+d'opera, and the Château Rouge; and if some Easy Chair accidentally
+encountered straying along the Boulevards, or seated at the door of a
+café, should chance to ask whether the well-informed traveller had ever
+taken a romantic stroll in Church Street, New York, he would be rewarded
+with a smile for his admirable humor. By-and-by, after the coffee was
+drunk and the pipe smoked out, the Easy Chair and his approving Mentor
+would perhaps stroll about until they came far away from the haunts of
+to-day to the respectable old Place Louis Quinze. It is always an
+attractive spot for that well-informed traveller. He looks at it with
+pensive emotion, and turns warmly to the Easy Chair and says:
+
+"How delightful this is! Here dwelt the noblesse! This is the Fifth
+Avenue--what do I say?--the Murray Hill of old Paris! And now all is
+gone! Fashion is an emigré. Inquire in the Faubourg St. Germain. What a
+pity we have nothing of this kind in America."
+
+"But we have," replies the Easy Chair.
+
+The incredulous well-informed traveller again smiles a mild, melancholy
+smile at the inscrutable methods of Providence, which has provided no
+Place Louis Quinze for the Yankees and aborigines.
+
+"We certainly have," persists the Easy Chair.
+
+"Where, pray?"
+
+"Well, Church Street."
+
+The reply seems to be beating out a jest very thin; but gradually the
+Easy Chair contrives to explain.
+
+The movement of life in New York is so rapid, fashion and trade sweep
+from one point to another with such impetuosity, that the romance of
+changed interest can be enjoyed in the same spot twice or thrice in a
+lifetime. In older cities, in Paris or London, it is not the individual
+experience, but history only which covers the change. The gentlemen and
+dames of the Louis Quinze era do not moralize over the Place from which
+the glory has departed, but only their descendants. The change is so
+gradual that it is not within their personal experience. It is a tide
+that rises and falls once in sixscore years, not in six hours. But the
+fortunate New-Yorker has his romance making for him while he sleeps. The
+sorry streets of to-day will disappear within a dozen years, and the
+instant they are gone, or seen just at the moment of the final lapse,
+they have passed into the realm of romance.
+
+Here is Church Street, for instance; it is not very long, and you turn
+into it from Fulton or from Canal. So turned the Easy Chair, and there
+was the long, narrow vista walled by lofty buildings, the spacious
+houses of trade, built yesterday, piled with dry goods, bold with
+prosperous newness, but instantly suggesting the street of palaces in
+Genoa. And a few rods off some old Knickerbocker is gravely stalking
+down Broadway who has not turned aside into Church Street for many a
+year, and who supposes Church Street is still a place not to be named,
+an unspeakable Gehenna. So it was a dozen years ago. Once, also, it was
+the Black Broadway. It was a kind of voluntary Ghetto of the colored
+people. Then, again, it was an offshoot of the Five Points. There were
+low ranges of dingy buildings. Dirty men and women slouched along on the
+walks and lounged out of the windows, and their idle, ribald laughter
+echoed along the street that few carriages travelled. Dens of every kind
+were just around every corner. Slatternly women emptied slops upon the
+pavement, and the stench was perpetual. Dirty little children screamed
+and played, and sickly babies squalled unheeded. It was a street fallen
+out of Hogarth; the street of worst repute in the city.
+
+And now it is a double range of stately buildings--symmetrical, massive.
+Horse-cars struggle on it with light carts of dry-goods dealers, with
+the slow, enormous teams that shake the ground. At every corner there is
+an inextricable snarl of wagons, and porters are heaving boxes, and
+young clerks are directing, and huge windows are filled with huge
+pattern cards, so that the narrow way is tapes-tried. "Look out,
+there!" cries a porter-compelling clerk to the Easy Chair, which smiles
+to think that only yesterday it was in Exchange Place, and Pearl Street,
+and elsewhere that the peremptory youth was ordering him to mind his
+eye. And if the employer who now sits in the spacious office opposite
+had known that his clerk was familiar with Church Street, he would have
+warned him of the gates of destruction, and have admonished him that
+Church Street, though a narrow street, was a broad way.
+
+The people that push and hurry and skip along this busy avenue are alert
+and well dressed. The slouchers and loungers, the old slatterns with the
+slop-pails, the fat, frouzy, jolly, dirty women with bare red arms and
+loud voices, the sneaks, the thieves, and the unclean groups at the
+grog-shop, where are they? No sneaks now, no thieves--honorable
+gentlemen with clean collars everywhere. What a consolation! As you
+watch the passers closely, as you read the signs, it occurs to you that
+the population, with the universal tendency in our mental and spiritual
+habits that Matthew Arnold sparklingly deplores, is clearly Hebraized.
+Here, where this especially fine warehouse or handsome shop stands,
+stood the French church. It has jumped up-town a few miles. Here was the
+church of Dr. Potts. Could you believe that the people who go to meeting
+in the snug, brown little edifice in an ivy mantle at the corner of
+University Place and Tenth Street, which probably seems to the young
+clerk coeval with the city, day before yesterday, as it were, came down
+here among the merchants? Then they came once a week for an hour or two.
+What did you say was the name of the deity to whom these temples were
+dedicated?
+
+And at this corner--why, if it were an April thicket it could not more
+sweetly bubble with song, only this music is the spirit ditty of no
+tone--here was the old National Theatre. Do you see that very
+respectable old gentleman in the office who carries an ostrich egg in
+his hat? for so his grandchildren describe grandpapa's baldness. He sits
+and reads the paper, and is presently going down to the bank of which
+he is a director, and of which he seems always to those grandchildren to
+smell, so tenacious is the peculiar odor of a bank; that is the very
+gentleman who in the temple of the Drama upon this spot used to lead the
+loud applause, and at whom in his buckish costume of those merry days
+and nights, the lovely Shirreff herself used to level her eyes and her
+voice as she trilled: "Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad." Can
+you imagine that excellent grandparent kissing his hand rapturously to
+the retiring prima donna, going off to sup at the Café de
+l'Independence, and hieing home at two in the morning waking the echoes
+of Murray Street with a reproduction of that arch song, followed by a
+loud whistle to prove whether that vision of delight really will come to
+him, and bringing only the gruff Charley, obese guardian of the night?
+Will you find in your famous Place Louis Quinze any roisterer of the
+regency grown old and careful of his diet?
+
+Here is one wall which survives from the prehistoric days of thirty
+years ago; it is the rear wall of the old hospital, that blessed green
+spot in the midst of the city, which is to be green no more, but will
+soon be piled with more palaces. And opposite this wall is a short
+street running from Church to West Broadway. A few years ago this was
+one of the worst of city slums. At the corner of West Broadway a wooden
+building still remains--a sullen, sickly, defiant cur of a
+building--that sits and snarls impotent over the savagery departed. And
+there is one tall rookery still, a tenement-house, with a system of
+fire-escapes in front, and the slattern slopping at the curb as in the
+ancient day, and a cooper's shop, and a blacksmith's, and one, two,
+three, how many whiskey shops? But they are all faint and feeble and
+submerged in the lofty buildings, and to-morrow all trace of them will
+be gone. And then who will remember the murder? The mysterious, awful,
+romantic murder. The murder that filled all the newspapers, and fed
+speculation at all the corner groggeries and in all offices. The murder
+that was done into a romance, and of which the hero--that is the
+murderer--was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal
+appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human
+life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to
+this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far
+away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful
+truth that he is the hero. Does he sometimes return to this spot? Does
+he look at the site of the house where the deed was done? Does he appear
+in the guise of a merchant, a jobber, a retailer from that remote
+southwestern somewhere, and higgle and chaffer in the noble warehouse on
+the very site of the wretched building where he murdered his mistress?
+Good heavens! Do you see that man of about those years, looking about as
+if to find a sign or number? (As if he didn't know the very place; as if
+it were not burned and cut into his heart and conscience!) Do you think
+it could possibly be he, or is it, after all, only the honest Timothy
+Tape, the modest retailer from Skowhegan or Palmyra?... The
+typhus-fever used to rage here; the cholera was fearful. The sanitary
+reports say that there were always cases of the worst diseases to be
+found here. The city missionaries also used to find their worst cases
+here too, and now, what cleanliness of collar, what modishness of coat!
+No more sin; what a consolation!
+
+And so, as the Easy Chair strolled along, bumped and hustled and
+severely looked upon by the eager throng in the narrow street, more
+radically reconstructed than any doubtful State, it could not help
+feeling that London with Her Majesty's Tower, and Paris with her
+deserted Place Louis Quinze, are not the only romantic cities in the
+world, and that a city of such rapid and incessant change as New York
+offers even some poetic aspects which its elder sisters want. The Easy
+Chair has pleaded formerly for some respect towards old historic
+buildings, like the old State-house in Boston, for instance, and has
+been indignantly laughed at for its pains. It will not deny that,
+unabashed by such laughter, it contemplates the old Walton House with
+satisfaction. It repairs, also, to the corner of Broad and Pearl
+streets, and, reflecting upon General Washington's parting with his
+officers, turns its eyes towards Wall Street, and beholds the Grecian
+temple which has taken the place of the old City Hall, upon whose
+balcony the first predecessor of President Grant was inaugurated. But
+the romance of Church Street is of another kind. It is the romance of
+striking and sudden change merely, not of historic interest, nor of
+personal association. Perhaps the gentle reader may not find it when he
+goes there. Then let him carry it.
+
+
+
+
+HISTORIC BUILDINGS
+
+
+A few months ago the Easy Chair, seeing that changes were making in the
+old State-house in Boston, one of the few Revolutionary and truly
+historic buildings that remain, modestly ventured to regret it, and to
+deplore the rapid disappearance of the venerable relics that had come
+down to us from former generations. It suggested, or meant to suggest,
+or might, could, would, or should have suggested, and will now, under
+correction, suggest that there are very few buildings in New York which
+recall that earlier epoch of the country. With a national and pardonable
+logic, or association of ideas, the Easy Chair enlarged upon the value
+of historical relics, of monuments, of visible traditions; and urged
+possibly that it made life a little barer, a little less poetic, here
+than it would otherwise be.
+
+The temerity of such a strain of remark does not seem very extravagant;
+it might indeed be put forth without any secret hostility to human
+rights, to liberty, to the equality of men, and even without a sigh for
+the repose of effete despotisms, and the traditions of outworn
+monarchies. But not in the opinion of a certain excellent journal, which
+we will agree to call the _Bugle of Freedom_, and which blew a sonorous
+blast and rallying cry against the sentiments of the Easy Chair's mild
+and innocent suggestions. "Monuments!" blew the _Bugle of Freedom_,
+"monuments! remains, traditions! Old lumber and rotten timber! What in
+the name of humanity have all these to do with a manly and patriotic
+sentiment? Look at Egypt; what have the Pyramids done for the
+civilization of Egypt? and we hope they are monuments, and ancient
+enough. Look at Greece; the very queen-mother of the noblest
+architecture! Look at Italy, teeming with 'storied monuments,' and what
+do we see?" played the _Bugle of Freedom_. "What do we see? Do we wish
+to be Egyptians, or modern Greeks, or Italians? Heaven forbid!" And the
+resounding _Bugle_ seemed to execute roulades and runs and trills of
+contempt at the unhappy Easy Chair, which was gazing vacantly at Egypt,
+Greece, and Italy, as the _Bugle_ had directed.
+
+Has the _Bugle of Freedom_ no drawer, or box, or casket of any kind, in
+which there is, possibly, a yellow rose-bud, faded years and years ago,
+in the days when it was a mere raw, shrill, piping flageolet? Has it no
+bundle of letters, worn and parted at the seam; no knotted handkerchief
+hidden out of sight, that shall never be more unknotted; no glove,
+delicate and perfumed, still holding the form gained by soft pressure
+upon a hand that shall never again be pressed. Is there no tree in the
+garden, in a public square, by the road-side, in a green field by a
+brook, under which, at every hour of the day and night, whenever and
+with whomsoever it is passed, there stand a youth and maid who shall be
+seen of men no more. Is there no house in town or country from whose
+windows long vanished faces look when the _Bugle_ passes by, and in
+whose unchanged rooms there are figures of old and young whose presence
+is infinitely tender and chastening? Would life be richer and better and
+more manly and inspiring for the _Bugle_ if all these were swept away?
+Would the rights of man and eternal justice be more secure if some
+morning Biddy should throw old letters, old rose-buds, and old
+handkerchiefs into the fire, and the woodman would not spare the old
+tree, and the haunted old household be burned up or pulled down? That is
+the whole question.
+
+It is merely a matter of association. It is in human nature; the Easy
+Chair did not put it there. The mysterious delight in the most ancient
+and inarticulate remains of human skill is the recognition by the soul
+of man of its identity and endless continuation; and when you descend
+from that Cyclopean work in the foundation of the wall of the temple at
+Jerusalem to the knotted handkerchief and the yellow bud, you have only
+come, O _Bugle_, to the individual delight in one's own experience, to
+the unsealing of sweet fountains forgotten, and the quickening of
+sanitary emotions. Surely when you were travelling and delighting
+yourselves in Greece you did not come upon the plain of Marathon with
+the same emotion that you cross the Hackensack meadows in the
+Philadelphia train. But what was the difference? Byron's lines sang
+themselves out of your mouth:
+
+    "The mountains look upon Marathon,
+    And Marathon looks on the sea."
+
+Why did Byron's lines rise in your memory? Why did Byron write the
+lines? Why was your glance eager and your mind pensive and your
+imagination alert and your soul full of generous impulse when you stood
+on the plain of Marathon? Because of the great conflict between two
+civilizations long and long and long ago--the conflict of ideas of which
+you are the child; the conflict of men essentially like you and your
+brothers who fought at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
+
+But if there be this subtle and over-powering influence in association
+with a place, although it is earth and trees and grass and stone, is
+there not the same charm and power in association with a building, a
+tree, a stream? And while Marathon has not saved Greece from decline,
+has it not been one of the natural influences that have pleaded against
+national decay? And could Marathon and Salamis and Platæa have been
+swept out of mind, would not the decline have been a thousandfold
+hastened? Are we not stronger and braver for Bunker Hill and Saratoga,
+for the sunken _Alabama_ and the Wilderness?
+
+For the same reason, O loud-blowing _Bugle of Freedom_, that it would be
+a national injury to forget the great deeds, it is in a lesser degree a
+misfortune, although an inevitable one, gradually to lose from sight the
+objects that recall them. Would it be a pity to shovel Bunker Hill into
+Boston Back Bay? The battle of Bunker Hill would still remain in
+history, the advantages of the Revolutionary War which it began would
+still survive; but something we should have lost, and the argument that
+urged the sparing of the hill would be sound and natural. So with the
+old State-house. To destroy it or essentially to change it was in a
+lesser degree to shovel Bunker Hill into the Back Bay.
+
+The town of Stratford-upon-Avon seemed not to be conscious of the great
+truth which the Easy Chair is expounding when it seemed disposed to let
+the house of Shakespeare be sold, and even moved away. But England at
+least was wiser, and the house remains. Some day--and the Easy Chair
+dedicates the remark as a conciliatory conclusion to the _Bugle of
+Freedom_--some day the Bugles of that same honored name will gaze at the
+present printing-office, where a sympathetic Easy Chair trusts the jobs
+are many and profitable, and will say, with emotion, "There the parental
+_Bugle of Freedom_ blew its melodious note." It will do the Buglets no
+harm, as they return to their palatial mansions, to reflect upon the
+simple and sturdy origin of their prosperity.
+
+The Easy Chair has the more feeling upon this subject because directly
+opposite to the vast and many-windowed building from which it surveys
+the world stands the old Walton House. Eighty years ago it was one of
+the finest houses in town. The Square, where now business hums and
+roars, then softly murmured with fashion, and this was the Faubourg St.
+Honoré of the republican city. The house still has the stately air of
+the old régime. The stone pediment of the windows is elaborate and
+arrests the idle eye. But it is now a sailors' boarding-house. The walls
+are cracked, and the house has an indescribable aspect of shabbiness and
+neglect. Surrounded by the mere mob of three-storied modern brick
+buildings, it has evidently become reckless and lost to shame, like a
+king's heir fallen into debauched and degraded courses. Long since
+slighted and forgotten, its peers utterly gone, their descendants moved
+miles away, and become a modern generation about the reservoir on Murray
+Hill, the Easy Chair has yet more than once, late on a summer afternoon,
+when trade had gone up-town, and silence and dreams were setting in,
+beheld the old Walton House glancing covertly across the street at our
+modern, many-windowed, bustling palace of busy traffic with a look of
+high-born haughtiness and contempt. "There may be trade going on within
+my walls," it seems to say as it gazes, "but I am innocent of it. I was
+not built for trade, at least." And then the Easy Chair, with its own
+eyes fixed upon the cracked and leaning walls, seems to see it reeling
+away into its dingy obscurity.
+
+It is a tradition of Franklin Square that Washington once lived in the
+Walton House; and it is certain that Citizen Genet married there the
+daughter of Governor George Clinton. Once indeed, some years since, the
+Easy Chair, hearing an extraordinary and novel sound like the smooth
+rolling of a stately chariot, thought, as the day was late and the
+twilight was already beginning, that some of the fine old societies of
+that fine old day had somehow forgotten themselves into somehow
+returning to the scene of so much last-century festivity; and anxious to
+see both them and their amazement at the transformation of the
+fashionable square, rolled itself to the window, and, looking out--saw
+the first horse-car rumbling gravely along to the neighboring ferry.
+
+Remaining at the window, and mindful of Washington at the old Walton
+House, the Easy Chair was aware of Mercury, who runs the editorial
+errands and is a much-meditating young messenger, standing by his side
+with one of the editorial brethren.
+
+"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you know who Washington was?"
+
+"The father of his country," promptly replied the messenger.
+
+"And what did he ever do that was notorious and disreputable?"
+
+Mercury was plainly indignant at this question, and answered, evasively:
+"Well, he never told a lie, if he did chop down his father's
+apple-tree."
+
+"And what else did he do?"
+
+With energy Mercury responded: "He whipped the bloody Britishers."
+
+"And what became of him when he grew up?"
+
+"He was President."
+
+"Mercury," said the editorial brother, "do you see that house across the
+street?"
+
+"The old Walton House?"
+
+"The old Walton House."
+
+"Of course I do."
+
+"Well, Mercury, he lived there."
+
+"Who lived where?" demanded Mercury, with wide-opening eyes.
+
+"George Washington lived in the old Walton House."
+
+"But not the same George?" asked Mercury, doubtfully. "Not the first
+President?"
+
+"The first wood-chopper of fame, and the first President," replied the
+brother quill.
+
+Mercury gazed at the house earnestly for a little while and then warmly
+demanded, "Why don't they keep his old sign-board up to let folks know?"
+
+_Bugle of Freedom!_ out of the mouths of babes and sucklings the truth
+proceeds. It was the same instinct that caused the Easy Chair to exclaim
+a year ago, as it contemplated the prospect of changing the old and
+famous State-house, "Why take the old sign down?"
+
+
+
+
+THE BOSTON MUSIC HALL
+
+
+It is not, of course, possible that New York feels any chagrin that
+Boston has given the most colossal concert ever known upon the
+continent; but it is observable that, as wind and fire finally levelled
+the last timbers of the Boston Coliseum in the dust, the first step
+taken was taken towards the Beethoven Centennial Celebration, in New
+York. The project is not yet matured; but a vision of something very
+large indeed, something "metropolitan," begins to allure expectation;
+and Boston, having scored handsomely in the game, sits upon the ruins of
+her Coliseum and the profits of her Jubilee to see what New York will
+do.
+
+If New York will build a proper hall for music and other public
+purposes, she will do well, and the Beethoven Centennial will not be in
+vain. The Cooper Institute hall is large enough for political meetings,
+and Steinway Hall is good for many purposes; but it is not a beautiful
+nor imposing room, as a great hall should be. The most impressive hall
+in the country is still the Boston Music Hall, where the great height
+and the two galleries, one above the other, with the organ and imposing
+statue of Beethoven, give a feeling of dignity. But the Music Hall lacks
+one of the chief characteristics of a noble room for the purposes to
+which it is devoted, and that is brilliancy. It is too dark. There is no
+smiling splendor of effect, which is always so enlivening. The darkness
+of the hall may be agreeable to weak eyes, it may even be described as
+"very much better than a glare of light," but brilliancy remains an
+indispensable quality of a great hall devoted to popular enjoyment.
+
+Yet, whether dark or light, how much has been enjoyed in that stately
+room! What memorable figures have passed across that platform! What
+exquisite strains of music, sung, played, or spoken, have died along
+those walls! No one who is familiar with our history for the last twenty
+years will sit in the hall for any purpose but suddenly he sees it
+crowded with a silent and attentive throng; sees a reading-desk with
+vases of flowers, and a man[A] of sturdy figure standing behind it,
+whose voice is deep and penetrating and sincere; whose words are things;
+who has a certain rustic shyness of movement; but whose sentences roll
+and flash like volleys of trained soldiery, and who stands in the warmth
+of his own emotion and the sympathy of his audience, an indomitable
+gladiator, compelling the admiration even of his enemies as he fights
+with the Ephesian beasts. Against him, as he stands there every Sunday
+preaching to that vast multitude what seems to him the truth, and
+breaking to them what he believes to be the very bread of life, other
+men are preaching and praying, and the excommunications of the Vatican
+against Luther, shorn of their thunder and lightning, are hurled. Who
+is he that judges motives and sincerity? We do not know in this world
+what is believed, but only what is said and done.
+
+  [A] Theodore Parker.
+
+This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks
+firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low
+half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself
+unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he
+is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them
+would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with
+dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and
+individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal
+truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him.
+They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to
+mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of
+his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and
+powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall
+is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war.
+
+Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and
+might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent.
+It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and
+preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if
+he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches;
+to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by
+the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his
+learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental
+tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense--this was not
+easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better;
+and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more
+music!
+
+Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness
+it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the
+loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits
+listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the
+minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the
+fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar
+who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel
+and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same
+sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he
+was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a
+devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this
+hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a
+hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the
+remembered voice.
+
+    "Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"
+
+And as the concert proceeds--one of the series of the Harvard Musical
+Association, whose concerts are the musical pride of Boston, at which
+the performance is all of the purest classical music, so pure and so
+severe that the profane sometimes secretly ask whether melody in music
+is the unpardonable sin, and are peremptorily answered by the elect:
+"No, but rub-a-dub-dub and tumti-id-dity are not music"--and as the
+concert proceeds it is surely a striking spectacle. The great hall,
+rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight
+outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the
+city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as
+attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture.
+If, in such a concert, melody is not the unpardonable sin, whispering
+is. Woe betide the whisperer at a Harvard Musical. It were better for
+him, or even her, that the money for the ticket had been expended at the
+minstrels or the museum. You might as well be a forger, a swindler, a
+perjurer, or a burglar in ordinary life as to be a whisperer at a
+Harvard Musical. Yes, you might as well "speak right out in meetin'"
+itself as whisper here.
+
+Such a disciplined audience, so quiet, so attentive, so susceptible to
+the slightest sigh of the oboe or wail of the violin, is a marvellous
+spectacle. They are hearing the finest and much of the freshest music in
+the world. They are not exactly sympathetic; perhaps the character of
+the music does not permit it. They applaud calmly--as it were, with
+reservations. It really seems sometimes as though they approve the music
+rather than enjoy it. But the Easy Chair reflects with pride that the
+organizer of these concerts, if such a word may be used, and certainly
+with no exclusion of the co-operation which alone makes such concerts
+possible, is a Brook-Farmer; and it complacently smiles upon the great
+multitude as unconscious pupils of that Arcadian influence.
+
+And, indeed, in other days in this same city of Boston, in the halcyon
+days of the "Academy" concerts at the old Odeon, or still more ancient
+Boston Theatre, many of the Brook-Farmers were present in the flesh.
+Those were the days--or, rather, the nights--when Beethoven was truly
+introduced to America. Preluded with the pretty "Zannetta" overture by
+Auber, or with the "Serment" or the "Domino Noir," or with Herold's
+shrill "Zanetta," or some strain which would not now be tolerated in the
+Harvard concerts, the Fifth Symphony was played until it became
+familiar. And the long, willowy Schmidt stood at the head directing,
+proud as a general commanding his column. In the audience, earnest,
+interested, attentive, sparkling with humor, was Margaret Fuller, not
+hesitating, when the thoughtless girls whispered and tittered and
+giggled in the most solemn adagio strains, to lean over when the
+movement ended and to say to the offenders: "But let us have our turn,
+too; some of us came to hear the music."
+
+There, also, was the delegation from Brook Farm, in whose appearance it
+was plain to see that in Arcadia the hair was worn long, that the stiff
+collar and cravat were repudiated, and that woollen blouses were a mute
+protest against the body coats of a selfish and competitive
+civilization. Those young fellows walked in from Brook Farm and out
+again. They made nothing of ten miles or so each way under the winter
+stars. And with them and of them, already accomplished in the beautiful
+science, already familiar with the great works of the great composers,
+was the present tutelary genius of the Harvard concerts, whose life,
+consecrated as critic and lover to this art, has been a true service to
+his city, and, reflectively, to the country.
+
+But even Boston does not deny the charm of Theodore Thomas's orchestra
+and the delight of the New York Philharmonic music. Indeed, there was no
+audience which, for its training, was more authorized to judge the great
+excellence of the Thomas orchestra than that of the Harvard concerts.
+But when he went to Boston it was not as a doubting Thomas. He did not
+play Bach and Beethoven only, but he tickled the amazed multitude with
+positive tunes. He raised his baton, and his varied orchestra, a single
+instrument in his magic grasp, consented to waltzes; or, like a
+cathedral choir becoming suddenly a lark, trilled airy roundelays, at
+which the delighted (but not all assured of the propriety of delight)
+audience smiled and shook, and the youngest catechumens even tapped time
+faintly with their feet!--a sound which, could it be conceived audible
+in the midst of one of the Harvards, would probably cause such a shudder
+of horror that the hall itself would fall as by an earthquake.
+
+Thus the Music Hall itself is a kind of symphony of memories. It is full
+of delightful ghosts. Among the visible figures there are a host of the
+unseen, and every singer, player, speaker, as he stands for an hour upon
+the platform, is measured by the masters of his art. But in the famous
+Peace Jubilee it had no part. Indeed, the musical taste of which it is
+peculiarly the temple resisted the colossal and continuous concert with
+bells, anvils, and cannon as something monstrous, and as repulsive to
+true art as a huge and clumsy Eastern idol. But not even the finest
+taste of the Music Hall denied the impressiveness and grandeur of the
+result. New York, in the Beethoven Centennial, will have immense
+advantages. The musical resources of the city are truly "metropolitan,"
+and such should the festival be.
+
+
+
+
+PUBLIC BENEFACTORS
+
+
+There is a class of unrecognized public benefactors to which the Easy
+Chair wishes to offer a respectful tribute of gratitude. Their service
+is none the less because it is unconscious; and it is not confined to
+either sex. It is, besides, a very varied service, as will be readily
+seen as we advance in our description. Let us, then, without delay, and
+to begin with, specify as benefactors of this kind the young and other
+gentlemen who do duty at club windows, and the ladies who kindly appear
+only in the latest fashions. Most men, intent upon the necessary
+industry wherewith they maintain their families, are content to live
+plainly, and can seldom escape their work. There is Sunday, indeed, and
+a happy hour in the Park, and perhaps a run in the summer for a week or
+two to Long Branch or the mountains. But black care generally attends as
+a body-servant, not always or immediately recognizable, but like that
+solemn waiter whom Mr. George Hadder describes at a dinner given by
+Leech, the artist, who announced the feast with the air of an
+undertaker, and who proved to be the clerk of the neighboring parish,--a
+little story which may be found, with much other entertaining reading,
+in a handy volume of Mr. Stoddard's "Bric-à-Brac Series."
+
+But the busy man's imagination is still at play, and he fancies a life
+which he does not know, a life of elegant and boundless leisure, which
+hovers above and around his weary routine, and a life in which his home
+is spacious and splendid, where he is clad in handsome clothes and never
+troubled by his tailor's bill, because he has always a balance in the
+bank; a life in which he opens his eyes in the morning, not to wonder if
+he has overslept himself and to plunge out of bed and into his clothes
+and through his breakfast, to hurry to the car or omnibus, dreading to
+be too late--opens his eyes, we say, not for this, but languidly to
+wonder, as he looks from under the hangings, how most easily and
+pleasantly to while away the time. A wise author says that the beauty of
+the landscape is only a mirage seen from the windows of a diligence. So
+is the life of leisure which the busy man sees in fancy and in the tales
+which in his hasty way he sometimes reads on a rainy Sunday or in the
+evening. Yet it would be mere fable to him except for the benevolent
+genii in the club window. As he hurries homeward when his day's work is
+done, he lifts his eye as he passes upon the sidewalk, or he peers from
+the omnibus window, and lo! there stands the man to whom this leisure of
+his dreams is a daily reality.
+
+The figure which is making these dreams real, and which he cannot but
+regard as a benefactor, stands in the spacious window, and there is
+often a group of such figures; always with the hat on, and generally
+with a cane in the hand, and such garments as are seen only in the
+plates of the fashions and upon the tailor's lay-figures. Why, being in
+a warm house, he should wear his hat, when he takes it off upon entering
+all other houses, doth not appear. But it is part of his office to wear
+it. For this representative of leisure models himself upon the habits of
+similar ministers in those tales which the busy man sometimes reads; and
+as Fitz-Clarence Mortimer wears his hat in the club window upon Pall
+Mall, so must the hat be worn in our own club windows. Do not think that
+hatted figure gazing at the passing ladies and carriages rolling to the
+Park is a useless dandy. Nature wastes nothing. Nature does not inspire
+him to pay tailors and shoemakers and jewellers and hatters, and then to
+stand sucking the head of a cane in a club window without a purpose. The
+brilliancy and perfume of flowers and the song of birds, as science
+shows, are not for our delight only; they serve the reproduction and
+perpetuity of life. The final cause of that hatted figure is not the
+advertising of a tailor; it is the effect upon the imagination. It
+serves the end of all art. It makes real to the busy citizen that life
+of leisure and of opportunity of which he reads and dreams.
+
+Nor does it end with the suggestion. As the busy man goes by and beholds
+the apparition, he reflects upon the use of such opportunity as is
+revealed to him at the window. That man, he says, born to a fortune, or
+having by faithful industry and sagacity early amassed it, is now master
+of his life. He commands time and money, the two levers which are so
+powerful in heaving the world forward. He has but to devise how he can
+be of service to others, and obey the leading of his generous soul.
+Think of the hearths and the hearts that he cheers! Think of the
+knowledge that he acquires, the studies that he pursues, for the
+enlightenment of legislation and the practical advantage of government!
+Think how gladly he bears his part in the work of organized charities!
+He has what so few of us have--time and money. He can do so much, so
+much! What can he not do? So muses the busy man, who must give all his
+day, and some of the night often, to earning the pittance upon which he
+lives. And as he muses his good heart asks him why he should require
+everything of the hatted figure of leisure in the club window, and
+discharge his own debt of duty by thinking how easily another can
+discharge his. Everything in its degree, he says, as his steps quicken
+with the thought. One star differeth from another star in glory. Why,
+because that man, born in the purple or winning it, can do so much, can
+I do nothing? Because his whole life is that leisure of endless
+opportunity of which I can only dream, have I no minutes, no chances?
+Haunted by this thought, he finds even his full-stretched day elastic.
+He pulls it out until he, too, cheers some hearth and heart that would
+otherwise have been frozen! and the busy man is busier, indeed, but
+happier, and the amount of human suffering is a little less. In this
+light does not the hatted figure at the window become a real benefactor?
+Nothing, indeed, is further from its mind. It does not even see the busy
+citizen by whom it is seen. But Nature has attained the object for
+which she placed it in a club window with a hat on and sucking the head
+of a cane.
+
+
+
+
+MR. TIBBINS'S NEW-YEAR'S CALL
+
+
+Mr. Tibbins wishes that his experience in making New-Year's calls may be
+made useful as an illustration of the deceitfulness of appearances. He
+is one of the gentlemen who do not keep dogs, although he lives in the
+country, and who decline social visits to persons who do. Mr. Tibbins
+is, however, just and impartial. "My friends," he says, "shall not
+complain of any obscurity in my conduct. I simply offer them the
+alternative, me or your dog--not both. If your tastes and preferences
+are such that you will have large or small animals lying within your
+gates, yelping and growling at every person who enters, smelling at
+ankles, and producing lively apprehensions which are not in the least
+allayed by calling the beast a good fellow, and remarking that he was
+never known to bite,--if," says Mr. Tibbins to his friends, "these are
+your preferences, we will not quarrel. I respect your idiosyncrasies,
+and I beg you to respect mine, while I embrace this occasion to mention
+that among the most prominent of mine is an indisposition to have my
+ankles smelled at by dogs of any breed or of any size, whether they are
+good fellows or not, and an insuperable disgust with the barking of
+beasts when I go to make a call. That it is very selfish in you or any
+person to subject his friends to such ordeals I do not say; that I leave
+entirely to your own judgment, only remarking that although black snakes
+and green snakes are not venomous reptiles, and are probably 'good
+fellows,' I do not think that those who delight in having them coiling
+and gliding about their parlors ought to be vexed with their neighbors
+for not calling. The line must be drawn somewhere," says Mr. Tibbins;
+"you may not draw it until you come to snakes; I draw it at dogs."
+
+When, therefore, you stroll about the delightful country in his
+neighborhood and mark the abodes of the rich and great, and say to him,
+"That is a charming place," Mr. Tibbins answers, "Yes, he has dogs; I
+never go there." Mr. Tibbins was naturally very much exhilarated by the
+hydrophobia excitement last summer, and hoped at one time that the
+public feeling might be carefully kindled to a general crusade against
+dogs. "I lately read in Mr. Warner's letter from the Nile," he said, "of
+an African king who had never seen a horse until Colonel Long came
+riding into his capital. Think, oh, my friend, of the happy island
+valley of Avillon, where never a dog barked loudly or was ever seen." Of
+course so severe a taste as Tibbins's in a world so largely canine
+produces inconvenience, as a dislike to butter in a society which holds
+to a natural and necessary relation between bread and butter will often
+expose the dissenter to difficulty. Such a man, in a crowded and elegant
+assembly, who at supper has incautiously bitten a heavily buttered
+sandwich, in the midst of a bout of badinage with youth and beauty,
+understands the emotion of those who, with Mr. Tibbins, dislike to have
+their ankles smelled at by dogs, yet who suddenly, within a neighbor's
+grounds and far from help, perceive that a dog is actually engaged in
+that office.
+
+But Mr. Tibbins went out merrily upon New-Year's morning, resolved at
+least to pay one visit long neglected to a neighbor who had become his
+neighbor the summer before, who had given no signs of dogs, and who, as
+Tibbins assured himself, was much too sensible a man to allow them about
+the house and grounds. Our friend began the day prosperously, finding
+everybody cordial and gay, and doing, as he thought, his full share
+towards the enlivenment of each call. At last he came to the new
+neighbor's, and went humming gayly up the neat plank-walk from the gate,
+when, turning briskly around the house--putting it, as it were, between
+himself and retreat--he was advancing rapidly towards the front door
+when he suddenly stopped, with a sickening sense of betrayal, as it
+were, in the house of a friend, for directly before him, within easy
+spring, so to speak, lay a large dog upon the door-mat and directly
+under the bell. He was asleep, and upon perceiving him Mr. Tibbins, as
+if upon tiptoe for silence, reconnoitred the situation. To advance and
+ring the bell was simple madness, for the dog would of course awake the
+moment a foot struck the step, and in the confusion of sudden awakening
+and of close quarters with an intruder he would probably be very
+reckless and sanguinary, and not in the least amenable to the "good
+fellow" blandishment. Mr. Tibbins, therefore, without moving, looked at
+the windows, hoping to see somebody looking out whom he might with
+beaming pantomime summon to the door, and so save himself the contact
+which seemed to be inevitable. But there was no one looking out, and the
+closed windows seemed to him to stare with blank indifference, so that
+he says he had had before no idea how cruel windows can be. It then
+occurred to him that if he could open communication with the kitchen,
+and entice some maid or man to the door without ringing, the difficulty
+would disappear, because the maid or man would pacify the dog. But to
+reach the kitchen required a lateral movement which would leave the
+enemy directly across his line of retreat. Moreover, any movement
+whatever exposed Mr. Tibbins to the risk of making a noise, which would
+arouse the foe and precipitate the engagement. He therefore maintained
+his position, looking hopefully towards the kitchen, but, seeing no one,
+he reluctantly held a further counsel with himself.
+
+The obvious heroic course was to step upon the piazza and ring the bell.
+But he saw again that it was impossible to touch the bell without
+bringing himself close to the dog, who would then, of course, awake and
+snap immediately at the nearest object, which would be Tibbins his leg.
+And what was the possible use of heroism under such circumstances? He
+might as well advance and kick the dog. But was the dog asleep? Was he
+not dead? Was he not--why shouldn't he be--a stuffed dog, an old family
+favorite, perhaps, now placed upon his familiar resting-place as his
+own monument? This thought cleared the prospect for a moment, but
+instant gloom shut down again, as Mr. Tibbins saw a slight breathing
+motion, and perceived that the beast still lived. One of the advantages,
+or misfortunes, of New-Year's Day in the country, according to the point
+of view, is the infrequency of visitors. To our friend this infrequency
+seemed to be, upon this occasion, a misfortune. Had there only been a
+merry group turning the corner at the moment, he would have joyously
+joined it, and so long as he could see other legs between himself and
+his enemy his soul would have been at rest.
+
+But his position was peculiarly solitary, nor did any other visitor
+appear, and Mr. Tibbins remained for some time motionless regarding the
+situation. There was no sign of relief. No visitor came to go in, so
+none came out. No friendly face shone at the windows, no helping hand
+opened the door. At any moment the dog might open his eyes, and, in that
+case, he would certainly not be content with a survey of the situation.
+Mr. Tibbins, who is no mean classic, remembered Xenophon and various
+other great and renowned commanders who retired in good order and not in
+the least demoralized, and reflecting that the sage truly defined
+prudence as the crown of wisdom, he gently turned and, careful by no
+rude noise to disturb the peaceful slumbers of an innocent animal which,
+some poets have suggested, might properly share our heaven, he tiptoed
+quietly around the house, and rapidly descending the plank-walk, firmly
+closed the gate behind him, and felt his heart swelling with gratitude
+for a great mercy.
+
+A few days afterwards he met his neighbor, and said to him that he had
+designed to call upon him on New-Year's Day, but that he had discovered
+a dog in the path, and as he never called where dogs were kept, he had
+been compelled to lose the pleasure of a visit. He then told the story
+of his attempt, in the midst of which the neighbor broke into the most
+prolonged and immoderate laughter, and when Mr. Tibbins had ended, said
+to him, "My dear sir, that dog is immemorially old and superannuated,
+and he is blind, deaf, and toothless."
+
+"Indeed!" replied Mr. Tibbins. "But he might not have been."
+
+"And yet I will confess," he said to the Easy Chair, later, "that the
+incident is a very pretty sermon upon the deceitfulness of appearances,
+which I respectfully offer to your acceptance."
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW ENGLAND SABBATH
+
+
+There are still villages among the hills of New England--we cannot call
+them remote hills, because the locomotive darts up every valley and
+fills the woods upon the highest hill-side with the shrill, eager cry of
+hurrying life and bustling human society, but even where the steam is
+heard, softened and far away, there are yet villages nestling in the
+hills in which also the old New England Sabbath lingers and nestles. The
+village street, broad and arched with thick-foliaged sugar-maples, is
+always still. In the warm silence of a summer noon, as you sit reading
+upon the piazza or in the shade of a tree, the only moving object in the
+street is a load of hay slowly passing under the maples, drawn by oxen,
+or a group of loiterers in front of the village store pitching quoits.
+The creak of the wagon, the ring of the quoits, or the laugh and
+exclamation of the players are the only sounds, except, indeed, the
+musical clangor of the blacksmith's anvil, as his quick hammer moulds
+the sparkling horseshoe or beats out the bar.
+
+These are drowsy summer sounds that only emphasize the stillness of the
+week-day. But the stillness of Sunday is startling. A faint tinkle of
+cows in the early morning filing to the pasture, the warning shout of
+the barefooted boy who drives them, are the only sounds that break the
+Sabbath silence, except, again, the chirp and song of birds in the
+trees, which are no respecters of days, and which sing as blithely, even
+in the deacon's maples, on "Sabbath morning" as in the tavern ash on the
+Fourth of July. The cows pass and all is still. The street is deserted,
+save by, at intervals, a solitary figure upon some small errand. The sun
+lies hot upon the pastures and hill-sides. There is no mail on Sunday,
+no newspaper, no barber to visit. Now and then men in their daily dress
+are seen at the barn door or in the shed or yard doing their chores.
+They are bringing wood, milking, feeding the cattle. But all is
+spectral. There is no sound. Even the wind in summer fears to be a
+Sabbath-breaker. It is an enchanted realm. Have the blue-laws such
+vitality? Are we still held by their grim spell?
+
+It is nine o'clock, and the meeting-house bell, with a bold voice of
+authority, as if it had the sole right to disturb the silence and to
+speak out, warns the village and the outlying farms that it is the
+Sabbath, and everybody must prepare to come to meeting; and the little
+children hear the bell with awe as if it were a living voice, and sacred
+as a part of the Sabbath, and to be heeded under unknown penalties. Obey
+thy father and mother; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt not steal; thou
+shalt go to meeting--seem to them all commandments of the first table.
+The sound of the bell lingers in their ears and hearts as a Thus saith
+the Lord. And, lo! at the second bell, the men, who have changed their
+daily dress and put on their Sabbath clothes, issue from the houses on
+the village street with their wives and children, and through the
+street, closely following each other and pounding along in a cloud of
+dust, comes the long line of wagons from the farms. The sun beats down
+remorselessly, and the man in heavy woollens, such as he wears in the
+sleigh in January, sits between two women in their Sabbath garments, the
+horses trot with a Sabbath jog, and all turn up to the stone platform by
+the meeting-house, upon which the women alight, and the man drives the
+horse under the shed, and then chats soberly with the others at the
+door.
+
+But the minister passes in, not clad in gown and bands and cocked hat of
+the older day, but in plain black clothes. The chatting loiterers follow
+him in. The bell which has gathered the village into the sacred fold
+rests from its labors. There is no one in the street. There is no sound.
+But after a few moments the music of "Old Hundred" pours out of the open
+doors and windows of the meeting-house, sung by a well-balanced and
+well-trained choir. It is the opening hymn, and it has a full,
+vigorous, triumphant sound. Once more Thus saith the Lord. There is
+another interval of silence, but at a little distance you can hear the
+voice of reading and prayer. Hark! another hymn. It is "Federal Street,"
+or "Coronation," or "Dundee," but whatever it is, it is a strain from
+other years, and voices and faces and scenes and days that are no more
+all blend in the familiar music, and a Sabbath benediction rests upon
+the listener's soul.
+
+A longer silence follows, broken by fragmentary sounds of energetic
+speech. Is the preacher emphasizing and elucidating the five points? Is
+he denouncing and alarming that tough regiment in woollen, or winning
+the wondering and doubting mind? Is his sermon upon an official and
+perfunctory discourse by which little children are soothed to sleep and
+in which the elders like unqualified damnation and the hottest fire as a
+toper likes "power" in his dram? Or is his pure and manly life and
+conversation his true preaching, and the Sabbath sermon only a statement
+of the principles of such holy living, and a revival of the colors in
+the immortal portrait of the holy life of the Gospel?
+
+Before we can answer there is a burst of music, then two strokes of the
+bell to announce that "meeting is out;" then an issue of the
+congregation, a procession homeward, a driving away of wagons, and soon
+once more the solitary street. In the afternoon there is the
+Sabbath-school, and the good pastor preaches at one of the school-houses
+in a farther part of the town. But it is always the Sabbath, in every
+sight and sound until the sun has set, and then from the neighboring
+house upon the hill above the village street comes a clear, resonant
+soprano voice singing hymns and prolonging the solemn spell of the holy
+day.
+
+The tithing-men are gone, and the deacons do not sit severe and
+conspicuous in the meeting-house, and the minister has not the air of a
+lord spiritual of the village; and the genius of modern times and the
+spirit of the age are entertained with full consciousness of what they
+are. But it is still the sober and constrained and decorous New England
+Sabbath which recurs every seventh day; and the honest, industrious,
+intelligent, self-respecting, plain-living village recalls remotely the
+day of the severer dispensation, and illustrates the noble manhood that
+the severe dispensation fostered.
+
+
+
+
+THE REUNION OF ANTISLAVERY VETERANS. 1884
+
+
+On a pleasant day and evening during the autumn a few venerable
+graybeards and bald-heads met in a church in the city, and sang and
+spoke, and told old tales of former meetings, and rejoiced that they had
+not died before their eyes had seen the glory. The meeting produced no
+ripple upon the surface of the city life. The newspapers printed brief
+reports of it among the other city news. But the return of the
+Philadelphia baseball players, and the "mill" between Sullivan and other
+bruisers, challenged very much more space and a very much more public
+attention.
+
+Yet fifty years before, when those gray beards were brown, and those
+bald heads were shaggy as Samson's, their meeting convulsed the city,
+and occasioned a riot which was the precursor of similar desperate
+disturbances, and the forerunner of one of the greatest of civil wars.
+The meeting was then denounced in advance in double-leaded editorials,
+which were the direct, and doubtless the intentional incitements to
+bloodshed and the subversion of popular rights; for the popular right
+which is the foundation of all other rights is that of free speech. The
+mere announcement of the meeting drew a vast and excited throng to
+prevent it. Men of standing in the community made themselves leaders of
+the mob, and occupied in advance the entrance to the hall where it was
+to take place. The proprietors of the hall, appalled by the evidences of
+furious hostility to the meeting and its purposes, refused to open it to
+those who had engaged it, and they went elsewhere.
+
+But the obstructing mob did not relax their purpose. They hastened to
+another hall where men of respected and even noted names harangued them
+violently, introducing resolutions decrying the purpose of the original
+meeting; and suddenly hearing that the projectors were assembled
+elsewhere, the crowd rushed wildly to the place, which was a small
+chapel, and, swarming in eager for crime, found the chapel deserted. The
+holders of the meeting had accomplished their object and retired from
+the rear of the building as the mob burst in through the front doors.
+The press of the city, with one or two notable exceptions, the next
+morning celebrated the intended suppression of a peaceful meeting by an
+angry mob as if it had been a national victory over piratical invaders.
+It denounced the leaders of the meeting with a malignant bitterness with
+which the familiars of the Inquisition might have anathematized Luther
+and his friends, and the few voices in the papers which protested
+against treating the holders of the meeting with violence, yet spoke of
+them in a strain of abhorrence which virtually branded them as public
+enemies.
+
+Who were these dangerous and desperate men whose mere proposal to meet
+and organize themselves for a purpose which was plainly declared, and
+which was to be sought by legal methods only, had so profoundly
+disturbed the city and startled the press into sounding a furious alarm?
+They were a few persons who asserted the principles of the Declaration
+of Independence, and demanded that all Americans should enjoy the rights
+which the Declaration affirmed to belong to all men. The object of the
+meeting was the formation of a city antislavery society, and those who
+assembled in October of this year were the survivors of that meeting.
+Their object has been accomplished, and the views whose announcement
+fifty years ago convulsed the city are now common-places of universal
+acceptance. It would be incredible that the sentiment of the city within
+easy memory of men living was so hostile to the American principle and
+its fundamental guarantees if a still later experience had not
+illustrated the same hostility.
+
+It seems almost cruel to recall the names of those who spoke of the
+purposes of men who proposed to appeal to public opinion against a
+monstrous public wrong, and of the men themselves, as "the folly,
+madness, and mischief of these bold and dangerous men," and as "persons
+who owe what notoriety they have to their love of meddling with
+agitating subjects." This was the way in which those who thought
+themselves to be in the van of freedom and of civilization spoke of the
+beginning of one of the great historic movements in the progress of the
+race, and of men who took up the work of the fathers of the country only
+to carry it further and logically forward. It was with this stupid and
+insolent contempt that the press, which prided itself upon its liberty,
+and in a country which guaranteed the right of free peaceful assembly
+and free speech, struck at both of them as fatal to the common welfare.
+Had Philip II. and the sanguinary Alva controlled a press in the
+Netherlands three centuries ago, they would have denounced the beginning
+of the great contest with the black despotism of the Inquisition in the
+same tone of vindictive hatred and disdain with which that little
+meeting at the Chatham Street chapel was assailed by the press of New
+York in 1833.
+
+It is no wonder that the pioneers of that famous evening wished to come
+together upon its fiftieth anniversary to rejoice that they had entered
+into the promised land. The fact that their meeting excited no general
+interest, and was almost unobserved, was the evidence of the
+completeness of their triumph. Their "folly, madness, and mischief" have
+become patriotic wisdom. The "bold and dangerous men" have grown into a
+mighty nation. And for the brethren of the press that anniversary has
+some very significant suggestions. First and chief is the consideration
+that the spirit of the newspapers, and not of the meeting in Chatham
+Street chapel, was the dangerous spirit. There is no blacker traitor to
+popular institutions than the man who incites an angry mob against
+peaceful meetings and free speech. Free speech is precious not for
+popular but for unpopular opinions. It is to secure in the land of the
+Inquisition a voice against the inquisition; in the land of slavery, a
+voice for liberty. That freedom has overthrown those two tyrants by
+developing a public opinion which has made them impossible. The first
+duty of a free press is to defend the right of the free assertion of
+unpopular opinions, however dangerous they may seem to government or to
+society; and it is but just to record that the only paper in New York
+which, "when this old coat was new," stated clearly and conclusively the
+true principle upon this subject was the _Journal of Commerce_.
+
+If, among the exulting crowd that welcomed King William of glorious and
+happy memory to England, a spectator had seen the flowing white locks of
+some old soldier of Cromwell's Ironsides, as the men of Hadley were
+fabled to have seen the venerable head of Goffe, the regicide, suddenly
+appearing as their deliverer, he would have felt his heart throbbing
+with gratitude at the vision of one of the heroes who founded the
+liberty which William came to complete. So some musing observer in the
+church where the reverend graybeards met to renew their friendship and
+to tell their story might well have gazed with gratitude, amid the peace
+and prosperity of the country, upon the thinned and thinning remnant of
+that old guard whose constancy and devotion made that peace and
+prosperity possible.
+
+
+
+
+REFORM CHARITY
+
+
+The State Board of Charities in New York would deal severely with Elia
+if it found him upon the street, stammering out his admiration of the
+fine histrionic powers of a beggar, and searching in his pocket for a
+penny. Lamb said that it was shameful to pay a crown for a seat in the
+theatre to enjoy the representation of woes that you knew to be
+fictitious, and to grudge a sixpence to the street performer who was so
+excellent that you could not tell whether his sufferings were real or
+affected. He is undoubtedly responsible for a great deal of easy and
+irresponsible alms-giving, which greatly increases human suffering and
+the expense of society. It is not possible to conceive anything more
+comical than Lamb's probable reception of a politico-economical or
+scientific view of charity. He would have felt his genius for humor to
+be hopelessly surpassed. His view would have been the ludicrous aspect
+of the idea which is more solemnly held by those who regard ordinary
+alms-giving as one of the cardinal virtues, and who have a vague
+conviction that a liberal disbursement of money to the poor in this
+world is a strong lien upon endless felicity in the next. There is,
+indeed, something very affecting in the old picture of conventional
+charity--the groups of disabled and destitute assembling at the great
+gate or in the courtyard, and the benign priests distributing food and
+clothing. And there is a similar picturesque interest in the ancient
+English bounties--a trust which secures to every wayfarer who may demand
+it a loaf of bread or a mug of beer.
+
+That charity meant this, and nothing more, was long the conviction, as
+it was the tradition, of society. It was thought to have the highest
+Christian sanction. There were to be always poor among us. The poor were
+to be relieved, and relief, or charity, consists in feeding the hungry
+and clothing the naked. Yet out of that simple, unreflecting, seemingly
+innocent faith, have sprung enormous suffering, demoralization, and
+crime. The whole subject of charitable relief was as misunderstood as
+that of penal imprisonment before John Howard. There will be criminals,
+was the theory, and they must be punished. They must therefore be
+secured in jails, and the object of imprisonment is intimidation from
+crime, not the improvement of criminals. The result of this view was
+that society dismissed the subject, and regarded prisoners as mere
+outcasts, so that the inhumanity of their treatment was revolting.
+Happily the neglect revenged itself. The jails became sores. They were
+nurseries of loathsome disease. Judges and sheriffs were smitten by the
+pestilence that exhaled from prisons, and John Howard, like a purifying
+angel, in cleansing the prisons began also to cleanse society.
+
+So alms-giving and the relief of the poor arrested the attention of
+humane persons who were not content with Elia's philosophy. They had
+sometimes watched the skilful street performer, and had seen him slip
+round the corner and spend at the gin-palace in a dram the money which,
+with some fine histrionic genius, he had besought for the sick wife and
+the starving children. They found the wife was also an accomplished
+histrione, and that the children were receiving parental instruction in
+the same calling. They found that the amiable, careless, unquestioning
+alms-giving was breeding a class of paupers, people who did not seek
+work nor wish to work, but who lived, and who meant to live, by beggary,
+who bred their children to do likewise, and whose haunts and
+associations and habits became great nurseries of crime. The evil had
+become enormous, and was most deeply seated before it was accurately
+observed. But wise men and wise women everywhere are now, and for some
+years have been, earnestly engaged in studying how to save society from
+the curse of pauperism, while taking care that all helpless and innocent
+suffering shall be relieved. This is what Elia and his amiable,
+thoughtless friends denounce as "machine charity." But their amiability
+is only selfishness. How many of those who decry "machine charity" ever
+went home with a single street beggar to whom they gave, or ever
+ascertained or cared whether his story was true, or told for any other
+purpose than to get the price of a dram? What they call their Christian
+charity and common humanity and apostolic alms-giving is often mere
+fostering of lying, drunkenness, and crime, and the indefinite increase
+of suffering.
+
+It is upon this spirit that knaves and charlatans play and prey in
+establishing great charitable agencies, of which they are managers, and,
+in the vivid French phrase, touch the funds. There are thousands of
+kind-hearted people in every city who devote a share of their income to
+charity. They know that there is immense suffering, and they would
+gladly do their share in relieving it. But they do not know how to do
+it. They are conscious that there is deception upon all sides, and they
+cannot spare the time to ascertain for themselves who, of the host of
+the poor, are proper objects of charity. But it is only less difficult
+to decide upon a trusty agency. Here is the chance of the ingenious and
+plausible rascal. If he can only obtain the co-operation of those whose
+names make societies respectable, and who will permit him to be the
+society, and especially to disburse the moneys, he will be as satisfied
+as Ferdinand Count Fathom with any of his "little games." It is not
+always difficult for such a rascal to secure the conditions of his
+success. The consequences are both lamentable and ludicrous. For under
+this solemn form of a Christian charitable foundation the most selfish
+purposes are served, and when the mischief is exposed it is denounced as
+one of the abuses to which delegated or "machine" charity is inevitably
+liable. To perfect the comedy, this criticism is usually made by those
+whose own alms are generally transferred from their pockets directly to
+the till of the dram-shop.
+
+It is evident from the letters that have been written to the newspapers
+during the winter that there are those who sincerely think that careful
+inquiry regarding poverty, and regulations of relief based upon it, must
+somehow deaden human sympathy and deepen the suffering of the poor. This
+is so ingeniously incorrect a theory that it would be exceedingly
+amusing if it were not so sincere and even general. The very first thing
+that careful investigation accomplishes is to acquaint the comfortable
+class with the real condition of the suffering, and to show the latter
+that they are not forsaken or turned off with uninquiring alms. They are
+conscious of an intelligent sympathy with which falsehood will be of no
+avail. They are taught self-respect by the perception that they are not
+forsaken, and self-respect is the main-spring of successful exertion.
+When the street-beggar understands that his tale will be tested, that if
+he needs succor he will receive it, and that if his plea is but asking
+for a dram he will not receive it, the number of street-beggars will
+sensibly decrease. And the sturdy tramp and professional pauper, when
+they know that they must go to the work-house or starve, will often
+conclude that even work is better than the poor-house, and they too
+will cease to be a nuisance and a terror.
+
+Nor need it be feared, on the other hand, that if irresponsible
+street-giving is stopped nobody will investigate the actual situation of
+the poor. What is asked of the street-giver is not that he will close
+his pocket and his hand and his heart and his soul; but that, if he will
+not take the trouble to inquire before giving, he will give his alms to
+somebody who will take that trouble, that his alms may be true charity
+and relieve suffering, instead of relieving nothing whatever, but
+fostering vice and crime. He must see that he is not a good Christian
+exercising the heavenly gift of charity, but an indolent and reckless
+citizen who is promoting poverty and multiplying the public burden of
+the honest poor. He is that lazy absurd boy who wishes to eat his cake
+and have it. He would satisfy his soul that he is good because he gives,
+without seeing that to give ignorantly is, socially, to be bad. Nobody
+is exhorted to surrender inquiry to others. Every one may inquire for
+himself. If a beggar stops you and asks for a penny in the name of God,
+and says that his family is starving, go and see if it is so. If you
+have not the time--O sophistical Sybarite! inclination--send him to
+those who, as you know, will inquire. Will his family starve in the
+meantime? That is something you do not believe yourself. Do you fear
+that the visitor will not go? Then go yourself. Do your engagements
+prevent? Then you know that it is a thousand to one the story is but a
+plea for whiskey. Will you take the chance? Then you become an immediate
+accomplice in the vast multiplication of hereditary pauperism and crime.
+The pretence of your giving is Christian charity and humanity; the real
+cause is indolent self-indulgence and saving yourself trouble.
+
+The charity that is beautiful in the old stories is actual charity. It
+is the friendly feeding of those who are really hungry, and the clothing
+of those who shiver with the cold. The Elia's charity is only a refined
+selfishness, a whim of humor. He rewarded the deceit, he did not
+relieve the suffering. Of course, his plea was an exquisite jest, and
+so he felt it to be. But his jest is made earnest and changed into a
+sober rule of life by gentle Sybarites, who, if they have ever heard of
+the Englishman Edward Denison, are lost in amazement and cigarette smoke
+as they meditate his career. The story may be found in a tender and
+graphic sketch in the entertaining volume of papers by the author of the
+admirable _History of the English People_, J. R. Green. Edward Denison,
+born in 1840, was the son of the Bishop of Salisbury, and nephew of the
+Speaker, and was educated at Oxford. Then he travelled on the Continent,
+and studied the condition of the Swiss peasantry. Returning to England,
+he engaged practically in the work of poor relief as an almoner of a
+charitable society. He soon learned the uselessness of relief by doles,
+and, determined to deal with the subject thoroughly, he withdrew from
+the clubs, Pall Mall, and Mayfair, and taking lodgings in Stepney, made
+himself the friend of the poor, built and endowed a school, in which he
+taught, gave lectures, and organized a self-helping relief. He went to
+France and to Scotland to study their poor-law systems. In 1868 he was
+elected to Parliament, where his knowledge of the general subject would
+have been invaluable. But his health failed before he took his seat. He
+sailed for Melbourne, still intent upon his life's purpose, and died
+there seven years ago, in his thirtieth year. A little volume of his
+letters has been published, and Mr. Green's affectionate and pathetic
+sketch draws the outline of this true modern knight and gentleman, the
+Sir Launfal of this time. The street-giver, seeking a rule of conduct,
+may more profitably heed the counsel of Edward Denison than the
+delicious humor of Charles Lamb.
+
+
+
+
+BICYCLE RIDING FOR CHILDREN
+
+
+There has been some joking over Mr. Gerry's proposal to bring Mr. Barnum
+to legal judgment for violating the statute in exhibiting the young
+riders upon the bicycle. Mr. Barnum invited a distinguished company,
+including eminent physicians, to witness the performance; the physicians
+added that it was no more than healthful exercise. Thereupon the cynics,
+who have never given a thought or lifted a hand to relieve suffering or
+to remedy wrong, sneer at superserviceable philanthropy. Mr. Bergh also
+complained of the killing of the elephant Pilate, and when the matter
+was explained there was contemptuous chuckling at the sentimental
+tomfoolery of philanthropic busybodies, and the usual exhortation to
+reformers to supply themselves with common-sense.
+
+But meantime the mere knowledge that there is an association for the
+protection of children from cruelty, and another for the defence of
+animals against human brutes, is in itself a protection for both classes
+of victims. No parent or employer can wreak his vengeance or ill-temper
+upon a child, no driver or owner can torment an animal, without the
+consciousness that some agent may learn of it, or perhaps see it, and
+bring the offender to justice. Both of these movements, which at first
+seemed to so many intelligent persons to be strange and impracticable
+fancies, are among the greatest proofs of the deeper and wiser humanity
+of the age. These are illustrations of the same spirit which organizes
+charity and ameliorates penal systems. Mr. Bergh and Mr. Gerry are in
+the right line of moral descent from John Howard and Sir Samuel Romilly
+and Mrs. Fry and Miss Carpenter, and when Mr. McMaster brings his
+history of the American people down to the last decade he will record
+the purpose and work of the two modest societies as among the striking
+illustrations of the actual progress of that people.
+
+It is in Lecky's detailed account of the horrible carelessness and
+suffering, and of the inhuman desertion of prisoners and the poor of the
+last century in England that we get the true key to the actual condition
+of the country. Mr. McMaster has thrown a similar light upon the same
+inhumanity in this country a hundred years ago. Yet every endeavor to
+correct that inhumanity, to remember the man in the criminal, and wisely
+to succor a brother in the beggar, has been greeted as an effort to make
+a silk purse of a sow's ear, to make water run uphill, as the rose-water
+philanthropy and the coddling of scoundrels, by the same spirit which
+sneers at the work of Mr. Gerry and Mr. Bergh. Left to that spirit
+England would be to-day where it was a hundred and fifty years ago, and
+the signal triumphs of the century would have been unwon. Such a spirit
+is mingled of ignorance, cowardice, and stupid selfishness. It is always
+the obstruction of advancing humanity, always the contempt of generous
+and courageous minds.
+
+It is true, undoubtedly, that every forward step is not wisely taken,
+and that there are the most absurd parodies of philanthropy, as well as
+a great deal of pseudo philanthropy, which is merely the mask of
+knavery. We have taken great pleasure in these very columns in stripping
+off sundry masks of such philanthropy which is pursued by impostors of
+both sexes in this city. Common-sense, careful scrutiny, and
+intelligence, are indispensable in every form of charity and
+beneficence. But because of the conduct of Shepherd Cowley shall nothing
+be done for the relief of wretched children? Because of the elaborate
+system of fraudulent charity of the reverend knave who has been exposed
+here and elsewhere shall the poor be left without succor?
+
+Everything said and done by the friends of the societies for protecting
+children and animals may not be wise; but there could be nothing more
+exquisitely ridiculous than to deride the societies and their labors for
+that reason. Those who lead the van of reforms are so much in earnest
+that they must sometimes offend, sometimes mistake, or nothing would
+ever be done. Emerson says that if Providence is resolved to achieve a
+result it over-loads the tendency. This produces enthusiasm and
+fanaticism, and also the indomitable devotion and energy which cannot be
+defeated. It is when the new way to the Indies becomes his one idea that
+Columbus discovers America. It is when Luther defies all the opposing
+devils, although they are as many as the tiles upon the roofs, that he
+establishes Protestantism.
+
+The doctors and the distinguished company decide upon Mr. Gerry's
+complaint that the bicycle-riding of the children at Barnum's is
+healthful and not injurious; and to Mr. Bergh's remonstrance about
+killing the elephant Pilot, Mr. Barnum replies that he is not likely to
+inflict a serious loss upon himself by killing one of his animals unless
+it were clearly necessary. All this may be conceded. But it is very
+fortunate for the community that there are sentinels of humanity who
+will summarily challenge and compel a clear and complete explanation. It
+appears that the riding of the children is not harmful, and the court
+dismisses Mr. Gerry's complaint. The result is not that Mr. Gerry is
+"left in a questionable position," but that every circus manager and
+every exhibitor of children knows that a vigilant eye watches his
+conduct, and that a prompt hand will deal even with seeming cruelty and
+severity and exposure. It is very possible that Pilot was despatched as
+humanely as practicable. But Mr. Bergh's challenge was not an
+impertinent intermeddling. It reminds every brute in the city that he
+cannot lose his temper and kick his horse with impunity. Both acts
+establish a moral consciousness of constant surveillance, which stays
+the angry hand and succors the limping animal and the friendless child.
+It is those who relieve pain and suffering, not those who laugh at their
+zeal, whom history remembers and mankind blesses.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEAD BIRD UPON CYRILLA'S HAT AN ENCOURAGEMENT OF "SLARTER"
+
+
+The story of the butcher who looked out in the soft summer moonlight and
+announced that something ought to be done on so fine a night, and he
+guessed he would go out and "slarter," was told to Melissa, who
+ejaculated pretty ohs and ahs, and said, "But how vulgar." Yet had some
+dreadful Nathan heard the words, and beheld Melissa as she spoke, he
+would have raised his voice and pointed his finger and said, "Thou art
+the woman!" For the delicate Melissa was the wearer of dead birds in her
+hat, and encouraged the "slarter" of the loveliest and sweetest of
+innocent song-birds merely to gratify her vanity. The butcher, madam,
+may be vulgar, but at least he does not kill in order to wear the horns
+and tails of his victims.
+
+"How hideous!" exclaims Belinda, as she sees the pictured head of the
+savage islander, "rings in his nose! how hideous!" And the gentle
+Belinda shakes the rings in her ears in protest against such barbarism.
+Sylvia, too, laughs gayly at the wife of the Chinese ambassador stumping
+along upon invisible feet; and Sylvia would laugh more freely except for
+her invisible waist. "It is so preposterous to squeeze your feet," she
+remarks; "it is a deformity, it outrages nature;" and the superb and
+benignant Venus of Milo smiles from her pedestal in the corner, and with
+her eyes fixed upon Sylvia's waist, echoes Sylvia's words, "It is a
+deformity, it outrages nature."
+
+The Puritan preacher who, somewhat perverting his text, cried, "Topknot,
+come down!" declared war upon the innocent ribbons that, carefully
+trained and twisted and exalted into a towering ornament, doubtless
+nodded from the head of Priscilla to the heart of John Alden and melted
+it completely, while the preacher could not even catch his wandering
+eyes. The preacher's course was clear. Topknots must come down if they
+allured to a sweeter worship than he inculcated. But those ribbons were
+made for that pretty purpose of adornment; they were not victims. They
+silenced no song; they hardened no heart; they rewarded no wanton
+cruelty; they destroyed no charm of the field or wood. They were not
+memorials of heartless slaughter. They were simply devices by which
+maidenly charms were heightened, and a little grace and taste and beauty
+lent to the sombre Puritan world.
+
+But the topknots of to-day are bought at a monstrous price. Carlyle says
+of certain enormous fire-flies on an island of the East Indies that,
+placed upon poles, they illuminate the journeys of distinguished people
+by night. "Great honor to the fire-flies!" he exclaims; "but--" It is a
+great honor to the golden-winged woodpecker to be shot and then daintily
+poised upon the hat of Cyrilla as, enveloped in a cloud of dudes, she
+promenades the Avenue on Sunday afternoon; great honor to the
+woodpecker; but--The naughty dog in the country who hunts and kills
+chickens is made to wear a dead chicken hung around his neck, and is at
+last shamed out of his murderous fancy. How if Cyrilla, strolling in the
+summer fields, haply with young Laurence hanging enthralled upon her
+sweet eyes, her low replies, should chance to meet the cur disgraced
+with the dead chicken hung around his neck, she with the dead woodpecker
+upon her head!
+
+The lovely lady puts a premium upon wanton slaughter and unspeakable
+cruelty. She incites the murderous small boy and all the idlers and
+vagrants to share and shoot the singing bird, and silence the heavenly
+music of the summer air. She cries for "slarter," and, like the white
+cat enchanted into the Princess, who leaps to the floor in hot chase
+when the mouse appears, the Queen of Beauty, with a feathered corpse for
+a crown, begins to seem even to Laurence unhappily enchanted.
+
+
+
+
+CHEAPENING HIS NAME
+
+
+A distinguished public man once said to the Easy Chair that after an
+election in which he had taken part, and in which his party had
+succeeded, he always signed the recommendations of anybody who asked him
+for any office he wished. And when the Easy Chair remarked that he must
+have sadly cheapened his name with the appointing power, the excellent
+statesman answered, "Not at all; because I wrote by mail that no
+attention was to be paid to my request." Perhaps he thought that this
+was not cheapening his name. But what must the appointing power have
+secretly thought of a man who respected his own name so little? And an
+eminent public officer of long service told the Easy Chair that a
+recommendation was once delivered to him by an office-seeker from a
+President of the United States; and when the officer, delaying the
+applicant, asked the President if he really wished the person appointed,
+the President replied, "Not in the least; but I gave the letter to him
+to get rid of him."
+
+Any Easy Chair must be often reminded of such incidents when it reads in
+the papers the cards and notices and invitations and petitions to which
+conspicuous names are attached. It discovers, for instance, that the
+most eminent ministers, merchants, lawyers, and capitalists are very
+anxious to hear Dr. Dunderhead upon the history of chaos. They
+compliment the learned doctor's erudition and eloquence, and beg him to
+name the evening when he will speak to them. The doctor replies in
+blushing rhetoric, and will yield to their desires on Thursday evening,
+the 32d. On that evening the Easy Chair, which has perused the
+correspondence with eager expectation, and which has a profound interest
+in chaos, repairs to the hall, finds a dozen surprised stragglers like
+itself, but not one of the conspicuous clergymen, lawyers, merchants,
+or capitalists, and goes home in bewilderment to read in the morning's
+paper an elaborate report of Dr. Dunderhead's lecture, delivered at the
+request of the following distinguished gentlemen--who are duly named;
+and it slowly dawns upon the Easy Chair that it has been assisting at an
+advertisement, that the invitation to Dr. Dunderhead was also written by
+Dr. Dunderhead, that the gentlemen signed because they were asked to do
+so, and that the whole proceeding is intended to impress the rural
+districts, and to procure the learned and erudite Dunderhead invitations
+to lecture in other places.
+
+Have these gentlemen no respect for their names? They would not indorse
+the note of a stranger for a thousand dollars because somebody asked
+them to do it for good-nature. But it is just as dishonorable to indorse
+a man's learning and eloquence when you know nothing of it as to indorse
+a man's promise to pay of whose solvency you are equally ignorant.
+Indeed, in the one case you could supply the money if the maker of the
+note failed. But, dear sirs, can you supply the eloquence and erudition
+which you indorsed in Dr. Dunderhead, for which many Easy Chairs paid
+many dollars, and which Dunderhead failed to display? You cannot,
+indeed, be sued at the City Hall, but you are prosecuted at another,
+even loftier tribunal, and you are mulcted in damages. Your own good
+name pays the penalty, and is thereafter less respected. If a man does
+not respect his own name, who will? But if he publicly announces that
+his name is of no weight, how can he complain if it becomes a jest?
+
+There are every day great public meetings at which a long list of
+familiar names appears as vice-presidents. Very often the gentlemen are
+notified that their names are to be used, and that if they are unwilling
+they may inform the managers. But very often, also, they know nothing of
+the complicity until they read their names in the report of the meeting.
+Upon this discovery most men shrug their shoulders, and wish impatiently
+that people wouldn't do so. But they have a feeling that the occasion is
+passed; that they will be derided as courting notoriety if they write
+to the papers stating that their names were used without authority; so
+they grumble and acquiesce. But they nevertheless connive at the abuse
+of their names. They embolden to further abuse, and they weaken both the
+power and the effect of disavowal. They condoned the abuse when they
+were made vice-presidents of the immense and enthusiastic meeting in
+favor of the annexation of Terra del Fuego; and why, sneers Mrs. Grundy
+and Mrs. Candour--why should they be too nice to assist at the grand
+demonstration of fraternity for the Philippine Islands? If the
+correspondents of Dr. Dunderhead would show that they respected their
+own names, they would soon find that other people would not trifle with
+them.
+
+But neither must they cheapen them by constant use. There are well-known
+names that appear upon every occasion. They ask all the Dunderheads to
+lecture; they petition for and against all public objects; they
+recommend everything from a Correggio to a corn-plaster; they offer
+benefits to actors; they are honorary directors of institutions of which
+they are painfully ignorant; their names appear so universally and
+indiscriminately that they have no more effect upon public attention or
+confidence than the machines with which the Chinese bonzes grind out
+prayers can be supposed to have upon the Divine intelligence. The
+consequence is that all sensible men come to regard these signatures as
+those of men of straw. And why not, since they give straw bail for the
+appearance of that which does not appear, or for the excellence of that
+of which, if it be excellence, they know nothing?
+
+And so, says the old story, after crying wolf so long that the shepherds
+no longer heeded him, one day the boy cried wolf lustily, for the wild
+beast had really come. But the louder he cried, the louder they sneered:
+"No, no; we've learned your tricks at last, you wicked boy, and you may
+shout until you are hoarse!" And while they laughed the wolf devoured
+the boy. Remember, then, dear Dunderhead correspondents, that, when
+Plato himself comes, and some foolish touter obtains your names, or
+even yourselves this time know that the truly seraphic doctor has
+arrived, whose golden wisdom would make the whole world richer, it will
+be in vain. You have invited discredit for your names; and we, who have
+been deluded, when we see that you earnestly invite us all to hear
+Plato, shall only smile incredulously--"Plato indeed! 'tis only
+Dunderhead Number Twenty."
+
+
+
+
+CLERGYMEN'S SALARIES
+
+
+Whether we bear or forbear, it is difficult to appease Mrs. Candour. Her
+responsibility is incessant, and the world always needs her correction.
+A certain religious society recently decided to give their minister a
+certain salary, which was apparently larger in the opinion of Mrs.
+Candour than any minister should receive, and she expressed herself to
+the effect that no society ought to offer and no clergyman ought to
+accept so large a sum. Mrs. Candour's impertinence is certainly as
+striking as her sense of responsibility. What business can it possibly
+be of hers whether a clergyman, or a lawyer, or a carpenter, or a
+physician, or a railroad superintendent, or a shoemaker, or a bank
+president, is paid more or less for his services? It is a purely private
+arrangement between private persons, and if Mrs. Candour had a quick
+sense of humor, which we sincerely hope, but are constrained to doubt,
+and were the editor of a paper, how she would smile if the Easy Chair
+should gravely remark: "We learn with great pain that the proprietors of
+the weekly _Green Dragon_ have decided to pay the editor, Mrs. Candour,
+twenty thousand dollars a year. This is a sum much too large for the
+proprietors of any journal to offer, and very much more than an editor
+ought to receive." Does the laborer cease to be worthy of his hire when
+he enters the editorial room or the pulpit?
+
+The facts of the case make this remark of Mrs. Candour's the more
+comical. The receipts of the society in question are very large indeed.
+They enable it to do good works of many kinds, and upon the largest
+scale--the Bethel, for instance, one of the wise charities of good men,
+which gathers in the poor, young and old, and thoughtfully and tenderly
+gives them glimpses of a bright and cheerful life. The large resources,
+overflowing in benefactions, are perhaps chiefly due to the minister,
+whose fame and eloquence constantly draw multitudes to the church. The
+salary which he receives, therefore, is really but a part of the money
+which he makes. And to put the argument as before, if Mrs. Candour,
+editing the paper, "ran it up" and increased the profits, for instance,
+by fifty thousand dollars, could she feel unwilling to receive ten
+thousand dollars in addition to her present salary?
+
+Or is she of those who think that clergymen ought not to be well paid?
+Then she belongs to the class whose opinion is faithfully followed. The
+clergy are the worst-paid body of laborers in the country. They work
+with ability and zeal. They are educated, sensitive men, often carefully
+nurtured, and they are expected to be everybody's servant, to hold their
+time and talents at the call of all the whimsical old women of the
+parish and of the selectmen of the town. They are to preach twice or
+thrice on Sunday, to lecture and expound during the week, to make
+parochial calls in sun or storm, to visit the poor, to be the confidant
+and counsellor of a throng, and always in every sermon to be fresh and
+bright, and always ready to do any public service that may be asked. Of
+course the clergyman must be chairman of the school committee, and a
+director of the town library, and president of charitable societies. He
+cannot give a great deal of money for educational and charitable and
+æsthetic purposes--not a very great deal--but he can always give time,
+and he can always make a speech, and draw the resolutions, and direct
+generally.
+
+He is, in fact, the town pound, to which everybody may commit the truant
+fancies that nobody else will tolerate upon the pastures and lawns of
+his attention. He is the town pump, at which everybody may fill himself
+with advice. He is the town bell, to summon everybody to every common
+enterprise. He is the town beast of burden, to carry everybody's pack.
+With all this he must have a neat and pretty house, and a comely and
+attractive wife, who must be always ready and well-dressed in the
+parlor, although she cannot afford to hire sufficient "help." And the
+good man's children must be well-behaved and properly clad, and his
+house be a kind of hotel for the travelling brethren. Of course he must
+be a scholar, and familiar with current literature, and he may justly be
+expected to fit half a dozen boys for college every year. These are but
+illustrations of the functions he is to fulfil, and always without
+murmuring; and for all he is to be glad to get a pittance upon which he
+can barely bring the ends of the year together, and to know that if he
+should suddenly die of overwork, as he probably will, his wife and
+children will be beggars.
+
+And when a man who does his duties of this kind so well that a great
+deal of money gladly given is the result, and it is proposed that he
+shall be paid as every chief of every profession is paid, Mrs. Candour
+exclaims in effect that the alabaster box had better be sold and given
+to the poor. If the good lady is of this opinion, let her advocate the
+method of the Church of Rome. If she thinks that a minister is a priest
+of the old dispensation, a part of a complete ecclesiastical system, let
+his support be made part of the system. But if she prefers that a
+minister shall be a man and a citizen, like the rest of us, discharging
+all the duties of a parent and an equal member of society, and leading
+the worship of those who invite him to that office--then let him have
+the same chances and fair play with other men. Now one of the proper
+aims of other men is a provision for their families; the possibility of
+saving something for the day of inaction, of ill-health, of desertion.
+If the reward of labor which is offered a clergyman is more generous
+than Mrs. Candour thinks to be becoming for him--if she insists that,
+like certain friars of the Roman Church, he shall take the vow of
+poverty, let her, at least, be as just to her own communion as those of
+that Church are to theirs. Let her also insist that he shall not marry,
+that he shall not be left to the mercy of a congregation that may tire
+of him, and that he shall be supported when he is not in service, or is
+unable to serve longer.
+
+Does it occur to Mrs. Candour why the cleverest men hesitate long before
+they become clergymen? "Yes," said the great leader of a sect in this
+country, a few years ago, in a convention of his fellow-believers--"yes,
+you wonder why the standard of the profession seems to decline. I will
+tell you why. If any brother has a son whom he does not know what to do
+with, he makes a--minister of him." And if the good lady with whom the
+Easy Chair is expostulating fears that if there are great prizes in the
+pulpit the religious character of the teacher will decline, and that the
+profession will become attractive to merely clever men, she states a
+good reason for changing the voluntary system, but a very poor one for
+starving ministers. Nor must she forget to ask herself, on the other
+hand, whether religion itself gains by identifying its preaching with
+feeble and timid men. There will, indeed, always be the great, devoted
+souls who, under any circumstances, in riches, in poverty, in health or
+sickness, in life or death, will give themselves to the work of the
+evangelist. But Mrs. Candour is not speaking of them; she speaks of an
+established profession like that of editing, in which she is, let us
+hope, prosperously engaged. If she is morally bound to give her labor
+for nothing, or to stint her family, when there is plenty of money made
+by her honest work, she may speak with the fervor of conviction, indeed,
+if not of persuasion, upon the impropriety of paying a minister well.
+
+If Mrs. Candour ever looks into English history she will remember the
+condition of the country curate and the squire's chaplain a century and
+a half ago. She will recall the contemptuous manner in which he was
+treated. Macaulay tells of him. Fielding describes him. The plays have
+him. He is everywhere in the literature of the time, and everywhere a
+pitiful figure. Whether the portrait of the chaplain be accurate or not,
+it certainly faithfully shows the feeling with which he was regarded.
+And if the feeling were justified by the character of the men, what was
+the reason that the men were what they were? Because the general opinion
+was then what Mrs. Candour's is now--that a clergyman should not be well
+paid. The chaplain was a pauper, and he was treated accordingly. The
+result was certain. Human nature always revenges itself. If you
+arbitrarily set apart certain men as _ex-officio_ a peculiarly holy
+class, and deny them the advantages and chances of other men, they will
+become servile and mean, and lose the noble spirit of a true man. Mrs.
+Candour may point to the fat English bishoprics--to such a shameful
+correspondence as that which Massey records between William Pitt and Dr.
+Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield--and ask if prizes of such a kind are a
+good thing, and if anything could more corrupt good men than such
+chances. Yes, one thing could; and that is sure penury and starvation.
+But there is no need of fat pulpit appointments. Wherever they exist
+they will be the objects of intrigue and chicanery. What has that to do
+with a society giving their minister part of the money that he makes for
+them?
+
+If Mrs. Candour insists that the money should not be made, and that the
+preaching should be free, the argument is still against her, because
+infinitely more good can be done by the charitable organizations which
+the money supports than by mere free preaching. Besides, the money to
+which she objects founds free churches and sustains free preaching. If
+she will fall back upon the other system, and have the churches built
+and the pulpits supported by established funds, then, at least, she will
+be consistent. But does she think it desirable for the welfare of
+society that there should be huge ecclesiastical funds? Would she
+restore the dead hand? Upon the whole, is it better that the priesthood,
+or the Church as such, should hold great properties, and dispose of
+unlimited money? The voluntary system has, at least, this advantage,
+that the money is not ecclesiastically held, and while it is the system
+of her choice, Mrs. Candour has no right to complain of those who are
+willing to pay to hear a great preacher, and thereby enable countless
+others to hear preaching, and to be taught and succored for nothing.
+
+Her position, indeed, is that of those who sometimes invite a speaker to
+lecture for the benefit of a charity, who agree to pay the lecturer what
+he asks, and then ask him to take half as much, giving the rest to the
+charity. They either think that the lecture is not worth the price
+agreed upon, or that it is the lecturer's duty to bestow a sum equal to
+half his fee. The reply to such gentlemen is short: It was a fair
+bargain; you have profited by it; and what the lecturer does with his
+part is none of your business. And there really is no other reply to
+Mrs. Candour: Madam, the minister and his friends have made a fine sum
+of money; and what they will do with it is none of your business, unless
+they fall to corrupting the public.
+
+But, indeed, there was no need, madam, to argue for the reduction of the
+salaries of clergymen. We hear in no direction of any tendency to
+excess; but we do hear everywhere of those abominations,
+"donation-parties!" Do we make donation-parties to other people whom we
+pay honestly for honest service? Are bakers and lawyers and tailors and
+doctors surprised by donation-parties? They are public confessions of
+our meanness. If we paid the minister adequately, why should we abuse
+the language by "donating" the necessaries of life to the parsonage?
+Some kind soul knows that we starve our shepherd, that he is pinched and
+cramped in his household, that his wife is thinly clad and his children
+shabby, and that the man of whom we demand that he should be a model of
+all the cardinal virtues is torn with anxious doubts for his family; and
+that generous soul proposes that we should club our sugar and butter and
+help him out. If we do not do it next year, what is to become of him? If
+we do, why not make it a certainty; why not, dear Mrs. Candour, raise
+his salary? And if you, madam, would only issue a tariff or sliding
+scale, so that we might know how much a religious teacher under
+different circumstances might properly receive--in fine, whether all
+boxes, or only the alabaster box, must be sold and given to the poor--it
+would be the most valuable service you are ever likely to perform to
+society.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+BY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.
+
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