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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mosses from an Old Manse, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Mosses from an Old Manse
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: April, 1996 [eBook #512]
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Charles Keller
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Mosses from an Old Manse
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+ The Old Manse
+ The Birthmark
+ A Select Party
+ Young Goodman Brown
+ Rappaccini’s Daughter
+ Mrs. Bullfrog
+ Fire Worship
+ Buds and Bird Voices
+ Monsieur du Miroir
+ The Hall of Fantasy
+ The Celestial Railroad
+ The Procession of Life
+ Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
+ The New Adam and Eve
+ Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent
+ The Christmas Banquet
+ Drowne’s Wooden Image
+ The Intelligence Office
+ Roger Malvin’s Burial
+ P.’s Correspondence
+ Earth’s Holocaust
+ Passages from a Relinquished Work
+ Sketches from Memory
+ The Old Apple Dealer
+ The Artist of the Beautiful
+ A Virtuoso’s Collection
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD MANSE
+
+The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.
+
+
+Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself having
+fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front
+of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash
+trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the
+venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway
+towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the
+door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown
+with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and
+an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the
+roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door
+of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium,
+seen through which the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to
+the material world. Certainly it had little in common with those
+ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the road that every
+passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle.
+From these quiet windows the figures of passing travellers looked too
+remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its near retirement
+and accessible seclusion, it was the very spot for the residence of a
+clergyman,—a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped, in the
+midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It
+was worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England,
+in which, through many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass
+from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to
+pervade the house and hover over it as with an atmosphere.
+
+Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
+until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A
+priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
+from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
+had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect
+how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant
+alone—he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was left
+vacant—had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the better,
+if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips. How often,
+no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue, attuning his
+meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and solemn peals
+of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees! In that variety of
+natural utterances he could find something accordant with every passage
+of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs
+over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as well as with
+rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been so long a
+writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend
+upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light
+upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hoards
+of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses.
+Profound treatises of morality; a layman’s unprofessional, and
+therefore unprejudiced, views of religion; histories (such as Bancroft
+might have written had he taken up his abode here, as he once purposed)
+bright with picture, gleaming over a depth of philosophic
+thought,—these were the works that might fitly have flowed from such a
+retirement. In the humblest event, I resolved at least to achieve a
+novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and should possess physical
+substance enough to stand alone.
+
+In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
+fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful
+little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a
+scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an
+inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and
+Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill. When I
+first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of
+unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan
+ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad
+angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so
+sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been
+imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; a cheerful
+coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
+apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the
+overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of
+the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael’s
+Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The
+only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and
+a bronze one containing graceful ferns. My books (few, and by no means
+choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as chance had thrown in my
+way) stood in order about the room, seldom to be disturbed.
+
+The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
+glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked,
+or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the orchard,
+with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing
+northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot where its
+hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was
+at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the Manse stood
+watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between two
+nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on the farther
+side of the river, and the glittering line of the British on the hither
+bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of the musketry.
+It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the battle-smoke
+around this quiet house.
+
+Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
+Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of
+sight-showing,—perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the
+memorable spot. We stand now on the river’s brink. It may well be
+called the Concord,—the river of peace and quietness; for it is
+certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered
+imperceptibly towards its eternity,—the sea. Positively I had lived
+three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which
+way the current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
+northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day. From the
+incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
+becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
+wild, free mountain torrent. While all things else are compelled to
+subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
+liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even
+water-power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The
+torpor of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so
+much as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course.
+It slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
+bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the roots
+of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow along
+its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad, flat leaves
+on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally
+selecting a position just so far from the river’s brink that it cannot
+be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.
+
+It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
+perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
+sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the
+mud-turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
+black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
+noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
+assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances
+which supply good and beautiful results—the fragrance of celestial
+flowers—to the daily life of others.
+
+The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
+towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calm and golden sunset
+it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the quietude
+that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
+blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest. Each tree and
+rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
+unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The
+minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
+pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
+All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
+the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
+peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign our river as gross and impure
+while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven
+that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
+muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
+has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
+within its depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
+any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
+everywhere, it must be true.
+
+Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
+battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed by
+the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of the
+contest. On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a wide
+circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some period
+within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
+battle-day. On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes,
+we discern the stone abutment of the bridge. Looking down into the
+river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers, all green
+with half a century’s growth of water-moss; for during that length of
+time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased along this
+ancient highway. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty
+strokes of a swimmer’s arm,—a space not too wide when the bullets were
+whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts will point out, the
+very spots on the western bank where our countrymen fell down and died;
+and on this side of the river an obelisk of granite has grown up from
+the soil that was fertilized with British blood. The monument, not more
+than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a
+village to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest rather
+than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national history.
+Still, by the fathers of the village this famous deed was done; and
+their descendants might rightfully claim the privilege of building a
+memorial.
+
+A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the
+granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates
+the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the
+grave,—marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and
+another at the foot,—the grave of two British soldiers who were slain
+in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah
+Brown and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was their warfare ended; a
+weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the
+river, and then these many years of rest. In the long procession of
+slain invaders who passed into eternity from the battle-fields of the
+Revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.
+
+Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
+tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. The story has
+something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot altogether
+be reconciled with probability. A youth in the service of the clergyman
+happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back door of
+the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the
+bridge, he hastened across the intervening field to see what might be
+going forward. It is rather strange, by the way, that this lad should
+have been so diligently at work when the whole population of town and
+country were startled out of their customary business by the advance of
+the British troops. Be that as it might, the tradition, says that the
+lad now left his task and hurried to the battle-field with the axe
+still in his hand. The British had by this time retreated; the
+Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was thus
+deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground,—one was a
+corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh, the other Briton
+raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and gave a ghastly
+stare into his face. The boy,—it must have been a nervous impulse,
+without purpose, without thought, and betokening a sensitive and
+impressible nature rather than a hardened one,—the boy uplifted his axe
+and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.
+
+I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
+whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
+skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
+intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
+youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
+tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
+custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
+seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This one circumstance has borne
+more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.
+
+Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
+my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
+any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
+the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
+died there. There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
+hundred yards in breadth—which extends between the battle-field and the
+northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and orchard.
+Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood an Indian
+village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants must have
+drawn so large a part of their substance. The site is identified by the
+spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other implements of war, labor,
+and the chase, which the plough turns up from the soil. You see a
+splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a sod; it looks like nothing
+worthy of note; but, if you have faith enough to pick it up, behold a
+relic! Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians
+have left behind them, first set me on the search; and I afterwards
+enriched myself with some very perfect specimens, so rudely wrought
+that it seemed almost as if chance had fashioned them. Their great
+charm consists in this rudeness and in the individuality of each
+article, so different from the productions of civilized machinery,
+which shapes everything on one pattern. There is exquisite delight,
+too, in picking up for one’s self an arrow-head that was dropped
+centuries ago and has never been handled since, and which we thus
+receive directly from the hand of the red hunter, who purposed to shoot
+it at his game or at an enemy. Such an incident builds up again the
+Indian village and its encircling forest, and recalls to life the
+painted chiefs and warriors, the squaws at their household toil, and
+the children sporting among the wigwams, while the little wind-rocked
+pappose swings from the branch of a tree. It can hardly be told whether
+it is a joy or a pain, after such a momentary vision, to gaze around in
+the broad daylight of reality and see stone fences, white houses,
+potato-fields, and men doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and
+homespun pantaloons. But this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than
+a thousand wigwams.
+
+The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
+through the orchard. This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
+decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed man
+for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of gathering
+fruit. Even had that been the case, there was only so much the better
+motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of benefiting
+his successors,—an end so seldom achieved by more ambitious efforts.
+But the old minister, before reaching his patriarchal age of ninety,
+ate the apples from this orchard during many years, and added silver
+and gold to his annual stipend by disposing of the superfluity. It is
+pleasant to think of him walking among the trees in the quiet
+afternoons of early autumn and picking up here and there a windfall,
+while he observes how heavily the branches are weighed down, and
+computes the number of empty flour-barrels that will be filled by their
+burden. He loved each tree, doubtless, as if it had been his own child.
+An orchard has a relation to mankind, and readily connects itself with
+matters of the heart. The trees possess a domestic character; they have
+lost the wild nature of their forest kindred, and have grown humanized
+by receiving the care of man as well as by contributing to his wants.
+There, is so much individuality of character, too, among apple trees,
+that it gives them all additional claim to be the objects of human
+interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another gives
+us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently
+grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in
+free-hearted benevolence. The variety of grotesque shapes into which
+apple, trees contort themselves has its effect on those who get
+acquainted with them: they stretch out their crooked branches, and take
+such hold of the imagination, that we remember them as humorists and
+odd fellows. And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that
+linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is
+now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar?
+They offer their fruit to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet
+with the moral of Time’s vicissitude.
+
+I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
+finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
+privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman’s wealth of
+fruits. Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and
+then came Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them
+continually from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along. In the
+stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was
+audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of
+perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that flung down
+bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach-trees, which, in a good
+year, tormented me with peaches, neither to be eaten nor kept, nor,
+without labor and perplexity, to be given away. The idea of an infinite
+generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother Nature was
+well worth obtaining through such cares as these. That feeling can be
+enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer islands, where the
+bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange grow spontaneously and
+hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise almost as well by a man
+long habituated to city life, who plunges into such a solitude as that
+of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of trees that he did not
+plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox taste, bear the closest
+resemblance to those that grew in Eden. It has been an apothegm these
+five thousand years, that toil sweetens the bread it earns. For my part
+(speaking from hard experience, acquired while belaboring the rugged
+furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best the free gifts of Providence.
+
+Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate
+a moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as is
+never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they
+would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,—be
+it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless
+weed,—should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy
+to maturity altogether by their own care. If there be not too many of
+them, each individual plant becomes an object of separate interest. My
+garden, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the
+right extent. An hour or two of morning labor was all that it required.
+But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in
+deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody
+could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of
+creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to
+observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early
+peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
+Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted by the blossoms of
+a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a joy to me, those little
+spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip airy food out of my
+nectar-cups. Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the yellow
+blossoms of the summer-squashes. This, too, was a deep satisfaction;
+although, when they had laden themselves with sweets, they flew away to
+some unknown hive, which would give back nothing in requital of what my
+garden had contributed. But I was glad thus to fling a benefaction upon
+the passing breeze with the certainty that somebody must profit by it
+and that there would be a little more honey in the world to allay the
+sourness and bitterness which mankind is always complaining of. Yes,
+indeed; my life was the sweeter for that honey.
+
+Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
+varied forms. They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
+shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a
+sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything
+more graceful. A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my eyes
+at least, of being rendered indestructible in marble. If ever
+Providence (but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity of
+gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most
+delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer-squashes
+gathered from vines which I will plant with my own hands. As dishes for
+containing vegetables, they would be peculiarly appropriate.
+
+But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
+toil in the kitchen-garden. There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise, in
+observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the first
+little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until they lay
+strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads beneath
+the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to the
+noontide sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something worth
+living for had been done. A new substance was born into the world. They
+were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of
+and rejoice in. A cabbage, too,—especially the early Dutch cabbage,
+which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its ambitious heart
+often bursts asunder,—is a matter to be proud of when we can claim a
+share with the earth and sky in producing it. But, after all, the
+hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable children of ours are
+smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them.
+
+What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden, the
+reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old Manse.
+But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep him out
+of doors. I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation till a long
+spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof. There could not
+be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as then seen from the
+windows of my study. The great willow-tree had caught and retained
+among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be shaken down at
+intervals by the frequent gusts of wind. All day long, and for a week
+together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash-splash-splashing
+from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into the tubs beneath the
+spouts. The old, unpainted shingles of the house and outbuildings were
+black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient growth upon the walls
+looked green and fresh, as if they were the newest things and
+afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was
+blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a
+completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the impression that the
+earth was wet through like a sponge; while the summit of a wooded hill,
+about a mile distant, was enveloped in a dense mist, where the demon of
+the tempest seemed to have his abiding-place and to be plotting still
+direr inclemencies.
+
+Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain. In the fiercest
+beat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes the
+wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot penetrate;
+but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us shiver to
+think of those deep, umbrageous recesses, those overshadowing banks,
+where we found such enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not a twig
+of foliage there but would dash a little shower into our faces. Looking
+reproachfully towards the impenetrable sky,—if sky there be above that
+dismal uniformity of cloud,—we are apt to murmur against the whole
+system of the universe, since it involves the extinction of so many
+summer days in so short a life by the hissing and spluttering rain. In
+such spells of weather,—and it is to be supposed such weather
+came,—Eve’s bower in paradise must have been but a cheerless and aguish
+kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old parsonage, which had
+resources of its own to beguile the week’s imprisonment. The idea of
+sleeping on a couch of wet roses!
+
+Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
+stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has
+left behind it from a period before the Revolution. Our garret was an
+arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was
+but a twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns, of
+deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too
+reverent of their dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters, roughly hewn
+and with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of the
+chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, an aspect unlike
+what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house. But on one
+side there was a little whitewashed apartment, which bore the
+traditionary title of the Saint’s Chamber, because holy men in their
+youth had slept, and studied, and prayed there. With its elevated
+retirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its closet
+convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where a young man might
+inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly dreams. The
+occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and ejaculations
+inscribed upon the walls. There, too, hung a tattered and shrivelled
+roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the forcibly wrought
+picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown, holding a Bible in his
+hand. As I turned his face towards the light, he eyed me with an air of
+authority such as men of his profession seldom assume in our days. The
+original had been pastor of the parish more than a century ago, a
+friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal in fervid eloquence. I bowed
+before the effigy of the dignified divine, and felt as if I had now met
+face to face with the ghost by whom, as there was reason to apprehend,
+the Manse was haunted.
+
+Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed with
+spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used
+to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor, and sometimes
+rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper
+entry,—where nevertheless he was invisible, in spite of the bright
+moonshine that fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
+wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of
+manuscript discourses that stood in the garret. Once, while Hillard and
+other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a
+rustling noise as of a minister’s silk gown, sweeping through the very
+midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs.
+Still there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business was that of a
+ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest
+midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short, all
+kinds of domestic labor,—although no traces of anything accomplished
+could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her
+servitude, some ill-starched ministerial band, disturbed the poor
+damsel in her grave and kept her at work without any wages.
+
+But to return from this digression. A part of my predecessor’s library
+was stored in the garret,—no unfit receptacle indeed for such dreary
+trash as comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books would
+have been worth nothing at an auction. In this venerable garret,
+however, they possessed an interest, quite apart from their literary
+value, as heirlooms, many of which had been transmitted down through a
+series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty Puritan
+divines. Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded ink on
+some of their fly-leaves; and there were marginal observations or
+interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegible
+shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom. The
+world will never be the better for it. A few of the books were Latin
+folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry, as
+with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on the Book of
+Job—which only Job himself could have had patience to read—filled at
+least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or three
+volumes to a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divinity,—too
+corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the spiritual
+element of religion. Volumes of this form dated back two hundred years
+or more, and were generally bound in black leather, exhibiting
+precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to books of
+enchantment. Others equally antique were of a size proper to be carried
+in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,—diminutive, but as black
+as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with Greek and
+Latin quotations. These little old volumes impressed me as if they had
+been intended for very large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted
+at an early stage of their growth.
+
+The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
+garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
+of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
+like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
+hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
+could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
+that the works of man’s intellect decay like those of his hands.
+Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the spirits
+of one generation affords no sustenance for the next. Books of
+religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring and
+vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so seldom
+really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so
+little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul can
+attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in
+holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most
+part, stupendous impertinence.
+
+Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last
+clergyman’s lifetime. These threatened to be of even less interest than
+the elder works a century hence to any curious inquirer who should then
+rummage then as I was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal Preacher and
+Christian Examiner, occasional sermons, controversial pamphlets,
+tracts, and other productions of a like fugitive nature, took the place
+of the thick and heavy volumes of past time. In a physical point of
+view, there was much the same difference as between a feather and a
+lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the specific gravity of old
+and new was about upon a par. Both also were alike frigid. The elder
+books nevertheless seemed to have been earnestly written, and might be
+conceived to have possessed warmth at some former period; although,
+with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled down even to the
+freezing-point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other
+hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little to do
+with the writer’s qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of this whole
+dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt
+myself none the less a Christian for eschewing it. There appeared no
+hope of either mounting to the better world on a Gothic staircase of
+ancient folios or of flying thither on the wings of a modern tract.
+
+Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
+for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea
+of permanence. There were a few old newspapers, and still older
+almanacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had
+issued from the press with a distinctness that was altogether
+unaccountable. It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass
+among the books with the images of a vanished century in them. I turned
+my eyes towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked of the
+austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, after the
+most painful rummaging and groping into their minds, had been able to
+produce nothing half so real as these newspaper scribblers and
+almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a moment. The
+portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself. It is the age
+itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
+distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible
+truth for all times; whereas most other works—being written by men who,
+in the very act, set themselves apart from their age—are likely to
+possess little significance when new, and none at all when old. Genius,
+indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent,
+yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral
+writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or
+perchance of a hundred centuries.
+
+Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me
+a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. A bound volume
+has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for
+the good Mussulman. He imagines that those wind-wafted records are
+perhaps hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book or
+antique one may contain the “open sesame,”—the spell to disclose
+treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth. Thus it was not
+without sadness that I turned away from the library of the Old Manse.
+
+Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of another
+stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western horizon; while the
+massive firmament of clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but
+served only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant glow by
+the strongly contrasted shadows. Heaven smiled at the earth, so long
+unseen, from beneath its heavy eyelid. To-morrow for the hill-tops and
+the woodpaths.
+
+Or it might be that Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a
+fishing excursion on the river. Strange and happy times were those when
+we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and
+delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any
+less conventional race during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing
+our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside
+into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a mile above its
+junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth, nowhere, indeed,
+except to lave the interior regions of a poet’s imagination. It is
+sheltered from the breeze by woods and a hillside; so that elsewhere
+there might be a hurricane, and here scarcely a ripple across the
+shaded water. The current lingers along so gently that the mere force
+of the boatman’s will seems sufficient to propel his craft against it.
+It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart
+of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back
+again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one
+another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of
+the sky and of the clustering foliage, amid which fall showers of
+broken sunlight, imparting specks of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast
+with the quiet depth of the prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the
+slumbering river has a dream-picture in its bosom. Which, after all,
+was the most real,—the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable
+to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath?
+Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul. But
+both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had
+it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river had
+strayed forth out of the rich scenery of my companion’s inner world;
+only the vegetation along its banks should then have had an Oriental
+character.
+
+Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods seem
+hardly satisfied to allow it passage. The trees are rooted on the very
+verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it. At one spot
+there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which grow some hemlocks,
+declining across the stream with outstretched arms, as if resolute to
+take the plunge. In other places the banks are almost on a level with
+the water; so that the quiet congregation of trees set their feet in
+the flood, and are Fringed with foliage down to the surface.
+Cardinal-flowers kindle their spiral flames and illuminate the dark
+nooks among the shrubbery. The pond-lily grows abundantly along the
+margin,—that delicious flower which, as Thoreau tells me, opens its
+virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being through the
+magic of that genial kiss. He has beheld beds of them unfolding in due
+succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower to flower,—a
+sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to
+a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine
+themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water
+within reach of the boatman’s hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of
+alien race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple
+against their will and enriching them with a purple offspring of which
+neither is the parent. One of these ambitious parasites has climbed
+into the upper branches of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending
+from bough to bough, unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree’s airy
+summit with a wreath of its broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.
+
+The winding course of the stream continually shut out the scene behind
+us and revealed as calm and lovely a one before. We glided from depth
+to depth, and breathed new seclusion at every turn. The shy kingfisher
+flew from the withered branch close at hand to another at a distance,
+uttering a shrill cry of anger or alarm. Ducks that had been floating
+there since the preceding eve were startled at our approach and skimmed
+along the glassy river, breaking its dark surface with a bright streak.
+The pickerel leaped from among the lilypads. The turtle, sunning itself
+upon a rock or at the root of a tree, slid suddenly into the water with
+a plunge. The painted Indian who paddled his canoe along the Assabeth
+three hundred years ago could hardly have seen a wilder gentleness
+displayed upon its banks and reflected in its bosom than we did. Nor
+could the same Indian have prepared his noontide meal with more
+simplicity. We drew up our skiff at some point where the overarching
+shade formed a natural bower, and there kindled a fire with the pine
+cones and decayed branches that lay strewn plentifully around. Soon the
+smoke ascended among the trees, impregnated with a savory incense, not
+heavy, dull, and surfeiting, like the steam of cookery within doors,
+but sprightly and piquant. The smell of our feast was akin to the
+woodland odors with which it mingled: there was no sacrilege committed
+by our intrusion there: the sacred solitude was hospitable, and granted
+us free leave to cook and eat in the recess that was at once our
+kitchen and banqueting-hall. It is strange what humble offices may be
+performed in a beautiful scene without destroying its poetry. Our fire,
+red gleaming among the trees, and we beside it, busied with culinary
+rites and spreading out our meal on a mossgrown log, all seemed in
+unison with the river gliding by and the foliage rustling over us. And,
+what was strangest, neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety
+of the solemn woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and
+the will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places might have
+come trooping to share our table-talk and have added their shrill
+laughter to our merriment. It was the very spot in which to utter the
+extremest nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product
+of the mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in
+correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.
+
+So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
+gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain. The evanescent spray was
+Ellery’s; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay glimmering
+in the fountain’s bed and brightened both our faces by the reflection.
+Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it with the
+mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had the
+profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the knowledge
+that it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days, to him and
+me, lay not in any definite idea, not in any angular or rounded truth,
+which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical stuff, but in
+the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and conventionalism
+and fettering influences of man on man. We were so free to-day that it
+was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow. When we crossed the
+threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still
+the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were whispering to
+us, “Be free! be free!” Therefore along that shady river-bank there are
+spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half-consumed brands, only less
+sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of a household fire.
+
+And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
+sunset,—how sweet was it to return within the system of human society,
+not as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice, whence we
+could go forth at will into state—her simplicity! How gently, too, did
+the sight of the Old Manse, best seen from the river, overshadowed with
+its willow and all environed about with the foliage of its orchard and
+avenue,—how gently did its gray, homely aspect rebuke the speculative
+extravagances of the day! It had grown sacred in connection with the
+artificial life against which we inveighed; it had been a home for many
+years, in spite of all; it was my home too; and, with these thoughts,
+it seemed to me that all the artifice and conventionalism of life was
+but an impalpable thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below
+was none the worse for it. Once, as we turned our boat to the bank,
+there was a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic figure of a
+hound, couched above the house, as if keeping guard over it. Gazing at
+this symbol, I prayed that the upper influences might long protect the
+institutions that had grown out of the heart of mankind.
+
+If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities,
+houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these
+the perverted ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the
+early autumn. Then Nature will love him better than at any other
+season, and will take him to her bosom with a more motherly tenderness.
+I could scarcely endure the roof of the old house above me in those
+first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too, the prophecy of
+autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others; sometimes even in
+the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling like what is caused
+by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception—if it be not rather a
+foreboding—of the year’s decay, so blessedly sweet and sad in the same
+breath.
+
+Did I say that there was no feeling like it? Ah, but there is a
+half-acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the
+perfected vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his
+flowers, and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to
+steal them one by one away.
+
+I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as early a
+token of autumn’s approach as any other,—that song which may be called
+an audible stillness; for though very loud and heard afar, yet the mind
+does not take note of it as a sound, so completely is its individual
+existence merged among the accompanying characteristics of the season.
+Alas for the pleasant summertime! In August the grass is still verdant
+on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense
+as ever and as green; the flowers gleam forth in richer abundance along
+the margin of the river and by the stone walls and deep among the
+woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as they were a month ago; and
+yet in every breath of wind and in every beam of sunshine we hear the
+whispered farewell and behold the parting smile of a dear friend. There
+is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness in the blazing noon. Not a
+breeze can stir but it thrills us with the breath of autumn. A pensive
+glory is seen in the far, golden gleams, among the shadows of the
+trees. The flowers—even the brightest of them, and they are the most
+gorgeous of the year—have this gentle sadness wedded to their pomp, and
+typify the character of the delicious time each within itself. The
+brilliant cardinal-flower has never seemed gay to me.
+
+Still later in the season Nature’s tenderness waxes stronger. It is
+impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so fond of us!
+At other periods she does not make this impression on me, or only at
+rare intervals; but in those genial days of autumn, when she has
+perfected her harvests and accomplished every needful thing that was
+given her to do, then she overflows with a blessed superfluity of love.
+She has leisure to caress her children now. It is good to be alive and
+at such times. Thank Heaven for breath—yes, for mere breath—when it is
+made up of a heavenly breeze like this! It comes with a real kiss upon
+our cheeks; it would linger fondly around us if it might; but, since it
+must be gone, it embraces us with its whole kindly heart and passes
+onward to embrace likewise the next thing that it meets. A blessing is
+flung abroad and scattered far and wide over the earth, to be gathered
+up by all who choose. I recline upon the still unwithered grass and
+whisper to myself, “O perfect day! O beautiful world! O beneficent
+God!” And it is the promise of a blessed eternity; for our Creator
+would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep
+hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were
+meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It
+beams through the gates of paradise and shows us glimpses far inward.
+
+By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts on a drear
+austerity. On some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the
+grass and along the tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall
+from the trees of our avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly
+descending by their own weight. All summer long they have murmured like
+the noise of waters; they have roared loudly while the branches were
+wrestling with the thunder-gust; they have made music both glad and
+solemn; they have attuned my thoughts by their quiet sound as I paced
+to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling boughs. Now they can only
+rustle under my feet. Henceforth the gray parsonage begins to assume a
+larger importance, and draws to its fireside,—for the abomination of
+the air-tight stove is reserved till wintry weather,—draws closer and
+closer to its fireside the vagrant impulses that had gone wandering
+about through the summer.
+
+When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became as lonely as a
+hermitage. Not that ever—in my time at least—it had been thronged with
+company; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some friend out of the
+dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with him the
+transparent obscurity that was floating over us. In one respect our
+precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim
+travelled on his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all,
+felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or
+took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched among
+the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily through the boughs.
+They could not have paid a more acceptable compliment to my abode nor
+to my own qualities as a host. I held it as a proof that they left
+their cares behind them as they passed between the stone gate-posts at
+the entrance of our avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the
+abundance of peace and quiet within and all around us. Others could
+give them pleasure and amusement or instruction,—these could be picked
+up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest,—rest in a life of
+trouble. What better could be done for those weary and world-worn
+spirits?—for him whose career of perpetual action was impeded and
+harassed by the rarest of his powers and the richest of his
+acquirements?—for another who had thrown his ardent heart from earliest
+youth into the strife of politics, and now, perchance, began to suspect
+that one lifetime is too brief for the accomplishment of any lofty
+aim?—for her oil whose feminine nature had been imposed the heavy gift
+of intellectual power, such as a strong man might have staggered under,
+and with it the necessity to act upon the world?—in a word, not to
+multiply instances, what better could be done for anybody who came
+within our magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit
+over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed
+him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.
+
+Were I to adopt a pet idea as so many people do, and fondle it in my
+embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great
+want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The
+world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and
+take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity,
+and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by
+visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect
+and character were all things once set right by an interval of sound
+repose. This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions and
+avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, so that it might in due
+time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of restoring to us the
+simple perception of what is right and the single-hearted desire to
+achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of this
+weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now
+afflict the universe. Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto
+attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.
+
+Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for,
+though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is the result and
+expression of what he knew, while he was writing, to be but a distorted
+survey of the state and prospects of mankind. There were circumstances
+around me which made it difficult to view the world precisely as it
+exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to
+go but a little way beyond its threshold before meeting with stranger
+moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere in a
+circuit of a thousand miles.
+
+These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
+widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
+earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted
+upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism,
+and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face.
+Young visionaries—to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as
+to make life all a labyrinth around them—came to seek the clew that
+should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed
+theorists—whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in
+an iron framework—travelled painfully to his door, not to ask
+deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom.
+People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied
+new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a
+lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled,
+earnest wanderers through the midnight of the moral world beheld his
+intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the
+difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity more
+hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen
+before,—mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among the
+chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the
+whole host of night birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the
+gazer’s eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather.
+Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is
+kindled.
+
+For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
+asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
+of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
+question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep
+beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
+philosopher. It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
+or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused
+about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be, so quiet,
+so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if
+expecting to receive more than he could impart. And, in truth, the
+heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions which he
+could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without
+inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought,
+which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness,—new
+truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country
+village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly
+behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
+agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense
+water. Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who
+crowd so closely about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered
+breath and thus become imbued with a false originality. This triteness
+of novelty is enough to make any man of common-sense blaspheme at all
+ideas of less than a century’s standing, and pray that the world may be
+petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral and
+physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by
+such schemes of such philosophers.
+
+And now I begin to feel—and perhaps should have sooner felt—that we
+have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be,
+will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many
+pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its
+walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that
+wrought upon him from all these sources. My conscience, however, does
+not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to be
+revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit. How
+narrow-how shallow and scanty too—is the stream of thought that has
+been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim emotions,
+ideas, and associations which swell around me from that portion of my
+existence! How little have I told! and of that little, how almost
+nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it exclusively my
+own! Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with me, through the
+inner passages of my being? and have we groped together into all its
+chambers and examined their treasures or their rubbish? Not so. We have
+been standing on the greensward, but just within the cavern’s mouth,
+where the common sunshine is free to penetrate, and where every
+footstep is therefore free to come. I have appealed to no sentiment or
+sensibilities save such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am a
+man of really individual attributes I veil my face; nor am I, nor have
+I ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up
+their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for
+their beloved public.
+
+Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
+reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no measurement
+of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life’s ocean,
+three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy
+sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a still valley.
+Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the owner of the
+old house was pining for his native air. Carpenters next, appeared,
+making a tremendous racket among the outbuildings, strewing the green
+grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing the
+whole antiquity of the place with their discordant renovations. Soon,
+moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of woodbine which had
+crept over a large portion of its southern face. All the aged mosses
+were cleared unsparingly away; and there were horrible whispers about
+brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint,—a purpose as
+little to my taste as might be that of rouging the venerable cheeks of
+one’s grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more
+sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our
+household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little
+breakfast-room,—delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one
+of the many angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us,—and passed
+forth between the tall stone gate-posts as uncertain as the wandering
+Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the
+hand, and—an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no
+irreverence in smiling at—has led me, as the newspapers announce while
+I am writing, from the Old Manse into a custom-house. As a
+story-teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my
+imaginary personages, but none like this.
+
+The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our secluded
+dwelling had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics, no
+philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its
+edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these, few
+tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm
+summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of
+my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else.
+With these idle weeds and withering blossoms I have intermixed some
+that were produced long ago,—old, faded things, reminding me of flowers
+pressed between the leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such
+as it is, to any whom it may please. These fitful sketches, with so
+little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of
+purpose,—so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,—often
+but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing
+satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,—such trifles,
+I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation.
+Nevertheless, the public—if my limited number of readers, whom I
+venture to regard rather as a circle of friends, may be termed a
+public—will receive them the more kindly, as the last offering, the
+last collection of this nature which it is my purpose ever to put
+forth. Unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind. For
+myself the book will always retain one charm,—as reminding me of the
+river, with its delightful solitudes, and of the avenue, the garden,
+and the orchard, and especially the dear Old Manse, with the little
+study on its western side, and the sunshine glimmering through the
+willow branches while I wrote.
+
+Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine himself my
+guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy of notice within
+and about the Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study.
+There, after seating him in an antique elbow-chair, an heirloom of the
+house, I take forth a roll of manuscript and entreat his attention to
+the following tales,—an act of personal inhospitality, however, which I
+never was guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst enemy.
+
+
+
+
+THE BIRTHMARK
+
+
+In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an
+eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long
+before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more
+attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the
+care of an assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace
+smoke, washed the stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a
+beautiful woman to become his wife. In those days when the
+comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred
+mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle, it
+was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman in
+its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the imagination,
+the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial aliment
+in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would
+ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the
+philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and
+perhaps make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer
+possessed this degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over Nature.
+He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies
+ever to be weaned from them by any second passion. His love for his
+young wife might prove the stronger of the two; but it could only be by
+intertwining itself with his love of science, and uniting the strength
+of the latter to his own.
+
+Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly
+remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very
+soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble
+in his countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.
+
+“Georgiana,” said he, “has it never occurred to you that the mark upon
+your cheek might be removed?”
+
+“No, indeed,” said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his
+manner, she blushed deeply. “To tell you the truth it has been so often
+called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.”
+
+“Ah, upon another face perhaps it might,” replied her husband; “but
+never on yours. No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from
+the hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we
+hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the
+visible mark of earthly imperfection.”
+
+“Shocks you, my husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first
+reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why
+did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks
+you!”
+
+To explain this conversation it must be mentioned that in the centre of
+Georgiana’s left cheek there was a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as
+it were, with the texture and substance of her face. In the usual state
+of her complexion—a healthy though delicate bloom—the mark wore a tint
+of deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the
+surrounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more
+indistinct, and finally vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that
+bathed the whole cheek with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting
+motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson
+stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful
+distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand,
+though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say
+that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the
+infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic
+endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a
+desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing
+his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however,
+that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied
+exceedingly, according to the difference of temperament in the
+beholders. Some fastidious persons—but they were exclusively of her own
+sex—affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite
+destroyed the effect of Georgiana’s beauty, and rendered her
+countenance even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say that one
+of those small blue stains which sometimes occur in the purest statuary
+marble would convert the Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine
+observers, if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration,
+contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess
+one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a
+flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of the
+matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this was the case with himself.
+
+Had she been less beautiful,—if Envy’s self could have found aught else
+to sneer at,—he might have felt his affection heightened by the
+prettiness of this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now
+stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of
+emotion that throbbed within her heart; but seeing her otherwise so
+perfect, he found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with
+every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity
+which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her
+productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or
+that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The crimson
+hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the
+highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with
+the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible
+frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of
+his wife’s liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer’s sombre
+imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object,
+causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty,
+whether of soul or sense, had given him delight.
+
+At all the seasons which should have been their happiest, he invariably
+and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary,
+reverted to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first
+appeared, it so connected itself with innumerable trains of thought and
+modes of feeling that it became the central point of all. With the
+morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and
+recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at
+the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and
+beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand
+that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana
+soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a glance with the
+peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the roses of her
+cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was
+brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.
+
+Late one night when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray
+the stain on the poor wife’s cheek, she herself, for the first time,
+voluntarily took up the subject.
+
+“Do you remember, my dear Aylmer,” said she, with a feeble attempt at a
+smile, “have you any recollection of a dream last night about this
+odious hand?”
+
+“None! none whatever!” replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in
+a dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real depth of
+his emotion, “I might well dream of it; for before I fell asleep it had
+taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy.”
+
+“And you did dream of it?” continued Georgiana, hastily; for she
+dreaded lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say. “A
+terrible dream! I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to
+forget this one expression?—‘It is in her heart now; we must have it
+out!’ Reflect, my husband; for by all means I would have you recall
+that dream.”
+
+The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot
+confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers
+them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that
+perchance belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He
+had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation
+for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the
+deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have
+caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was
+inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away.
+
+When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in
+his wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to
+the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with
+uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an
+unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had
+not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over
+his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for
+the sake of giving himself peace.
+
+“Aylmer,” resumed Georgiana, solemnly, “I know not what may be the cost
+to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal
+may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as
+life itself. Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any
+terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid
+upon me before I came into the world?”
+
+“Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject,”
+hastily interrupted Aylmer. “I am convinced of the perfect
+practicability of its removal.”
+
+“If there be the remotest possibility of it,” continued Georgiana, “let
+the attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for
+life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and
+disgust,—life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either
+remove this dreadful hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep
+science. All the world bears witness of it. You have achieved great
+wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little mark, which I cover with
+the tips of two small fingers? Is this beyond your power, for the sake
+of your own peace, and to save your poor wife from madness?”
+
+“Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife,” cried Aylmer, rapturously, “doubt
+not my power. I have already given this matter the deepest
+thought—thought which might almost have enlightened me to create a
+being less perfect than yourself. Georgiana, you have led me deeper
+than ever into the heart of science. I feel myself fully competent to
+render this dear cheek as faultless as its fellow; and then, most
+beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what
+Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even Pygmalion, when his
+sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater ecstasy than mine will
+be.”
+
+“It is resolved, then,” said Georgiana, faintly smiling. “And, Aylmer,
+spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my
+heart at last.”
+
+Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek—her right cheek—not that which
+bore the impress of the crimson hand.
+
+The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan that he had formed
+whereby he might have opportunity for the intense thought and constant
+watchfulness which the proposed operation would require; while
+Georgiana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect repose essential to its
+success. They were to seclude themselves in the extensive apartments
+occupied by Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toilsome
+youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental powers of Nature that
+had roused the admiration of all the learned societies in Europe.
+Seated calmly in this laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated
+the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the profoundest mines;
+he had satisfied himself of the causes that kindled and kept alive the
+fires of the volcano; and had explained the mystery of fountains, and
+how it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure, and others
+with such rich medicinal virtues, from the dark bosom of the earth.
+Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the
+human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature
+assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from
+the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The
+latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling
+recognition of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later
+stumble—that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with
+apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to
+keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us
+nothing but results. She permits us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to
+mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now,
+however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten investigations; not, of
+course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested them; but because
+they involved much physiological truth and lay in the path of his
+proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.
+
+As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory, Georgiana was cold
+and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with intent to
+reassure her, but was so startled with the intense glow of the
+birthmark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could not restrain a
+strong convulsive shudder. His wife fainted.
+
+“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor.
+
+Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature,
+but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was
+grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer’s
+underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably
+fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill
+with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he
+executed all the details of his master’s experiments. With his vast
+strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable
+earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man’s physical
+nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face,
+were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.
+
+“Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,” said Aylmer, “and burn
+a pastil.”
+
+“Yes, master,” answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form
+of Georgiana; and then he muttered to himself, “If she were my wife,
+I’d never part with that birthmark.”
+
+When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an
+atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had
+recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked
+like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre
+rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits,
+into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded
+abode of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains,
+which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other
+species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to
+the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and
+straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For
+aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds. And
+Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his
+chemical processes, had supplied its place with perfumed lamps,
+emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a soft, impurpled
+radiance. He now knelt by his wife’s side, watching her earnestly, but
+without alarm; for he was confident in his science, and felt that he
+could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might intrude.
+
+“Where am I? Ah, I remember,” said Georgiana, faintly; and she placed
+her hand over her cheek to hide the terrible mark from her husband’s
+eyes.
+
+“Fear not, dearest!” exclaimed he. “Do not shrink from me! Believe me,
+Georgiana, I even rejoice in this single imperfection, since it will be
+such a rapture to remove it.”
+
+“Oh, spare me!” sadly replied his wife. “Pray do not look at it again.
+I never can forget that convulsive shudder.”
+
+In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from
+the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the
+light and playful secrets which science had taught him among its
+profounder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of
+unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their
+momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct
+idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was
+almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed
+sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look
+forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were
+answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen.
+The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented,
+but with that bewitching, yet indescribable difference which always
+makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the
+original. When wearied of this, Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a
+vessel containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest
+at first; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant
+shooting upward from the soil. Then came the slender stalk; the leaves
+gradually unfolded themselves; and amid them was a perfect and lovely
+flower.
+
+“It is magical!” cried Georgiana. “I dare not touch it.”
+
+“Nay, pluck it,” answered Aylmer,—“pluck it, and inhale its brief
+perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and
+leave nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be
+perpetuated a race as ephemeral as itself.”
+
+But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant
+suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of
+fire.
+
+“There was too powerful a stimulus,” said Aylmer, thoughtfully.
+
+To make up for this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her
+portrait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be
+effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal.
+Georgiana assented; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted to
+find the features of the portrait blurred and indefinable; while the
+minute figure of a hand appeared where the cheek should have been.
+Aylmer snatched the metallic plate and threw it into a jar of corrosive
+acid.
+
+Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures. In the intervals of
+study and chemical experiment he came to her flushed and exhausted, but
+seemed invigorated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language of
+the resources of his art. He gave a history of the long dynasty of the
+alchemists, who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by
+which the golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and
+base. Aylmer appeared to believe that, by the plainest scientific
+logic, it was altogether within the limits of possibility to discover
+this long-sought medium; “but,” he added, “a philosopher who should go
+deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to
+stoop to the exercise of it.” Not less singular were his opinions in
+regard to the elixir vitae. He more than intimated that it was at his
+option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps
+interminably; but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all
+the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find
+cause to curse.
+
+“Aylmer, are you in earnest?” asked Georgiana, looking at him with
+amazement and fear. “It is terrible to possess such power, or even to
+dream of possessing it.”
+
+“Oh, do not tremble, my love,” said her husband. “I would not wrong
+either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects upon our
+lives; but I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is
+the skill requisite to remove this little hand.”
+
+At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as if a
+redhot iron had touched her cheek.
+
+Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in
+the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh,
+uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt
+or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer
+reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of
+chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former
+he showed her a small vial, in which, he remarked, was contained a
+gentle yet most powerful fragrance, capable of impregnating all the
+breezes that blow across a kingdom. They were of inestimable value, the
+contents of that little vial; and, as he said so, he threw some of the
+perfume into the air and filled the room with piercing and invigorating
+delight.
+
+“And what is this?” asked Georgiana, pointing to a small crystal globe
+containing a gold-colored liquid. “It is so beautiful to the eye that I
+could imagine it the elixir of life.”
+
+“In one sense it is,” replied Aylmer; “or, rather, the elixir of
+immortality. It is the most precious poison that ever was concocted in
+this world. By its aid I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at
+whom you might point your finger. The strength of the dose would
+determine whether he were to linger out years, or drop dead in the
+midst of a breath. No king on his guarded throne could keep his life if
+I, in my private station, should deem that the welfare of millions
+justified me in depriving him of it.”
+
+“Why do you keep such a terrific drug?” inquired Georgiana in horror.
+
+“Do not mistrust me, dearest,” said her husband, smiling; “its virtuous
+potency is yet greater than its harmful one. But see! here is a
+powerful cosmetic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water,
+freckles may be washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed. A
+stronger infusion would take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the
+rosiest beauty a pale ghost.”
+
+“Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my cheek?” asked
+Georgiana, anxiously.
+
+“Oh, no,” hastily replied her husband; “this is merely superficial.
+Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper.”
+
+In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute
+inquiries as to her sensations and whether the confinement of the rooms
+and the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions
+had such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjecture that she
+was already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed
+in with the fragrant air or taken with her food. She fancied likewise,
+but it might be altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up of her
+system—a strange, indefinite sensation creeping through her veins, and
+tingling, half painfully, half pleasurably, at her heart. Still,
+whenever she dared to look into the mirror, there she beheld herself
+pale as a white rose and with the crimson birthmark stamped upon her
+cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much as she.
+
+To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary
+to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana
+turned over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old
+tomes she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the
+works of philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus,
+Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the
+prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance
+of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and
+therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves to have
+acquired from the investigation of Nature a power above Nature, and
+from physics a sway over the spiritual world. Hardly less curious and
+imaginative were the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal
+Society, in which the members, knowing little of the limits of natural
+possibility, were continually recording wonders or proposing methods
+whereby wonders might be wrought.
+
+But to Georgiana the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her
+husband’s own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his
+scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its
+development, and its final success or failure, with the circumstances
+to which either event was attributable. The book, in truth, was both
+the history and emblem of his ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet
+practical and laborious life. He handled physical details as if there
+were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed
+himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the
+infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul.
+Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more profoundly
+than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment than
+heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that
+his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if
+compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were
+the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with
+the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume,
+rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as
+melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad
+confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the
+composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and
+of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so
+miserably thwarted by the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius in
+whatever sphere might recognize the image of his own experience in
+Aylmer’s journal.
+
+So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that she laid her face
+upon the open volume and burst into tears. In this situation she was
+found by her husband.
+
+“It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer’s books,” said he with a smile,
+though his countenance was uneasy and displeased. “Georgiana, there are
+pages in that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep my
+senses. Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to you.”
+
+“It has made me worship you more than ever,” said she.
+
+“Ah, wait for this one success,” rejoined he, “then worship me if you
+will. I shall deem myself hardly unworthy of it. But come, I have
+sought you for the luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest.”
+
+So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of
+his spirit. He then took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gayety,
+assuring her that her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and
+that the result was already certain. Scarcely had he departed when
+Georgiana felt irresistibly impelled to follow him. She had forgotten
+to inform Aylmer of a symptom which for two or three hours past had
+begun to excite her attention. It was a sensation in the fatal
+birthmark, not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her
+system. Hastening after her husband, she intruded for the first time
+into the laboratory.
+
+The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and
+feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the
+quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for
+ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the
+room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of
+chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use.
+The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous
+odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The
+severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and
+brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to
+the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost
+solely, drew her attention, was the aspect of Aylmer himself.
+
+He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and hung over the furnace
+as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which
+it was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or
+misery. How different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had
+assumed for Georgiana’s encouragement!
+
+“Carefully now, Aminadab; carefully, thou human machine; carefully,
+thou man of clay!” muttered Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant.
+“Now, if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all over.”
+
+“Ho! ho!” mumbled Aminadab. “Look, master! look!”
+
+Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first reddened, then grew paler
+than ever, on beholding Georgiana. He rushed towards her and seized her
+arm with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.
+
+“Why do you come hither? Have you no trust in your husband?” cried he,
+impetuously. “Would you throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over
+my labors? It is not well done. Go, prying woman, go!”
+
+“Nay, Aylmer,” said Georgiana with the firmness of which she possessed
+no stinted endowment, “it is not you that have a right to complain. You
+mistrust your wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch
+the development of this experiment. Think not so unworthily of me, my
+husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink;
+for my share in it is far less than your own.”
+
+“No, no, Georgiana!” said Aylmer, impatiently; “it must not be.”
+
+“I submit,” replied she calmly. “And, Aylmer, I shall quaff whatever
+draught you bring me; but it will be on the same principle that would
+induce me to take a dose of poison if offered by your hand.”
+
+“My noble wife,” said Aylmer, deeply moved, “I knew not the height and
+depth of your nature until now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then,
+that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp
+into your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception.
+I have already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except
+to change your entire physical system. Only one thing remains to be
+tried. If that fail us we are ruined.”
+
+“Why did you hesitate to tell me this?” asked she.
+
+“Because, Georgiana,” said Aylmer, in a low voice, “there is danger.”
+
+“Danger? There is but one danger—that this horrible stigma shall be
+left upon my cheek!” cried Georgiana. “Remove it, remove it, whatever
+be the cost, or we shall both go mad!”
+
+“Heaven knows your words are too true,” said Aylmer, sadly. “And now,
+dearest, return to your boudoir. In a little while all will be tested.”
+
+He conducted her back and took leave of her with a solemn tenderness
+which spoke far more than his words how much was now at stake. After
+his departure Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the
+character of Aylmer, and did it completer justice than at any previous
+moment. Her heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love—so
+pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than perfection nor
+miserably make itself contented with an earthlier nature than he had
+dreamed of. She felt how much more precious was such a sentiment than
+that meaner kind which would have borne with the imperfection for her
+sake, and have been guilty of treason to holy love by degrading its
+perfect idea to the level of the actual; and with her whole spirit she
+prayed that, for a single moment, she might satisfy his highest and
+deepest conception. Longer than one moment she well knew it could not
+be; for his spirit was ever on the march, ever ascending, and each
+instant required something that was beyond the scope of the instant
+before.
+
+The sound of her husband’s footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal
+goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be
+the draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the
+consequence of a highly-wrought state of mind and tension of spirit
+than of fear or doubt.
+
+“The concoction of the draught has been perfect,” said he, in answer to
+Georgiana’s look. “Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot
+fail.”
+
+“Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer,” observed his wife, “I might
+wish to put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mortality
+itself in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to
+those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at
+which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I
+stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself,
+methinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die.”
+
+“You are fit for heaven without tasting death!” replied her husband
+“But why do we speak of dying? The draught cannot fail. Behold its
+effect upon this plant.”
+
+On the window seat there stood a geranium diseased with yellow
+blotches, which had overspread all its leaves. Aylmer poured a small
+quantity of the liquid upon the soil in which it grew. In a little
+time, when the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the
+unsightly blotches began to be extinguished in a living verdure.
+
+“There needed no proof,” said Georgiana, quietly. “Give me the goblet I
+joyfully stake all upon your word.”
+
+“Drink, then, thou lofty creature!” exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid
+admiration. “There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy
+sensible frame, too, shall soon be all perfect.”
+
+She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand.
+
+“It is grateful,” said she with a placid smile. “Methinks it is like
+water from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of
+unobtrusive fragrance and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst
+that had parched me for many days. Now, dearest, let me sleep. My
+earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the
+heart of a rose at sunset.”
+
+She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required
+almost more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and
+lingering syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere
+she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect
+with the emotions proper to a man the whole value of whose existence
+was involved in the process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood,
+however, was the philosophic investigation characteristic of the man of
+science. Not the minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush of
+the cheek, a slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a
+hardly perceptible tremor through the frame,—such were the details
+which, as the moments passed, he wrote down in his folio volume.
+Intense thought had set its stamp upon every previous page of that
+volume, but the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon the last.
+
+While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand, and
+not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse
+he pressed it with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very
+act, and Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep, moved uneasily
+and murmured as if in remonstrance. Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor
+was it without avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been
+strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek, now
+grew more faintly outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but
+the birthmark with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat of
+its former distinctness. Its presence had been awful; its departure was
+more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out the sky,
+and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.
+
+“By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!” said Aylmer to himself, in almost
+irrepressible ecstasy. “I can scarcely trace it now. Success! success!
+And now it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of blood
+across her cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!”
+
+He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the light of natural day
+to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek. At the same time he
+heard a gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his servant
+Aminadab’s expression of delight.
+
+“Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!” cried Aylmer, laughing in a sort of
+frenzy, “you have served me well! Matter and spirit—earth and
+heaven—have both done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses!
+You have earned the right to laugh.”
+
+These exclamations broke Georgiana’s sleep. She slowly unclosed her
+eyes and gazed into the mirror which her husband had arranged for that
+purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized how
+barely perceptible was now that crimson hand which had once blazed
+forth with such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their
+happiness. But then her eyes sought Aylmer’s face with a trouble and
+anxiety that he could by no means account for.
+
+“My poor Aylmer!” murmured she.
+
+“Poor? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored!” exclaimed he. “My
+peerless bride, it is successful! You are perfect!”
+
+“My poor Aylmer,” she repeated, with a more than human tenderness, “you
+have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so
+high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could
+offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!”
+
+Alas! it was too true! The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of
+life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union
+with a mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark—that
+sole token of human imperfection—faded from her cheek, the parting
+breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her
+soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight.
+Then a hoarse, chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the
+gross fatality of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the
+immortal essence which, in this dim sphere of half development, demands
+the completeness of a higher state. Yet, had Alymer reached a
+profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which
+would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the
+celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed
+to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in
+eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.
+
+
+
+
+A SELECT PARTY
+
+
+The man of fancy made an entertainment at one of his castles in the
+air, and invited a select number of distinguished personages to favor
+him with their presence. The mansion, though less splendid than many
+that have been situated in the same region, was nevertheless of a
+magnificence such as is seldom witnessed by those acquainted only with
+terrestrial architecture. Its strong foundations and massive walls were
+quarried out of a ledge of heavy and sombre clouds which had hung
+brooding over the earth, apparently as dense and ponderous as its own
+granite, throughout a whole autumnal day. Perceiving that the general
+effect was gloomy,—so that the airy castle looked like a feudal
+fortress, or a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a state prison of our
+own times, rather than the home of pleasure and repose which he
+intended it to be,—the owner, regardless of expense, resolved to gild
+the exterior from top to bottom. Fortunately, there was just then a
+flood of evening sunshine in the air. This being gathered up and poured
+abundantly upon the roof and walls, imbued them with a kind of solemn
+cheerfulness; while the cupolas and pinnacles were made to glitter with
+the purest gold, and all the hundred windows gleamed with a glad light,
+as if the edifice itself were rejoicing in its heart.
+
+And now, if the people of the lower world chanced to be looking upward
+out of the turmoil of their petty perplexities, they probably mistook
+the castle in the air for a heap of sunset clouds, to which the magic
+of light and shade had imparted the aspect of a fantastically
+constructed mansion. To such beholders it was unreal, because they
+lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pass within its
+portal, they would have recognized the truth, that the dominions which
+the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand
+times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying,
+“This is solid and substantial; this may be called a fact.”
+
+At the appointed hour, the host stood in his great saloon to receive
+the company. It was a vast and noble room, the vaulted ceiling of which
+was supported by double rows of gigantic pillars that had been hewn
+entire out of masses of variegated clouds. So brilliantly were they
+polished, and so exquisitely wrought by the sculptor’s skill, as to
+resemble the finest specimens of emerald, porphyry, opal, and
+chrysolite, thus producing a delicate richness of effect which their
+immense size rendered not incompatible with grandeur. To each of these
+pillars a meteor was suspended. Thousands of these ethereal lustres are
+continually wandering about the firmament, burning out to waste, yet
+capable of imparting a useful radiance to any person who has the art of
+converting them to domestic purposes. As managed in the saloon, they
+are far more economical than ordinary lamplight. Such, however, was the
+intensity of their blaze that it had been found expedient to cover each
+meteor with a globe of evening mist, thereby muffling the too potent
+glow and soothing it into a mild and comfortable splendor. It was like
+the brilliancy of a powerful yet chastened imagination,—a light which
+seemed to hide whatever was unworthy to be noticed and give effect to
+every beautiful and noble attribute. The guests, therefore, as they
+advanced up the centre of the saloon, appeared to better advantage than
+ever before in their lives.
+
+The first that entered, with old-fashioned punctuality, was a venerable
+figure in the costume of bygone days, with his white hair flowing down
+over his shoulders and a reverend beard upon his breast. He leaned upon
+a staff, the tremulous stroke of which, as he set it carefully upon the
+floor, re-echoed through the saloon at every footstep. Recognizing at
+once this celebrated personage, whom it had cost him a vast deal of
+trouble and research to discover, the host advanced nearly three
+fourths of the distance down between the pillars to meet and welcome
+him.
+
+“Venerable sir,” said the Man of Fancy, bending to the floor, “the
+honor of this visit would never be forgotten were my term of existence
+to be as happily prolonged as your own.”
+
+The old gentleman received the compliment with gracious condescension.
+He then thrust up his spectacles over his forehead and appeared to take
+a critical survey of the saloon.
+
+“Never within my recollection,” observed he, “have I entered a more
+spacious and noble hall. But are you sure that it is built of solid
+materials and that the structure will be permanent?”
+
+“O, never fear, my venerable friend,” replied the host. “In reference
+to a lifetime like your own, it is true my castle may well be called a
+temporary edifice. But it will endure long enough to answer all the
+purposes for which it was erected.”
+
+But we forget that the reader has not yet been made acquainted with the
+guest. It was no other than that universally accredited character so
+constantly referred to in all seasons of intense cold or heat; he that,
+remembers the hot Sunday and the cold Friday; the witness of a past age
+whose negative reminiscences find their way into every newspaper, yet
+whose antiquated and dusky abode is so overshadowed by accumulated
+years and crowded back by modern edifices that none but the Man of
+Fancy could have discovered it; it was, in short, that twin brother of
+Time, and great-grandsire of mankind, and hand-and-glove associate of
+all forgotten men and things,—the Oldest Inhabitant. The host would
+willingly have drawn him into conversation, but succeeded only in
+eliciting a few remarks as to the oppressive atmosphere of this present
+summer evening compared with one which the guest had experienced about
+fourscore years ago. The old gentleman, in fact, was a good deal
+overcome by his journey among the clouds, which, to a frame so
+earth-incrusted by long continuance in a lower region, was unavoidably
+more fatiguing than to younger spirits. He was therefore conducted to
+an easy-chair, well cushioned and stuffed with vaporous softness, and
+left to take a little repose.
+
+The Man of Fancy now discerned another guest, who stood so quietly in
+the shadow of one of the pillars that he might easily have been
+overlooked.
+
+“My dear sir,” exclaimed the host, grasping him warmly by the hand,
+“allow me to greet you as the hero of the evening. Pray do not take it
+as an empty compliment; for, if there were not another guest in my
+castle, it would be entirely pervaded with your presence.”
+
+“I thank you,” answered the unpretending stranger; “but, though you
+happened to overlook me, I have not just arrived. I came very early;
+and, with your permission, shall remain after the rest of the company
+have retired.”
+
+And who does the reader imagine was this unobtrusive guest? It was the
+famous performer of acknowledged impossibilities,—a character of
+superhuman capacity and virtue, and, if his enemies are to be credited,
+of no less remarkable weaknesses and defects. With a generosity with
+which he alone sets us an example, we will glance merely at his nobler
+attributes. He it is, then, who prefers the interests of others to his
+own and a humble station to an exalted one. Careless of fashion,
+custom, the opinions of men, and the influence of the press, he
+assimilates his life to the standard of ideal rectitude, and thus
+proves himself the one independent citizen of our free country. In
+point of ability, many people declare him to be the only mathematician
+capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted with the
+principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can
+compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is
+equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are
+his accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded
+in jumping down his own throat. With all these talents, however, he is
+so far from being considered a member of good society, that it is the
+severest censure of any fashionable assemblage to affirm that this
+remarkable individual was present. Public orators, lecturers, and
+theatrical performers particularly eschew his company. For especial
+reasons, we are not at liberty to disclose his name, and shall mention
+only one other trait,—a most singular phenomenon in natural
+philosophy,—that, when he happens to cast his eyes upon a
+looking-glass, he beholds Nobody reflected there!
+
+Several other guests now made their appearance; and among them,
+chattering with immense volubility, a brisk little gentleman of
+universal vogue in private society, and not unknown in the public
+journals under the title of Monsieur On-Dit. The name would seem to
+indicate a Frenchman; but, whatever be his country, he is thoroughly
+versed in all the languages of the day, and can express himself quite
+as much to the purpose in English as in any other tongue. No sooner
+were the ceremonies of salutation over than this talkative little
+person put his mouth to the host’s ear and whispered three secrets of
+state, an important piece of commercial intelligence, and a rich item
+of fashionable scandal. He then assured the Man of Fancy that he would
+not fail to circulate in the society of the lower world a minute
+description of this magnificent castle in the air and of the
+festivities at which he had the honor to be a guest. So saying,
+Monsieur On-Dit made his bow and hurried from one to another of the
+company, with all of whom he seemed to be acquainted and to possess
+some topic of interest or amusement for every individual. Coming at
+last to the Oldest Inhabitant, who was slumbering comfortably in the
+easy-chair, he applied his mouth to that venerable ear.
+
+“What do you say?” cried the old gentleman, starting from his nap and
+putting up his hand to serve the purpose of an ear-trumpet.
+
+Monsieur On-Dit bent forward again and repeated his communication.
+
+“Never within my memory,” exclaimed the Oldest Inhabitant, lifting his
+hands in astonishment, “has so remarkable an incident been heard of.”
+
+Now came in the Clerk of the Weather, who had been invited out of
+deference to his official station, although the host was well aware
+that his conversation was likely to contribute but little to the
+general enjoyment. He soon, indeed, got into a corner with his
+acquaintance of long ago, the Oldest Inhabitant, and began to compare
+notes with him in reference to the great storms, gales of wind, and
+other atmospherical facts that had occurred during a century past. It
+rejoiced the Man of Fancy that his venerable and much-respected guest
+had met with so congenial an associate. Entreating them both to make
+themselves perfectly at home, he now turned to receive the Wandering
+Jew. This personage, however, had latterly grown so common, by mingling
+in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of every entertainer,
+that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in a very exclusive
+circle. Besides, being covered with dust from his continual wanderings
+along the highways of the world, he really looked out of place in a
+dress party; so that the host felt relieved of an incommodity when the
+restless individual in question, after a brief stay, took his departure
+on a ramble towards Oregon.
+
+The portal was now thronged by a crowd of shadowy people with whom the
+Man of Fancy had been acquainted in his visionary youth. He had invited
+them hither for the sake of observing how they would compare, whether
+advantageously or otherwise, with the real characters to whom his
+maturer life had introduced him. They were beings of crude imagination,
+such as glide before a young man’s eye and pretend to be actual
+inhabitants of the earth; the wise and witty with whom he would
+hereafter hold intercourse; the generous and heroic friends whose
+devotion would be requited with his own; the beautiful dream-woman who
+would become the helpmate of his human toils and sorrows and at once
+the source and partaker of his happiness. Alas! it is not good for the
+full-grown man to look too closely at these old acquaintances, but
+rather to reverence them at a distance through the medium of years that
+have gathered duskily between. There was something laughably untrue in
+their pompous stride and exaggerated sentiment; they were neither human
+nor tolerable likenesses of humanity, but fantastic maskers, rendering
+heroism and nature alike ridiculous by the grave absurdity of their
+pretensions to such attributes; and as for the peerless dream-lady,
+behold! there advanced up the saloon, with a movement like a jointed
+doll, a sort of wax-figure of an angel, a creature as cold as
+moonshine, an artifice in petticoats, with an intellect of pretty
+phrases and only the semblance of a heart, yet in all these particulars
+the true type of a young man’s imaginary mistress. Hardly could the
+host’s punctilious courtesy restrain a smile as he paid his respects to
+this unreality and met the sentimental glance with which the Dream
+sought to remind him of their former love passages.
+
+“No, no, fair lady,” murmured he betwixt sighing and smiling; “my taste
+is changed; I have learned to love what Nature makes better than my own
+creations in the guise of womanhood.”
+
+“Ah, false one,” shrieked the dream-lady, pretending to faint, but
+dissolving into thin air, out of which came the deplorable murmur of
+her voice, “your inconstancy has annihilated me.”
+
+“So be it,” said the cruel Man of Fancy to himself; “and a good
+riddance too.”
+
+Together with these shadows, and from the same region, there came an
+uninvited multitude of shapes which at any time during his life had
+tormented the Man of Fancy in his moods of morbid melancholy or had
+haunted him in the delirium of fever. The walls of his castle in the
+air were not dense enough to keep them out, nor would the strongest of
+earthly architecture have availed to their exclusion. Here were those
+forms of dim terror which had beset him at the entrance of life, waging
+warfare with his hopes; here were strange uglinesses of earlier date,
+such as haunt children in the night-time. He was particularly startled
+by the vision of a deformed old black woman whom he imagined as lurking
+in the garret of his native home, and who, when he was an infant, had
+once come to his bedside and grinned at him in the crisis of a scarlet
+fever. This same black shadow, with others almost as hideous, now
+glided among the pillars of the magnificent saloon, grinning
+recognition, until the man shuddered anew at the forgotten terrors of
+his childhood. It amused him, however, to observe the black woman, with
+the mischievous caprice peculiar to such beings, steal up to the chair
+of the Oldest Inhabitant and peep into his half-dreamy mind.
+
+“Never within my memory,” muttered that venerable personage, aghast,
+“did I see such a face.”
+
+Almost immediately after the unrealities just described, arrived a
+number of guests whom incredulous readers may be inclined to rank
+equally among creatures of imagination. The most noteworthy were an
+incorruptible Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without
+worldly ambition; and a Beautiful Woman without pride or coquetry; a
+Married Pair whose life had never been disturbed by incongruity of
+feeling; a Reformer untrammelled by his theory; and a Poet who felt no
+jealousy towards other votaries of the lyre. In truth, however, the
+host was not one of the cynics who consider these patterns of
+excellence, without the fatal flaw, such rarities in the world; and he
+had invited them to his select party chiefly out of humble deference to
+the judgment of society, which pronounces them almost impossible to be
+met with.
+
+“In my younger days,” observed the Oldest Inhabitant, “such characters
+might be seen at the corner of every street.”
+
+Be that as it might, these specimens of perfection proved to be not
+half so entertaining companions as people with the ordinary allowance
+of faults.
+
+But now appeared a stranger, whom the host had no sooner recognized
+than, with an abundance of courtesy unlavished on any other, he
+hastened down the whole length of the saloon in order to pay him
+emphatic honor. Yet he was a young man in poor attire, with no insignia
+of rank or acknowledged eminence, nor anything to distinguish him among
+the crowd except a high, white forehead, beneath which a pair of
+deep-set eyes were glowing with warm light. It was such a light as
+never illuminates the earth save when a great heart burns as the
+household fire of a grand intellect. And who was he?—who but the Master
+Genius for whom our country is looking anxiously into the mist of Time,
+as destined to fulfil the great mission of creating an American
+literature, hewing it, as it were, out of the unwrought granite of our
+intellectual quarries? From him, whether moulded in the form of an epic
+poem or assuming a guise altogether new as the spirit itself may
+determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall
+do all that remains to be achieved for our glory among the nations. How
+this child of a mighty destiny had been discovered by the Man of Fancy
+it is of little consequence to mention. Suffice it that he dwells as
+yet unhonored among men, unrecognized by those who have known him from
+his cradle; the noble countenance which should be distinguished by a
+halo diffused around it passes daily amid the throng of people toiling
+and troubling themselves about the trifles of a moment, and none pay
+reverence to the worker of immortality. Nor does it matter much to him,
+in his triumph over all the ages, though a generation or two of his own
+times shall do themselves the wrong to disregard him.
+
+By this time Monsieur On-Dit had caught up the stranger’s name and
+destiny and was busily whispering the intelligence among the other
+guests.
+
+“Pshaw!” said one. “There can never be an American genius.”
+
+“Pish!” cried another. “We have already as good poets as any in the
+world. For my part, I desire to see no better.”
+
+And the Oldest Inhabitant, when it was proposed to introduce him to the
+Master Genius, begged to be excused, observing that a man who had been
+honored with the acquaintance of Dwight, and Freneau, and Joel Barlow,
+might be allowed a little austerity of taste.
+
+The saloon was now fast filling up by the arrival of other remarkable
+characters, among whom were noticed Davy Jones, the distinguished
+nautical personage, and a rude, carelessly dressed, harum-scarum sort
+of elderly fellow, known by the nickname of Old Harry. The latter,
+however, after being shown to a dressing-room, reappeared with his gray
+hair nicely combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky on his neck, and
+altogether so changed in aspect as to merit the more respectful
+appellation of Venerable Henry. Joel Doe and Richard Roe came arm in
+arm, accompanied by a Man of Straw, a fictitious indorser, and several
+persons who had no existence except as voters in closely contested
+elections. The celebrated Seatsfield, who now entered, was at first
+supposed to belong to the same brotherhood, until he made it apparent
+that he was a real man of flesh and blood and had his earthly domicile
+in Germany. Among the latest comers, as might reasonably be expected,
+arrived a guest from the far future.
+
+“Do you know him? do you know him?” whispered Monsieur On-Dit, who
+seemed to be acquainted with everybody. “He is the representative of
+Posterity,—the man of an age to come.”
+
+“And how came he here?” asked a figure who was evidently the prototype
+of the fashion-plate in a magazine, and might be taken to represent the
+vanities of the passing moment. “The fellow infringes upon our rights
+by coming before his time.”
+
+“But you forget where we are,” answered the Man of Fancy, who overheard
+the remark. “The lower earth, it is true, will be forbidden ground to
+him for many long years hence; but a castle in the air is a sort of
+no-man’s-land, where Posterity may make acquaintance with us on equal
+terms.”
+
+No sooner was his identity known than a throng of guests gathered about
+Posterity, all expressing the most generous interest in his welfare,
+and many boasting of the sacrifices which they had made, or were
+willing to make, in his behalf. Some, with as much secrecy as possible,
+desired his judgment upon certain copies of verses or great manuscript
+rolls of prose; others accosted him with the familiarity of old
+friends, taking it for granted that he was perfectly cognizant of their
+names and characters. At length, finding himself thus beset, Posterity
+was put quite beside his patience.
+
+“Gentlemen, my good friends,” cried he, breaking loose from a misty
+poet who strove to hold him by the button, “I pray you to attend to
+your own business, and leave me to take care of mine! I expect to owe
+you nothing, unless it be certain national debts, and other
+encumbrances and impediments, physical and moral, which I shall find it
+troublesome enough to remove from my path. As to your verses, pray read
+them to your contemporaries. Your names are as strange to me as your
+faces; and even were it otherwise,—let me whisper you a secret,—the
+cold, icy memory which one generation may retain of another is but a
+poor recompense to barter life for. Yet, if your heart is set on being
+known to me, the surest, the only method is, to live truly and wisely
+for your own age, whereby, if the native force be in you, you may
+likewise live for posterity.”
+
+“It is nonsense,” murmured the Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of the
+past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from himself to
+be lavished on the future, “sheer nonsense, to waste so much thought on
+what only is to be.”
+
+To divert the minds of his guests, who were considerably abashed by
+this little incident, the Man of Fancy led them through several
+apartments of the castle, receiving their compliments upon the taste
+and varied magnificence that were displayed in each. One of these rooms
+was filled with moonlight, which did not enter through the window, but
+was the aggregate of all the moonshine that is scattered around the
+earth on a summer night while no eyes are awake to enjoy its beauty.
+Airy spirits had gathered it up, wherever they found it gleaming on the
+broad bosom of a lake, or silvering the meanders of a stream, or
+glimmering among the wind-stirred boughs of a wood, and had garnered it
+in this one spacious hall. Along the walls, illuminated by the mild
+intensity of the moonshine, stood a multitude of ideal statues, the
+original conceptions of the great works of ancient or modern art, which
+the sculptors did but imperfectly succeed in putting into marble; for
+it is not to be supposed that the pure idea of an immortal creation
+ceases to exist; it is only necessary to know where they are deposited
+in order to obtain possession of them.—In the alcoves of another vast
+apartment was arranged a splendid library, the volumes of which were
+inestimable, because they consisted, not of actual performances, but of
+the works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the
+happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the
+untold tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of
+the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge’s Christabel; and the
+whole of Dryden’s projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The
+shelves were crowded; for it would not be too much to affirm that every
+author has imagined and shaped out in his thought more and far better
+works than those which actually proceeded from his pen. And here,
+likewise, where the unrealized conceptions of youthful poets who died
+of the very strength of their own genius before the world had caught
+one inspired murmur from their lips.
+
+When the peculiarities of the library and statue-gallery were explained
+to the Oldest Inhabitant, he appeared infinitely perplexed, and
+exclaimed, with more energy than usual, that he had never heard of such
+a thing within his memory, and, moreover, did not at all understand how
+it could be.
+
+“But my brain, I think,” said the good old gentleman, “is getting not
+so clear as it used to be. You young folks, I suppose, can see your way
+through these strange matters. For my part, I give it up.”
+
+“And so do I,” muttered the Old Harry. “It is enough to puzzle
+the—Ahem!”
+
+Making as little reply as possible to these observations, the Man of
+Fancy preceded the company to another noble saloon, the pillars of
+which were solid golden sunbeams taken out of the sky in the first hour
+in the morning. Thus, as they retained all their living lustre, the
+room was filled with the most cheerful radiance imaginable, yet not too
+dazzling to be borne with comfort and delight. The windows were
+beautifully adorned with curtains made of the many-colored clouds of
+sunrise, all imbued with virgin light, and hanging in magnificent
+festoons from the ceiling to the floor. Moreover, there were fragments
+of rainbows scattered through the room; so that the guests, astonished
+at one another, reciprocally saw their heads made glorious by the seven
+primary hues; or, if they chose,—as who would not?—they could grasp a
+rainbow in the air and convert it to their own apparel and adornment.
+But the morning light and scattered rainbows were only a type and
+symbol of the real wonders of the apartment. By an influence akin to
+magic, yet perfectly natural, whatever means and opportunities of joy
+are neglected in the lower world had been carefully gathered up and
+deposited in the saloon of morning sunshine. As may well be conceived,
+therefore, there was material enough to supply, not merely a joyous
+evening, but also a happy lifetime, to more than as many people as that
+spacious apartment could contain. The company seemed to renew their
+youth; while that pattern and proverbial standard of innocence, the
+Child Unborn, frolicked to and fro among them, communicating his own
+unwrinkled gayety to all who had the good fortune to witness his
+gambols.
+
+“My honored friends,” said the Man of Fancy, after they had enjoyed
+themselves awhile, “I am now to request your presence in the
+banqueting-hall, where a slight collation is awaiting you.”
+
+“Ah, well said!” ejaculated a cadaverous figure, who had been invited
+for no other reason than that he was pretty constantly in the habit of
+dining with Duke Humphrey. “I was beginning to wonder whether a castle
+in the air were provided with a kitchen.”
+
+It was curious, in truth, to see how instantaneously the guests were
+diverted from the high moral enjoyments which they had been tasting
+with so much apparent zest by a suggestion of the more solid as well as
+liquid delights of the festive board. They thronged eagerly in the rear
+of the host, who now ushered them into a lofty and extensive hall, from
+end to end of which was arranged a table, glittering all over with
+innumerable dishes and drinking-vessels of gold. It is an uncertain
+point whether these rich articles of plate were made for the occasion
+out of molten sunbeams, or recovered from the wrecks of Spanish
+galleons that had lain for ages at the bottom of the sea. The upper end
+of the table was overshadowed by a canopy, beneath which was placed a
+chair of elaborate magnificence, which the host himself declined to
+occupy, and besought his guests to assign it to the worthiest among
+them. As a suitable homage to his incalculable antiquity and eminent
+distinction, the post of honor was at first tendered to the Oldest
+Inhabitant. He, however, eschewed it, and requested the favor of a bowl
+of gruel at a side table, where he could refresh himself with a quiet
+nap. There was some little hesitation as to the next candidate, until
+Posterity took the Master Genius of our country by the hand and led him
+to the chair of state beneath the princely canopy. When once they
+beheld him in his true place, the company acknowledged the justice of
+the selection by a long thunder-roll of vehement applause.
+
+Then was served up a banquet, combining, if not all the delicacies of
+the season, yet all the rarities which careful purveyors had met with
+in the flesh, fish, and vegetable markets of the land of Nowhere. The
+bill of fare being unfortunately lost, we can only mention a phoenix,
+roasted in its own flames, cold potted birds of paradise, ice-creams
+from the Milky-Way, and whip syllabubs and flummery from the Paradise
+of Fools, whereof there was a very great consumption. As for
+drinkables, the temperance people contented themselves with water as
+usual; but it was the water of the Fountain of Youth; the ladies sipped
+Nepenthe; the lovelorn, the careworn, and the sorrow-stricken were
+supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe; and it was shrewdly
+conjectured that a certain golden vase, from which only the more
+distinguished guests were invited to partake, contained nectar that had
+been mellowing ever since the days of classical mythology. The cloth
+being removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent over their liquor
+and delivered themselves of a succession of brilliant speeches,—the
+task of reporting which we resign to the more adequate ability of
+Counsellor Gill, whose indispensable co-operation the Man of Fancy had
+taken the precaution to secure.
+
+When the festivity of the banquet was at its most ethereal point, the
+Clerk of the Weather was observed to steal from the table and thrust
+his head between the purple and golden curtains of one of the windows.
+
+“My fellow-guests,” he remarked aloud, after carefully noting the signs
+of the night, “I advise such of you as live at a distance to be going
+as soon as possible; for a thunder-storm is certainly at hand.”
+
+“Mercy on me!” cried Mother Carey, who had left her brood of chickens
+and come hither in gossamer drapery, with pink silk stockings. “How
+shall I ever get home?”
+
+All now was confusion and hasty departure, with but little superfluous
+leave-taking. The Oldest Inhabitant, however, true to the rule of those
+long past days in which his courtesy had been studied, paused on the
+threshold of the meteor-lighted hall to express his vast satisfaction
+at the entertainment.
+
+“Never, within my memory,” observed the gracious old gentleman, “has it
+been my good fortune to spend a pleasanter evening or in more select
+society.”
+
+The wind here took his breath away, whirled his three-cornered hat into
+infinite space, and drowned what further compliments it had been his
+purpose to bestow. Many of the company had bespoken will-o’-the-wisps
+to convoy them home; and the host, in his general beneficence, had
+engaged the Man in the Moon, with an immense horn-lantern, to be the
+guide of such desolate spinsters as could do no better for themselves.
+But a blast of the rising tempest blew out all their lights in the
+twinkling of an eye. How, in the darkness that ensued, the guests
+contrived to get back to earth, or whether the greater part of them
+contrived to get back at all, or are still wandering among clouds,
+mists, and puffs of tempestuous wind, bruised by the beams and rafters
+of the overthrown castle in the air, and deluded by all sorts of
+unrealities, are points that concern themselves much more than the
+writer or the public. People should think of these matters before they
+trust themselves on a pleasure-party into the realm of Nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN
+
+
+Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem
+village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to
+exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was
+aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the
+wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman
+Brown.
+
+“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips
+were close to his ear, “prithee put off your journey until sunrise and
+sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such
+dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeard of herself sometimes. Pray
+tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.”
+
+“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights in
+the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as
+thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ’twixt now
+and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already,
+and we but three months married?”
+
+“Then God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons; “and may you
+find all well when you come back.”
+
+“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to
+bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.”
+
+So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to
+turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head
+of Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air, in spite of her
+pink ribbons.
+
+“Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “What a
+wretch am I to leave her on such an errand! She talks of dreams, too.
+Methought as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had
+warned her what work is to be done tonight. But no, no; ’twould kill
+her to think it. Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this
+one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.”
+
+With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself
+justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had
+taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest,
+which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and
+closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there
+is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not
+who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs
+overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through
+an unseen multitude.
+
+“There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman Brown
+to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if
+the devil himself should be at my very elbow!”
+
+His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking
+forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire,
+seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown’s approach
+and walked onward side by side with him.
+
+“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South was
+striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes
+agone.”
+
+“Faith kept me back a while,” replied the young man, with a tremor in
+his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not
+wholly unexpected.
+
+It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it
+where these two were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the
+second traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank
+of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to
+him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might
+have been taken for father and son. And yet, though the elder person
+was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had
+an indescribable air of one who knew the world, and who would not have
+felt abashed at the governor’s dinner table or in King William’s court,
+were it possible that his affairs should call him thither. But the only
+thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff,
+which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought
+that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living
+serpent. This, of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted
+by the uncertain light.
+
+“Come, Goodman Brown,” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is a dull pace
+for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon
+weary.”
+
+“Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop,
+“having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to
+return whence I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st
+of.”
+
+“Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Let us
+walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not
+thou shalt turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet.”
+
+“Too far! too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his
+walk. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his
+father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good
+Christians since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of
+the name of Brown that ever took this path and kept—”
+
+“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person,
+interpreting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well
+acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and
+that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when
+he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and
+it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own
+hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. They
+were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along
+this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends
+with you for their sake.”
+
+“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never
+spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least
+rumor of the sort would have driven them from New England. We are a
+people of prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such
+wickedness.”
+
+“Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff, “I have
+a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a
+church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers
+towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General
+Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—But
+these are state secrets.”
+
+“Can this be so?” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at his
+undisturbed companion. “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor
+and council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a simple
+husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I meet
+the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his
+voice would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day.”
+
+Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now
+burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently
+that his snake-like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.
+
+“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he again and again; then composing himself,
+“Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, prithee, don’t kill me with
+laughing.”
+
+“Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown,
+considerably nettled, “there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear
+little heart; and I’d rather break my own.”
+
+“Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways,
+Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women like the one hobbling
+before us that Faith should come to any harm.”
+
+As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in
+whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had
+taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and
+spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.
+
+“A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness
+at nightfall,” said he. “But with your leave, friend, I shall take a
+cut through the woods until we have left this Christian woman behind.
+Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and
+whither I was going.”
+
+“Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods, and
+let me keep the path.”
+
+Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his
+companion, who advanced softly along the road until he had come within
+a staff’s length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making the best
+of her way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some
+indistinct words—a prayer, doubtless—as she went. The traveller put
+forth his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the
+serpent’s tail.
+
+“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.
+
+“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller,
+confronting her and leaning on his writhing stick.
+
+“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame.
+“Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman
+Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But—would your
+worship believe it?—my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen,
+as I suspect, by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I
+was all anointed with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf’s
+bane.”
+
+“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the
+shape of old Goodman Brown.
+
+“Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cackling
+aloud. “So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no
+horse to ride on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me there
+is a nice young man to be taken into communion to-night. But now your
+good worship will lend me your arm, and we shall be there in a
+twinkling.”
+
+“That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm,
+Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you will.”
+
+So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed
+life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the
+Egyptian magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take
+cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down
+again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his
+fellow-traveller alone, who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had
+happened.
+
+“That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and there
+was a world of meaning in this simple comment.
+
+They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his
+companion to make good speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so
+aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his
+auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a
+branch of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of
+the twigs and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The
+moment his fingers touched them they became strangely withered and
+dried up as with a week’s sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good
+free pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman
+Brown sat himself down on the stump of a tree and refused to go any
+farther.
+
+“Friend,” said he, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not another step
+will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to
+go to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any
+reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?”
+
+“You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance,
+composedly. “Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like
+moving again, there is my staff to help you along.”
+
+Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as
+speedily out of sight as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom.
+The young man sat a few moments by the roadside, applauding himself
+greatly, and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the
+minister in his morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old
+Deacon Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his that very night, which
+was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in
+the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations,
+Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it
+advisable to conceal himself within the verge of the forest, conscious
+of the guilty purpose that had brought him thither, though now so
+happily turned from it.
+
+On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old
+voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled sounds
+appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man’s
+hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that
+particular spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible.
+Though their figures brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could
+not be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam
+from the strip of bright sky athwart which they must have passed.
+Goodman Brown alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside
+the branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst without
+discerning so much as a shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could
+have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices
+of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were
+wont to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council.
+While yet within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a switch.
+
+“Of the two, reverend sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, “I had
+rather miss an ordination dinner than to-night’s meeting. They tell me
+that some of our community are to be here from Falmouth and beyond, and
+others from Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian
+powwows, who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the
+best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into
+communion.”
+
+“Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tones of the
+minister. “Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know,
+until I get on the ground.”
+
+The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the
+empty air, passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been
+gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these holy
+men be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman
+Brown caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on
+the ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his
+heart. He looked up to the sky, doubting whether there really was a
+heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars
+brightening in it.
+
+“With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the
+devil!” cried Goodman Brown.
+
+While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had
+lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried
+across the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still
+visible, except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was
+sweeping swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of
+the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the
+listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of towns-people
+of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had
+met at the communion table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern.
+The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he
+had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a
+wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily
+in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of
+night There was one voice of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet
+with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which,
+perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen multitude,
+both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.
+
+“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation;
+and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if
+bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness.
+
+The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the
+unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream,
+drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off
+laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent
+sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through
+the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it,
+and beheld a pink ribbon.
+
+“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no
+good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this
+world given.”
+
+And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did
+Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that
+he seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The
+road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at
+length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing
+onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole
+forest was peopled with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the
+howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the
+wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar
+around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But
+he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its
+other horrors.
+
+“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.
+
+“Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with
+your deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil
+himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he
+fear you.”
+
+In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more
+frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black
+pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to
+an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such
+laughter as set all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons
+around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he
+rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course,
+until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as
+when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on
+fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of
+midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him
+onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly
+from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it
+was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse
+died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices,
+but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful
+harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his
+own ear by its unison with the cry of the desert.
+
+In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full
+upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark
+wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural
+resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four
+blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles
+at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the
+summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and
+fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy
+festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous
+congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and
+again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the
+solitary woods at once.
+
+“A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown.
+
+In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom
+and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council
+board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked
+devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the
+holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor
+was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives
+of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient
+maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled
+lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light
+flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he
+recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for
+their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited
+at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But,
+irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people,
+these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there
+were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given
+over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes.
+It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor
+were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their
+pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often
+scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any
+known to English witchcraft.
+
+“But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his
+heart, he trembled.
+
+Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as
+the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature
+can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to
+mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and
+still the chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of
+a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there
+came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling
+beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were
+mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the
+prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and
+obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths
+above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock
+shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now
+appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no
+slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
+New England churches.
+
+“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field
+and rolled into the forest.
+
+At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees
+and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful
+brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He
+could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father
+beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a
+woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him
+back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor
+to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon
+Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came
+also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse,
+that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had
+received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was
+she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.
+
+“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your
+race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My
+children, look behind you!”
+
+They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the
+fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on
+every visage.
+
+“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from
+youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own
+sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful
+aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping
+assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret
+deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton
+words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager
+for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him
+sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste
+to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet
+ones—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole
+guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for
+sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber,
+street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall
+exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood
+spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every
+bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and
+which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than
+my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my
+children, look upon each other.”
+
+They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the
+wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling
+before that unhallowed altar.
+
+“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and
+solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once
+angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon
+one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a
+dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must
+be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of
+your race.”
+
+“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and
+triumph.
+
+And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet
+hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was
+hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the
+lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did
+the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism
+upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of
+sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and
+thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look
+at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the
+next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they
+disclosed and what they saw!
+
+“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the
+wicked one.”
+
+Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found
+himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind
+which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the
+rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been
+all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.
+
+The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of
+Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old
+minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for
+breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he
+passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to
+avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the
+holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God
+doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that
+excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own
+lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of
+morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp
+of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied
+the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and
+bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the
+street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But
+Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on
+without a greeting.
+
+Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild
+dream of a witch-meeting?
+
+Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young
+Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if
+not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.
+On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he
+could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear
+and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the
+pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open
+Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives
+and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then
+did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down
+upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at
+midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or
+eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered
+to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he
+had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by
+Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly
+procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse
+upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.
+
+
+
+
+RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER
+
+
+A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the
+more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University
+of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his
+pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice
+which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble,
+and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings
+of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not
+unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the
+ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion,
+had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his
+Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the
+tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of
+his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around
+the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.
+
+“Holy Virgin, signor!” cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won by the
+youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the
+chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young
+man’s heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of
+Heaven, then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as
+bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.”
+
+Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not
+quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that
+of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden
+beneath the window and expended its fostering influences on a variety
+of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.
+
+“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.
+
+“Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs
+than any that grow there now,” answered old Lisabetta. “No; that garden
+is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous
+doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is
+said that he distils these plants into medicines that are as potent as
+a charm. Oftentimes you may see the signor doctor at work, and
+perchance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the strange flowers
+that grow in the garden.”
+
+The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the
+chamber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints,
+took her departure.
+
+Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the
+garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one
+of those botanic gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than
+elsewhere in Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once
+have been the pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the
+ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but
+so wofully shattered that it was impossible to trace the original
+design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however,
+continued to gush and sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever.
+A little gurgling sound ascended to the young man’s window, and made
+him feel as if the fountain were an immortal spirit that sung its song
+unceasingly and without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one
+century imbodied it in marble and another scattered the perishable
+garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which the water subsided
+grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of
+moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some instances,
+flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in particular, set
+in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of
+purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem;
+and the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough
+to illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every
+portion of the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less
+beautiful, still bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their
+individual virtues, known to the scientific mind that fostered them.
+Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and others in common
+garden pots; some crept serpent-like along the ground or climbed on
+high, using whatever means of ascent was offered them. One plant had
+wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus, which was thus quite
+veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage, so happily
+arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.
+
+While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling behind a screen
+of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden.
+His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no
+common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man,
+dressed in a scholar’s garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of
+life, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked
+with intellect and cultivation, but which could never, even in his more
+youthful days, have expressed much warmth of heart.
+
+Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener
+examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was
+looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to
+their creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape
+and another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among
+themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep
+intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between
+himself and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he avoided
+their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a caution
+that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man’s demeanor was
+that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts,
+or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one
+moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. It was
+strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination to see this air of
+insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and
+innocent of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of
+the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of
+the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what
+his own hands caused to grow,—was he the Adam?
+
+The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or
+pruning the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, defended his hands with
+a pair of thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his
+walk through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its
+purple gems beside the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over
+his mouth and nostrils, as if all this beauty did but conceal a
+deadlier malice; but, finding his task still too dangerous, he drew
+back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm voice of a
+person affected with inward disease, “Beatrice! Beatrice!”
+
+“Here am I, my father. What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice
+from the window of the opposite house—a voice as rich as a tropical
+sunset, and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep
+hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable. “Are you
+in the garden?”
+
+“Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.”
+
+Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young
+girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of
+the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid
+that one shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with
+life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and
+compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her
+virgin zone. Yet Giovanni’s fancy must have grown morbid while he
+looked down into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger
+made upon him was as if here were another flower, the human sister of
+those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the
+richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, nor to be
+approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, it
+was observable that she handled and inhaled the odor of several of the
+plants which her father had most sedulously avoided.
+
+“Here, Beatrice,” said the latter, “see how many needful offices
+require to be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered as I am, my
+life might pay the penalty of approaching it so closely as
+circumstances demand. Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be consigned
+to your sole charge.”
+
+“And gladly will I undertake it,” cried again the rich tones of the
+young lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant and opened her
+arms as if to embrace it. “Yes, my sister, my splendour, it shall be
+Beatrice’s task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with
+thy kisses and perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life.”
+
+Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly
+expressed in her words, she busied herself with such attentions as the
+plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his
+eyes and almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite
+flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection to another.
+The scene soon terminated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his
+labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had caught the
+stranger’s face, he now took his daughter’s arm and retired. Night was
+already closing in; oppressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the
+plants and steal upward past the open window; and Giovanni, closing the
+lattice, went to his couch and dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful
+girl. Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught
+with some strange peril in either shape.
+
+But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify
+whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred
+during the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the
+less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni’s first movement, on
+starting from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into
+the garden which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was
+surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an
+affair it proved to be, in the first rays of the sun which gilded the
+dew-drops that hung upon leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter
+beauty to each rare flower, brought everything within the limits of
+ordinary experience. The young man rejoiced that, in the heart of the
+barren city, he had the privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely
+and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself, as a
+symbolic language to keep him in communion with Nature. Neither the
+sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his
+brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not
+determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was
+due to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy;
+but he was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.
+
+In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro
+Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of
+eminent repute to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction.
+The professor was an elderly personage, apparently of genial nature,
+and habits that might almost be called jovial. He kept the young man to
+dinner, and made himself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness
+of his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan
+wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men of science, inhabitants of the same
+city, must needs be on familiar terms with one another, took an
+opportunity to mention the name of Dr. Rappaccini. But the professor
+did not respond with so much cordiality as he had anticipated.
+
+“Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine,” said
+Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, “to
+withhold due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently
+skilled as Rappaccini; but, on the other hand, I should answer it but
+scantily to my conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like
+yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe
+erroneous ideas respecting a man who might hereafter chance to hold
+your life and death in his hands. The truth is, our worshipful Dr.
+Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty—with
+perhaps one single exception—in Padua, or all Italy; but there are
+certain grave objections to his professional character.”
+
+“And what are they?” asked the young man.
+
+“Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so
+inquisitive about physicians?” said the professor, with a smile. “But
+as for Rappaccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can
+answer for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for
+mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some
+new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest,
+or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as
+a grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated
+knowledge.”
+
+“Methinks he is an awful man indeed,” remarked Guasconti, mentally
+recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. “And
+yet, worshipful professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men
+capable of so spiritual a love of science?”
+
+“God forbid,” answered the professor, somewhat testily; “at least,
+unless they take sounder views of the healing art than those adopted by
+Rappaccini. It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised
+within those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he
+cultivates with his own hands, and is said even to have produced new
+varieties of poison, more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the
+assistance of this learned person, would ever have plagued the world
+withal. That the signor doctor does less mischief than might be
+expected with such dangerous substances is undeniable. Now and then, it
+must be owned, he has effected, or seemed to effect, a marvellous cure;
+but, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive
+little credit for such instances of success,—they being probably the
+work of chance,—but should be held strictly accountable for his
+failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”
+
+The youth might have taken Baglioni’s opinions with many grains of
+allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long
+continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter was
+generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be
+inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter
+tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of the
+University of Padua.
+
+“I know not, most learned professor,” returned Giovanni, after musing
+on what had been said of Rappaccini’s exclusive zeal for science,—“I
+know not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there
+is one object more dear to him. He has a daughter.”
+
+“Aha!” cried the professor, with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s
+secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men
+in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good
+hap to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that
+Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and
+that, young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified
+to fill a professor’s chair. Perchance her father destines her for
+mine! Other absurd rumors there be, not worth talking about or
+listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink off your glass of
+lachryma.”
+
+Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had
+quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies in
+reference to Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way,
+happening to pass by a florist’s, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers.
+
+Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within
+the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, so that he could look down
+into the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his
+eye was a solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine,
+and now and then nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment
+of sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew
+the magnificent shrub, with its purple gems clustering all over it;
+they glowed in the air, and gleamed back again out of the depths of the
+pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radiance from the rich
+reflection that was steeped in it. At first, as we have said, the
+garden was a solitude. Soon, however,—as Giovanni had half hoped, half
+feared, would be the case,—a figure appeared beneath the antique
+sculptured portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling
+their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of old
+classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice,
+the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty
+exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its
+character, that she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni
+whispered to himself, positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals
+of the garden path. Her face being now more revealed than on the former
+occasion, he was struck by its expression of simplicity and
+sweetness,—qualities that had not entered into his idea of her
+character, and which made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might
+be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between
+the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gemlike flowers
+over the fountain,—a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged
+a fantastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement of her dress
+and the selection of its hues.
+
+Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate
+ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace—so intimate that
+her features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets
+all intermingled with the flowers.
+
+“Give me thy breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint
+with common air. And give me this flower of thine, which I separate
+with gentlest fingers from the stem and place it close beside my
+heart.”
+
+With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of
+the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her
+bosom. But now, unless Giovanni’s draughts of wine had bewildered his
+senses, a singular incident occurred. A small orange-colored reptile,
+of the lizard or chameleon species, chanced to be creeping along the
+path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni,—but, at
+the distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything
+so minute,—it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of moisture
+from the broken stem of the flower descended upon the lizard’s head.
+For an instant the reptile contorted itself violently, and then lay
+motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this remarkable
+phenomenon and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did
+she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her bosom. There
+it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a precious
+stone, adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm which
+nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out of the
+shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured and
+trembled.
+
+“Am I awake? Have I my senses?” said he to himself. “What is this
+being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?”
+
+Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer
+beneath Giovanni’s window, so that he was compelled to thrust his head
+quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and
+painful curiosity which she excited. At this moment there came a
+beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered
+through the city, and found no flowers or verdure among those antique
+haunts of men until the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini’s shrubs had
+lured it from afar. Without alighting on the flowers, this winged
+brightness seemed to be attracted by Beatrice, and lingered in the air
+and fluttered about her head. Now, here it could not be but that
+Giovanni Guasconti’s eyes deceived him. Be that as it might, he fancied
+that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it
+grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was
+dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere
+of her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she
+bent over the dead insect.
+
+An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There
+she beheld the beautiful head of the young man—rather a Grecian than an
+Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold
+among his ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in
+mid air. Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet
+which he had hitherto held in his hand.
+
+“Signora,” said he, “there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them
+for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti.”
+
+“Thanks, signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that came
+forth as it were like a gush of music, and with a mirthful expression
+half childish and half woman-like. “I accept your gift, and would fain
+recompense it with this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into
+the air it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must even content
+himself with my thanks.”
+
+She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly
+ashamed at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to
+a stranger’s greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But
+few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the
+point of vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful
+bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle
+thought; there could be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower
+from a fresh one at so great a distance.
+
+For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that
+looked into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, as if something ugly and monstrous
+would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He
+felt conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the
+influence of an unintelligible power by the communication which he had
+opened with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart
+were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once;
+the next wiser, to have accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the
+familiar and daylight view of Beatrice—thus bringing her rigidly and
+systematically within the limits of ordinary experience. Least of all,
+while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this
+extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of
+intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild
+vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.
+Guasconti had not a deep heart—or, at all events, its depths were not
+sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern
+temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether
+or no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath,
+the affinity with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were
+indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a
+fierce and subtle poison into his system. It was not love, although her
+rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her
+spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to
+pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and
+horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered
+like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less did he know
+what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in his
+breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to
+renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or
+bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the
+illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.
+
+Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid
+walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates: his footsteps
+kept time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to
+accelerate itself to a race. One day he found himself arrested; his arm
+was seized by a portly personage, who had turned back on recognizing
+the young man and expended much breath in overtaking him.
+
+“Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!” cried he. “Have you forgotten
+me? That might well be the case if I were as much altered as yourself.”
+
+It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first
+meeting, from a doubt that the professor’s sagacity would look too
+deeply into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared
+forth wildly from his inner world into the outer one and spoke like a
+man in a dream.
+
+“Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now
+let me pass!”
+
+“Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the professor,
+smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth with an earnest
+glance. “What! did I grow up side by side with your father? and shall
+his son pass me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand
+still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part.”
+
+“Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speedily,” said Giovanni,
+with feverish impatience. “Does not your worship see that I am in
+haste?”
+
+Now, while he was speaking there came a man in black along the street,
+stooping and moving feebly like a person in inferior health. His face
+was all overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so
+pervaded with an expression of piercing and active intellect that an
+observer might easily have overlooked the merely physical attributes
+and have seen only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person
+exchanged a cold and distant salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his
+eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness that seemed to bring out whatever
+was within him worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar
+quietness in the look, as if taking merely a speculative, not a human
+interest, in the young man.
+
+“It is Dr. Rappaccini!” whispered the professor when the stranger had
+passed. “Has he ever seen your face before?”
+
+“Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name.
+
+“He HAS seen you! he must have seen you!” said Baglioni, hastily. “For
+some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I
+know that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face
+as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance
+of some experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as
+deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor
+Giovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of
+Rappaccini’s experiments!”
+
+“Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately. “THAT,
+signor professor, were an untoward experiment.”
+
+“Patience! patience!” replied the imperturbable professor. “I tell
+thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in
+thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora
+Beatrice,—what part does she act in this mystery?”
+
+But Guasconti, finding Baglioni’s pertinacity intolerable, here broke
+away, and was gone before the professor could again seize his arm. He
+looked after the young man intently and shook his head.
+
+“This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “The youth is the son of
+my old friend, and shall not come to any harm from which the arcana of
+medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an
+impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands,
+as I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This
+daughter of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned
+Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little dream of it!”
+
+Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found
+himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was
+met by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently
+desirous to attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition
+of his feelings had momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity.
+He turned his eyes full upon the withered face that was puckering
+itself into a smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame,
+therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.
+
+“Signor! signor!” whispered she, still with a smile over the whole
+breadth of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a grotesque carving
+in wood, darkened by centuries. “Listen, signor! There is a private
+entrance into the garden!”
+
+“What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an
+inanimate thing should start into feverish life. “A private entrance
+into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden?”
+
+“Hush! hush! not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over
+his mouth. “Yes; into the worshipful doctor’s garden, where you may see
+all his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be
+admitted among those flowers.”
+
+Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.
+
+“Show me the way,” said he.
+
+A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed
+his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might perchance be
+connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the
+professor seemed to suppose that Dr. Rappaccini was involving him. But
+such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to
+restrain him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of
+approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence
+to do so. It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was
+irrevocably within her sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him
+onward, in ever-lessening circles, towards a result which he did not
+attempt to foreshadow; and yet, strange to say, there came across him a
+sudden doubt whether this intense interest on his part were not
+delusory; whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature as to
+justify him in now thrusting himself into an incalculable position;
+whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young man’s brain, only
+slightly or not at all connected with his heart.
+
+He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. His
+withered guide led him along several obscure passages, and finally
+undid a door, through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and
+sound of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among
+them. Giovanni stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the
+entanglement of a shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden
+entrance, stood beneath his own window in the open area of Dr.
+Rappaccini’s garden.
+
+How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass
+and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible
+realities, we find ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid
+circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to
+anticipate! Fate delights to thwart us thus. Passion will choose his
+own time to rush upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an
+appropriate adjustment of events would seem to summon his appearance.
+So was it now with Giovanni. Day after day his pulses had throbbed with
+feverish blood at the improbable idea of an interview with Beatrice,
+and of standing with her, face to face, in this very garden, basking in
+the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching from her full gaze
+the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But now
+there was a singular and untimely equanimity within his breast. He
+threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father
+were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical
+observation of the plants.
+
+The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness
+seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an
+individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a
+forest, would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an
+unearthly face had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would
+have shocked a delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness
+indicating that there had been such commixture, and, as it were,
+adultery, of various vegetable species, that the production was no
+longer of God’s making, but the monstrous offspring of man’s depraved
+fancy, glowing with only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably
+the result of experiment, which in one or two cases had succeeded in
+mingling plants individually lovely into a compound possessing the
+questionable and ominous character that distinguished the whole growth
+of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but two or three plants in
+the collection, and those of a kind that he well knew to be poisonous.
+While busy with these contemplations he heard the rustling of a silken
+garment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from beneath the
+sculptured portal.
+
+Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his deportment;
+whether he should apologize for his intrusion into the garden, or
+assume that he was there with the privity at least, if not by the
+desire, of Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter; but Beatrice’s manner placed
+him at his ease, though leaving him still in doubt by what agency he
+had gained admittance. She came lightly along the path and met him near
+the broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by
+a simple and kind expression of pleasure.
+
+“You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor,” said Beatrice, with a
+smile, alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her from the window.
+“It is no marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father’s rare
+collection has tempted you to take a nearer view. If he were here, he
+could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and
+habits of these shrubs; for he has spent a lifetime in such studies,
+and this garden is his world.”
+
+“And yourself, lady,” observed Giovanni, “if fame says true,—you
+likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated by these rich
+blossoms and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my
+instructress, I should prove an apter scholar than if taught by Signor
+Rappaccini himself.”
+
+“Are there such idle rumors?” asked Beatrice, with the music of a
+pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I am skilled in my father’s science
+of plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these
+flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and
+sometimes methinks I would fain rid myself of even that small
+knowledge. There are many flowers here, and those not the least
+brilliant, that shock and offend me when they meet my eye. But pray,
+signor, do not believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing
+of me save what you see with your own eyes.”
+
+“And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked
+Giovanni, pointedly, while the recollection of former scenes made him
+shrink. “No, signora; you demand too little of me. Bid me believe
+nothing save what comes from your own lips.”
+
+It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush
+to her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni’s eyes, and responded
+to his gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness.
+
+“I do so bid you, signor,” she replied. “Forget whatever you may have
+fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it may be
+false in its essence; but the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are
+true from the depths of the heart outward. Those you may believe.”
+
+A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon Giovanni’s
+consciousness like the light of truth itself; but while she spoke there
+was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful,
+though evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable
+reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor
+of the flowers. Could it be Beatrice’s breath which thus embalmed her
+words with a strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A
+faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he
+seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent
+soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.
+
+The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice’s manner vanished; she
+became gay, and appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion
+with the youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have
+felt conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her
+experience of life had been confined within the limits of that garden.
+She talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer
+clouds, and now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni’s
+distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters—questions
+indicating such seclusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and
+forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed
+out before him like a fresh rill that was just catching its first
+glimpse of the sunlight and wondering at the reflections of earth and
+sky which were flung into its bosom. There came thoughts, too, from a
+deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if diamonds and
+rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon
+there gleamed across the young man’s mind a sense of wonder that he
+should be walking side by side with the being who had so wrought upon
+his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom
+he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful
+attributes,—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother,
+and should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections
+were only momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to
+make itself familiar at once.
+
+In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, and now,
+after many turns among its avenues, were come to the shattered
+fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of
+glowing blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it which Giovanni
+recognized as identical with that which he had attributed to Beatrice’s
+breath, but incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it,
+Giovanni beheld her press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were
+throbbing suddenly and painfully.
+
+“For the first time in my life,” murmured she, addressing the shrub, “I
+had forgotten thee.”
+
+“I remember, signora,” said Giovanni, “that you once promised to reward
+me with one of these living gems for the bouquet which I had the happy
+boldness to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a memorial
+of this interview.”
+
+He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand; but Beatrice
+darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through his heart like a
+dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back with the whole force of
+her slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his
+fibres.
+
+“Touch it not!” exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. “Not for thy life!
+It is fatal!”
+
+Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished beneath the
+sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he beheld
+the emaciated figure and pale intelligence of Dr. Rappaccini, who had
+been watching the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the
+entrance.
+
+No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of Beatrice
+came back to his passionate musings, invested with all the witchery
+that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her,
+and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood. She
+was human; her nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine
+qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely,
+on her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he
+had hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her
+physical and moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle
+sophistry of passion transmitted into a golden crown of enchantment,
+rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so much as she was the more
+unique. Whatever had looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of
+such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those shapeless half
+ideas which throng the dim region beyond the daylight of our perfect
+consciousness. Thus did he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the
+dawn had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Dr. Rappaccini’s
+garden, whither Giovanni’s dreams doubtless led him. Up rose the sun in
+his due season, and, flinging his beams upon the young man’s eyelids,
+awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly aroused, he became
+sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—in his right
+hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was on
+the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. On the back of that
+hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and
+the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist.
+
+Oh, how stubbornly does love,—or even that cunning semblance of love
+which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into
+the heart,—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes
+when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a
+handkerchief about his hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him,
+and soon forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.
+
+After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of
+what we call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in
+the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the
+whole space in which he might be said to live; for the anticipation and
+memory of that ecstatic hour made up the remainder. Nor was it
+otherwise with the daughter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth’s
+appearance, and flew to his side with confidence as unreserved as if
+they had been playmates from early infancy—as if they were such
+playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the
+appointed moment, she stood beneath the window and sent up the rich
+sweetness of her tones to float around him in his chamber and echo and
+reverberate throughout his heart: “Giovanni! Giovanni! Why tarriest
+thou? Come down!” And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous
+flowers.
+
+But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in
+Beatrice’s demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained that the idea
+of infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all
+appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love with eyes that
+conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of
+the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way; they
+had even spoken love in those gushes of passion when their spirits
+darted forth in articulated breath like tongues of long-hidden flame;
+and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of hands, nor any
+slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He had never touched
+one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so marked was the
+physical barrier between them—had never been waved against him by a
+breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed tempted to
+overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore
+such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a
+spoken word was requisite to repel him. At such times he was startled
+at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns
+of his heart and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint
+as the morning mist, his doubts alone had substance. But, when
+Beatrice’s face brightened again after the momentary shadow, she was
+transformed at once from the mysterious, questionable being whom he had
+watched with so much awe and horror; she was now the beautiful and
+unsophisticated girl whom he felt that his spirit knew with a certainty
+beyond all other knowledge.
+
+A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with
+Baglioni. One morning, however, he was disagreeably surprised by a
+visit from the professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole
+weeks, and would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up as he
+had long been to a pervading excitement, he could tolerate no
+companions except upon condition of their perfect sympathy with his
+present state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from
+Professor Baglioni.
+
+The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of
+the city and the university, and then took up another topic.
+
+“I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met
+with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember
+it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present
+to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as
+the sunset; but what especially distinguished her was a certain rich
+perfume in her breath—richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander,
+as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight
+with this magnificent stranger; but a certain sage physician, happening
+to be present, discovered a terrible secret in regard to her.”
+
+“And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to avoid
+those of the professor.
+
+“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been
+nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature
+was so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest
+poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich
+perfume of her breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have
+been poison—her embrace death. Is not this a marvellous tale?”
+
+“A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his
+chair. “I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense
+among your graver studies.”
+
+“By the by,” said the professor, looking uneasily about him, “what
+singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your
+gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, by no means
+agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It
+is like the breath of a flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber.”
+
+“Nor are there any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the
+professor spoke; “nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your
+worship’s imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the
+sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The
+recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken
+for a present reality.”
+
+“Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said
+Baglioni; “and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, it would be that of
+some vile apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be
+imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures
+his medicaments with odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless,
+likewise, the fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her
+patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden’s breath; but woe to him
+that sips them!”
+
+Giovanni’s face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which the
+professor alluded to the pure and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a
+torture to his soul; and yet the intimation of a view of her character
+opposite to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim
+suspicions, which now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove
+hard to quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s
+perfect faith.
+
+“Signor professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend; perchance,
+too, it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards his son. I would
+fain feel nothing towards you save respect and deference; but I pray
+you to observe, signor, that there is one subject on which we must not
+speak. You know not the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore,
+estimate the wrong—the blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her
+character by a light or injurious word.”
+
+“Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!” answered the professor, with a calm
+expression of pity, “I know this wretched girl far better than
+yourself. You shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner
+Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, poisonous as she is
+beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do violence to my gray hairs,
+it shall not silence me. That old fable of the Indian woman has become
+a truth by the deep and deadly science of Rappaccini and in the person
+of the lovely Beatrice.”
+
+Giovanni groaned and hid his face
+
+“Her father,” continued Baglioni, “was not restrained by natural
+affection from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the
+victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he
+is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own heart in an
+alembic. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected
+as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be
+death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls
+the interest of science before his eyes, will hesitate at nothing.”
+
+“It is a dream,” muttered Giovanni to himself; “surely it is a dream.”
+
+“But,” resumed the professor, “be of good cheer, son of my friend. It
+is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may even succeed in
+bringing back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary
+nature, from which her father’s madness has estranged her. Behold this
+little silver vase! It was wrought by the hands of the renowned
+Benvenuto Cellini, and is well worthy to be a love gift to the fairest
+dame in Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little sip of this
+antidote would have rendered the most virulent poisons of the Borgias
+innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as efficacious against those of
+Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within it, on your
+Beatrice, and hopefully await the result.”
+
+Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver vial on the table and
+withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young
+man’s mind.
+
+“We will thwart Rappaccini yet,” thought he, chuckling to himself, as
+he descended the stairs; “but, let us confess the truth of him, he is a
+wonderful man—a wonderful man indeed; a vile empiric, however, in his
+practice, and therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the
+good old rules of the medical profession.”
+
+Throughout Giovanni’s whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had
+occasionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark surmises as to her
+character; yet so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a
+simple, natural, most affectionate, and guileless creature, that the
+image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked as strange and
+incredible as if it were not in accordance with his own original
+conception. True, there were ugly recollections connected with his
+first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could not quite forget the
+bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that perished amid
+the sunny air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of her
+breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her
+character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged
+as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might
+appear to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real than
+what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better
+evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather
+by the necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and
+generous faith on his part. But now his spirit was incapable of
+sustaining itself at the height to which the early enthusiasm of
+passion had exalted it; he fell down, grovelling among earthly doubts,
+and defiled therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice’s image. Not that
+he gave her up; he did but distrust. He resolved to institute some
+decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all, whether there were
+those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature which could not be
+supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul. His
+eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the
+insect, and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a
+few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower in
+Beatrice’s hand, there would be room for no further question. With this
+idea he hastened to the florist’s and purchased a bouquet that was
+still gemmed with the morning dew-drops.
+
+It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice.
+Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his
+figure in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man,
+yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the
+token of a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character.
+He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never
+before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his
+cheeks so warm a hue of superabundant life.
+
+“At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet insinuated itself into
+my system. I am no flower to perish in her grasp.”
+
+With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had never
+once laid aside from his hand. A thrill of indefinable horror shot
+through his frame on perceiving that those dewy flowers were already
+beginning to droop; they wore the aspect of things that had been fresh
+and lovely yesterday. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood
+motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at
+the likeness of something frightful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark
+about the fragrance that seemed to pervade the chamber. It must have
+been the poison in his breath! Then he shuddered—shuddered at himself.
+Recovering from his stupor, he began to watch with curious eye a spider
+that was busily at work hanging its web from the antique cornice of the
+apartment, crossing and recrossing the artful system of interwoven
+lines—as vigorous and active a spider as ever dangled from an old
+ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted a deep, long
+breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web vibrated with a
+tremor originating in the body of the small artisan. Again Giovanni
+sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a venomous feeling
+out of his heart: he knew not whether he were wicked, or only
+desperate. The spider made a convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung
+dead across the window.
+
+“Accursed! accursed!” muttered Giovanni, addressing himself. “Hast thou
+grown so poisonous that this deadly insect perishes by thy breath?”
+
+At that moment a rich, sweet voice came floating up from the garden.
+
+“Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the hour! Why tarriest thou? Come
+down!”
+
+“Yes,” muttered Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath
+may not slay! Would that it might!”
+
+He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and
+loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his wrath and despair had been so
+fierce that he could have desired nothing so much as to wither her by a
+glance; but with her actual presence there came influences which had
+too real an existence to be at once shaken off: recollections of the
+delicate and benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often
+enveloped him in a religious calm; recollections of many a holy and
+passionate outgush of her heart, when the pure fountain had been
+unsealed from its depths and made visible in its transparency to his
+mental eye; recollections which, had Giovanni known how to estimate
+them, would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an
+earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have
+gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel. Incapable as
+he was of such high faith, still her presence had not utterly lost its
+magic. Giovanni’s rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen
+insensibility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt
+that there was a gulf of blackness between them which neither he nor
+she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus
+to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the
+midst of which grew the shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni was
+affrighted at the eager enjoyment—the appetite, as it were—with which
+he found himself inhaling the fragrance of the flowers.
+
+“Beatrice,” asked he, abruptly, “whence came this shrub?”
+
+“My father created it,” answered she, with simplicity.
+
+“Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What mean you, Beatrice?”
+
+“He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature,” replied
+Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang
+from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I
+was but his earthly child. Approach it not!” continued she, observing
+with terror that Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. “It has
+qualities that you little dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni,—I grew up
+and blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its breath. It was
+my sister, and I loved it with a human affection; for, alas!—hast thou
+not suspected it?—there was an awful doom.”
+
+Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and
+trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured her, and made her
+blush that she had doubted for an instant.
+
+“There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s
+fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind.
+Until Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely was thy poor
+Beatrice!”
+
+“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.
+
+“Only of late have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly.
+“Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet.”
+
+Giovanni’s rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning
+flash out of a dark cloud.
+
+“Accursed one!” cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. “And, finding
+thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the
+warmth of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!”
+
+“Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his
+face. The force of his words had not found its way into her mind; she
+was merely thunderstruck.
+
+“Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion.
+“Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins
+with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and
+deadly a creature as thyself—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity!
+Now, if our breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others,
+let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!”
+
+“What has befallen me?” murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her
+heart. “Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heart-broken child!”
+
+“Thou,—dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish
+scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the
+atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip
+our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us
+will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will
+be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!”
+
+“Giovanni,” said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief was beyond passion,
+“why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those terrible words? I, it
+is true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou,—what hast thou
+to do, save with one other shudder at my hideous misery to go forth out
+of the garden and mingle with thy race, and forget there ever crawled
+on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?”
+
+“Dost thou pretend ignorance?” asked Giovanni, scowling upon her.
+“Behold! this power have I gained from the pure daughter of
+Rappaccini.”
+
+There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search
+of the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. They
+circled round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him
+by the same influence which had drawn them for an instant within the
+sphere of several of the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and
+smiled bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell
+dead upon the ground.
+
+“I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal
+science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only
+to love thee and be with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass
+away, leaving but thine image in mine heart; for, Giovanni, believe it,
+though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature,
+and craves love as its daily food. But my father,—he has united us in
+this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill me! Oh, what
+is death after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a world
+of bliss would I have done it.”
+
+Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips.
+There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not without
+tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice
+and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would
+be made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life.
+Ought not, then, the desert of humanity around them to press this
+insulated pair closer together? If they should be cruel to one another,
+who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might
+there not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of
+ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by the
+hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an
+earthly union and earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love
+had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s
+blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass
+heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time—she must
+bathe her hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the
+light of immortality, and THERE be well.
+
+But Giovanni did not know it.
+
+“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as
+always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest
+Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! there is a
+medicine, potent, as a wise physician has assured me, and almost divine
+in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients the most opposite to
+those by which thy awful father has brought this calamity upon thee and
+me. It is distilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it together,
+and thus be purified from evil?”
+
+“Give it me!” said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little
+silver vial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She added, with a
+peculiar emphasis, “I will drink; but do thou await the result.”
+
+She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the
+figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards
+the marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to
+gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as
+might an artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a
+group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused;
+his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands
+over them in the attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his
+children; but those were the same hands that had thrown poison into the
+stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously,
+and pressed her hand upon her heart.
+
+“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the
+world. Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid
+thy bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My
+science and the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within
+his system that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost,
+daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then,
+through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all
+besides!”
+
+“My father,” said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke she kept her
+hand upon her heart,—“wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom
+upon thy child?”
+
+“Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost
+thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which
+no power nor strength could avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell
+the mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as terrible as thou art
+beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak
+woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?”
+
+“I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking
+down upon the ground. “But now it matters not. I am going, father,
+where the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will
+pass away like a dream-like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers,
+which will no longer taint my breath among the flowers of Eden.
+Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart;
+but they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there not, from the
+first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”
+
+To Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by
+Rappaccini’s skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote
+was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted
+nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted
+wisdom, perished there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at
+that moment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and
+called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the
+thunderstricken man of science, “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is _this_
+the upshot of your experiment!”
+
+
+
+
+MRS. BULLFROG
+
+
+It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people
+act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a
+most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits,
+disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady
+herself. An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of
+perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered
+that no tolerable woman will accept them. Now this is the very height
+of absurdity. A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and
+the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious
+exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married
+state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is fundamentally a
+good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor objections,
+should there be such, will vanish, if you let them alone. Only put
+yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss, and
+it is scarcely to be imagined what miracles, in the way of recognizing
+smaller incongruities, connubial love will effect.
+
+For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was
+precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not
+to be. My early habits had gifted me with a feminine sensibility and
+too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished graduate of a dry
+goods store, where, by dint of ministering to the whims of fine ladies,
+and suiting silken hose to delicate limbs, and handling satins,
+ribbons, chintzes calicoes, tapes, gauze, and cambric needles, I grew
+up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is not assuming too much to
+affirm that the ladies themselves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas
+Bullfrog. So painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection, and
+such varied excellence did I require in the woman whom I could love,
+that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all, or of being
+driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the looking-glass.
+Besides the fundamental principle already hinted at, I demanded the
+fresh bloom of youth, pearly teeth, glossy ringlets, and the whole list
+of lovely items, with the utmost delicacy of habits and sentiments, a
+silken texture of mind, and, above all, a virgin heart. In a word, if a
+young angel just from paradise, yet dressed in earthly fashion, had
+come and offered me her hand, it is by no means certain that I should
+have taken it. There was every chance of my becoming a most miserable
+old bachelor, when, by the best luck in the world, I made a journey
+into another state, and was smitten by, and smote again, and wooed,
+won, and married, the present Mrs. Bullfrog, all in the space of a
+fortnight. Owing to these extempore measures, I not only gave my bride
+credit for certain perfections which have not as yet come to light, but
+also overlooked a few trifling defects, which, however, glimmered on my
+perception long before the close of the honeymoon. Yet, as there was no
+mistake about the fundamental principle aforesaid, I soon learned, as
+will be seen, to estimate Mrs. Bullfrog’s deficiencies and
+superfluities at exactly their proper value.
+
+The same morning that Mrs. Bullfrog and I came together as a unit, we
+took two seats in the stage-coach and began our journey towards my
+place of business. There being no other passengers, we were as much
+alone and as free to give vent to our raptures as if I had hired a hack
+for the matrimonial jaunt. My bride looked charmingly in a green silk
+calash and riding habit of pelisse cloth; and whenever her red lips
+parted with a smile, each tooth appeared like an inestimable pearl.
+Such was my passionate warmth that—we had rattled out of the village,
+gentle reader, and were lonely as Adam and Eve in paradise—I plead
+guilty to no less freedom than a kiss. The gentle eye of Mrs. Bullfrog
+scarcely rebuked me for the profanation. Emboldened by her indulgence,
+I threw back the calash from her polished brow, and suffered my
+fingers, white and delicate as her own, to stray among those dark and
+glossy curls which realized my daydreams of rich hair.
+
+“My love,” said Mrs. Bullfrog tenderly, “you will disarrange my curls.”
+
+“Oh, no, my sweet Laura!” replied I, still playing with the glossy
+ringlet. “Even your fair hand could not manage a curl more delicately
+than mine. I propose myself the pleasure of doing up your hair in
+papers every evening at the same time with my own.”
+
+“Mr. Bullfrog,” repeated she, “you must not disarrange my curls.”
+
+This was spoken in a more decided tone than I had happened to hear,
+until then, from my gentlest of all gentle brides. At the same time she
+put up her hand and took mine prisoner; but merely drew it away from
+the forbidden ringlet, and then immediately released it. Now, I am a
+fidgety little man, and always love to have something in my fingers; so
+that, being debarred from my wife’s curls, I looked about me for any
+other plaything. On the front seat of the coach there was one of those
+small baskets in which travelling ladies who are too delicate to appear
+at a public table generally carry a supply of gingerbread, biscuits and
+cheese, cold ham, and other light refreshments, merely to sustain
+nature to the journey’s end. Such airy diet will sometimes keep them in
+pretty good flesh for a week together. Laying hold of this same little
+basket, I thrust my hand under the newspaper with which it was
+carefully covered.
+
+“What’s this, my dear?” cried I; for the black neck of a bottle had
+popped out of the basket.
+
+“A bottle of Kalydor, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, coolly taking the
+basket from my hands and replacing it on the front seat.
+
+There was no possibility of doubting my wife’s word; but I never knew
+genuine Kalydor, such as I use for my own complexion, to smell so much
+like cherry brandy. I was about to express my fears that the lotion
+would injure her skin, when an accident occurred which threatened more
+than a skin-deep injury. Our Jehu had carelessly driven over a heap of
+gravel and fairly capsized the coach, with the wheels in the air and
+our heels where our heads should have been. What became of my wits I
+cannot imagine; they have always had a perverse trick of deserting me
+just when they were most needed; but so it chanced, that in the
+confusion of our overthrow I quite forgot that there was a Mrs.
+Bullfrog in the world. Like many men’s wives, the good lady served her
+husband as a steppingstone. I had scrambled out of the coach and was
+instinctively settling my cravat, when somebody brushed roughly by me,
+and I heard a smart thwack upon the coachman’s ear.
+
+“Take that, you villain!” cried a strange, hoarse voice. “You have
+ruined me, you blackguard! I shall never be the woman I have been!”
+
+And then came a second thwack, aimed at the driver’s other ear; but
+which missed it, and hit him on the nose, causing a terrible effusion
+of blood. Now, who or what fearful apparition was inflicting this
+punishment on the poor fellow remained an impenetrable mystery to me.
+The blows were given by a person of grisly aspect, with a head almost
+bald, and sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though
+hardly to be classed in the gentler sex. There being no teeth to
+modulate the voice, it had a mumbled fierceness, not passionate, but
+stern, which absolutely made me quiver like calf’s-foot jelly. Who
+could the phantom be? The most awful circumstance of the affair is yet
+to be told: for this ogre, or whatever it was, had a riding habit like
+Mrs. Bullfrog’s, and also a green silk calash dangling down her back by
+the strings. In my terror and turmoil of mind I could imagine nothing
+less than that the Old Nick, at the moment of our overturn, had
+annihilated my wife and jumped into her petticoats. This idea seemed
+the most probable, since I could nowhere perceive Mrs. Bullfrog alive,
+nor, though I looked very sharply about the coach, could I detect any
+traces of that beloved woman’s dead body. There would have been a
+comfort in giving her Christian burial.
+
+“Come, sir, bestir yourself! Help this rascal to set up the coach,”
+said the hobgoblin to me; then, with a terrific screech at three
+countrymen at a distance, “Here, you fellows, ain’t you ashamed to
+stand off when a poor woman is in distress?”
+
+The countrymen, instead of fleeing for their lives, came running at
+full speed, and laid hold of the topsy-turvy coach. I, also, though a
+small-sized man, went to work like a son of Anak. The coachman, too,
+with the blood still streaming from his nose, tugged and toiled most
+manfully, dreading, doubtless, that the next blow might break his head.
+And yet, bemauled as the poor fellow had been, he seemed to glance at
+me with an eye of pity, as if my case were more deplorable than his.
+But I cherished a hope that all would turn out a dream, and seized the
+opportunity, as we raised the coach, to jam two of my fingers under the
+wheel, trusting that the pain would awaken me.
+
+“Why, here we are, all to rights again!” exclaimed a sweet voice
+behind. “Thank you for your assistance, gentlemen. My dear Mr.
+Bullfrog, how you perspire! Do let me wipe your face. Don’t take this
+little accident too much to heart, good driver. We ought to be thankful
+that none of our necks are broken.”
+
+“We might have spared one neck out of the three,” muttered the driver,
+rubbing his ear and pulling his nose, to ascertain whether he had been
+cuffed or not. “Why, the woman’s a witch!”
+
+I fear that the reader will not believe, yet it is positively a fact,
+that there stood Mrs. Bullfrog, with her glossy ringlets curling on her
+brow, and two rows of orient pearls gleaming between her parted lips,
+which wore a most angelic smile. She had regained her riding habit and
+calash from the grisly phantom, and was, in all respects, the lovely
+woman who had been sitting by my side at the instant of our overturn.
+How she had happened to disappear, and who had supplied her place, and
+whence she did now return, were problems too knotty for me to solve.
+There stood my wife. That was the one thing certain among a heap of
+mysteries. Nothing remained but to help her into the coach, and plod
+on, through the journey of the day and the journey of life, as
+comfortably as we could. As the driver closed the door upon us, I heard
+him whisper to the three countrymen, “How do you suppose a fellow feels
+shut up in the cage with a she tiger?”
+
+Of course this query could have no reference to my situation. Yet,
+unreasonable as it may appear, I confess that my feelings were not
+altogether so ecstatic as when I first called Mrs. Bullfrog mine. True,
+she was a sweet woman and an angel of a wife; but what if a Gorgon
+should return, amid the transports of our connubial bliss, and take the
+angel’s place. I recollected the tale of a fairy, who half the time was
+a beautiful woman and half the time a hideous monster. Had I taken that
+very fairy to be the wife of my bosom? While such whims and chimeras
+were flitting across my fancy I began to look askance at Mrs. Bullfrog,
+almost expecting that the transformation would be wrought before my
+eyes.
+
+To divert my mind, I took up the newspaper which had covered the little
+basket of refreshments, and which now lay at the bottom of the coach,
+blushing with a deep-red stain and emitting a potent spirituous fume
+from the contents of the broken bottle of Kalydor. The paper was two or
+three years old, but contained an article of several columns, in which
+I soon grew wonderfully interested. It was the report of a trial for
+breach of promise of marriage, giving the testimony in full, with
+fervid extracts from both the gentleman’s and lady’s amatory
+correspondence. The deserted damsel had personally appeared in court,
+and had borne energetic evidence to her lover’s perfidy and the
+strength of her blighted affections. On the defendant’s part there had
+been an attempt, though insufficiently sustained, to blast the
+plaintiff’s character, and a plea, in mitigation of damages, on account
+of her unamiable temper. A horrible idea was suggested by the lady’s
+name.
+
+“Madam,” said I, holding the newspaper before Mrs. Bullfrog’s
+eyes,—and, though a small, delicate, and thin-visaged man, I feel
+assured that I looked very terrific,—“madam,” repeated I, through my
+shut teeth, “were you the plaintiff in this cause?”
+
+“Oh, my dear Mr. Bullfrog,” replied my wife, sweetly, “I thought all
+the world knew that!”
+
+“Horror! horror!” exclaimed I, sinking back on the seat.
+
+Covering my face with both hands, I emitted a deep and deathlike groan,
+as if my tormented soul were rending me asunder—I, the most exquisitely
+fastidious of men, and whose wife was to have been the most delicate
+and refined of women, with all the fresh dew-drops glittering on her
+virgin rosebud of a heart!
+
+I thought of the glossy ringlets and pearly teeth; I thought of the
+Kalydor; I thought of the coachman’s bruised ear and bloody nose; I
+thought of the tender love secrets which she had whispered to the judge
+and jury and a thousand tittering auditors,—and gave another groan!
+
+“Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife.
+
+As I made no reply, she gently took my hands within her own, removed
+them from my face, and fixed her eyes steadfastly on mine.
+
+“Mr. Bullfrog,” said she, not unkindly, yet with all the decision of
+her strong character, “let me advise you to overcome this foolish
+weakness, and prove yourself, to the best of your ability, as good a
+husband as I will be a wife. You have discovered, perhaps, some little
+imperfections in your bride. Well, what did you expect? Women are not
+angels. If they were, they would go to heaven for husbands; or, at
+least, be more difficult in their choice on earth.”
+
+“But why conceal those imperfections?” interposed I, tremulously.
+
+“Now, my love, are not you a most unreasonable little man?” said Mrs.
+Bullfrog, patting me on the cheek. “Ought a woman to disclose her
+frailties earlier than the wedding day? Few husbands, I assure you,
+make the discovery in such good season, and still fewer complain that
+these trifles are concealed too long. Well, what a strange man you are!
+Poh! you are joking.”
+
+“But the suit for breach of promise!” groaned I.
+
+“Ah, and is that the rub?” exclaimed my wife. “Is it possible that you
+view that affair in an objectionable light? Mr. Bullfrog, I never could
+have dreamed it! Is it an objection that I have triumphantly defended
+myself against slander and vindicated my purity in a court of justice?
+Or do you complain because your wife has shown the proper spirit of a
+woman, and punished the villain who trifled with her affections?”
+
+“But,” persisted I, shrinking into a corner of the coach, however,—for
+I did not know precisely how much contradiction the proper spirit of a
+woman would endure,—“but, my love, would it not have been more
+dignified to treat the villain with the silent contempt he merited?”
+
+“That is all very well, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, slyly; “but, in
+that case, where would have been the five thousand dollars which are to
+stock your dry goods store?”
+
+“Mrs. Bullfrog, upon your honor,” demanded I, as if my life hung upon
+her words, “is there no mistake about those five thousand dollars?”
+
+“Upon my word and honor there is none,” replied she. “The jury gave me
+every cent the rascal had; and I have kept it all for my dear
+Bullfrog.”
+
+“Then, thou dear woman,” cried I, with an overwhelming gush of
+tenderness, “let me fold thee to my heart. The basis of matrimonial
+bliss is secure, and all thy little defects and frailties are forgiven.
+Nay, since the result has been so fortunate, I rejoice at the wrongs
+which drove thee to this blessed lawsuit. Happy Bullfrog that I am!”
+
+
+
+
+FIRE WORSHIP
+
+
+It is a great revolution in social and domestic life, and no less so in
+the life of a secluded student, this almost universal exchange of the
+open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. On such a morning
+as now lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the bright face of
+my ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the hearth and play the
+part of more familiar sunshine. It is sad to turn from the cloudy sky
+and sombre landscape; from yonder hill, with its crown of rusty, black
+pines, the foliage of which is so dismal in the absence of the sun;
+that bleak pasture-land, and the broken surface of the potato-field,
+with the brown clods partly concealed by the snowfall of last night;
+the swollen and sluggish river, with ice-incrusted borders, dragging
+its bluish-gray stream along the verge of our orchard like a snake half
+torpid with the cold,—it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so
+little comfort and find the same sullen influences brooding within the
+precincts of my study. Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and
+subtle spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize mankind
+and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate,
+whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient
+consolation for summer’s lingering advance and early flight? Alas!
+blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and
+mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to
+smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have been
+too scanty for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make our fire
+in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some half a dozen sticks of
+wood between dawn and nightfall.
+
+I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said that
+the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there
+and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the
+picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life. The
+domestic fire was a type of all these attributes, and seemed to bring
+might and majesty, and wild nature and a spiritual essence, into our in
+most home, and yet to dwell with us in such friendliness that its
+mysteries and marvels excited no dismay. The same mild companion that
+smiled so placidly in our faces was he that comes roaring out of Ætna
+and rushes madly up the sky like a fiend breaking loose from torment
+and fighting for a place among the upper angels. He it is, too, that
+leaps from cloud to cloud amid the crashing thunder-storm. It was he
+whom the Gheber worshipped with no unnatural idolatry; and it was he
+who devoured London and Moscow and many another famous city, and who
+loves to riot through our own dark forests and sweep across our
+prairies, and to whose ravenous maw, it is said, the universe shall one
+day be given as a final feast. Meanwhile he is the great artisan and
+laborer by whose aid men are enabled to build a world within a world,
+or, at least, to smooth down the rough creation which Nature flung to
+it. He forges the mighty anchor and every lesser instrument; he drives
+the steamboat and drags the rail-car; and it was he—this creature of
+terrible might, and so many-sided utility and all-comprehensive
+destructiveness—that used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our
+wintry days, and whom we have made the prisoner of this iron cage.
+
+How kindly he was! and, though the tremendous agent of change, yet
+bearing himself with such gentleness, so rendering himself a part of
+all life-long and age-coeval associations, that it seemed as if he were
+the great conservative of nature. While a man was true to the fireside,
+so long would he be true to country and law, to the God whom his
+fathers worshipped, to the wife of his youth, and to all things else
+which instinct or religion has taught us to consider sacred. With how
+sweet humility did this elemental spirit perform all needful offices
+for the household in which he was domesticated! He was equal to the
+concoction of a grand dinner, yet scorned not to roast a potato or
+toast a bit of cheese. How humanely did he cherish the school-boy’s icy
+fingers, and thaw the old man’s joints with a genial warmth which
+almost equalled the glow of youth! And how carefully did he dry the
+cowhide boots that had trudged through mud and snow, and the shaggy
+outside garment stiff with frozen sleet! taking heed, likewise, to the
+comfort of the faithful dog who had followed his master through the
+storm. When did he refuse a coal to light a pipe, or even a part of his
+own substance to kindle a neighbor’s fire? And then, at twilight, when
+laborer, or scholar, or mortal of whatever age, sex, or degree, drew a
+chair beside him and looked into his glowing face, how acute, how
+profound, how comprehensive was his sympathy with the mood of each and
+all! He pictured forth their very thoughts. To the youthful he showed
+the scenes of the adventurous life before them; to the aged the shadows
+of departed love and hope; and, if all earthly things had grown
+distasteful, he could gladden the fireside muser with golden glimpses
+of a better world. And, amid this varied communion with the human soul,
+how busily would the sympathizer, the deep moralist, the painter of
+magic pictures, be causing the teakettle to boil!
+
+Nor did it lessen the charm of his soft, familiar courtesy and
+helpfulness that the mighty spirit, were opportunity offered him, would
+run riot through the peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible
+embrace, and leave nothing of them save their whitened bones. This
+possibility of mad destruction only made his domestic kindness the more
+beautiful and touching. It was so sweet of him, being endowed with such
+power, to dwell day after day, and one long lonesome night after
+another, on the dusky hearth, only now and then betraying his wild
+nature by thrusting his red tongue out of the chimney-top! True, he had
+done much mischief in the world, and was pretty certain to do more; but
+his warm heart atoned for all. He was kindly to the race of man; and
+they pardoned his characteristic imperfections.
+
+The good old clergyman, my predecessor in this mansion, was well
+acquainted with the comforts of the fireside. His yearly allowance of
+wood, according to the terms of his settlement, was no less than sixty
+cords. Almost an annual forest was converted from sound oak logs into
+ashes, in the kitchen, the parlor, and this little study, where now an
+unworthy successor, not in the pastoral office, but merely in his
+earthly abode, sits scribbling beside an air-tight stove. I love to
+fancy one of those fireside days while the good man, a contemporary of
+the Revolution, was in his early prime, some five-and-sixty years ago.
+Before sunrise, doubtless, the blaze hovered upon the gray skirts of
+night and dissolved the frostwork that had gathered like a curtain over
+the small window-panes. There is something peculiar in the aspect of
+the morning fireside; a fresher, brisker glare; the absence of that
+mellowness which can be produced only by half-consumed logs, and
+shapeless brands with the white ashes on them, and mighty coals, the
+remnant of tree-trunks that the hungry, elements have gnawed for hours.
+The morning hearth, too, is newly swept, and the brazen andirons well
+brightened, so that the cheerful fire may see its face in them. Surely
+it was happiness, when the pastor, fortified with a substantial
+breakfast, sat down in his arm-chair and slippers and opened the Whole
+Body of Divinity, or the Commentary on Job, or whichever of his old
+folios or quartos might fall within the range of his weekly sermons. It
+must have been his own fault if the warmth and glow of this abundant
+hearth did not permeate the discourse and keep his audience comfortable
+in spite of the bitterest northern blast that ever wrestled with the
+church-steeple. He reads while the heat warps the stiff covers of the
+volume; he writes without numbness either in his heart or fingers; and,
+with unstinted hand, he throws fresh sticks of wood upon the fire.
+
+A parishioner comes in. With what warmth of benevolence—how should he
+be otherwise than warm in any of his attributes?—does the minister bid
+him welcome, and set a chair for him in so close proximity to the
+hearth, that soon the guest finds it needful to rub his scorched shins
+with his great red hands! The melted snow drips from his steaming boots
+and bubbles upon the hearth. His puckered forehead unravels its
+entanglement of crisscross wrinkles. We lose much of the enjoyment of
+fireside heat without such an opportunity of marking its genial effect
+upon those who have been looking the inclement weather in the face. In
+the course of the day our clergyman himself strides forth, perchance to
+pay a round of pastoral visits; or, it may he, to visit his mountain of
+a wood-pile and cleave the monstrous logs into billets suitable for the
+fire. He returns with fresher life to his beloved hearth. During the
+short afternoon the western sunshine comes into the study and strives
+to stare the ruddy blaze out of countenance but with only a brief
+triumph, soon to be succeeded by brighter glories of its rival.
+Beautiful it is to see the strengthening gleam, the deepening light
+that gradually casts distinct shadows of the human figure, the table,
+and the high-backed chairs upon the opposite wall, and at length, as
+twilight comes on, replenishes the room with living radiance and makes
+life all rose-color. Afar the wayfarer discerns the flickering flame as
+it dances upon the windows, and hails it as a beacon-light of humanity,
+reminding him, in his cold and lonely path, that the world is not all
+snow, and solitude, and desolation. At eventide, probably, the study
+was peopled with the clergyman’s wife and family, and children tumbled
+themselves upon the hearth-rug, and grave puss sat with her back to the
+fire, or gazed, with a semblance of human meditation, into its fervid
+depths. Seasonably the plenteous ashes of the day were raked over the
+mouldering brands, and from the heap came jets of flame, and an incense
+of night-long smoke creeping quietly up the chimney.
+
+Heaven forgive the old clergyman! In his later life, when for almost
+ninety winters he had been gladdened by the firelight,—when it had
+gleamed upon him from infancy to extreme age, and never without
+brightening his spirits as well as his visage, and perhaps keeping him
+alive so long,—he had the heart to brick up his chimney-place and bid
+farewell to the face of his old friend forever, why did he not take an
+eternal leave of the sunshine too? His sixty cords of wood had probably
+dwindled to a far less ample supply in modern times; and it is certain
+that the parsonage had grown crazy with time and tempest and pervious
+to the cold; but still it was one of the saddest tokens of the decline
+and fall of open fireplaces that, the gray patriarch should have
+deigned to warm himself at an air-tight stove.
+
+And I, likewise,—who have found a home in this ancient owl’s-nest since
+its former occupant took his heavenward flight,—I, to my shame, have
+put up stoves in kitchen and parlor and chamber. Wander where you will
+about the house, not a glimpse of the earth-born, heaven-aspiring fiend
+of Ætna,—him that sports in the thunder-storm, the idol of the Ghebers,
+the devourer of cities, the forest-rioter and prairie-sweeper, the
+future destroyer of our earth, the old chimney-corner companion who
+mingled himself so sociably with household joys and sorrows,—not a
+glimpse of this mighty and kindly one will greet your eyes. He is now
+an invisible presence. There is his iron cage. Touch it, and he
+scorches your fingers. He delights to singe a garment or perpetrate any
+other little unworthy mischief; for his temper is ruined by the
+ingratitude of mankind, for whom he cherished such warmth of feeling,
+and to whom he taught all their arts, even that of making his own
+prison-house. In his fits of rage he puffs volumes of smoke and noisome
+gas through the crevices of the door, and shakes the iron walls of his
+dungeon so as to overthrow the ornamental urn upon its summit. We
+tremble lest he should break forth amongst us. Much of his time is
+spent in sighs, burdened with unutterable grief, and long drawn through
+the funnel. He amuses himself, too, with repeating all the whispers,
+the moans, and the louder utterances or tempestuous howls of the wind;
+so that the stove becomes a microcosm of the aerial world. Occasionally
+there are strange combinations of sounds,—voices talking almost
+articulately within the hollow chest of iron,—insomuch that fancy
+beguiles me with the idea that my firewood must have grown in that
+infernal forest of lamentable trees which breathed their complaints to
+Dante. When the listener is half asleep he may readily take these
+voices for the conversation of spirits and assign them an intelligible
+meaning. Anon there is a pattering noise,—drip, drip, drip,—as if a
+summer shower were falling within the narrow circumference of the
+stove.
+
+These barren and tedious eccentricities are all that the air-tight
+stove can bestow in exchange for the invaluable moral influences which
+we have lost by our desertion of the open fireplace. Alas! is this
+world so very bright that we can afford to choke up such a domestic
+fountain of gladsomeness, and sit down by its darkened source without
+being conscious of a gloom?
+
+It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it
+has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and
+vivifying an element as firelight. The effects will be more perceptible
+on our children and the generations that shall succeed them than on
+ourselves, the mechanism of whose life may remain unchanged, though its
+spirit be far other than it was. The sacred trust of the household fire
+has been transmitted in unbroken succession from the earliest ages, and
+faithfully cherished in spite of every discouragement such as the
+curfew law of the Norman conquerors, until in these evil days physical
+science has nearly succeeded in extinguishing it. But we at least have
+our youthful recollections tinged with the glow of the hearth, and our
+life-long habits and associations arranged on the principle of a mutual
+bond in the domestic fire. Therefore, though the sociable friend be
+forever departed, yet in a degree he will be spiritually present with
+us; and still more will the empty forms which were once full of his
+rejoicing presence continue to rule our manners. We shall draw our
+chairs together as we and our forefathers have been wont for thousands
+of years back, and sit around some blank and empty corner of the room,
+babbling with unreal cheerfulness of topics suitable to the homely
+fireside. A warmth from the past—from the ashes of bygone years and the
+raked-up embers of long ago—will sometimes thaw the ice about our
+hearts; but it must be otherwise with our successors. On the most
+favorable supposition, they will be acquainted with the fireside in no
+better shape than that of the sullen stove; and more probably they will
+have grown up amid furnace heat in houses which might be fancied to
+have their foundation over the infernal pit, whence sulphurous steams
+and unbreathable exhalations ascend through the apertures of the floor.
+There will be nothing to attract these poor children to one centre.
+They will never behold one another through that peculiar medium of
+vision the ruddy gleam of blazing wood or bituminous coal—-which gives
+the human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and melts all
+humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may
+still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never
+gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious
+Jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual
+way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple
+fireside word,—will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract
+the air of debate, and all mortal intercourse be chilled with a fatal
+frost.
+
+In classic times, the exhortation to fight “pro axis et focis,” for the
+altars and the hearths, was considered the strongest appeal that could
+be made to patriotism. And it seemed an immortal utterance; for all
+subsequent ages and people have acknowledged its force and responded to
+it with the full portion of manhood that nature had assigned to each.
+Wisely were the altar and the hearth conjoined in one mighty sentence;
+for the hearth, too, had its kindred sanctity. Religion sat down beside
+it, not in the priestly robes which decorated and perhaps disguised her
+at the altar, but arrayed in a simple matron’s garb, and uttering her
+lessons with the tenderness of a mother’s voice and heart. The holy
+hearth! If any earthly and material thing, or rather a divine idea
+embodied in brick and mortar, might be supposed to possess the
+permanence of moral truth, it was this. All revered it. The man who did
+not put off his shoes upon this holy ground would have deemed it
+pastime to trample upon the altar. It has been our task to uproot the
+hearth. What further reform is left for our children to achieve, unless
+they overthrow the altar too? And by what appeal hereafter, when the
+breath of hostile armies may mingle with the pure, cold breezes of our
+country, shall we attempt to rouse up native valor? Fight for your
+hearths? There will be none throughout the land. FIGHT FOR YOUR STOVES!
+Not I, in faith. If in such a cause I strike a blow, it shall be on the
+invader’s part; and Heaven grant that it may shatter the abomination
+all to pieces!
+
+
+
+
+BUDS AND BIRD VOICES
+
+
+Balmy Spring—weeks later than we expected and months later than we
+longed for her—comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls
+of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window, inviting
+me to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture
+of her genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove.
+As the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable
+forms of thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement
+of this little chamber during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather;
+visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures of real life, tinted with
+nature’s homely gray and russet; scenes in dreamland, bedizened with
+rainbow hues which faded before they were well laid on,—all these may
+vanish now, and leave me to mould a fresh existence out of sunshine,
+Brooding Meditation may flap her dusky wings and take her owl-like
+Right, blinking amid the cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions
+befit the season of frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the
+blast howls through the black-ash trees of our avenue and the drifting
+snow-storm chokes up the wood-paths and fills the highway from stone
+wall to stone wall. In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts
+should follow the winter northward with the sombre and thoughtful
+crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force; we live,
+not to think or to labor, but for the simple end of being happy.
+Nothing for the present hour is worthy of man’s infinite capacity save
+to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and sympathize with the reviving
+earth.
+
+The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because Winter
+lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can
+hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a
+fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river and beheld
+the accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the stream. Except in
+streaks here and there upon the hillsides, the whole visible universe
+was then covered with deep snow, the nethermost layer of which had been
+deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the
+beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white
+napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less
+time than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate
+the power of gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the
+moral winter of man’s heart? There have been no tempestuous rains, even
+no sultry days, but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a day
+of kindly sunshine, and now a no less kindly mist or a soft descent of
+showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped.
+The snow has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in
+the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain
+in the landscape; and those I shall almost regret to miss when
+to-morrow I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring
+pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the
+roadside the green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of
+the snow-drifts. The pastures and mowing-fields have not vet assumed a
+general aspect of verdure; but neither have they the cheerless-brown
+tint which they wear in latter autumn when vegetation has entirely
+ceased; there is now a faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into
+the warm reality. Some tracts in a happy exposure,—as, for instance,
+yonder southwestern slope of an orchard, in front of that old red
+farm-house beyond the river,—such patches of land already wear a
+beautiful and tender green, to which no future luxuriance can add a
+charm. It looks unreal; a prophecy, a hope, a transitory effect of
+sonic peculiar light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of
+the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts, but
+the dark and barren landscape all around them, is a shadow and a dream.
+Each moment wins seine portion of the earth from death to life; a
+sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope of a bank which
+an instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an
+apparition of green grass!
+
+The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already
+appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic
+touch they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the
+wind which now sighs through their naked branches might make sudden
+music amid innumerable leaves. The mossgrown willow-tree which for
+forty years past has overshadowed these western windows will be among
+the first to put on its green attire. There are some objections to the
+willow; it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder
+with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly
+agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a
+firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost
+the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in
+its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow
+yet scarcely withered leaves upon the ground. All through the winter,
+too, its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a
+cheering influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a
+clouded sky it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would
+lose a charm were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over
+the snow-covered roof and its heap of summer verdure.
+
+The lilac-shrubs under my study-windows are likewise almost in leaf: in
+two or three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the topmost
+bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost
+the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart, or the judgment, or
+the moral sense, or the taste is dissatisfied with their present
+aspect. Old age is not venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs,
+rose-bushes, or any other ornamental shrub; it seems as if such plants,
+as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish always in immortal
+youth, or, at least, to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of
+beauty are trees of paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by
+their original nature, though they have lost that precious birthright
+by being transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous
+unfitness in the idea of a time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush.
+The analogy holds good in human life. Persons who can only be graceful
+and ornamental—who can give the world nothing but flowers—should die
+young, and never be seen with gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the
+flower-shrubs with mossy bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs
+under my window. Not that beauty is worthy of less than immortality;
+no, the beautiful should live forever,—and thence, perhaps, the sense
+of impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on
+the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as long as
+they may, and contort themselves into whatever perversity of shape they
+please, and deck their withered limbs with a springtime gaudiness of
+pink blossoms; still they are respectable, even if they afford us only
+an apple or two in a season. Those few apples—or, at all events, the
+remembrance of apples in bygone years—are the atonement which
+utilitarianism inexorably demands for the privilege of lengthened life.
+Human flower-shrubs, if they will grow old on earth, should, besides
+their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of fruit that will satisfy
+earthly appetites, else neither man nor the decorum of nature will deem
+it fit that the moss should gather on them.
+
+One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet
+of winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden
+beneath it. Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices. The
+beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted
+deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present hour.
+Our avenue is strewn with the whole crop of autumn’s withered leaves.
+There are quantities of decayed branches which one tempest after
+another has flung down, black and rotten, and one or two with the ruin
+of a bird’s-nest clinging to them. In the garden are the dried
+bean-vines, the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old
+cabbages which were frozen into the soil before their unthrifty
+cultivator could find time to gather them. How invariably, throughout
+all the forms of life, do we find these intermingled memorials of
+death! On the soil of thought and in the garden of the heart, as well
+as in the sensual world, he withered leaves,—the ideas and feelings
+that we have done with. There is no wind strong enough to sweep them
+away; infinite space will not garner then from our sight. What mean
+they? Why may we not be permitted to live and enjoy, as if this were
+the first life and our own the primal enjoyment, instead of treading
+always on these dry hones and mouldering relics, from the aged
+accumulation of which springs all that now appears so young and new?
+Sweet must have been the springtime of Eden, when no earlier year had
+strewn its decay upon the virgin turf and no former experience had
+ripened into summer and faded into autumn in the hearts of its
+inhabitants! That was a world worth living in. O then murmurer, it is
+out of the very wantonness of such a life that then feignest these idle
+lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is the first-created
+inhabitant of its own Eden. We dwell in an old moss-covered mansion,
+and tread in the worn footprints of the past, and have a gray
+clergyman’s ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all these
+outward circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing
+power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power,—should the
+withered leaves, and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house,
+and the ghost of the gray past ever become its realities, and the
+verdure and the freshness merely its faint dream,—then let it pray to
+be released from earth. It will need the air of heaven to revive its
+pristine energies.
+
+What an unlooked-for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of
+black-ash and balm of Gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have our
+feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so
+industriously as in this homely yard, along the base of the stone wall,
+and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and especially around the
+southern doorstep,—a locality which seems particularly favorable to its
+growth, for it is already tall enough to bend over and wave in the
+wind. I observe that several weeds—and most frequently a plant that
+stains the fingers with its yellow juice—have survived and retained
+their freshness and sap throughout the winter. One knows not how they
+have deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race. They
+are now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may preach mortality
+to the present generation of flowers and weeds.
+
+Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds?
+Even the crows were welcome as the sable harbingers of a brighter and
+livelier race. They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly
+to have betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they
+haunt all summer long. Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel
+as if I had intruded among a company of silent worshippers, as they sit
+in Sabbath stillness among the tree-tops. Their voices, when they
+speak, are in admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a
+summer afternoon; and resounding so far above the head, their loud
+clamor increases the religious quiet of the scene instead of breaking
+it. A crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of
+his gravity of mien and black attire; he is certainly a thief, and
+probably an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a moral
+point of view. These denizens of seabeaten rocks and haunters of the
+lonely beach come up our inland river at this season, and soar high
+overhead, flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are
+among the most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest
+upon the air as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The
+imagination has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not
+flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds and greet these
+lofty-flighted gulls, and repose confidently with them upon the
+sustaining atmosphere. Duck’s have their haunts along the solitary
+places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the broad bosom of the
+overflowed meadows. Their flight is too rapid and determined for the
+eye to catch enjoyment from it, although it never fails to stir up the
+heart with the sportsman’s ineradicable instinct. They have now gone
+farther northward, but will visit us again in autumn.
+
+The smaller birds,—the little songsters of the woods, and those that
+haunt man’s dwellings and claim human friendship by building their
+nests under the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees,—these
+require a touch more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them
+justice. Their outburst of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry
+chains. We need not deem it a too high and solemn word to call it a
+hymn of praise to the Creator; since Nature, who pictures the reviving
+year in so many sights of beauty, has expressed the sentiment of
+renewed life in no other sound save the notes of these blessed birds.
+Their music, however, just now, seems to be incidental, and not the
+result of a set purpose. They are discussing the economy of life and
+love and the site and architecture of their summer residences, and have
+no time to sit on a twig and pour forth solemn hymns, or overtures,
+operas, symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked; grave
+subjects are settled in quick and animated debate; and only by
+occasional accident, as from pure ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its
+tiny waves of golden sound through the atmosphere. Their little bodies
+are as busy as their voices; they are all a constant flutter and
+restlessness. Even when two or three retreat to a tree-top to hold
+council, they wag their tails and heads all the time with the
+irrepressible activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their
+brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal age of
+sluggish man. The blackbirds, three species of which consort together,
+are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great companies of
+them—more than the famous “four-and-twenty” whom Mother Goose has
+immortalized—congregate in contiguous treetops and vociferate with all
+the clamor and confusion of a turbulent political meeting. Politics,
+certainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous debates; but still,
+unlike all other politicians, they instil melody into their individual
+utterances and produce harmony as a general effect. Of all bird voices,
+none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear than those of swallows, in
+the dim, sunstreaked interior of a lofty barn; they address the heart
+with even a closer sympathy than robin-redbreast. But, indeed, all
+these winged people, that dwell in the vicinity of homesteads, seem to
+partake of human nature, and possess the germ, if not the development,
+of immortal souls. We hear them saying their melodious prayers at
+morning’s blush and eventide. A little while ago, in the deep of night,
+there came the lively thrill of a bird’s note from a neighboring
+tree,—a real song, such as greets the purple dawn or mingles with the
+yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by pouring it forth at
+midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the midst of a dream in
+which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but suddenly awoke
+on a cold leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating through
+his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination for reality.
+
+Insects are among the earliest births of sprung. Multitudes of I know
+not what species appeared long ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds
+of them, almost too minute for sight, hover in a beam of sunshine, and
+vanish, as if annihilated, when they pass into the shade. A mosquito
+has already been heard to sound the small horror of his bugle-horn.
+Wasps infest the sunny windows of the house. A bee entered one of the
+chambers with a prophecy of flowers. Rare butterflies came before the
+snow was off, flaunting in the chill breeze, and looking forlorn and
+all astray, in spite of the magnificence of their dark velvet cloaks,
+with golden borders.
+
+The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the
+wanderer. In a walk, the other day, I found no violets, nor anemones,
+nor anything in the likeness of a flower. It was worth while, however,
+to ascend our opposite hill for the sake of gaining a general idea of
+the advance of spring, which I had hitherto been studying in its minute
+developments. The river lay around me in a semicircle, overflowing all
+the meadows which give it its Indian name, and offering a noble breadth
+to sparkle in the sunbeams. Along the hither shore a row of trees stood
+up to their knees in water; and afar off, on the surface of the stream,
+tufts of bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe. The most
+striking objects were great solitary trees here and there, with a
+mile-wide waste of water all around them. The curtailment of the trunk,
+by its immersion in the river, quite destroys the fair proportions of
+the tree, and thus makes us sensible of a regularity and propriety in
+the usual forms of nature. The flood of the present season—though it
+never amounts to a freshet on our quiet stream—has encroached farther
+upon the land than any previous one for at least a score of years. It
+has overflowed stone fences, and even rendered a portion of the highway
+navigable for boats.
+
+The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands become
+annexed to the mainland; and other islands emerge, like new creations,
+from the watery waste. The scene supplies an admirable image of the
+receding of the Nile, except that there is no deposit of black slime;
+or of Noah’s flood, only that there is a freshness and novelty in these
+recovered portions of the continent which give the impression of a
+world just made rather than of one so polluted that a deluge had been
+requisite to purify it. These upspringing islands are the greenest
+spots in the landscape; the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover
+them with verdure.
+
+Thank Providence for spring! The earth—and man himself, by sympathy
+with his birthplace would be far other than we find them if life toiled
+wearily onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit.
+Will the world ever be so decayed that spring may not renew its
+greenness? Can man be so dismally age stricken that no faintest
+sunshine of his youth may revisit him once a year? It is impossible.
+The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; the good old
+pastor who once dwelt here renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in
+the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy
+soul if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege of
+springtime sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no
+reformation of its evil, no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant
+struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the
+present, and thinks not of the future; autumn is a rich conservative;
+winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the
+remembrance of what has been; but spring, with its outgushing life, is
+the true type of the movement.
+
+
+
+
+MONSIEUR DU MIROIR
+
+
+Than the gentleman above named, there is nobody, in the whole circle of
+my acquaintance, whom I have more attentively studied, yet of whom I
+have less real knowledge, beneath the surface which it pleases him to
+present. Being anxious to discover who and what he really is, and how
+connected with me, and what are to be the results to him and to myself
+of the joint interest which, without any choice on my part, seems to be
+permanently established between us, and incited, furthermore, by the
+propensities of a student of human nature, though doubtful whether
+Monsieur du Miroir have aught of humanity but the figure,—I have
+determined to place a few of his remarkable points before the public,
+hoping to be favored with some clew to the explanation of his
+character. Nor let the reader condemn any part of the narrative as
+frivolous, since a subject of such grave reflection diffuses its
+importance through the minutest particulars; and there is no judging
+beforehand what odd little circumstance may do the office of a blind
+man’s dog among the perplexities of this dark investigation; and
+however extraordinary, marvellous, preternatural, and utterly
+incredible some of the meditated disclosures may appear, I pledge my
+honor to maintain as sacred a regard to fact as if my testimony were
+given on oath and involved the dearest interests of the personage in
+question. Not that there is matter for a criminal accusation against
+Monsieur du Miroir, nor am I the man to bring it forward if there were.
+The chief that I complain of is his impenetrable mystery, which is no
+better than nonsense if it conceal anything good, and much worse in the
+contrary case.
+
+But, if undue partialities could be supposed to influence me, Monsieur
+du Miroir might hope to profit rather than to suffer by them, for in
+the whole of our long intercourse we have seldom had the slightest
+disagreement; and, moreover, there are reasons for supposing him a near
+relative of mine, and consequently entitled to the best word that I can
+give him. He bears indisputably a strong personal resemblance to
+myself, and generally puts on mourning at the funerals of the family.
+On the other hand, his name would indicate a French descent; in which
+case, infinitely preferring that my blood should flow from a bold
+British and pure Puritan source, I beg leave to disclaim all kindred
+with Monsieur du Miroir. Some genealogists trace his origin to Spain,
+and dub him a knight of the order of the CABALLEROS DE LOS ESPEJOZ, one
+of whom was overthrown by Don Quixote. But what says Monsieur du Miroir
+himself of his paternity and his fatherland? Not a word did he ever say
+about the matter; and herein, perhaps, lies one of his most especial
+reasons for maintaining such a vexatious mystery, that he lacks the
+faculty of speech to expound it. His lips are sometimes seen to move;
+his eyes and countenance are alive with shifting expression, as if
+corresponding by visible hieroglyphics to his modulated breath; and
+anon he will seem to pause with as satisfied an air as if he had been
+talking excellent sense. Good sense or bad, Monsieur du Miroir is the
+sole judge of his own conversational powers, never having whispered so
+much as a syllable that reached the ears of any other auditor. Is he
+really dumb? or is all the world deaf? or is it merely a piece of my
+friend’s waggery, meant for nothing but to make fools of us? If so, he
+has the joke all to himself.
+
+This dumb devil which possesses Monsieur do Miroir is, I am persuaded,
+the sole reason that he does not make me the most flattering
+protestations of friendship. In many particulars—indeed, as to all his
+cognizable and not preternatural points, except that, once in a great
+while, I speak a word or two—there exists the greatest apparent
+sympathy between us. Such is his confidence in my taste that he goes
+astray from the general fashion and copies all his dresses after mine.
+I never try on a new garment without expecting to meet, Monsieur du
+Miroir in one of the same pattern. He has duplicates of all my
+waistcoats and cravats, shirt-bosoms of precisely a similar plait, and
+an old coat for private wear, manufactured, I suspect, by a Chinese
+tailor, in exact imitation of a beloved old coat of mine, with a
+facsimile, stitch by stitch, of a patch upon the elbow. In truth, the
+singular and minute coincidences that occur, both in the accidents of
+the passing day and the serious events of our lives, remind me of those
+doubtful legends of lovers, or twin children, twins of fate, who have
+lived, enjoyed, suffered, and died in unison, each faithfully repeating
+the last tremor of the other’s breath, though separated by vast tracts
+of sea and land. Strange to say, my incommodities belong equally to my
+companion, though the burden is nowise alleviated by his participation.
+The other morning, after a night of torment from the toothache, I met
+Monsieur du Miroir with such a swollen anguish in his cheek that my own
+pangs were redoubled, as were also his, if I might judge by a fresh
+contortion of his visage. All the inequalities of my spirits are
+communicated to him, causing the unfortunate Monsieur du Miroir to mope
+and scowl through a whole summer’s day, or to laugh as long, for no
+better reason than the gay or gloomy crotchets of my brain. Once we
+were joint sufferers of a three months’ sickness, and met like mutual
+ghosts in the first days of convalescence. Whenever I have been in
+love, Monsieur du Miroir has looked passionate and tender; and never
+did my mistress discard me, but this too susceptible gentleman grew
+lackadaisical. His temper, also, rises to blood heat, fever heat, or
+boiling-water beat, according to the measure of any wrong which might
+seem to have fallen entirely on myself. I have sometimes been calmed
+down by the sight of my own inordinate wrath depicted on his frowning
+brow. Yet, however prompt in taking up my quarrels, I cannot call to
+mind that he ever struck a downright blow in my behalf; nor, in fact,
+do I perceive that any real and tangible good has resulted from his
+constant interference in my affairs; so that, in my distrustful moods,
+I am apt to suspect Monsieur du Miroir’s sympathy to be mere outward
+show, not a whit better nor worse than other people’s sympathy.
+Nevertheless, as mortal man must have something in the guise of
+sympathy,—and whether the true metal, or merely copper-washed, is of
+less moment,—I choose rather to content myself with Monsieur du
+Miroir’s, such as it is, than to seek the sterling coin, and perhaps
+miss even the counterfeit.
+
+In my age of vanities I have often seen him in the ballroom, and might
+again were I to seek him there. We have encountered each other at the
+Tremont Theatre, where, however, he took his seat neither in the
+dress-circle, pit, nor upper regions, nor threw a single glance at the
+stage, though the brightest star, even Fanny Kemble herself, might be
+culminating there. No; this whimsical friend of mine chose to linger in
+the saloon, near one of the large looking-glasses which throw back
+their pictures of the illuminated room. He is so full of these
+unaccountable eccentricities that I never like to notice Monsieur du
+Miroir, nor to acknowledge the slightest connection with him, in places
+of public resort. He, however, has no scruple about claiming my
+acquaintance, even when his common-sense, if he had any, might teach
+him that I would as willingly exchange a nod with the Old Nick. It was
+but the other day that he got into a large brass kettle at the entrance
+of a hardware-store, and thrust his head, the moment afterwards, into a
+bright, new warming-pan, whence he gave me a most merciless look of
+recognition. He smiled, and so did I; but these childish tricks make
+decent people rather shy of Monsieur du Miroir, and subject him to more
+dead cuts than any other gentleman in town.
+
+One of this singular person’s most remarkable peculiarities is his
+fondness for water, wherein he excels any temperance man whatever. His
+pleasure, it must be owned, is not so much to drink it (in which
+respect a very moderate quantity will answer his occasions) as to souse
+himself over head and ears wherever he may meet with it. Perhaps he is
+a merman, or born of a mermaid’s marriage with a mortal, and thus
+amphibious by hereditary right, like the children which the old river
+deities, or nymphs of fountains, gave to earthly love. When no cleaner
+bathing-place happened to be at hand, I have seen the foolish fellow in
+a horse-pond. Some times he refreshes himself in the trough of a
+town-pump, without caring what the people think about him. Often, while
+carefully picking my way along the street after a heavy shower, I have
+been scandalized to see Monsieur du Miroir, in full dress, paddling
+from one mud-puddle to another, and plunging into the filthy depths of
+each. Seldom have I peeped into a well without discerning this
+ridiculous gentleman at the bottom, whence he gazes up, as through a
+long telescopic tube, and probably makes discoveries among the stars by
+daylight. Wandering along lonesome paths or in pathless forests, when I
+have come to virgin fountains of which it would have been pleasant to
+deem myself the first discoverer, I have started to find Monsieur du
+Miroir there before me. The solitude seemed lonelier for his presence.
+I have leaned from a precipice that frowns over Lake George, which the
+French call nature’s font of sacramental water, and used it in their
+log-churches here and their cathedrals beyond the sea, and seen him far
+below in that pure element. At Niagara, too, where I would gladly have
+forgotten both myself and him, I could not help observing my companion
+in the smooth water on the very verge of the cataract just above the
+Table Rock. Were I to reach the sources of the Nile, I should expect to
+meet him there. Unless he be another Ladurlad, whose garments the depth
+of ocean could not moisten, it is difficult to conceive how he keeps
+himself in any decent pickle; though I am bound to confess that his
+clothes seem always as dry and comfortable as my own. But, as a friend,
+I could wish that he would not so often expose himself in liquor.
+
+All that I have hitherto related may be classed among those little
+personal oddities which agreeably diversify the surface of society,
+and, though they may sometimes annoy us, yet keep our daily intercourse
+fresher and livelier than if they were done away. By an occasional
+hint, however, I have endeavored to pave the way for stranger things to
+come, which, had they been disclosed at once, Monsieur du Miroir might
+have been deemed a shadow, and myself a person of no veracity, and this
+truthful history a fabulous legend. But, now that the reader knows me
+worthy of his confidence, I will begin to make him stare.
+
+To speak frankly, then, I could bring the most astounding proofs that
+Monsieur du Miroir is at least a conjurer, if not one of that unearthly
+tribe with whom conjurers deal. He has inscrutable methods of conveying
+himself from place to place with the rapidity of the swiftest steamboat
+or rail-car. Brick walls and oaken doors and iron bolts are no
+impediment to his passage. Here in my chamber, for instance, as the
+evening deepens into night, I sit alone,—the key turned and withdrawn
+from the lock, the keyhole stuffed with paper to keep out a peevish
+little blast of wind. Yet, lonely as I seem, were I to lift one of the
+lamps and step five paces eastward, Monsieur du Miroir would be sure to
+meet me with a lamp also in his hand; and were I to take the
+stage-coach to-morrow, without giving him the least hint of my design,
+and post onward till the week’s end, at whatever hotel I might find
+myself I should expect to share my private apartment with this
+inevitable Monsieur du Miroir. Or, out of a mere wayward fantasy, were
+I to go, by moonlight, and stand beside the stone Pout of the Shaker
+Spring at Canterbury, Monsieur du Miroir would set forth on the same
+fool’s errand, and would not fail to meet me there. Shall I heighten
+the reader’s wonder? While writing these latter sentences, I happened
+to glance towards the large, round globe of one off the brass andirons,
+and lo! a miniature apparition of Monsieur du Miroir, with his face
+widened and grotesquely contorted, as if he were making fun of my
+amazement! But he has played so many of these jokes that they begin to
+lose their effect. Once, presumptuous that he was, he stole into the
+heaven of a young lady’s eyes; so that, while I gazed and was dreaming
+only of herself, I found him also in my dream. Years have so changed
+him since that he need never hope to enter those heavenly orbs again.
+
+From these veritable statements it will be readily concluded that, had
+Monsieur du Miroir played such pranks in old witch times, matters might
+have gone hard with him; at least if the constable and posse comitatus
+could have executed a warrant, or the jailer had been cunning enough to
+keep him. But it has often occurred to me as a very singular
+circumstance, and as betokening either a temperament morbidly
+suspicious or some weighty cause of apprehension, that he never trusts
+himself within the grasp even of his most intimate friend. If you step
+forward to meet him, he readily advances; if you offer him your hand,
+he extends his own with an air of the utmost frankness; but, though you
+calculate upon a hearty shake, you do not get hold of his little
+finger. Ah, this Monsieur du Miroir is a slippery fellow!
+
+These truly are matters of special admiration. After vainly
+endeavoring, by the strenuous exertion of my own wits, to gain a
+satisfactory insight into the character of Monsieur du Miroir, I had
+recourse to certain wise men, and also to books of abstruse philosophy,
+seeking who it was that haunted me, and why. I heard long lectures and
+read huge volumes with little profit beyond the knowledge that many
+former instances are recorded, in successive ages, of similar
+connections between ordinary mortals and beings possessing the
+attributes of Monsieur du Miroir. Some now alive, perhaps, besides
+myself, have such attendants. Would that Monsieur du Miroir could be
+persuaded to transfer his attachment to one of those, and allow some
+other of his race to assume the situation that he now holds in regard
+to me! If I must needs have so intrusive an intimate, who stares me in
+the face in my closest privacy, and follows me even to my bedchamber, I
+should prefer—scandal apart—the laughing bloom of a young girl to the
+dark and bearded gravity of my present companion. But such desires are
+never to be gratified. Though the members of Monsieur du Miroir’s
+family have been accused, perhaps justly, of visiting their friends
+often in splendid halls, and seldom in darksome dungeons, yet they
+exhibit a rare constancy to the objects of their first attachment,
+however unlovely in person or unamiable in disposition,—however
+unfortunate, or even infamous, and deserted by all the world besides.
+So will it be with my associate. Our fates appear inseparably blended.
+It is my belief, as I find him mingling with my earliest recollections,
+that we came into existence together, as my shadow follows me into the
+sunshine, and that hereafter, as heretofore, the brightness or gloom of
+my fortunes will shine upon, or darken, the face of Monsieur du Miroir.
+As we have been young together, and as it is now near the summer noon
+with both of us, so, if long life be granted, shall each count his own
+wrinkles on the other’s brow and his white hairs on the other’s head.
+And when the coffin-lid shall have closed over me and that face and
+form, which, more truly than the lover swears it to his beloved, are
+the sole light of his existence,—when they shall be laid in that dark
+chamber, whither his swift and secret footsteps cannot bring him,—then
+what is to become of poor Monsieur du Miroir? Will he have the
+fortitude, with my other friends, to take a last look at my pale
+countenance? Will he walk foremost in the funeral train? Will he come
+often and haunt around my grave, and weed away the nettles, and plant
+flowers amid the verdure, and scrape the moss out of the letters of my
+burial-stone? Will he linger where I have lived, to remind the
+neglectful world of one who staked much to win a name, but will not
+then care whether he lost or won?
+
+Not thus will he prove his deep fidelity. O, what terror, if this
+friend of mine, after our last farewell, should step into the crowded
+street, or roam along our old frequented path by the still waters, or
+sit down in the domestic circle where our faces are most familiar and
+beloved! No; but when the rays of heaven shall bless me no more, nor
+the thoughtful lamplight gleam upon my studies, nor the cheerful
+fireside gladden the meditative man, then, his task fulfilled, shall
+this mysterious being vanish from the earth forever. He will pass to
+the dark realm of nothingness, but will not find me there.
+
+There is something fearful in bearing such a relation to a creature so
+imperfectly known, and in the idea that, to a certain extent, all which
+concerns myself will be reflected in its consequences upon him. When we
+feel that another is to share the self-same fortune with ourselves we
+judge more severely of our prospects, and withhold our confidence from
+that delusive magic which appears to shed an infallibility of happiness
+over our own pathway. Of late years, indeed, there has been much to
+sadden my intercourse with Monsieur de Miroir. Had not our union been a
+necessary condition of our life, we must have been estranged ere now.
+In early youth, when my affections were warm and free, I loved him
+well, and could always spend a pleasant hour in his society, chiefly
+because it gave me an excellent opinion of myself. Speechless as he
+was, Monsieur du Miroir had then a most agreeable way of calling me a
+handsome fellow; and I, of course, returned the compliment; so that,
+the more we kept each other’s company, the greater coxcombs we mutually
+grew. But neither of us need apprehend any such misfortune now. When we
+chance to meet,—for it is chance oftener than design,—each glances
+sadly at the other’s forehead, dreading wrinkles there; and at our
+temples, whence the hair is thinning away too early; and at the sunken
+eyes, which no longer shed a gladsome light over the whole face. I
+involuntarily peruse him as a record of my heavy youth, which has been
+wasted in sluggishness for lack of hope and impulse, or equally thrown
+away in toil that had no wise motive and has accomplished no good end.
+I perceive that the tranquil gloom of a disappointed soul has darkened
+through his countenance, where the blackness of the future seems to
+mingle with the shadows of the past, giving him the aspect of a fated
+man. Is it too wild a thought that my fate may have assumed this image
+of myself, and therefore haunts me with such inevitable pertinacity,
+originating every act which it appears to imitate, while it deludes me
+by pretending to share the events of which it is merely the emblem and
+the prophecy? I must banish this idea, or it will throw too deep an awe
+round my companion. At our next meeting, especially if it be at
+midnight or in solitude, I fear that I shall glance aside and shudder;
+in which case, as Monsieur du Miroir is extremely sensitive to
+ill-treatment, he also will avert his eyes and express horror or
+disgust.
+
+But no; this is unworthy of me. As of old I sought his society for the
+bewitching dreams of woman’s love which he inspired, and because I
+fancied a bright fortune in his aspect, so now will I hold daily and
+long communion with hint for the sake of the stern lessons that he will
+teach my manhood. With folded arms we will sit face to face, and
+lengthen out our silent converse till a wiser cheerfulness shall have
+been wrought from the very texture of despondency. He will say, perhaps
+indignantly, that it befits only him to mourn for the decay of outward
+grace, which, while he possessed it, was his all. But have not you, he
+will ask, a treasure in reserve, to which every year may add far more
+value than age or death itself can snatch from that miserable clay? He
+will tell me that though the bloom of life has been nipped with a
+frost, yet the soul must not sit shivering in its cell, but bestir
+itself manfully, and kindle a genial warmth from its own exercise
+against; the autumnal and the wintry atmosphere. And I, in return, will
+bid him be of good cheer, nor take it amiss that I must blanch his
+locks and wrinkle him up like a wilted apple, since it shall be my
+endeavor so to beautify his face with intellect and mild benevolence
+that he shall profit immensely by the change. But here a smile will
+glimmer somewhat sadly over Monsieur du Miroir’s visage.
+
+When this subject shall have been sufficiently discussed we may take up
+others as important. Reflecting upon his power of following me to the
+remotest regions and into the deepest privacy, I will compare the
+attempt to escape him to the hopeless race that men sometimes run with
+memory, or their own hearts, or their moral selves, which, though
+burdened with cares enough to crush an elephant, will never be one step
+behind. I will be self-contemplative, as nature bids me, and make him
+the picture or visible type of what I muse upon, that my mind may not
+wander so vaguely as heretofore, chasing its own shadow through a chaos
+and catching only the monsters that abide there. Then will we turn our
+thoughts to the spiritual world, of the reality of which my companions
+shall furnish me an illustration, if not an argument; for, as we have
+only the testimony of the eye to Monsieur du Miroir’s existence, while
+all the other senses would fail to inform us that such a figure stands
+within arm’s-length, wherefore should there not be beings innumerable
+close beside us, and filling heaven and earth with their multitude, yet
+of whom no corporeal perception can take cognizance? A blind man might
+as reasonably deny that Monsieur du Miroir exists, as we, because the
+Creator has hitherto withheld the spiritual perception, can therefore
+contend that there are no spirits. O, there are! And, at this moment,
+when the subject of which I write has grown strong within me and
+surrounded itself with those solemn and awful associations which might
+have seemed most alien to it, I could fancy that Monsieur du Miroir
+himself is a wanderer from the spiritual world, with nothing human
+except his delusive garment of visibility. Methinks I should tremble
+now were his wizard power of gliding through all impediments in search
+of me to place him suddenly before my eyes.
+
+Ha! What is yonder? Shape of mystery, did the tremor of my heartstrings
+vibrate to thine own, and call thee from thy home among the dancers of
+the northern lights, and shadows flung from departed sunshine, and
+giant spectres that appear on clouds at daybreak and affright the
+climber of the Alps? In truth it startled me, as I threw a wary glance
+eastward across the chamber, to discern an unbidden guest with his eyes
+bent on mine. The identical MONSIEUR DU MIROIR! Still there he sits and
+returns my gaze with as much of awe and curiosity as if he, too, had
+spent a solitary evening in fantastic musings and made me his theme. So
+inimitably does he counterfeit that I could almost doubt which of us is
+the visionary form, or whether each be not the other’s mystery, and
+both twin brethren of one fate, in mutually reflected spheres. O
+friend, canst thou not hear and answer me? Break down the barrier
+between us! Grasp my hand! Speak! Listen! A few words, perhaps, might
+satisfy the feverish yearning of my soul for some master-thought that
+should guide me through this labyrinth of life, teaching wherefore I
+was born, and how to do my task on earth, and what is death. Alas! Even
+that unreal image should forget to ape me and smile at these vain
+questions. Thus do mortals deify, as it were, a mere shadow of
+themselves, a spectre of human reason, and ask of that to unveil the
+mysteries which Divine Intelligence has revealed so far as needful to
+our guidance, and hid the rest.
+
+Farewell, Monsieur du Miroir. Of you, perhaps, as of many men, it may
+be doubted whether you are the wiser, though your whole business is
+REFLECTION.
+
+
+
+
+THE HALL OF FANTASY
+
+
+It has happened to me, on various occasions, to find myself in a
+certain edifice which would appear to have some of the characteristics
+of a public exchange. Its interior is a spacious hall, with a pavement
+of white marble. Overhead is a lofty dome, supported by long rows of
+pillars of fantastic architecture, the idea of which was probably taken
+from the Moorish ruins of the Alhambra, or perhaps from some enchanted
+edifice in the Arabian tales. The windows of this hall have a breadth
+and grandeur of design and an elaborateness of workmanship that have
+nowhere been equalled, except in the Gothic cathedrals of the Old
+World. Like their prototypes, too, they admit the light of heaven only
+through stained and pictured glass, thus filling the hall with
+many-colored radiance and painting its marble floor with beautiful or
+grotesque designs; so that its inmates breathe, as it were, a visionary
+atmosphere, and tread upon the fantasies of poetic minds. These
+peculiarities, combining a wilder mixture of styles than even an
+American architect usually recognizes as allowable,—Grecian, Gothic,
+Oriental, and nondescript,—cause the whole edifice to give the
+impression of a dream, which might be dissipated and shattered to
+fragments by merely stamping the foot upon the pavement. Yet, with such
+modifications and repairs as successive ages demand, the Hall of
+Fantasy is likely to endure longer than the most substantial structure
+that ever cumbered the earth.
+
+It is not at all times that one can gain admittance into this edifice,
+although most persons enter it at some period or other of their lives;
+if not in their waking moments, then by the universal passport of a
+dream. At my last visit I wandered thither unawares while my mind was
+busy with an idle tale, and was startled by the throng of people who
+seemed suddenly to rise up around me.
+
+“Bless me! Where am I?” cried I, with but a dim recognition of the
+place.
+
+“You are in a spot,” said a friend who chanced to be near at hand,
+“which occupies in the world of fancy the same position which the
+Bourse, the Rialto, and the Exchange do in the commercial world. All
+who have affairs in that mystic region, which lies above, below, or
+beyond the actual, may here meet and talk over the business of their
+dreams.”
+
+“It is a noble hall,” observed I.
+
+“Yes,” he replied. “Yet we see but a small portion of the edifice. In
+its upper stories are said to be apartments where the inhabitants of
+earth may hold converse with those of the moon; and beneath our feet
+are gloomy cells, which communicate with the infernal regions, and
+where monsters and chimeras are kept in confinement and fed with all
+unwholesomeness.”
+
+In niches and on pedestals around about the hall stood the statues or
+busts of men who in every age have been rulers and demigods in the
+realms of imagination and its kindred regions. The grand old
+countenance of Homer; the shrunken and decrepit form but vivid face of
+AEsop; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais’s smile
+of deep-wrought mirth, the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the
+all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric
+structure; the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, moulded of
+homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire,—were those that
+chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott occupied
+conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure and shadowy niche was deposited
+the bust of our countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn.
+
+“Besides these indestructible memorials of real genius,” remarked my
+companion, “each century has erected statues of its own ephemeral
+favorites in wood.”
+
+“I observe a few crumbling relics of such,” said I. “But ever and anon,
+I suppose, Oblivion comes with her huge broom and sweeps them all from
+the marble floor. But such will never be the fate of this fine statue
+of Goethe.”
+
+“Nor of that next to it,—Emanuel Swedenborg,” said he. “Were ever two
+men of transcendent imagination more unlike?”
+
+In the centre of the hall springs an ornamental fountain, the water of
+which continually throws itself into new shapes and snatches the most
+diversified lines from the stained atmosphere around. It is impossible
+to conceive what a strange vivacity is imparted to the scene by the
+magic dance of this fountain, with its endless transformations, in
+which the imaginative beholder may discern what form he will. The water
+is supposed by some to flow from the same source as the Castalian
+spring, and is extolled by others as uniting the virtues of the
+Fountain of Youth with those of many other enchanted wells long
+celebrated in tale and song. Having never tasted it, I can bear no
+testimony to its quality.
+
+“Did you ever drink this water?” I inquired of my friend.
+
+“A few sips now and then,” answered he. “But there are men here who
+make it their constant beverage,—or, at least, have the credit of doing
+so. In some instances it is known to have intoxicating qualities.”
+
+“Pray let us look at these water-drinkers,” said I.
+
+So we passed among the fantastic pillars till we came to a spot where a
+number of persons were clustered together in the light of one of the
+great stained windows, which seemed to glorify the whole group as well
+as the marble that they trod on. Most of them were men of broad
+foreheads, meditative countenances, and thoughtful, inward eyes; yet it
+required but a trifle to summon up mirth, peeping out from the very
+midst of grave and lofty musings. Some strode about, or leaned against
+the pillars of the hall, alone and in silence; their faces wore a rapt
+expression, as if sweet music were in the air around them, or as if
+their inmost souls were about to float away in song. One or two,
+perhaps, stole a glance at the bystanders, to watch if their poetic
+absorption were observed. Others stood talking in groups, with a
+liveliness of expression, a ready smile, and a light, intellectual
+laughter, which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to
+and fro among them.
+
+A few held higher converse, which caused their calm and melancholy
+souls to beam moonlight from their eyes. As I lingered near them,—for I
+felt an inward attraction towards these men, as if the sympathy of
+feeling, if not of genius, had united me to their order,—my friend
+mentioned several of their names. The world has likewise heard those
+names; with some it has been familiar for years; and others are daily
+making their way deeper into the universal heart.
+
+“Thank Heaven,” observed I to my companion, as we passed to another
+part of the hall, “we have done with this techy, wayward, shy, proud
+unreasonable set of laurel-gatherers. I love them in their works, but
+have little desire to meet them elsewhere.”
+
+“You have adopted all old prejudice, I see,” replied my friend, who was
+familiar with most of these worthies, being himself a student of
+poetry, and not without the poetic flame. “But, so far as my experience
+goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in
+this age there appears to be a fellow-feeling among them which had not
+heretofore been developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to be
+on equal terms with their fellow-men; and as authors, they have thrown
+aside their proverbial jealousy, and acknowledge a generous
+brotherhood.”
+
+“The world does not think so,” answered I. “An author is received in
+general society pretty much as we honest citizens are in the Hall of
+Fantasy. We gaze at him as if he had no business among us, and question
+whether he is fit for any of our pursuits.”
+
+“Then it is a very foolish question,” said he. “Now, here are a class
+of men whom we may daily meet on ’Change. Yet what poet in the hall is
+more a fool of fancy than the sagest of them?”
+
+He pointed to a number of persons, who, manifest as the fact was, would
+have deemed it an insult to be told that they stood in the Hall of
+Fantasy. Their visages were traced into wrinkles and furrows, each of
+which seemed the record of some actual experience in life. Their eyes
+had the shrewd, calculating glance which detects so quickly and so
+surely all that it concerns a man of business to know about the
+characters and purposes of his fellow-men. Judging them as they stood,
+they might be honored and trusted members of the Chamber of Commerce,
+who had found the genuine secret of wealth and whose sagacity gave them
+the command of fortune.
+
+There was a character of detail and matter of fact in their talk which
+concealed the extravagance of its purport, insomuch that the wildest
+schemes had the aspect of everyday realities. Thus the listener was not
+startled at the idea of cities to be built, as if by magic, in the
+heart of pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out where now the
+sea was tossing; and of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses in
+order to turn the machinery of a cotton-mill. It was only by an effort,
+and scarcely then, that the mind convinced itself that such
+speculations were as much matter of fantasy as the old dream of
+Eldorado, or as Mammon’s Cave, or any other vision of gold ever
+conjured up by the imagination of needy poet or romantic adventurer.
+
+“Upon my word,” said I, “it is dangerous to listen to such dreamers as
+these. Their madness is contagious.”
+
+“Yes,” said my friend, “because they mistake the Hall of Fantasy for
+actual brick and mortar, and its purple atmosphere for unsophisticated
+sunshine. But the poet knows his whereabout, and therefore is less
+likely to make a fool of himself in real life.”
+
+“Here again,” observed I, as we advanced a little farther, “we see
+another order of dreamers, peculiarly characteristic, too, of the
+genius of our country.”
+
+These were the inventors of fantastic machines. Models of their
+contrivances were placed against some of the pillars of the hall, and
+afforded good emblems of the result generally to be anticipated from an
+attempt to reduce day-dreams to practice. The analogy may hold in
+morals as well as physics; for instance, here was the model of a
+railroad through the air and a tunnel under the sea. Here was a
+machine—stolen, I believe—for the distillation of heat from moonshine;
+and another for the condensation of morning mist into square blocks of
+granite, wherewith it was proposed to rebuild the entire Hall of
+Fantasy. One man exhibited a sort of lens whereby he had succeeded in
+making sunshine out of a lady’s smile; and it was his purpose wholly to
+irradiate the earth by means of this wonderful invention.
+
+“It is nothing new,” said I; “for most of our sunshine comes from
+woman’s smile already.”
+
+“True,” answered the inventor; “but my machine will secure a constant
+supply for domestic use; whereas hitherto it has been very precarious.”
+
+Another person had a scheme for fixing the reflections of objects in a
+pool of water, and thus taking the most life-like portraits imaginable;
+and the same gentleman demonstrated the practicability of giving a
+permanent dye to ladies’ dresses, in the gorgeous clouds of sunset.
+There were at least fifty kinds of perpetual motion, one of which was
+applicable to the wits of newspaper editors and writers of every
+description. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous storm in a
+gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many more of these Utopian
+inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative collection is to be
+found in the Patent Office at Washington.
+
+Turning from the inventors we took a more general survey of the inmates
+of the hall. Many persons were present whose right of entrance appeared
+to consist in some crotchet of the brain, which, so long as it might
+operate, produced a change in their relation to the actual world. It is
+singular how very few there are who do not occasionally gain admittance
+on such a score, either in abstracted musings, or momentary thoughts,
+or bright anticipations, or vivid remembrances; for even the actual
+becomes ideal, whether in hope or memory, and beguiles the dreamer into
+the Hall of Fantasy. Some unfortunates make their whole abode and
+business here, and contract habits which unfit them for all the real
+employments of life. Others—but these are few—possess the faculty, in
+their occasional visits, of discovering a purer truth than the world
+call impart among the lights and shadows of these pictured windows.
+
+And with all its dangerous influences, we have reason to thank God that
+there is such a place of refuge from the gloom and chillness of actual
+life. Hither may come the prisoner, escaping from his dark and narrow
+cell and cankerous chain, to breathe free air in this enchanted
+atmosphere. The sick man leaves his weary pillow, and finds strength to
+wander hither, though his wasted limbs might not support him even to
+the threshold of his chamber. The exile passes through the Hall of
+Fantasy to revisit his native soil. The burden of years rolls down from
+the old man’s shoulders the moment that the door uncloses. Mourners
+leave their heavy sorrows at the entrance, and here rejoin the lost
+ones whose faces would else be seen no more, until thought shall have
+become the only fact. It may be said, in truth, that there is but half
+a life—the meaner and earthier half—for those who never find their way
+into the hall. Nor must I fail to mention that in the observatory of
+the edifice is kept that wonderful perspective-glass, through which the
+shepherds of the Delectable Mountains showed Christian the far-off
+gleam of the Celestial City. The eye of Faith still loves to gaze
+through it.
+
+“I observe some men here,” said I to my friend, “who might set up a
+strong claim to be reckoned among the most real personages of the day.”
+
+“Certainly,” he replied. “If a man be in advance of his age, he must be
+content to make his abode in this hall until the lingering generations
+of his fellow-men come up with him. He can find no other shelter in the
+universe. But the fantasies of one day are the deepest realities of a
+future one.”
+
+“It is difficult to distinguish them apart amid the gorgeous and
+bewildering light of this ball,” rejoined I. “The white sunshine of
+actual life is necessary in order to test them. I am rather apt to
+doubt both men and their reasonings till I meet them in that truthful
+medium.”
+
+“Perhaps your faith in the ideal is deeper than you are aware,” said my
+friend. “You are at least a democrat; and methinks no scanty share of
+such faith is essential to the adoption of that creed.”
+
+Among the characters who had elicited these remarks were most of the
+noted reformers of the day, whether in physics, politics, morals, or
+religion. There is no surer method of arriving at the Hall of Fantasy
+than to throw one’s-self into the current of a theory; for, whatever
+landmarks of fact may be set up along the stream, there is a law of
+nature that impels it thither. And let it be so; for here the wise head
+and capacious heart may do their work; and what is good and true
+becomes gradually hardened into fact, while error melts away and
+vanishes among the shadows of the ball. Therefore may none who believe
+and rejoice in the progress of mankind be angry with me because I
+recognized their apostles and leaders amid the fantastic radiance of
+those pictured windows. I love and honor such men as well as they.
+
+It would be endless to describe the herd of real or self styled
+reformers that peopled this place of refuge. They were the
+representatives of an unquiet period, when mankind is seeking to cast
+off the whole tissue of ancient custom like a tattered garment. Many of
+then had got possession of some crystal fragment of truth, the
+brightness of which so dazzled them that they could see nothing else in
+the wide universe. Here were men whose faith had embodied itself in the
+form of a potato; and others whose long beards had a deep spiritual
+significance. Here was the abolitionist, brandishing his one idea like
+an iron flail. In a word, there were a thousand shapes of good and
+evil, faith and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense,—a most incongruous
+throng.
+
+Yet, withal, the heart of the stanchest conservative, unless he abjured
+his fellowship with man, could hardly have helped throbbing in sympathy
+with the spirit that pervaded these innumerable theorists. It was good
+for the man of unquickened heart to listen even to their folly. Far
+down beyond the fathom of the intellect the soul acknowledged that all
+these varying and conflicting developments of humanity were united in
+one sentiment. Be the individual theory as wild as fancy could make it,
+still the wiser spirit would recognize the struggle of the race after a
+better and purer life than had yet been realized on earth. My faith
+revived even while I rejected all their schemes. It could not be that
+the world should continue forever what it has been; a soil where
+Happiness is so rare a flower and Virtue so often a blighted fruit; a
+battle-field where the good principle, with its shield flung above its
+head, can hardly save itself amid the rush of adverse influences. In
+the enthusiasm of such thoughts I gazed through one of the pictured
+windows, and, behold! the whole external world was tinged with the
+dimly glorious aspect that is peculiar to the Hall of Fantasy, insomuch
+that it seemed practicable at that very instant to realize some plan
+for the perfection of mankind. But, alas! if reformers would understand
+the sphere in which their lot is cast they must cease to look through
+pictured windows. Yet they not only use this medium, but mistake it for
+the whitest sunshine.
+
+“Come,” said I to my friend, starting from a deep revery, “let us
+hasten hence, or I shall be tempted to make a theory, after which there
+is little hope of any man.”
+
+“Come hither, then,” answered he. “Here is one theory that swallows up
+and annihilates all others.”
+
+He led me to a distant part of the hall where a crowd of deeply
+attentive auditors were assembled round an elderly man of plain,
+honest, trustworthy aspect. With an earnestness that betokened the
+sincerest faith in his own doctrine, he announced that the destruction
+of the world was close at hand.
+
+“It is Father Miller himself!” exclaimed I.
+
+“No less a man,” said my friend; “and observe how picturesque a
+contrast between his dogma and those of the reformers whom we have just
+glanced at. They look for the earthly perfection of mankind, and are
+forming schemes which imply that the immortal spirit will be connected
+with a physical nature for innumerable ages of futurity. On the other
+hand, here comes good Father Miller, and with one puff of his
+relentless theory scatters all their dreams like so many withered
+leaves upon the blast.”
+
+“It is, perhaps, the only method of getting mankind out of the various
+perplexities into which they have fallen,” I replied. “Yet I could wish
+that the world might be permitted to endure until some great moral
+shall have been evolved. A riddle is propounded. Where is the solution?
+The sphinx did not slay herself until her riddle had been guessed. Will
+it not be so with the world? Now, if it should be burned to-morrow
+morning, I am at a loss to know what purpose will have been
+accomplished, or how the universe will be wiser or better for our
+existence and destruction.”
+
+“We cannot tell what mighty truths may have been embodied in act
+through the existence of the globe and its inhabitants,” rejoined my
+companion. “Perhaps it may be revealed to us after the fall of the
+curtain over our catastrophe; or not impossibly, the whole drama, in
+which we are involuntary actors, may have been performed for the
+instruction of another set of spectators. I cannot perceive that our
+own comprehension of it is at all essential to the matter. At any rate,
+while our view is so ridiculously narrow and superficial it would be
+absurd to argue the continuance of the world from the fact that it
+seems to have existed hitherto in vain.”
+
+“The poor old earth,” murmured I. “She has faults enough, in all
+conscience, but I cannot hear to have her perish.”
+
+“It is no great matter,” said my friend. “The happiest of us has been
+weary of her many a time and oft.”
+
+“I doubt it,” answered I, pertinaciously; “the root of human nature
+strikes down deep into this earthly soil, and it is but reluctantly
+that we submit to be transplanted, even for a higher cultivation in
+heaven. I query whether the destruction of the earth would gratify any
+one individual, except perhaps some embarrassed man of business whose
+notes fall due a day after the day of doom.”
+
+Then methought I heard the expostulating cry of a multitude against the
+consummation prophesied by Father Miller. The lover wrestled with
+Providence for his foreshadowed bliss. Parents entreated that the
+earth’s span of endurance might be prolonged by some seventy years, so
+that their new-born infant should not be defrauded of his lifetime. A
+youthful poet murmured because there would be no posterity to recognize
+the inspiration of his song. The reformers, one and all, demanded a few
+thousand years to test their theories, after which the universe might
+go to wreck. A mechanician, who was busied with an improvement of the
+steam-engine, asked merely time to perfect his model. A miser insisted
+that the world’s destruction would be a personal wrong to himself,
+unless he should first be permitted to add a specified sum to his
+enormous heap of gold. A little boy made dolorous inquiry whether the
+last day would come before Christmas, and thus deprive him of his
+anticipated dainties. In short, nobody seemed satisfied that this
+mortal scene of things should have its close just now. Yet, it must be
+confessed, the motives of the crowd for desiring its continuance were
+mostly so absurd, that unless infinite Wisdom had been aware of much
+better reasons, the solid earth must have melted away at once.
+
+For my own part, not to speak of a few private and personal ends, I
+really desired our old mother’s prolonged existence for her own dear
+sake.
+
+“The poor old earth!” I repeated. “What I should chiefly regret in her
+destruction would be that very earthliness which no other sphere or
+state of existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of flowers
+and of new-mown hay; the genial warmth of sunshine, and the beauty of a
+sunset among clouds; the comfort and cheerful glow of the fireside; the
+deliciousness of fruits and of all good cheer; the magnificence of
+mountains, and seas, and cataracts, and the softer charm of rural
+scenery; even the fast-falling snow and the gray atmosphere through
+which it descends,—all these and innumerable other enjoyable things of
+earth must perish with her. Then the country frolics; the homely humor;
+the broad, open-mouthed roar of laughter, in which body and soul
+conjoin so heartily! I fear that no other world call show its anything
+just like this. As for purely moral enjoyments, the good will find them
+in every state of being. But where the material and the moral exist
+together, what is to happen then? And then our mute four-footed friends
+and the winged songsters of our woods! Might it not be lawful to regret
+them, even in the hallowed groves of paradise?”
+
+“You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued with a scent of
+freshly turned soil,” exclaimed my friend.
+
+“It is not that I so much object to giving up these enjoyments on my
+own account,” continued I, “but I hate to think that they will have
+been eternally annihilated from the list of joys.”
+
+“Nor need they be,” he replied. “I see no real force in what you say.
+Standing in this Hall of Fantasy, we perceive what even the
+earth-clogged intellect of man can do in creating circumstances which,
+though we call them shadowy and visionary, are scarcely more so than
+those that surround us in actual life. Doubt not then that man’s
+disembodied spirit may recreate time and the world for itself, with all
+their peculiar enjoyments, should there still be human yearnings amid
+life eternal and infinite. But I doubt whether we shall be inclined to
+play such a poor scene over again.”
+
+“O, you are ungrateful to our mother earth!” rejoined I. “Come what
+may, I never will forget her! Neither will it satisfy me to have her
+exist merely in idea. I want her great, round, solid self to endure
+interminably, and still to be peopled with the kindly race of man, whom
+I uphold to be much better than he thinks himself. Nevertheless, I
+confide the whole matter to Providence, and shall endeavor so to live
+that the world may come to an end at any moment without leaving me at a
+loss to find foothold somewhere else.”
+
+“It is an excellent resolve,” said my companion, looking at his watch.
+“But come; it is the dinner-hour. Will you partake of my vegetable
+diet?”
+
+A thing so matter of fact as an invitation to dinner, even when the
+fare was to be nothing more substantial than vegetables and fruit,
+compelled us forthwith to remove from the Hall of Fantasy. As we passed
+out of the portal we met the spirits of several persons who had been
+sent thither in magnetic sleep. I looked back among the sculptured
+pillars and at the transformations of the gleaming fountain, and almost
+desired that the whole of life might be spent in that visionary scene
+where the actual world, with its hard angles, should never rub against
+me, and only be viewed through the medium of pictured windows. But for
+those who waste all their days in the Hall of Fantasy, good Father
+Miller’s prophecy is already accomplished, and the solid earth has come
+to an untimely end. Let us be content, therefore, with merely an
+occasional visit, for the sake of spiritualizing the grossness of this
+actual life, and prefiguring to ourselves a state in which the Idea
+shall be all in all.
+
+
+
+
+THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD
+
+
+Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited
+that region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction.
+It interested me much to learn that by the public spirit of some of the
+inhabitants a railroad has recently been established between this
+populous and flourishing town and the Celestial City. Having a little
+time upon my hands, I resolved to gratify a liberal curiosity by making
+a trip thither. Accordingly, one fine morning after paying my bill at
+the hotel, and directing the porter to stow my luggage behind a coach,
+I took my seat in the vehicle and set out for the station-house. It was
+my good fortune to enjoy the company of a gentleman—one Mr.
+Smooth-it-away—who, though he had never actually visited the Celestial
+City, yet seemed as well acquainted with its laws, customs, policy, and
+statistics, as with those of the City of Destruction, of which he was a
+native townsman. Being, moreover, a director of the railroad
+corporation and one of its largest stockholders, he had it in his power
+to give me all desirable information respecting that praiseworthy
+enterprise.
+
+Our coach rattled out of the city, and at a short distance from its
+outskirts passed over a bridge of elegant construction, but somewhat
+too slight, as I imagined, to sustain any considerable weight. On both
+sides lay an extensive quagmire, which could not have been more
+disagreeable either to sight or smell, had all the kennels of the earth
+emptied their pollution there.
+
+“This,” remarked Mr. Smooth-it-away, “is the famous Slough of Despond—a
+disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so
+easily be converted into firm ground.”
+
+“I have understood,” said I, “that efforts have been made for that
+purpose from time immemorial. Bunyan mentions that above twenty
+thousand cartloads of wholesome instructions had been thrown in here
+without effect.”
+
+“Very probably! And what effect could be anticipated from such
+unsubstantial stuff?” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away. “You observe this
+convenient bridge. We obtained a sufficient foundation for it by
+throwing into the slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of
+French philosophy and German rationalism; tracts, sermons, and essays
+of modern clergymen; extracts from Plato, Confucius, and various Hindoo
+sages together with a few ingenious commentaries upon texts of
+Scripture,—all of which by some scientific process, have been converted
+into a mass like granite. The whole bog might be filled up with similar
+matter.”
+
+It really seemed to me, however, that the bridge vibrated and heaved up
+and down in a very formidable manner; and, in spite of Mr.
+Smooth-it-away’s testimony to the solidity of its foundation, I should
+be loath to cross it in a crowded omnibus, especially if each passenger
+were encumbered with as heavy luggage as that gentleman and myself.
+Nevertheless we got over without accident, and soon found ourselves at
+the stationhouse. This very neat and spacious edifice is erected on the
+site of the little wicket gate, which formerly, as all old pilgrims
+will recollect, stood directly across the highway, and, by its
+inconvenient narrowness, was a great obstruction to the traveller of
+liberal mind and expansive stomach. The reader of John Bunyan will be
+glad to know that Christian’s old friend Evangelist, who was accustomed
+to supply each pilgrim with a mystic roll, now presides at the ticket
+office. Some malicious persons it is true deny the identity of this
+reputable character with the Evangelist of old times, and even pretend
+to bring competent evidence of an imposture. Without involving myself
+in a dispute I shall merely observe that, so far as my experience goes,
+the square pieces of pasteboard now delivered to passengers are much
+more convenient and useful along the road than the antique roll of
+parchment. Whether they will be as readily received at the gate of the
+Celestial City I decline giving an opinion.
+
+A large number of passengers were already at the station-house awaiting
+the departure of the cars. By the aspect and demeanor of these persons
+it was easy to judge that the feelings of the community had undergone a
+very favorable change in reference to the celestial pilgrimage. It
+would have done Bunyan’s heart good to see it. Instead of a lonely and
+ragged man with a huge burden on his back, plodding along sorrowfully
+on foot while the whole city hooted after him, here were parties of the
+first gentry and most respectable people in the neighborhood setting
+forth towards the Celestial City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage
+were merely a summer tour. Among the gentlemen were characters of
+deserved eminence—magistrates, politicians, and men of wealth, by whose
+example religion could not but be greatly recommended to their meaner
+brethren. In the ladies’ apartment, too, I rejoiced to distinguish some
+of those flowers of fashionable society who are so well fitted to adorn
+the most elevated circles of the Celestial City. There was much
+pleasant conversation about the news of the day, topics of business and
+politics, or the lighter matters of amusement; while religion, though
+indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the
+background. Even an infidel would have heard little or nothing to shock
+his sensibility.
+
+One great convenience of the new method of going on pilgrimage I must
+not forget to mention. Our enormous burdens, instead of being carried
+on our shoulders as had been the custom of old, were all snugly
+deposited in the baggage car, and, as I was assured, would be delivered
+to their respective owners at the journey’s end. Another thing,
+likewise, the benevolent reader will be delighted to understand. It may
+be remembered that there was an ancient feud between Prince Beelzebub
+and the keeper of the wicket gate, and that the adherents of the former
+distinguished personage were accustomed to shoot deadly arrows at
+honest pilgrims while knocking at the door. This dispute, much to the
+credit as well of the illustrious potentate above mentioned as of the
+worthy and enlightened directors of the railroad, has been pacifically
+arranged on the principle of mutual compromise. The prince’s subjects
+are now pretty numerously employed about the station-house, some in
+taking care of the baggage, others in collecting fuel, feeding the
+engines, and such congenial occupations; and I can conscientiously
+affirm that persons more attentive to their business, more willing to
+accommodate, or more generally agreeable to the passengers, are not to
+be found on any railroad. Every good heart must surely exult at so
+satisfactory an arrangement of an immemorial difficulty.
+
+“Where is Mr. Greatheart?” inquired I. “Beyond a doubt the directors
+have engaged that famous old champion to be chief conductor on the
+railroad?”
+
+“Why, no,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a dry cough. “He was offered
+the situation of brakeman; but, to tell you the truth, our friend
+Greatheart has grown preposterously stiff and narrow in his old age. He
+has so often guided pilgrims over the road on foot that he considers it
+a sin to travel in any other fashion. Besides, the old fellow had
+entered so heartily into the ancient feud with Prince Beelzebub that he
+would have been perpetually at blows or ill language with some of the
+prince’s subjects, and thus have embroiled us anew. So, on the whole,
+we were not sorry when honest Greatheart went off to the Celestial City
+in a huff and left us at liberty to choose a more suitable and
+accommodating man. Yonder comes the engineer of the train. You will
+probably recognize him at once.”
+
+The engine at this moment took its station in advance of the cars,
+looking, I must confess, much more like a sort of mechanical demon that
+would hurry us to the infernal regions than a laudable contrivance for
+smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its top sat a personage
+almost enveloped in smoke and flame, which, not to startle the reader,
+appeared to gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as from the
+engine’s brazen abdomen.
+
+“Do my eyes deceive me?” cried I. “What on earth is this! A living
+creature? If so, he is own brother to the engine he rides upon!”
+
+“Poh, poh, you are obtuse!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a hearty
+laugh. “Don’t you know Apollyon, Christian’s old enemy, with whom he
+fought so fierce a battle in the Valley of Humiliation? He was the very
+fellow to manage the engine; and so we have reconciled him to the
+custom of going on pilgrimage, and engaged him as chief engineer.”
+
+“Bravo, bravo!” exclaimed I, with irrepressible enthusiasm; “this shows
+the liberality of the age; this proves, if anything can, that all musty
+prejudices are in a fair way to be obliterated. And how will Christian
+rejoice to hear of this happy transformation of his old antagonist! I
+promise myself great pleasure in informing him of it when we reach the
+Celestial City.”
+
+The passengers being all comfortably seated, we now rattled away
+merrily, accomplishing a greater distance in ten minutes than Christian
+probably trudged over in a day. It was laughable, while we glanced
+along, as it were, at the tail of a thunderbolt, to observe two dusty
+foot travellers in the old pilgrim guise, with cockle shell and staff,
+their mystic rolls of parchment in their hands and their intolerable
+burdens on their backs. The preposterous obstinacy of these honest
+people in persisting to groan and stumble along the difficult pathway
+rather than take advantage of modern improvements, excited great mirth
+among our wiser brotherhood. We greeted the two pilgrims with many
+pleasant gibes and a roar of laughter; whereupon they gazed at us with
+such woful and absurdly compassionate visages that our merriment grew
+tenfold more obstreperous. Apollyon also entered heartily into the fun,
+and contrived to flirt the smoke and flame of the engine, or of his own
+breath, into their faces, and envelop them in an atmosphere of scalding
+steam. These little practical jokes amused us mightily, and doubtless
+afforded the pilgrims the gratification of considering themselves
+martyrs.
+
+At some distance from the railroad Mr. Smooth-it-away pointed to a
+large, antique edifice, which, he observed, was a tavern of long
+standing, and had formerly been a noted stopping-place for pilgrims. In
+Bunyan’s road-book it is mentioned as the Interpreter’s House.
+
+“I have long had a curiosity to visit that old mansion,” remarked I.
+
+“It is not one of our stations, as you perceive,” said my companion
+“The keeper was violently opposed to the railroad; and well he might
+be, as the track left his house of entertainment on one side, and thus
+was pretty certain to deprive him of all his reputable customers. But
+the footpath still passes his door, and the old gentleman now and then
+receives a call from some simple traveller, and entertains him with
+fare as old-fashioned as himself.”
+
+Before our talk on this subject came to a conclusion we were rushing by
+the place where Christian’s burden fell from his shoulders at the sight
+of the Cross. This served as a theme for Mr. Smooth-it-away, Mr.
+Livefor-the-world, Mr. Hide-sin-in-the-heart, Mr. Scaly-conscience, and
+a knot of gentlemen from the town of Shun-repentance, to descant upon
+the inestimable advantages resulting from the safety of our baggage.
+Myself, and all the passengers indeed, joined with great unanimity in
+this view of the matter; for our burdens were rich in many things
+esteemed precious throughout the world; and, especially, we each of us
+possessed a great variety of favorite Habits, which we trusted would
+not be out of fashion even in the polite circles of the Celestial City.
+It would have been a sad spectacle to see such an assortment of
+valuable articles tumbling into the sepulchre. Thus pleasantly
+conversing on the favorable circumstances of our position as compared
+with those of past pilgrims and of narrow-minded ones at the present
+day, we soon found ourselves at the foot of the Hill Difficulty.
+Through the very heart of this rocky mountain a tunnel has been
+constructed of most admirable architecture, with a lofty arch and a
+spacious double track; so that, unless the earth and rocks should
+chance to crumble down, it will remain an eternal monument of the
+builder’s skill and enterprise. It is a great though incidental
+advantage that the materials from the heart of the Hill Difficulty have
+been employed in filling up the Valley of Humiliation, thus obviating
+the necessity of descending into that disagreeable and unwholesome
+hollow.
+
+“This is a wonderful improvement, indeed,” said I. “Yet I should have
+been glad of an opportunity to visit the Palace Beautiful and be
+introduced to the charming young ladies—Miss Prudence, Miss Piety, Miss
+Charity, and the rest—who have the kindness to entertain pilgrims
+there.”
+
+“Young ladies!” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away, as soon as he could speak for
+laughing. “And charming young ladies! Why, my dear fellow, they are old
+maids, every soul of them—prim, starched, dry, and angular; and not one
+of them, I will venture to say, has altered so much as the fashion of
+her gown since the days of Christian’s pilgrimage.”
+
+“Ah, well,” said I, much comforted, “then I can very readily dispense
+with their acquaintance.”
+
+The respectable Apollyon was now putting on the steam at a prodigious
+rate, anxious, perhaps, to get rid of the unpleasant reminiscences
+connected with the spot where he had so disastrously encountered
+Christian. Consulting Mr. Bunyan’s road-book, I perceived that we must
+now be within a few miles of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, into
+which doleful region, at our present speed, we should plunge much
+sooner than seemed at all desirable. In truth, I expected nothing
+better than to find myself in the ditch on one side or the Quag on the
+other; but on communicating my apprehensions to Mr. Smooth-it-away, he
+assured me that the difficulties of this passage, even in its worst
+condition, had been vastly exaggerated, and that, in its present state
+of improvement, I might consider myself as safe as on any railroad in
+Christendom.
+
+Even while we were speaking the train shot into the entrance of this
+dreaded Valley. Though I plead guilty to some foolish palpitations of
+the heart during our headlong rush over the causeway here constructed,
+yet it were unjust to withhold the highest encomiums on the boldness of
+its original conception and the ingenuity of those who executed it. It
+was gratifying, likewise, to observe how much care had been taken to
+dispel the everlasting gloom and supply the defect of cheerful
+sunshine, not a ray of which has ever penetrated among these awful
+shadows. For this purpose, the inflammable gas which exudes plentifully
+from the soil is collected by means of pipes, and thence communicated
+to a quadruple row of lamps along the whole extent of the passage. Thus
+a radiance has been created even out of the fiery and sulphurous curse
+that rests forever upon the valley—a radiance hurtful, however, to the
+eyes, and somewhat bewildering, as I discovered by the changes which it
+wrought in the visages of my companions. In this respect, as compared
+with natural daylight, there is the same difference as between truth
+and falsehood, but if the reader have ever travelled through the dark
+Valley, he will have learned to be thankful for any light that he could
+get—if not from the sky above, then from the blasted soil beneath. Such
+was the red brilliancy of these lamps that they appeared to build walls
+of fire on both sides of the track, between which we held our course at
+lightning speed, while a reverberating thunder filled the Valley with
+its echoes. Had the engine run off the track,—a catastrophe, it is
+whispered, by no means unprecedented,—the bottomless pit, if there be
+any such place, would undoubtedly have received us. Just as some dismal
+fooleries of this nature had made my heart quake there came a
+tremendous shriek, careering along the valley as if a thousand devils
+had burst their lungs to utter it, but which proved to be merely the
+whistle of the engine on arriving at a stopping-place.
+
+The spot where we had now paused is the same that our friend Bunyan—a
+truthful man, but infected with many fantastic notions—has designated,
+in terms plainer than I like to repeat, as the mouth of the infernal
+region. This, however, must be a mistake, inasmuch as Mr.
+Smooth-it-away, while we remained in the smoky and lurid cavern, took
+occasion to prove that Tophet has not even a metaphorical existence.
+The place, he assured us, is no other than the crater of a half-extinct
+volcano, in which the directors had caused forges to be set up for the
+manufacture of railroad iron. Hence, also, is obtained a plentiful
+supply of fuel for the use of the engines. Whoever had gazed into the
+dismal obscurity of the broad cavern mouth, whence ever and anon darted
+huge tongues of dusky flame, and had seen the strange, half-shaped
+monsters, and visions of faces horribly grotesque, into which the smoke
+seemed to wreathe itself, and had heard the awful murmurs, and shrieks,
+and deep, shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes forming
+themselves into words almost articulate, would have seized upon Mr.
+Smooth-it-away’s comfortable explanation as greedily as we did. The
+inhabitants of the cavern, moreover, were unlovely personages, dark,
+smoke-begrimed, generally deformed, with misshapen feet, and a glow of
+dusky redness in their eyes as if their hearts had caught fire and were
+blazing out of the upper windows. It struck me as a peculiarity that
+the laborers at the forge and those who brought fuel to the engine,
+when they began to draw short breath, positively emitted smoke from
+their mouth and nostrils.
+
+Among the idlers about the train, most of whom were puffing cigars
+which they had lighted at the flame of the crater, I was perplexed to
+notice several who, to my certain knowledge, had heretofore set forth
+by railroad for the Celestial City. They looked dark, wild, and smoky,
+with a singular resemblance, indeed, to the native inhabitants, like
+whom, also, they had a disagreeable propensity to ill-natured gibes and
+sneers, the habit of which had wrought a settled contortion of their
+visages. Having been on speaking terms with one of these persons,—an
+indolent, good-for-nothing fellow, who went by the name of
+Take-it-easy,—I called him, and inquired what was his business there.
+
+“Did you not start,” said I, “for the Celestial City?”
+
+“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Take-it-easy, carelessly puffing some smoke
+into my eyes. “But I heard such bad accounts that I never took pains to
+climb the hill on which the city stands. No business doing, no fun
+going on, nothing to drink, and no smoking allowed, and a thrumming of
+church music from morning till night. I would not stay in such a place
+if they offered me house room and living free.”
+
+“But, my good Mr. Take-it-easy,” cried I, “why take up your residence
+here, of all places in the world?”
+
+“Oh,” said the loafer, with a grin, “it is very warm hereabouts, and I
+meet with plenty of old acquaintances, and altogether the place suits
+me. I hope to see you back again some day soon. A pleasant journey to
+you.”
+
+While he was speaking the bell of the engine rang, and we dashed away
+after dropping a few passengers, but receiving no new ones. Rattling
+onward through the Valley, we were dazzled with the fiercely gleaming
+gas lamps, as before. But sometimes, in the dark of intense brightness,
+grim faces, that bore the aspect and expression of individual sins, or
+evil passions, seemed to thrust themselves through the veil of light,
+glaring upon us, and stretching forth a great, dusky hand, as if to
+impede our progress. I almost thought that they were my own sins that
+appalled me there. These were freaks of imagination—nothing more,
+certainly-mere delusions, which I ought to be heartily ashamed of; but
+all through the Dark Valley I was tormented, and pestered, and
+dolefully bewildered with the same kind of waking dreams. The mephitic
+gases of that region intoxicate the brain. As the light of natural day,
+however, began to struggle with the glow of the lanterns, these vain
+imaginations lost their vividness, and finally vanished from the first
+ray of sunshine that greeted our escape from the Valley of the Shadow
+of Death. Ere we had gone a mile beyond it I could well-nigh have taken
+my oath that this whole gloomy passage was a dream.
+
+At the end of the valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where,
+in his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strown the
+ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims.
+These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but into their deserted
+cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his
+business to seize upon honest travellers and fatten them for his table
+with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and
+sawdust. He is a German by birth, and is called Giant
+Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and
+his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge
+miscreant that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever
+been able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern’s mouth we
+caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an
+ill-proportioned figure, but considerably more like a heap of fog and
+duskiness. He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology that we
+knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.
+
+It was late in the day when the train thundered into the ancient city
+of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and
+exhibits an epitome of whatever is brilliant, gay, and fascinating
+beneath the sun. As I purposed to make a considerable stay here, it
+gratified me to learn that there is no longer the want of harmony
+between the town’s-people and pilgrims, which impelled the former to
+such lamentably mistaken measures as the persecution of Christian and
+the fiery martyrdom of Faithful. On the contrary, as the new railroad
+brings with it great trade and a constant influx of strangers, the lord
+of Vanity Fair is its chief patron, and the capitalists of the city are
+among the largest stockholders. Many passengers stop to take their
+pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead of going onward to
+the Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place that
+people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly
+contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere
+dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the Celestial City lay
+but a bare mile beyond the gates of Vanity, they would not be fools
+enough to go thither. Without subscribing to these perhaps exaggerated
+encomiums, I can truly say that my abode in the city was mainly
+agreeable, and my intercourse with the inhabitants productive of much
+amusement and instruction.
+
+Being naturally of a serious turn, my attention was directed to the
+solid advantages derivable from a residence here, rather than to the
+effervescent pleasures which are the grand object with too many
+visitants. The Christian reader, if he have had no accounts of the city
+later than Bunyan’s time, will be surprised to hear that almost every
+street has its church, and that the reverend clergy are nowhere held in
+higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve such
+honorable estimation; for the maxims of wisdom and virtue which fall
+from their lips come from as deep a spiritual source, and tend to as
+lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of old. In
+justification of this high praise I need only mention the names of the
+Rev. Mr. Shallow-deep, the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth, that fine old
+clerical character the Rev. Mr. This-today, who expects shortly to
+resign his pulpit to the Rev. Mr. That-tomorrow; together with the Rev.
+Mr. Bewilderment, the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-spirit, and, last and greatest,
+the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are
+aided by those of innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various
+profundity, in all subjects of human or celestial science, that any man
+may acquire an omnigenous erudition without the trouble of even
+learning to read. Thus literature is etherealized by assuming for its
+medium the human voice; and knowledge, depositing all its heavier
+particles, except, doubtless, its gold becomes exhaled into a sound,
+which forthwith steals into the ever-open ear of the community. These
+ingenious methods constitute a sort of machinery, by which thought and
+study are done to every person’s hand without his putting himself to
+the slightest inconvenience in the matter. There is another species of
+machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality. This
+excellent result is effected by societies for all manner of virtuous
+purposes, with which a man has merely to connect himself, throwing, as
+it were, his quota of virtue into the common stock, and the president
+and directors will take care that the aggregate amount be well applied.
+All these, and other wonderful improvements in ethics, religion, and
+literature, being made plain to my comprehension by the ingenious Mr.
+Smooth-it-away, inspired me with a vast admiration of Vanity Fair.
+
+It would fill a volume, in an age of pamphlets, were I to record all my
+observations in this great capital of human business and pleasure.
+There was an unlimited range of society—the powerful, the wise, the
+witty, and the famous in every walk of life; princes, presidents,
+poets, generals, artists, actors, and philanthropists,—all making their
+own market at the fair, and deeming no price too exorbitant for such
+commodities as hit their fancy. It was well worth one’s while, even if
+he had no idea of buying or selling, to loiter through the bazaars and
+observe the various sorts of traffic that were going forward.
+
+Some of the purchasers, I thought, made very foolish bargains. For
+instance, a young man having inherited a splendid fortune, laid out a
+considerable portion of it in the purchase of diseases, and finally
+spent all the rest for a heavy lot of repentance and a suit of rags. A
+very pretty girl bartered a heart as clear as crystal, and which seemed
+her most valuable possession, for another jewel of the same kind, but
+so worn and defaced as to be utterly worthless. In one shop there were
+a great many crowns of laurel and myrtle, which soldiers, authors,
+statesmen, and various other people pressed eagerly to buy; some
+purchased these paltry wreaths with their lives, others by a toilsome
+servitude of years, and many sacrificed whatever was most valuable, yet
+finally slunk away without the crown. There was a sort of stock or
+scrip, called Conscience, which seemed to be in great demand, and would
+purchase almost anything. Indeed, few rich commodities were to be
+obtained without paying a heavy sum in this particular stock, and a
+man’s business was seldom very lucrative unless he knew precisely when
+and how to throw his hoard of conscience into the market. Yet as this
+stock was the only thing of permanent value, whoever parted with it was
+sure to find himself a loser in the long run. Several of the
+speculations were of a questionable character. Occasionally a member of
+Congress recruited his pocket by the sale of his constituents; and I
+was assured that public officers have often sold their country at very
+moderate prices. Thousands sold their happiness for a whim. Gilded
+chains were in great demand, and purchased with almost any sacrifice.
+In truth, those who desired, according to the old adage, to sell
+anything valuable for a song, might find customers all over the Fair;
+and there were innumerable messes of pottage, piping hot, for such as
+chose to buy them with their birthrights. A few articles, however,
+could not be found genuine at Vanity Fair. If a customer wished to
+renew his stock of youth the dealers offered him a set of false teeth
+and an auburn wig; if he demanded peace of mind, they recommended opium
+or a brandy bottle.
+
+Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the Celestial City, were
+often exchanged, at very disadvantageous rates, for a few years’ lease
+of small, dismal, inconvenient tenements in Vanity Fair. Prince
+Beelzebub himself took great interest in this sort of traffic, and
+sometimes condescended to meddle with smaller matters. I once had the
+pleasure to see him bargaining with a miser for his soul, which, after
+much ingenious skirmishing on both sides, his highness succeeded in
+obtaining at about the value of sixpence. The prince remarked with a
+smile, that he was a loser by the transaction.
+
+Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and
+deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants. The
+place began to seem like home; the idea of pursuing my travels to the
+Celestial City was almost obliterated from my mind. I was reminded of
+it, however, by the sight of the same pair of simple pilgrims at whom
+we had laughed so heartily when Apollyon puffed smoke and steam into
+their faces at the commencement of our journey. There they stood amidst
+the densest bustle of Vanity; the dealers offering them their purple
+and fine linen and jewels, the men of wit and humor gibing at them, a
+pair of buxom ladies ogling them askance, while the benevolent Mr.
+Smooth-it-away whispered some of his wisdom at their elbows, and
+pointed to a newly-erected temple; but there were these worthy
+simpletons, making the scene look wild and monstrous, merely by their
+sturdy repudiation of all part in its business or pleasures.
+
+One of them—his name was Stick-to-the-right—perceived in my face, I
+suppose, a species of sympathy and almost admiration, which, to my own
+great surprise, I could not help feeling for this pragmatic couple. It
+prompted him to address me.
+
+“Sir,” inquired he, with a sad, yet mild and kindly voice, “do you call
+yourself a pilgrim?”
+
+“Yes,” I replied, “my right to that appellation is indubitable. I am
+merely a sojourner here in Vanity Fair, being bound to the Celestial
+City by the new railroad.”
+
+“Alas, friend,” rejoined Mr. Stick-to-the-truth, “I do assure you, and
+beseech you to receive the truth of my words, that that whole concern
+is a bubble. You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live
+thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair.
+Yea, though you should deem yourself entering the gates of the blessed
+city, it will be nothing but a miserable delusion.”
+
+“The Lord of the Celestial City,” began the other pilgrim, whose name
+was Mr. Foot-it-to-heaven, “has refused, and will ever refuse, to grant
+an act of incorporation for this railroad; and unless that be obtained,
+no passenger can ever hope to enter his dominions. Wherefore every man
+who buys a ticket must lay his account with losing the purchase money,
+which is the value of his own soul.”
+
+“Poh, nonsense!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, taking my arm and leading me
+off, “these fellows ought to be indicted for a libel. If the law stood
+as it once did in Vanity Fair we should see them grinning through the
+iron bars of the prison window.”
+
+This incident made a considerable impression on my mind, and
+contributed with other circumstances to indispose me to a permanent
+residence in the city of Vanity; although, of course, I was not simple
+enough to give up my original plan of gliding along easily and
+commodiously by railroad. Still, I grew anxious to be gone. There was
+one strange thing that troubled me. Amid the occupations or amusements
+of the Fair, nothing was more common than for a person—whether at
+feast, theatre, or church, or trafficking for wealth and honors, or
+whatever he might be doing, to vanish like a soap bubble, and be never
+more seen of his fellows; and so accustomed were the latter to such
+little accidents that they went on with their business as quietly as if
+nothing had happened. But it was otherwise with me.
+
+Finally, after a pretty long residence at the Fair, I resumed my
+journey towards the Celestial City, still with Mr. Smooth-it-away at my
+side. At a short distance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we passed the
+ancient silver mine, of which Demas was the first discoverer, and which
+is now wrought to great advantage, supplying nearly all the coined
+currency of the world. A little further onward was the spot where Lot’s
+wife had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious
+travellers have long since carried it away piecemeal. Had all regrets
+been punished as rigorously as this poor dame’s were, my yearning for
+the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have produced a similar
+change in my own corporeal substance, and left me a warning to future
+pilgrims.
+
+The next remarkable object was a large edifice, constructed of
+moss-grown stone, but in a modern and airy style of architecture. The
+engine came to a pause in its vicinity, with the usual tremendous
+shriek.
+
+“This was formerly the castle of the redoubted giant Despair,” observed
+Mr. Smooth-it-away; “but since his death Mr. Flimsy-faith has repaired
+it, and keeps an excellent house of entertainment here. It is one of
+our stopping-places.”
+
+“It seems but slightly put together,” remarked I, looking at the frail
+yet ponderous walls. “I do not envy Mr. Flimsy-faith his habitation.
+Some day it will thunder down upon the heads of the occupants.”
+
+“We shall escape at all events,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, “for Apollyon
+is putting on the steam again.”
+
+The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delectable Mountains, and
+traversed the field where in former ages the blind men wandered and
+stumbled among the tombs. One of these ancient tombstones had been
+thrust across the track by some malicious person, and gave the train of
+cars a terrible jolt. Far up the rugged side of a mountain I perceived
+a rusty iron door, half overgrown with bushes and creeping plants, but
+with smoke issuing from its crevices.
+
+“Is that,” inquired I, “the very door in the hill-side which the
+shepherds assured Christian was a by-way to hell?”
+
+“That was a joke on the part of the shepherds,” said Mr. Smooth-itaway,
+with a smile. “It is neither more nor less than the door of a cavern
+which they use as a smoke-house for the preparation of mutton hams.”
+
+My recollections of the journey are now, for a little space, dim and
+confused, inasmuch as a singular drowsiness here overcame me, owing to
+the fact that we were passing over the enchanted ground, the air of
+which encourages a disposition to sleep. I awoke, however, as soon as
+we crossed the borders of the pleasant land of Beulah. All the
+passengers were rubbing their eyes, comparing watches, and
+congratulating one another on the prospect of arriving so seasonably at
+the journey’s end. The sweet breezes of this happy clime came
+refreshingly to our nostrils; we beheld the glimmering gush of silver
+fountains, overhung by trees of beautiful foliage and delicious fruit,
+which were propagated by grafts from the celestial gardens. Once, as we
+dashed onward like a hurricane, there was a flutter of wings and the
+bright appearance of an angel in the air, speeding forth on some
+heavenly mission. The engine now announced the close vicinity of the
+final station-house by one last and horrible scream, in which there
+seemed to be distinguishable every kind of wailing and woe, and bitter
+fierceness of wrath, all mixed up with the wild laughter of a devil or
+a madman. Throughout our journey, at every stopping-place, Apollyon had
+exercised his ingenuity in screwing the most abominable sounds out of
+the whistle of the steam-engine; but in this closing effort he outdid
+himself and created an infernal uproar, which, besides disturbing the
+peaceful inhabitants of Beulah, must have sent its discord even through
+the celestial gates.
+
+While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our ears we heard an
+exulting strain, as if a thousand instruments of music, with height and
+depth and sweetness in their tones, at once tender and triumphant, were
+struck in unison, to greet the approach of some illustrious hero, who
+had fought the good fight and won a glorious victory, and was come to
+lay aside his battered arms forever. Looking to ascertain what might be
+the occasion of this glad harmony, I perceived, on alighting from the
+cars, that a multitude of shining ones had assembled on the other side
+of the river, to welcome two poor pilgrims, who were just emerging from
+its depths. They were the same whom Apollyon and ourselves had
+persecuted with taunts, and gibes, and scalding steam, at the
+commencement of our journey—the same whose unworldly aspect and
+impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the wild revellers of
+Vanity Fair.
+
+“How amazingly well those men have got on,” cried I to Mr.
+Smoothit—away. “I wish we were secure of as good a reception.”
+
+“Never fear, never fear!” answered my friend. “Come, make haste; the
+ferry boat will be off directly, and in three minutes you will be on
+the other side of the river. No doubt you will find coaches to carry
+you up to the city gates.”
+
+A steam ferry boat, the last improvement on this important route, lay
+at the river side, puffing, snorting, and emitting all those other
+disagreeable utterances which betoken the departure to be immediate. I
+hurried on board with the rest of the passengers, most of whom were in
+great perturbation: some bawling out for their baggage; some tearing
+their hair and exclaiming that the boat would explode or sink; some
+already pale with the heaving of the stream; some gazing affrighted at
+the ugly aspect of the steersman; and some still dizzy with the
+slumberous influences of the Enchanted Ground. Looking back to the
+shore, I was amazed to discern Mr. Smooth-it-away waving his hand in
+token of farewell.
+
+“Don’t you go over to the Celestial City?” exclaimed I.
+
+“Oh, no!” answered he with a queer smile, and that same disagreeable
+contortion of visage which I had remarked in the inhabitants of the
+Dark Valley. “Oh, no! I have come thus far only for the sake of your
+pleasant company. Good-by! We shall meet again.”
+
+And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-away laugh outright, in
+the midst of which cachinnation a smoke-wreath issued from his mouth
+and nostrils, while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of either eye,
+proving indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent
+fiend! To deny the existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures
+raging within his breast. I rushed to the side of the boat, intending
+to fling myself on shore; but the wheels, as they began their
+revolutions, threw a dash of spray over me so cold—so deadly cold, with
+the chill that will never leave those waters until Death be drowned in
+his own river—that with a shiver and a heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven
+it was a Dream!
+
+
+
+
+THE PROCESSION OF LIFE
+
+
+Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. All of us
+have our places, and are to move onward under the direction of the
+Chief Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the invariably
+mistaken principles on which the deputy marshals seek to arrange this
+immense concourse of people, so much more numerous than those that
+train their interminable length through streets and highways in times
+of political excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory
+of man or even the record of history, and has hitherto been very little
+modified by the innate sense of something wrong, and the dim perception
+of better methods, that have disquieted all the ages through which the
+procession has taken its march. Its members are classified by the
+merest external circumstances, and thus are more certain to be thrown
+out of their true positions than if no principle of arrangement were
+attempted. In one part of the procession we see men of landed estate or
+moneyed capital gravely keeping each other company, for the
+preposterous reason that they chance to have a similar standing in the
+tax-gatherer’s book. Trades and professions march together with
+scarcely a more real bond of union. In this manner, it cannot be
+denied, people are disentangled from the mass and separated into
+various classes according to certain apparent relations; all have some
+artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn
+to consider as a genuine characteristic. Fixing our attention on such
+outside shows of similarity or difference, we lose sight of those
+realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or Providence has constituted
+for every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one great office of human
+wisdom to classify him. When the mind has once accustomed itself to a
+proper arrangement of the Procession of Life, or a true classification
+of society, even though merely speculative, there is thenceforth a
+satisfaction which pretty well suffices for itself without the aid of
+any actual reformation in the order of march.
+
+For instance, assuming to myself the power of marshalling the aforesaid
+procession, I direct a trumpeter to send forth a blast loud enough to
+be heard from hence to China; and a herald, with world-pervading voice,
+to make proclamation for a certain class of mortals to take their
+places. What shall be their principle of union? After all, an external
+one, in comparison with many that might be found, yet far more real
+than those which the world has selected for a similar purpose. Let all
+who are afflicted with like physical diseases form themselves into
+ranks.
+
+Our first attempt at classification is not very successful. It may
+gratify the pride of aristocracy to reflect that disease, more than any
+other circumstance of human life, pays due observance to the
+distinctions which rank and wealth, and poverty and lowliness, have
+established among mankind. Some maladies are rich and precious, and
+only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
+Of this kind is the gout, which serves as a bond of brotherhood to the
+purple-visaged gentry, who obey the herald’s voice, and painfully
+hobble from all civilized regions of the globe to take their post in
+the grand procession. In mercy to their toes, let us hope that the
+march may not be long. The Dyspeptics, too, are people of good standing
+in the world. For them the earliest salmon is caught in our eastern
+rivers, and the shy woodcock stains the dry leaves with his blood in
+his remotest haunts, and the turtle comes from the far Pacific Islands
+to be gobbled up in soup. They can afford to flavor all their dishes
+with indolence, which, in spite of the general opinion, is a sauce more
+exquisitely piquant than appetite won by exercise. Apoplexy is another
+highly respectable disease. We will rank together all who have the
+symptom of dizziness in the brain, and as fast as any drop by the way
+supply their places with new members of the board of aldermen.
+
+On the other hand, here come whole tribes of people whose physical
+lives are but a deteriorated variety of life, and themselves a meaner
+species of mankind; so sad an effect has been wrought by the tainted
+breath of cities, scanty and unwholesome food, destructive modes of
+labor, and the lack of those moral supports that might partially have
+counteracted such bad influences. Behold here a train of house
+painters, all afflicted with a peculiar sort of colic. Next in place we
+will marshal those workmen in cutlery, who have breathed a fatal
+disorder into their lungs with the impalpable dust of steel. Tailors
+and shoemakers, being sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
+part of the procession and march under similar banners of disease; but
+among them we may observe here and there a sickly student, who has left
+his health between the leaves of classic volumes; and clerks, likewise,
+who have caught their deaths on high official stools; and men of genius
+too, who have written sheet after sheet with pens dipped in their
+heart’s blood. These are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But
+what is this cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear
+with the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are
+seamstresses, who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the
+service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now it is
+almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud. Consumption
+points their place in the procession. With their sad sisterhood are
+intermingled many youthful maidens who have sickened in aristocratic
+mansions, and for whose aid science has unavailingly searched its
+volumes, and whom breathless love has watched. In our ranks the rich
+maiden and the poor seamstress may walk arm in arm. We might find
+innumerable other instances, where the bond of mutual disease—not to
+speak of nation-sweeping pestilence—embraces high and low, and makes
+the king a brother of the clown. But it is not hard to own that disease
+is the natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
+established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the color of a
+fever flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their own physical
+infirmities, and display their symptoms as the badges of high station.
+All things considered, these are as proper subjects of human pride as
+any relations of human rank that men can fix upon.
+
+Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and herald, with thy voice
+of might, shout forth another summons that shall reach the old baronial
+castles of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our western wilderness! What
+class is next to take its place in the procession of mortal life? Let
+it be those whom the gifts of intellect have united in a noble
+brotherhood.
+
+Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional distinctions of
+society melt away like a vapor when we would grasp it with the hand.
+Were Byron now alive, and Burns, the first would come from his
+ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited
+honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who
+grew immortal while he stooped behind his plough. These are gone; but
+the hall, the farmer’s fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace, the
+counting-room, the workshop, the village, the city, life’s high places
+and low ones, may all produce their poets, whom a common temperament
+pervades like an electric sympathy. Peer or ploughman, we will muster
+them pair by pair and shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in its most
+artificial state, consents to this arrangement. These factory girls
+from Lowell shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and
+literary circles, the bluebells in fashion’s nosegay, the Sapphos, and
+Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of intellect bring
+together as strange companies. Silk-gowned professor of languages, give
+your arm to this sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the
+conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the anvil. All varieties
+of human speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man.
+Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank they
+come, who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway a
+people—Nature’s generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with them also
+the deep philosophers who think the thought in one generation that is
+to revolutionize society in the next. With the hereditary legislator in
+whom eloquence is a far-descended attainment—a rich echo repeated by
+powerful voices from Cicero downward—we will match some wondrous
+backwoodsman, who has caught a wild power of language from the breeze
+among his native forest boughs. But we may safely leave these brethren
+and sisterhood to settle their own congenialities. Our ordinary
+distinctions become so trifling, so impalpable, so ridiculously
+visionary, in comparison with a classification founded on truth, that
+all talk about the matter is immediately a common place.
+
+Yet the longer I reflect the less am I satisfied with the idea of
+forming a separate class of mankind on the basis of high intellectual
+power. At best it is but a higher development of innate gifts common to
+all. Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius appears deepest and truest
+excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws
+out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is
+profoundly, though unutterably, conscious. Therefore, though we suffer
+the brotherhood of intellect to march onward together, it may be
+doubted whether their peculiar relation will not begin to vanish as
+soon as the procession shall have passed beyond the circle of this
+present world. But we do not classify for eternity.
+
+And next, let the trumpet pour forth a funereal wail, and the herald’s
+voice give breath in one vast cry to all the groans and grievous
+utterances that are audible throughout the earth. We appeal now to the
+sacred bond of sorrow, and summon the great multitude who labor under
+similar afflictions to take their places in the march.
+
+How many a heart that would have been insensible to any other call has
+responded to the doleful accents of that voice! It has gone far and
+wide, and high and low, and left scarcely a mortal roof unvisited.
+Indeed, the principle is only too universal for our purpose, and,
+unless we limit it, will quite break up our classification of mankind,
+and convert the whole procession into a funeral train. We will
+therefore be at some pains to discriminate. Here comes a lonely rich
+man: he has built a noble fabric for his dwelling-house, with a front
+of stately architecture and marble floors and doors of precious woods;
+the whole structure is as beautiful as a dream and as substantial as
+the native rock. But the visionary shapes of a long posterity, for
+whose home this mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness since
+the death of the founder’s only son. The rich man gives a glance at his
+sable garb in one of the splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and
+descending a flight of lofty steps instinctively offers his arm to
+yonder poverty stricken widow in the rusty black bonnet, and with a
+check apron over her patched gown. The sailor boy, who was her sole
+earthly stay, was washed overboard in a late tempest. This couple from
+the palace and the almshouse are but the types of thousands more who
+represent the dark tragedy of life and seldom quarrel for the upper
+parts. Grief is such a leveller, with its own dignity and its own
+humility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and the monarch,
+will waive their pretensions to external rank without the officiousness
+of interference on our part. If pride—the influence of the world’s
+false distinctions—remain in the heart, then sorrow lacks the
+earnestness which makes it holy and reverend. It loses its reality and
+becomes a miserable shadow. On this ground we have an opportunity to
+assign over multitudes who would willingly claim places here to other
+parts of the procession. If the mourner have anything dearer than his
+grief he must seek his true position elsewhere. There are so many
+unsubstantial sorrows which the necessity of our mortal state begets on
+idleness, that an observer, casting aside sentiment, is sometimes led
+to question whether there be any real woe, except absolute physical
+suffering and the loss of closest friends. A crowd who exhibit what
+they deem to be broken hearts—and among them many lovelorn maids and
+bachelors, and men of disappointed ambition in arts or politics, and
+the poor who were once rich, or who have sought to be rich in vain—the
+great majority of these may ask admittance into some other fraternity.
+There is no room here. Perhaps we may institute a separate class where
+such unfortunates will naturally fall into the procession. Meanwhile
+let them stand aside and patiently await their time.
+
+If our trumpeter can borrow a note from the doomsday trumpet blast, let
+him sound it now. The dread alarum should make the earth quake to its
+centre, for the herald is about to address mankind with a summons to
+which even the purest mortal may be sensible of some faint responding
+echo in his breast. In many bosoms it will awaken a still small voice
+more terrible than its own reverberating uproar.
+
+The hideous appeal has swept around the globe. Come, all ye guilty
+ones, and rank yourselves in accordance with the brotherhood of crime.
+This, indeed, is an awful summons. I almost tremble to look at the
+strange partnerships that begin to be formed, reluctantly, but by the
+invincible necessity of like to like in this part of the procession. A
+forger from the state prison seizes the arm of a distinguished
+financier. How indignantly does the latter plead his fair reputation
+upon ’Change, and insist that his operations, by their magnificence of
+scope, were removed into quite another sphere of morality than those of
+his pitiful companion! But let him cut the connection if he can. Here
+comes a murderer with his clanking chains, and pairs himself—horrible
+to tell—with as pure and upright a man, in all observable respects, as
+ever partook of the consecrated bread and wine. He is one of those,
+perchance the most hopeless of all sinners, who practise such an
+exemplary system of outward duties, that even a deadly crime may be
+hidden from their own sight and remembrance, under this unreal
+frostwork. Yet he now finds his place. Why do that pair of flaunting
+girls, with the pert, affected laugh and the sly leer at the
+by-standers, intrude themselves into the same rank with yonder decorous
+matron, and that somewhat prudish maiden? Surely these poor creatures,
+born to vice as their sole and natural inheritance, can be no fit
+associates for women who have been guarded round about by all the
+proprieties of domestic life, and who could not err unless they first
+created the opportunity. Oh no; it must be merely the impertinence of
+those unblushing hussies; and we can only wonder how such respectable
+ladies should have responded to a summons that was not meant for them.
+
+We shall make short work of this miserable class, each member of which
+is entitled to grasp any other member’s hand, by that vile degradation
+wherein guilty error has buried all alike. The foul fiend to whom it
+properly belongs must relieve us of our loathsome task. Let the bond
+servants of sin pass on. But neither man nor woman, in whom good
+predominates, will smile or sneer, nor bid the Rogues’ March be played,
+in derision of their array. Feeling within their breasts a shuddering
+sympathy, which at least gives token of the sin that might have been,
+they will thank God for any place in the grand procession of human
+existence, save among those most wretched ones. Many, however, will be
+astonished at the fatal impulse that drags them thitherward. Nothing is
+more remarkable than the various deceptions by which guilt conceals
+itself from the perpetrator’s conscience, and oftenest, perhaps, by the
+splendor of its garments. Statesmen, rulers, generals, and all men who
+act over an extensive sphere, are most liable to be deluded in this
+way; they commit wrong, devastation, and murder, on so grand a scale,
+that it impresses them as speculative rather than actual; but in our
+procession we find them linked in detestable conjunction with the
+meanest criminals whose deeds have the vulgarity of petty details. Here
+the effect of circumstance and accident is done away, and a man finds
+his rank according to the spirit of his crime, in whatever shape it may
+have been developed.
+
+We have called the Evil; now let us call the Good. The trumpet’s brazen
+throat should pour heavenly music over the earth, and the herald’s
+voice go forth with the sweetness of an angel’s accents, as if to
+summon each upright man to his reward. But how is this? Does none
+answer to the call? Not one: for the just, the pure, the true, and all
+who might most worthily obey it, shrink sadly back, as most conscious
+of error and imperfection. Then let the summons be to those whose
+pervading principle is Love. This classification will embrace all the
+truly good, and none in whose souls there exists not something that may
+expand itself into a heaven, both of well-doing and felicity.
+
+The first that presents himself is a man of wealth, who has bequeathed
+the bulk of his property to a hospital; his ghost, methinks, would have
+a better right here than his living body. But here they come, the
+genuine benefactors of their race. Some have wandered about the earth
+with pictures of bliss in their imagination, and with hearts that
+shrank sensitively from the idea of pain and woe, yet have studied all
+varieties of misery that human nature can endure. The prison, the
+insane asylum, the squalid chamber of the almshouse, the manufactory
+where the demon of machinery annihilates the human soul, and the cotton
+field where God’s image becomes a beast of burden; to these and every
+other scene where man wrongs or neglects his brother, the apostles of
+humanity have penetrated. This missionary, black with India’s burning
+sunshine, shall give his arm to a pale-faced brother who has made
+himself familiar with the infected alleys and loathsome haunts of vice
+in one of our own cities. The generous founder of a college shall be
+the partner of a maiden lady of narrow substance, one of whose good
+deeds it has been to gather a little school of orphan children. If the
+mighty merchant whose benefactions are reckoned by thousands of dollars
+deem himself worthy, let him join the procession with her whose love
+has proved itself by watchings at the sick-bed, and all those lowly
+offices which bring her into actual contact with disease and
+wretchedness. And with those whose impulses have guided them to
+benevolent actions, we will rank others to whom Providence has assigned
+a different tendency and different powers. Men who have spent their
+lives in generous and holy contemplation for the human race; those who,
+by a certain heavenliness of spirit, have purified the atmosphere
+around them, and thus supplied a medium in which good and high things
+may be projected and performed—give to these a lofty place among the
+benefactors of mankind, although no deed, such as the world calls
+deeds, may be recorded of them. There are some individuals of whom we
+cannot conceive it proper that they should apply their hands to any
+earthly instrument, or work out any definite act; and others, perhaps
+not less high, to whom it is an essential attribute to labor in body as
+well as spirit for the welfare of their brethren. Thus, if we find a
+spiritual sage whose unseen, inestimable influence has exalted the
+moral standard of mankind, we will choose for his companion some poor
+laborer who has wrought for love in the potato field of a neighbor
+poorer than himself.
+
+We have summoned this various multitude—and, to the credit of our
+nature, it is a large one—on the principle of Love. It is singular,
+nevertheless, to remark the shyness that exists among many members of
+the present class, all of whom we might expect to recognize one another
+by the freemasonry of mutual goodness, and to embrace like brethren,
+giving God thanks for such various specimens of human excellence. But
+it is far otherwise. Each sect surrounds its own righteousness with a
+hedge of thorns. It is difficult for the good Christian to acknowledge
+the good Pagan; almost impossible for the good Orthodox to grasp the
+hand of the good Unitarian, leaving to their Creator to settle the
+matters in dispute, and giving their mutual efforts strongly and
+trustingly to whatever right thing is too evident to be mistaken. Then
+again, though the heart be large, yet the mind is often of such
+moderate dimensions as to be exclusively filled up with one idea. When
+a good man has long devoted himself to a particular kind of
+beneficence—to one species of reform—he is apt to become narrowed into
+the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to fancy that there is no
+other good to be done on earth but that self-same good to which he has
+put his hand, and in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions.
+All else is worthless. His scheme must be wrought out by the united
+strength of the whole world’s stock of love, or the world is no longer
+worthy of a position in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being
+the rich grape juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an
+intoxicating quality, when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect,
+and often, as it were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups. For
+such reasons, strange to say, it is harder to contrive a friendly
+arrangement of these brethren of love and righteousness, in the
+procession of life, than to unite even the wicked, who, indeed, are
+chained together by their crimes. The fact is too preposterous for
+tears, too lugubrious for laughter.
+
+But, let good men push and elbow one another as they may during their
+earthly march, all will be peace among them when the honorable array of
+their procession shall tread on heavenly ground. There they will
+doubtless find that they have been working each for the other’s cause,
+and that every well-delivered stroke, which, with an honest purpose any
+mortal struck, even for a narrow object, was indeed stricken for the
+universal cause of good. Their own view may be bounded by country,
+creed, profession, the diversities of individual character—but above
+them all is the breadth of Providence. How many who have deemed
+themselves antagonists will smile hereafter, when they look back upon
+the world’s wide harvest field, and perceive that, in unconscious
+brotherhood, they were helping to bind the selfsame sheaf!
+
+But, come! The sun is hastening westward, while the march of human
+life, that never paused before, is delayed by our attempt to rearrange
+its order. It is desirable to find some comprehensive principle, that
+shall render our task easier by bringing thousands into the ranks where
+hitherto we have brought one. Therefore let the trumpet, if possible,
+split its brazen throat with a louder note than ever, and the herald
+summon all mortals, who, from whatever cause, have lost, or never
+found, their proper places in the wold.
+
+Obedient to this call, a great multitude come together, most of them
+with a listless gait, betokening weariness of soul, yet with a gleam of
+satisfaction in their faces, at a prospect of at length reaching those
+positions which, hitherto, they have vainly sought. But here will be
+another disappointment; for we can attempt no more than merely to
+associate in one fraternity all who are afflicted with the same vague
+trouble. Some great mistake in life is the chief condition of
+admittance into this class. Here are members of the learned
+professions, whom Providence endowed with special gifts for the plough,
+the forge, and the wheelbarrow, or for the routine of unintellectual
+business. We will assign to them, as partners in the march, those lowly
+laborers and handicraftsmen, who have pined, as with a dying thirst,
+after the unattainable fountains of knowledge. The latter have lost
+less than their companions; yet more, because they deem it infinite.
+Perchance the two species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here
+are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and men of war who
+should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be ranked here whom some
+freak of Nature, making game of her poor children, had imbued with the
+confidence of genius and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no
+corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied
+with the faculty of expression, or any of that earthly machinery by
+which ethereal endowments must be manifested to mankind. All these,
+therefore, are melancholy laughing-stocks. Next, here are honest and
+well intentioned persons, who by a want of tact—by inaccurate
+perceptions—by a distorting imagination—have been kept continually at
+cross purposes with the world and bewildered upon the path of life. Let
+us see if they can confine themselves within the line of our
+procession. In this class, likewise, we must assign places to those who
+have encountered that worst of ill success, a higher fortune than their
+abilities could vindicate; writers, actors, painters, the pets of a
+day, but whose laurels wither unrenewed amid their hoary hair;
+politicians, whom some malicious contingency of affairs has thrust into
+conspicuous station, where, while the world stands gazing at them, the
+dreary consciousness of imbecility makes them curse their birth hour.
+To such men, we give for a companion him whose rare talents, which
+perhaps require a Revolution for their exercise, are buried in the tomb
+of sluggish circumstances.
+
+Not far from these, we must find room for one whose success has been of
+the wrong kind; the man who should have lingered in the cloisters of a
+university, digging new treasures out of the Herculaneum of antique
+lore, diffusing depth and accuracy of literature throughout his
+country, and thus making for himself a great and quiet fame. But the
+outward tendencies around him have proved too powerful for his inward
+nature, and have drawn him into the arena of political tumult, there to
+contend at disadvantage, whether front to front, or side by side, with
+the brawny giants of actual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for
+brawling parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the Union; a
+governor of his native state; an ambassador to the courts of kings or
+queens; and the world may deem him a man of happy stars. But not so the
+wise; and not so himself, when he looks through his experience, and
+sighs to miss that fitness, the one invaluable touch which makes all
+things true and real. So much achieved, yet how abortive is his life!
+Whom shall we choose for his companion? Some weak framed blacksmith,
+perhaps, whose delicacy of muscle might have suited a tailor’s
+shopboard better than the anvil.
+
+Shall we bid the trumpet sound again? It is hardly worth the while.
+There remain a few idle men of fortune, tavern and grog-shop loungers,
+lazzaroni, old bachelors, decaying maidens, and people of crooked
+intellect or temper, all of whom may find their like, or some tolerable
+approach to it, in the plentiful diversity of our latter class. There
+too, as his ultimate destiny, must we rank the dreamer, who, all his
+life long, has cherished the idea that he was peculiarly apt for
+something, but never could determine what it was; and there the most
+unfortunate of men, whose purpose it has been to enjoy life’s
+pleasures, but to avoid a manful struggle with its toil and sorrow. The
+remainder, if any, may connect themselves with whatever rank of the
+procession they shall find best adapted to their tastes and
+consciences. The worst possible fate would be to remain behind,
+shivering in the solitude of time, while all the world is on the move
+towards eternity. Our attempt to classify society is now complete. The
+result may be anything but perfect; yet better—to give it the very
+lowest praise—than the antique rule of the herald’s office, or the
+modern one of the tax-gatherer, whereby the accidents and superficial
+attributes with which the real nature of individuals has least to do,
+are acted upon as the deepest characteristics of mankind. Our task is
+done! Now let the grand procession move!
+
+Yet pause a while! We had forgotten the Chief Marshal.
+
+Hark! That world-wide swell of solemn music, with the clang of a mighty
+bell breaking forth through its regulated uproar, announces his
+approach. He comes; a severe, sedate, immovable, dark rider, waving his
+truncheon of universal sway, as he passes along the lengthened line, on
+the pale horse of the Revelation. It is Death! Who else could assume
+the guidance of a procession that comprehends all humanity? And if
+some, among these many millions, should deem themselves classed amiss,
+yet let them take to their hearts the comfortable truth that Death
+levels us all into one great brotherhood, and that another state of
+being will surely rectify the wrong of this. Then breathe thy wail upon
+the earth’s wailing wind, thou band of melancholy music, made up of
+every sigh that the human heart, unsatisfied, has uttered! There is yet
+triumph in thy tones. And now we move! Beggars in their rags, and Kings
+trailing the regal purple in the dust; the Warrior’s gleaming helmet;
+the Priest in his sable robe; the hoary Grandsire, who has run life’s
+circle and come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy with his golden
+curls, frisking along the march; the Artisan’s stuff jacket; the
+Noble’s star-decorated coat;—the whole presenting a motley spectacle,
+yet with a dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward, onward, into that
+dimness where the lights of Time which have blazed along the
+procession, are flickering in their sockets! And whither! We know not;
+and Death, hitherto our leader, deserts us by the wayside, as the tramp
+of our innumerable footsteps echoes beyond his sphere. He knows not,
+more than we, our destined goal. But God, who made us, knows, and will
+not leave us on our toilsome and doubtful march, either to wander in
+infinite uncertainty, or perish by the way!
+
+
+
+
+FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND
+
+
+“Dickon,” cried Mother Rigby, “a coal for my pipe!”
+
+The pipe was in the old dame’s mouth when she said these words. She had
+thrust it there after filling it with tobacco, but without stooping to
+light it at the hearth, where indeed there was no appearance of a fire
+having been kindled that morning. Forthwith, however, as soon as the
+order was given, there was an intense red glow out of the bowl of the
+pipe, and a whiff of smoke came from Mother Rigby’s lips. Whence the
+coal came, and how brought thither by an invisible hand, I have never
+been able to discover.
+
+“Good!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a nod of her head. “Thank ye, Dickon!
+And now for making this scarecrow. Be within call, Dickon, in case I
+need you again.”
+
+The good woman had risen thus early (for as yet it was scarcely
+sunrise) in order to set about making a scarecrow, which she intended
+to put in the middle of her corn-patch. It was now the latter week of
+May, and the crows and blackbirds had already discovered the little,
+green, rolledup leaf of the Indian corn just peeping out of the soil.
+She was determined, therefore, to contrive as lifelike a scarecrow as
+ever was seen, and to finish it immediately, from top to toe, so that
+it should begin its sentinel’s duty that very morning. Now Mother Rigby
+(as everybody must have heard) was one of the most cunning and potent
+witches in New England, and might, with very little trouble, have made
+a scarecrow ugly enough to frighten the minister himself. But on this
+occasion, as she had awakened in an uncommonly pleasant humor, and was
+further dulcified by her pipe tobacco, she resolved to produce
+something fine, beautiful, and splendid, rather than hideous and
+horrible.
+
+“I don’t want to set up a hobgoblin in my own corn-patch, and almost at
+my own doorstep,” said Mother Rigby to herself, puffing out a whiff of
+smoke; “I could do it if I pleased, but I’m tired of doing marvellous
+things, and so I’ll keep within the bounds of every-day business just
+for variety’s sake. Besides, there is no use in scaring the little
+children for a mile roundabout, though ’tis true I’m a witch.”
+
+It was settled, therefore, in her own mind, that the scarecrow should
+represent a fine gentleman of the period, so far as the materials at
+hand would allow. Perhaps it may be as well to enumerate the chief of
+the articles that went to the composition of this figure.
+
+The most important item of all, probably, although it made so little
+show, was a certain broomstick, on which Mother Rigby had taken many an
+airy gallop at midnight, and which now served the scarecrow by way of a
+spinal column, or, as the unlearned phrase it, a backbone. One of its
+arms was a disabled flail which used to be wielded by Goodman Rigby,
+before his spouse worried him out of this troublesome world; the other,
+if I mistake not, was composed of the pudding stick and a broken rung
+of a chair, tied loosely together at the elbow. As for its legs, the
+right was a hoe handle, and the left an undistinguished and
+miscellaneous stick from the woodpile. Its lungs, stomach, and other
+affairs of that kind were nothing better than a meal bag stuffed with
+straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton and entire corporosity of the
+scarecrow, with the exception of its head; and this was admirably
+supplied by a somewhat withered and shrivelled pumpkin, in which Mother
+Rigby cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth, leaving a
+bluish-colored knob in the middle to pass for a nose. It was really
+quite a respectable face.
+
+“I’ve seen worse ones on human shoulders, at any rate,” said Mother
+Rigby. “And many a fine gentleman has a pumpkin head, as well as my
+scarecrow.”
+
+But the clothes, in this case, were to be the making of the man. So the
+good old woman took down from a peg an ancient plum-colored coat of
+London make, and with relics of embroidery on its seams, cuffs,
+pocket-flaps, and button-holes, but lamentably worn and faded, patched
+at the elbows, tattered at the skirts, and threadbare all over. On the
+left breast was a round hole, whence either a star of nobility had been
+rent away, or else the hot heart of some former wearer had scorched it
+through and through. The neighbors said that this rich garment belonged
+to the Black Man’s wardrobe, and that he kept it at Mother Rigby’s
+cottage for the convenience of slipping it on whenever he wished to
+make a grand appearance at the governor’s table. To match the coat
+there was a velvet waistcoat of very ample size, and formerly
+embroidered with foliage that had been as brightly golden as the maple
+leaves in October, but which had now quite vanished out of the
+substance of the velvet. Next came a pair of scarlet breeches, once
+worn by the French governor of Louisbourg, and the knees of which had
+touched the lower step of the throne of Louis le Grand. The Frenchman
+had given these small-clothes to an Indian powwow, who parted with them
+to the old witch for a gill of strong waters, at one of their dances in
+the forest. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings
+and put them on the figure’s legs, where they showed as unsubstantial
+as a dream, with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself
+miserably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead
+husband’s wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin, and surmounted the
+whole with a dusty three-cornered hat, in which was stuck the longest
+tail feather of a rooster.
+
+Then the old dame stood the figure up in a corner of her cottage and
+chuckled to behold its yellow semblance of a visage, with its nobby
+little nose thrust into the air. It had a strangely self-satisfied
+aspect, and seemed to say, “Come look at me!”
+
+“And you are well worth looking at, that’s a fact!” quoth Mother Rigby,
+in admiration at her own handiwork. “I’ve made many a puppet since I’ve
+been a witch, but methinks this is the finest of them all. ’Tis almost
+too good for a scarecrow. And, by the by, I’ll just fill a fresh pipe
+of tobacco and then take him out to the corn-patch.”
+
+While filling her pipe the old woman continued to gaze with almost
+motherly affection at the figure in the corner. To say the truth,
+whether it were chance, or skill, or downright witchcraft, there was
+something wonderfully human in this ridiculous shape, bedizened with
+its tattered finery; and as for the countenance, it appeared to shrivel
+its yellow surface into a grin—a funny kind of expression betwixt scorn
+and merriment, as if it understood itself to be a jest at mankind. The
+more Mother Rigby looked the better she was pleased.
+
+“Dickon,” cried she sharply, “another coal for my pipe!”
+
+Hardly had she spoken, than, just as before, there was a red-glowing
+coal on the top of the tobacco. She drew in a long whiff and puffed it
+forth again into the bar of morning sunshine which struggled through
+the one dusty pane of her cottage window. Mother Rigby always liked to
+flavor her pipe with a coal of fire from the particular chimney corner
+whence this had been brought. But where that chimney corner might be,
+or who brought the coal from it,—further than that the invisible
+messenger seemed to respond to the name of Dickon,—I cannot tell.
+
+“That puppet yonder,” thought Mother Rigby, still with her eyes fixed
+on the scarecrow, “is too good a piece of work to stand all summer in a
+corn-patch, frightening away the crows and blackbirds. He’s capable of
+better things. Why, I’ve danced with a worse one, when partners
+happened to be scarce, at our witch meetings in the forest! What if I
+should let him take his chance among the other men of straw and empty
+fellows who go bustling about the world?”
+
+The old witch took three or four more whiffs of her pipe and smiled.
+
+“He’ll meet plenty of his brethren at every street corner!” continued
+she. “Well; I didn’t mean to dabble in witchcraft to-day, further than
+the lighting of my pipe, but a witch I am, and a witch I’m likely to
+be, and there’s no use trying to shirk it. I’ll make a man of my
+scarecrow, were it only for the joke’s sake!”
+
+While muttering these words, Mother Rigby took the pipe from her own
+mouth and thrust it into the crevice which represented the same feature
+in the pumpkin visage of the scarecrow.
+
+“Puff, darling, puff!” said she. “Puff away, my fine fellow! your life
+depends on it!”
+
+This was a strange exhortation, undoubtedly, to be addressed to a mere
+thing of sticks, straw, and old clothes, with nothing better than a
+shrivelled pumpkin for a head,—as we know to have been the scarecrow’s
+case. Nevertheless, as we must carefully hold in remembrance, Mother
+Rigby was a witch of singular power and dexterity; and, keeping this
+fact duly before our minds, we shall see nothing beyond credibility in
+the remarkable incidents of our story. Indeed, the great difficulty
+will be at once got over, if we can only bring ourselves to believe
+that, as soon as the old dame bade him puff, there came a whiff of
+smoke from the scarecrow’s mouth. It was the very feeblest of whiffs,
+to be sure; but it was followed by another and another, each more
+decided than the preceding one.
+
+“Puff away, my pet! puff away, my pretty one!” Mother Rigby kept
+repeating, with her pleasantest smile. “It is the breath of life to ye;
+and that you may take my word for.”
+
+Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched. There must have been a
+spell either in the tobacco or in the fiercely-glowing coal that so
+mysteriously burned on top of it, or in the pungently-aromatic smoke
+which exhaled from the kindled weed. The figure, after a few doubtful
+attempts at length blew forth a volley of smoke extending all the way
+from the obscure corner into the bar of sunshine. There it eddied and
+melted away among the motes of dust. It seemed a convulsive effort; for
+the two or three next whiffs were fainter, although the coal still
+glowed and threw a gleam over the scarecrow’s visage. The old witch
+clapped her skinny hands together, and smiled encouragingly upon her
+handiwork. She saw that the charm worked well. The shrivelled, yellow
+face, which heretofore had been no face at all, had already a thin,
+fantastic haze, as it were of human likeness, shifting to and fro
+across it; sometimes vanishing entirely, but growing more perceptible
+than ever with the next whiff from the pipe. The whole figure, in like
+manner, assumed a show of life, such as we impart to ill-defined shapes
+among the clouds, and half deceive ourselves with the pastime of our
+own fancy.
+
+If we must needs pry closely into the matter, it may be doubted whether
+there was any real change, after all, in the sordid, wornout worthless,
+and ill-jointed substance of the scarecrow; but merely a spectral
+illusion, and a cunning effect of light and shade so colored and
+contrived as to delude the eyes of most men. The miracles of witchcraft
+seem always to have had a very shallow subtlety; and, at least, if the
+above explanation do not hit the truth of the process, I can suggest no
+better.
+
+“Well puffed, my pretty lad!” still cried old Mother Rigby. “Come,
+another good stout whiff, and let it be with might and main. Puff for
+thy life, I tell thee! Puff out of the very bottom of thy heart, if any
+heart thou hast, or any bottom to it! Well done, again! Thou didst suck
+in that mouthful as if for the pure love of it.”
+
+And then the witch beckoned to the scarecrow, throwing so much magnetic
+potency into her gesture that it seemed as if it must inevitably be
+obeyed, like the mystic call of the loadstone when it summons the iron.
+
+“Why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one?” said she. “Step forth! Thou
+hast the world before thee!”
+
+Upon my word, if the legend were not one which I heard on my
+grandmother’s knee, and which had established its place among things
+credible before my childish judgment could analyze its probability, I
+question whether I should have the face to tell it now.
+
+In obedience to Mother Rigby’s word, and extending its arm as if to
+reach her outstretched hand, the figure made a step forward—a kind of
+hitch and jerk, however, rather than a step—then tottered and almost
+lost its balance. What could the witch expect? It was nothing, after
+all, but a scarecrow stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed old
+beldam scowled, and beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so
+forcibly at this poor combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and
+ragged garments, that it was compelled to show itself a man, in spite
+of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There
+it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the
+thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was
+evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered,
+good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap
+upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall
+I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the
+scarecrow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abortive characters,
+composed of heterogeneous materials, used for the thousandth time, and
+never worth using, with which romance writers (and myself, no doubt,
+among the rest) have so overpeopled the world of fiction.
+
+But the fierce old hag began to get angry and show a glimpse of her
+diabolic nature (like a snake’s head, peeping with a hiss out of her
+bosom), at this pusillanimous behavior of the thing which she had taken
+the trouble to put together.
+
+“Puff away, wretch!” cried she, wrathfully. “Puff, puff, puff, thou
+thing of straw and emptiness! thou rag or two! thou meal bag! thou
+pumpkin head! thou nothing! Where shall I find a name vile enough to
+call thee by? Puff, I say, and suck in thy fantastic life with the
+smoke! else I snatch the pipe from thy mouth and hurl thee where that
+red coal came from.”
+
+Thus threatened, the unhappy scarecrow had nothing for it but to puff
+away for dear life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself lustily
+to the pipe, and sent forth such abundant volleys of tobacco smoke that
+the small cottage kitchen became all vaporous. The one sunbeam
+struggled mistily through, and could but imperfectly define the image
+of the cracked and dusty window pane on the opposite wall. Mother
+Rigby, meanwhile, with one brown arm akimbo and the other stretched
+towards the figure, loomed grimly amid the obscurity with such port and
+expression as when she was wont to heave a ponderous nightmare on her
+victims and stand at the bedside to enjoy their agony. In fear and
+trembling did this poor scarecrow puff. But its efforts, it must be
+acknowledged, served an excellent purpose; for, with each successive
+whiff, the figure lost more and more of its dizzy and perplexing
+tenuity and seemed to take denser substance. Its very garments,
+moreover, partook of the magical change, and shone with the gloss of
+novelty and glistened with the skilfully embroidered gold that had long
+ago been rent away. And, half revealed among the smoke, a yellow visage
+bent its lustreless eyes on Mother Rigby.
+
+At last the old witch clinched her fist and shook it at the figure. Not
+that she was positively angry, but merely acting on the
+principle—perhaps untrue, or not the only truth, though as high a one
+as Mother Rigby could be expected to attain—that feeble and torpid
+natures, being incapable of better inspiration, must be stirred up by
+fear. But here was the crisis. Should she fail in what she now sought
+to effect, it was her ruthless purpose to scatter the miserable
+simulacre into its original elements.
+
+“Thou hast a man’s aspect,” said she, sternly. “Have also the echo and
+mockery of a voice! I bid thee speak!”
+
+The scarecrow gasped, struggled, and at length emitted a murmur, which
+was so incorporated with its smoky breath that you could scarcely tell
+whether it were indeed a voice or only a whiff of tobacco. Some
+narrators of this legend hold the opinion that Mother Rigby’s
+conjurations and the fierceness of her will had compelled a familiar
+spirit into the figure, and that the voice was his.
+
+“Mother,” mumbled the poor stifled voice, “be not so awful with me! I
+would fain speak; but being without wits, what can I say?”
+
+“Thou canst speak, darling, canst thou?” cried Mother Rigby, relaxing
+her grim countenance into a smile. “And what shalt thou say, quoth-a!
+Say, indeed! Art thou of the brotherhood of the empty skull, and
+demandest of me what thou shalt say? Thou shalt say a thousand things,
+and saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said
+nothing! Be not afraid, I tell thee! When thou comest into the world
+(whither I purpose sending thee forthwith) thou shalt not lack the
+wherewithal to talk. Talk! Why, thou shall babble like a mill-stream,
+if thou wilt. Thou hast brains enough for that, I trow!”
+
+“At your service, mother,” responded the figure.
+
+“And that was well said, my pretty one,” answered Mother Rigby. “Then
+thou speakest like thyself, and meant nothing. Thou shalt have a
+hundred such set phrases, and five hundred to the boot of them. And
+now, darling, I have taken so much pains with thee and thou art so
+beautiful, that, by my troth, I love thee better than any witch’s
+puppet in the world; and I’ve made them of all sorts—clay, wax, straw,
+sticks, night fog, morning mist, sea foam, and chimney smoke. But thou
+art the very best. So give heed to what I say.”
+
+“Yes, kind mother,” said the figure, “with all my heart!”
+
+“With all thy heart!” cried the old witch, setting her hands to her
+sides and laughing loudly. “Thou hast such a pretty way of speaking.
+With all thy heart! And thou didst put thy hand to the left side of thy
+waistcoat as if thou really hadst one!”
+
+So now, in high good humor with this fantastic contrivance of hers,
+Mother Rigby told the scarecrow that it must go and play its part in
+the great world, where not one man in a hundred, she affirmed, was
+gifted with more real substance than itself. And, that he might hold up
+his head with the best of them, she endowed him, on the spot, with an
+unreckonable amount of wealth. It consisted partly of a gold mine in
+Eldorado, and of ten thousand shares in a broken bubble, and of half a
+million acres of vineyard at the North Pole, and of a castle in the
+air, and a chateau in Spain, together with all the rents and income
+therefrom accruing. She further made over to him the cargo of a certain
+ship, laden with salt of Cadiz, which she herself, by her necromantic
+arts, had caused to founder, ten years before, in the deepest part of
+mid-ocean. If the salt were not dissolved, and could be brought to
+market, it would fetch a pretty penny among the fishermen. That he
+might not lack ready money, she gave him a copper farthing of
+Birmingham manufacture, being all the coin she had about her, and
+likewise a great deal of brass, which she applied to his forehead, thus
+making it yellower than ever.
+
+“With that brass alone,” quoth Mother Rigby, “thou canst pay thy way
+all over the earth. Kiss me, pretty darling! I have done my best for
+thee.”
+
+Furthermore, that the adventurer might lack no possible advantage
+towards a fair start in life, this excellent old dame gave him a token
+by which he was to introduce himself to a certain magistrate, member of
+the council, merchant, and elder of the church (the four capacities
+constituting but one man), who stood at the head of society in the
+neighboring metropolis. The token was neither more nor less than a
+single word, which Mother Rigby whispered to the scarecrow, and which
+the scarecrow was to whisper to the merchant.
+
+“Gouty as the old fellow is, he’ll run thy errands for thee, when once
+thou hast given him that word in his ear,” said the old witch. “Mother
+Rigby knows the worshipful Justice Gookin, and the worshipful Justice
+knows Mother Rigby!”
+
+Here the witch thrust her wrinkled face close to the puppet’s,
+chuckling irrepressibly, and fidgeting all through her system, with
+delight at the idea which she meant to communicate.
+
+“The worshipful Master Gookin,” whispered she, “hath a comely maiden to
+his daughter. And hark ye, my pet! Thou hast a fair outside, and a
+pretty wit enough of thine own. Yea, a pretty wit enough! Thou wilt
+think better of it when thou hast seen more of other people’s wits.
+Now, with thy outside and thy inside, thou art the very man to win a
+young girl’s heart. Never doubt it! I tell thee it shall be so. Put but
+a bold face on the matter, sigh, smile, flourish thy hat, thrust forth
+thy leg like a dancing-master, put thy right hand to the left side of
+thy waistcoat, and pretty Polly Gookin is thine own!”
+
+All this while the new creature had been sucking in and exhaling the
+vapory fragrance of his pipe, and seemed now to continue this
+occupation as much for the enjoyment it afforded as because it was an
+essential condition of his existence. It was wonderful to see how
+exceedingly like a human being it behaved. Its eyes (for it appeared to
+possess a pair) were bent on Mother Rigby, and at suitable junctures it
+nodded or shook its head. Neither did it lack words proper for the
+occasion: “Really! Indeed! Pray tell me! Is it possible! Upon my word!
+By no means! Oh! Ah! Hem!” and other such weighty utterances as imply
+attention, inquiry, acquiescence, or dissent on the part of the
+auditor. Even had you stood by and seen the scarecrow made, you could
+scarcely have resisted the conviction that it perfectly understood the
+cunning counsels which the old witch poured into its counterfeit of an
+ear. The more earnestly it applied its lips to the pipe, the more
+distinctly was its human likeness stamped among visible realities, the
+more sagacious grew its expression, the more lifelike its gestures and
+movements, and the more intelligibly audible its voice. Its garments,
+too, glistened so much the brighter with an illusory magnificence. The
+very pipe, in which burned the spell of all this wonderwork, ceased to
+appear as a smoke-blackened earthen stump, and became a meerschaum,
+with painted bowl and amber mouthpiece.
+
+It might be apprehended, however, that as the life of the illusion
+seemed identical with the vapor of the pipe, it would terminate
+simultaneously with the reduction of the tobacco to ashes. But the
+beldam foresaw the difficulty.
+
+“Hold thou the pipe, my precious one,” said she, “while I fill it for
+thee again.”
+
+It was sorrowful to behold how the fine gentleman began to fade back
+into a scarecrow while Mother Rigby shook the ashes out of the pipe and
+proceeded to replenish it from her tobacco-box.
+
+“Dickon,” cried she, in her high, sharp tone, “another coal for this
+pipe!”
+
+No sooner said than the intensely red speck of fire was glowing within
+the pipe-bowl; and the scarecrow, without waiting for the witch’s
+bidding, applied the tube to his lips and drew in a few short,
+convulsive whiffs, which soon, however, became regular and equable.
+
+“Now, mine own heart’s darling,” quoth Mother Rigby, “whatever may
+happen to thee, thou must stick to thy pipe. Thy life is in it; and
+that, at least, thou knowest well, if thou knowest nought besides.
+Stick to thy pipe, I say! Smoke, puff, blow thy cloud; and tell the
+people, if any question be made, that it is for thy health, and that so
+the physician orders thee to do. And, sweet one, when thou shalt find
+thy pipe getting low, go apart into some corner, and (first filling
+thyself with smoke) cry sharply, ‘Dickon, a fresh pipe of tobacco!’
+and, ‘Dickon, another coal for my pipe!’ and have it into thy pretty
+mouth as speedily as may be. Else, instead of a gallant gentleman in a
+gold-laced coat, thou wilt be but a jumble of sticks and tattered
+clothes, and a bag of straw, and a withered pumpkin! Now depart, my
+treasure, and good luck go with thee!”
+
+“Never fear, mother!” said the figure, in a stout voice, and sending
+forth a courageous whiff of smoke, “I will thrive, if an honest man and
+a gentleman may!”
+
+“Oh, thou wilt be the death of me!” cried the old witch, convulsed with
+laughter. “That was well said. If an honest man and a gentleman may!
+Thou playest thy part to perfection. Get along with thee for a smart
+fellow; and I will wager on thy head, as a man of pith and substance,
+with a brain and what they call a heart, and all else that a man should
+have, against any other thing on two legs. I hold myself a better witch
+than yesterday, for thy sake. Did not I make thee? And I defy any witch
+in New England to make such another! Here; take my staff along with
+thee!”
+
+The staff, though it was but a plain oaken stick, immediately took the
+aspect of a gold-headed cane.
+
+“That gold head has as much sense in it as thine own,” said Mother
+Rigby, “and it will guide thee straight to worshipful Master Gookin’s
+door. Get thee gone, my pretty pet, my darling, my precious one, my
+treasure; and if any ask thy name, it is Feathertop. For thou hast a
+feather in thy hat, and I have thrust a handful of feathers into the
+hollow of thy head, and thy wig, too, is of the fashion they call
+Feathertop,—so be Feathertop thy name!”
+
+And, issuing from the cottage, Feathertop strode manfully towards town.
+Mother Rigby stood at the threshold, well pleased to see how the
+sunbeams glistened on him, as if all his magnificence were real, and
+how diligently and lovingly he smoked his pipe, and how handsomely he
+walked, in spite of a little stiffness of his legs. She watched him
+until out of sight, and threw a witch benediction after her darling,
+when a turn of the road snatched him from her view.
+
+Betimes in the forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring
+town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very
+distinguished figure was seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his
+garments betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a
+richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, a waistcoat of costly velvet,
+magnificently adorned with golden foliage, a pair of splendid scarlet
+breeches, and the finest and glossiest of white silk stockings. His
+head was covered with a peruke, so daintily powdered and adjusted that
+it would have been sacrilege to disorder it with a hat; which,
+therefore (and it was a gold-laced hat, set off with a snowy feather),
+he carried beneath his arm. On the breast of his coat glistened a star.
+He managed his gold-headed cane with an airy grace, peculiar to the
+fine gentlemen of the period; and, to give the highest possible finish
+to his equipment, he had lace ruffles at his wrist, of a most ethereal
+delicacy, sufficiently avouching how idle and aristocratic must be the
+hands which they half concealed.
+
+It was a remarkable point in the accoutrement of this brilliant
+personage that he held in his left hand a fantastic kind of a pipe,
+with an exquisitely painted bowl and an amber mouthpiece. This he
+applied to his lips as often as every five or six paces, and inhaled a
+deep whiff of smoke, which, after being retained a moment in his lungs,
+might be seen to eddy gracefully from his mouth and nostrils.
+
+As may well be supposed, the street was all astir to find out the
+stranger’s name.
+
+“It is some great nobleman, beyond question,” said one of the
+townspeople. “Do you see the star at his breast?”
+
+“Nay; it is too bright to be seen,” said another. “Yes; he must needs
+be a nobleman, as you say. But by what conveyance, think you, can his
+lordship have voyaged or travelled hither? There has been no vessel
+from the old country for a month past; and if he have arrived overland
+from the southward, pray where are his attendants and equipage?”
+
+“He needs no equipage to set off his rank,” remarked a third. “If he
+came among us in rags, nobility would shine through a hole in his
+elbow. I never saw such dignity of aspect. He has the old Norman blood
+in his veins, I warrant him.”
+
+“I rather take him to be a Dutchman, or one of your high Germans,” said
+another citizen. “The men of those countries have always the pipe at
+their mouths.”
+
+“And so has a Turk,” answered his companion. “But, in my judgment, this
+stranger hath been bred at the French court, and hath there learned
+politeness and grace of manner, which none understand so well as the
+nobility of France. That gait, now! A vulgar spectator might deem it
+stiff—he might call it a hitch and jerk—but, to my eye, it hath an
+unspeakable majesty, and must have been acquired by constant
+observation of the deportment of the Grand Monarque. The stranger’s
+character and office are evident enough. He is a French ambassador,
+come to treat with our rulers about the cession of Canada.”
+
+“More probably a Spaniard,” said another, “and hence his yellow
+complexion; or, most likely, he is from the Havana, or from some port
+on the Spanish main, and comes to make investigation about the piracies
+which our government is thought to connive at. Those settlers in Peru
+and Mexico have skins as yellow as the gold which they dig out of their
+mines.”
+
+“Yellow or not,” cried a lady, “he is a beautiful man!—so tall, so
+slender! such a fine, noble face, with so well-shaped a nose, and all
+that delicacy of expression about the mouth! And, bless me, how bright
+his star is! It positively shoots out flames!”
+
+“So do your eyes, fair lady,” said the stranger, with a bow and a
+flourish of his pipe; for he was just passing at the instant. “Upon my
+honor, they have quite dazzled me.”
+
+“Was ever so original and exquisite a compliment?” murmured the lady,
+in an ecstasy of delight.
+
+Amid the general admiration excited by the stranger’s appearance, there
+were only two dissenting voices. One was that of an impertinent cur,
+which, after snuffing at the heels of the glistening figure, put its
+tail between its legs and skulked into its master’s back yard,
+vociferating an execrable howl. The other dissentient was a young
+child, who squalled at the fullest stretch of his lungs, and babbled
+some unintelligible nonsense about a pumpkin.
+
+Feathertop meanwhile pursued his way along the street. Except for the
+few complimentary words to the lady, and now and then a slight
+inclination of the head in requital of the profound reverences of the
+bystanders, he seemed wholly absorbed in his pipe. There needed no
+other proof of his rank and consequence than the perfect equanimity
+with which he comported himself, while the curiosity and admiration of
+the town swelled almost into clamor around him. With a crowd gathering
+behind his footsteps, he finally reached the mansion-house of the
+worshipful Justice Gookin, entered the gate, ascended the steps of the
+front door, and knocked. In the interim, before his summons was
+answered, the stranger was observed to shake the ashes out of his pipe.
+
+“What did he say in that sharp voice?” inquired one of the spectators.
+
+“Nay, I know not,” answered his friend. “But the sun dazzles my eyes
+strangely. How dim and faded his lordship looks all of a sudden! Bless
+my wits, what is the matter with me?”
+
+“The wonder is,” said the other, “that his pipe, which was out only an
+instant ago, should be all alight again, and with the reddest coal I
+ever saw. There is something mysterious about this stranger. What a
+whiff of smoke was that! Dim and faded did you call him? Why, as he
+turns about the star on his breast is all ablaze.”
+
+“It is, indeed,” said his companion; “and it will go near to dazzle
+pretty Polly Gookin, whom I see peeping at it out of the chamber
+window.”
+
+The door being now opened, Feathertop turned to the crowd, made a
+stately bend of his body like a great man acknowledging the reverence
+of the meaner sort, and vanished into the house. There was a mysterious
+kind of a smile, if it might not better be called a grin or grimace,
+upon his visage; but, of all the throng that beheld him, not an
+individual appears to have possessed insight enough to detect the
+illusive character of the stranger except a little child and a cur dog.
+
+Our legend here loses somewhat of its continuity, and, passing over the
+preliminary explanation between Feathertop and the merchant, goes in
+quest of the pretty Polly Gookin. She was a damsel of a soft, round
+figure, with light hair and blue eyes, and a fair, rosy face, which
+seemed neither very shrewd nor very simple. This young lady had caught
+a glimpse of the glistening stranger while standing on the threshold,
+and had forthwith put on a laced cap, a string of beads, her finest
+kerchief, and her stiffest damask petticoat in preparation for the
+interview. Hurrying from her chamber to the parlor, she had ever since
+been viewing herself in the large looking-glass and practising pretty
+airs-now a smile, now a ceremonious dignity of aspect, and now a softer
+smile than the former, kissing her hand likewise, tossing her head, and
+managing her fan; while within the mirror an unsubstantial little maid
+repeated every gesture and did all the foolish things that Polly did,
+but without making her ashamed of them. In short, it was the fault of
+pretty Polly’s ability rather than her will if she failed to be as
+complete an artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself; and, when
+she thus tampered with her own simplicity, the witch’s phantom might
+well hope to win her.
+
+No sooner did Polly hear her father’s gouty footsteps approaching the
+parlor door, accompanied with the stiff clatter of Feathertop’s
+high-heeled shoes, than she seated herself bolt upright and innocently
+began warbling a song.
+
+“Polly! daughter Polly!” cried the old merchant. “Come hither, child.”
+
+Master Gookin’s aspect, as he opened the door, was doubtful and
+troubled.
+
+“This gentleman,” continued he, presenting the stranger, “is the
+Chevalier Feathertop,—nay, I beg his pardon, my Lord Feathertop,—who
+hath brought me a token of remembrance from an ancient friend of mine.
+Pay your duty to his lordship, child, and honor him as his quality
+deserves.”
+
+After these few words of introduction, the worshipful magistrate
+immediately quitted the room. But, even in that brief moment, had the
+fair Polly glanced aside at her father instead of devoting herself
+wholly to the brilliant guest, she might have taken warning of some
+mischief nigh at hand. The old man was nervous, fidgety, and very pale.
+Purposing a smile of courtesy, he had deformed his face with a sort of
+galvanic grin, which, when Feathertop’s back was turned, he exchanged
+for a scowl, at the same time shaking his fist and stamping his gouty
+foot—an incivility which brought its retribution along with it. The
+truth appears to have been that Mother Rigby’s word of introduction,
+whatever it might be, had operated far more on the rich merchant’s
+fears than on his good will. Moreover, being a man of wonderfully acute
+observation, he had noticed that these painted figures on the bowl of
+Feathertop’s pipe were in motion. Looking more closely he became
+convinced that these figures were a party of little demons, each duly
+provided with horns and a tail, and dancing hand in hand, with gestures
+of diabolical merriment, round the circumference of the pipe bowl. As
+if to confirm his suspicions, while Master Gookin ushered his guest
+along a dusky passage from his private room to the parlor, the star on
+Feathertop’s breast had scintillated actual flames, and threw a
+flickering gleam upon the wall, the ceiling, and the floor.
+
+With such sinister prognostics manifesting themselves on all hands, it
+is not to be marvelled at that the merchant should have felt that he
+was committing his daughter to a very questionable acquaintance. He
+cursed, in his secret soul, the insinuating elegance of Feathertop’s
+manners, as this brilliant personage bowed, smiled, put his hand on his
+heart, inhaled a long whiff from his pipe, and enriched the atmosphere
+with the smoky vapor of a fragrant and visible sigh. Gladly would poor
+Master Gookin have thrust his dangerous guest into the street; but
+there was a constraint and terror within him. This respectable old
+gentleman, we fear, at an earlier period of life, had given some pledge
+or other to the evil principle, and perhaps was now to redeem it by the
+sacrifice of his daughter.
+
+It so happened that the parlor door was partly of glass, shaded by a
+silken curtain, the folds of which hung a little awry. So strong was
+the merchant’s interest in witnessing what was to ensue between the
+fair Polly and the gallant Feathertop that, after quitting the room, he
+could by no means refrain from peeping through the crevice of the
+curtain.
+
+But there was nothing very miraculous to be seen; nothing—except the
+trifles previously noticed—to confirm the idea of a supernatural peril
+environing the pretty Polly. The stranger it is true was evidently a
+thorough and practised man of the world, systematic and self-possessed,
+and therefore the sort of a person to whom a parent ought not to
+confide a simple, young girl without due watchfulness for the result.
+The worthy magistrate who had been conversant with all degrees and
+qualities of mankind, could not but perceive every motion and gesture
+of the distinguished Feathertop came in its proper place; nothing had
+been left rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had
+incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him
+into a work of art. Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him
+with a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of anything
+completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person
+impresses us as an unreality and as having hardly pith enough to cast a
+shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all this resulted in a
+wild, extravagant, and fantastical impression, as if his life and being
+were akin to the smoke that curled upward from his pipe.
+
+But pretty Polly Gookin felt not thus. The pair were now promenading
+the room: Feathertop with his dainty stride and no less dainty grimace,
+the girl with a native maidenly grace, just touched, not spoiled, by a
+slightly affected manner, which seemed caught from the perfect artifice
+of her companion. The longer the interview continued, the more charmed
+was pretty Polly, until, within the first quarter of an hour (as the
+old magistrate noted by his watch), she was evidently beginning to be
+in love. Nor need it have been witchcraft that subdued her in such a
+hurry; the poor child’s heart, it may be, was so very fervent that it
+melted her with its own warmth as reflected from the hollow semblance
+of a lover. No matter what Feathertop said, his words found depth and
+reverberation in her ear; no matter what he did, his action was heroic
+to her eye. And by this time it is to be supposed there was a blush on
+Polly’s cheek, a tender smile about her mouth and a liquid softness in
+her glance; while the star kept coruscating on Feathertop’s breast, and
+the little demons careered with more frantic merriment than ever about
+the circumference of his pipe bowl. O pretty Polly Gookin, why should
+these imps rejoice so madly that a silly maiden’s heart was about to be
+given to a shadow! Is it so unusual a misfortune, so rare a triumph?
+
+By and by Feathertop paused, and throwing himself into an imposing
+attitude, seemed to summon the fair girl to survey his figure and
+resist him longer if she could. His star, his embroidery, his buckles
+glowed at that instant with unutterable splendor; the picturesque hues
+of his attire took a richer depth of coloring; there was a gleam and
+polish over his whole presence betokening the perfect witchery of
+well-ordered manners. The maiden raised her eyes and suffered them to
+linger upon her companion with a bashful and admiring gaze. Then, as if
+desirous of judging what value her own simple comeliness might have
+side by side with so much brilliancy, she cast a glance towards the
+full-length looking-glass in front of which they happened to be
+standing. It was one of the truest plates in the world and incapable of
+flattery. No sooner did the images therein reflected meet Polly’s eye
+than she shrieked, shrank from the stranger’s side, gazed at him for a
+moment in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor.
+Feathertop likewise had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld,
+not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the
+sordid patchwork of his real composition stripped of all witchcraft.
+
+The wretched simulacrum! We almost pity him. He threw up his arms with
+an expression of despair that went further than any of his previous
+manifestations towards vindicating his claims to be reckoned human, for
+perchance the only time since this so often empty and deceptive life of
+mortals began its course, an illusion had seen and fully recognized
+itself.
+
+Mother Rigby was seated by her kitchen hearth in the twilight of this
+eventful day, and had just shaken the ashes out of a new pipe, when she
+heard a hurried tramp along the road. Yet it did not seem so much the
+tramp of human footsteps as the clatter of sticks or the rattling of
+dry bones.
+
+“Ha!” thought the old witch, “what step is that? Whose skeleton is out
+of its grave now, I wonder?”
+
+A figure burst headlong into the cottage door. It was Feathertop! His
+pipe was still alight; the star still flamed upon his breast; the
+embroidery still glowed upon his garments; nor had he lost, in any
+degree or manner that could be estimated, the aspect that assimilated
+him with our mortal brotherhood. But yet, in some indescribable way (as
+is the case with all that has deluded us when once found out), the poor
+reality was felt beneath the cunning artifice.
+
+“What has gone wrong?” demanded the witch. “Did yonder sniffling
+hypocrite thrust my darling from his door? The villain! I’ll set twenty
+fiends to torment him till he offer thee his daughter on his bended
+knees!”
+
+“No, mother,” said Feathertop despondingly; “it was not that.”
+
+“Did the girl scorn my precious one?” asked Mother Rigby, her fierce
+eyes glowing like two coals of Tophet. “I’ll cover her face with
+pimples! Her nose shall be as red as the coal in thy pipe! Her front
+teeth shall drop out! In a week hence she shall not be worth thy
+having!”
+
+“Let her alone, mother,” answered poor Feathertop; “the girl was half
+won; and methinks a kiss from her sweet lips might have made me
+altogether human. But,” he added, after a brief pause and then a howl
+of self-contempt, “I’ve seen myself, mother! I’ve seen myself for the
+wretched, ragged, empty thing I am! I’ll exist no longer!”
+
+Snatching the pipe from his mouth, he flung it with all his might
+against the chimney, and at the same instant sank upon the floor, a
+medley of straw and tattered garments, with some sticks protruding from
+the heap, and a shrivelled pumpkin in the midst. The eyeholes were now
+lustreless; but the rudely-carved gap, that just before had been a
+mouth still seemed to twist itself into a despairing grin, and was so
+far human.
+
+“Poor fellow!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a rueful glance at the relics
+of her ill-fated contrivance. “My poor, dear, pretty Feathertop! There
+are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world,
+made up of just such a jumble of wornout, forgotten, and
+good-for-nothing trash as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and
+never see themselves for what they are. And why should my poor puppet
+be the only one to know himself and perish for it?”
+
+While thus muttering, the witch had filled a fresh pipe of tobacco, and
+held the stem between her fingers, as doubtful whether to thrust it
+into her own mouth or Feathertop’s.
+
+“Poor Feathertop!” she continued. “I could easily give him another
+chance and send him forth again tomorrow. But no; his feelings are too
+tender, his sensibilities too deep. He seems to have too much heart to
+bustle for his own advantage in such an empty and heartless world.
+Well! well! I’ll make a scarecrow of him after all. ’Tis an innocent
+and useful vocation, and will suit my darling well; and, if each of his
+human brethren had as fit a one, ’twould be the better for mankind; and
+as for this pipe of tobacco, I need it more than he.”
+
+So saying Mother Rigby put the stem between her lips. “Dickon!” cried
+she, in her high, sharp tone, “another coal for my pipe!”
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW ADAM AND EVE
+
+
+We who are born into the world’s artificial system can never adequately
+know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and
+how much is merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of
+man. Art has become a second and stronger nature; she is a step-mother,
+whose crafty tenderness has taught us to despise the bountiful and
+wholesome ministrations of our true parent. It is only through the
+medium of the imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters, which
+we call truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible
+what prisoners we are. For instance, let us conceive good Father
+Miller’s interpretation of the prophecies to have proved true. The Day
+of Doom has burst upon the globe and swept away the whole race of men.
+From cities and fields, sea-shore and midland mountain region, vast
+continents, and even the remotest islands of the ocean, each living
+thing is gone. No breath of a created being disturbs this earthly
+atmosphere. But the abodes of man, and all that he has accomplished,
+the footprints of his wanderings and the results of his toil, the
+visible symbols of his intellectual cultivation and moral progress,—in
+short, everything physical that can give evidence of his present
+position,—shall remain untouched by the hand of destiny. Then, to
+inherit and repeople this waste and deserted earth, we will suppose a
+new Adam and a new Eve to have been created, in the full development of
+mind and heart, but with no knowledge of their predecessors nor of the
+diseased circumstances that had become incrusted around them. Such a
+pair would at once distinguish between art and nature. Their instincts
+and intuitions would immediately recognize the wisdom and simplicity of
+the latter; while the former, with its elaborate perversities, would
+offer them a continual succession of puzzles.
+
+Let us attempt, in a mood half sportive and half thoughtful, to track
+these imaginary heirs of our mortality, through their first day’s
+experience. No longer ago than yesterday the flame of human life was
+extinguished; there has been a breathless night; and now another morn
+approaches, expecting to find the earth no less desolate than at
+eventide.
+
+It is dawn. The east puts on its immemorial blush, although no human
+eye is gazing at it; for all the phenomena of the natural world renew
+themselves, in spite of the solitude that now broods around the globe.
+There is still beauty of earth, sea, and sky, for beauty’s sake. But
+soon there are to be spectators. Just when the earliest sunshine gilds
+earth’s mountain-tops, two beings have come into life, not in such an
+Eden as bloomed to welcome our first parents, but in the heart of a
+modern city. They find themselves in existence, and gazing into one
+another’s eyes. Their emotion is not astonishment; nor do they perplex
+themselves with efforts to discover what, and whence, and why they are.
+Each is satisfied to be, because the other exists likewise; and their
+first consciousness is of calm and mutual enjoyment, which seems not to
+have been the birth of that very moment, but prolonged from a past
+eternity. Thus content with an inner sphere which they inhabit
+together, it is not immediately that the outward world can obtrude
+itself upon their notice.
+
+Soon, however, they feel the invincible necessity of this earthly life,
+and begin to make acquaintance with the objects and circumstances that
+surround them. Perhaps no other stride so vast remains to be taken as
+when they first turn from the reality of their mutual glance to the
+dreams and shadows that perplex them everywhere else.
+
+“Sweetest Eve, where are we?” exclaims the new Adam; for speech, or
+some equivalent mode of expression, is born with them, and comes just
+as natural as breath. “Methinks I do not recognize this place.”
+
+“Nor I, dear Man,” replies the new Eve. “And what a strange place, too!
+Let me come closer to thy side and behold thee only; for all other
+sights trouble and perplex my spirit.”
+
+“Nay, Eve,” replies Adam, who appears to have the stronger tendency
+towards the material world; “it were well that we gain some insight
+into these matters. We are in an odd situation here. Let us look about
+us.”
+
+Assuredly there are sights enough to throw the new inheritors of earth
+into a state of hopeless perplexity. The long lines of edifices, their
+windows glittering in the yellow sunrise, and the narrow street
+between, with its barren pavement tracked and battered by wheels that
+have now rattled into an irrevocable past! The signs, with their
+unintelligible hieroglyphics! The squareness and ugliness, and regular
+or irregular deformity of everything that meets the eye! The marks of
+wear and tear, and unrenewed decay, which distinguish the works of man
+from the growth of nature! What is there in all this, capable of the
+slightest significance to minds that know nothing of the artificial
+system which is implied in every lamp-post and each brick of the
+houses? Moreover, the utter loneliness and silence, in a scene that
+originally grew out of noise and bustle, must needs impress a feeling
+of desolation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as they are of the
+recent extinction of human existence. In a forest, solitude would be
+life; in a city, it is death.
+
+The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt and distrust, such as
+a city dame, the daughter of numberless generations of citizens, might
+experience if suddenly transported to the garden of Eden. At length her
+downcast eye discovers a small tuft of grass, just beginning to sprout
+among the stones of the pavement; she eagerly grasps it, and is
+sensible that this little herb awakens some response within her heart.
+Nature finds nothing else to offer her. Adam, after staring up and down
+the street without detecting a single object that his comprehension can
+lay hold of, finally turns his forehead to the sky. There, indeed, is
+something which the soul within him recognizes.
+
+“Look up yonder, mine own Eve,” he cries; “surely we ought to dwell
+among those gold-tinged clouds or in the blue depths beyond them. I
+know not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our
+home; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us.”
+
+“Can we not ascend thither?” inquires Eve.
+
+“Why not?” answers Adam, hopefully. “But no; something drags us down in
+spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter.”
+
+In the energy of new life it appears no such impracticable feat to
+climb into the sky. But they have already received a woful lesson,
+which may finally go far towards reducing them to the level of the
+departed race, when they acknowledge the necessity of keeping the
+beaten track of earth. They now set forth on a ramble through the city,
+in the hope of making their escape from this uncongenial sphere.
+Already in the fresh elasticity of their spirits they have found the
+idea of weariness. We will watch them as they enter some of the shops
+and public or private edifices; for every door, whether of alderman or
+beggar, church or hall of state, has been flung wide open by the same
+agency that swept away the inmates.
+
+It so happens,—and not unluckily for an Adam and Eve who are still in
+the costume that might better have befitted Eden,—it so happens that
+their first visit is to a fashionable dry-goods store. No courteous and
+importunate attendants hasten to receive their orders; no throng of
+ladies are tossing over the rich Parisian fabrics. All is deserted;
+trade is at a stand-still; and not even an echo of the national
+watchword, “Go ahead!” disturbs the quiet of the new customers. But
+specimens of the latest earthly fashions, silks of every shade, and
+whatever is most delicate or splendid for the decoration of the human
+form, he scattered around, profusely as bright autumnal leaves in a
+forest. Adam looks at a few of the articles, but throws them carelessly
+aside with whatever exclamation may correspond to “Pish!” or “Pshaw!”
+in the new vocabulary of nature. Eve, however,—be it said without
+offence to her native modesty,—examines these treasures of her sex with
+somewhat livelier interest. A pair of corsets chance to be upon the
+counter; she inspects them curiously, but knows not what to make of
+them. Then she handles a fashionable silk with dim yearnings, thoughts
+that wander hither and thither, instincts groping in the dark.
+
+“On the whole, I do not like it,” she observes, laying the glossy
+fabric upon the counter. “But, Adam, it is very strange. What can these
+things mean? Surely I ought to know; yet they put me in a perfect
+maze.”
+
+“Poh! my dear Eve, why trouble thy little head about such nonsense?”
+cries Adam, in a fit of impatience. “Let us go somewhere else. But
+stay; how very beautiful! My loveliest Eve, what a charm you have
+imparted to that robe by merely throwing it over your shoulders!”
+
+For Eve, with the taste that nature moulded into her composition, has
+taken a remnant of exquisite silver gauze and drawn it around her
+forms, with an effect that gives Adam his first idea of the witchery of
+dress. He beholds his spouse in a new light and with renewed
+admiration; yet is hardly reconciled to any other attire than her own
+golden locks. However, emulating Eve’s example, he makes free with a
+mantle of blue velvet, and puts it on so picturesquely that it might
+seem to have fallen from heaven upon his stately figure. Thus garbed
+they go in search of new discoveries.
+
+They next wander into a Church, not to make a display of their fine
+clothes, but attracted by its spire pointing upwards to the sky,
+whither they have already yearned to climb. As they enter the portal, a
+clock, which it was the last earthly act of the sexton to wind up,
+repeats the hour in deep reverberating tones; for Time has survived his
+former progeny, and, with the iron tongue that man gave him, is now
+speaking to his two grandchildren. They listen, but understand him not.
+Nature would measure time by the succession of thoughts and acts which
+constitute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the
+church-aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve
+become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the vastness and
+sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have recognized the purpose
+for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like the dim awfulness of
+an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to
+prayer. Within the snug walls of a metropolitan church there can be no
+such influence.
+
+Yet some odor of religion is still lingering here, the bequest of pious
+souls, who had grace to enjoy a foretaste of immortal life. Perchance
+they breathe a prophecy of a better world to their successors, who have
+become obnoxious to all their own cares and calamities in the present
+one.
+
+“Eve, something impels me to look upward,” says Adam; “but it troubles
+me to see this roof between us and the sky. Let us go forth, and
+perhaps we shall discern a Great Face looking down upon us.”
+
+“Yes; a Great Face, with a beam of love brightening over it, like
+sunshine,” responds Eve. “Surely we have seen such a countenance
+somewhere.”
+
+They go out of the church, and kneeling at its threshold give way to
+the spirit’s natural instinct of adoration towards a beneficent Father.
+But, in truth, their life thus far has been a continual prayer. Purity
+and simplicity hold converse at every moment with their Creator.
+
+We now observe them entering a Court of Justice. But what remotest
+conception can they attain of the purposes of such an edifice? How
+should the idea occur to them that human brethren, of like nature with
+themselves, and originally included in the same law of love which is
+their only rule of life, should ever need an outward enforcement of the
+true voice within their souls? And what, save a woful experience, the
+dark result of many centuries, could teach them the sad mysteries of
+crime? O Judgment Seat, not by the pure in heart vast thou established,
+nor in the simplicity of nature; but by hard and wrinkled men, and upon
+the accumulated heap of earthly wrong. Thou art the very symbol of
+man’s perverted state.
+
+On as fruitless an errand our wanderers next visit a Hall of
+Legislature, where Adam places Eve in the Speaker’s chair, unconscious
+of the moral which he thus exemplifies. Man’s intellect, moderated by
+Woman’s tenderness and moral sense! Were such the legislation of the
+world there would be no need of State Houses, Capitols, Halls of
+Parliament, nor even of those little assemblages of patriarchs beneath
+the shadowy trees, by whom freedom was first interpreted to mankind on
+our native shores.
+
+Whither go they next? A perverse destiny seems to perplex them with one
+after another of the riddles which mankind put forth to the wandering
+universe, and left unsolved in their own destruction. They enter an
+edifice of stern gray stone standing insulated in the midst of others,
+and gloomy even in the sunshine, which it barely suffers to penetrate
+through its iron grated windows. It is a prison. The jailer has left
+his post at the summons of a stronger authority than the sheriff’s. But
+the prisoners? Did the messenger of fate, when he shook open all the
+doors, respect the magistrate’s warrant and the judge’s sentence, and
+leave the inmates of the dungeons to be delivered by due course of
+earthly law? No; a new trial has been granted in a higher court, which
+may set judge, jury, and prisoner at its bar all in a row, and perhaps
+find one no less guilty than another. The jail, like the whole earth,
+is now a solitude, and has thereby lost something of its dismal gloom.
+But here are the narrow cells, like tombs, only drearier and deadlier,
+because in these the immortal spirit was buried with the body.
+Inscriptions appear on the walls, scribbled with a pencil or scratched
+with a rusty nail; brief words of agony, perhaps, or guilt’s desperate
+defiance to the world, or merely a record of a date by which the writer
+strove to keep up with the march of life. There is not a living eye
+that could now decipher these memorials.
+
+Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator’s hand that the new
+denizens of earth—no, nor their descendants for a thousand years—could
+discover that this edifice was a hospital for the direst disease which
+could afflict their predecessors. Its patients bore the outward marks
+of that leprosy with which all were more or less infected. They were
+sick-and so were the purest of their brethren—with the plague of sin. A
+deadly sickness, indeed! Feeling its symptoms within the breast, men
+concealed it with fear and shame, and were only the more cruel to those
+unfortunates whose pestiferous sores were flagrant to the common eye.
+Nothing save a rich garment could ever hide the plague-spot. In the
+course of the world’s lifetime, every remedy was tried for its cure and
+extirpation, except the single one, the flower that grew in Heaven and
+was sovereign for all the miseries of earth. Man never had attempted to
+cure sin by LOVE! Had he but once made the effort, it might well have
+happened that there would have been no more need of the dark
+lazar-house into which Adam and Eve have wandered. Hasten forth with
+your native innocence, lest the damps of these still conscious walls
+infect you likewise, and thus another fallen race be propagated!
+
+Passing from the interior of the prison into the space within its
+outward wall, Adam pauses beneath a structure of the simplest
+contrivance, yet altogether unaccountable to him. It consists merely of
+two upright posts, supporting a transverse beam, from which dangles a
+cord.
+
+“Eve, Eve!” cries Adam, shuddering with a nameless horror. “What can
+this thing be?”
+
+“I know not,” answers Eve; “but, Adam, my heart is sick! There seems to
+be no more sky,—no more sunshine!”
+
+Well might Adam shudder and poor Eve be sick at heart; for this
+mysterious object was the type of mankind’s whole system in regard to
+the great difficulties which God had given to be solved,—a system of
+fear and vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the last. Here,
+on the morning when the final summons came, a criminal—one criminal,
+where none were guiltless—had died upon the gallows. Had the world
+heard the footfall of its own approaching doom, it would have been no
+inappropriate act thus to close the record of its deeds by one so
+characteristic.
+
+The two pilgrims now hurry from the prison. Had they known how the
+former inhabitants of earth were shut up in artificial error and
+cramped and chained by their perversions, they might have compared the
+whole moral world to a prison-house, and have deemed the removal of the
+race a general jail-delivery.
+
+They next enter, unannounced, but they might have rung at the door in
+vain, a private mansion, one of the stateliest in Beacon Street. A wild
+and plaintive strain of music is quivering through the house, now
+rising like a solemn organ-peal, and now dying into the faintest
+murmur, as if some spirit that had felt an interest in the departed
+family were bemoaning itself in the solitude of hall and chamber.
+Perhaps a virgin, the purest of mortal race, has been left behind to
+perform a requiem for the whole kindred of humanity. Not so. These are
+the tones of an Eolian harp, through which Nature pours the harmony
+that lies concealed in her every breath, whether of summer breeze or
+tempest. Adam and Eve are lost in rapture, unmingled with surprise. The
+passing wind, that stirred the harp-strings, has been hushed, before
+they can think of examining the splendid furniture, the gorgeous
+carpets, and the architecture of the rooms. These things amuse their
+unpractised eyes, but appeal to nothing within their hearts. Even the
+pictures upon the walls scarcely excite a deeper interest; for there is
+something radically artificial and deceptive in painting with which
+minds in the primal simplicity cannot sympathize. The unbidden guests
+examine a row of family portraits, but are too dull to recognize them
+as men and women, beneath the disguise of a preposterous garb, and with
+features and expression debased, because inherited through ages of
+moral and physical decay.
+
+Chance, however, presents them with pictures of human beauty, fresh
+from the hand of Nature. As they enter a magnificent apartment they are
+astonished, but not affrighted, to perceive two figures advancing to
+meet them. Is it not awful to imagine that any life, save their own,
+should remain in the wide world?
+
+“How is this?” exclaims Adam. “My beautiful Eve, are you in two places
+at once?”
+
+“And you, Adam!” answers Eve, doubtful, yet delighted. “Surely that
+noble and lovely form is yours. Yet here you are by my side. I am
+content with one,—methinks there should not be two.”
+
+This miracle is wrought by a tall looking-glass, the mystery of which
+they soon fathom, because Nature creates a mirror for the human face in
+every pool of water, and for her own great features in waveless lakes.
+Pleased and satisfied with gazing at themselves, they now discover the
+marble statue of a child in a corner of the room so exquisitely
+idealized that it is almost worthy to be the prophetic likeness of
+their first-born. Sculpture, in its highest excellence, is more genuine
+than painting, and might seem to be evolved from a natural germ, by the
+same law as a leaf or flower. The statue of the child impresses the
+solitary pair as if it were a companion; it likewise hints at secrets
+both of the past and future.
+
+“My husband!” whispers Eve.
+
+“What would you say, dearest Eve?” inquires Adam.
+
+“I wonder if we are alone in the world,” she continues, “with a sense
+of something like fear at the thought of other inhabitants. This lovely
+little form! Did it ever breathe? Or is it only the shadow of something
+real, like our pictures in the mirror?”
+
+“It is strange!” replies Adam, pressing his hand to his brow. “There
+are mysteries all around us. An idea flits continually before me,—would
+that I could seize it! Eve, Eve, are we treading in the footsteps of
+beings that bore a likeness to ourselves? If so, whither are they
+gone?—and why is their world so unfit for our dwelling-place?”
+
+“Our great Father only knows,” answers Eve. “But something tells me
+that we shall not always be alone. And how sweet if other beings were
+to visit us in the shape of this fair image!”
+
+Then they wander through the house, and everywhere find tokens of human
+life, which now, with the idea recently suggested, excite a deeper
+curiosity in their bosoms. Woman has here left traces of her delicacy
+and refinement, and of her gentle labors. Eve ransacks a work-basket
+and instinctively thrusts the rosy tip of her finger into a thimble.
+She takes up a piece of embroidery, glowing with mimic flowers, in one
+of which a fair damsel of the departed race has left her needle. Pity
+that the Day of Doom should have anticipated the completion of such a
+useful task! Eve feels almost conscious of the skill to finish it. A
+pianoforte has been left open. She flings her hand carelessly over the
+keys, and strikes out a sudden melody, no less natural than the strains
+of the AEolian harp, but joyous with the dance of her yet unburdened
+life. Passing through a dark entry they find a broom behind the door;
+and Eve, who comprises the whole nature of womanhood, has a dim idea
+that it is an instrument proper for her hand. In another apartment they
+behold a canopied bed, and all the appliances of luxurious repose. A
+heap of forest-leaves would be more to the purpose. They enter the
+nursery, and are perplexed with the sight of little gowns and caps,
+tiny slices, and a cradle, amid the drapery of which is still to be
+seen the impress of a baby’s form. Adam slightly notices these trifles;
+but Eve becomes involved in a fit of mute reflection from which it is
+hardly possible to rouse her.
+
+By a most unlucky arrangement there was to have been a grand
+dinner-party in this mansion on the very day when the whole human
+family, including the invited guests, were summoned to the unknown
+regions of illimitable space. At the moment of fate, the table was
+actually spread, and the company on the point of sitting down. Adam and
+Eve come unbidden to the banquet; it has now been some time cold, but
+otherwise furnishes them with highly favorable specimens of the
+gastronomy of their predecessors. But it is difficult to imagine the
+perplexity of the unperverted couple, in endeavoring to find proper
+food for their first meal, at a table where the cultivated appetites of
+a fashionable party were to have been gratified. Will Nature teach them
+the mystery of a plate of turtle-soup? Will she embolden them to attack
+a haunch of venison? Will she initiate them into the merits of a
+Parisian pasty, imported by the last steamer that ever crossed the
+Atlantic? Will she not, rather, bid them turn with disgust from fish,
+fowl, and flesh, which, to their pure nostrils, steam with a loathsome
+odor of death and corruption?—Food? The bill of fare contains nothing
+which they recognize as such.
+
+Fortunately, however, the dessert is ready upon a neighboring table.
+Adam, whose appetite and animal instincts are quicker than those of
+Eve, discovers this fitting banquet.
+
+“Here, dearest Eve,” he exclaims,—“here is food.”
+
+“Well,” answered she, with the germ of a housewife stirring within her,
+“we have been so busy to-day, that a picked-up dinner must serve.”
+
+So Eve comes to the table and receives a red-cheeked apple from her
+husband’s hand in requital of her predecessor’s fatal gift to our
+common grandfather. She eats it without sin, and, let us hope, with no
+disastrous consequences to her future progeny. They make a plentiful,
+yet temperate, meal of fruit, which, though not gathered in paradise,
+is legitimately derived from the seeds that were planted there. Their
+primal appetite is satisfied.
+
+“What shall we drink, Eve?” inquires Adam.
+
+Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which, as they contain
+fluids, she naturally conceives must be proper to quench thirst. But
+never before did claret, hock, and madeira, of rich and rare perfume,
+excite such disgust as now.
+
+“Pah!” she exclaims, after smelling at various wines. “What stuff is
+here? The beings who have gone before us could not have possessed the
+same nature that we do; for neither their hunger nor thirst were like
+our own.”
+
+“Pray hand me yonder bottle,” says Adam. “If it be drinkable by any
+manner of mortal, I must moisten my throat with it.”
+
+After some remonstrances, she takes up a champagne bottle, but is
+frightened by the sudden explosion of the cork, and drops it upon the
+floor. There the untasted liquor effervesces. Had they quaffed it they
+would have experienced that brief delirium whereby, whether excited by
+moral or physical causes, man sought to recompense himself for the
+calm, life-long joys which he had lost by his revolt from nature. At
+length, in a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure,
+cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among the hills. Both
+drink; and such refreshment does it bestow, that they question one
+another if this precious liquid be not identical with the stream of
+life within them.
+
+“And now,” observes Adam, “we must again try to discover what sort of a
+world this is, and why we have been sent hither.”
+
+“Why? to love one another,” cries Eve. “Is not that employment enough?”
+
+“Truly is it,” answers Adam, kissing her; “but still—I know
+not—something tells us there is labor to be done. Perhaps our allotted
+task is no other than to climb into the sky, which is so much more
+beautiful than earth.”
+
+“Then would we were there now,” murmurs Eve, “that no task or duty
+might come between us!”
+
+They leave the hospitable mansion, and we next see them passing down
+State Street. The clock on the old State House points to high noon,
+when the Exchange should be in its glory and present the liveliest
+emblem of what was the sole business of life, as regarded a multitude
+of the foregone worldlings. It is over now. The Sabbath of eternity has
+shed its stillness along the street. Not even a newsboy assails the two
+solitary passers-by with an extra penny-paper from the office of the
+Times or Mail, containing a full account of yesterday’s terrible
+catastrophe. Of all the dull times that merchants and speculators have
+known, this is the very worst; for, so far as they were concerned,
+creation itself has taken the benefit of the Bankrupt Act. After all,
+it is a pity. Those mighty capitalists who had just attained the
+wished-for wealth! Those shrewd men of traffic who had devoted so many
+years to the most intricate and artificial of sciences, and had barely
+mastered it when the universal bankruptcy was announced by peal of
+trumpet! Can they have been so incautious as to provide no currency of
+the country whither they have gone, nor any bills of exchange, or
+letters of credit from the needy on earth to the cash-keepers of
+heaven?
+
+Adam and Eve enter a Bank. Start not, ye whose funds are treasured
+there! You will never need them now. Call not for the police. The
+stones of the street and the coin of the vaults are of equal value to
+this simple pair. Strange sight! They take up the bright gold in
+handfuls and throw it sportively into the air for the sake of seeing
+the glittering worthlessness descend again in a shower. They know not
+that each of those small yellow circles was once a magic spell, potent
+to sway men’s hearts and mystify their moral sense. Here let them pause
+in the investigation of the past. They have discovered the mainspring,
+the life, the very essence of the system that had wrought itself into
+the vitals of mankind, and choked their original nature in its deadly
+gripe. Yet how powerless over these young inheritors of earth’s hoarded
+wealth! And here, too, are huge, packages of back-notes, those
+talismanic slips of paper which once had the efficacy to build up
+enchanted palaces like exhalations, and work all kinds of perilous
+wonders, yet were themselves but the ghosts of money, the shadows of a
+shade. How like is this vault to a magician’s cave when the
+all-powerful wand is broken, and the visionary splendor vanished, and
+the floor strewn with fragments of shattered spells, and lifeless
+shapes, once animated by demons!
+
+“Everywhere, my dear Eve,” observes Adam, “we find heaps of rubbish of
+one kind or another. Somebody, I am convinced, has taken pains to
+collect them, but for what purpose? Perhaps, hereafter, we shall be
+moved to do the like. Can that be our business in the world?”
+
+“O no, no, Adam!” answers Eve. “It would be better to sit down quietly
+and look upward to tine sky.”
+
+They leave the Bank, and in good time; for had they tarried later they
+would probably have encountered some gouty old goblin of a capitalist,
+whose soul could not long be anywhere save in the vault with his
+treasure.
+
+Next they drop into a jeweller’s shop. They are pleased with the glow
+of gems; and Adam twines a string of beautiful pearls around the head
+of Eve, and fastens his own mantle with a magnificent diamond brooch.
+Eve thanks him, and views herself with delight, in the nearest
+looking-glass. Shortly afterward, observing a bouquet of roses and
+other brilliant flowers in a vase of water, she flings away the
+inestimable pearls, and adorns herself with these lovelier gems of
+nature. They charm her with sentiment as well as beauty.
+
+“Surely they are living beings,” she remarks to Adam.
+
+“I think so,” replies Adam, “and they seem to be as little at home in
+the world as ourselves.”
+
+We must not attempt to follow every footstep of these investigators
+whom their Creator has commissioned to pass unconscious judgment upon
+the works and ways of the vanished race. By this time, being endowed
+with quick and accurate perceptions, they begin to understand the
+purpose of the many things around them. They conjecture, for instance,
+that the edifices of the city were erected, not by the immediate hand
+that made the world, but by beings somewhat similar to themselves, for
+shelter and convenience. But how will they explain the magnificence of
+one habitation as compared with the squalid misery of another? Through
+what medium can the idea of servitude enter their minds? When will they
+comprehend the great and miserable fact—the evidences of which appeal
+to their senses everywhere—that one portion of earth’s lost inhabitants
+was rolling in luxury while the multitude was toiling for scanty food?
+A wretched change, indeed, must be wrought in their own hearts ere they
+can conceive the primal decree of Love to have been so completely
+abrogated, that a brother should ever want what his brother had. When
+their intelligence shah have reached so far, Earth’s new progeny will
+have little reason to exult over her old rejected one.
+
+Their wanderings have now brought them into the suburbs of the city,
+They stand on a grassy brow of a hill at the foot of a granite obelisk
+which points its great finger upwards, as if the human family had
+agreed, by a visible symbol of age-long endurance, to offer some high
+sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplication. The solemn height of the
+monument, its deep simplicity, and the absence of any vulgar and
+practical use, all strengthen its effect upon Adam and Eve, and leave
+them to interpret it by a purer sentiment than the builders thought of
+expressing.
+
+“Eve, it is a visible prayer,” observed Adam.
+
+“And we will pray too,” she replies.
+
+Let us pardon these poor children of neither father nor mother for so
+absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial which man founded and
+woman finished on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not native
+to their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the brave defenders of
+liberty, since oppression is one of their unconjectured mysteries.
+Could they guess that the green sward on which they stand so peacefully
+was once strewn with human corpses and purple with their blood, it
+would equally amaze them that one generation of men should perpetrate
+such carnage, and that a subsequent generation should triumphantly
+commemorate it.
+
+With a sense of delight they now stroll across green fields and along
+the margin of a quiet river. Not to track them too closely, we next
+find the wanderers entering a Gothic edifice of gray stone, where the
+bygone world has left whatever it deemed worthy of record, in the rich
+library of Harvard University.
+
+No student ever yet enjoyed such solitude and silence as now broods
+within its deep alcoves. Little do the present visitors understand what
+opportunities are thrown away upon them. Yet Adam looks anxiously at
+the long rows of volumes, those storied heights of human lore,
+ascending one above another from floor to ceiling. He takes up a bulky
+folio. It opens in his hands as if spontaneously to impart the spirit
+of its author to the yet unworn and untainted intellect of the
+fresh-created mortal. He stands poring over the regular columns of
+mystic characters, seemingly in studious mood; for the unintelligible
+thought upon the page has a mysterious relation to his mind, and makes
+itself felt as if it were a burden flung upon him. He is even painfully
+perplexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what. O Adam, it is too
+soon, too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on spectacles
+and bury yourself in the alcoves of a library!
+
+“What can this be?” he murmurs at last. “Eve, methinks nothing is so
+desirable as to find out the mystery of this big and heavy object with
+its thousand thin divisions. See! it stares me in the face as if it
+were about to speak!”
+
+Eve, by a feminine instinct, is dipping into a volume of fashionable
+poetry, the production certainly the most fortunate of earthly bards,
+since his lay continues in vogue when all the great masters of the lyre
+have passed into oblivion. But let not, his ghost be too exultant! The
+world’s one lady tosses the book upon the floor and laughs merrily at
+her husband’s abstracted mien.
+
+“My dear Adam,” cries she, “you look pensive and dismal. Do fling down
+that stupid thing; for even if it should speak it would not be worth
+attending to. Let us talk with one another, and with the sky, and the
+green earth, and its trees and flowers. They will teach us better
+knowledge than we can find here.”
+
+“Well, Eve, perhaps you are right,” replies Adam, with a sort of sigh.
+“Still I cannot help thinking that the interpretation of the riddles
+amid which we have been wandering all day long might here be
+discovered.”
+
+“It may be better not to seek the interpretation,” persists Eve. “For
+my part, the air of this place does not suit me. If you love me, come
+away!”
+
+She prevails, and rescues him from the mysterious perils of the
+library. Happy influence of woman! Had he lingered there long enough to
+obtain a clew to its treasures,—as was not impossible, his intellect
+being of human structure, indeed, but with an untransmitted vigor and
+acuteness,—had he then and there become a student, the annalist of our
+poor world would soon have recorded the downfall of a second Adam. The
+fatal apple of another Tree of knowledge would have been eaten. All the
+perversions, and sophistries, and false wisdom so aptly mimicking the
+true,—all the narrow truth, so partial that it becomes more deceptive
+than falsehood,—all the wrong principles and worse practice, the
+pernicious examples and mistaken rules of life,—all the specious
+theories which turn earth into cloudland and men into shadows,—all the
+sad experience which it took mankind so many ages to accumulate, and
+from which they never drew a moral for their future guidance, the whole
+heap of this disastrous lore would have tumbled at once upon Adam’s
+head. There would have been nothing left for him but to take up the
+already abortive experiment of life where he had dropped it, and toil
+onward with it a little farther.
+
+But, blessed in his ignorance, he may still enjoy a new world in our
+worn-out one. Should he fall short of good, even as far as we did, he
+has at least the freedom—no worthless one—to make errors for himself.
+And his literature, when the progress of centuries shall create it,
+will be no interminably repeated echo of our own poetry and
+reproduction of the images that were moulded by our great fathers of
+song and fiction, but a melody never yet heard on earth, and
+intellectual forms unbreathed upon by our conceptions. Therefore let
+the dust of ages gather upon the volumes of the library, and in due
+season the roof of the edifice crumble down upon the whole. When the
+second Adam’s descendants shall have collected as much rubbish of their
+own, it will be time enough to dig into our ruins and compare the
+literary advancement of two independent races.
+
+But we are looking forward too far. It seems to be the vice of those
+who have a long past behind them. We will return to the new Adam and
+Eve, who, having no reminiscences save dim and fleeting visions of a
+pre-existence, are content to live and be happy in the present.
+
+The day is near its close when these pilgrims, who derive their being
+from no dead progenitors, reach the cemetery of Mount Auburn. With
+light hearts—for earth and sky now gladden each other with beauty—they
+tread along the winding paths, among marble pillars, mimic temples,
+urns, obelisks, and sarcophagi, sometimes pausing to contemplate these
+fantasies of human growth, and sometimes to admire the flowers
+wherewith nature converts decay to loveliness. Can Death, in the midst
+of his old triumphs, make them sensible that they have taken up the
+heavy burden of mortality which a whole species had thrown down? Dust
+kindred to their own has never lain in the grave. Will they then
+recognize, and so soon, that Time and the elements have an indefeasible
+claim upon their bodies? Not improbably they may. There must have been
+shadows enough, even amid the primal sunshine of their existence, to
+suggest the thought of the soul’s incongruity with its circumstances.
+They have already learned that something is to be thrown aside. The
+idea of Death is in them, or not far off. But, were they to choose a
+symbol for him, it would be the butterfly soaring upward, or the bright
+angel beckoning them aloft, or the child asleep, with soft dreams
+visible through her transparent purity.
+
+Such a Child, in whitest marble, they have found among the monuments of
+Mount Auburn.
+
+“Sweetest Eve,” observes Adam, while hand in hand they contemplate this
+beautiful object, “yonder sun has left us, and the whole world is
+fading from our sight. Let us sleep as this lovely little figure is
+sleeping. Our Father only knows whether what outward things we have
+possessed to-day are to be snatched from us forever. But should our
+earthly life be leaving us with the departing light, we need not doubt
+that another morn will find us somewhere beneath the smile of God. I
+feel that he has imparted the boon of existence never to be resumed.”
+
+“And no matter where we exist,” replies Eve, “for we shall always be
+together.”
+
+
+
+
+EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT
+
+
+“Here he comes!” shouted the boys along the street. “Here comes the man
+with a snake in his bosom!”
+
+This outcry, saluting Herkimer’s ears as he was about to enter the iron
+gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was not without a
+shudder that he found himself on the point of meeting his former
+acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom now
+after an interval of five years, he was to find the victim either of a
+diseased fancy or a horrible physical misfortune.
+
+“A snake in his bosom!” repeated the young sculptor to himself. “It
+must be he. No second man on earth has such a bosom friend. And now, my
+poor Rosina, Heaven grant me wisdom to discharge my errand aright!
+Woman’s faith must be strong indeed since thine has not yet failed.”
+
+Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of the gate and waited
+until the personage so singularly announced should make his appearance.
+After an instant or two he beheld the figure of a lean man, of
+unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and long black hair, who seemed
+to imitate the motion of a snake; for, instead of walking straight
+forward with open front, he undulated along the pavement in a curved
+line. It may be too fanciful to say that something, either in his moral
+or material aspect, suggested the idea that a miracle had been wrought
+by transforming a serpent into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky
+nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere outward
+guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his complexion had a greenish
+tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a species of marble out
+of which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with her snaky locks.
+
+The wretched being approached the gate, but, instead of entering,
+stopped short and fixed the glitter of his eye full upon the
+compassionate yet steady countenance of the sculptor.
+
+“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” he exclaimed.
+
+And then there was an audible hiss, but whether it came from the
+apparent lunatic’s own lips, or was the real hiss of a serpent, might
+admit of a discussion. At all events, it made Herkimer shudder to his
+heart’s core.
+
+“Do you know me, George Herkimer?” asked the snake-possessed.
+
+Herkimer did know him; but it demanded all the intimate and practical
+acquaintance with the human face, acquired by modelling actual
+likenesses in clay, to recognize the features of Roderick Elliston in
+the visage that now met the sculptor’s gaze. Yet it was he. It added
+nothing to the wonder to reflect that the once brilliant young man had
+undergone this odious and fearful change during the no more than five
+brief years of Herkimer’s abode at Florence. The possibility of such a
+transformation being granted, it was as easy to conceive it effected in
+a moment as in an age. Inexpressibly shocked and startled, it was still
+the keenest pang when Herkimer remembered that the fate of his cousin
+Rosina, the ideal of gentle womanhood, was indissolubly interwoven with
+that of a being whom Providence seemed to have unhumanized.
+
+“Elliston! Roderick!” cried he, “I had heard of this; but my conception
+came far short of the truth. What has befallen you? Why do I find you
+thus?”
+
+“Oh, ’tis a mere nothing! A snake! A snake! The commonest thing in the
+world. A snake in the bosom—that’s all,” answered Roderick Elliston.
+“But how is your own breast?” continued he, looking the sculptor in the
+eye with the most acute and penetrating glance that it had ever been
+his fortune to encounter. “All pure and wholesome? No reptile there? By
+my faith and conscience, and by the devil within me, here is a wonder!
+A man without a serpent in his bosom!”
+
+“Be calm, Elliston,” whispered George Herkimer, laying his hand upon
+the shoulder of the snake-possessed. “I have crossed the ocean to meet
+you. Listen! Let us be private. I bring a message from Rosina—from your
+wife!”
+
+“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” muttered Roderick.
+
+With this exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the unfortunate
+man clutched both hands upon his breast as if an intolerable sting or
+torture impelled him to rend it open and let out the living mischief,
+even should it be intertwined with his own life. He then freed himself
+from Herkimer’s grasp by a subtle motion, and, gliding through the
+gate, took refuge in his antiquated family residence. The sculptor did
+not pursue him. He saw that no available intercourse could be expected
+at such a moment, and was desirous, before another meeting, to inquire
+closely into the nature of Roderick’s disease and the circumstances
+that had reduced him to so lamentable a condition. He succeeded in
+obtaining the necessary information from an eminent medical gentleman.
+
+Shortly after Elliston’s separation from his wife—now nearly four years
+ago—his associates had observed a singular gloom spreading over his
+daily life, like those chill, gray mists that sometimes steal away the
+sunshine from a summer’s morning. The symptoms caused them endless
+perplexity. They knew not whether ill health were robbing his spirits
+of elasticity, or whether a canker of the mind was gradually eating, as
+such cankers do, from his moral system into the physical frame, which
+is but the shadow of the former. They looked for the root of this
+trouble in his shattered schemes of domestic bliss,—wilfully shattered
+by himself,—but could not be satisfied of its existence there. Some
+thought that their once brilliant friend was in an incipient stage of
+insanity, of which his passionate impulses had perhaps been the
+forerunners; others prognosticated a general blight and gradual
+decline. From Roderick’s own lips they could learn nothing. More than
+once, it is true, he had been heard to say, clutching his hands
+convulsively upon his breast,—“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”—but, by
+different auditors, a great diversity of explanation was assigned to
+this ominous expression. What could it be that gnawed the breast of
+Roderick Elliston? Was it sorrow? Was it merely the tooth of physical
+disease? Or, in his reckless course, often verging upon profligacy, if
+not plunging into its depths, had he been guilty of some deed which
+made his bosom a prey to the deadlier fangs of remorse? There was
+plausible ground for each of these conjectures; but it must not be
+concealed that more than one elderly gentleman, the victim of good
+cheer and slothful habits, magisterially pronounced the secret of the
+whole matter to be Dyspepsia!
+
+Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally he had become the
+subject of curiosity and conjecture, and, with a morbid repugnance to
+such notice, or to any notice whatsoever, estranged himself from all
+companionship. Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him; not
+merely the light of a friend’s countenance; but even the blessed
+sunshine, likewise, which in its universal beneficence typifies the
+radiance of the Creator’s face, expressing his love for all the
+creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was now too transparent for
+Roderick Elliston; the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to steal
+abroad; and if ever he were seen, it was when the watchman’s lantern
+gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street, with his hands
+clutched upon his bosom, still muttering, “It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”
+What could it be that gnawed him?
+
+After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of
+resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom money
+would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of these
+persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed far
+and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets on dingy paper,
+that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been
+relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here was the monstrous secret,
+ejected from its lurking place into public view, in all its horrible
+deformity. The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it
+were anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The
+empiric’s cure had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of some
+stupefying drug which more nearly caused the death of the patient than
+of the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston
+regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune the town
+talk—the more than nine days’ wonder and horror—while, at his bosom, he
+felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the gnawing of that
+restless fang which seemed to gratify at once a physical appetite and a
+fiendish spite.
+
+He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his father’s
+house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his cradle.
+
+“Scipio!” he began; and then paused, with his arms folded over his
+heart. “What do people say of me, Scipio.”
+
+“Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom,” answered
+the servant with hesitation.
+
+“And what else?” asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man.
+
+“Nothing else, dear master,” replied Scipio, “only that the doctor gave
+you a powder, and that the snake leaped out upon the floor.”
+
+“No, no!” muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and
+pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast, “I feel
+him still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”
+
+From this time the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world, but
+rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of acquaintances
+and strangers. It was partly the result of desperation on finding that
+the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep and dark enough to hide
+the secret, even while it was so secure a fortress for the loathsome
+fiend that had crept into it. But still more, this craving for
+notoriety was a symptom of the intense morbidness which now pervaded
+his nature. All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the
+disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely
+the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the
+cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a
+self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be
+so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the
+face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure—perhaps the
+greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible—in displaying the wasted
+or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the
+crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it
+from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is
+that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective
+individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before, had held
+himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full
+allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the
+symbol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was referred, and
+which he pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive
+sacrifice of devil worship.
+
+He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of
+insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and gloried
+himself on being marked out from the ordinary experience of mankind, by
+the possession of a double nature, and a life within a life. He
+appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity,—not celestial, it is
+true, but darkly infernal,—and that he thence derived an eminence and a
+sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than whatever ambition
+aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a regal mantle, and
+looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly
+monster. Oftener, however, his human nature asserted its empire over
+him in the shape of a yearning for fellowship. It grew to be his custom
+to spend the whole day in wandering about the streets, aimlessly,
+unless it might be called an aim to establish a species of brotherhood
+between himself and the world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out
+his own disease in every breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so
+keen a perception of frailty, error, and vice, that many persons gave
+him credit for being possessed not merely with a serpent, but with an
+actual fiend, who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever
+was ugliest in man’s heart.
+
+For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had
+cherished a hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the throng
+of the street, laid his hand on this man’s chest, and looking full into
+his forbidding face, “How is the snake to-day?” he inquired, with a
+mock expression of sympathy.
+
+“The snake!” exclaimed the brother hater—“what do you mean?”
+
+“The snake! The snake! Does it gnaw you?” persisted Roderick. “Did you
+take counsel with him this morning when you should have been saying
+your prayers? Did he sting, when you thought of your brother’s health,
+wealth, and good repute? Did he caper for joy, when you remembered the
+profligacy of his only son? And whether he stung, or whether he
+frolicked, did you feel his poison throughout your body and soul,
+converting everything to sourness and bitterness? That is the way of
+such serpents. I have learned the whole nature of them from my own!”
+
+“Where is the police?” roared the object of Roderick’s persecution, at
+the same time giving an instinctive clutch to his breast. “Why is this
+lunatic allowed to go at large?”
+
+“Ha, ha!” chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp of the man.— “His
+bosom serpent has stung him then!”
+
+Often it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter
+satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like virulence.
+One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired
+after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick
+affirmed, this gentleman’s serpent must needs be, since its appetite
+was enormous enough to devour the whole country and constitution. At
+another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth,
+but who skulked about the city in the guise of a scarecrow, with a
+patched blue surtout, brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence
+together, and picking up rusty nails. Pretending to look earnestly at
+this respectable person’s stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake
+was a copper-head and had been generated by the immense quantities of
+that base metal with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he
+assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom
+serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the
+vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention
+was a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in
+a theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than
+divine inspiration.
+
+“You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramental wine,” quoth he.
+
+“Profane wretch!” exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand
+stole to his breast.
+
+He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early
+disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
+intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately
+over the irrevocable past. This man’s very heart, if Roderick might be
+believed, had been changed into a serpent, which would finally torment
+both him and itself to death. Observing a married couple, whose
+domestic troubles were matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on
+having mutually taken a house adder to their bosoms. To an envious
+author, who depreciated works which he could never equal, he said that
+his snake was the slimiest and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but
+was fortunately without a sting. A man of impure life, and a brazen
+face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told
+him that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don
+Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and gazing
+sadly into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the
+deadliest kind within her gentle breast; and the world found the truth
+of those ominous words, when, a few months afterwards, the poor girl
+died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life who
+tormented one another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite,
+were given to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of
+diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief as one great one.
+
+But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a
+person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous
+green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting
+of any snake save one.
+
+“And what one is that?” asked a by-stander, overhearing him.
+
+It was a dark-browed man who put the question; he had an evasive eye,
+which in the course of a dozen years had looked no mortal directly in
+the face. There was an ambiguity about this person’s character,—a stain
+upon his reputation,—yet none could tell precisely of what nature,
+although the city gossips, male and female, whispered the most
+atrocious surmises. Until a recent period he had followed the sea, and
+was, in fact, the very shipmaster whom George Herkimer had encountered,
+under such singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.
+
+“What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting?” repeated this man; but he
+put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he
+was uttering it.
+
+“Why need you ask?” replied Roderick, with a look of dark intelligence.
+“Look into your own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He
+acknowledges the presence of a master fiend!”
+
+And then, as the by-standers afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound was
+heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston’s breast. It was said, too, that
+an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake
+were actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its
+brother reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might have
+been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of
+Roderick.
+
+Thus making his own actual serpent—if a serpent there actually was in
+his bosom—the type of each man’s fatal error, or hoarded sin, or
+unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into the
+sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the pest of the
+city. Nobody could elude him—none could withstand him. He grappled with
+the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his
+adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human life where it is
+the instinctive effort of one and all to hide those sad realities, and
+leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics which
+constitute the materials of intercourse between man and man! It was not
+to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break through the tacit
+compact by which the world has done its best to secure repose without
+relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious remarks, it is true,
+had brothers enough to keep them in countenance; for, by Roderick’s
+theory, every mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small serpents or
+one overgrown monster that had devoured all the rest. Still the city
+could not bear this new apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and
+particularly by the most respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should
+no longer be permitted to violate the received rules of decorum by
+obtruding his own bosom serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those
+of decent people from their lurking places.
+
+Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed him in a private
+asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was observed
+that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances and
+covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.
+
+His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the
+peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In
+solitude his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
+days—indeed, it was his sole occupation—in communing with the serpent.
+A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden
+monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners, and
+inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had
+now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however,
+with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant
+emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and
+poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love—horrible antipathy—embracing
+one another in his bosom, and both concentrating themselves upon a
+being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there, and
+which was nourished with his food, and lived upon his life, and was as
+intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all
+created things! But not the less was it the true type of a morbid
+nature.
+
+Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake
+and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at the
+expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation; but, while
+the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster seemed to
+feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his
+sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active
+poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the
+devil that possessed him, or both together. Another mistake; for if
+Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart nor the
+snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive
+sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest appeared to operate as an antidote
+against all other poisons. The physicians tried to suffocate the fiend
+with tobacco smoke. He breathed it as freely as if it were his native
+atmosphere. Again, they drugged their patient with opium and drenched
+him with intoxicating liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be
+reduced to stupor and perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They
+succeeded in rendering Roderick insensible; but, placing their hands
+upon his breast, they were inexpressibly horror stricken to feel the
+monster wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro within his narrow
+limits, evidently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to
+unusual feats of activity. Thenceforth they gave up all attempts at
+cure or palliation. The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate, resumed
+his former loathsome affection for the bosom fiend, and spent whole
+miserable days before a looking-glass, with his mouth wide open,
+watching, in hope and horror, to catch a glimpse of the snake’s head
+far down within his throat. It is supposed that he succeeded; for the
+attendants once heard a frenzied shout, and, rushing into the room,
+found Roderick lifeless upon the floor.
+
+He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute
+investigation, the medical directors of the asylum decided that his
+mental disease did not amount to insanity, nor would warrant his
+confinement, especially as its influence upon his spirits was
+unfavorable, and might produce the evil which it was meant to remedy.
+His eccentricities were doubtless great; he had habitually violated
+many of the customs and prejudices of society; but the world was not,
+without surer ground, entitled to treat him as a madman. On this
+decision of such competent authority Roderick was released, and had
+returned to his native city the very day before his encounter with
+George Herkimer.
+
+As soon as possible after learning these particulars the sculptor,
+together with a sad and tremulous companion, sought Elliston at his own
+house. It was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters and a
+balcony, and was divided from one of the principal streets by a terrace
+of three elevations, which was ascended by successive flights of stone
+steps. Some immense old elms almost concealed the front of the mansion.
+This spacious and once magnificent family residence was built by a
+grandee of the race early in the past century, at which epoch, land
+being of small comparative value, the garden and other grounds had
+formed quite an extensive domain. Although a portion of the ancestral
+heritage had been alienated, there was still a shadowy enclosure in the
+rear of the mansion where a student, or a dreamer, or a man of stricken
+heart might lie all day upon the grass, amid the solitude of murmuring
+boughs, and forget that a city had grown up around him.
+
+Into this retirement the sculptor and his companion were ushered by
+Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage grew almost sunny
+with intelligence and joy as he paid his humble greetings to one of the
+two visitors.
+
+“Remain in the arbor,” whispered the sculptor to the figure that leaned
+upon his arm. “You will know whether, and when, to make your
+appearance.”
+
+“God will teach me,” was the reply. “May He support me too!”
+
+Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain which gushed into
+the fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle and the same voice
+of airy quietude as when trees of primeval growth flung their shadows
+cross its bosom. How strange is the life of a fountain!—born at every
+moment, yet of an age coeval with the rocks, and far surpassing the
+venerable antiquity of a forest.
+
+“You are come! I have expected you,” said Elliston, when he became
+aware of the sculptor’s presence.
+
+His manner was very different from that of the preceding day—quiet,
+courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over his guest and
+himself. This unnatural restraint was almost the only trait that
+betokened anything amiss. He had just thrown a book upon the grass,
+where it lay half opened, thus disclosing itself to be a natural
+history of the serpent tribe, illustrated by lifelike plates. Near it
+lay that bulky volume, the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor, full of
+cases of conscience, and in which most men, possessed of a conscience,
+may find something applicable to their purpose.
+
+“You see,” observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents, while a
+smile gleamed upon his lips, “I am making an effort to become better
+acquainted with my bosom friend; but I find nothing satisfactory in
+this volume. If I mistake not, he will prove to be sui generis, and
+akin to no other reptile in creation.”
+
+“Whence came this strange calamity?” inquired the sculptor.
+
+“My sable friend Scipio has a story,” replied Roderick, “of a snake
+that had lurked in this fountain—pure and innocent as it looks—ever
+since it was known to the first settlers. This insinuating personage
+once crept into the vitals of my great grandfather and dwelt there many
+years, tormenting the old gentleman beyond mortal endurance. In short
+it is a family peculiarity. But, to tell you the truth, I have no faith
+in this idea of the snake’s being an heirloom. He is my own snake, and
+no man’s else.”
+
+“But what was his origin?” demanded Herkimer.
+
+“Oh, there is poisonous stuff in any man’s heart sufficient to generate
+a brood of serpents,” said Elliston with a hollow laugh. “You should
+have heard my homilies to the good town’s-people. Positively, I deem
+myself fortunate in having bred but a single serpent. You, however,
+have none in your bosom, and therefore cannot sympathize with the rest
+of the world. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”
+
+With this exclamation Roderick lost his self-control and threw himself
+upon the grass, testifying his agony by intricate writhings, in which
+Herkimer could not but fancy a resemblance to the motions of a snake.
+Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss, which often ran through
+the sufferer’s speech, and crept between the words and syllables
+without interrupting their succession.
+
+“This is awful indeed!” exclaimed the sculptor—“an awful infliction,
+whether it be actual or imaginary. Tell me, Roderick Elliston, is there
+any remedy for this loathsome evil?”
+
+“Yes, but an impossible one,” muttered Roderick, as he lay wallowing
+with his face in the grass. “Could I for one moment forget myself, the
+serpent might not abide within me. It is my diseased self-contemplation
+that has engendered and nourished him.”
+
+“Then forget yourself, my husband,” said a gentle voice above him;
+“forget yourself in the idea of another!”
+
+Rosina had emerged from the arbor, and was bending over him with the
+shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance, yet so mingled with
+hope and unselfish love that all anguish seemed but an earthly shadow
+and a dream. She touched Roderick with her hand. A tremor shivered
+through his frame. At that moment, if report be trustworthy, the
+sculptor beheld a waving motion through the grass, and heard a tinkling
+sound, as if something had plunged into the fountain. Be the truth as
+it might, it is certain that Roderick Elliston sat up like a man
+renewed, restored to his right mind, and rescued from the fiend which
+had so miserably overcome him in the battle-field of his own breast.
+
+“Rosina!” cried he, in broken and passionate tones, but with nothing of
+the wild wail that had haunted his voice so long, “forgive! forgive!”
+
+Her happy tears bedewed his face.
+
+“The punishment has been severe,” observed the sculptor. “Even Justice
+might now forgive; how much more a woman’s tenderness! Roderick
+Elliston, whether the serpent was a physical reptile, or whether the
+morbidness of your nature suggested that symbol to your fancy, the
+moral of the story is not the less true and strong. A tremendous
+Egotism, manifesting itself in your case in the form of jealousy, is as
+fearful a fiend as ever stole into the human heart. Can a breast, where
+it has dwelt so long, be purified?”
+
+“Oh yes,” said Rosina with a heavenly smile. “The serpent was but a
+dark fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The past,
+dismal as it seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To give it
+its due importance we must think of it but as an anecdote in our
+Eternity.”
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET
+
+FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART.”
+
+
+“I have here attempted,” said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
+manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the
+summer-house,—“I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides
+past me, occasionally, in my walk through life. My former sad
+experience, as you know, has gifted me with some degree of insight into
+the gloomy mysteries of the human heart, through which I have wandered
+like one astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast flickering to
+extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a hopeless puzzle.”
+
+“Well, but propound him,” said the sculptor. “Let us have an idea of
+hint, to begin with.”
+
+“Why, indeed,” replied Roderick, “he is such a being as I could
+conceive you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized perfection
+of human science to endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect; but
+still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a divine Creator. He
+looks like a man; and, perchance, like a better specimen of man than
+you ordinarily meet. You might esteem him wise; he is capable of
+cultivation and refinement, and has at least an external conscience;
+but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are precisely those to
+which he cannot respond. When at last you come close to him you find
+him chill and unsubstantial,—a mere vapor.”
+
+“I believe,” said Rosina, “I have a glimmering idea of what you mean.”
+
+“Then be thankful,” answered her husband, smiling; “but do not
+anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I
+have here imagined such a man to be—what, probably, he never
+is—conscious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks
+the result would be a sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go
+shivering through the world, longing to exchange his load of ice for
+any burden of real grief that fate could fling upon a human being.”
+
+Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.
+
+
+In a certain old gentleman’s last will and testament there appeared a
+bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in
+keeping with a long life of melancholy eccentricity. He devised a
+considerable sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was to
+be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christmas Banquet for ten
+of the most miserable persons that could be found. It seemed not to be
+the testator’s purpose to make these half a score of sad hearts merry,
+but to provide that the stern or fierce expression of human discontent
+should not be drowned, even for that one holy and joyful day, amid the
+acclamations of festal gratitude which all Christendom sends up. And he
+desired, likewise, to perpetuate his own remonstrance against the
+earthly course of Providence, and his sad and sour dissent from those
+systems of religion or philosophy which either find sunshine in the
+world or draw it down from heaven.
+
+The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might
+advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was
+confided to the two trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentlemen,
+like their deceased friend, were sombre humorists, who made it their
+principal occupation to number the sable threads in the web of human
+life, and drop all the golden ones out of the reckoning. They performed
+their present office with integrity and judgment. The aspect of the
+assembled company, on the day of the first festival, might not, it is
+true, have satisfied every beholder that these were especially the
+individuals, chosen forth from all the world, whose griefs were worthy
+to stand as indicators of the mass of human suffering. Yet, after due
+consideration, it could not be disputed that here was a variety of
+hopeless discomfort, which, if it sometimes arose from causes
+apparently inadequate, was thereby only the shrewder imputation against
+the nature and mechanism of life.
+
+The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably intended
+to signify that death in life which had been the testator’s definition
+of existence. The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with
+curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress
+and wreaths of artificial flowers, imitative of such as used to be
+strewn over the dead. A sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The
+main reservoir of wine, was a sepulchral urn of silver, whence the
+liquor was distributed around the table in small vases, accurately
+copied from those that held the tears of ancient mourners. Neither had
+the stewards—if it were their taste that arranged these
+details—forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a
+skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with
+the imperturbable grin of a death’s-head. Such a fearful guest,
+shrouded in a black mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It was
+whispered, I know not with what truth, that the testator himself had
+once walked the visible world with the machinery of that sane skeleton,
+and that it was one of the stipulations of his will, that he should
+thus be permitted to sit, from year to year, at the banquet which he
+had instituted. If so, it was perhaps covertly implied that he had
+cherished no hopes of bliss beyond the grave to compensate for the
+evils which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their bewildered
+conjectures as to the purpose of earthly existence, the banqueters
+should throw aside the veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this
+figure of death, as seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable,
+the only reply would be a stare of the vacant eye-caverns and a grin of
+the skeleton jaws. Such was the response that the dead man had fancied
+himself to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his
+life; and it was his desire to repeat it when the guests of his dismal
+hospitality should find themselves perplexed with the same question.
+
+“What means that wreath?” asked several of the company, while viewing
+the decorations of the table.
+
+They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a
+skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle.
+
+“It is a crown,” said one of the stewards, “not for the worthiest, but
+for the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it.”
+
+The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and gentle
+character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy despondency
+to which his temperament rendered him liable; and therefore with
+nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he had spent a life of
+quiet misery that made his blood torpid, and weighed upon his breath,
+and sat like a ponderous night-fiend upon every throb of his
+unresisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as deep as his original
+nature, if not identical with it. It was the misfortune of a second
+guest to cherish within his bosom a diseased heart, which had become so
+wretchedly sore that the continual and unavoidable rubs of the world,
+the blow of an enemy, the careless jostle of a stranger, and even the
+faithful and loving touch of a friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is
+the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in
+exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give themselves the
+pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac, whose
+imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world, and
+caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in
+the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and
+something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature.
+His neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted
+mankind too much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting
+with many disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several
+years back this misanthrope bad employed himself in accumulating
+motives for hating and despising his race,—such as murder, lust,
+treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive
+vices of children, impurity of women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like
+aspect,—and, in short, all manner of black realities that sought to
+decorate themselves with outward grace or glory. But at every atrocious
+fact that was added to his catalogue, at every increase of the sad
+knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native impulses of
+the poor man’s loving and confiding heart made him groan with anguish.
+Next, with his heavy brow bent downward, there stole into the hall a
+man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial
+infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high message to the world;
+but, essaying to deliver it, had found either no voice or form of
+speech, or else no ears to listen. Therefore his whole life was a
+bitter questioning of himself: “Why have not men acknowledged my
+mission? Am I not a self-deluding fool? What business have I on earth?
+Where is my grave?” Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent
+draughts from the sepulchral urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the
+celestial fire that tortured his own breast and could not benefit his
+race.
+
+Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay
+gallant of yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow,
+and more gray hairs than he could well number on his head. Endowed with
+sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but
+had reached at last that dreary point in life where Folly quits us of
+her own accord, leaving us to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus,
+cold and desolate, he had come to seek Wisdom at the banquet, and
+wondered if the skeleton were she. To eke out the company, the stewards
+had invited a distressed poet from his home in the almshouse, and a
+melancholy idiot from the street-corner. The latter had just the
+glimmering of sense that was sufficient to make him conscious of a
+vacancy, which the poor fellow, all his life long, had mistily sought
+to fill up with intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and
+groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffectual. The only lady
+in the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
+beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye.
+But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal of her
+soul, rather than her vanity, that she passed her life in solitude, and
+veiled her countenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat
+shrouded at one end of the table, and this poor lady at the other.
+
+One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth
+brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior
+developed him, he might much more suitably have found a place at some
+merry Christmas table, than have been numbered among the blighted,
+fate-stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs
+arose among the guests as they noted, the glance of general scrutiny
+which the intruder threw over his companions. What had he to do among
+them? Why did not the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast unbend
+its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwelcome stranger from the
+board?
+
+“Shameful!” said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
+heart. “He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends
+I—he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the
+stage!”
+
+“O, never mind him!” said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly. “He shall
+feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a fricassee of
+scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the
+dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if he like our
+Christmas fare, let him return again next year!”
+
+“Trouble him not,” murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness. “What
+matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few years sooner
+or later? If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with us
+for the sake of the wretchedness to come.”
+
+The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
+vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused people
+to say that he was always in search of his missing wits. After no
+little examination he touched the stranger’s hand, but immediately drew
+back his own, shaking his head and shivering.
+
+“Cold, cold, cold!” muttered the idiot.
+
+The young man shivered too, and smiled.
+
+“Gentlemen, and you, madam,” said one of the stewards of the festival,
+“do not conceive so ill either of our caution or judgment, as to
+imagine that we have admitted this young stranger—Gervayse Hastings by
+name—without a full investigation and thoughtful balance of his claims.
+Trust me, not a guest at the table is better entitled to his seat.”
+
+The steward’s guaranty was perforce satisfactory. The company,
+therefore, took their places, and addressed themselves to the serious
+business of the feast, but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac,
+who thrust back his chair, complaining that a dish of stewed toads and
+vipers was set before him, and that there was green ditchwater in his
+cup of wine. This mistake being amended, he quietly resumed his seat.
+The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn, seemed to come
+imbued with all gloomy inspirations; so that its influence was not to
+cheer, but either to sink the revellers into a deeper melancholy, or
+elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. The
+conversation was various. They told sad stories about people who might
+have been Worthy guests at such a festival as the present. They talked
+of grisly incidents in human history; of strange crimes, which, if
+truly considered, were but convulsions of agony; of some lives that had
+been altogether wretched, and of others, which, wearing a general
+semblance of happiness, had yet been deformed, sooner or later, by
+misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a banquet; of
+death-bed scenes, and what dark intimations might be gathered from the
+words of dying men; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were
+by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of
+charcoal. The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people
+thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their own
+woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most excellent in
+anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and
+wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a gleam of discolored
+light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. Many a miserable
+thought, such as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he now
+rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestimable gem, a diamond, a
+treasure far preferable to those bright, spiritual revelations of a
+better world, which are like precious stones from heaven’s pavement.
+And then, amid his lore of wretchedness he hid his face and wept.
+
+It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz might suitably have been
+a guest, together with all, in each succeeding age, who have tasted
+deepest of the bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that every son
+or daughter of woman, however favored with happy fortune, might, at one
+sad moment or another, have claimed the privilege of a stricken heart,
+to sit down at this table. But, throughout the feast, it was remarked
+that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings, was unsuccessful in his
+attempts to catch its pervading spirit. At any deep, strong thought
+that found utterance, and which was torn out, as it were, from the
+saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked mystified and
+bewildered; even more than the poor idiot, who seemed to grasp at such
+things with his earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend
+them. The young man’s conversation was of a colder and lighter kind,
+often brilliant, but lacking the powerful characteristics of a nature
+that had been developed by suffering.
+
+“Sir,” said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to some observation by
+Gervayse Hastings, “pray do not address me again. We have no right to
+talk together. Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim you
+appear at this banquet I cannot guess; but methinks, to a man who could
+say what you have just now said, my companions and myself must seem no
+more than shadows flickering on the wall. And precisely such a shadow
+are you to us.”
+
+The young man smiled and bowed, but, drawing himself back in his chair,
+he buttoned his coat over his breast, as if the banqueting-ball were
+growing chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon the
+youth, and murmured, “Cold! cold! cold!”
+
+The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests departed. Scarcely
+had they stepped across the threshold of the hall, when the scene that
+had there passed seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an
+exhalation from a stagnant heart. Now and then, however, during the
+year that ensued, these melancholy people caught glimpses of one
+another, transient, indeed, but enough to prove that they walked the
+earth with the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair of them
+came face to face, while stealing through the evening twilight,
+enveloped in their sable cloaks. Sometimes they casually met in
+churchyards. Once, also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters
+mutually started at recognizing each other in the noonday sunshine of a
+crowded street, stalking there like ghosts astray. Doubtless they
+wondered why the skeleton did not come abroad at noonday too.
+
+But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled these Christmas
+guests into the bustling world, they were sure to encounter the young
+man who had so unaccountably been admitted to the festival. They saw
+him among the gay and fortunate; they caught the sunny sparkle of his
+eye; they heard the light and careless tones of his voice, and muttered
+to themselves with such indignation as only the aristocracy of
+wretchedness could kindle, “The traitor! The vile impostor! Providence,
+in its own good time, may give him a right to feast among us!” But the
+young man’s unabashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they
+passed him, seeming to say, perchance with somewhat of a sneer, “First,
+know my secret then, measure your claims with mine!”
+
+The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought merry Christmas round
+again, with glad and solemn worship in the churches, and sports, games,
+festivals, and everywhere the bright face of Joy beside the household
+fire. Again likewise the hall, with its curtains of dusky purple, was
+illuminated by the death-torches gleaming on the sepulchral decorations
+of the banquet. The veiled, skeleton sat in state, lifting the
+cypress-wreath above its head, as the guerdon of some guest illustrious
+in the qualifications which there claimed precedence. As the stewards
+deemed the world inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of
+recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit to reassemble
+the company of the former year. New faces now threw their gloom across
+the table.
+
+There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a blood-stain in his
+heart—the death of a fellow-creature—which, for his more exquisite
+torture, had chanced with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he
+could not absolutely determine whether his will had entered into the
+deed or not. Therefore, his whole life was spent in the agony of an
+inward trial for murder, with a continual sifting of the details of his
+terrible calamity, until his mind had no longer any thought, nor his
+soul any emotion, disconnected with it, There was a mother, too,—a
+mother once, but a desolation now,—who, many years before, had gone out
+on a pleasure-party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in its
+little bed. And ever since she has been tortured with the fantasy that
+her buried baby lay smothering in its coffin. Then there was an aged
+lady, who had lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
+quivering through her-frame. It was terrible to discern her dark shadow
+tremulous upon the wall; her lips, likewise, were tremulous; and the
+expression of her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was trembling
+too. Owing to the bewilderment and confusion which made almost a chaos
+of her intellect, it was impossible to discover what dire misfortune
+had thus shaken her nature to its depths; so that the stewards had
+admitted her to the table, not from any acquaintance with her history,
+but on the safe testimony of her miserable aspect. Some surprise was
+expressed at the presence of a bluff, red-faced gentleman, a certain
+Mr. Smith, who had evidently the fat of many a rich feast within him,
+and the habitual twinkle of whose eye betrayed a disposition to break
+forth into uproarious laughter for little cause or none. It turned out,
+however, that, with the best possible flow of spirits, our poor friend
+was afflicted with a physical disease of the heart, which threatened
+instant death on the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that
+titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry thoughts. In this
+dilemma he had sought admittance to the banquet, on the ostensible plea
+of his irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the hope of
+imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.
+
+A married couple had been invited from a motive of bitter humor, it
+being well understood that they rendered each other unutterably
+miserable whenever they chanced to meet, and therefore must necessarily
+be fit associates at the festival. In contrast with these was another
+couple still unmarried, who had interchanged their hearts in early
+life, but had been divided by circumstances as impalpable as morning
+mist, and kept apart so long that their spirits now found it impossible
+to meet, Therefore, yearning for communion, yet shrinking from one
+another and choosing none beside, they felt themselves companionless in
+life, and looked upon eternity as a boundless desert. Next to the
+skeleton sat a mere son of earth,—a hunter of the Exchange,—a gatherer
+of shining dust,—a man whose life’s record was in his ledger, and whose
+soul’s prison-house the vaults of the bank where he kept his deposits.
+This person had been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming
+himself one of the most fortunate men in the city; but the stewards
+persisted in demanding his presence, assuring him that he had no
+conception how miserable he was.
+
+And now appeared a figure which we must acknowledge as our acquaintance
+of the former festival. It was Gervayse Hastings, whose presence had
+then caused so much question and criticism, and who now took his place
+with the composure of one whose claims were satisfactory to himself and
+must needs be allowed by others. Yet his easy and unruffled face
+betrayed no sorrow.
+
+The well-skilled beholders gazed a moment into his eyes and shook their
+heads, to miss the unuttered sympathy—the countersign never to be
+falsified—of those whose hearts are cavern-mouths through which they
+descend into a region of illimitable woe and recognize other wanderers
+there.
+
+“Who is this youth?” asked the man with a bloodstain on his conscience.
+“Surely he has never gone down into the depths! I know all the aspects
+of those who have passed through the dark valley. By what right is he
+among us?”
+
+“Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a sorrow,” murmured
+the aged lady, in accents that partook of the eternal tremor which
+pervaded her whole being “Depart, young man! Your soul has never been
+shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the more to look at you.”
+
+“His soul shaken! No; I’ll answer for it,” said bluff Mr. Smith,
+pressing his hand upon his heart and making himself as melancholy as he
+could, for fear of a fatal explosion of laughter. “I know the lad well;
+he has as fair prospects as any young man about town, and has no more
+right among us miserable creatures than the child unborn. He never was
+miserable and probably never will be!”
+
+“Our honored guests,” interposed the stewards, “pray have patience with
+us, and believe, at least, that our deep veneration for the sacredness
+of this solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of it. Receive
+this young man to your table. It may not be too much to say, that no
+guest here would exchange his own heart for the one that beats within
+that youthful bosom!”
+
+“I’d call it a bargain, and gladly, too,” muttered Mr. Smith, with a
+perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit. “A plague upon
+their nonsense! My own heart is the only really miserable one in the
+company; it will certainly be the death of me at last!”
+
+Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judgment of the stewards
+being without appeal, the company sat down. The obnoxious guest made no
+more attempt to obtrude his conversation on those about him, but
+appeared to listen to the table-talk with peculiar assiduity, as if
+some inestimable secret, otherwise beyond his reach, might be conveyed
+in a casual word. And in truth, to those who could understand and value
+it, there was rich matter in the upgushings and outpourings of these
+initiated souls to whom sorrow had been a talisman, admitting them into
+spiritual depths which no other spell can open. Sometimes out of the
+midst of densest gloom there flashed a momentary radiance, pure as
+crystal, bright as the flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon
+the mysteries of life, that the guests were ready to exclaim, “Surely
+the riddle is on the point of being solved!” At such illuminated
+intervals the saddest mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal
+griefs are but shadowy and external; no more than the sable robes
+voluminously shrouding a certain divine reality, and thus indicating
+what might otherwise be altogether invisible to mortal eye.
+
+“Just now,” remarked the trembling old woman, “I seemed to see beyond
+the outside. And then my everlasting tremor passed away!”
+
+“Would that I could dwell always in these momentary gleams of light!”
+said the man of stricken conscience. “Then the blood-stain in my heart
+would be washed clean away.”
+
+This strain of conversation appeared so unintelligibly absurd to good
+Mr. Smith, that he burst into precisely the fit of laughter which his
+physicians had warned him against, as likely to prove instantaneously
+fatal. In effect, he fell back in his chair a corpse, with a broad grin
+upon his face, while his ghost, perchance, remained beside it
+bewildered at its unpremeditated exit. This catastrophe of course broke
+up the festival.
+
+“How is this? You do not tremble!” observed the tremulous old woman to
+Gervayse Hastings, who was gazing at the dead man with singular
+intentness. “Is it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of the
+midst of life,—this man of flesh and blood, whose earthly nature was so
+warm and strong? There is a never-ending tremor in my soul, but it
+trembles afresh at, this! And you are calm!”
+
+“Would that he could teach me somewhat!” said Gervayse Hastings,
+drawing a long breath. “Men pass before me like shadows on the wall;
+their actions, passions, feelings, are flickerings of the light, and
+then they vanish! Neither the corpse, nor yonder skeleton, nor this old
+woman’s everlasting tremor, can give me what I seek.”
+
+And then the company departed.
+
+We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more circumstances of
+these singular festivals, which, in accordance with the founder’s will,
+continued to be kept with the regularity of an established institution.
+In process of time the stewards adopted the custom of inviting, from
+far and near, those individuals whose misfortunes were prominent above
+other men’s, and whose mental and moral development might, therefore,
+be supposed to possess a corresponding interest. The exiled noble of
+the French Revolution, and the broken soldier of the Empire, were alike
+represented at the table. Fallen monarchs, wandering about the earth,
+have found places at that forlorn and miserable feast. The statesman,
+when his party flung him off, might, if he chose it, be once more a
+great man for the space of a single banquet. Aaron Burr’s name appears
+on the record at a period when his ruin—the profoundest and most
+striking, with more of moral circumstance in it than that of almost any
+other man—was complete in his lonely age. Stephen Guard, when his
+wealth weighed upon him like a mountain, once sought admittance of his
+own accord. It is not probable, however, that these men had any lesson
+to teach in the lore of discontent and misery which might not equally
+well have been studied in the common walks of life. Illustrious
+unfortunates attract a wider sympathy, not because their griefs are
+more intense, but because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the
+better serve mankind as instances and bywords of calamity.
+
+It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each successive
+festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face, gradually changing from
+the smooth beauty of his youth to the thoughtful comeliness of manhood,
+and thence to the bald, impressive dignity of age. He was the only
+individual invariably present. Yet on every occasion there were
+murmurs, both from those who knew his character and position, and from
+them whose hearts shrank back as denying his companionship in their
+mystic fraternity.
+
+“Who is this impassive man?” had been asked a hundred times. “Has he
+suffered? Has he sinned? There are no traces of either. Then wherefore
+is he here?”
+
+“You must inquire of the stewards or of himself,” was the constant
+reply. “We seem to know him well here in our city, and know nothing of
+him but what is creditable and fortunate. Yet hither he comes, year
+after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among the guests like a
+marble statue. Ask yonder skeleton, perhaps that may solve the riddle!”
+
+It was in truth a wonder. The life of Gervayse Hastings was not merely
+a prosperous, but a brilliant one. Everything had gone well with him.
+He was wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was required by habits
+of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and cultivation, a love of
+travel, a scholar’s instinct to collect a splendid library, and,
+moreover, what seemed a magnificent liberality to the distressed. He
+had sought happiness, and not vainly, if a lovely and tender wife, and
+children of fair promise, could insure it. He had, besides, ascended
+above the limit which separates the obscure from the distinguished, and
+had won a stainless reputation in affairs of the widest public
+importance. Not that he was a popular character, or had within him the
+mysterious attributes which are essential to that species of success.
+To the public he was a cold abstraction, wholly destitute of those rich
+lines of personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar faculty of
+stamping his own heart’s impression on a multitude of hearts, by which
+the people recognize their favorites. And it must be owned that, after
+his most intimate associates had done their best to know him
+thoroughly, and love him warmly, they were startled to find how little
+hold he had upon their affections. They approved, they admired, but
+still in those moments when the human spirit most craves reality, they
+shrank back from Gervayse Hastings, as powerless to give them what they
+sought. It was the feeling of distrustful regret with which we should
+draw back the hand after extending it, in an illusive twilight, to
+grasp the hand of a shadow upon the wall.
+
+As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this peculiar effect of
+Gervayse Hastings’s character grew more perceptible. His children, when
+he extended his arms, came coldly to his knees, but never climbed them
+of their own accord. His wife wept secretly, and almost adjudged
+herself a criminal because she shivered in the chill of his bosom. He,
+too, occasionally appeared not unconscious of the chillness of his
+moral atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so, to warm himself at a
+kindly fire. But age stole onward and benumbed him snore and more. As
+the hoar-frost began to gather on him his wife went to her grave, and
+was doubtless warmer there; his children either died or were scattered
+to different homes of their own; and old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed
+by grief,—alone, but needing no companionship,—continued his steady
+walk through life, and still one very Christmas day attended at the
+dismal banquet. His privilege as a guest had become prescriptive now.
+Had he claimed the head of the table, even the skeleton would have been
+ejected from its seat.
+
+Finally, at the merry Christmas-tide, when he had numbered fourscore
+years complete, this pale, highbrowed, marble-featured old man once
+more entered the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive aspect
+that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark at his first
+attendance. Time, except in matters merely external, had done nothing
+for him, either of good or evil. As he took his place he threw a calm,
+inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain whether any guest
+had yet appeared, after so many unsuccessful banquets, who might impart
+to him the mystery—the deep, warm secret—the life within the
+life—which, whether manifested in joy or sorrow, is what gives
+substance to a world of shadows.
+
+“My friends,” said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a position which his
+long conversance with the festival caused to appear natural, “you are
+welcome! I drink to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine.”
+
+The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner that proved them
+unable to receive the old man as a member of their sad fraternity. It
+may be well to give the reader an idea of the present company at the
+banquet.
+
+One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his profession, and
+apparently of the genuine dynasty of those old Puritan divines whose
+faith in their calling, and stern exercise of it, had placed them among
+the mighty of the earth. But yielding to the speculative tendency of
+the age, he had gone astray from the firm foundation of an ancient
+faith, and wandered into a cloud-region, where everything was misty and
+deceptive, ever mocking him with a semblance of reality, but still
+dissolving when he flung himself upon it for support and rest. His
+instinct and early training demanded something steadfast; but, looking
+forward, he beheld vapors piled on vapors, and behind him an impassable
+gulf between the man of yesterday and to-day, on the borders of which
+he paced to and fro, sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often
+making his own woe a theme of scornful merriment. This surely was a
+miserable man. Next, there was a theorist,—one of a numerous tribe,
+although he deemed himself unique since the creation,—a theorist, who
+had conceived a plan by which all the wretchedness of earth, moral and
+physical, might be done away, and the bliss of the millennium at once
+accomplished. But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him from
+action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the whole mass of woe
+which he was denied the opportunity to remedy were crowded into his own
+bosom. A plain old man in black attracted much of the company’s notice,
+on the supposition that he was no other than Father Miller, who, it
+seemed, had given himself up to despair at the tedious delay of the
+final conflagration. Then there was a man distinguished for native
+pride and obstinacy, who, a little while before, had possessed immense
+wealth, and held the control of a vast moneyed interest which he had
+wielded in the same spirit as a despotic monarch would wield the power
+of his empire, carrying on a tremendous moral warfare, the roar and
+tremor of which was felt at every fireside in the land. At length came
+a crushing ruin,—a total overthrow of fortune, power, and
+character,—the effect of which on his imperious and, in many respects,
+noble and lofty nature might have entitled him to a place, not merely
+at our festival, but among the peers of Pandemonium.
+
+There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of
+the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures, and
+of the impracticableness of any general measures for their relief, that
+he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately within his
+power, but contented himself with being miserable for sympathy. Near
+him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of
+which the present epoch probably affords numerous examples. Ever since
+he was of capacity to read a newspaper, this person had prided himself
+on his consistent adherence to one political party, but, in the
+confusion of these latter days, had got bewildered and knew not
+whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition, so morally desolate
+and disheartening to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his
+individuality in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by
+such as have experienced it. His next companion was a popular orator
+who had lost his voice, and—as it was pretty much all that he had to
+lose—had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy. The table was
+likewise graced by two of the gentler sex,—one, a half-starved,
+consumptive seamstress, the representative of thousands just as
+wretched; the other, a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself in
+the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing even
+to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of madness
+by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion from a
+proper field of action. The roll of guests being thus complete, a
+side-table had been set for three or four disappointed office-seekers,
+with hearts as sick as death, whom the stewards had admitted partly
+because their calamities really entitled them to entrance here, and
+partly that they were in especial need of a good dinner. There was
+likewise a homeless dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the
+crumbs and gnawing the fragments of the feast,—such a melancholy cur as
+one sometimes sees about the streets without a master, and willing to
+follow the first that will accept his service.
+
+In their own way, these were as wretched a set of people as ever had
+assembled at the festival. There they sat, with the veiled skeleton of
+the founder holding aloft the cypress-wreath, at one end of the table,
+and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure of Gervayse
+Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, impressing the company with awe, yet
+so little interesting their sympathy that he might have vanished into
+thin air without their once exclaiming, “Whither is he gone?”
+
+“Sir,” said the philanthropist, addressing the old man, “you have been
+so long a guest at this annual festival, and have thus been conversant
+with so many varieties of human affliction, that, not improbably, you
+have thence derived some great and important lessons. How blessed were
+your lot could you reveal a secret by which all this mass of woe might
+be removed!”
+
+“I know of but one misfortune,” answered Gervayse Hastings, quietly,
+“and that is my own.”
+
+“Your own!” rejoined the philanthropist. “And looking back on your
+serene and prosperous life, how can you claim to be the sole
+unfortunate of the human race?”
+
+“You will not understand it,” replied Gervayse Hastings, feebly, and
+with a singular inefficiency of pronunciation, and sometimes putting
+one word for another. “None have understood it, not even those who
+experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a
+feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting
+perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men
+have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy
+nor griefs. All things, all persons,—as was truly said to me at this
+table long and long ago,—have been like shadows flickering on the wall.
+It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends:
+it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I
+myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.”
+
+“And how is it with your views of a future life?” inquired the
+speculative clergyman.
+
+“Worse than with you,” said the old man, in a hollow and feeble tone;
+“for I cannot conceive it earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear.
+Mine,—mine is the wretchedness! This cold heart,—this unreal life! Ah!
+it grows colder still.”
+
+It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed ligaments of the
+skeleton gave way, and the dry hones fell together in a heap, thus
+causing the dusty wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The
+attention of the company being thus diverted for a single instant from
+Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on turning again towards him, that
+the old man had undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to flicker on
+the wall.
+
+
+“Well, Rosina, what is your criticism?” asked Roderick, as he rolled up
+the manuscript.
+
+“Frankly, your success is by no means complete,” replied she. “It is
+true, I have an idea of the character you endeavor to describe; but it
+is rather by dint of my own thought than your expression.”
+
+“That is unavoidable,” observed the sculptor, “because the
+characteristics are all negative. If Gervayse Hastings could have
+imbibed one human grief at the gloomy banquet, the task of describing
+him would have been infinitely easier. Of such persons—and we do meet
+with these moral monsters now and then—it is difficult to conceive how
+they came to exist here, or what there is in them capable of existence
+hereafter. They seem to be on the outside of everything; and nothing
+wearies the soul more than an attempt to comprehend them within its
+grasp.”
+
+
+
+
+DROWNE’S WOODEN IMAGE
+
+
+One sunshiny morning, in the good old times of the town of Boston, a
+young carver in wood, well known by the name of Drowne, stood
+contemplating a large oaken log, which it was his purpose to convert
+into the figure-head of a vessel. And while he discussed within his own
+mind what sort of shape or similitude it were well to bestow upon this
+excellent piece of timber, there came into Drowne’s workshop a certain
+Captain Hunnewell, owner and commander of the good brig called the
+Cynosure, which had just returned from her first voyage to Fayal.
+
+“Ah! that will do, Drowne, that will do!” cried the jolly captain,
+tapping the log with his rattan. “I bespeak this very piece of oak for
+the figure-head of the Cynosure. She has shown herself the sweetest
+craft that ever floated, and I mean to decorate her prow with the
+handsomest image that the skill of man can cut out of timber. And,
+Drowne, you are the fellow to execute it.”
+
+“You give me more credit than I deserve, Captain Hunnewell,” said the
+carver, modestly, yet as one conscious of eminence in his art. “But,
+for the sake of the good brig, I stand ready to do my best. And which
+of these designs do you prefer? Here,”—pointing to a staring,
+half-length figure, in a white wig and scarlet coat,—“here is an
+excellent model, the likeness of our gracious king. Here is the valiant
+Admiral Vernon. Or, if you prefer a female figure, what say you to
+Britannia with the trident?”
+
+“All very fine, Drowne; all very fine,” answered the mariner. “But as
+nothing like the brig ever swam the ocean, so I am determined she shall
+have such a figure-head as old Neptune never saw in his life. And what
+is more, as there is a secret in the matter, you must pledge your
+credit not to betray it.”
+
+“Certainly,” said Drowne, marvelling, however, what possible mystery
+there could be in reference to an affair so open, of necessity, to the
+inspection of all the world as the figure-head of a vessel. “You may
+depend, captain, on my being as secret as the nature of the case will
+permit.”
+
+Captain Hunnewell then took Drowne by the button, and communicated his
+wishes in so low a tone that it would be unmannerly to repeat what was
+evidently intended for the carver’s private ear. We shall, therefore,
+take the opportunity to give the reader a few desirable particulars
+about Drowne himself.
+
+He was the first American who is known to have attempted—in a very
+humble line, it is true—that art in which we can now reckon so many
+names already distinguished, or rising to distinction. From his
+earliest boyhood he had exhibited a knack—for it would be too proud a
+word to call it genius—a knack, therefore, for the imitation of the
+human figure in whatever material came most readily to hand. The snows
+of a New England winter had often supplied him with a species of marble
+as dazzingly white, at least, as the Parian or the Carrara, and if less
+durable, yet sufficiently so to correspond with any claims to permanent
+existence possessed by the boy’s frozen statues. Yet they won
+admiration from maturer judges than his school-fellows, and were
+indeed, remarkably clever, though destitute of the native warmth that
+might have made the snow melt beneath his hand. As he advanced in life,
+the young man adopted pine and oak as eligible materials for the
+display of his skill, which now began to bring him a return of solid
+silver as well as the empty praise that had been an apt reward enough
+for his productions of evanescent snow. He became noted for carving
+ornamental pump heads, and wooden urns for gate posts, and decorations,
+more grotesque than fanciful, for mantelpieces. No apothecary would
+have deemed himself in the way of obtaining custom without setting up a
+gilded mortar, if not a head of Galen or Hippocrates, from the skilful
+hand of Drowne.
+
+But the great scope of his business lay in the manufacture of
+figure-heads for vessels. Whether it were the monarch himself, or some
+famous British admiral or general, or the governor of the province, or
+perchance the favorite daughter of the ship-owner, there the image
+stood above the prow, decked out in gorgeous colors, magnificently
+gilded, and staring the whole world out of countenance, as if from an
+innate consciousness of its own superiority. These specimens of native
+sculpture had crossed the sea in all directions, and been not ignobly
+noticed among the crowded shipping of the Thames and wherever else the
+hardy mariners of New England had pushed their adventures. It must be
+confessed that a family likeness pervaded these respectable progeny of
+Drowne’s skill; that the benign countenance of the king resembled those
+of his subjects, and that Miss Peggy Hobart, the merchant’s daughter,
+bore a remarkable similitude to Britannia, Victory, and other ladies of
+the allegoric sisterhood; and, finally, that they all had a kind of
+wooden aspect which proved an intimate relationship with the unshaped
+blocks of timber in the carver’s workshop. But at least there was no
+inconsiderable skill of hand, nor a deficiency of any attribute to
+render them really works of art, except that deep quality, be it of
+soul or intellect, which bestows life upon the lifeless and warmth upon
+the cold, and which, had it been present, would have made Drowne’s
+wooden image instinct with spirit.
+
+The captain of the Cynosure had now finished his instructions.
+
+“And Drowne,” said he, impressively, “you must lay aside all other
+business and set about this forthwith. And as to the price, only do the
+job in first-rate style, and you shall settle that point yourself.”
+
+“Very well, captain,” answered the carver, who looked grave and
+somewhat perplexed, yet had a sort of smile upon his visage; “depend
+upon it, I’ll do my utmost to satisfy you.”
+
+From that moment the men of taste about Long Wharf and the Town Dock
+who were wont to show their love for the arts by frequent visits to
+Drowne’s workshop, and admiration of his wooden images, began to be
+sensible of a mystery in the carver’s conduct. Often he was absent in
+the daytime. Sometimes, as might be judged by gleams of light from the
+shop windows, he was at work until a late hour of the evening; although
+neither knock nor voice, on such occasions, could gain admittance for a
+visitor, or elicit any word of response. Nothing remarkable, however,
+was observed in the shop at those late hours when it was thrown open. A
+fine piece of timber, indeed, which Drowne was known to have reserved
+for some work of especial dignity, was seen to be gradually assuming
+shape. What shape it was destined ultimately to take was a problem to
+his friends and a point on which the carver himself preserved a rigid
+silence. But day after day, though Drowne was seldom noticed in the act
+of working upon it, this rude form began to be developed until it
+became evident to all observers that a female figure was growing into
+mimic life. At each new visit they beheld a larger pile of wooden chips
+and a nearer approximation to something beautiful. It seemed as if the
+hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world
+within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to
+remove the strange shapelessness that had incrusted her, and reveal the
+grace and loveliness of a divinity. Imperfect as the design, the
+attitude, the costume, and especially the face of the image still
+remained, there was already an effect that drew the eye from the wooden
+cleverness of Drowne’s earlier productions and fixed it upon the
+tantalizing mystery of this new project.
+
+Copley, the celebrated painter, then a young man and a resident of
+Boston, came one day to visit Drowne; for he had recognized so much of
+moderate ability in the carver as to induce him, in the dearth of
+professional sympathy, to cultivate his acquaintance. On entering the
+shop, the artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander,
+dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have
+been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man
+had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the
+intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation.
+But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing
+the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and
+how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the
+utmost degree of the former!
+
+“My friend Drowne;” said Copley, smiling to himself, but alluding to
+the mechanical and wooden cleverness that so invariably distinguished
+the images, “you are really a remarkable person! I have seldom met with
+a man in your line of business that could do so much; for one other
+touch might make this figure of General Wolfe, for instance, a
+breathing and intelligent human creature.”
+
+“You would have me think that you are praising me highly, Mr. Copley,”
+answered Drowne, turning his back upon Wolfe’s image in apparent
+disgust. “But there has come a light into my mind. I know what you know
+as well, that the one touch which you speak of as deficient is the only
+one that would be truly valuable, and that without it these works of
+mine are no better than worthless abortions. There is the same
+difference between them and the works of an inspired artist as between
+a sign-post daub and one of your best pictures.”
+
+“This is strange,” cried Copley, looking him in the face, which now, as
+the painter fancied, had a singular depth of intelligence, though
+hitherto it had not given him greatly the advantage over his own family
+of wooden images. “What has come over you? How is it that, possessing
+the idea which you have now uttered, you should produce only such works
+as these?”
+
+The carver smiled, but made no reply. Copley turned again to the
+images, conceiving that the sense of deficiency which Drowne had just
+expressed, and which is so rare in a merely mechanical character, must
+surely imply a genius, the tokens of which had heretofore been
+overlooked. But no; there was not a trace of it. He was about to
+withdraw when his eyes chanced to fall upon a half-developed figure
+which lay in a corner of the workshop, surrounded by scattered chips of
+oak. It arrested him at once.
+
+“What is here? Who has done this?” he broke out, after contemplating it
+in speechless astonishment for an instant. “Here is the divine, the
+lifegiving touch. What inspired hand is beckoning this wood to arise
+and live? Whose work is this?”
+
+“No man’s work,” replied Drowne. “The figure lies within that block of
+oak, and it is my business to find it.”
+
+“Drowne,” said the true artist, grasping the carver fervently by the
+hand, “you are a man of genius!”
+
+As Copley departed, happening to glance backward from the threshold, he
+beheld Drowne bending over the half-created shape, and stretching forth
+his arms as if he would have embraced and drawn it to his heart; while,
+had such a miracle been possible, his countenance expressed passion
+enough to communicate warmth and sensibility to the lifeless oak.
+
+“Strange enough!” said the artist to himself. “Who would have looked
+for a modern Pygmalion in the person of a Yankee mechanic!”
+
+As yet, the image was but vague in its outward presentment; so that, as
+in the cloud shapes around the western sun, the observer rather felt,
+or was led to imagine, than really saw what was intended by it. Day by
+day, however, the work assumed greater precision, and settled its
+irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty. The
+general design was now obvious to the common eye. It was a female
+figure, in what appeared to be a foreign dress; the gown being laced
+over the bosom, and opening in front so as to disclose a skirt or
+petticoat, the folds and inequalities of which were admirably
+represented in the oaken substance. She wore a hat of singular
+gracefulness, and abundantly laden with flowers, such as never grew in
+the rude soil of New England, but which, with all their fanciful
+luxuriance, had a natural truth that it seemed impossible for the most
+fertile imagination to have attained without copying from real
+prototypes. There were several little appendages to this dress, such as
+a fan, a pair of earrings, a chain about the neck, a watch in the
+bosom, and a ring upon the finger, all of which would have been deemed
+beneath the dignity of sculpture. They were put on, however, with as
+much taste as a lovely woman might have shown in her attire, and could
+therefore have shocked none but a judgment spoiled by artistic rules.
+
+The face was still imperfect; but gradually, by a magic touch,
+intelligence and sensibility brightened through the features, with all
+the effect of light gleaming forth from within the solid oak. The face
+became alive. It was a beautiful, though not precisely regular and
+somewhat haughty aspect, but with a certain piquancy about the eyes and
+mouth, which, of all expressions, would have seemed the most impossible
+to throw over a wooden countenance. And now, so far as carving went,
+this wonderful production was complete.
+
+“Drowne,” said Copley, who had hardly missed a single day in his visits
+to the carver’s workshop, “if this work were in marble it would make
+you famous at once; nay, I would almost affirm that it would make an
+era in the art. It is as ideal as an antique statue, and yet as real as
+any lovely woman whom one meets at a fireside or in the street. But I
+trust you do not mean to desecrate this exquisite creature with paint,
+like those staring kings and admirals yonder?”
+
+“Not paint her!” exclaimed Captain Hunnewell, who stood by; “not paint
+the figure-head of the Cynosure! And what sort of a figure should I cut
+in a foreign port with such an unpainted oaken stick as this over my
+prow! She must, and she shall, be painted to the life, from the topmost
+flower in her hat down to the silver spangles on her slippers.”
+
+“Mr. Copley,” said Drowne, quietly, “I know nothing of marble statuary,
+and nothing of the sculptor’s rules of art; but of this wooden image,
+this work of my hands, this creature of my heart,”—and here his voice
+faltered and choked in a very singular manner,—“of this—of her—I may
+say that I know something. A well-spring of inward wisdom gushed within
+me as I wrought upon the oak with my whole strength, and soul, and
+faith. Let others do what they may with marble, and adopt what rules
+they choose. If I can produce my desired effect by painted wood, those
+rules are not for me, and I have a right to disregard them.”
+
+“The very spirit of genius,” muttered Copley to himself. “How otherwise
+should this carver feel himself entitled to transcend all rules, and
+make me ashamed of quoting them?”
+
+He looked earnestly at Drowne, and again saw that expression of human
+love which, in a spiritual sense, as the artist could not help
+imagining, was the secret of the life that had been breathed into this
+block of wood.
+
+The carver, still in the same secrecy that marked all his operations
+upon this mysterious image, proceeded to paint the habiliments in their
+proper colors, and the countenance with Nature’s red and white. When
+all was finished he threw open his workshop, and admitted the towns
+people to behold what he had done. Most persons, at their first
+entrance, felt impelled to remove their hats, and pay such reverence as
+was due to the richly-dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to
+stand in a corner of the room, with oaken chips and shavings scattered
+at her feet. Then came a sensation of fear; as if, not being actually
+human, yet so like humanity, she must therefore be something
+preternatural. There was, in truth, an indefinable air and expression
+that might reasonably induce the query, Who and from what sphere this
+daughter of the oak should be? The strange, rich flowers of Eden on her
+head; the complexion, so much deeper and more brilliant than those of
+our native beauties; the foreign, as it seemed, and fantastic garb, yet
+not too fantastic to be worn decorously in the street; the
+delicately-wrought embroidery of the skirt; the broad gold chain about
+her neck; the curious ring upon her finger; the fan, so exquisitely
+sculptured in open work, and painted to resemble pearl and ebony;—where
+could Drowne, in his sober walk of life, have beheld the vision here so
+matchlessly embodied! And then her face! In the dark eyes, and around
+the voluptuous mouth, there played a look made up of pride, coquetry,
+and a gleam of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea that
+the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing admiration of himself
+and other beholders.
+
+“And will you,” said he to the carver, “permit this masterpiece to
+become the figure-head of a vessel? Give the honest captain yonder
+figure of Britannia—it will answer his purpose far better—and send this
+fairy queen to England, where, for aught I know, it may bring you a
+thousand pounds.”
+
+“I have not wrought it for money,” said Drowne.
+
+“What sort of a fellow is this!” thought Copley. “A Yankee, and throw
+away the chance of making his fortune! He has gone mad; and thence has
+come this gleam of genius.”
+
+There was still further proof of Drowne’s lunacy, if credit were due to
+the rumor that he had been seen kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady,
+and gazing with a lover’s passionate ardor into the face that his own
+hands had created. The bigots of the day hinted that it would be no
+matter of surprise if an evil spirit were allowed to enter this
+beautiful form, and seduce the carver to destruction.
+
+The fame of the image spread far and wide. The inhabitants visited it
+so universally, that after a few days of exhibition there was hardly an
+old man or a child who had not become minutely familiar with its
+aspect. Even had the story of Drowne’s wooden image ended here, its
+celebrity might have been prolonged for many years by the reminiscences
+of those who looked upon it in their childhood, and saw nothing else so
+beautiful in after life. But the town was now astounded by an event,
+the narrative of which has formed itself into one of the most singular
+legends that are yet to be met with in the traditionary chimney corners
+of the New England metropolis, where old men and women sit dreaming of
+the past, and wag their heads at the dreamers of the present and the
+future.
+
+One fine morning, just before the departure of the Cynosure on her
+second voyage to Fayal, the commander of that gallant vessel was seen
+to issue from his residence in Hanover Street. He was stylishly dressed
+in a blue broadcloth coat, with gold lace at the seams and
+button-holes, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, a triangular hat, with
+a loop and broad binding of gold, and wore a silver-hilted hanger at
+his side. But the good captain might have been arrayed in the robes of
+a prince or the rags of a beggar, without in either case attracting
+notice, while obscured by such a companion as now leaned on his arm.
+The people in the street started, rubbed their eyes, and either leaped
+aside from their path, or stood as if transfixed to wood or marble in
+astonishment.
+
+“Do you see it?—do you see it?” cried one, with tremulous eagerness.
+“It is the very same!”
+
+“The same?” answered another, who had arrived in town only the night
+before. “Who do you mean? I see only a sea-captain in his shoregoing
+clothes, and a young lady in a foreign habit, with a bunch of beautiful
+flowers in her hat. On my word, she is as fair and bright a damsel as
+my eyes have looked on this many a day!”
+
+“Yes; the same!—the very same!” repeated the other. “Drowne’s wooden
+image has come to life!”
+
+Here was a miracle indeed! Yet, illuminated by the sunshine, or
+darkened by the alternate shade of the houses, and with its garments
+fluttering lightly in the morning breeze, there passed the image along
+the street. It was exactly and minutely the shape, the garb, and the
+face which the towns-people had so recently thronged to see and admire.
+Not a rich flower upon her head, not a single leaf, but had had its
+prototype in Drowne’s wooden workmanship, although now their fragile
+grace had become flexible, and was shaken by every footstep that the
+wearer made. The broad gold chain upon the neck was identical with the
+one represented on the image, and glistened with the motion imparted by
+the rise and fall of the bosom which it decorated. A real diamond
+sparkled on her finger. In her right hand she bore a pearl and ebony
+fan, which she flourished with a fantastic and bewitching coquetry,
+that was likewise expressed in all her movements as well as in the
+style of her beauty and the attire that so well harmonized with it. The
+face with its brilliant depth of complexion had the same piquancy of
+mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the countenance of the image, but
+which was here varied and continually shifting, yet always essentially
+the same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain. On the whole,
+there was something so airy and yet so real in the figure, and withal
+so perfectly did it represent Drowne’s image, that people knew not
+whether to suppose the magic wood etherealized into a spirit or warmed
+and softened into an actual woman.
+
+“One thing is certain,” muttered a Puritan of the old stamp, “Drowne
+has sold himself to the devil; and doubtless this gay Captain Hunnewell
+is a party to the bargain.”
+
+“And I,” said a young man who overheard him, “would almost consent to
+be the third victim, for the liberty of saluting those lovely lips.”
+
+“And so would I,” said Copley, the painter, “for the privilege of
+taking her picture.”
+
+The image, or the apparition, whichever it might be, still escorted by
+the bold captain, proceeded from Hanover Street through some of the
+cross lanes that make this portion of the town so intricate, to Ann
+Street, thence into Dock Square, and so downward to Drowne’s shop,
+which stood just on the water’s edge. The crowd still followed,
+gathering volume as it rolled along. Never had a modern miracle
+occurred in such broad daylight, nor in the presence of such a
+multitude of witnesses. The airy image, as if conscious that she was
+the object of the murmurs and disturbance that swelled behind her,
+appeared slightly vexed and flustered, yet still in a manner consistent
+with the light vivacity and sportive mischief that were written in her
+countenance. She was observed to flutter her fan with such vehement
+rapidity that the elaborate delicacy of its workmanship gave way, and
+it remained broken in her hand.
+
+Arriving at Drowne’s door, while the captain threw it open, the
+marvellous apparition paused an instant on the threshold, assuming the
+very attitude of the image, and casting over the crowd that glance of
+sunny coquetry which all remembered on the face of the oaken lady. She
+and her cavalier then disappeared.
+
+“Ah!” murmured the crowd, drawing a deep breath, as with one vast pair
+of lungs.
+
+“The world looks darker now that she has vanished,” said some of the
+young men.
+
+But the aged, whose recollections dated as far back as witch times,
+shook their heads, and hinted that our forefathers would have thought
+it a pious deed to burn the daughter of the oak with fire.
+
+“If she be other than a bubble of the elements,” exclaimed Copley, “I
+must look upon her face again.”
+
+He accordingly entered the shop; and there, in her usual corner, stood
+the image, gazing at him, as it might seem, with the very same
+expression of mirthful mischief that had been the farewell look of the
+apparition when, but a moment before, she turned her face towards the
+crowd. The carver stood beside his creation mending the beautiful fan,
+which by some accident was broken in her hand. But there was no longer
+any motion in the lifelike image, nor any real woman in the workshop,
+nor even the witchcraft of a sunny shadow, that might have deluded
+people’s eyes as it flitted along the street. Captain Hunnewell, too,
+had vanished. His hoarse sea-breezy tones, however, were audible on the
+other side of a door that opened upon the water.
+
+“Sit down in the stern sheets, my lady,” said the gallant captain.
+“Come, bear a hand, you lubbers, and set us on board in the turning of
+a minute-glass.”
+
+And then was heard the stroke of oars.
+
+“Drowne,” said Copley with a smile of intelligence, “you have been a
+truly fortunate man. What painter or statuary ever had such a subject!
+No wonder that she inspired a genius into you, and first created the
+artist who afterwards created her image.”
+
+Drowne looked at him with a visage that bore the traces of tears, but
+from which the light of imagination and sensibility, so recently
+illuminating it, had departed. He was again the mechanical carver that
+he had been known to be all his lifetime.
+
+“I hardly understand what you mean, Mr. Copley,” said he, putting his
+hand to his brow. “This image! Can it have been my work? Well, I have
+wrought it in a kind of dream; and now that I am broad awake I must set
+about finishing yonder figure of Admiral Vernon.”
+
+And forthwith he employed himself on the stolid countenance of one of
+his wooden progeny, and completed it in his own mechanical style, from
+which he was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed his
+business industriously for many years, acquired a competence, and in
+the latter part of his life attained to a dignified station in the
+church, being remembered in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne,
+the carver. One of his productions, an Indian chief, gilded all over,
+stood during the better part of a century on the cupola of the Province
+House, bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of
+the sun. Another work of the good deacon’s hand—a reduced likeness of
+his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope and quadrant—may be
+seen to this day, at the corner of Broad and State streets, serving in
+the useful capacity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker.
+We know not how to account for the inferiority of this quaint old
+figure, as compared with the recorded excellence of the Oaken Lady,
+unless on the supposition that in every human spirit there is
+imagination, sensibility, creative power, genius, which, according to
+circumstances, may either be developed in this world, or shrouded in a
+mask of dulness until another state of being. To our friend Drowne
+there came a brief season of excitement, kindled by love. It rendered
+him a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disappointment,
+left him again the mechanical carver in wood, without the power even of
+appreciating the work that his own hands had wrought. Yet who can doubt
+that the very highest state to which a human spirit can attain, in its
+loftiest aspirations, is its truest and most natural state, and that
+Drowne was more consistent with himself when he wrought the admirable
+figure of the mysterious lady, than when he perpetrated a whole progeny
+of blockheads?
+
+There was a rumor in Boston, about this period, that a young Portuguese
+lady of rank, on some occasion of political or domestic disquietude,
+had fled from her home in Fayal and put herself under the protection of
+Captain Hunnewell, on board of whose vessel, and at whose residence,
+she was sheltered until a change of affairs. This fair stranger must
+have been the original of Drowne’s Wooden Image.
+
+
+
+
+THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE
+
+
+Grave figure, with a pair of mysterious spectacles on his nose and a
+pen behind his ear, was seated at a desk in the corner of a
+metropolitan office. The apartment was fitted up with a counter, and
+furnished with an oaken cabinet and a Chair or two, in simple and
+business-like style. Around the walls were stuck advertisements of
+articles lost, or articles wanted, or articles to be disposed of; in
+one or another of which classes were comprehended nearly all the
+Conveniences, or otherwise, that the imagination of man has contrived.
+The interior of the room was thrown into shadow, partly by the tall
+edifices that rose on the opposite side of the street, and partly by
+the immense show-bills of blue and crimson paper that were expanded
+over each of the three windows. Undisturbed by the tramp of feet, the
+rattle of wheels, the hump of voices, the shout of the city crier, the
+scream of the newsboys, and other tokens of the multitudinous life that
+surged along in front of the office, the figure at the desk pored
+diligently over a folio volume, of ledger-like size and aspect, He
+looked like the spirit of a record—the soul of his own great volume
+made visible in mortal shape.
+
+But scarcely an instant elapsed without the appearance at the door of
+some individual from the busy population whose vicinity was manifested
+by so much buzz, and clatter, and outcry. Now, it was a thriving
+mechanic in quest of a tenement that should come within his moderate
+means of rent; now, a ruddy Irish girl from the banks of Killarney,
+wandering from kitchen to kitchen of our land, while her heart still
+hung in the peat-smoke of her native cottage; now, a single gentleman
+looking out for economical board; and now—for this establishment
+offered an epitome of worldly pursuits—it was a faded beauty inquiring
+for her lost bloom; or Peter Schlemihl, for his lost shadow; or an
+author of ten years’ standing, for his vanished reputation; or a moody
+man, for yesterday’s sunshine.
+
+At the next lifting of the latch there entered a person with his hat
+awry upon his head, his clothes perversely ill-suited to his form, his
+eyes staring in directions opposite to their intelligence, and a
+certain odd unsuitableness pervading his whole figure. Wherever he
+might chance to be, whether in palace or cottage, church or market, on
+land or sea, or even at his own fireside, he must have worn the
+characteristic expression of a man out of his right place.
+
+“This,” inquired he, putting his question in the form of an
+assertion,—“this is the Central Intelligence Office?”
+
+“Even so,” answered the figure at the desk, turning another leaf of his
+volume; he then looked the applicant in the face and said briefly,
+“Your business?”
+
+“I want,” said the latter, with tremulous earnestness, “a place!”
+
+“A place! and of what nature?” asked the Intelligencer. “There are many
+vacant, or soon to be so, some of which will probably suit, since they
+range from that of a footman up to a seat at the council-board, or in
+the cabinet, or a throne, or a presidential chair.”
+
+The stranger stood pondering before the desk with an unquiet,
+dissatisfied air,—a dull, vague pain of heart, expressed by a slight
+contortion of the brow,—an earnestness of glance, that asked and
+expected, yet continually wavered, as if distrusting. In short, he
+evidently wanted, not in a physical or intellectual sense, but with an
+urgent moral necessity that is the hardest of all things to satisfy,
+since it knows not its own object.
+
+“Ah, you mistake me!” said he at length, with a gesture of nervous
+impatience. “Either of the places you mention, indeed, might answer my
+purpose; or, more probably, none of them. I want my place! my own
+place! my true place in the world! my proper sphere! my thing to do,
+which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry,
+and which I have vainly sought all my lifetime! Whether it be a
+footman’s duty or a king’s is of little consequence, so it be naturally
+mine. Can you help me here?”
+
+“I will enter your application,” answered the Intelligencer, at the
+same time writing a few lines in his volume. “But to undertake such a
+business, I tell you frankly, is quite apart from the ground covered by
+my official duties. Ask for something specific, and it may doubtless be
+negotiated for you, on your compliance with the conditions. But were I
+to go further, I should have the whole population of the city upon my
+shoulders; since far the greater proportion of them are, more or less,
+in your predicament.”
+
+The applicant sank into a fit of despondency, and passed out of the
+door without again lifting his eyes; and, if he died of the
+disappointment, he was probably buried in the wrong tomb, inasmuch as
+the fatality of such people never deserts them, and, whether alive or
+dead, they are invariably out of place.
+
+Almost immediately another foot was heard on the threshold. A youth
+entered hastily, and threw a glance around the office to ascertain
+whether the man of intelligence was alone. He then approached close to
+the desk, blushed like a maiden, and seemed at a loss how to broach his
+business.
+
+“You come upon an affair of the heart,” said the official personage,
+looking into him through his mysterious spectacles. “State it in as few
+words as may be.”
+
+“You are right,” replied the youth. “I have a heart to dispose of.”
+
+“You seek an exchange?” said the Intelligencer. “Foolish youth, why not
+be contented with your own?”
+
+“Because,” exclaimed the young man, losing his embarrassment in a
+passionate glow,—“because my heart burns me with an intolerable fire;
+it tortures me all day long with yearnings for I know not what, and
+feverish throbbings, and the pangs of a vague sorrow; and it awakens me
+in the night-time with a quake, when there is nothing to be feared. I
+cannot endure it any longer. It were wiser to throw away such a heart,
+even if it brings me nothing in return.”
+
+“O, very well,” said the man of office, making an entry in his volume.
+“Your affair will be easily transacted. This species of brokerage makes
+no inconsiderable part of my business; and there is always a large
+assortment of the article to select from. Here, if I mistake not, comes
+a pretty fair sample.”
+
+Even as he spoke the door was gently and slowly thrust ajar, affording
+a glimpse of the slender figure of a young girl, who, as she timidly
+entered, seemed to bring the light and cheerfulness of the outer
+atmosphere into the somewhat gloomy apartment. We know not her errand
+there, nor can we reveal whether the young man gave up his heart into
+her custody. If so, the arrangement was neither better nor worse than
+in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where the parallel sensibilities
+of a similar age, importunate affections, and the easy satisfaction of
+characters not deeply conscious of themselves, supply the place of any
+profounder sympathy.
+
+Not always, however, was the agency of the passions and affections an
+office of so little trouble. It happened, rarely, indeed, in proportion
+to the cases that came under an ordinary rule, but still it did happen,
+that a heart was occasionally brought hither of such exquisite
+material, so delicately attempered, and so curiously wrought, that no
+other heart could be found to match it. It might almost be considered a
+misfortune, in a worldly point of view, to be the possessor of such a
+diamond of the purest water; since in any reasonable probability it
+could only be exchanged for an ordinary pebble, or a bit of cunningly
+manufactured glass, or, at least, for a jewel of native richness, but
+ill-set, or with some fatal flaw, or an earthy vein running through its
+central lustre. To choose another figure, it is sad that hearts which
+have their wellspring in the infinite, and contain inexhaustible
+sympathies, should ever be doomed to pour themselves into shallow
+vessels, and thus lavish their rich affections on the ground. Strange
+that the finer and deeper nature, whether in man or woman, while
+possessed of every other delicate instinct, should so often lack that
+most invaluable one of preserving itself front contamination with what
+is of a baser kind! Sometimes, it is true, the spiritual fountain is
+kept pure by a wisdom within itself, and sparkles into the light of
+heaven without a stain from the earthy strata through which it had
+gushed upward. And sometimes, even here on earth, the pure mingles with
+the pure, and the inexhaustible is recompensed with the infinite. But
+these miracles, though he should claim the credit of them, are far
+beyond the scope of such a superficial agent in human affairs as the
+figure in the mysterious spectacles.
+
+Again the door was opened, admitting the bustle of the city with a
+fresher reverberation into the Intelligence Office. Now entered a man
+of woe-begone and downcast look; it was such an aspect as if he had
+lost the very soul out of his body, and had traversed all the world
+over, searching in the dust of the highways, and along the shady
+footpaths, and beneath the leaves of the forest, and among the sands of
+the sea-shore, in hopes to recover it again. He had bent an anxious
+glance along the pavement of the street as he came hitherward; he
+looked also in the angle of the doorstep, and upon the floor of the
+room; and, finally, coming up to the Man of Intelligence, he gazed
+through the inscrutable spectacles which the latter wore, as if the
+lost treasure might be hidden within his eyes.
+
+“I have lost—” he began; and then he paused.
+
+“Yes,” said the Intelligencer, “I see that you have lost,—but what?”
+
+“I have lost a precious jewel!” replied the unfortunate person, “the
+like of which is not to be found among any prince’s treasures. While I
+possessed it, the contemplation of it was my sole and sufficient
+happiness. No price should have purchased it of me; but it has fallen
+from my bosom where I wore it in my careless wanderings about the
+city.”
+
+After causing the stranger to describe the marks of his lost jewel, the
+Intelligencer opened a drawer of the oaken cabinet which has been
+mentioned as forming a part of the furniture of the room. Here were
+deposited whatever articles had been picked up in the streets, until
+the right owners should claim them. It was a strange and heterogeneous
+collection. Not the least remarkable part of it was a great number of
+wedding-rings, each one of which had been riveted upon the finger with
+holy vows, and all the mystic potency that the most solemn rites could
+attain, but had, nevertheless, proved too slippery for the wearer’s
+vigilance. The gold of some was worn thin, betokening the attrition of
+years of wedlock; others, glittering from the jeweller’s shop, must
+have been lost within the honeymoon. There were ivory tablets, the
+leaves scribbled over with sentiments that had been the deepest truths
+of the writer’s earlier years, but which were now quite obliterated
+from his memory. So scrupulously were articles preserved in this
+depository, that not even withered flowers were rejected; white roses,
+and blush-roses, and moss-roses, fit emblems of virgin purity and
+shamefacedness, which bad been lost or flung away, and trampled into
+the pollution of the streets; locks of hair,—the golden and the glossy
+dark,—the long tresses of woman and the crisp curls of man, signified
+that lovers were now and then so heedless of the faith intrusted to
+them as to drop its symbol from the treasure-place of the bosom. Many
+of these things were imbued with perfumes, and perhaps a sweet scent
+had departed from the lives of their former possessors ever since they
+had so wilfully or negligently lost them. Here were gold pencil-cases,
+little ruby hearts with golden arrows through them, bosom-pins, pieces
+of coin, and small articles of every description, comprising nearly all
+that have been lost since a long time ago. Most of them, doubtless, had
+a history and a meaning, if there were time to search it out and room
+to tell it. Whoever has missed anything valuable, whether out of his
+heart, mind, or pocket, would do well to make inquiry at the Central
+Intelligence Office.
+
+And in the corner of one of the drawers of the oaken cabinet, after
+considerable research, was found a great pearl, looking like the soul
+of celestial purity, congealed and polished.
+
+“There is my jewel! my very pearl!” cried the stranger, almost beside
+himself with rapture. “It is mine! Give it me this moment! or I shall
+perish!”
+
+“I perceive,” said the Man of Intelligence, examining it more closely,
+“that this is the Pearl of Great Price!”
+
+“The very same,” answered the stranger. “Judge, then, of my misery at
+losing it out of my bosom! Restore it to me! I must not live without it
+an instant to longer.”
+
+“Pardon me,” rejoined the Intelligencer, calmly, “you ask what is
+beyond my duty. This pearl, as you well know, is held upon a peculiar
+tenure; and having once let it escape from your keeping, you have no
+greater claim to it—nay, not so great—as any other person. I cannot
+give it back.”
+
+Nor could the entreaties of the miserable man—who saw before his eyes
+the jewel of his life without the power to reclaim it—soften the heart
+of this stern being, impassive to human sympathy, though exercising
+such an apparent influence over human fortunes. Finally the loser of
+the inestimable pearl clutched his hands among his hair, and ran madly
+forth into the world, which was affrighted at his desperate looks.
+There passed him on the doorstep a fashionable young gentleman, whose
+business was to inquire for a damask rosebud, the gift of his
+lady-love, which he had lost out of his buttonhole within a hour after
+receiving it. So various were the errands of those who visited this
+Central Office, where all human wishes seemed to be made known, and, so
+far as destiny would allow, negotiated to their fulfilment.
+
+The next that entered was a man beyond the middle age, bearing the look
+of one who knew the world and his own course in it. He had just
+alighted from a handsome private carriage, which had orders to wait in
+the street while its owner transacted his business. This person came up
+to the desk with a quick, determined step, and looked the Intelligencer
+in the face with a resolute eye; though, at the same time, some secret
+trouble gleamed from it in red and dusky light.
+
+“I have an estate to dispose of,” said he, with a brevity that seemed
+characteristic.
+
+“Describe it,” said the Intelligencer.
+
+The applicant proceeded to give the boundaries of his property, its
+nature, comprising tillage, pasture, woodland, and pleasure-grounds, in
+ample circuit; together with a mansion-house, in the construction of
+which it had been his object to realize a castle in the air, hardening
+its shadowy walls into granite, and rendering its visionary splendor
+perceptible to the awakened eye. Judging from his description, it was
+beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to
+endure for centuries. He spoke, too, of the gorgeous furniture, the
+refinements of upholstery, and all the luxurious artifices that
+combined to render this a residence where life might flow onward in a
+stream of golden days, undisturbed by the ruggedness which fate loves
+to fling into it.
+
+“I am a man of strong will,” said he, in conclusion; “and at my first
+setting out in life, as a poor, unfriended youth, I resolved to make
+myself the possessor of such a mansion and estate as this, together
+with the abundant revenue necessary to uphold it. I have succeeded to
+the extent of my utmost wish. And this is the estate which I have now
+concluded to dispose of.”
+
+“And your terms?” asked the Intelligencer, after taking down the
+particulars with which the stranger had supplied him.
+
+“Easy, abundantly easy!” answered the successful man, smiling, but with
+a stern and almost frightful contraction of the brow, as if to quell an
+inward pang. “I have been engaged in various sorts of business,—a
+distiller, a trader to Africa, an East India merchant, a speculator in
+the stocks,—and, in the course of these affairs, have contracted an
+encumbrance of a certain nature. The purchaser of the estate shall
+merely be required to assume this burden to himself.”
+
+“I understand you,” said the Man of Intelligence, putting his pen
+behind his ear. “I fear that no bargain can be negotiated on these
+conditions. Very probably the next possessor may acquire the estate
+with a similar encumbrance, but it will be of his own contracting, and
+will not lighten your burden in the least.”
+
+“And am I to live on,” fiercely exclaimed the stranger, “with the dirt
+of these accursed acres and the granite of this infernal mansion
+crushing down my soul? How, if I should turn the edifice into an
+almshouse or a hospital, or tear it down and build a church?”
+
+“You can at least make the experiment,” said the Intelligencer; “but
+the whole matter is one which you must settle for yourself.”
+
+The man of deplorable success withdrew, and got into his coach, which
+rattled off lightly over the wooden pavements, though laden with the
+weight of much land, a stately house, and ponderous heaps of gold, all
+compressed into an evil conscience.
+
+There now appeared many applicants for places; among the most
+noteworthy of whom was a small, smoke-dried figure, who gave himself
+out to be one of the bad spirits that had waited upon Dr. Faustus in
+his laboratory. He pretended to show a certificate of character, which,
+he averred, had been given him by that famous necromancer, and
+countersigned by several masters whom he had subsequently served.
+
+“I am afraid, my good friend,” observed the Intelligencer, “that your
+chance of getting a service is but poor. Nowadays, men act the evil
+spirit for themselves and their neighbors, and play the part more
+effectually than ninety-nine out of a hundred of your fraternity.”
+
+But, just as the poor fiend was assuming a vaporous consistency, being
+about to vanish through the floor in sad disappointment and chagrin,
+the editor of a political newspaper chanced to enter the office in
+quest of a scribbler of party paragraphs. The former servant of Dr.
+Faustus, with some misgivings as to his sufficiency of venom, was
+allowed to try his hand in this capacity. Next appeared, likewise
+seeking a service, the mysterious man in Red, who had aided Bonaparte
+in his ascent to imperial power. He was examined as to his
+qualifications by an aspiring politician, but finally rejected, as
+lacking familiarity with the cunning tactics of the present day.
+
+People continued to succeed each other with as much briskness as if
+everybody turned aside, out of the roar and tumult of the city, to
+record here some want, or superfluity, or desire. Some had goods or
+possessions, of which they wished to negotiate the sale. A China
+merchant had lost his health by a long residence in that wasting
+climate. He very liberally offered his disease, and his wealth along
+with it, to any physician who would rid him of both together. A soldier
+offered his wreath of laurels for as good a leg as that which it had
+cost him on the battle-field. One poor weary wretch desired nothing but
+to be accommodated with any creditable method of laying down his life;
+for misfortune and pecuniary troubles had so subdued his spirits that
+he could no longer conceive the possibility of happiness, nor had the
+heart to try for it. Nevertheless, happening to, overhear some
+conversation in the Intelligence Office respecting wealth to be rapidly
+accumulated by a certain mode of speculation, he resolved to live out
+this one other experiment of better fortune. Many persons desired to
+exchange their youthful vices for others better suited to the gravity
+of advancing age; a few, we are glad to say, made earnest, efforts to
+exchange vice for virtue, and, hard as the bargain was, succeeded in
+effecting it. But it was remarkable that what all were the least
+willing to give up, even on the most advantageous terms, were the
+habits, the oddities, the characteristic traits, the little ridiculous
+indulgences, somewhere between faults and follies, of which nobody but
+themselves could understand the fascination.
+
+The great folio, in which the Man of Intelligence recorded all these
+freaks of idle hearts, and aspirations of deep hearts, and desperate
+longings of miserable hearts, and evil prayers of perverted hearts,
+would be curious reading were it possible to obtain it for publication.
+Human character in its individual developments-human nature in the
+mass—may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them
+all. There was an endless diversity of mode and circumstance, yet
+withal such a similarity in the real groundwork, that any one page of
+the volume-whether written in the days before the Flood, or the
+yesterday that is just gone by, or to be written on the morrow that is
+close at hand, or a thousand ages hence—might serve as a specimen of
+the whole. Not but that there were wild sallies of fantasy that could
+scarcely occur to more than one man’s brain, whether reasonable or
+lunatic. The strangest wishes—yet most incident to men who had gone
+deep into scientific pursuits, and attained a high intellectual stage,
+though not the loftiest—were, to contend with Nature, and wrest from
+her some secret, or some power, which she had seen fit to withhold from
+mortal grasp. She loves to delude her aspiring students, and mock them
+with mysteries that seem but just beyond their utmost reach. To concoct
+new minerals, to produce new forms of vegetable life, to create an
+insect, if nothing higher in the living scale, is a sort of wish that
+has often revelled in the breast of a man of science. An astronomer,
+who lived far more among the distant worlds of space than in this lower
+sphere, recorded a wish to behold the opposite side of the moon, which,
+unless the system of the firmament be reversed, she can never turn
+towards the earth. On the same page of the volume was written the wish
+of a little child to have the stars for playthings.
+
+The most ordinary wish, that was written down with wearisome
+recurrence, was, of course, for wealth, wealth, wealth, in sums from a
+few shillings up to unreckonable thousands. But in reality this
+often-repeated expression covered as many different desires. Wealth is
+the golden essence of the outward world, embodying almost everything
+that exists beyond the limits of the soul; and therefore it is the
+natural yearning for the life in the midst of which we find ourselves,
+and of which gold is the condition of enjoyment, that men abridge into
+this general wish. Here and there, it is true, the volume testified to
+some heart so perverted as to desire gold for its own sake. Many wished
+for power; a strange desire indeed, since it is but another form of
+slavery. Old people wished for the delights of youth; a fop for a
+fashionable coat; an idle reader, for a new novel; a versifier, for a
+rhyme to some stubborn word; a painter, for Titian’s secret of
+coloring; a prince, for a cottage; a republican, for a kingdom and a
+palace; a libertine, for his neighbor’s wife; a man of palate, for
+green peas; and a poor man, for a crust of bread. The ambitious desires
+of public men, elsewhere so craftily concealed, were here expressed
+openly and boldly, side by side with the unselfish wishes of the
+philanthropist for the welfare of the race, so beautiful, so
+comforting, in contrast with the egotism that continually weighed self
+against the world. Into the darker secrets of the Book of Wishes we
+will not penetrate.
+
+It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind,
+perusing this volume carefully and comparing its records with men’s
+perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to
+ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most
+cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous
+wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart towards heaven, often
+lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul,
+selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart,
+often passes into the spiritual atmosphere without being concreted into
+an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation
+of the human heart, than is the living drama of action as it evolves
+around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming
+points of the bad and more errors of the virtuous; higher upsoarings,
+and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing
+amalgamation of vice and virtue than we witness in the outward world.
+Decency and external conscience often produce a far fairer outside than
+is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, oil the other hand,
+that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he
+realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or
+other, have arisen from the depths of his nature and witnessed for him
+in this volume. Yet there is enough on every leaf to make the good man
+shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner,
+whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.
+
+But again the door is opened, and we hear the tumultuous stir of the
+world,—a deep and awful sound, expressing in another form some portion
+of what is written in the volume that lies before the Man of
+Intelligence. A grandfatherly personage tottered hastily into the
+office, with such an earnestness in his infirm alacrity that his white
+hair floated backward as he hurried up to the desk, while his dim eyes
+caught a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable
+figure explained that he was in search of To-morrow.
+
+“I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” added the sage old
+gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other
+in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make
+haste; for, unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it
+will finally escape me.”
+
+“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of
+Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father
+into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will
+doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you
+expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”
+
+Obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, the
+grandsire hastened forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the
+floor; and, as he disappeared, a little boy scampered through the door
+in chase of a butterfly which had got astray amid the barren sunshine
+of the city. Had the old gentleman been shrewder, he might have
+detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect. The golden
+butterfly glistened through the shadowy apartment, and brushed its
+wings against the Book of Wishes, and fluttered forth again with the
+child still in pursuit.
+
+A man now entered, in neglected attire, with the aspect of a thinker,
+but somewhat too rough-hewn and brawny for a scholar. His face was full
+of sturdy vigor, with some finer and keener attribute beneath. Though
+harsh at first, it was tempered with the glow of a large, warm heart,
+which had force enough to heat his powerful intellect through and
+through. He advanced to the Intelligencer and looked at him with a
+glance of such stern sincerity that perhaps few secrets were beyond its
+scope.
+
+“I seek for Truth,” said he.
+
+“It is precisely the most rare pursuit that has ever come under my
+cognizance,” replied the Intelligencer, as he made the new inscription
+in his volume. “Most men seek to impose some cunning falsehood upon
+themselves for truth. But I can lend no help to your researches. You
+must achieve the miracle for yourself. At some fortunate moment you may
+find Truth at your side, or perhaps she may be mistily discerned far in
+advance, or possibly behind you.”
+
+“Not behind me,” said the seeker; “for I have left nothing on my track
+without a thorough investigation. She flits before me, passing now
+through a naked solitude, and now mingling with the throng of a popular
+assembly, and now writing with the pen of a French philosopher, and now
+standing at the altar of an old cathedral, in the guise of a Catholic
+priest, performing the high mass. O weary search! But I must not
+falter; and surely my heart-deep quest of Truth shall avail at last.”
+
+He paused and fixed his eyes upon the Intelligencer with a depth of
+investigation that seemed to hold commerce with the inner nature of
+this being, wholly regardless of his external development.
+
+“And what are you?” said he. “It will not satisfy me to point to this
+fantastic show of an Intelligence Office and this mockery of business.
+Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life and your
+influence upon mankind.”
+
+“Yours is a mind,” answered the Man of Intelligence, “before which the
+forms and fantasies that conceal the inner idea from the multitude
+vanish at once and leave the naked reality beneath. Know, then, the
+secret. My agency in worldly action, my connection with the press, and
+tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs, is merely
+delusive. The desire of man’s heart does for him whatever I seem to do.
+I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit.”
+
+What further secrets were then spoken remains a mystery, inasmuch as
+the roar of the city, the bustle of human business, the outcry of the
+jostling masses, the rush and tumult of man’s life, in its noisy and
+brief career, arose so high that it drowned the words of these two
+talkers; and whether they stood talking in the moon, or in Vanity Fair,
+or in a city of this actual world, is more than I can say.
+
+
+
+
+ROGER MALVIN’S BURIAL
+
+
+One of the few incidents of Indian warfare naturally susceptible of the
+moonlight of romance was that expedition undertaken for the defence of
+the frontiers in the year 1725, which resulted in the well-remembered
+“Lovell’s Fight.” Imagination, by casting certain circumstances
+judicially into the shade, may see much to admire in the heroism of a
+little band who gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the
+enemy’s country. The open bravery displayed by both parties was in
+accordance with civilized ideas of valor; and chivalry itself might not
+blush to record the deeds of one or two individuals. The battle, though
+so fatal to those who fought, was not unfortunate in its consequences
+to the country; for it broke the strength of a tribe and conduced to
+the peace which subsisted during several ensuing years. History and
+tradition are unusually minute in their memorials of their affair; and
+the captain of a scouting party of frontier men has acquired as actual
+a military renown as many a victorious leader of thousands. Some of the
+incidents contained in the following pages will be recognized,
+notwithstanding the substitution of fictitious names, by such as have
+heard, from old men’s lips, the fate of the few combatants who were in
+a condition to retreat after “Lovell’s Fight.”
+
+
+The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree-tops, beneath which
+two weary and wounded men had stretched their limbs the night before.
+Their bed of withered oak leaves was strewn upon the small level space,
+at the foot of a rock, situated near the summit of one of the gentle
+swells by which the face of the country is there diversified. The mass
+of granite, rearing its smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet
+above their heads, was not unlike a gigantic gravestone, upon which the
+veins seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters. On a tract
+of several acres around this rock, oaks and other hard-wood trees had
+supplied the place of the pines, which were the usual growth of the
+land; and a young and vigorous sapling stood close beside the
+travellers.
+
+The severe wound of the elder man had probably deprived him of sleep;
+for, so soon as the first ray of sunshine rested on the top of the
+highest tree, he reared himself painfully from his recumbent posture
+and sat erect. The deep lines of his countenance and the scattered gray
+of his hair marked him as past the middle age; but his muscular frame
+would, but for the effect of his wound, have been as capable of
+sustaining fatigue as in the early vigor of life. Languor and
+exhaustion now sat upon his haggard features; and the despairing glance
+which he sent forward through the depths of the forest proved his own
+conviction that his pilgrimage was at an end. He next turned his eyes
+to the companion who reclined by his side. The youth—for he had
+scarcely attained the years of manhood—lay, with his head upon his arm,
+in the embrace of an unquiet sleep, which a thrill of pain from his
+wounds seemed each moment on the point of breaking. His right hand
+grasped a musket; and, to judge from the violent action of his
+features, his slumbers were bringing back a vision of the conflict of
+which he was one of the few survivors. A shout deep and loud in his
+dreaming fancy—found its way in an imperfect murmur to his lips; and,
+starting even at the slight sound of his own voice, he suddenly awoke.
+The first act of reviving recollection was to make anxious inquiries
+respecting the condition of his wounded fellow-traveller. The latter
+shook his head.
+
+“Reuben, my boy,” said he, “this rock beneath which we sit will serve
+for an old hunter’s gravestone. There is many and many a long mile of
+howling wilderness before us yet; nor would it avail me anything if the
+smoke of my own chimney were but on the other side of that swell of
+land. The Indian bullet was deadlier than I thought.”
+
+“You are weary with our three days’ travel,” replied the youth, “and a
+little longer rest will recruit you. Sit you here while I search the
+woods for the herbs and roots that must be our sustenance; and, having
+eaten, you shall lean on me, and we will turn our faces homeward. I
+doubt not that, with my help, you can attain to some one of the
+frontier garrisons.”
+
+“There is not two days’ life in me, Reuben,” said the other, calmly,
+“and I will no longer burden you with my useless body, when you can
+scarcely support your own. Your wounds are deep and your strength is
+failing fast; yet, if you hasten onward alone, you may be preserved.
+For me there is no hope, and I will await death here.”
+
+“If it must be so, I will remain and watch by you,” said Reuben,
+resolutely.
+
+“No, my son, no,” rejoined his companion. “Let the wish of a dying man
+have weight with you; give me one grasp of your hand, and get you
+hence. Think you that my last moments will be eased by the thought that
+I leave you to die a more lingering death? I have loved you like a
+father, Reuben; and at a time like this I should have something of a
+father’s authority. I charge you to be gone that I may die in peace.”
+
+“And because you have been a father to me, should I therefore leave you
+to perish and to lie unburied in the wilderness?” exclaimed the youth.
+“No; if your end be in truth approaching, I will watch by you and
+receive your parting words. I will dig a grave here by the rock, in
+which, if my weakness overcome me, we will rest together; or, if Heaven
+gives me strength, I will seek my way home.”
+
+“In the cities and wherever men dwell,” replied the other, “they bury
+their dead in the earth; they hide them from the sight of the living;
+but here, where no step may pass perhaps for a hundred years, wherefore
+should I not rest beneath the open sky, covered only by the oak leaves
+when the autumn winds shall strew them? And for a monument, here is
+this gray rock, on which my dying hand shall carve the name of Roger
+Malvin, and the traveller in days to come will know that here sleeps a
+hunter and a warrior. Tarry not, then, for a folly like this, but
+hasten away, if not for your own sake, for hers who will else be
+desolate.”
+
+Malvin spoke the last few words in a faltering voice, and their effect
+upon his companion was strongly visible. They reminded him that there
+were other and less questionable duties than that of sharing the fate
+of a man whom his death could not benefit. Nor can it be affirmed that
+no selfish feeling strove to enter Reuben’s heart, though the
+consciousness made him more earnestly resist his companion’s
+entreaties.
+
+“How terrible to wait the slow approach of death in this solitude!”
+exclaimed he. “A brave man does not shrink in the battle; and, when
+friends stand round the bed, even women may die composedly; but here—”
+
+“I shall not shrink even here, Reuben Bourne,” interrupted Malvin. “I
+am a man of no weak heart, and, if I were, there is a surer support
+than that of earthly friends. You are young, and life is dear to you.
+Your last moments will need comfort far more than mine; and when you
+have laid me in the earth, and are alone, and night is settling on the
+forest, you will feel all the bitterness of the death that may now be
+escaped. But I will urge no selfish motive to your generous nature.
+Leave me for my sake, that, having said a prayer for your safety, I may
+have space to settle my account undisturbed by worldly sorrows.”
+
+“And your daughter,—how shall I dare to meet her eye?” exclaimed
+Reuben. “She will ask the fate of her father, whose life I vowed to
+defend with my own. Must I tell her that he travelled three days’ march
+with me from the field of battle and that then I left him to perish in
+the wilderness? Were it not better to lie down and die by your side
+than to return safe and say this to Dorcas?”
+
+“Tell my daughter,” said Roger Malvin, “that, though yourself sore
+wounded, and weak, and weary, you led my tottering footsteps many a
+mile, and left me only at my earnest entreaty, because I would not have
+your blood upon my soul. Tell her that through pain and danger you were
+faithful, and that, if your lifeblood could have saved me, it would
+have flowed to its last drop; and tell her that you will be something
+dearer than a father, and that my blessing is with you both, and that
+my dying eyes can see a long and pleasant path in which you will
+journey together.”
+
+As Malvin spoke he almost raised himself from the ground, and the
+energy of his concluding words seemed to fill the wild and lonely
+forest with a vision of happiness; but, when he sank exhausted upon his
+bed of oak leaves, the light which had kindled in Reuben’s eye was
+quenched. He felt as if it were both sin and folly to think of
+happiness at such a moment. His companion watched his changing
+countenance, and sought with generous art to wile him to his own good.
+
+“Perhaps I deceive myself in regard to the time I have to live,” he
+resumed. “It may be that, with speedy assistance, I might recover of my
+wound. The foremost fugitives must, ere this, have carried tidings of
+our fatal battle to the frontiers, and parties will be out to succor
+those in like condition with ourselves. Should you meet one of these
+and guide them hither, who can tell but that I may sit by my own
+fireside again?”
+
+A mournful smile strayed across the features of the dying man as he
+insinuated that unfounded hope,—which, however, was not without its
+effect on Reuben. No merely selfish motive, nor even the desolate
+condition of Dorcas, could have induced him to desert his companion at
+such a moment—but his wishes seized on the thought that Malvin’s life
+might be preserved, and his sanguine nature heightened almost to
+certainty the remote possibility of procuring human aid.
+
+“Surely there is reason, weighty reason, to hope that friends are not
+far distant,” he said, half aloud. “There fled one coward, unwounded,
+in the beginning of the fight, and most probably he made good speed.
+Every true man on the frontier would shoulder his musket at the news;
+and, though no party may range so far into the woods as this, I shall
+perhaps encounter them in one day’s march. Counsel me faithfully,” he
+added, turning to Malvin, in distrust of his own motives. “Were your
+situation mine, would you desert me while life remained?”
+
+“It is now twenty years,” replied Roger Malvin,—sighing, however, as he
+secretly acknowledged the wide dissimilarity between the two cases,—“it
+is now twenty years since I escaped with one dear friend from Indian
+captivity near Montreal. We journeyed many days through the woods, till
+at length overcome with hunger and weariness, my friend lay down and
+besought me to leave him; for he knew that, if I remained, we both must
+perish; and, with but little hope of obtaining succor, I heaped a
+pillow of dry leaves beneath his head and hastened on.”
+
+“And did you return in time to save him?” asked Reuben, hanging on
+Malvin’s words as if they were to be prophetic of his own success.
+
+“I did,” answered the other. “I came upon the camp of a hunting party
+before sunset of the same day. I guided them to the spot where my
+comrade was expecting death; and he is now a hale and hearty man upon
+his own farm, far within the frontiers, while I lie wounded here in the
+depths of the wilderness.”
+
+This example, powerful in affecting Reuben’s decision, was aided,
+unconsciously to himself, by the hidden strength of many another
+motive. Roger Malvin perceived that the victory was nearly won.
+
+“Now, go, my son, and Heaven prosper you!” he said. “Turn not back with
+your friends when you meet them, lest your wounds and weariness
+overcome you; but send hitherward two or three, that may be spared, to
+search for me; and believe me, Reuben, my heart will be lighter with
+every step you take towards home.” Yet there was, perhaps, a change
+both in his countenance and voice as he spoke thus; for, after all, it
+was a ghastly fate to be left expiring in the wilderness.
+
+Reuben Bourne, but half convinced that he was acting rightly, at length
+raised himself from the ground and prepared himself for his departure.
+And first, though contrary to Malvin’s wishes, he collected a stock of
+roots and herbs, which had been their only food during the last two
+days. This useless supply he placed within reach of the dying man, for
+whom, also, he swept together a bed of dry oak leaves. Then climbing to
+the summit of the rock, which on one side was rough and broken, he bent
+the oak sapling downward, and bound his handkerchief to the topmost
+branch. This precaution was not unnecessary to direct any who might
+come in search of Malvin; for every part of the rock, except its broad,
+smooth front, was concealed at a little distance by the dense
+undergrowth of the forest. The handkerchief had been the bandage of a
+wound upon Reuben’s arm; and, as he bound it to the tree, he vowed by
+the blood that stained it that he would return, either to save his
+companion’s life or to lay his body in the grave. He then descended,
+and stood, with downcast eyes, to receive Roger Malvin’s parting words.
+
+The experience of the latter suggested much and minute advice
+respecting the youth’s journey through the trackless forest. Upon this
+subject he spoke with calm earnestness, as if he were sending Reuben to
+the battle or the chase while he himself remained secure at home, and
+not as if the human countenance that was about to leave him were the
+last he would ever behold. But his firmness was shaken before he
+concluded.
+
+“Carry my blessing to Dorcas, and say that my last prayer shall be for
+her and you. Bid her to have no hard thoughts because you left me
+here,”—Reuben’s heart smote him,—“for that your life would not have
+weighed with you if its sacrifice could have done me good. She will
+marry you after she has mourned a little while for her father; and
+Heaven grant you long and happy days, and may your children’s children
+stand round your death bed! And, Reuben,” added he, as the weakness of
+mortality made its way at last, “return, when your wounds are healed
+and your weariness refreshed,—return to this wild rock, and lay my
+bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them.”
+
+An almost superstitious regard, arising perhaps from the customs of the
+Indians, whose war was with the dead as well as the living, was paid by
+the frontier inhabitants to the rites of sepulture; and there are many
+instances of the sacrifice of life in the attempt to bury those who had
+fallen by the “sword of the wilderness.” Reuben, therefore, felt the
+full importance of the promise which he most solemnly made to return
+and perform Roger Malvin’s obsequies. It was remarkable that the
+latter, speaking his whole heart in his parting words, no longer
+endeavored to persuade the youth that even the speediest succor might
+avail to the preservation of his life. Reuben was internally convinced
+that he should see Malvin’s living face no more. His generous nature
+would fain have delayed him, at whatever risk, till the dying scene
+were past; but the desire of existence and the hope of happiness had
+strengthened in his heart, and he was unable to resist them.
+
+“It is enough,” said Roger Malvin, having listened to Reuben’s promise.
+“Go, and God speed you!”
+
+The youth pressed his hand in silence, turned, and was departing. His
+slow and faltering steps, however, had borne him but a little way
+before Malvin’s voice recalled him.
+
+“Reuben, Reuben,” said he, faintly; and Reuben returned and knelt down
+by the dying man.
+
+“Raise me, and let me lean against the rock,” was his last request. “My
+face will be turned towards home, and I shall see you a moment longer
+as you pass among the trees.”
+
+Reuben, having made the desired alteration in his companion’s posture,
+again began his solitary pilgrimage. He walked more hastily at first
+than was consistent with his strength; for a sort of guilty feeling,
+which sometimes torments men in their most justifiable acts, caused him
+to seek concealment from Malvin’s eyes; but after he had trodden far
+upon the rustling forest leaves he crept back, impelled by a wild and
+painful curiosity, and, sheltered by the earthy roots of an uptorn
+tree, gazed earnestly at the desolate man. The morning sun was
+unclouded, and the trees and shrubs imbibed the sweet air of the month
+of May; yet there seemed a gloom on Nature’s face, as if she
+sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow. Roger Malvin’s hands were
+uplifted in a fervent prayer, some of the words of which stole through
+the stillness of the woods and entered Reuben’s heart, torturing it
+with an unutterable pang. They were the broken accents of a petition
+for his own happiness and that of Dorcas; and, as the youth listened,
+conscience, or something in its similitude, pleaded strongly with him
+to return and lie down again by the rock. He felt how hard was the doom
+of the kind and generous being whom he had deserted in his extremity.
+Death would come like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually
+towards him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless
+features from behind a nearer and yet a nearer tree. But such must have
+been Reuben’s own fate had he tarried another sunset; and who shall
+impute blame to him if he shrink from so useless a sacrifice? As he
+gave a parting look, a breeze waved the little banner upon the sapling
+oak and reminded Reuben of his vow.
+
+
+Many circumstances combined to retard the wounded traveller in his way
+to the frontiers. On the second day the clouds, gathering densely over
+the sky, precluded the possibility of regulating his course by the
+position of the sun; and he knew not but that every effort of his
+almost exhausted strength was removing him farther from the home he
+sought. His scanty sustenance was supplied by the berries and other
+spontaneous products of the forest. Herds of deer, it is true,
+sometimes bounded past him, and partridges frequently whirred up before
+his footsteps; but his ammunition had been expended in the fight, and
+he had no means of slaying them. His wounds, irritated by the constant
+exertion in which lay the only hope of life, wore away his strength and
+at intervals confused his reason. But, even in the wanderings of
+intellect, Reuben’s young heart clung strongly to existence; and it was
+only through absolute incapacity of motion that he at last sank down
+beneath a tree, compelled there to await death.
+
+In this situation he was discovered by a party who, upon the first
+intelligence of the fight, had been despatched to the relief of the
+survivors. They conveyed him to the nearest settlement, which chanced
+to be that of his own residence.
+
+Dorcas, in the simplicity of the olden time, watched by the bedside of
+her wounded lover, and administered all those comforts that are in the
+sole gift of woman’s heart and hand. During several days Reuben’s
+recollection strayed drowsily among the perils and hardships through
+which he had passed, and he was incapable of returning definite answers
+to the inquiries with which many were eager to harass him. No authentic
+particulars of the battle had yet been circulated; nor could mothers,
+wives, and children tell whether their loved ones were detained by
+captivity or by the stronger chain of death. Dorcas nourished her
+apprehensions in silence till one afternoon when Reuben awoke from an
+unquiet sleep, and seemed to recognize her more perfectly than at any
+previous time. She saw that his intellect had become composed, and she
+could no longer restrain her filial anxiety.
+
+“My father, Reuben?” she began; but the change in her lover’s
+countenance made her pause.
+
+The youth shrank as if with a bitter pain, and the blood gushed vividly
+into his wan and hollow cheeks. His first impulse was to cover his
+face; but, apparently with a desperate effort, he half raised himself
+and spoke vehemently, defending himself against an imaginary
+accusation.
+
+“Your father was sore wounded in the battle, Dorcas; and he bade me not
+burden myself with him, but only to lead him to the lakeside, that he
+might quench his thirst and die. But I would not desert the old man in
+his extremity, and, though bleeding myself, I supported him; I gave him
+half my strength, and led him away with me. For three days we journeyed
+on together, and your father was sustained beyond my hopes, but,
+awaking at sunrise on the fourth day, I found him faint and exhausted;
+he was unable to proceed; his life had ebbed away fast; and—”
+
+“He died!” exclaimed Dorcas, faintly.
+
+Reuben felt it impossible to acknowledge that his selfish love of life
+had hurried him away before her father’s fate was decided. He spoke
+not; he only bowed his head; and, between shame and exhaustion, sank
+back and hid his face in the pillow. Dorcas wept when her fears were
+thus confirmed; but the shock, as it had been long anticipated, was on
+that account the less violent.
+
+“You dug a grave for my poor father in the wilderness, Reuben?” was the
+question by which her filial piety manifested itself.
+
+“My hands were weak; but I did what I could,” replied the youth in a
+smothered tone. “There stands a noble tombstone above his head; and I
+would to Heaven I slept as soundly as he!”
+
+Dorcas, perceiving the wildness of his latter words, inquired no
+further at the time; but her heart found ease in the thought that Roger
+Malvin had not lacked such funeral rites as it was possible to bestow.
+The tale of Reuben’s courage and fidelity lost nothing when she
+communicated it to her friends; and the poor youth, tottering from his
+sick chamber to breathe the sunny air, experienced from every tongue
+the miserable and humiliating torture of unmerited praise. All
+acknowledged that he might worthily demand the hand of the fair maiden
+to whose father he had been “faithful unto death;” and, as my tale is
+not of love, it shall suffice to say that in the space of a few months
+Reuben became the husband of Dorcas Malvin. During the marriage
+ceremony the bride was covered with blushes, but the bridegroom’s face
+was pale.
+
+There was now in the breast of Reuben Bourne an incommunicable
+thought—something which he was to conceal most heedfully from her whom
+he most loved and trusted. He regretted, deeply and bitterly, the moral
+cowardice that had restrained his words when he was about to disclose
+the truth to Dorcas; but pride, the fear of losing her affection, the
+dread of universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood. He
+felt that for leaving Roger Malvin he deserved no censure. His
+presence, the gratuitous sacrifice of his own life, would have added
+only another and a needless agony to the last moments of the dying man;
+but concealment had imparted to a justifiable act much of the secret
+effect of guilt; and Reuben, while reason told him that he had done
+right, experienced in no small degree the mental horrors which punish
+the perpetrator of undiscovered crime. By a certain association of
+ideas, he at times almost imagined himself a murderer. For years, also,
+a thought would occasionally recur, which, though he perceived all its
+folly and extravagance, he had not power to banish from his mind. It
+was a haunting and torturing fancy that his father-in-law was yet
+sitting at the foot of the rock, on the withered forest leaves, alive,
+and awaiting his pledged assistance. These mental deceptions, however,
+came and went, nor did he ever mistake them for realities: but in the
+calmest and clearest moods of his mind he was conscious that he had a
+deep vow unredeemed, and that an unburied corpse was calling to him out
+of the wilderness. Yet such was the consequence of his prevarication
+that he could not obey the call. It was now too late to require the
+assistance of Roger Malvin’s friends in performing his long-deferred
+sepulture; and superstitious fears, of which none were more susceptible
+than the people of the outward settlements, forbade Reuben to go alone.
+Neither did he know where in the pathless and illimitable forest to
+seek that smooth and lettered rock at the base of which the body lay:
+his remembrance of every portion of his travel thence was indistinct,
+and the latter part had left no impression upon his mind. There was,
+however, a continual impulse, a voice audible only to himself,
+commanding him to go forth and redeem his vow; and he had a strange
+impression that, were he to make the trial, he would be led straight to
+Malvin’s bones. But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was
+disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his
+spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart; and he was
+transformed into a sad and downcast yet irritable man.
+
+In the course of a few years after their marriage changes began to be
+visible in the external prosperity of Reuben and Dorcas. The only
+riches of the former had been his stout heart and strong arm; but the
+latter, her father’s sole heiress, had made her husband master of a
+farm, under older cultivation, larger, and better stocked than most of
+the frontier establishments. Reuben Bourne, however, was a neglectful
+husbandman; and, while the lands of the other settlers became annually
+more fruitful, his deteriorated in the same proportion. The
+discouragements to agriculture were greatly lessened by the cessation
+of Indian war, during which men held the plough in one hand and the
+musket in the other, and were fortunate if the products of their
+dangerous labor were not destroyed, either in the field or in the barn,
+by the savage enemy. But Reuben did not profit by the altered condition
+of the country; nor can it be denied that his intervals of industrious
+attention to his affairs were but scantily rewarded with success. The
+irritability by which he had recently become distinguished was another
+cause of his declining prosperity, as it occasioned frequent quarrels
+in his unavoidable intercourse with the neighboring settlers. The
+results of these were innumerable lawsuits; for the people of New
+England, in the earliest stages and wildest circumstances of the
+country, adopted, whenever attainable, the legal mode of deciding their
+differences. To be brief, the world did not go well with Reuben Bourne;
+and, though not till many years after his marriage, he was finally a
+ruined man, with but one remaining expedient against the evil fate that
+had pursued him. He was to throw sunlight into some deep recess of the
+forest, and seek subsistence from the virgin bosom of the wilderness.
+
+The only child of Reuben and Dorcas was a son, now arrived at the age
+of fifteen years, beautiful in youth, and giving promise of a glorious
+manhood. He was peculiarly qualified for, and already began to excel
+in, the wild accomplishments of frontier life. His foot was fleet, his
+aim true, his apprehension quick, his heart glad and high; and all who
+anticipated the return of Indian war spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future
+leader in the land. The boy was loved by his father with a deep and
+silent strength, as if whatever was good and happy in his own nature
+had been transferred to his child, carrying his affections with it.
+Even Dorcas, though loving and beloved, was far less dear to him; for
+Reuben’s secret thoughts and insulated emotions had gradually made him
+a selfish man, and he could no longer love deeply except where he saw
+or imagined some reflection or likeness of his own mind. In Cyrus he
+recognized what he had himself been in other days; and at intervals he
+seemed to partake of the boy’s spirit, and to be revived with a fresh
+and happy life. Reuben was accompanied by his son in the expedition,
+for the purpose of selecting a tract of land and felling and burning
+the timber, which necessarily preceded the removal of the household
+gods. Two months of autumn were thus occupied, after which Reuben
+Bourne and his young hunter returned to spend their last winter in the
+settlements.
+
+
+It was early in the month of May that the little family snapped asunder
+whatever tendrils of affections had clung to inanimate objects, and
+bade farewell to the few who, in the blight of fortune, called
+themselves their friends. The sadness of the parting moment had, to
+each of the pilgrims, its peculiar alleviations. Reuben, a moody man,
+and misanthropic because unhappy, strode onward with his usual stern
+brow and downcast eye, feeling few regrets and disdaining to
+acknowledge any. Dorcas, while she wept abundantly over the broken ties
+by which her simple and affectionate nature had bound itself to
+everything, felt that the inhabitants of her inmost heart moved on with
+her, and that all else would be supplied wherever she might go. And the
+boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous
+pleasures of the untrodden forest.
+
+Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream, has not wished that he were a
+wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle
+being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth his free and exulting step
+would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topped
+mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home where Nature had strewn a
+double wealth in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary
+age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him
+there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a
+people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. When death, like the
+sweet sleep which we welcome after a day of happiness, came over him,
+his far descendants would mourn over the venerated dust. Enveloped by
+tradition in mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would
+call him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly
+glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries.
+
+The tangled and gloomy forest through which the personages of my tale
+were wandering differed widely from the dreamer’s land of fantasy; yet
+there was something in their way of life that Nature asserted as her
+own, and the gnawing cares which went with them from the world were all
+that now obstructed their happiness. One stout and shaggy steed, the
+bearer of all their wealth, did not shrink from the added weight of
+Dorcas; although her hardy breeding sustained her, during the latter
+part of each day’s journey, by her husband’s side. Reuben and his son,
+their muskets on their shoulders and their axes slung behind them, kept
+an unwearied pace, each watching with a hunter’s eye for the game that
+supplied their food. When hunger bade, they halted and prepared their
+meal on the bank of some unpolluted forest brook, which, as they knelt
+down with thirsty lips to drink, murmured a sweet unwillingness, like a
+maiden at love’s first kiss. They slept beneath a hut of branches, and
+awoke at peep of light refreshed for the toils of another day. Dorcas
+and the boy went on joyously, and even Reuben’s spirit shone at
+intervals with an outward gladness; but inwardly there was a cold cold
+sorrow, which he compared to the snowdrifts lying deep in the glens and
+hollows of the rivulets while the leaves were brightly green above.
+
+Cyrus Bourne was sufficiently skilled in the travel of the woods to
+observe that his father did not adhere to the course they had pursued
+in their expedition of the preceding autumn. They were now keeping
+farther to the north, striking out more directly from the settlements,
+and into a region of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet the
+sole possessors. The boy sometimes hinted his opinions upon the
+subject, and Reuben listened attentively, and once or twice altered the
+direction of their march in accordance with his son’s counsel; but,
+having so done, he seemed ill at ease. His quick and wandering glances
+were sent forward apparently in search of enemies lurking behind the
+tree trunks, and, seeing nothing there, he would cast his eyes
+backwards as if in fear of some pursuer. Cyrus, perceiving that his
+father gradually resumed the old direction, forbore to interfere; nor,
+though something began to weigh upon his heart, did his adventurous
+nature permit him to regret the increased length and the mystery of
+their way.
+
+On the afternoon of the fifth day they halted, and made their simple
+encampment nearly an hour before sunset. The face of the country, for
+the last few miles, had been diversified by swells of land resembling
+huge waves of a petrified sea; and in one of the corresponding hollows,
+a wild and romantic spot, had the family reared their hut and kindled
+their fire. There is something chilling, and yet heart-warming, in the
+thought of these three, united by strong bands of love and insulated
+from all that breathe beside. The dark and gloomy pines looked down
+upon them, and, as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying sound
+was heard in the forest; or did those old trees groan in fear that men
+were come to lay the axe to their roots at last? Reuben and his son,
+while Dorcas made ready their meal, proposed to wander out in search of
+game, of which that day’s march had afforded no supply. The boy,
+promising not to quit the vicinity of the encampment, bounded off with
+a step as light and elastic as that of the deer he hoped to slay; while
+his father, feeling a transient happiness as he gazed after him, was
+about to pursue an opposite direction. Dorcas in the meanwhile, had
+seated herself near their fire of fallen branches upon the mossgrown
+and mouldering trunk of a tree uprooted years before. Her employment,
+diversified by an occasional glance at the pot, now beginning to simmer
+over the blaze, was the perusal of the current year’s Massachusetts
+Almanac, which, with the exception of an old black-letter Bible,
+comprised all the literary wealth of the family. None pay a greater
+regard to arbitrary divisions of time than those who are excluded from
+society; and Dorcas mentioned, as if the information were of
+importance, that it was now the twelfth of May. Her husband started.
+
+“The twelfth of May! I should remember it well,” muttered he, while
+many thoughts occasioned a momentary confusion in his mind. “Where am
+I? Whither am I wandering? Where did I leave him?”
+
+Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband’s wayward moods to note any
+peculiarity of demeanor, now laid aside the almanac and addressed him
+in that mournful tone which the tender hearted appropriate to griefs
+long cold and dead.
+
+“It was near this time of the month, eighteen years ago, that my poor
+father left this world for a better. He had a kind arm to hold his head
+and a kind voice to cheer him, Reuben, in his last moments; and the
+thought of the faithful care you took of him has comforted me many a
+time since. Oh, death would have been awful to a solitary man in a wild
+place like this!”
+
+“Pray Heaven, Dorcas,” said Reuben, in a broken voice,—“pray Heaven
+that neither of us three dies solitary and lies unburied in this
+howling wilderness!” And he hastened away, leaving her to watch the
+fire beneath the gloomy pines.
+
+Reuben Bourne’s rapid pace gradually slackened as the pang,
+unintentionally inflicted by the words of Dorcas, became less acute.
+Many strange reflections, however, thronged upon him; and, straying
+onward rather like a sleep walker than a hunter, it was attributable to
+no care of his own that his devious course kept him in the vicinity of
+the encampment. His steps were imperceptibly led almost in a circle;
+nor did he observe that he was on the verge of a tract of land heavily
+timbered, but not with pine-trees. The place of the latter was here
+supplied by oaks and other of the harder woods; and around their roots
+clustered a dense and bushy under-growth, leaving, however, barren
+spaces between the trees, thick strewn with withered leaves. Whenever
+the rustling of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made a
+sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber, Reuben instinctively
+raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp
+glance on every side; but, convinced by a partial observation that no
+animal was near, he would again give himself up to his thoughts. He was
+musing on the strange influence that had led him away from his
+premeditated course, and so far into the depths of the wilderness.
+Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives
+lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him
+onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat. He
+trusted that it was Heaven’s intent to afford him an opportunity of
+expiating his sin; he hoped that he might find the bones so long
+unburied; and that, having laid the earth over them, peace would throw
+its sunlight into the sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he
+was aroused by a rustling in the forest at some distance from the spot
+to which he had wandered. Perceiving the motion of some object behind a
+thick veil of undergrowth, he fired, with the instinct of a hunter and
+the aim of a practised marksman. A low moan, which told his success,
+and by which even animals cars express their dying agony, was unheeded
+by Reuben Bourne. What were the recollections now breaking upon him?
+
+The thicket into which Reuben had fired was near the summit of a swell
+of land, and was clustered around the base of a rock, which, in the
+shape and smoothness of one of its surfaces, was not unlike a gigantic
+gravestone. As if reflected in a mirror, its likeness was in Reuben’s
+memory. He even recognized the veins which seemed to form an
+inscription in forgotten characters: everything remained the same,
+except that a thick covert of bushes shrouded the lowerpart of the
+rock, and would have hidden Roger Malvin had he still been sitting
+there. Yet in the next moment Reuben’s eye was caught by another change
+that time had effected since he last stood where he was now standing
+again behind the earthy roots of the uptorn tree. The sapling to which
+he had bound the bloodstained symbol of his vow had increased and
+strengthened into an oak, far indeed from its maturity, but with no
+mean spread of shadowy branches. There was one singularity observable
+in this tree which made Reuben tremble. The middle and lower branches
+were in luxuriant life, and an excess of vegetation had fringed the
+trunk almost to the ground; but a blight had apparently stricken the
+upper part of the oak, and the very topmost bough was withered,
+sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered how the little banner had
+fluttered on that topmost bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen
+years before. Whose guilt had blasted it?
+
+
+Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, continued her
+preparations for their evening repast. Her sylvan table was the
+moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of
+which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of
+the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements.
+It had a strange aspect that one little spot of homely comfort in the
+desolate heart of Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the higher
+branches of the trees that grew on rising ground; but the shadows of
+evening had deepened into the hollow where the encampment was made, and
+the firelight began to redden as it gleamed up the tall trunks of the
+pines or hovered on the dense and obscure mass of foliage that circled
+round the spot. The heart of Dorcas was not sad; for she felt that it
+was better to journey in the wilderness with two whom she loved than to
+be a lonely woman in a crowd that cared not for her. As she busied
+herself in arranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves, for
+Reuben and her son, her voice danced through the gloomy forest in the
+measure of a song that she had learned in youth. The rude melody, the
+production of a bard who won no name, was descriptive of a winter
+evening in a frontier cottage, when, secured from savage inroad by the
+high-piled snow-drifts, the family rejoiced by their own fireside. The
+whole song possessed the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought,
+but four continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the
+blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them, working
+magic with a few simple words, the poet had instilled the very essence
+of domestic love and household happiness, and they were poetry and
+picture joined in one. As Dorcas sang, the walls of her forsaken home
+seemed to encircle her; she no longer saw the gloomy pines, nor heard
+the wind which still, as she began each verse, sent a heavy breath
+through the branches, and died away in a hollow moan from the burden of
+the song. She was aroused by the report of a gun in the vicinity of the
+encampment; and either the sudden sound, or her loneliness by the
+glowing fire, caused her to tremble violently. The next moment she
+laughed in the pride of a mother’s heart.
+
+“My beautiful young hunter! My boy has slain a deer!” she exclaimed,
+recollecting that in the direction whence the shot proceeded Cyrus had
+gone to the chase.
+
+She waited a reasonable time to hear her son’s light step bounding over
+the rustling leaves to tell of his success. But he did not immediately
+appear; and she sent her cheerful voice among the trees in search of
+him.
+
+“Cyrus! Cyrus!”
+
+His coming was still delayed; and she determined, as the report had
+apparently been very near, to seek for him in person. Her assistance,
+also, might be necessary in bringing home the venison which she
+flattered herself he had obtained. She therefore set forward, directing
+her steps by the long-past sound, and singing as she went, in order
+that the boy might be aware of her approach and run to meet her. From
+behind the trunk of every tree, and from every hiding-place in the
+thick foliage of the undergrowth, she hoped to discover the countenance
+of her son, laughing with the sportive mischief that is born of
+affection. The sun was now beneath the horizon, and the light that came
+down among the leaves was sufficiently dim to create many illusions in
+her expecting fancy. Several times she seemed indistinctly to see his
+face gazing out from among the leaves; and once she imagined that he
+stood beckoning to her at the base of a craggy rock. Keeping her eyes
+on this object, however, it proved to be no more than the trunk of an
+oak fringed to the very ground with little branches, one of which,
+thrust out farther than the rest, was shaken by the breeze. Making her
+way round the foot of the rock, she suddenly found herself close to her
+husband, who had approached in another direction. Leaning upon the butt
+of his gun, the muzzle of which rested upon the withered leaves, he was
+apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some object at his feet.
+
+“How is this, Reuben? Have you slain the deer and fallen asleep over
+him?” exclaimed Dorcas, laughing cheerfully, on her first slight
+observation of his posture and appearance.
+
+He stirred not, neither did he turn his eyes towards her; and a cold,
+shuddering fear, indefinite in its source and object, began to creep
+into her blood. She now perceived that her husband’s face was ghastly
+pale, and his features were rigid, as if incapable of assuming any
+other expression than the strong despair which had hardened upon them.
+He gave not the slightest evidence that he was aware of her approach.
+
+“For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me!” cried Dorcas; and the
+strange sound of her own voice affrighted her even more than the dead
+silence.
+
+Her husband started, stared into her face, drew her to the front of the
+rock, and pointed with his finger.
+
+Oh, there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon the fallen forest
+leaves! His cheek rested upon his arm—his curled locks were thrown back
+from his brow—his limbs were slightly relaxed. Had a sudden weariness
+overcome the youthful hunter? Would his mother’s voice arouse him? She
+knew that it was death.
+
+“This broad rock is the gravestone of your near kindred, Dorcas,” said
+her husband. “Your tears will fall at once over your father and your
+son.”
+
+She heard him not. With one wild shriek, that seemed to force its way
+from the sufferer’s inmost soul, she sank insensible by the side of her
+dead boy. At that moment the withered topmost bough of the oak loosened
+itself in the stilly air, and fell in soft, light fragments upon the
+rock, upon the leaves, upon Reuben, upon his wife and child, and upon
+Roger Malvin’s bones. Then Reuben’s heart was stricken, and the tears
+gushed out like water from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth had
+made the blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was expiated,—the
+curse was gone from him; and in the hour when he had shed blood dearer
+to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven
+from the lips of Reuben Bourne.
+
+
+
+
+P.’S CORRESPONDENCE
+
+
+My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the
+interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The
+past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often
+productive of curious results, and which will be better understood
+after the perusal of the following letter than from any description
+that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the
+little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first
+paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his
+wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible
+to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a
+delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the
+imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that
+he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less
+distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of
+illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based
+upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not
+a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of
+correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend
+from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
+pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after
+literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to
+achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object
+while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have
+stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
+
+LONDON, February 29, 1845.
+
+
+MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing
+tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and
+consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind’s
+strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me
+whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all
+the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in my
+hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of
+Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world’s
+metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which,
+whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,—with all this
+positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you
+think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,—would you believe it?—that
+all this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little
+chamber,—that whitewashed little chamber,—that little chamber with its
+one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste
+or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars,—that same
+little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought
+you to visit me! Will no length of time or breadth of space enfranchise
+me from that unlovely abode? I travel; but it seems to be like the
+snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose,
+on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble
+impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile
+myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me
+hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
+
+My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me
+to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until
+now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse
+as the wits of Queen Anne’s time or Ben Jenson’s compotators at the
+Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself was the letter to
+Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had
+anticipated, although, considering his former irregularities of life
+and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not older than a man
+on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
+earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet’s spiritual
+immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
+extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
+concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
+increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat,—so fat as to give the
+impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without
+sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of
+corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the
+mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be
+Byron, you murmur within yourself, “For Heaven’s sake, where is he?”
+Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly
+matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and
+carnal vices which unspiritualize man’s nature and clog up his avenues
+of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
+and, besides, Lord Byron’s morals have been improving while his outward
+man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he
+were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet
+it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I
+had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
+
+On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on
+the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up
+its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed
+in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot
+was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether
+Byron’s right or left foot was the deformed one.
+
+The noble poet’s reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as you are
+aware, of ten years’ standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any
+symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at
+least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple, descending the
+slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support which will
+enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is
+pleasant to reflect how entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful
+errors in this particular. Her ladyship’s influence, it rejoices me to
+add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a
+religious point of view. He now combines the most rigid tenets of
+Methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former being
+perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble
+consort, while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque
+illumination demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
+expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is
+bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship; and
+this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonyme of the foul
+fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the
+metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising
+conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether in the House of Lords
+or in private circles, of denouncing and repudiating the mischievous
+and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit
+similar sins in other people with the sincerest vengeance which his
+somewhat blunted pen is capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on
+the most intimate terms. You are aware that, some little time before
+the death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man
+to be evicted from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart
+that, it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness
+which brought him to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in
+a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred melodies, and
+expressing his belief that it would be heard within the gate of
+paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance. I wish he may
+have found it so.
+
+I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with
+Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by
+allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
+which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words,
+whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one
+worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that
+they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that
+there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with
+myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own
+heart to the gifted author’s ear, the echo of those strains that have
+resounded throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly
+out. Byron,—I have the information from his own lips, so that you need
+not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,—Byron is preparing a new
+edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and
+amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals,
+politics, and religion. It so happened that the very passages of
+highest inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
+rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
+oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions
+having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has
+deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote,
+but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively
+he no longer understands his own poetry.
+
+This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
+specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious,
+whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever
+morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails
+settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever
+could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a
+republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its
+place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his lordship’s later style.
+You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The
+result is not so good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very
+sad affair indeed; for, though the torches kindled in Tophet have been
+extinguished, they leave an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by
+no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that
+this attempt on Lord Byron’s part to atone for his youthful errors will
+at length induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
+concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen’s statue of the poet its due niche in
+the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece,
+were denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.
+
+What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about
+burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in
+a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat
+man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very
+extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to the
+immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted
+into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty
+years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of
+shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to
+attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of
+it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more
+substantial.
+
+Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns—now, if I
+mistake not, in his eighty-seventh year—happens to be making a visit to
+London, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of grasping him by
+the hand. For upwards of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet
+cottage in Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither
+now by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
+England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday by a festival.
+It will be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray Heaven the
+little spirit of life within the aged bard’s bosom may not be
+extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already had the honor
+of an introduction to him at the British Museum, where he was examining
+a collection of his own unpublished letters, interspersed with songs,
+which have escaped the notice of all his biographers.
+
+Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been
+embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
+
+The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor
+the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair
+floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows
+of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that
+have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent
+preservation, considering his time of life. He has that crickety sort
+of liveliness,—I mean the cricket’s humor of chirping for any cause or
+none,—which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme
+old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we
+perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was
+surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and
+brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving
+only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing
+upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos.
+At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song
+to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses,
+so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the
+scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of it did
+partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes and
+his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
+knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary in
+Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to
+meet her there.
+
+Burns then began to repeat Tan O’Shanter; but was so tickled with its
+wit and humor—of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary
+sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded
+by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a
+close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a
+satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant
+poet’s life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having
+been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as
+attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now
+considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I
+suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
+
+I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard
+to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say,
+remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless
+paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of
+which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day
+and from year to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which
+grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer’s
+tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether
+in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing,
+although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in
+his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating
+tales to an amanuensis,—to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not
+deemed worth any one’s trouble now to take down what flows from that
+once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
+capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
+assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,—a striking
+combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as
+no other man alive could have bit off,—a glimmer from that ruined mind,
+as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom
+of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
+confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses
+itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy
+ground.
+
+For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his
+consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It
+was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should
+first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a
+one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same
+position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest
+purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was
+qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation
+even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations from a young
+man,—one Dickens,—who published a few magazine articles, very rich in
+humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow
+died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I
+think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more than
+it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
+
+Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other day? You would not hit
+it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all
+that is now left of him,—that is to say, the skin, bones, and corporeal
+substance, little cocked hat, green coat, white breeches, and small
+sword, which are still known by his redoubtable name. He was attended
+only by two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the
+old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty in regard to him except to
+see that none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of
+thee star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody save myself so much as turned
+to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even I contrive
+to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike
+spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape, had wrought
+upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic
+influence of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in
+the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,—buried
+beneath his own mortality,—and lacking even the qualities of sense that
+enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of
+the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long
+endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,—for he is now
+above seventy,—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has acted
+shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena to England. They should
+now restore him to Paris, and there let him once again review the
+relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his nether lip hung
+down upon his chin. While I was observing him there chanced to be a
+little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
+Hannibal,—the great captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke
+and tracked it round with bloody footsteps,—was seized with a nervous
+trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
+and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
+and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.
+
+Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my
+inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear
+friend, pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those
+two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea
+of that odious wretch—you remember him well—who was pleased to take
+such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I quitted New
+England. Forthwith up rose before my mind’s eye that same little
+whitewashed room, with the iron-grated window,—strange that it should
+have been iron-grated!—where, in too easy compliance with the absurd
+wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life.
+Positively it seemed to me that I was still sitting there, and that the
+keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of
+intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just peeped in at the door. The
+rascal! I owe him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.
+Fie! fie! The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even
+now that hateful chamber—the iron-grated window, which blasted the
+blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it poison
+to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my comfortable
+apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that which I know to be
+such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably
+prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.
+
+You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known
+to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past
+been reconciled to the Church of England. In his more recent works he
+has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Christian faith,
+with an especial view to that particular development. Latterly, as you
+may not have heard, he has taken orders, and been inducted to a small
+country living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily
+for me, he has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of
+a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of
+Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first
+introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the manner of
+combining what I had to say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt
+of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might
+be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
+Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing
+where he now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a
+higher point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a
+regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand upon any one of
+the earlier poems and say, “This is my work,” with precisely the same
+complacency of conscience wherewithal he contemplates the volume of
+discourses above mentioned. They are like the successive steps of a
+staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
+to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting upon
+the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what
+would have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his
+staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the celestial
+brightness.
+
+How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly care,
+so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a lower
+region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their religious merits,
+I consider the productions of his maturity superior, as poems, to those
+of his youth. They are warmer with human love, which has served as an
+interpreter between his mind and the multitude. The author has learned
+to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby avoided the
+faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont
+to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete
+arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they
+were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
+heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley
+can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate than his
+friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when
+he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,—sheer nonsense!
+What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his
+being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio,
+and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and
+frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of
+marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet’s heart, and that
+his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman
+earth. If all this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I
+have met the drowned and burned and buried man here in London only
+yesterday?
+
+Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
+heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
+England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on
+terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in
+contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream is the life of man!
+
+Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be
+issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
+publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
+affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop,
+to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from his
+lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation of
+ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a week or
+two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed
+_The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his
+_Laodamia_. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets
+whom it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with
+his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of
+age, and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
+intellect the Devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a
+man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away our
+speculative license of kicking him.
+
+Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
+coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers
+other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender
+figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore,
+or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old
+cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the
+verge of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the
+dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere, in
+short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted out by the
+porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him
+fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell
+whether he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my
+mind and clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile
+me. At one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
+I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so
+fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the
+effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on
+his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him
+to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
+sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
+never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
+think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have
+been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
+infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.
+
+Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the world,
+is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic
+poem. Some passages of it have been communicated to the inner circle of
+his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest strains that have been
+audible on earth since Milton’s days. If I can obtain copies of these
+specimens, I will ask you to present them to James Russell Lowell, who
+seems to be one of the poet’s most fervent and worthiest worshippers.
+The information took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats’s
+poetic incense, without being embodied in human language, floated up to
+heaven and mingled with the songs of the immortal choristers, who
+perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought
+their melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively
+written a poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another
+sense than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In
+compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
+that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
+exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
+remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of
+the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the eve of
+its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection; Woman,
+redeemed from the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts so powerful
+and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for
+herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children’s
+happier state, has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty
+as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over
+dewy Eden. Nor then indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then
+but a golden promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
+mankind another peril,—a last encounter with the evil principle. Should
+the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of
+ages. If we triumph—But it demands a poet’s eye to contemplate the
+splendor of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.
+
+To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a
+spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of
+a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme.
+Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends;
+for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in
+question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea
+that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it
+worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet.
+The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best
+child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is
+because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
+foreign to the purpose.
+
+I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you
+know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time
+blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order
+of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few
+words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or
+rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men whom
+I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
+not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long
+grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who
+made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter,
+clatter, when the sexton’s spade disturbs them. Were it only possible
+to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely
+to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me
+in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men,
+and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him.
+For instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose
+before me, in the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the bodily presence of the
+elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or
+other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His
+powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the
+ghost of the Danish king.
+
+In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and among
+them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
+profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into my
+brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she
+took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother,
+John Kemble, sat behind,—a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly
+majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, Nature enables
+him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his
+genius. Charles Matthews was likewise there; but a paralytic affection
+has distorted his once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable
+one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into proper form
+than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as
+if, for the joke’s sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
+expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
+contrive, and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so
+hideous, an avenging Providence had seen fit to petrify him. Since it
+is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him to change
+countenance, for his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and
+night-time. Some other players of the past generation were present, but
+none that greatly interested me. It behooves actors, more than all
+other men of publicity, to vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best
+but painted shadows flickering on the wall and empty sounds that echo
+anther’s thought, it is a sad disenchantment when the colors begin to
+fade and the voice to croak with age.
+
+What is there new in the literary way on your side of the water?
+Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of
+poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know
+that this eminent writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to
+exhibit any of the characteristics of the author’s mind as displayed in
+his prose works; although some of the poems have a richness that is not
+merely of the surface, but glows still the brighter the deeper and more
+faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
+like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
+native manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from Africa. I
+doubt whether the American public will accept them; it looks less to
+the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How slowly
+our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to
+untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned
+my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else
+he never could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last
+sleep, with the _Thanatopsis_ gleaming over him like a sculptured
+marble sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer verses
+in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic poem called _Fanny_, is
+defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis
+as a man of business. Somewhat later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker
+youth, to whom the muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and
+who got himself lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I
+remember, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who
+scattered some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
+perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of
+Gottingen. Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly, in
+1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going to give us sketches
+of the world’s sunny face. If these had lived, they might, one or all
+of them, have grown to be famous men.
+
+And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I
+was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit,
+where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when
+fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest
+mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world’s hopes to scorn,
+it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall never
+make a truer one.
+
+What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,—for there is no
+need of generalizing the remark,—what an odd brain is mine! Would you
+believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my
+intellectual ear—some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat
+as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such
+verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable
+destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit,
+perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their
+posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they
+have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to
+attend to; and besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in
+some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of
+pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be
+glad of such a job.
+
+Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are you about? Still
+scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and
+proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever?
+It is too bad. Let every man manufacture his own nonsense, say I.
+Expect me home soon, and—to whisper you a secret—in company with the
+poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and enjoy the shadow of
+the laurels that he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls
+himself well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale,
+and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a finger through his
+densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim and
+forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.
+
+Your true friend, P.
+
+
+P. S.—Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and
+revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
+
+It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his works, in a
+double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press at
+Philadelphia. Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic
+reputation on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
+Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his century. And
+does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas with
+machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-engine, as being the
+nearest to celestial agency that our epoch can boast? How can he expect
+ever to rise again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists
+in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?
+
+
+
+
+EARTH’S HOLOCAUST
+
+
+Once upon a time—but whether in the time past or time to come is a
+matter of little or no moment—this wide world had become so
+overburdened with an accumulation of worn-out trumpery, that the
+inhabitants determined to rid themselves of it by a general bonfire.
+The site fixed upon at the representation of the insurance companies,
+and as being as central a spot as any other on the globe, was one of
+the broadest prairies of the West, where no human habitation would be
+endangered by the flames, and where a vast assemblage of spectators
+might commodiously admire the show. Having a taste for sights of this
+kind, and imagining, likewise, that the illumination of the bonfire
+might reveal some profundity of moral truth heretofore hidden in mist
+or darkness, I made it convenient to journey thither and be present. At
+my arrival, although the heap of condemned rubbish was as yet
+comparatively small, the torch had already been applied. Amid that
+boundless plain, in the dusk of the evening, like a far off star alone
+in the firmament, there was merely visible one tremulous gleam, whence
+none could have anticipated so fierce a blaze as was destined to ensue.
+With every moment, however, there came foot-travellers, women holding
+up their aprons, men on horseback, wheelbarrows, lumbering
+baggage-wagons, and other vehicles, great and small, and from far and
+near, laden with articles that were judged fit for nothing but to be
+burned.
+
+“What materials have been used to kindle the flame?” inquired I of a
+bystander; for I was desirous of knowing the whole process of the
+affair from beginning to end.
+
+The person whom I addressed was a grave man, fifty years old or
+thereabout, who had evidently come thither as a looker-on. He struck me
+immediately as having weighed for himself the true value of life and
+its circumstances, and therefore as feeling little personal interest in
+whatever judgment the world might form of them. Before answering my
+question, he looked me in the face by the kindling light of the fire.
+
+“O, some very dry combustibles,” replied he, “and extremely suitable to
+the purpose,—no other, in fact, than yesterday’s newspapers, last
+month’s magazines, and last year’s withered leaves. Here now comes some
+antiquated trash that will take fire like a handful of shavings.”
+
+As he spoke, some rough-looking men advanced to the verge of the
+bonfire, and threw in, as it appeared, all the rubbish of the herald’s
+office,—the blazonry of coat armor, the crests and devices of
+illustrious families, pedigrees that extended back, like lines of
+light, into the mist of the dark ages, together with stars, garters,
+and embroidered collars, each of which, as paltry a bawble as it might
+appear to the uninstructed eye, had once possessed vast significance,
+and was still, in truth, reckoned among the most precious of moral or
+material facts by the worshippers of the gorgeous past. Mingled with
+this confused heap, which was tossed into the flames by armfuls at
+once, were innumerable badges of knighthood, comprising those of all
+the European sovereignties, and Napoleon’s decoration of the Legion of
+Honor, the ribbons of which were entangled with those of the ancient
+order of St. Louis. There, too, were the medals of our own Society of
+Cincinnati, by means of which, as history tells us, an order of
+hereditary knights came near being constituted out of the king quellers
+of the Revolution. And besides, there were the patents of nobility of
+German counts and barons, Spanish grandees, and English peers, from the
+worm-eaten instruments signed by William the Conqueror down to the
+bran-new parchment of the latest lord who has received his honors from
+the fair hand of Victoria.
+
+At sight of the dense volumes of smoke, mingled with vivid jets of
+flame, that gushed and eddied forth from this immense pile of earthly
+distinctions, the multitude of plebeian spectators set up a joyous
+shout, and clapped their hands with an emphasis that made the welkin
+echo. That was their moment of triumph, achieved, after long ages, over
+creatures of the same clay and the same spiritual infirmities, who had
+dared to assume the privileges due only to Heaven’s better workmanship.
+But now there rushed towards the blazing heap a gray-haired man, of
+stately presence, wearing a coat, from the breast of which a star, or
+other badge of rank, seemed to have been forcibly wrenched away. He had
+not the tokens of intellectual power in his face; but still there was
+the demeanor, the habitual and almost native dignity, of one who had
+been born to the idea of his own social superiority, and had never felt
+it questioned till that moment.
+
+“People,” cried he, gazing at the ruin of what was dearest to his eyes
+with grief and wonder, but nevertheless with a degree of
+stateliness,—“people, what have you done? This fire is consuming all
+that marked your advance from barbarism, or that could have prevented
+your relapse thither. We, the men of the privileged orders, were those
+who kept alive from age to age the old chivalrous spirit; the gentle
+and generous thought; the higher, the purer, the more refined and
+delicate life. With the nobles, too, you cast off the poet, the
+painter, the sculptor,—all the beautiful arts; for we were their
+patrons, and created the atmosphere in which they flourish. In
+abolishing the majestic distinctions of rank, society loses not only
+its grace, but its steadfastness—”
+
+More he would doubtless have spoken; but here there arose an outcry,
+sportive, contemptuous, and indignant, that altogether drowned the
+appeal of the fallen nobleman, insomuch that, casting one look of
+despair at his own half-burned pedigree, he shrunk back into the crowd,
+glad to shelter himself under his new-found insignificance.
+
+“Let him thank his stars that we have not flung him into the same
+fire!” shouted a rude figure, spurning the embers with his foot. “And
+henceforth let no man dare to show a piece of musty parchment as his
+warrant for lording it over his fellows. If he have strength of arm,
+well and good; it is one species of superiority. If he have wit,
+wisdom, courage, force of character, let these attributes do for him
+what they may; but from this day forward no mortal must hope for place
+and consideration by reckoning up the mouldy bones of his ancestors.
+That nonsense is done away.”
+
+“And in good time,” remarked the grave observer by my side, in a low
+voice, however, “if no worse nonsense comes in its place; but, at all
+events, this species of nonsense has fairly lived out its life.”
+
+There was little space to muse or moralize over the embers of this
+time-honored rubbish; for, before it was half burned out, there came
+another multitude from beyond the sea, bearing the purple robes of
+royalty, and the crowns, globes, and sceptres of emperors and kings.
+All these had been condemned as useless bawbles, playthings at best,
+fit only for the infancy of the world or rods to govern and chastise it
+in its nonage, but with which universal manhood at its full-grown
+stature could no longer brook to be insulted. Into such contempt had
+these regal insignia now fallen that the gilded crown and tinselled
+robes of the player king from Drury Lane Theatre had been thrown in
+among the rest, doubtless as a mockery of his brother monarchs on the
+great stage of the world. It was a strange sight to discern the crown
+jewels of England glowing and flashing in the midst of the fire. Some
+of them had been delivered down from the time of the Saxon princes;
+others were purchased with vast revenues, or perchance ravished from
+the dead brows of the native potentates of Hindustan; and the whole now
+blazed with a dazzling lustre, as if a star had fallen in that spot and
+been shattered into fragments. The splendor of the ruined monarchy had
+no reflection save in those inestimable precious stones. But enough on
+this subject. It were but tedious to describe how the Emperor of
+Austria’s mantle was converted to tinder, and how the posts and pillars
+of the French throne became a heap of coals, which it was impossible to
+distinguish from those of any other wood. Let me add, however, that I
+noticed one of the exiled Poles stirring up the bonfire with the Czar
+of Russia’s sceptre, which he afterwards flung into the flames.
+
+“The smell of singed garments is quite intolerable here,” observed my
+new acquaintance, as the breeze enveloped us in the smoke of a royal
+wardrobe. “Let us get to windward and see what they are doing on the
+other side of the bonfire.”
+
+We accordingly passed around, and were just in time to witness the
+arrival of a vast procession of Washingtonians,—as the votaries of
+temperance call themselves nowadays,—accompanied by thousands of the
+Irish disciples of Father Mathew, with that great apostle at their
+head. They brought a rich contribution to the bonfire, being nothing
+less than all the hogsheads and barrels of liquor in the world, which
+they rolled before them across the prairie.
+
+“Now, my children,” cried Father Mathew, when they reached the verge of
+the fire, “one shove more, and the work is done. And now let us stand
+off and see Satan deal with his own liquor.”
+
+Accordingly, having placed their wooden vessels within reach of the
+flames, the procession stood off at a safe distance, and soon beheld
+them burst into a blaze that reached the clouds and threatened to set
+the sky itself on fire. And well it might; for here was the whole
+world’s stock of spirituous liquors, which, instead of kindling a
+frenzied light in the eyes of individual topers as of yore, soared
+upwards with a bewildering gleam that startled all mankind. It was the
+aggregate of that fierce fire which would otherwise have scorched the
+hearts of millions. Meantime numberless bottles of precious wine were
+flung into the blaze, which lapped up the contents as if it loved them,
+and grew, like other drunkards, the merrier and fiercer for what it
+quaffed. Never again will the insatiable thirst of the fire-fiend be so
+pampered. Here were the treasures of famous bon vivants,—liquors that
+had been tossed on ocean, and mellowed in the sun, and hoarded long in
+the recesses of the earth,—the pale, the gold, the ruddy juice of
+whatever vineyards were most delicate,—the entire vintage of Tokay,—all
+mingling in one stream with the vile fluids of the common pot house,
+and contributing to heighten the self-same blaze. And while it rose in
+a gigantic spire that seemed to wave against the arch of the firmament
+and combine itself with the light of stars, the multitude gave a shout
+as if the broad earth were exulting in its deliverance from the curse
+of ages.
+
+But the joy was not universal. Many deemed that human life would be
+gloomier than ever when that brief illumination should sink down. While
+the reformers were at work I overheard muttered expostulations from
+several respectable gentlemen with red noses and wearing gouty shoes;
+and a ragged worthy, whose face looked like a hearth where the fire is
+burned out, now expressed his discontent more openly and boldly.
+
+“What is this world good for,” said the last toper, “now that we can
+never be jolly any more? What is to comfort the poor man in sorrow and
+perplexity? How is he to keep his heart warm against the cold winds of
+this cheerless earth? And what do you propose to give him in exchange
+for the solace that you take away? How are old friends to sit together
+by the fireside without a cheerful glass between them? A plague upon
+your reformation! It is a sad world, a cold world, a selfish world, a
+low world, not worth an honest fellow’s living in, now that good
+fellowship is gone forever!”
+
+This harangue excited great mirth among the bystanders; but,
+preposterous as was the sentiment, I could not help commiserating the
+forlorn condition of the last toper, whose boon companions had dwindled
+away from his side, leaving the poor fellow without a soul to
+countenance him in sipping his liquor, nor indeed any liquor to sip.
+Not that this was quite the true state of the case; for I had observed
+him at a critical moment filch a bottle of fourth-proof brandy that
+fell beside the bonfire and hide it in his pocket.
+
+The spirituous and fermented liquors being thus disposed of, the zeal
+of the reformers next induced them to replenish the fire with all the
+boxes of tea and bags of coffee in the world. And now came the planters
+of Virginia, bringing their crops of tobacco. These, being cast upon
+the heap of inutility, aggregated it to the size of a mountain, and
+incensed the atmosphere with such potent fragrance that methought we
+should never draw pure breath again. The present sacrifice seemed to
+startle the lovers of the weed more than any that they had hitherto
+witnessed.
+
+“Well, they’ve put my pipe out,” said an old gentleman, flinging it
+into the flames in a pet. “What is this world coming to? Everything
+rich and racy—all the spice of life—is to be condemned as useless. Now
+that they have kindled the bonfire, if these nonsensical reformers
+would fling themselves into it, all would be well enough!”
+
+“Be patient,” responded a stanch conservative; “it will come to that in
+the end. They will first fling us in, and finally themselves.”
+
+From the general and systematic measures of reform I now turn to
+consider the individual contributions to this memorable bonfire. In
+many instances these were of a very amusing character. One poor fellow
+threw in his empty purse, and another a bundle of counterfeit or
+insolvable bank-notes. Fashionable ladies threw in their last season’s
+bonnets, together with heaps of ribbons, yellow lace, and much other
+half-worn milliner’s ware, all of which proved even more evanescent in
+the fire than it had been in the fashion. A multitude of lovers of both
+sexes—discarded maids or bachelors and couples mutually weary of one
+another—tossed in bundles of perfumed letters and enamored sonnets. A
+hack politician, being deprived of bread by the loss of office, threw
+in his teeth, which happened to be false ones. The Rev. Sydney
+Smith—having voyaged across the Atlantic for that sole purpose—came up
+to the bonfire with a bitter grin and threw in certain repudiated
+bonds, fortified though they were with the broad seal of a sovereign
+state. A little boy of five years old, in the premature manliness of
+the present epoch, threw in his playthings; a college graduate, his
+diploma; an apothecary, ruined by the spread of homeopathy, his whole
+stock of drugs and medicines; a physician, his library; a parson, his
+old sermons; and a fine gentleman of the old school, his code of
+manners, which he had formerly written down for the benefit of the next
+generation. A widow, resolving on a second marriage, slyly threw in her
+dead husband’s miniature. A young man, jilted by his mistress, would
+willingly have flung his own desperate heart into the flames, but could
+find no means to wrench it out of his bosom. An American author, whose
+works were neglected by the public, threw his pen and paper into the
+bonfire and betook himself to some less discouraging occupation. It
+somewhat startled me to overhear a number of ladies, highly respectable
+in appearance, proposing to fling their gowns and petticoats into the
+flames, and assume the garb, together with the manners, duties,
+offices, and responsibilities, of the opposite sex.
+
+What favor was accorded to this scheme I am unable to say, my attention
+being suddenly drawn to a poor, deceived, and half-delirious girl, who,
+exclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead,
+attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all that wrecked and
+broken trumpery of the world. A good man, however, ran to her rescue.
+
+“Patience, my poor girl!” said he, as he drew her back from the fierce
+embrace of the destroying angel. “Be patient, and abide Heaven’s will.
+So long as you possess a living soul, all may be restored to its first
+freshness. These things of matter and creations of human fantasy are
+fit for nothing but to be burned when once they have had their day; but
+your day is eternity!”
+
+“Yes,” said the wretched girl, whose frenzy seemed now to have sunk
+down into deep despondency, “yes, and the sunshine is blotted out of
+it!”
+
+It was now rumored among the spectators that all the weapons and
+munitions of war were to be thrown into the bonfire with the exception
+of the world’s stock of gunpowder, which, as the safest mode of
+disposing of it, had already been drowned in the sea. This intelligence
+seemed to awaken great diversity of opinion. The hopeful philanthropist
+esteemed it a token that the millennium was already come; while persons
+of another stamp, in whose view mankind was a breed of bulldogs,
+prophesied that all the old stoutness, fervor, nobleness, generosity,
+and magnanimity of the race would disappear,—these qualities, as they
+affirmed, requiring blood for their nourishment. They comforted
+themselves, however, in the belief that the proposed abolition of war
+was impracticable for any length of time together.
+
+Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose thunder had long been
+the voice of battle,—the artillery of the Armada, the battering trains
+of Marlborough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon and Wellington,—were
+trundled into the midst of the fire. By the continual addition of dry
+combustibles, it had now waxed so intense that neither brass nor iron
+could withstand it. It was wonderful to behold how these terrible
+instruments of slaughter melted away like playthings of wax. Then the
+armies of the earth wheeled around the mighty furnace, with their
+military music playing triumphant marches,—and flung in their muskets
+and swords. The standard-bearers, likewise, cast one look upward at
+their banners, all tattered with shot-holes and inscribed with the
+names of victorious fields; and, giving them a last flourish on the
+breeze, they lowered them into the flame, which snatched them upward in
+its rush towards the clouds. This ceremony being over, the world was
+left without a single weapon in its hands, except possibly a few old
+king’s arms and rusty swords and other trophies of the Revolution in
+some of our State armories. And now the drums were beaten and the
+trumpets brayed all together, as a prelude to the proclamation of
+universal and eternal peace and the announcement that glory was no
+longer to be won by blood, but that it would henceforth be the
+contention of the human race to work out the greatest mutual good, and
+that beneficence, in the future annals of the earth, would claim the
+praise of valor. The blessed tidings were accordingly promulgated, and
+caused infinite rejoicings among those who had stood aghast at the
+horror and absurdity of war.
+
+But I saw a grim smile pass over the seared visage of a stately old
+commander,—by his war-worn figure and rich military dress, he might
+have been one of Napoleon’s famous marshals,—who, with the rest of the
+world’s soldiery, had just flung away the sword that had been familiar
+to his right hand for half a century.
+
+“Ay! ay!” grumbled he. “Let them proclaim what they please; but, in the
+end, we shall find that all this foolery has only made more work for
+the armorers and cannon-founders.”
+
+“Why, sir,” exclaimed I, in astonishment, “do you imagine that the
+human race will ever so far return on the steps of its past madness as
+to weld another sword or cast another cannon?”
+
+“There will be no need,” observed, with a sneer, one who neither felt
+benevolence nor had faith in it. “When Cain wished to slay his brother,
+he was at no loss for a weapon.”
+
+“We shall see,” replied the veteran commander. “If I am mistaken, so
+much the better; but in my opinion, without pretending to philosophize
+about the matter, the necessity of war lies far deeper than these
+honest gentlemen suppose. What! is there a field for all the petty
+disputes of individuals? and shall there be no great law court for the
+settlement of national difficulties? The battle-field is the only court
+where such suits can be tried.”
+
+“You forget, general,” rejoined I, “that, in this advanced stage of
+civilization, Reason and Philanthropy combined will constitute just
+such a tribunal as is requisite.”
+
+“Ah, I had forgotten that, indeed!” said the old warrior, as he limped
+away.
+
+The fire was now to be replenished with materials that had hitherto
+been considered of even greater importance to the well-being of society
+than the warlike munitions which we had already seen consumed. A body
+of reformers had travelled all over the earth in quest of the machinery
+by which the different nations were accustomed to inflict the
+punishment of death. A shudder passed through the multitude as these
+ghastly emblems were dragged forward. Even the flames seemed at first
+to shrink away, displaying the shape and murderous contrivance of each
+in a full blaze of light, which of itself was sufficient to convince
+mankind of the long and deadly error of human law. Those old implements
+of cruelty; those horrible monsters of mechanism; those inventions
+which it seemed to demand something worse than man’s natural heart to
+contrive, and which had lurked in the dusky nooks of ancient prisons,
+the subject of terror-stricken legend,—were now brought forth to view.
+Headsmen’s axes, with the rust of noble and royal blood upon them, and
+a vast collection of halters that had choked the breath of plebeian
+victims, were thrown in together. A shout greeted the arrival of the
+guillotine, which was thrust forward on the same wheels that had borne
+it from one to another of the bloodstained streets of Paris. But the
+loudest roar of applause went up, telling the distant sky of the
+triumph of the earth’s redemption, when the gallows made its
+appearance. An ill-looking fellow, however, rushed forward, and,
+putting himself in the path of the reformers, bellowed hoarsely, and
+fought with brute fury to stay their progress.
+
+It was little matter of surprise, perhaps, that the executioner should
+thus do his best to vindicate and uphold the machinery by which he
+himself had his livelihood and worthier individuals their death; but it
+deserved special note that men of a far different sphere—even of that
+consecrated class in whose guardianship the world is apt to trust its
+benevolence—were found to take the hangman’s view of the question.
+
+“Stay, my brethren!” cried one of them. “You are misled by a false
+philanthropy; you know not what you do. The gallows is a
+Heaven-ordained instrument. Bear it back, then, reverently, and set it
+up in its old place, else the world will fall to speedy ruin and
+desolation!”
+
+“Onward! onward!” shouted a leader in the reform. “Into the flames with
+the accursed instrument of man’s bloody policy! How can human law
+inculcate benevolence and love while it persists in setting up the
+gallows as its chief symbol? One heave more, good friends, and the
+world will be redeemed from its greatest error.”
+
+A thousand hands, that nevertheless loathed the touch, now lent their
+assistance, and thrust the ominous burden far, far into the centre of
+the raging furnace. There its fatal and abhorred image was beheld,
+first black, then a red coal, then ashes.
+
+“That was well done!” exclaimed I.
+
+“Yes, it was well done,” replied, but with less enthusiasm than I
+expected, the thoughtful observer, who was still at my side,—“well
+done, if the world be good enough for the measure. Death, however, is
+an idea that cannot easily be dispensed with in any condition between
+the primal innocence and that other purity and perfection which
+perchance we are destined to attain after travelling round the full
+circle; but, at all events, it is well that the experiment should now
+be tried.”
+
+“Too cold! too cold!” impatiently exclaimed the young and ardent leader
+in this triumph. “Let the heart have its voice here as well as the
+intellect. And as for ripeness, and as for progress, let mankind always
+do the highest, kindest, noblest thing that, at any given period, it
+has attained the perception of; and surely that thing cannot be wrong
+nor wrongly timed.”
+
+I know not whether it were the excitement of the scene, or whether the
+good people around the bonfire were really growing more enlightened
+every instant; but they now proceeded to measures in the full length of
+which I was hardly prepared to keep them company. For instance, some
+threw their marriage certificates into the flames, and declared
+themselves candidates for a higher, holier, and more comprehensive
+union than that which had subsisted from the birth of time under the
+form of the connubial tie. Others hastened to the vaults of banks and
+to the coffers of the rich—all of which were opened to the first comer
+on this fated occasion—and brought entire bales of paper-money to
+enliven the blaze, and tons of coin to be melted down by its intensity.
+Henceforth, they said, universal benevolence, uncoined and exhaustless,
+was to be the golden currency of the world. At this intelligence the
+bankers and speculators in the stocks grew pale, and a pickpocket, who
+had reaped a rich harvest among the crowd, fell down in a deadly
+fainting fit. A few men of business burned their day-books and ledgers,
+the notes and obligations of their creditors, and all other evidences
+of debts due to themselves; while perhaps a somewhat larger number
+satisfied their zeal for reform with the sacrifice of any uncomfortable
+recollection of their own indebtment. There was then a cry that the
+period was arrived when the title-deeds of landed property should be
+given to the flames, and the whole soil of the earth revert to the
+public, from whom it had been wrongfully abstracted and most unequally
+distributed among individuals. Another party demanded that all written
+constitutions, set forms of government, legislative acts,
+statute-books, and everything else on which human invention had
+endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws, should at once be destroyed,
+leaving the consummated world as free as the man first created.
+
+Whether any ultimate action was taken with regard to these propositions
+is beyond my knowledge; for, just then, some matters were in progress
+that concerned my sympathies more nearly.
+
+“See! see! What heaps of books and pamphlets!” cried a fellow, who did
+not seem to be a lover of literature. “Now we shall have a glorious
+blaze!”
+
+“That’s just the thing!” said a modern philosopher. “Now we shall get
+rid of the weight of dead men’s thought, which has hitherto pressed so
+heavily on the living intellect that it has been incompetent to any
+effectual self-exertion. Well done, my lads! Into the fire with them!
+Now you are enlightening the world indeed!”
+
+“But what is to become of the trade?” cried a frantic bookseller.
+
+“O, by all means, let them accompany their merchandise,” coolly
+observed an author. “It will be a noble funeral-pile!”
+
+The truth was, that the human race had now reached a stage of progress
+so far beyond what the wisest and wittiest men of former ages had ever
+dreamed of, that it would have been a manifest absurdity to allow the
+earth to be any longer encumbered with their poor achievements in the
+literary line. Accordingly a thorough and searching investigation had
+swept the booksellers’ shops, hawkers’ stands, public and private
+libraries, and even the little book-shelf by the country fireside, and
+had brought the world’s entire mass of printed paper, bound or in
+sheets, to swell the already mountain bulk of our illustrious bonfire.
+Thick, heavy folios, containing the labors of lexicographers,
+commentators, and encyclopedists, were flung in, and, falling among the
+embers with a leaden thump, smouldered away to ashes like rotten wood.
+The small, richly gilt French tomes of the last age, with the hundred
+volumes of Voltaire among them, went off in a brilliant shower of
+sparkles and little jets of flame; while the current literature of the
+same nation burned red and blue, and threw an infernal light over the
+visages of the spectators, converting them all to the aspect of
+party-colored fiends. A collection of German stories emitted a scent of
+brimstone. The English standard authors made excellent fuel, generally
+exhibiting the properties of sound oak logs. Milton’s works, in
+particular, sent up a powerful blaze, gradually reddening into a coal,
+which promised to endure longer than almost any other material of the
+pile. From Shakespeare there gushed a flame of such marvellous splendor
+that men shaded their eyes as against the sun’s meridian glory; nor
+even when the works of his own elucidators were flung upon him did he
+cease to flash forth a dazzling radiance from beneath the ponderous
+heap. It is my belief that he is still blazing as fervidly as ever.
+
+“Could a poet but light a lamp at that glorious flame,” remarked I, “he
+might then consume the midnight oil to some good purpose.”
+
+“That is the very thing which modern poets have been too apt to do, or
+at least to attempt,” answered a critic. “The chief benefit to be
+expected from this conflagration of past literature undoubtedly is,
+that writers will henceforth be compelled to light their lamps at the
+sun or stars.”
+
+“If they can reach so high,” said I; “but that task requires a giant,
+who may afterwards distribute the light among inferior men. It is not
+every one that can steal the fire from heaven like Prometheus; but,
+when once he had done the deed, a thousand hearths were kindled by it.”
+
+It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was the proportion between
+the physical mass of any given author and the property of brilliant and
+long-continued combustion. For instance, there was not a quarto volume
+of the last century—nor, indeed, of the present—that could compete in
+that particular with a child’s little gilt-covered book, containing
+_Mother Goose’s Melodies_. _The Life and Death of Tom Thumb_ outlasted
+the biography of Marlborough. An epic, indeed a dozen of them, was
+converted to white ashes before the single sheet of an old ballad was
+half consumed. In more than one case, too, when volumes of applauded
+verse proved incapable of anything better than a stifling smoke, an
+unregarded ditty of some nameless bard—perchance in the corner of a
+newspaper—soared up among the stars with a flame as brilliant as their
+own. Speaking of the properties of flame, methought Shelley’s poetry
+emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day,
+contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of
+black vapor that flashed and eddied from the volumes of Lord Byron. As
+for Tom Moore, some of his songs diffused an odor like a burning
+pastil.
+
+I felt particular interest in watching the combustion of American
+authors, and scrupulously noted by my watch the precise number of
+moments that changed most of them from shabbily printed books to
+indistinguishable ashes. It would be invidious, however, if not
+perilous, to betray these awful secrets; so that I shall content myself
+with observing that it was not invariably the writer most frequent in
+the public mouth that made the most splendid appearance in the bonfire.
+I especially remember that a great deal of excellent inflammability was
+exhibited in a thin volume of poems by Ellery Channing; although, to
+speak the truth, there were certain portions that hissed and spluttered
+in a very disagreeable fashion. A curious phenomenon occurred in
+reference to several writers, native as well as foreign. Their books,
+though of highly respectable figure, instead of bursting into a blaze
+or even smouldering out their substance in smoke, suddenly melted away
+in a manner that proved them to be ice.
+
+If it be no lack of modesty to mention my own works, it must here be
+confessed that I looked for them with fatherly interest, but in vain.
+Too probably they were changed to vapor by the first action of the
+heat; at best, I can only hope that, in their quiet way, they
+contributed a glimmering spark or two to the splendor of the evening.
+
+“Alas! and woe is me!” thus bemoaned himself a heavy-looking gentleman
+in green spectacles. “The world is utterly ruined, and there is nothing
+to live for any longer. The business of my life is snatched from me.
+Not a volume to be had for love or money!”
+
+“This,” remarked the sedate observer beside me, “is a bookworm,—one of
+those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are
+covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas;
+and, in good earnest, now that the old stock is abolished, I do not see
+what is to become of the poor fellow. Have you no word of comfort for
+him?”
+
+“My dear sir,” said I to the desperate bookworm, “is not nature better
+than a book? Is not the human heart deeper than any system of
+philosophy? Is not life replete with more instruction than past
+observers have found it possible to write down in maxims? Be of good
+cheer. The great book of Time is still spread wide open before us; and,
+if we read it aright, it will be to us a volume of eternal truth.”
+
+“O, my books, my books, my precious printed books!” reiterated the
+forlorn bookworm. “My only reality was a bound volume; and now they
+will not leave me even a shadowy pamphlet!”
+
+In fact, the last remnant of the literature of all the ages was now
+descending upon the blazing heap in the shape of a cloud of pamphlets
+from the press of the New World. These likewise were consumed in the
+twinkling of an eye, leaving the earth, for the first time since the
+days of Cadmus, free from the plague of letters,—an enviable field for
+the authors of the next generation.
+
+“Well, and does anything remain to be done?” inquired I, somewhat
+anxiously. “Unless we set fire to the earth itself, and then leap
+boldly off into infinite space, I know not that we can carry reform to
+any farther point.”
+
+“You are vastly mistaken, my good friend,” said the observer. “Believe
+me, the fire will not be allowed to settle down without the addition of
+fuel that will startle many persons who have lent a willing hand thus
+far.”
+
+Nevertheless there appeared to be a relaxation of effort for a little
+time, during which, probably, the leaders of the movement were
+considering what should be done next. In the interval, a philosopher
+threw his theory into the flames,—a sacrifice which, by those who knew
+how to estimate it, was pronounced the most remarkable that had yet
+been made. The combustion, however, was by no means brilliant. Some
+indefatigable people, scorning to take a moment’s ease, now employed
+themselves in collecting all the withered leaves and fallen boughs of
+the forest, and thereby recruited the bonfire to a greater height than
+ever. But this was mere by-play.
+
+“Here comes the fresh fuel that I spoke of,” said my companion.
+
+To my astonishment the persons who now advanced into the vacant space
+around the mountain fire bore surplices and other priestly garments,
+mitres, crosiers, and a confusion of Popish and Protestant emblems with
+which it seemed their purpose to consummate the great act of faith.
+Crosses from the spires of old cathedrals were cast upon the heap with
+as little remorse as if the reverence of centuries passing in long
+array beneath the lofty towers had not looked up to them as the holiest
+of symbols. The font in which infants were consecrated to God, the
+sacramental vessels whence piety received the hallowed draught, were
+given to the same destruction. Perhaps it most nearly touched my heart
+to see among these devoted relics fragments of the humble
+communion-tables and undecorated pulpits which I recognized as having
+been torn from the meeting-houses of New England. Those simple edifices
+might have been permitted to retain all of sacred embellishment that
+their Puritan founders had bestowed, even though the mighty structure
+of St. Peter’s had sent its spoils to the fire of this terrible
+sacrifice. Yet I felt that these were but the externals of religion,
+and might most safely be relinquished by spirits that best knew their
+deep significance.
+
+“All is well,” said I, cheerfully. “The wood-paths shall be the aisles
+of our cathedral, the firmament itself shall be its ceiling. What needs
+an earthly roof between the Deity and his worshippers? Our faith can
+well afford to lose all the drapery that even the holiest men have
+thrown around it, and be only the more sublime in its simplicity.”
+
+“True,” said my companion; “but will they pause here?”
+
+The doubt implied in his question was well founded. In the general
+destruction of books already described, a holy volume, that stood apart
+from the catalogue of human literature, and yet, in one sense, was at
+its head, had been spared. But the Titan of innovation,—angel or fiend,
+double in his nature, and capable of deeds befitting both
+characters,—at first shaking down only the old and rotten shapes of
+things, had now, as it appeared, laid his terrible hand upon the main
+pillars which supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual
+state. The inhabitants of the earth had grown too enlightened to define
+their faith within a form of words, or to limit the spiritual by any
+analogy to our material existence. Truths which the heavens trembled at
+were now but a fable of the world’s infancy. Therefore, as the final
+sacrifice of human error, what else remained to be thrown upon the
+embers of that awful pile, except the book which, though a celestial
+revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere as
+regarded the present race of man? It was done! Upon the blazing heap of
+falsehood and worn-out truth—things that the earth had never needed, or
+had ceased to need, or had grown childishly weary of—fell the ponderous
+church Bible, the great old volume that had lain so long on the cushion
+of the pulpit, and whence the pastor’s solemn voice had given holy
+utterance on so many a Sabbath day. There, likewise, fell the family
+Bible, which the long-buried patriarch had read to his children,—in
+prosperity or sorrow, by the fireside and in the summer shade of
+trees,—and had bequeathed downward as the heirloom of generations.
+There fell the bosom Bible, the little volume that had been the soul’s
+friend of some sorely tried child of dust, who thence took courage,
+whether his trial were for life or death, steadfastly confronting both
+in the strong assurance of immortality.
+
+All these were flung into the fierce and riotous blaze; and then a
+mighty wind came roaring across the plain with a desolate howl, as if
+it were the angry lamentation of the earth for the loss of heaven’s
+sunshine; and it shook the gigantic pyramid of flame and scattered the
+cinders of half-consumed abominations around upon the spectators.
+
+“This is terrible!” said I, feeling that my check grew pale, and seeing
+a like change in the visages about me.
+
+“Be of good courage yet,” answered the man with whom I had so often
+spoken. He continued to gaze steadily at the spectacle with a singular
+calmness, as if it concerned him merely as an observer. “Be of good
+courage, nor yet exult too much; for there is far less both of good and
+evil in the effect of this bonfire than the world might be willing to
+believe.”
+
+“How can that be?” exclaimed I, impatiently. “Has it not consumed
+everything? Has it not swallowed up or melted down every human or
+divine appendage of our mortal state that had substance enough to be
+acted on by fire? Will there be anything left us to-morrow morning
+better or worse than a heap of embers and ashes?”
+
+“Assuredly there will,” said my grave friend. “Come hither to-morrow
+morning, or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite
+burned out, and you will find among the ashes everything really
+valuable that you have seen cast into the flames. Trust me, the world
+of to-morrow will again enrich itself with the gold and diamonds which
+have been cast off by the world of today. Not a truth is destroyed nor
+buried so deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last.”
+
+This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined to credit it, the
+more especially as I beheld among the wallowing flames a copy of the
+Holy Scriptures, the pages of which, instead of being blackened into
+tinder, only assumed a more dazzling whiteness as the fingermarks of
+human imperfection were purified away. Certain marginal notes and
+commentaries, it is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test,
+but without detriment to the smallest syllable that had flamed from the
+pen of inspiration.
+
+“Yes; there is the proof of what you say,” answered I, turning to the
+observer; “but if only what is evil can feel the action of the fire,
+then, surely, the conflagration has been of inestimable utility. Yet,
+if I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether the world’s
+expectation of benefit would be realized by it.”
+
+“Listen to the talk of these worthies,” said he, pointing to a group in
+front of the blazing pile; “possibly they may teach you something
+useful, without intending it.”
+
+The persons whom he indicated consisted of that brutal and most earthy
+figure who had stood forth so furiously in defence of the gallows,—the
+hangman, in short,—together with the last thief and the last murderer,
+all three of whom were clustered about the last toper. The latter was
+liberally passing the brandy bottle, which he had rescued from the
+general destruction of wines and spirits. This little convivial party
+seemed at the lowest pitch of despondency, as considering that the
+purified world must needs be utterly unlike the sphere that they had
+hitherto known, and therefore but a strange and desolate abode for
+gentlemen of their kidney.
+
+“The best counsel for all of us is,” remarked the hangman, “that, as
+soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor, I help you, my three
+friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang
+myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer.”
+
+“Poh, poh, my good fellows!” said a dark-complexioned personage, who
+now joined the group,—his complexion was indeed fearfully dark, and his
+eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; “be not so
+cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There is one
+thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and
+without which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all;
+yes, though they had burned the earth itself to a cinder.”
+
+“And what may that be?” eagerly demanded the last murderer.
+
+“What but the human heart itself?” said the dark-visaged stranger, with
+a portentous grin. “And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying
+that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong
+and misery—the same old shapes or worse ones—which they have taken such
+a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this
+livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. O, take
+my word for it, it will be the old world yet!”
+
+This brief conversation supplied me with a theme for lengthened
+thought. How sad a truth, if true it were, that man’s age-long endeavor
+for perfection had served only to render him the mockery of the evil
+principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of
+the matter! The heart, the heart, there was the little yet boundless
+sphere wherein existed the original wrong of which the crime and misery
+of this outward world were merely types. Purify that inward sphere, and
+the many shapes of evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem
+almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of
+their own accord; but if we go no deeper than the intellect, and
+strive, with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what
+is wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so unsubstantial
+that it matters little whether the bonfire, which I have so faithfully
+described, were what we choose to call a real event and a flame that
+would scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a parable of
+my own brain.
+
+
+
+
+PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK
+
+
+AT HOME
+
+From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made
+me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes,
+using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between
+myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been
+very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men
+and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father’s
+pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a
+wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of
+them, have run the course which this volume will describe. Yet there is
+room for doubt whether I should have been any better contented with
+such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,—at least, till
+after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
+trial.
+
+My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
+place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
+page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
+hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
+gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
+powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
+pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones,
+would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such
+pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
+with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the
+whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in
+imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and
+belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable
+adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering his
+sermons could have supported the good parson’s health under the mental
+toil which they cost him in composition.
+
+Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a
+warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose,
+to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
+tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a good and
+wise man after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself,
+it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any
+mode of education with which it was possible for him to be acquainted
+have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier fortune
+than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
+nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it
+was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for
+parents have an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
+children, and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and
+affection of his parents which he cannot transfer to any delegate of
+their duties, however conscientious. An orphan’s fate is hard, be he
+rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old
+gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding
+out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
+and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!
+
+I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
+of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
+fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in contact with the
+stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
+thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
+pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
+profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
+purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
+have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
+New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen;
+they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what
+they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man
+who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
+takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be
+satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent in
+its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that
+violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as
+if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,—with the
+drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
+soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence
+of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.
+
+I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
+many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which
+I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been
+suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
+vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
+ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant
+than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
+day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering
+orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one
+illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere,—of Goldsmith, who
+planned and performed his travels through France and Italy on a less
+promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various
+qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking.
+Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up
+an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I
+must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives
+were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
+Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than
+seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit
+upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I
+had written romances instead of reciting them.
+
+The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
+intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
+mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
+cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
+was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had
+collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
+were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed,
+the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence
+was its own reward, though the hope of praise also became a powerful
+incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought as I
+did then, let me beseech the reader to believe that my tales were not
+always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be
+given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus
+my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames perhaps more valuable than
+the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
+characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the
+villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book
+for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by,
+though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller.
+
+A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.
+
+I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise. The day
+promised to be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay along
+the earth and settled in minute globules on the folds of my clothes, so
+that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost. The sky was
+quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible till they grew out
+of the fog as I came close upon them. There is a hill towards the west
+whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level course through the
+village and ascending an eminence on the other side, behind which it
+disappears. The whole view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I
+paused; and, while gazing through the misty veil, it partially rose and
+swept away with so sudden an effect that a gray cloud seemed to have
+taken the aspect of a small white town. A thin vapor being still
+diffused through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog,
+whether hung in air or based on earth, appeared not less substantial
+than the edifices, and gave their own indistinctness to the whole. It
+was singular that such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.
+
+Half of the parson’s dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of it
+was a cloud; but Squire Moody’s mansion, the grandest in the village,
+was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony under the
+front window; while in another place only two red chimneys were seen
+above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence, then
+tenanted by strangers. I could not remember those with whom I had dwelt
+there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank was in the
+clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of buildings
+had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods store of Mr.
+Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike’s tobacco
+manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian
+chief in front. The white spire of the meeting-house ascended out of
+the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy base were its only
+support: or, to give a truer interpretation, the steeple was the emblem
+of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet pointing to a cloudless
+atmosphere, and catching the brightness of the east on its gilded vane.
+
+As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy intervals
+and a border of trees between the wheeltrack and the sidewalks, all so
+indistinct, and not to be traced without an effort, the whole seemed
+more like memory than reality. I would have imagined that years had
+already passed, and I was far away, contemplating that dim picture of
+my native place, which I should retain in my mind through the mist of
+time. No tears fell from my eyes among the dewdrops of the morning; nor
+does it occur to me that I heaved a sigh. In truth, I had never felt
+such a delicious excitement nor known what freedom was till that moment
+when I gave up my home and took the whole world in exchange, fluttering
+the wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to
+another through the universe. I waved my hand towards the dusky
+village, bade it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path
+but that which might lead me back. Never was Childe Harold’s sentiment
+adopted in a spirit more unlike his own.
+
+Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote. Recollecting how the knight
+and Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road to Toboso,
+I began, between jest and earnest, to feel a similar anxiety. It was
+gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon than the braying of the
+dappled ass or the neigh of Rosinante. The sun, then just above the
+horizon, shone faintly through the fog, and formed a species of rainbow
+in the west, bestriding my intended road like a gigantic portal. I had
+never known before that a bow could be generated between the sunshine
+and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but
+was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar
+rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to
+which all omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway
+of futurity.
+
+I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred miles
+of home, and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The first
+precaution was reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson Thumpcushion
+might have put an untimely catastrophe to my story; but as nobody would
+be much affected by my disgrace, and all was to be suffered in my own
+person, I know not why I cared about a name. For a week or two I
+travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any guidance except the
+whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or the green bough that
+beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed its withered finger
+onward. All my care was to be farther from home each night than the
+preceding morning.
+
+A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.
+
+One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
+and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether of
+tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree. The first which offered itself
+was a wood,—not a forest, but a trim plantation of young oaks, growing
+just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out, while they admitted
+a few straggling beams, and thus produced the most cheerful gloom
+imaginable. A brook, so small and clear, and apparently so cool, that I
+wanted to drink it up, ran under the road through a little arch of
+stone without once meeting the sun in its passage from the shade on one
+side to the shade on the other. As there was a stepping-place over the
+stone wall and a path along the rivulet, I followed it and discovered
+its source,—a spring gushing out of an old barrel.
+
+In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch of a
+tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on the
+grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me. He was a slender
+figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the finest nor
+very fashionably cut. On hearing my footsteps he started up rather
+nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young man about my
+own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been reading till my
+intrusion. His book was evidently a pocket Bible. Though I piqued
+myself at that period on my great penetration into people’s characters
+and pursuits, I could not decide whether this young man in black were
+an unfledged divine from Andover, a college student, or preparing for
+college at some academy. In either case I would quite as willingly have
+found a merrier companion; such, for instance, as the comedian with
+whom Gil Blas shared his dinner beside a fountain in Spain.
+
+After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves,
+filled and emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit the
+stranger’s classical associations, that this beautiful fountain ought
+to flow from an urn instead of an old barrel. He did not show that he
+understood the allusion, and replied very briefly, with a shyness that
+was quite out of place between persons who met in such circumstances.
+Had he treated my next observation in the same way, we should have
+parted without another word.
+
+“It is very singular,” said I,—“though doubtless there are good reasons
+for it,—that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and lavish it
+everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat. Why should
+not we find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a barrel of good
+liquor at the foot of it?”
+
+“There is a loaf of bread on the tree,” replied the stranger, without
+even smiling—at a coincidence which made me laugh. “I have something to
+eat in my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with me, you shall be
+welcome.”
+
+“I accept your offer with pleasure,” said I. “A pilgrim such as I am
+must not refuse a providential meal.”
+
+The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the tree,
+but now turned round and regarded me with great earnestness, coloring
+deeply at the same time. However, he said nothing, and produced part of
+a loaf of bread and some cheese, the former being evidently home baked,
+though some days out of the oven. The fare was good enough, with a real
+welcome, such as his appeared to be. After spreading these articles on
+the stump of a tree, he proceeded to ask a blessing on our food, an
+unexpected ceremony, and quite an impressive one at our woodland table,
+with the fountain gushing beside us and the bright sky glimmering
+through the boughs; nor did his brief petition affect me less because
+his embarrassment made his voice tremble. At the end of the meal he
+returned thanks with the same tremulous fervor.
+
+He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my necessities,
+and showed it by becoming less reserved. On my part, I professed never
+to have relished a dinner better; and, in requital of the stranger’s
+hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company to supper.
+
+“Where? At your home?” asked he.
+
+“Yes,” said I, smiling.
+
+“Perhaps our roads are not the same,” observed he.
+
+“O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way,” answered I.
+“This morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home to-night; and
+a moment ago I dined at home. To be sure, there was a certain place
+which I called home; but I have resolved not to see it again till I
+have been quite round the globe and enter the street on the east as I
+left it on the west. In the mean time, I have a home everywhere, or
+nowhere, just as you please to take it.”
+
+“Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home,” said the
+young man, with solemnity. “We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but it
+is strange that we two should meet.”
+
+I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no satisfactory
+reply. But we had eaten salt together, and it was right that we should
+form acquaintance after that ceremony as the Arabs of the desert do,
+especially as he had learned something about myself, and the courtesy
+of the country entitled me to as much information in return. I asked
+whither he was travelling.
+
+“I do not know,” said he; “but God knows.”
+
+“That is strange!” exclaimed I; “not that God should know it, but that
+you should not. And how is your road to be pointed out?”
+
+“Perhaps by an inward conviction,” he replied, looking sideways at me
+to discover whether I smiled; “perhaps by an outward sign.”
+
+“Then, believe me,” said I, “the outward sign is already granted you,
+and the inward conviction ought to follow. We are told of pious men in
+old times who committed themselves to the care of Providence, and saw
+the manifestation of its will in the slightest circumstances, as in the
+shooting of a star, the flight of a bird, or the course taken by some
+brute animal. Sometimes even a stupid ass was their guide. May I not be
+as good a one?”
+
+“I do not know,” said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.
+
+We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I
+partly apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit of
+a stray patient. Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my sanity
+as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since I was fully
+aware of my own extravagances, while he acted as wildly, and deemed it
+heavenly wisdom. We were a singular couple, strikingly contrasted, yet
+curiously assimilated, each of us remarkable enough by himself, and
+doubly so in the other’s company. Without any formal compact, we kept
+together day after day till our union appeared permanent. Even had I
+seen nothing to love and admire in him, I could never have thought of
+deserting one who needed me continually; for I never knew a person; not
+even a woman, so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was,—so
+painfully shy, so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so often
+depressed by a weight within himself.
+
+I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before the
+public. A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of relinquishing
+the immunities of a private character, and giving every man, and for
+money too, the right which no man yet possessed, of treating me with
+open scorn. But about a week after contracting the above alliance I
+made my bow to an audience of nine persons, seven of whom hissed me in
+a very disagreeable manner, and not without good cause. Indeed, the
+failure was so signal that it would have been mere swindling to retain
+the money, which had been paid on my implied contract to give its value
+of amusement. So I called in the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole
+receipts, a mighty sum and was gratified with a round of applause by
+way of offset to the hisses. This event would have looked most horrible
+in anticipation,—a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or
+hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning blush;
+but the reality was not so very hard to bear. It is a fact that I was
+more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to
+my companion on the same evening. In my own behalf I was angry and
+excited, not depressed; my blood ran quick, my spirits rose buoyantly,
+and I had never felt such a confidence of future success and
+determination to achieve it as at that trying moment. I resolved to
+persevere, if it were only to wring the reluctant praise from my
+enemies.
+
+Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle trade;
+now I recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole powers
+cultivated to the utmost, and exerted with the same prodigality as if I
+were speaking for a great party or for the nation at large on the floor
+of the Capitol. No talent or attainment could come amiss; everything,
+indeed, was requisite,—wide observation, varied knowledge, deep
+thoughts, and sparkling ones; pathos and levity, and a mixture of both,
+like sunshine in a raindrop; lofty imagination, veiling itself in the
+garb of common life; and the practised art which alone could render
+these gifts, and more than these, available. Not that I ever hoped to
+be thus qualified. But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
+impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,
+I did my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of every defect;
+and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next
+attempt. It is one of my few sources of pride, that, ridiculous as the
+object was, I followed it up with the firmness and energy of a man.
+
+I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and
+kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of
+the moment; though I cannot remember ever to have told a tale which did
+not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and acquire a novelty
+of aspect as often as I repeated it. Oddly enough, my success was
+generally in proportion to the difference between the conception and
+accomplishment. I provided two or more commencements and catastrophes
+to many of the tales,—a happy expedient, suggested by the double sets
+of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the suits in Sir Piercy
+Shafton’s wardrobe. But my best efforts had a unity, a wholeness, and a
+separate character that did not admit of this sort of mechanism.
+
+THE VILLAGE THEATRE
+
+About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived at
+a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return from a
+summer’s campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a series of
+dramatic exhibitions. A moderately sized hall of the tavern had been
+converted into a theatre. The performances that evening were, The Heir
+at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the recitation of Alexander’s
+Feast between the play and farce. The house was thin and dull. But the
+next day there appeared to be brighter prospects, the playbills
+announcing at every corner, on the town-pump, and—awful sacrilege!—on
+the very door of the meeting-house, an Unprecedented Attraction! After
+setting forth the ordinary entertainments of a theatre, the public were
+informed, in the hugest type that the printing-office could supply,
+that the manager had been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement
+with the celebrated Story-Teller. He would make his first appearance
+that evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s
+Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
+audiences in all the principal cities. This outrageous flourish of
+trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
+made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
+celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the tale, it could hardly
+have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an unfilled
+plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether Mr.
+Higginbotham should live or die.
+
+In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
+the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice, in
+tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
+school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
+address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.
+
+In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
+took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion. My
+spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had already
+learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success. Passing a
+small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning dimly and a
+few people were entering the door, I went in with them, and saw my
+friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected about fifteen hearers,
+mostly females. Just as I entered he was beginning to pray in accents
+so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of his
+efforts both with God and man. There was room for distrust in regard to
+the latter. At the conclusion of the prayer several of the little
+audience went out, leaving him to begin his discourse under such
+discouraging circumstances, added to his natural and agonizing
+diffidence. Knowing that my presence on these occasions increased his
+embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a dusky place near the door,
+and now stole softly out.
+
+On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
+being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
+much the better chance for the Story-Teller. The bar was thronged with
+customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in the
+hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of
+impatient thunder,—all symptoms of all overflowing house and an eager
+audience. I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood at the side
+scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex. If a gentleman,
+how could he have performed the singing girl the night before in No
+Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why did she enact Young Norval, and now
+wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little
+Pickle? In either case the dress was pretty and the wearer bewitching;
+so that, at the proper moment, I stepped forward with a gay heart and a
+hold one; while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded at many
+a country ball, and the curtain, as it rose, discovered something like
+a country bar-room. Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a
+tale.
+
+The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
+clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there, it
+might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted
+me. The good people of the town, knowing that the world contained
+innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them, took it for
+granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome was but a feeble
+echo of those which had thundered around me in lofty theatres. Such an
+enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each person seemed a Briarcus
+clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping his feet and several cudgels
+in play with stamping and thumping on the floor; while the ladies
+flourished their white cambric handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow
+and red bandanna, like the flags of different nations. After such a
+salutation, the celebrated Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce
+so humble an affair as Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.
+
+This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
+afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to my
+shame, did I spare. I never knew the “magic of a name” till I used that
+of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated it, there were louder bursts
+of merriment than those which responded to what, in my opinion, were
+more legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the piece was
+incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which Little
+Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had fastened
+to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the queerest
+gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The audience,
+supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this long tail
+behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a tumult of
+approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches broke beneath
+them and left one whole row of my admirers on the floor. Even in that
+predicament they continued their applause. In after times, when I had
+grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example how much of
+fame is humbug; how much the meed of what our better nature blushes at;
+how much an accident; how much bestowed on mistaken principles; and how
+small and poor the remnant. From pit and boxes there was now a
+universal call for the Story-Teller.
+
+That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I left
+the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given me a
+letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to my
+assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
+Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
+conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no other
+than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it, affected me
+most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian
+standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the
+players,—the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy
+girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than modest,—pointing to these with
+solemn ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type
+of the austere duty, and they of the vanities of life.
+
+I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
+hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
+theatre. Another train of thought came over me. The stern old man
+appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
+authority with love as a father might, and even bending his venerable
+head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his own mistaken
+discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then held the letter in
+the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in
+my mind, and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a style of
+paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation which I could not have
+resisted had I but risked the trial. The thought still haunts me that
+then I made my irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.
+
+Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed me
+to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in spite of
+a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the liberal
+offers of the manager. As we walked onward, following the same road, on
+two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with
+tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my life.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES FROM MEMORY
+
+
+THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS
+
+It was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise from
+Bartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extends
+between mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often as
+level as a church-aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we had
+been loitering towards the heart of the White Mountains,—those old
+crystal hills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our distant
+wanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after height had
+risen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang below
+the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, those
+avalanches of earth, stones, and trees, which descend into the hollows,
+leaving vestiges of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation
+of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side, and a
+group of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco,
+right towards the centre of that group, as if to climb above the clouds
+in its passage to the farther region.
+
+In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
+Northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart
+through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrous
+path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was
+travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he
+passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across
+his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it
+asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of
+hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain’s
+inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side.
+This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted
+to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of
+those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not
+to the conception, of Omnipotence.
+
+
+We had now reached a narrow passage, which showed almost the appearance
+of having been cut by human strength and artifice in the solid rock.
+There was a wall of granite on each side, high and precipitous,
+especially on our right, and so smooth that a few evergreens could
+hardly find foothold enough to grow there. This is the entrance, or, in
+the direction we were going, the extremity, of the romantic defile of
+the Notch. Before emerging from it, the rattling of wheels approached
+behind us, and a stage-coach rumbled out of the mountain, with seats on
+top and trunks behind, and a smart driver, in a drab great-coat,
+touching the wheel-horses with the whip-stock and reigning in the
+leaders. To my mind there was a sort of poetry in such an incident,
+hardly inferior to what would have accompanied the painted array of an
+Indian war-party gliding forth from the same wild chasm. All the
+passengers, except a very fat lady on the back seat, had alighted. One
+was a mineralogist, a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black,
+bearing a heavy hammer, with which he did great damage to the
+precipices, and put the fragments in his pocket. Another was a
+well-dressed young man, who carried an operaglass set in gold, and
+seemed to be making a quotation from some of Byron’s rhapsodies on
+mountain scenery. There was also a trader, returning from Portland to
+the upper part of Vermont; and a fair young girl, with a very faint
+bloom like one of those pale and delicate flowers which sometimes occur
+among alpine cliffs.
+
+They disappeared, and we followed them, passing through a deep pine
+forest, which for some miles allowed us to see nothing but its own
+dismal shade. Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,
+surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out the sunshine
+long before it left the external world. It was here that we obtained
+our first view, except at a distance, of the principal group of
+mountains. They are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a
+proper mood, yet, by their breadth of base and the long ridges which
+support them, give the idea of immense bulk rather than of towering
+height. Mount Washington, indeed, looked near to Heaven: he was white
+with snow a mile downward, and had caught the only cloud that was
+sailing through the atmosphere to veil his head. Let us forget the
+other names of American statesmen that have been stamped upon these
+hills, but still call the loftiest WASHINGTON. Mountains are Earth’s
+undecaying monuments. They must stand while she endures, and never
+should be consecrated to the mere great men of their own age and
+country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is universal, and
+whom all time will render illustrious.
+
+The air, not often sultry in this elevated region, nearly two thousand
+feet above the sea, was now sharp and cold, like that of a clear
+November evening in the lowlands. By morning, probably, there would be
+a frost, if not a snowfall, on the grass and rye, and an icy surface
+over the standing water. I was glad to perceive a prospect of
+comfortable quarters in a house which we were approaching, and of
+pleasant company in the guests who were assembled at the door.
+
+OUR EVENING PARTY AMONG THE MOUNTAINS
+
+WE stood in front of a good substantial farm-house, of old date in that
+wild country. A sign over the door denoted it to be the White Mountain
+Post-Office,—an establishment which distributes letters and newspapers
+to perhaps a score of persons, comprising the population of two or
+three townships among the hills. The broad and weighty antlers of a
+deer, “a stag of ten,” were fastened at the corner of the house; a
+fox’s bushy tail was nailed beneath them; and a huge black paw lay on
+the ground, newly severed and still bleeding, the trophy of a
+bear-hunt. Among several persons collected about the doorsteps, the
+most remarkable was a sturdy mountaineer, of six feet two, and
+corresponding bulk, with a heavy set of features, such as might be
+moulded on his own blacksmith’s anvil, but yet indicative of mother wit
+and rough humor. As we appeared, he uplifted a tin trumpet, four or
+five feet long, and blew a tremendous blast, either in honor of our
+arrival or to awaken an echo from the opposite hill.
+
+Ethan Crawford’s guests were of such a motley description as to form
+quite a picturesque group, seldom seen together except at some place
+like this, at once the pleasure-house of fashionable tourists and the
+homely inn of country travellers. Among the company at the door were
+the mineralogist and the owner of the gold operaglass whom we had
+encountered in the Notch; two Georgian gentlemen, who had chilled their
+Southern blood that morning on the top of Mount Washington; a physician
+and his wife from Conway; a trader of Burlington and an old squire of
+the Green Mountains; and two young married couples, all the way from
+Massachusetts, on the matrimonial jaunt. Besides these strangers, the
+rugged county of Coos, in which we were, was represented by half a
+dozen wood-cutters, who had slain a bear in the forest and smitten off
+his paw.
+
+I had joined the party, and had a moment’s leisure to examine them
+before the echo of Ethan’s blast returned from the hill. Not one, but
+many echoes had caught up the harsh and tuneless sound, untwisted its
+complicated threads, and found a thousand aerial harmonies in one stern
+trumpet-tone. It was a distinct yet distant and dream-like symphony of
+melodious instruments, as if an airy band had been hidden on the
+hillside and made faint music at the summons. No subsequent trial
+produced so clear, delicate, and spiritual a concert as the first. A
+field-piece was then discharged from the top of a neighboring hill, and
+gave birth to one long reverberation, which ran round the circle of
+mountains in an unbroken chain of sound and rolled away without a
+separate echo. After these experiments, the cold atmosphere drove us
+all into the house, with the keenest appetites for supper.
+
+It did one’s heart good to see the great fires that were kindled in the
+parlor and bar-room, especially the latter, where the fireplace was
+built of rough stone, and might have contained the trunk of an old tree
+for a backlog.
+
+A man keeps a comfortable hearth when his own forest is at his very
+door. In the parlor, when the evening was fairly set in, we held our
+hands before our eyes to shield them from the ruddy glow, and began a
+pleasant variety of conversation. The mineralogist and the physician
+talked about the invigorating qualities of the mountain air, and its
+excellent effect on Ethan Crawford’s father, an old man of
+seventy-five, with the unbroken frame of middle life. The two brides
+and the doctor’s wife held a whispered discussion, which, by their
+frequent titterings and a blush or two, seemed to have reference to the
+trials or enjoyments of the matrimonial state. The bridegrooms sat
+together in a corner, rigidly silent, like Quakers whom the spirit
+moveth not, being still in the odd predicament of bashfulness towards
+their own young wives. The Green Mountain squire chose me for his
+companion, and described the difficulties he had met with half a
+century ago in travelling from the Connecticut River through the Notch
+to Conway, now a single day’s journey, though it had cost him eighteen.
+The Georgians held the album between them, and favored us with the few
+specimens of its contents, which they considered ridiculous enough to
+be worth hearing. One extract met with deserved applause. It was a
+“Sonnet to the Snow on Mount Washington,” and had been contributed that
+very afternoon, bearing a signature of great distinction in magazines
+and annuals. The lines were elegant and full of fancy, but too remote
+from familiar sentiment, and cold as their subject, resembling those
+curious specimens of crystallized vapor which I observed next day on
+the mountain-top. The poet was understood to be the young gentleman of
+the gold opera-glass, who heard our laudatory remarks with the
+composure of a veteran.
+
+Such was our party, and such their ways of amusement. But on a winter
+evening another set of guests assembled at the hearth where these
+summer travellers were now sitting. I once had it in contemplation to
+spend a month hereabouts, in sleighing-time, for the sake of studying
+the yeomen of New England, who then elbow each other through the Notch
+by hundreds, on their way to Portland. There could be no better school
+for such a purpose than Ethan Crawford’s inn. Let the student go
+thither in December, sit down with the teamsters at their meals, share
+their evening merriment, and repose with them at night when every bed
+has its three occupants, and parlor, bar-room, and kitchen are strewn
+with slumberers around the fire. Then let him rise before daylight,
+button his great-coat, muffle up his ears, and stride with the
+departing caravan a mile or two, to see how sturdily they make head
+against the blast. A treasure of characteristic traits will repay all
+inconveniences, even should a frozen nose be of the number.
+
+The conversation of our party soon became more animated and sincere,
+and we recounted some traditions of the Indians, who believed that the
+father and mother of their race were saved from a deluge by ascending
+the peak of Mount Washington. The children of that pair have been
+overwhelmed, and found no such refuge. In the mythology of the savage,
+these mountains were afterwards considered sacred and inaccessible,
+full of unearthly wonders, illuminated at lofty heights by the blaze of
+precious stones, and inhabited by deities, who sometimes shrouded
+themselves in the snow-storm and came down on the lower world. There
+are few legends more poetical than that of the “Great Carbuncle” of the
+White Mountains. The belief was communicated to the English settlers,
+and is hardly yet extinct, that a gem, of such immense size as to be
+seen shining miles away, hangs from a rock over a clear, deep lake,
+high up among the hills. They who had once beheld its splendor were
+enthralled with an unutterable yearning to possess it. But a spirit
+guarded that inestimable jewel, and bewildered the adventurer with a
+dark mist from the enchanted lake. Thus life was worn away in the vain
+search for an unearthly treasure, till at length the deluded one went
+up the mountain, still sanguine as in youth, but returned no more. On
+this theme methinks I could frame a tale with a deep moral.
+
+The hearts of the palefaces would not thrill to these superstitions of
+the red men, though we spoke of them in the centre of their haunted
+region. The habits and sentiments of that departed people were too
+distinct from those of their successors to find much real sympathy. It
+has often been a matter of regret to me that I was shut out from the
+most peculiar field of American fiction by an inability to see any
+romance, or poetry, or grandeur, or beauty in the Indian character, at
+least till such traits were pointed out by others. I do abhor an Indian
+story. Yet no writer can be more secure of a permanent place in our
+literature than the biographer of the Indian chiefs. His subject, as
+referring to tribes which have mostly vanished from the earth, gives
+him a right to be placed on a classic shelf, apart from the merits
+which will sustain him there.
+
+I made inquiries whether, in his researches about these parts, our
+mineralogist had found the three “Silver Hills” which an Indian sachem
+sold to an Englishman nearly two hundred years ago, and the treasure of
+which the posterity of the purchaser have been looking for ever since.
+But the man of science had ransacked every hill along the Saco, and
+knew nothing of these prodigious piles of wealth. By this time, as
+usual with men on the eve of great adventure, we had prolonged our
+session deep into the night, considering how early we were to set out
+on our six miles’ ride to the foot of Mount Washington. There was now a
+general breaking up. I scrutinized the faces of the two bridegrooms,
+and saw but little probability of their leaving the bosom of earthly
+bliss, in the first week of the honeymoon and at the frosty hour of
+three, to climb above the clouds; nor, when I felt how sharp the wind
+was as it rushed through a broken pane and eddied between the chinks of
+my unplastered chamber, did I anticipate much alacrity on my own part,
+though we were to seek for the “Great Carbuncle.”
+
+THE CANAL-BOAT
+
+I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal. In my imagination
+De Witt Clinton was an enchanter, who had waved his magic wand from the
+Hudson to Lake Erie and united them by a watery highway, crowded with
+the commerce of two worlds, till then inaccessible to each other. This
+simple and mighty conception had conferred inestimable value on spots
+which Nature seemed to have thrown carelessly into the great body of
+the earth, without foreseeing that they could ever attain importance. I
+pictured the surprise of the sleepy Dutchmen when the new river first
+glittered by their doors, bringing them hard cash or foreign
+commodities in exchange for their hitherto unmarketable produce. Surely
+the water of this canal must be the most fertilizing of all fluids; for
+it causes towns, with their masses of brick and stone, their churches
+and theatres, their business and hubbub, their luxury and refinement,
+their gay dames and polished citizens, to spring up, till in time the
+wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings,
+through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany. I embarked about
+thirty miles below Utica, determining to voyage along the whole extent
+of the canal at least twice in the course of the summer.
+
+Behold us, then, fairly afloat, with three horses harnessed to our
+vessel, like the steeds of Neptune to a huge scallop-shell in
+mythological pictures. Bound to a distant port, we had neither chart
+nor compass, nor cared about the wind, nor felt the heaving of a
+billow, nor dreaded shipwreck, however fierce the tempest, in our
+adventurous navigation of an interminable mudpuddle; for a mudpuddle it
+seemed, and as dark and turbid as if every kennel in the land paid
+contribution to it. With an imperceptible current, it holds its drowsy
+way through all the dismal swamps and unimpressive scenery that could
+be found between the great lakes and the sea-coast. Yet there is
+variety enough, both on the surface of the canal and along its banks,
+to amuse the traveller, if an overpowering tedium did not deaden his
+perceptions.
+
+Sometimes we met a black and rusty-looking vessel, laden with lumber,
+salt from Syracuse, or Genesee flour, and shaped at both ends like a
+square-toed boot, as if it had two sterns, and were fated always to
+advance backward. On its deck would be a square hut, and a woman seen
+through the window at her household work, with a little tribe of
+children who perhaps had been born in this strange dwelling and knew no
+other home. Thus, while the husband smoked his pipe at the helm and the
+eldest son rode one of the horses, on went the family, travelling
+hundreds of miles in their own house and carrying their fireside with
+them. The most frequent species of craft were the “line-boats,” which
+had a cabin at each end, and a great bulk of barrels, bales, and boxes
+in the midst, or light packets like our own decked all over with a row
+of curtained windows from stem to stern, and a drowsy face at every
+one. Once we encountered a boat of rude construction, painted all in
+gloomy black, and manned by three Indians, who gazed at us in silence
+and with a singular fixedness of eye. Perhaps these three alone, among
+the ancient possessors of the land, had attempted to derive benefit
+from the white mail’s mighty projects and float along the current of
+his enterprise. Not long after, in the midst of a swamp and beneath a
+clouded sky, we overtook a vessel that seemed full of mirth and
+sunshine. It contained a little colony of Swiss on their way to
+Michigan, clad in garments of strange fashion and gay colors, scarlet,
+yellow, and bright blue, singing, laughing, and making merry in odd
+tones and a babble of outlandish words. One pretty damsel, with a
+beautiful pair of naked white arms, addressed a mirthful remark to me.
+She spoke in her native tongue, and I retorted in good English, both of
+us laughing heartily at each other’s unintelligible wit. I cannot
+describe how pleasantly this incident affected me. These honest Swiss
+were all itinerant community of jest and fun journeying through a
+gloomy land and among a dull race of money-getting drudges, meeting
+none to understand their mirth, and only one to sympathize with it, yet
+still retaining the happy lightness of their own spirit.
+
+Had I been on my feet at the time instead of sailing slowly along in a
+dirty canal-boat, I should often have paused to contemplate the
+diversified panorama along the banks of the canal. Sometimes the scene
+was a forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away occasionally
+and receding from a lonely tract, covered with dismal black stumps,
+where, on the verge of the canal, might be seen a log-cottage and a
+sallow-faced woman at the window. Lean and aguish, she looked like
+poverty personified, half clothed, half fed, and dwelling in a desert,
+while a tide of wealth was sweeping by her door. Two or three miles
+farther would bring us to a lock, where the slight impediment to
+navigation had created a little mart of trade. Here would be found
+commodities of all sorts, enumerated in yellow letters on the
+window-shutters of a small grocery-store, the owner of which had set
+his soul to the gathering of coppers and small change, buying and
+selling through the week, and counting his gains on the blessed
+Sabbath. The next scene might be the dwelling-houses and stores of a
+thriving village, built of wood or small gray stones, a church-spire
+rising in the midst, and generally two taverns, bearing over their
+piazzas the pompous titles of “hotel,” “exchange,” “tontine,” or
+“coffee-house.” Passing on, we glide now into the unquiet heart of an
+inland city,—of Utica, for instance,—and find ourselves amid piles of
+brick, crowded docks and quays, rich warehouses, and a busy population.
+We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the place, like a stream and
+eddy whirling us along with it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes
+the canal, flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched bridges
+of hewn stone. Onward, also, go we, till the hum and bustle of
+struggling enterprise die away behind us and we are threading an avenue
+of the ancient woods again.
+
+This sounds not amiss in description, but was so tiresome in reality
+that we were driven to the most childish expedients for amusement. An
+English traveller paraded the deck, with a rifle in his walking-stick,
+and waged war on squirrels and woodpeckers, sometimes sending an
+unsuccessful bullet among flocks of tame ducks and geese which abound
+in the dirty water of the canal. I, also, pelted these foolish birds
+with apples, and smiled at the ridiculous earnestness of their
+scrambles for the prize while the apple bobbed about like a thing of
+life. Several little accidents afforded us good-natured diversion. At
+the moment of changing horses the tow-rope caught a Massachusetts
+farmer by the leg and threw him down in a very indescribable posture,
+leaving a purple mark around his sturdy limb. A new passenger fell flat
+on his back in attempting to step on deck as the boat emerged from
+under a bridge. Another, in his Sunday clothes, as good luck would have
+it, being told to leap aboard from the bank, forthwith plunged up to
+his third waistcoat-button in the canal, and was fished out in a very
+pitiable plight, not at all amended by our three rounds of applause.
+Anon a Virginia schoolmaster, too intent on a pocket Virgil to heed the
+helmsman’s warning, “Bridge! bridge!” was saluted by the said bridge on
+his knowledge-box. I had prostrated myself like a pagan before his
+idol, but heard the dull, leaden sound of the contact, and fully
+expected to see the treasures of the poor man’s cranium scattered about
+the deck. However, as there was no harm done, except a large bump on
+the head, and probably a corresponding dent in the bridge, the rest of
+us exchanged glances and laughed quietly. O, bow pitiless are idle
+people!
+
+
+The table being now lengthened through the cabin and spread for supper,
+the next twenty minutes were the pleasantest I had spent on the canal,
+the same space at dinner excepted. At the close of the meal it had
+become dusky enough for lamplight. The rain pattered unceasingly on the
+deck, and sometimes came with a sullen rush against the windows, driven
+by the wind as it stirred through an opening of the forest. The
+intolerable dulness of the scene engendered an evil spirit in me.
+Perceiving that the Englishman was taking notes in a memorandum-book,
+with occasional glances round the cabin, I presumed that we were all to
+figure in a future volume of travels, and amused my ill-humor by
+falling into the probable vein of his remarks. He would hold up an
+imaginary mirror, wherein our reflected faces would appear ugly and
+ridiculous, yet still retain all undeniable likeness to the originals.
+Then, with more sweeping malice, he would make these caricatures the
+representatives of great classes of my countrymen.
+
+He glanced at the Virginia schoolmaster, a Yankee by birth, who, to
+recreate himself, was examining a freshman from Schenectady College in
+the conjugation of a Greek verb. Him the Englishman would portray as
+the scholar of America, and compare his erudition to a school-boy’s
+Latin theme made up of scraps ill-selected and worse put together. Next
+the tourist looked at the Massachusetts farmer, who was delivering a
+dogmatic harangue on the iniquity of Sunday mails. Here was the
+far-famed yeoman of New England; his religion, writes the Englishman,
+is gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and
+illiberality at all times; his boasted information is merely an
+abstract and compound of newspaper paragraphs, Congress debates, caucus
+harangues, and the argument and judge’s charge in his own lawsuits. The
+book-monger cast his eye at a Detroit merchant, and began scribbling
+faster than ever. In this sharp-eyed man, this lean man, of wrinkled
+brow, we see daring enterprise and close-fisted avarice combined. Here
+is the worshipper of Mammon at noonday; here is the three times
+bankrupt, richer after every ruin; here, in one word, (O wicked
+Englishman to say it!) here is the American. He lifted his eyeglass to
+inspect a Western lady, who at once became aware of the glance,
+reddened, and retired deeper into the female part of the cabin. Here
+was the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of
+America,—shrinking when no evil is intended, and sensitive like
+diseased flesh, that thrills if you but point at it; and strangely
+modest, without confidence in the modesty of other people; and
+admirably pure, with such a quick apprehension of all impurity.
+
+In this manner I went all through the cabin, hitting everybody as hard
+a lash as I could, and laying the whole blame on the infernal
+Englishman. At length I caught the eyes of my own image in the
+looking-glass, where a number of the party were likewise reflected, and
+among them the Englishman, who at that moment was intently observing
+myself.
+
+
+The crimson curtain being let down between the ladies and gentlemen,
+the cabin became a bedchamber for twenty persons, who were laid on
+shelves one above another. For a long time our various incommodities
+kept us all awake except five or six, who were accustomed to sleep
+nightly amid the uproar of their own snoring, and had little to dread
+from any other species of disturbance. It is a curious fact that these
+snorers had been the most quiet people in the boat while awake, and
+became peace-breakers only when others cease to be so, breathing tumult
+out of their repose. Would it were possible to affix a wind-instrument
+to the nose, and thus make melody of a snore, so that a sleeping lover
+might serenade his mistress or a congregation snore a psalm-tune!
+Other, though fainter, sounds than these contributed to my
+restlessness. My head was close to the crimson curtain,—the sexual
+division of the boat,—behind which I continually heard whispers and
+stealthy footsteps; the noise of a comb laid on the table or a slipper
+dropped on the floor; the twang, like a broken harp-string, caused by
+loosening a tight belt; the rustling of a gown in its descent; and the
+unlacing of a pair of stays. My ear seemed to have the properties of an
+eye; a visible image pestered my fancy in the darkness; the curtain was
+withdrawn between me and the Western lady, who yet disrobed herself
+without a blush.
+
+Finally all was hushed in that quarter. Still I was more broad awake
+than through the whole preceding day, and felt a feverish impulse to
+toss my limbs miles apart and appease the unquietness of mind by that
+of matter. Forgetting that my berth was hardly so wide as a coffin, I
+turned suddenly over and fell like an avalanche on the floor, to the
+disturbance of the whole community of sleepers. As there were no bones
+broken, I blessed the accident and went on deck. A lantern was burning
+at each end of the boat, and one of the crew was stationed at the bows,
+keeping watch, as mariners do on the ocean. Though the rain had ceased,
+the sky was all one cloud, and the darkness so intense that there
+seemed to be no world except the little space on which our lanterns
+glimmered. Yet it was an impressive scene.
+
+We were traversing the “long level,” a dead flat between Utica and
+Syracuse, where the canal has not rise or fall enough to require a lock
+for nearly seventy miles. There can hardly be a more dismal tract of
+country. The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white-cedar,
+black-ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now
+decayed and death-struck by the partial draining of the swamp into the
+great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected
+from pools of stagnant water which stretched far in among the trunks of
+the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage. But generally the tall
+stems and intermingled branches were naked, and brought into strong
+relief amid the surrounding gloom by the whiteness of their decay.
+Often we beheld the prostrate form of some old sylvan giant which had
+fallen and crushed down smaller trees under its immense ruin. In spots
+where destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a
+hundred trunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground,
+resting on their shattered limbs or tossing them desperately into the
+darkness, but all of one ashy white, all naked together, in desolate
+confusion. Thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing
+as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it,
+the scene was ghostlike,—the very land of unsubstantial things, whither
+dreams might betake themselves when they quit the slumberer’s brain.
+
+My fancy found another emblem. The wild nature of America had been
+driven to this desert-place by the encroachments of civilized man. And
+even here, where the savage queen was throned on the ruins of her
+empire, did we penetrate, a vulgar and worldly throng, intruding on her
+latest solitude. In other lands decay sits among fallen palaces; but
+here her home is in the forests.
+
+Looking ahead, I discerned a distant light, announcing the approach of
+another boat, which soon passed us, and proved to be a rusty old
+scow,—just such a craft as the “Flying Dutchman” would navigate on the
+canal. Perhaps it was that celebrated personage himself whom I
+imperfectly distinguished at the helm in a glazed cap and rough
+great-coat, with a pipe in his mouth, leaving the fumes of tobacco a
+hundred yards behind. Shortly after our boatman blew a horn, sending a
+long and melancholy note through the forest avenue, as a signal for
+some watcher in the wilderness to be ready with a change of horses. We
+had proceeded a mile or two with our fresh team when the tow-rope got
+entangled in a fallen branch on the edge of the canal, and caused a
+momentary delay, during which I went to examine the phosphoric light of
+an old tree a little within the forest. It was not the first delusive
+radiance that I had followed.
+
+The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly converted into a mass of
+diseased splendor, which threw a ghastliness around. Being full of
+conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light,
+illumining decay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around the
+dead man without warming him, or of genius when it owes its brilliancy
+to moral rottenness, and was thinking that such ghostlike torches were
+just fit to light up this dead forest or to blaze coldly in tombs,
+when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I
+recollected myself, and discovered the lanterns glimmering far away.
+
+“Boat ahoy!” shouted I, making a trumpet of my closed fists.
+
+Though the cry must have rung for miles along that hollow passage of
+the woods, it produced no effect. These packet-boats make up for their
+snail-like pace by never loitering day nor night, especially for those
+who have paid their fare. Indeed, the captain had an interest in
+getting rid of me; for I was his creditor for a breakfast.
+
+“They are gone, Heaven be praised!” ejaculated I; “for I cannot
+possibly overtake them. Here am I, on the ‘long level,’ at midnight,
+with the comfortable prospect of a walk to Syracuse, where my baggage
+will be left. And now to find a house or shed wherein to pass the
+night.” So thinking aloud, I took a flambeau from the old tree,
+burning, but consuming not, to light my steps withal, and, like a
+jack-o’-the-lantern, set out on my midnight tour.
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD APPLE DEALER
+
+
+The lover of the moral picturesque may sometimes find what he, seeks in
+a character which is nevertheless of too negative a description to be
+seized upon and represented to the imaginative vision by word-painting.
+As an instance, I remember an old man who carries on a little trade of
+gingerbread and apples at the depot of one of our railroads. While
+awaiting the departure of the cars, my observation, flitting to and fro
+among the livelier characteristics of the scene, has often settled
+insensibly upon this almost hueless object. Thus, unconsciously to
+myself and unsuspected by him, I have studied the old apple-dealer
+until he has become a naturalized citizen of my inner world. How little
+would he imagine—poor, neglected, friendless, unappreciated, and with
+little that demands appreciation—that the mental eye of an utter
+stranger has so often reverted to his figure! Many a noble form, many a
+beautiful face, has flitted before me and vanished like a shadow. It is
+a strange witchcraft whereby this faded and featureless old
+apple-dealer has gained a settlement in my memory.
+
+He is a small man, with gray hair and gray stubble beard, and is
+invariably clad in a shabby surtout of snuff-color, closely buttoned,
+and half concealing a pair of gray pantaloons; the whole dress, though
+clean and entire, being evidently flimsy with much wear. His face,
+thin, withered, furrowed, and with features which even age has failed
+to render impressive, has a frost-bitten aspect. It is a moral frost
+which no physical warmth or comfortableness could counteract. The
+summer sunshine may fling its white heat upon him or the good fire of
+the depot room may slake him the focus of its blaze on a winter’s day;
+but all in vain; for still the old roan looks as if he were in a frosty
+atmosphere, with scarcely warmth enough to keep life in the region
+about his heart. It is a patient, long-suffering, quiet, hopeless,
+shivering aspect. He is not desperate,—that, though its etymology
+implies no more, would be too positive an expression,—but merely devoid
+of hope. As all his past life, probably, offers no spots of brightness
+to his memory, so he takes his present poverty and discomfort as
+entirely a matter of course! he thinks it the definition of existence,
+so far as himself is concerned, to be poor, cold, and uncomfortable. It
+may be added, that time has not thrown dignity as a mantle over the old
+man’s figure: there is nothing venerable about him: you pity him
+without a scruple.
+
+He sits on a bench in the depot room; and before him, on the floor, are
+deposited two baskets of a capacity to contain his whole stock in
+trade. Across from one basket to the other extends a board, on which is
+displayed a plate of cakes and gingerbread, some russet and red-cheeked
+apples, and a box containing variegated sticks of candy, together with
+that delectable condiment known by children as Gibraltar rock, neatly
+done up in white paper. There is likewise a half-peck measure of
+cracked walnuts and two or three tin half-pints or gills filled with
+the nut-kernels, ready for purchasers.
+
+Such are the small commodities with which our old friend comes daily
+before the world, ministering to its petty needs and little freaks of
+appetite, and seeking thence the solid subsistence—so far as he may
+subsist of his life.
+
+A slight observer would speak of the old man’s quietude; but, on closer
+scrutiny, you discover that there is a continual unrest within him,
+which somewhat resembles the fluttering action of the nerves in a
+corpse from which life has recently departed. Though he never exhibits
+any violent action, and, indeed, might appear to be sitting quite
+still, yet you perceive, when his minuter peculiarities begin to be
+detected, that he is always making some little movement or other. He
+looks anxiously at his plate of cakes or pyramid of apples and slightly
+alters their arrangement, with an evident idea that a great deal
+depends on their being disposed exactly thus and so. Then for a moment
+he gazes out of the window; then he shivers quietly and folds his arms
+across his breast, as if to draw himself closer within himself, and
+thus keep a flicker of warmth in his lonesome heart. Now he turns again
+to his merchandise of cakes, apples, and candy, and discovers that this
+cake or that apple, or yonder stick of red and white candy, has somehow
+got out of its proper position. And is there not a walnut-kernel too
+many or too few in one of those small tin measures? Again the whole
+arrangement appears to be settled to his mind; but, in the course of a
+minute or two, there will assuredly be something to set right. At
+times, by an indescribable shadow upon his features, too quiet,
+however, to be noticed until you are familiar with his ordinary aspect,
+the expression of frostbitten, patient despondency becomes very
+touching. It seems as if just at that instant the suspicion occurred to
+him that, in his chill decline of life, earning scanty bread by selling
+cakes, apples, and candy, he is a very miserable old fellow.
+
+But, if he thinks so, it is a mistake. He can never suffer the extreme
+of misery, because the tone of his whole being is too much subdued for
+him to feel anything acutely.
+
+Occasionally one of the passengers, to while away a tedious interval,
+approaches the old man, inspects the articles upon his board, and even
+peeps curiously into the two baskets. Another, striding to and fro
+along the room, throws a look at the apples and gingerbread at every
+turn. A third, it may be of a more sensitive and delicate texture of
+being, glances shyly thitherward, cautious not to excite expectations
+of a purchaser while yet undetermined whether to buy. But there appears
+to be no need of such a scrupulous regard to our old friend’s feelings.
+True, he is conscious of the remote possibility to sell a cake or an
+apple; but innumerable disappointments have rendered him so far a
+philosopher, that, even if the purchased article should be returned, he
+will consider it altogether in the ordinary train of events. He speaks
+to none, and makes no sign of offering his wares to the public: not
+that he is deterred by pride, but by the certain conviction that such
+demonstrations would not increase his custom. Besides, this activity in
+business would require an energy that never could have been a
+characteristic of his almost passive disposition even in youth.
+Whenever an actual customer customer appears the old man looks up with
+a patient eye: if the price and the article are approved, he is ready
+to make change; otherwise his eyelids droop again sadly enough, but
+with no heavier despondency than before. He shivers, perhaps folds his
+lean arms around his lean body, and resumes the life-long, frozen
+patience in which consists his strength.
+
+Once in a while a school-boy comes hastily up, places cent or two upon
+the board, and takes up a cake, or stick of candy, or a measure of
+walnuts, or an apple as red-checked as himself. There are no words as
+to price, that being as well known to the buyer as to the seller. The
+old apple-dealer never speaks an unnecessary word not that he is sullen
+and morose; but there is none of the cheeriness and briskness in him
+that stirs up people to talk.
+
+Not seldom he is greeted by some old neighbor, a man well to do in the
+world, who makes a civil, patronizing observation about the weather;
+and then, by way of performing a charitable deed, begins to chaffer for
+an apple. Our friend presumes not on any past acquaintance; he makes
+the briefest possible response to all general remarks, and shrinks
+quietly into himself again. After every diminution of his stock he
+takes care to produce from the basket another cake, another stick of
+candy, another apple, or another measure of walnuts, to supply the
+place of the article sold. Two or three attempts—or, perchance, half a
+dozen—are requisite before the board can be rearranged to his
+satisfaction. If he have received a silver coin, he waits till the
+purchaser is out of sight, then examines it closely, and tries to bend
+it with his finger and thumb: finally he puts it into his
+waistcoat-pocket with seemingly a gentle sigh. This sigh, so faint as
+to be hardly perceptible, and not expressive of any definite emotion,
+is the accompaniment and conclusion of all his actions. It is the
+symbol of the chillness and torpid melancholy of his old age, which
+only make themselves felt sensibly when his repose is slightly
+disturbed.
+
+Our man of gingerbread and apples is not a specimen of the “needy man
+who has seen better days.” Doubtless there have been better and
+brighter days in the far-off time of his youth; but none with so much
+sunshine of prosperity in them that the chill, the depression, the
+narrowness of means, in his declining years, can have come upon him by
+surprise. His life has all been of a piece. His subdued and nerveless
+boyhood prefigured his abortive prime, which likewise contained within
+itself the prophecy and image of his lean and torpid age. He was
+perhaps a mechanic, who never came to be a master in his craft, or a
+petty tradesman, rubbing onward between passably to do and poverty.
+Possibly he may look back to some brilliant epoch of his career when
+there were a hundred or two of dollars to his credit in the Savings
+Bank. Such must have been the extent of his better fortune,—his little
+measure of this world’s triumphs,—all that he has known of success. A
+meek, downcast, humble, uncomplaining creature, he probably has never
+felt himself entitled to more than so much of the gifts of Providence.
+Is it not still something that he has never held out his hand for
+charity, nor has yet been driven to that sad home and household of
+Earth’s forlorn and broken-spirited children, the almshouse? He
+cherishes no quarrel, therefore, with his destiny, nor with the Author
+of it. All is as it should be.
+
+If, indeed, he have been bereaved of a son, a bold, energetic, vigorous
+young man, on whom the father’s feeble nature leaned as on a staff of
+strength, in that case he may have felt a bitterness that could not
+otherwise have been generated in his heart. But methinks the joy of
+possessing such a son and the agony of losing him would have developed
+the old man’s moral and intellectual nature to a much greater degree
+than we now find it. Intense grief appears to be as much out of keeping
+with his life as fervid happiness.
+
+To confess the truth, it is not the easiest matter in the world to
+define and individualize a character like this which we are now
+handling. The portrait must be so generally negative that the most
+delicate pencil is likely to spoil it by introducing some too positive
+tint. Every touch must be kept down, or else you destroy the subdued
+tone which is absolutely essential to the whole effect. Perhaps more
+may be done by contrast than by direct description. For this purpose I
+make use of another cake and candy merchant, who, likewise infests the
+railroad depot. This latter worthy is a very smart and well-dressed boy
+of ten years old or thereabouts, who skips briskly hither and thither,
+addressing the passengers in a pert voice, yet with somewhat of good
+breeding in his tone and pronunciation. Now he has caught my eye, and
+skips across the room with a pretty pertness, which I should like to
+correct with a box on the ear. “Any cake, sir? any candy?”
+
+No, none for me, my lad. I did but glance at your brisk figure in order
+to catch a reflected light and throw it upon your old rival yonder.
+
+Again, in order to invest my conception of the old man with a more
+decided sense of reality, I look at him in the very moment of intensest
+bustle, on the arrival of the cars. The shriek of the engine as it
+rushes into the car-house is the utterance of the steam fiend, whom man
+has subdued by magic spells and compels to serve as a beast of burden.
+He has skimmed rivers in his headlong rush, dashed through forests,
+plunged into the hearts of mountains, and glanced from the city to the
+desert-place, and again to a far-off city, with a meteoric progress,
+seen and out of sight, while his reverberating roar still fills the
+ear. The travellers swarm forth from the cars. All are full of the
+momentum which they have caught from their mode of conveyance. It seems
+as if the whole world, both morally and physically, were detached from
+its old standfasts and set in rapid motion. And, in the midst of this
+terrible activity, there sits the old man of gingerbread, so subdued,
+so hopeless, so without a stake in life, and yet not positively
+miserable,—there he sits, the forlorn old creature, one chill and
+sombre day after another, gathering scanty coppers for his cakes,
+apples, and candy,—there sits the old apple-dealer, in his threadbare
+suit of snuff-color and gray and his grizzly stubble heard. See! he
+folds his lean arms around his lean figure with that quiet sigh and
+that scarcely perceptible shiver which are the tokens of his inward
+state. I have him now. He and the steam fiend are each other’s
+antipodes; the latter is the type of all that go ahead, and the old man
+the representative of that melancholy class who by some sad witchcraft
+are doomed never to share in the world’s exulting progress. Thus the
+contrast between mankind and this desolate brother becomes picturesque,
+and even sublime.
+
+And now farewell, old friend! Little do you suspect that a student of
+human life has made your character the theme of more than one solitary
+and thoughtful hour. Many would say that you have hardly individuality
+enough to be the object of your own self-love. How, then, can a
+stranger’s eye detect anything in your mind and heart to study and to
+wonder at? Yet, could I read but a tithe of what is written there, it
+would be a volume of deeper and more comprehensive import than all that
+the wisest mortals have given to the world; for the soundless depths of
+the human soul and of eternity have an opening through your breast. God
+be praised, were it only for your sake, that the present shapes of
+human existence are not cast in iron nor hewn in everlasting adamant,
+but moulded of the vapors that vanish away while the essence flits
+upward to the infinite. There is a spiritual essence in this gray and
+lean old shape that shall flit upward too. Yes; doubtless there is a
+region where the life-long shiver will pass away from his being, and
+that quiet sigh, which it has taken him so many years to breathe, will
+be brought to a close for good and all.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL
+
+
+An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along
+the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the
+light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. It
+was a projecting window; and on the inside were suspended a variety of
+watches, pinchbeck, silver, and one or two of gold, all with their
+faces turned from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform
+the wayfarers what o’clock it was. Seated within the shop, sidelong to
+the window with his pale face bent earnestly over some delicate piece
+of mechanism on which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade
+lamp, appeared a young man.
+
+“What can Owen Warland be about?” muttered old Peter Hovenden, himself
+a retired watchmaker, and the former master of this same young man
+whose occupation he was now wondering at. “What can the fellow be
+about? These six months past I have never come by his shop without
+seeing him just as steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond
+his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion; and yet I know
+enough of my old business to be certain that what he is now so busy
+with is no part of the machinery of a watch.”
+
+“Perhaps, father,” said Annie, without showing much interest in the
+question, “Owen is inventing a new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has
+ingenuity enough.”
+
+“Poh, child! He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better
+than a Dutch toy,” answered her father, who had formerly been put to
+much vexation by Owen Warland’s irregular genius. “A plague on such
+ingenuity! All the effect that ever I knew of it was to spoil the
+accuracy of some of the best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun
+out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said
+before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child’s toy!”
+
+“Hush, father! He hears you!” whispered Annie, pressing the old man’s
+arm. “His ears are as delicate as his feelings; and you know how easily
+disturbed they are. Do let us move on.”
+
+So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded on without further
+conversation, until in a by-street of the town they found themselves
+passing the open door of a blacksmith’s shop. Within was seen the
+forge, now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky roof, and now
+confining its lustre to a narrow precinct of the coal-strewn floor,
+according as the breath of the bellows was puffed forth or again
+inhaled into its vast leathern lungs. In the intervals of brightness it
+was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the shop and the
+horseshoes that hung upon the wall; in the momentary gloom the fire
+seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space.
+Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the
+blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of
+light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night,
+as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other. Anon
+he drew a white-hot bar of iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil,
+uplifted his arm of might, and was soon enveloped in the myriads of
+sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding
+gloom.
+
+“Now, that is a pleasant sight,” said the old watchmaker. “I know what
+it is to work in gold; but give me the worker in iron after all is said
+and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you, daughter
+Annie?”
+
+“Pray don’t speak so loud, father,” whispered Annie, “Robert Danforth
+will hear you.”
+
+“And what if he should hear me?” said Peter Hovenden. “I say again, it
+is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and
+reality, and to earn one’s bread with the bare and brawny arm of a
+blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a
+wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my
+case, and finds himself at middle age, or a little after, past labor at
+his own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his
+ease. So I say once again, give me main strength for my money. And
+then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a
+blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?”
+
+“Well said, uncle Hovenden!” shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in
+a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. “And what says
+Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler
+business to tinker up a lady’s watch than to forge a horseshoe or make
+a gridiron.”
+
+Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.
+
+But we must return to Owen Warland’s shop, and spend more meditation
+upon his history and character than either Peter Hovenden, or probably
+his daughter Annie, or Owen’s old school-fellow, Robert Danforth, would
+have thought due to so slight a subject. From the time that his little
+fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate
+ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally
+figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden
+mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of grace, and
+never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the crowd of
+school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn
+or watermills across the neighboring brook. Those who discovered such
+peculiarity in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe him
+closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to
+imitate the beautiful movements of Nature as exemplified in the flight
+of birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new
+development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a
+poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined
+from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the
+fine arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and regular
+processes of ordinary machinery. Being once carried to see a
+steam-engine, in the expectation that his intuitive comprehension of
+mechanical principles would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick,
+as if something monstrous and unnatural had been presented to him. This
+horror was partly owing to the size and terrible energy of the iron
+laborer; for the character of Owen’s mind was microscopic, and tended
+naturally to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame and
+the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his fingers. Not that
+his sense of beauty was thereby diminished into a sense of prettiness.
+The beautiful idea has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly
+developed in a space too minute for any but microscopic investigation
+as within the ample verge that is measured by the arc of the rainbow.
+But, at all events, this characteristic minuteness in his objects and
+accomplishments made the world even more incapable than it might
+otherwise have been of appreciating Owen Warland’s genius. The boy’s
+relatives saw nothing better to be done—as perhaps there was not—than
+to bind him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his strange
+ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to utilitarian purposes.
+
+Peter Hovenden’s opinion of his apprentice has already been expressed.
+He could make nothing of the lad. Owen’s apprehension of the
+professional mysteries, it is true, was inconceivably quick; but he
+altogether forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker’s
+business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had
+been merged into eternity. So long, however, as he remained under his
+old master’s care, Owen’s lack of sturdiness made it possible, by
+strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain his creative
+eccentricity within bounds; but when his apprenticeship was served out,
+and he had taken the little shop which Peter Hovenden’s failing
+eyesight compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize how
+unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old blind Father Time along his
+daily course. One of his most rational projects was to connect a
+musical operation with the machinery of his watches, so that all the
+harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful, and each flitting
+moment fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. If a
+family clock was intrusted to him for repair,—one of those tall,
+ancient clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature by
+measuring out the lifetime of many generations,—he would take upon
+himself to arrange a dance or funeral procession of figures across its
+venerable face, representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours.
+Several freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young watchmaker’s
+credit with that steady and matter-of-fact class of people who hold the
+opinion that time is not to be trifled with, whether considered as the
+medium of advancement and prosperity in this world or preparation for
+the next. His custom rapidly diminished—a misfortune, however, that was
+probably reckoned among his better accidents by Owen Warland, who was
+becoming more and more absorbed in a secret occupation which drew all
+his science and manual dexterity into itself, and likewise gave full
+employment to the characteristic tendencies of his genius. This pursuit
+had already consumed many months.
+
+After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter had gazed at him out
+of the obscurity of the street, Owen Warland was seized with a
+fluttering of the nerves, which made his hand tremble too violently to
+proceed with such delicate labor as he was now engaged upon.
+
+“It was Annie herself!” murmured he. “I should have known it, by this
+throbbing of my heart, before I heard her father’s voice. Ah, how it
+throbs! I shall scarcely be able to work again on this exquisite
+mechanism to-night. Annie! dearest Annie! thou shouldst give firmness
+to my heart and hand, and not shake them thus; for if I strive to put
+the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy
+sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted,
+there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will leave me
+spiritless to-morrow.”
+
+As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his task, the shop
+door opened and gave admittance to no other than the stalwart figure
+which Peter Hovenden had paused to admire, as seen amid the light and
+shadow of the blacksmith’s shop. Robert Danforth had brought a little
+anvil of his own manufacture, and peculiarly constructed, which the
+young artist had recently bespoken. Owen examined the article and
+pronounced it fashioned according to his wish.
+
+“Why, yes,” said Robert Danforth, his strong voice filling the shop as
+with the sound of a bass viol, “I consider myself equal to anything in
+the way of my own trade; though I should have made but a poor figure at
+yours with such a fist as this,” added he, laughing, as he laid his
+vast hand beside the delicate one of Owen. “But what then? I put more
+main strength into one blow of my sledge hammer than all that you have
+expended since you were a ’prentice. Is not that the truth?”
+
+“Very probably,” answered the low and slender voice of Owen. “Strength
+is an earthly monster. I make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever
+there may be of it, is altogether spiritual.”
+
+“Well, but, Owen, what are you about?” asked his old school-fellow,
+still in such a hearty volume of tone that it made the artist shrink,
+especially as the question related to a subject so sacred as the
+absorbing dream of his imagination. “Folks do say that you are trying
+to discover the perpetual motion.”
+
+“The perpetual motion? Nonsense!” replied Owen Warland, with a movement
+of disgust; for he was full of little petulances. “It can never be
+discovered. It is a dream that may delude men whose brains are
+mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a discovery were
+possible, it would not be worth my while to make it only to have the
+secret turned to such purposes as are now effected by steam and water
+power. I am not ambitious to be honored with the paternity of a new
+kind of cotton machine.”
+
+“That would be droll enough!” cried the blacksmith, breaking out into
+such an uproar of laughter that Owen himself and the bell glasses on
+his work-board quivered in unison. “No, no, Owen! No child of yours
+will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I won’t hinder you any more.
+Good night, Owen, and success, and if you need any assistance, so far
+as a downright blow of hammer upon anvil will answer the purpose, I’m
+your man.”
+
+And with another laugh the man of main strength left the shop.
+
+“How strange it is,” whispered Owen Warland to himself, leaning his
+head upon his hand, “that all my musings, my purposes, my passion for
+the beautiful, my consciousness of power to create it,—a finer, more
+ethereal power, of which this earthly giant can have no
+conception,—all, all, look so vain and idle whenever my path is crossed
+by Robert Danforth! He would drive me mad were I to meet him often. His
+hard, brute force darkens and confuses the spiritual element within me;
+but I, too, will be strong in my own way. I will not yield to him.”
+
+He took from beneath a glass a piece of minute machinery, which he set
+in the condensed light of his lamp, and, looking intently at it through
+a magnifying glass, proceeded to operate with a delicate instrument of
+steel. In an instant, however, he fell back in his chair and clasped
+his hands, with a look of horror on his face that made its small
+features as impressive as those of a giant would have been.
+
+“Heaven! What have I done?” exclaimed he. “The vapor, the influence of
+that brute force,—it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I
+have made the very stroke—the fatal stroke—that I have dreaded from the
+first. It is all over—the toil of months, the object of my life. I am
+ruined!”
+
+And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the
+socket and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.
+
+Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear
+so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are
+exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.
+It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character
+that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith
+in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter
+disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole
+disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is
+directed.
+
+For a time Owen Warland succumbed to this severe but inevitable test.
+He spent a few sluggish weeks with his head so continually resting in
+his hands that the towns-people had scarcely an opportunity to see his
+countenance. When at last it was again uplifted to the light of day, a
+cold, dull, nameless change was perceptible upon it. In the opinion of
+Peter Hovenden, however, and that order of sagacious understandings who
+think that life should be regulated, like clockwork, with leaden
+weights, the alteration was entirely for the better. Owen now, indeed,
+applied himself to business with dogged industry. It was marvellous to
+witness the obtuse gravity with which he would inspect the wheels of a
+great old silver watch thereby delighting the owner, in whose fob it
+had been worn till he deemed it a portion of his own life, and was
+accordingly jealous of its treatment. In consequence of the good report
+thus acquired, Owen Warland was invited by the proper authorities to
+regulate the clock in the church steeple. He succeeded so admirably in
+this matter of public interest that the merchants gruffly acknowledged
+his merits on ’Change; the nurse whispered his praises as she gave the
+potion in the sick-chamber; the lover blessed him at the hour of
+appointed interview; and the town in general thanked Owen for the
+punctuality of dinner time. In a word, the heavy weight upon his
+spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his own system, but
+wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible. It was a
+circumstance, though minute, yet characteristic of his present state,
+that, when employed to engrave names or initials on silver spoons, he
+now wrote the requisite letters in the plainest possible style,
+omitting a variety of fanciful flourishes that had heretofore
+distinguished his work in this kind.
+
+One day, during the era of this happy transformation, old Peter
+Hovenden came to visit his former apprentice.
+
+“Well, Owen,” said he, “I am glad to hear such good accounts of you
+from all quarters, and especially from the town clock yonder, which
+speaks in your commendation every hour of the twenty-four. Only get rid
+altogether of your nonsensical trash about the beautiful, which I nor
+nobody else, nor yourself to boot, could ever understand,—only free
+yourself of that, and your success in life is as sure as daylight. Why,
+if you go on in this way, I should even venture to let you doctor this
+precious old watch of mine; though, except my daughter Annie, I have
+nothing else so valuable in the world.”
+
+“I should hardly dare touch it, sir,” replied Owen, in a depressed
+tone; for he was weighed down by his old master’s presence.
+
+“In time,” said the latter,—“In time, you will be capable of it.”
+
+The old watchmaker, with the freedom naturally consequent on his former
+authority, went on inspecting the work which Owen had in hand at the
+moment, together with other matters that were in progress. The artist,
+meanwhile, could scarcely lift his head. There was nothing so antipodal
+to his nature as this man’s cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact
+with which everything was converted into a dream except the densest
+matter of the physical world. Owen groaned in spirit and prayed
+fervently to be delivered from him.
+
+“But what is this?” cried Peter Hovenden abruptly, taking up a dusty
+bell glass, beneath which appeared a mechanical something, as delicate
+and minute as the system of a butterfly’s anatomy. “What have we here?
+Owen! Owen! there is witchcraft in these little chains, and wheels, and
+paddles. See! with one pinch of my finger and thumb I am going to
+deliver you from all future peril.”
+
+“For Heaven’s sake,” screamed Owen Warland, springing up with wonderful
+energy, “as you would not drive me mad, do not touch it! The slightest
+pressure of your finger would ruin me forever.”
+
+“Aha, young man! And is it so?” said the old watchmaker, looking at him
+with just enough penetration to torture Owen’s soul with the bitterness
+of worldly criticism. “Well, take your own course; but I warn you again
+that in this small piece of mechanism lives your evil spirit. Shall I
+exorcise him?”
+
+“You are my evil spirit,” answered Owen, much excited,—“you and the
+hard, coarse world! The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you
+fling upon me are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the
+task that I was created for.”
+
+Peter Hovenden shook his head, with the mixture of contempt and
+indignation which mankind, of whom he was partly a representative, deem
+themselves entitled to feel towards all simpletons who seek other
+prizes than the dusty one along the highway. He then took his leave,
+with an uplifted finger and a sneer upon his face that haunted the
+artist’s dreams for many a night afterwards. At the time of his old
+master’s visit, Owen was probably on the point of taking up the
+relinquished task; but, by this sinister event, he was thrown back into
+the state whence he had been slowly emerging.
+
+But the innate tendency of his soul had only been accumulating fresh
+vigor during its apparent sluggishness. As the summer advanced he
+almost totally relinquished his business, and permitted Father Time, so
+far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks and watches
+under his control, to stray at random through human life, making
+infinite confusion among the train of bewildered hours. He wasted the
+sunshine, as people said, in wandering through the woods and fields and
+along the banks of streams. There, like a child, he found amusement in
+chasing butterflies or watching the motions of water insects. There was
+something truly mysterious in the intentness with which he contemplated
+these living playthings as they sported on the breeze or examined the
+structure of an imperial insect whom he had imprisoned. The chase of
+butterflies was an apt emblem of the ideal pursuit in which he had
+spent so many golden hours; but would the beautiful idea ever be
+yielded to his hand like the butterfly that symbolized it? Sweet,
+doubtless, were these days, and congenial to the artist’s soul. They
+were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through his intellectual
+world as the butterflies gleamed through the outward atmosphere, and
+were real to him, for the instant, without the toil, and perplexity,
+and many disappointments of attempting to make them visible to the
+sensual eye. Alas that the artist, whether in poetry, or whatever other
+material, may not content himself with the inward enjoyment of the
+beautiful, but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge of his
+ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in seizing it with a
+material grasp. Owen Warland felt the impulse to give external reality
+to his ideas as irresistibly as any of the poets or painters who have
+arrayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, imperfectly copied
+from the richness of their visions.
+
+The night was now his time for the slow progress of re-creating the one
+idea to which all his intellectual activity referred itself. Always at
+the approach of dusk he stole into the town, locked himself within his
+shop, and wrought with patient delicacy of touch for many hours.
+Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the watchman, who, when all the
+world should be asleep, had caught the gleam of lamplight through the
+crevices of Owen Warland’s shutters. Daylight, to the morbid
+sensibility of his mind, seemed to have an intrusiveness that
+interfered with his pursuits. On cloudy and inclement days, therefore,
+he sat with his head upon his hands, muffling, as it were, his
+sensitive brain in a mist of indefinite musings, for it was a relief to
+escape from the sharp distinctness with which he was compelled to shape
+out his thoughts during his nightly toil.
+
+From one of these fits of torpor he was aroused by the entrance of
+Annie Hovenden, who came into the shop with the freedom of a customer,
+and also with something of the familiarity of a childish friend. She
+had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted Owen to repair
+it.
+
+“But I don’t know whether you will condescend to such a task,” said
+she, laughing, “now that you are so taken up with the notion of putting
+spirit into machinery.”
+
+“Where did you get that idea, Annie?” said Owen, starting in surprise.
+
+“Oh, out of my own head,” answered she, “and from something that I
+heard you say, long ago, when you were but a boy and I a little child.
+But come, will you mend this poor thimble of mine?”
+
+“Anything for your sake, Annie,” said Owen Warland,—“anything, even
+were it to work at Robert Danforth’s forge.”
+
+“And that would be a pretty sight!” retorted Annie, glancing with
+imperceptible slightness at the artist’s small and slender frame.
+“Well; here is the thimble.”
+
+“But that is a strange idea of yours,” said Owen, “about the
+spiritualization of matter.”
+
+And then the thought stole into his mind that this young girl possessed
+the gift to comprehend him better than all the world besides. And what
+a help and strength would it be to him in his lonely toil if he could
+gain the sympathy of the only being whom he loved! To persons whose
+pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either
+in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of
+moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen
+solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer,
+the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from
+the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.
+
+“Annie,” cried he, growing pale as death at the thought, “how gladly
+would I tell you the secret of my pursuit! You, methinks, would
+estimate it rightly. You, I know, would hear it with a reverence that I
+must not expect from the harsh, material world.”
+
+“Would I not? to be sure I would!” replied Annie Hovenden, lightly
+laughing. “Come; explain to me quickly what is the meaning of this
+little whirligig, so delicately wrought that it might be a plaything
+for Queen Mab. See! I will put it in motion.”
+
+“Hold!” exclaimed Owen, “hold!”
+
+Annie had but given the slightest possible touch, with the point of a
+needle, to the same minute portion of complicated machinery which has
+been more than once mentioned, when the artist seized her by the wrist
+with a force that made her scream aloud. She was affrighted at the
+convulsion of intense rage and anguish that writhed across his
+features. The next instant he let his head sink upon his hands.
+
+“Go, Annie,” murmured he; “I have deceived myself, and must suffer for
+it. I yearned for sympathy, and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that
+you might give it me; but you lack the talisman, Annie, that should
+admit you into my secrets. That touch has undone the toil of months and
+the thought of a lifetime! It was not your fault, Annie; but you have
+ruined me!”
+
+Poor Owen Warland! He had indeed erred, yet pardonably; for if any
+human spirit could have sufficiently reverenced the processes so sacred
+in his eyes, it must have been a woman’s. Even Annie Hovenden, possibly
+might not have disappointed him had she been enlightened by the deep
+intelligence of love.
+
+The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that satisfied any persons
+who had hitherto retained a hopeful opinion of him that he was, in
+truth, irrevocably doomed to unutility as regarded the world, and to an
+evil destiny on his own part. The decease of a relative had put him in
+possession of a small inheritance. Thus freed from the necessity of
+toil, and having lost the steadfast influence of a great
+purpose,—great, at least, to him,—he abandoned himself to habits from
+which it might have been supposed the mere delicacy of his organization
+would have availed to secure him. But when the ethereal portion of a
+man of genius is obscured the earthly part assumes an influence the
+more uncontrollable, because the character is now thrown off the
+balance to which Providence had so nicely adjusted it, and which, in
+coarser natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen Warland made
+proof of whatever show of bliss may be found in riot. He looked at the
+world through the golden medium of wine, and contemplated the visions
+that bubble up so gayly around the brim of the glass, and that people
+the air with shapes of pleasant madness, which so soon grow ghostly and
+forlorn. Even when this dismal and inevitable change had taken place,
+the young man might still have continued to quaff the cup of
+enchantments, though its vapor did but shroud life in gloom and fill
+the gloom with spectres that mocked at him. There was a certain
+irksomeness of spirit, which, being real, and the deepest sensation of
+which the artist was now conscious, was more intolerable than any
+fantastic miseries and horrors that the abuse of wine could summon up.
+In the latter case he could remember, even out of the midst of his
+trouble, that all was but a delusion; in the former, the heavy anguish
+was his actual life.
+
+From this perilous state he was redeemed by an incident which more than
+one person witnessed, but of which the shrewdest could not explain or
+conjecture the operation on Owen Warland’s mind. It was very simple. On
+a warm afternoon of spring, as the artist sat among his riotous
+companions with a glass of wine before him, a splendid butterfly flew
+in at the open window and fluttered about his head.
+
+“Ah,” exclaimed Owen, who had drank freely, “are you alive again, child
+of the sun and playmate of the summer breeze, after your dismal
+winter’s nap? Then it is time for me to be at work!”
+
+And, leaving his unemptied glass upon the table, he departed and was
+never known to sip another drop of wine.
+
+And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the woods and fields. It
+might be fancied that the bright butterfly, which had come so
+spirit-like into the window as Owen sat with the rude revellers, was
+indeed a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal life that
+had so etheralized him among men. It might be fancied that he went
+forth to seek this spirit in its sunny haunts; for still, as in the
+summer time gone by, he was seen to steal gently up wherever a
+butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in contemplation of it. When
+it took flight his eyes followed the winged vision, as if its airy
+track would show the path to heaven. But what could be the purpose of
+the unseasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watchman knew by
+the lines of lamplight through the crevices of Owen Warland’s shutters?
+The towns-people had one comprehensive explanation of all these
+singularities. Owen Warland had gone mad! How universally
+efficacious—how satisfactory, too, and soothing to the injured
+sensibility of narrowness and dulness—is this easy method of accounting
+for whatever lies beyond the world’s most ordinary scope! From St.
+Paul’s days down to our poor little Artist of the Beautiful, the same
+talisman had been applied to the elucidation of all mysteries in the
+words or deeds of men who spoke or acted too wisely or too well. In
+Owen Warland’s case the judgment of his towns-people may have been
+correct. Perhaps he was mad. The lack of sympathy—that contrast between
+himself and his neighbors which took away the restraint of example—was
+enough to make him so. Or possibly he had caught just so much of
+ethereal radiance as served to bewilder him, in an earthly sense, by
+its intermixture with the common daylight.
+
+One evening, when the artist had returned from a customary ramble and
+had just thrown the lustre of his lamp on the delicate piece of work so
+often interrupted, but still taken up again, as if his fate were
+embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the entrance of old
+Peter Hovenden. Owen never met this man without a shrinking of the
+heart. Of all the world he was most terrible, by reason of a keen
+understanding which saw so distinctly what it did see, and disbelieved
+so uncompromisingly in what it could not see. On this occasion the old
+watchmaker had merely a gracious word or two to say.
+
+“Owen, my lad,” said he, “we must see you at my house to-morrow night.”
+
+The artist began to mutter some excuse.
+
+“Oh, but it must be so,” quoth Peter Hovenden, “for the sake of the
+days when you were one of the household. What, my boy! don’t you know
+that my daughter Annie is engaged to Robert Danforth? We are making an
+entertainment, in our humble way, to celebrate the event.”
+
+That little monosyllable was all he uttered; its tone seemed cold and
+unconcerned to an ear like Peter Hovenden’s; and yet there was in it
+the stifled outcry of the poor artist’s heart, which he compressed
+within him like a man holding down an evil spirit. One slight outbreak,
+however, imperceptible to the old watchmaker, he allowed himself.
+Raising the instrument with which he was about to begin his work, he
+let it fall upon the little system of machinery that had, anew, cost
+him months of thought and toil. It was shattered by the stroke!
+
+Owen Warland’s story would have been no tolerable representation of the
+troubled life of those who strive to create the beautiful, if, amid all
+other thwarting influences, love had not interposed to steal the
+cunning from his hand. Outwardly he had been no ardent or enterprising
+lover; the career of his passion had confined its tumults and
+vicissitudes so entirely within the artist’s imagination that Annie
+herself had scarcely more than a woman’s intuitive perception of it;
+but, in Owen’s view, it covered the whole field of his life. Forgetful
+of the time when she had shown herself incapable of any deep response,
+he had persisted in connecting all his dreams of artistical success
+with Annie’s image; she was the visible shape in which the spiritual
+power that he worshipped, and on whose altar he hoped to lay a not
+unworthy offering, was made manifest to him. Of course he had deceived
+himself; there were no such attributes in Annie Hovenden as his
+imagination had endowed her with. She, in the aspect which she wore to
+his inward vision, was as much a creature of his own as the mysterious
+piece of mechanism would be were it ever realized. Had he become
+convinced of his mistake through the medium of successful love,—had he
+won Annie to his bosom, and there beheld her fade from angel into
+ordinary woman,—the disappointment might have driven him back, with
+concentrated energy, upon his sole remaining object. On the other hand,
+had he found Annie what he fancied, his lot would have been so rich in
+beauty that out of its mere redundancy he might have wrought the
+beautiful into many a worthier type than he had toiled for; but the
+guise in which his sorrow came to him, the sense that the angel of his
+life had been snatched away and given to a rude man of earth and iron,
+who could neither need nor appreciate her ministrations,—this was the
+very perversity of fate that makes human existence appear too absurd
+and contradictory to be the scene of one other hope or one other fear.
+There was nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a man that
+had been stunned.
+
+He went through a fit of illness. After his recovery his small and
+slender frame assumed an obtuser garniture of flesh than it had ever
+before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his delicate little hand, so
+spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than the
+hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might
+have induced a stranger to pat him on the head—pausing, however, in the
+act, to wonder what manner of child was here. It was as if the spirit
+had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a sort of
+vegetable existence. Not that Owen Warland was idiotic. He could talk,
+and not irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin
+to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of
+marvels of mechanism that he had read about in books, but which he had
+learned to consider as absolutely fabulous. Among them he enumerated
+the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head
+of Friar Bacon; and, coming down to later times, the automata of a
+little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured
+for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about
+the ear like a living fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute
+steel springs. There was a story, too, of a duck that waddled, and
+quacked, and ate; though, had any honest citizen purchased it for
+dinner, he would have found himself cheated with the mere mechanical
+apparition of a duck.
+
+“But all these accounts,” said Owen Warland, “I am now satisfied are
+mere impositions.”
+
+Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he once thought
+differently. In his idle and dreamy days he had considered it possible,
+in a certain sense, to spiritualize machinery, and to combine with the
+new species of life and motion thus produced a beauty that should
+attain to the ideal which Nature has proposed to herself in all her
+creatures, but has never taken pains to realize. He seemed, however, to
+retain no very distinct perception either of the process of achieving
+this object or of the design itself.
+
+“I have thrown it all aside now,” he would say. “It was a dream such as
+young men are always mystifying themselves with. Now that I have
+acquired a little common sense, it makes me laugh to think of it.”
+
+Poor, poor and fallen Owen Warland! These were the symptoms that he had
+ceased to be an inhabitant of the better sphere that lies unseen around
+us. He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as
+such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that
+even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his
+hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies
+out of them and leaves the grosser understanding to assimilate them
+more and more to the things of which alone it can take cognizance; but
+in Owen Warland the spirit was not dead nor passed away; it only slept.
+
+How it awoke again is not recorded. Perhaps the torpid slumber was
+broken by a convulsive pain. Perhaps, as in a former instance, the
+butterfly came and hovered about his head and reinspired him,—as indeed
+this creature of the sunshine had always a mysterious mission for the
+artist,—reinspired him with the former purpose of his life. Whether it
+were pain or happiness that thrilled through his veins, his first
+impulse was to thank Heaven for rendering him again the being of
+thought, imagination, and keenest sensibility that he had long ceased
+to be.
+
+“Now for my task,” said he. “Never did I feel such strength for it as
+now.”
+
+Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil the more
+diligently by an anxiety lest death should surprise him in the midst of
+his labors. This anxiety, perhaps, is common to all men who set their
+hearts upon anything so high, in their own view of it, that life
+becomes of importance only as conditional to its accomplishment. So
+long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we
+desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty
+of its texture. But, side by side with this sense of insecurity, there
+is a vital faith in our invulnerability to the shaft of death while
+engaged in any task that seems assigned by Providence as our proper
+thing to do, and which the world would have cause to mourn for should
+we leave it unaccomplished. Can the philosopher, big with the
+inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to
+be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is
+mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so,
+the weary ages may pass away—the world’s, whose life sand may fall,
+drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth
+that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example
+where the most precious spirit, at any particular epoch manifested in
+human shape, has gone hence untimely, without space allowed him, so far
+as mortal judgment could discern, to perform his mission on the earth.
+The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives
+on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the
+scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The painter—as Allston
+did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its
+imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no
+irreverence to say so, in the hues of heaven. But rather such
+incomplete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere. This so
+frequent abortion of man’s dearest projects must be taken as a proof
+that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are
+without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit. In
+heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton’s
+song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left
+unfinished here?
+
+But to return to Owen Warland. It was his fortune, good or ill, to
+achieve the purpose of his life. Pass we over a long space of intense
+thought, yearning effort, minute toil, and wasting anxiety, succeeded
+by an instant of solitary triumph: let all this be imagined; and then
+behold the artist, on a winter evening, seeking admittance to Robert
+Danforth’s fireside circle. There he found the man of iron, with his
+massive substance thoroughly warmed and attempered by domestic
+influences. And there was Annie, too, now transformed into a matron,
+with much of her husband’s plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen
+Warland still believed, with a finer grace, that might enable her to be
+the interpreter between strength and beauty. It happened, likewise,
+that old Peter Hovenden was a guest this evening at his daughter’s
+fireside, and it was his well-remembered expression of keen, cold
+criticism that first encountered the artist’s glance.
+
+“My old friend Owen!” cried Robert Danforth, starting up, and
+compressing the artist’s delicate fingers within a hand that was
+accustomed to gripe bars of iron. “This is kind and neighborly to come
+to us at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had bewitched you out
+of the remembrance of old times.”
+
+“We are glad to see you,” said Annie, while a blush reddened her
+matronly cheek. “It was not like a friend to stay from us so long.”
+
+“Well, Owen,” inquired the old watchmaker, as his first greeting, “how
+comes on the beautiful? Have you created it at last?”
+
+The artist did not immediately reply, being startled by the apparition
+of a young child of strength that was tumbling about on the carpet,—a
+little personage who had come mysteriously out of the infinite, but
+with something so sturdy and real in his composition that he seemed
+moulded out of the densest substance which earth could supply. This
+hopeful infant crawled towards the new-comer, and setting himself on
+end, as Robert Danforth expressed the posture, stared at Owen with a
+look of such sagacious observation that the mother could not help
+exchanging a proud glance with her husband. But the artist was
+disturbed by the child’s look, as imagining a resemblance between it
+and Peter Hovenden’s habitual expression. He could have fancied that
+the old watchmaker was compressed into this baby shape, and looking out
+of those baby eyes, and repeating, as he now did, the malicious
+question: “The beautiful, Owen! How comes on the beautiful? Have you
+succeeded in creating the beautiful?”
+
+“I have succeeded,” replied the artist, with a momentary light of
+triumph in his eyes and a smile of sunshine, yet steeped in such depth
+of thought that it was almost sadness. “Yes, my friends, it is the
+truth. I have succeeded.”
+
+“Indeed!” cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthfulness peeping out of her
+face again. “And is it lawful, now, to inquire what the secret is?”
+
+“Surely; it is to disclose it that I have come,” answered Owen Warland.
+“You shall know, and see, and touch, and possess the secret! For,
+Annie,—if by that name I may still address the friend of my boyish
+years,—Annie, it is for your bridal gift that I have wrought this
+spiritualized mechanism, this harmony of motion, this mystery of
+beauty. It comes late, indeed; but it is as we go onward in life, when
+objects begin to lose their freshness of hue and our souls their
+delicacy of perception, that the spirit of beauty is most needed.
+If,—forgive me, Annie,—if you know how—to value this gift, it can never
+come too late.”
+
+He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel box. It was carved richly
+out of ebony by his own hand, and inlaid with a fanciful tracery of
+pearl, representing a boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, elsewhere,
+had become a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward; while the boy,
+or youth, had found such efficacy in his strong desire that he ascended
+from earth to cloud, and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the
+beautiful. This case of ebony the artist opened, and bade Annie place
+her fingers on its edge. She did so, but almost screamed as a butterfly
+fluttered forth, and, alighting on her finger’s tip, sat waving the
+ample magnificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in
+prelude to a flight. It is impossible to express by words the glory,
+the splendor, the delicate gorgeousness which were softened into the
+beauty of this object. Nature’s ideal butterfly was here realized in
+all its perfection; not in the pattern of such faded insects as flit
+among earthly flowers, but of those which hover across the meads of
+paradise for child-angels and the spirits of departed infants to
+disport themselves with. The rich down was visible upon its wings; the
+lustre of its eyes seemed instinct with spirit. The firelight glimmered
+around this wonder—the candles gleamed upon it; but it glistened
+apparently by its own radiance, and illuminated the finger and
+outstretched hand on which it rested with a white gleam like that of
+precious stones. In its perfect beauty, the consideration of size was
+entirely lost. Had its wings overreached the firmament, the mind could
+not have been more filled or satisfied.
+
+“Beautiful! beautiful!” exclaimed Annie. “Is it alive? Is it alive?”
+
+“Alive? To be sure it is,” answered her husband. “Do you suppose any
+mortal has skill enough to make a butterfly, or would put himself to
+the trouble of making one, when any child may catch a score of them in
+a summer’s afternoon? Alive? Certainly! But this pretty box is
+undoubtedly of our friend Owen’s manufacture; and really it does him
+credit.”
+
+At this moment the butterfly waved its wings anew, with a motion so
+absolutely lifelike that Annie was startled, and even awestricken; for,
+in spite of her husband’s opinion, she could not satisfy herself
+whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of wondrous
+mechanism.
+
+“Is it alive?” she repeated, more earnestly than before.
+
+“Judge for yourself,” said Owen Warland, who stood gazing in her face
+with fixed attention.
+
+The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round Annie’s
+head, and soared into a distant region of the parlor, still making
+itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of
+its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course
+with his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it
+returned in a spiral curve and settled again on Annie’s finger.
+
+“But is it alive?” exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the
+gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was
+forced to balance himself with his wings. “Tell me if it be alive, or
+whether you created it.”
+
+“Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?” replied Owen
+Warland. “Alive? Yes, Annie; it may well be said to possess life, for
+it has absorbed my own being into itself; and in the secret of that
+butterfly, and in its beauty,—which is not merely outward, but deep as
+its whole system,—is represented the intellect, the imagination, the
+sensibility, the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful! Yes; I created it.
+But”—and here his countenance somewhat changed—“this butterfly is not
+now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in the daydreams of my
+youth.”
+
+“Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything,” said the blacksmith,
+grinning with childlike delight. “I wonder whether it would condescend
+to alight on such a great clumsy finger as mine? Hold it hither,
+Annie.”
+
+By the artist’s direction, Annie touched her finger’s tip to that of
+her husband; and, after a momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from
+one to the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar, yet not
+precisely the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment; then,
+ascending from the blacksmith’s stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually
+enlarging curve to the ceiling, made one wide sweep around the room,
+and returned with an undulating movement to the point whence it had
+started.
+
+“Well, that does beat all nature!” cried Robert Danforth, bestowing the
+heartiest praise that he could find expression for; and, indeed, had he
+paused there, a man of finer words and nicer perception could not
+easily have said more. “That goes beyond me, I confess. But what then?
+There is more real use in one downright blow of my sledge hammer than
+in the whole five years’ labor that our friend Owen has wasted on this
+butterfly.”
+
+Here the child clapped his hands and made a great babble of indistinct
+utterance, apparently demanding that the butterfly should be given him
+for a plaything.
+
+Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at Annie, to discover whether
+she sympathized in her husband’s estimate of the comparative value of
+the beautiful and the practical. There was, amid all her kindness
+towards himself, amid all the wonder and admiration with which she
+contemplated the marvellous work of his hands and incarnation of his
+idea, a secret scorn—too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness,
+and perceptible only to such intuitive discernment as that of the
+artist. But Owen, in the latter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of
+the region in which such a discovery might have been torture. He knew
+that the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, whatever
+praise might be bestowed, could never say the fitting word nor feel the
+fitting sentiment which should be the perfect recompense of an artist
+who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material trifle,—converting what
+was earthly to spiritual gold,—had won the beautiful into his
+handiwork. Not at this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of
+all high performance must be sought within itself, or sought in vain.
+There was, however, a view of the matter which Annie and her husband,
+and even Peter Hovenden, might fully have understood, and which would
+have satisfied them that the toil of years had here been worthily
+bestowed. Owen Warland might have told them that this butterfly, this
+plaything, this bridal gift of a poor watchmaker to a blacksmith’s
+wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch would have purchased
+with honors and abundant wealth, and have treasured it among the jewels
+of his kingdom as the most unique and wondrous of them all. But the
+artist smiled and kept the secret to himself.
+
+“Father,” said Annie, thinking that a word of praise from the old
+watchmaker might gratify his former apprentice, “do come and admire
+this pretty butterfly.”
+
+“Let us see,” said Peter Hovenden, rising from his chair, with a sneer
+upon his face that always made people doubt, as he himself did, in
+everything but a material existence. “Here is my finger for it to
+alight upon. I shall understand it better when once I have touched it.”
+
+But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when the tip of her
+father’s finger was pressed against that of her husband, on which the
+butterfly still rested, the insect drooped its wings and seemed on the
+point of falling to the floor. Even the bright spots of gold upon its
+wings and body, unless her eyes deceived her, grew dim, and the glowing
+purple took a dusky hue, and the starry lustre that gleamed around the
+blacksmith’s hand became faint and vanished.
+
+“It is dying! it is dying!” cried Annie, in alarm.
+
+“It has been delicately wrought,” said the artist, calmly. “As I told
+you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence—call it magnetism, or what you
+will. In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite
+susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who instilled
+his own life into it. It has already lost its beauty; in a few moments
+more its mechanism would be irreparably injured.”
+
+“Take away your hand, father!” entreated Annie, turning pale. “Here is
+my child; let it rest on his innocent hand. There, perhaps, its life
+will revive and its colors grow brighter than ever.”
+
+Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his finger. The butterfly
+then appeared to recover the power of voluntary motion, while its hues
+assumed much of their original lustre, and the gleam of starlight,
+which was its most ethereal attribute, again formed a halo round about
+it. At first, when transferred from Robert Danforth’s hand to the small
+finger of the child, this radiance grew so powerful that it positively
+threw the little fellow’s shadow back against the wall. He, meanwhile,
+extended his plump hand as he had seen his father and mother do, and
+watched the waving of the insect’s wings with infantine delight.
+Nevertheless, there was a certain odd expression of sagacity that made
+Owen Warland feel as if here were old Pete Hovenden, partially, and but
+partially, redeemed from his hard scepticism into childish faith.
+
+“How wise the little monkey looks!” whispered Robert Danforth to his
+wife.
+
+“I never saw such a look on a child’s face,” answered Annie, admiring
+her own infant, and with good reason, far more than the artistic
+butterfly. “The darling knows more of the mystery than we do.”
+
+As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not
+entirely congenial in the child’s nature, it alternately sparkled and
+grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an
+airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the
+ethereal instincts with which its master’s spirit had endowed it
+impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there
+been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown
+immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite
+texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle
+or two, as of stardust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the
+carpet. Then the butterfly came fluttering down, and, instead of
+returning to the infant, was apparently attracted towards the artist’s
+hand.
+
+“Not so! not so!” murmured Owen Warland, as if his handiwork could have
+understood him. “Thou has gone forth out of thy master’s heart. There
+is no return for thee.”
+
+With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremulous radiance, the
+butterfly struggled, as it were, towards the infant, and was about to
+alight upon his finger; but while it still hovered in the air, the
+little child of strength, with his grandsire’s sharp and shrewd
+expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvellous insect and
+compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed. Old Peter Hovenden burst
+into a cold and scornful laugh. The blacksmith, by main force, unclosed
+the infant’s hand, and found within the palm a small heap of glittering
+fragments, whence the mystery of beauty had fled forever. And as for
+Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life’s
+labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly
+than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful,
+the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of
+little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the
+enjoyment of the reality.
+
+
+
+
+A VIRTUOSO’S COLLECTION
+
+
+The other day, having a leisure hour at my disposal, I stepped into a
+new museum, to which my notice was casually drawn by a small and
+unobtrusive sign: “TO BE SEEN HERE, A VIRTUOSO’S COLLECTION.” Such was
+the simple yet not altogether unpromising announcement that turned my
+steps aside for a little while from the sunny sidewalk of our principal
+thoroughfare. Mounting a sombre staircase, I pushed open a door at its
+summit, and found myself in the presence of a person, who mentioned the
+moderate sum that would entitle me to admittance.
+
+“Three shillings, Massachusetts tenor,” said he. “No, I mean half a
+dollar, as you reckon in these days.”
+
+While searching my pocket for the coin I glanced at the doorkeeper, the
+marked character and individuality of whose aspect encouraged me to
+expect something not quite in the ordinary way. He wore an
+old-fashioned great-coat, much faded, within which his meagre person
+was so completely enveloped that the rest of his attire was
+undistinguishable. But his visage was remarkably wind-flushed,
+sunburnt, and weather-worn, and had a most, unquiet, nervous, and
+apprehensive expression. It seemed as if this man had some
+all-important object in view, some point of deepest interest to be
+decided, some momentous question to ask, might he but hope for a reply.
+As it was evident, however, that I could have nothing to do with his
+private affairs, I passed through an open doorway, which admitted me
+into the extensive hall of the museum.
+
+Directly in front of the portal was the bronze statue of a youth with
+winged feet. He was represented in the act of flitting away from earth,
+yet wore such a look of earnest invitation that it impressed me like a
+summons to enter the hall.
+
+“It is the original statue of Opportunity, by the ancient sculptor
+Lysippus,” said a gentleman who now approached me. “I place it at the
+entrance of my museum, because it is not at all times that one can gain
+admittance to such a collection.”
+
+The speaker was a middle-aged person, of whom it was not easy to
+determine whether he had spent his life as a scholar or as a man of
+action; in truth, all outward and obvious peculiarities had been worn
+away by an extensive and promiscuous intercourse with the world. There
+was no mark about him of profession, individual habits, or scarcely of
+country; although his dark complexion and high features made me
+conjecture that he was a native of some southern clime of Europe. At
+all events, he was evidently the virtuoso in person.
+
+“With your permission,” said he, “as we have no descriptive catalogue,
+I will accompany you through the museum and point out whatever may be
+most worthy of attention. In the first place, here is a choice
+collection of stuffed animals.”
+
+Nearest the door stood the outward semblance of a wolf, exquisitely
+prepared, it is true, and showing a very wolfish fierceness in the
+large glass eyes which were inserted into its wild and crafty head.
+Still it was merely the skin of a wolf, with nothing to distinguish it
+from other individuals of that unlovely breed.
+
+“How does this animal deserve a place in your collection?” inquired I.
+
+“It is the wolf that devoured Little Red Riding Hood,” answered the
+virtuoso; “and by his side—with a milder and more matronly look, as you
+perceive—stands the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus.”
+
+“Ah, indeed!” exclaimed I. “And what lovely lamb is this with the
+snow-white fleece, which seems to be of as delicate a texture as
+innocence itself?”
+
+“Methinks you have but carelessly read Spenser,” replied my guide, “or
+you would at once recognize the ‘milk-white lamb’ which Una led. But I
+set no great value upon the lamb. The next specimen is better worth our
+notice.”
+
+“What!” cried I, “this strange animal, with the black head of an ox
+upon the body of a white horse? Were it possible to suppose it, I
+should say that this was Alexander’s steed Bucephalus.”
+
+“The same,” said the virtuoso. “And can you likewise give a name to the
+famous charger that stands beside him?”
+
+Next to the renowned Bucephalus stood the mere skeleton of a horse,
+with the white bones peeping through his ill-conditioned hide; but, if
+my heart had not warmed towards that pitiful anatomy, I might as well
+have quitted the museum at once. Its rarities had not been collected
+with pain and toil from the four quarters of the earth, and from the
+depths of the sea, and from the palaces and sepulchres of ages, for
+those who could mistake this illustrious steed.
+
+“It, is Rosinante!” exclaimed I, with enthusiasm.
+
+And so it proved. My admiration for the noble and gallant horse caused
+me to glance with less interest at the other animals, although many of
+them might have deserved the notice of Cuvier himself. There was the
+donkey which Peter Bell cudgelled so soundly, and a brother of the same
+species who had suffered a similar infliction from the ancient prophet
+Balaam. Some doubts were entertained, however, as to the authenticity
+of the latter beast. My guide pointed out the venerable Argus, that
+faithful dog of Ulysses, and also another dog (for so the skin bespoke
+it), which, though imperfectly preserved, seemed once to have had three
+heads. It was Cerberus. I was considerably amused at detecting in an
+obscure corner the fox that became so famous by the loss of his tail.
+There were several stuffed cats, which, as a dear lover of that
+comfortable beast, attracted my affectionate regards. One was Dr.
+Johnson’s cat Hodge; and in the same row stood the favorite cats of
+Mahomet, Gray, and Walter Scott, together with Puss in Boots, and a cat
+of very noble aspect—who had once been a deity of ancient Egypt.
+Byron’s tame bear came next. I must not forget to mention the
+Eryruanthean boar, the skin of St. George’s dragon, and that of the
+serpent Python; and another skin with beautifully variegated hues,
+supposed to have been the garment of the “spirited sly snake,” which
+tempted Eve. Against the walls were suspended the horns of the stag
+that Shakespeare shot; and on the floor lay the ponderous shell of the
+tortoise which fell upon the head of Aeschylus. In one row, as natural
+as life, stood the sacred bull Apis, the “cow with the crumpled horn,”
+and a very wild-looking young heifer, which I guessed to be the cow
+that jumped over the moon. She was probably killed by the rapidity of
+her descent. As I turned away, my eyes fell upon an indescribable
+monster, which proved to be a griffin.
+
+“I look in vain,” observed I, “for the skin of an animal which might
+well deserve the closest study of a naturalist,—the winged horse,
+Pegasus.”
+
+“He is not yet dead,” replied the virtuoso; “but he is so hard ridden
+by many young gentlemen of the day that I hope soon to add his skin and
+skeleton to my collection.”
+
+We now passed to the next alcove of the hall, in which was a multitude
+of stuffed birds. They were very prettily arranged, some upon the
+branches of trees, others brooding upon nests, and others suspended by
+wires so artificially that they seemed in the very act of flight. Among
+them was a white dove, with a withered branch of olive-leaves in her
+mouth.
+
+“Can this be the very dove,” inquired I, “that brought the message of
+peace and hope to the tempest-beaten passengers of the ark?”
+
+“Even so,” said my companion.
+
+“And this raven, I suppose,” continued I, “is the same that fed Elijah
+in the wilderness.”
+
+“The raven? No,” said the virtuoso; “it is a bird of modern date. He
+belonged to one Barnaby Rudge, and many people fancied that the Devil
+himself was disguised under his sable plumage. But poor Grip has drawn
+his last cork, and has been forced to ‘say die’ at last. This other
+raven, hardly less curious, is that in which the soul of King George I.
+revisited his lady-love, the Duchess of Kendall.”
+
+My guide next pointed out Minerva’s owl and the vulture that preyed
+upon the liver of Prometheus. There was likewise the sacred ibis of
+Egypt, and one of the Stymphalides which Hercules shot in his sixth
+labor. Shelley’s skylark, Bryant’s water-fowl, and a pigeon from the
+belfry of the Old South Church, preserved by N. P. Willis, were placed
+on the same perch. I could not but shudder on beholding Coleridge’s
+albatross, transfixed with the Ancient Mariner’s crossbow shaft. Beside
+this bird of awful poesy stood a gray goose of very ordinary aspect.
+
+“Stuffed goose is no such rarity,” observed I. “Why do you preserve
+such a specimen in your museum?”
+
+“It is one of the flock whose cackling saved the Roman Capitol,”
+answered the virtuoso. “Many geese have cackled and hissed both before
+and since; but none, like those, have clamored themselves into
+immortality.”
+
+There seemed to be little else that demanded notice in this department
+of the museum, unless we except Robinson Crusoe’s parrot, a live
+phoenix, a footless bird of paradise, and a splendid peacock, supposed
+to be the same that once contained the soul of Pythagoras. I therefore
+passed to the next alcove, the shelves of which were covered with a
+miscellaneous collection of curiosities such as are usually found in
+similar establishments. One of the first things that took my eye was a
+strange-looking cap, woven of some substance that appeared to be
+neither woollen, cotton, nor linen.
+
+“Is this a magician’s cap?” I asked.
+
+“No,” replied the virtuoso; “it is merely Dr. Franklin’s cap of
+asbestos. But here is one which, perhaps, may suit you better. It is
+the wishing-cap of Fortunatus. Will you try it on?”
+
+“By no means,” answered I, putting it aside with my hand. “The day of
+wild wishes is past with me. I desire nothing that may not come in the
+ordinary course of Providence.”
+
+“Then probably,” returned the virtuoso, “you will not be tempted to rub
+this lamp?”
+
+While speaking, he took from the shelf an antique brass lamp, curiously
+wrought with embossed figures, but so covered with verdigris that the
+sculpture was almost eaten away.
+
+“It is a thousand years,” said he, “since the genius of this lamp
+constructed Aladdin’s palace in a single night. But he still retains
+his power; and the man who rubs Aladdin’s lamp has but to desire either
+a palace or a cottage.”
+
+“I might desire a cottage,” replied I; “but I would have it founded on
+sure and stable truth, not on dreams and fantasies. I have learned to
+look for the real and the true.”
+
+My guide next showed me Prospero’s magic wand, broken into three
+fragments by the hand of its mighty master. On the same shelf lay the
+gold ring of ancient Gyges, which enabled the wearer to walk invisible.
+On the other side of the alcove was a tall looking-glass in a frame of
+ebony, but veiled with a curtain of purple silk, through the rents of
+which the gleam of the mirror was perceptible.
+
+“This is Cornelius Agrippa’s magic glass,” observed the virtuoso. “Draw
+aside the curtain, and picture any human form within your mind, and it
+will be reflected in the mirror.”
+
+“It is enough if I can picture it within my mind,” answered I. “Why
+should I wish it to be repeated in the mirror? But, indeed, these works
+of magic have grown wearisome to me. There are so many greater wonders
+in the world, to those who keep their eyes open and their sight
+undimmed by custom, that all the delusions of the old sorcerers seem
+flat and stale. Unless you can show me something really curious, I care
+not to look further into your museum.”
+
+“Ah, well, then,” said the virtuoso, composedly, “perhaps you may deem
+some of my antiquarian rarities deserving of a glance.”
+
+He pointed out the iron mask, now corroded with rust; and my heart grew
+sick at the sight of this dreadful relic, which had shut out a human
+being from sympathy with his race. There was nothing half so terrible
+in the axe that beheaded King Charles, nor in the dagger that slew
+Henry of Navarre, nor in the arrow that pierced the heart of William
+Rufus,—all of which were shown to me. Many of the articles derived
+their interest, such as it was, from having been formerly in the
+possession of royalty. For instance, here was Charlemagne’s sheepskin
+cloak, the flowing wig of Louis Quatorze, the spinning-wheel of
+Sardanapalus, and King Stephen’s famous breeches which cost him but a
+crown. The heart of the Bloody Mary, with the word “Calais” worn into
+its diseased substance, was preserved in a bottle of spirits; and near
+it lay the golden case in which the queen of Gustavus Adolphus
+treasured up that hero’s heart. Among these relics and heirlooms of
+kings I must not forget the long, hairy ears of Midas, and a piece of
+bread which had been changed to gold by the touch of that unlucky
+monarch. And as Grecian Helen was a queen, it may here be mentioned
+that I was permitted to take into my hand a lock of her golden hair and
+the bowl which a sculptor modelled from the curve of her perfect
+breast. Here, likewise, was the robe that smothered Agamemnon, Nero’s
+fiddle, the Czar Peter’s brandy-bottle, the crown of Semiramis, and
+Canute’s sceptre which he extended over the sea. That my own land may
+not deem itself neglected, let me add that I was favored with a sight
+of the skull of King Philip, the famous Indian chief, whose head the
+Puritans smote off and exhibited upon a pole.
+
+“Show me something else,” said I to the virtuoso. “Kings are in such an
+artificial position that people in the ordinary walks of life cannot
+feel an interest in their relics. If you could show me the straw hat of
+sweet little Nell, I would far rather see it than a king’s golden
+crown.”
+
+“There it is,” said my guide, pointing carelessly with his staff to the
+straw hat in question. “But, indeed, you are hard to please. Here are
+the seven-league boots. Will you try them on?”
+
+“Our modern railroads have superseded their use,” answered I; “and as
+to these cowhide boots, I could show you quite as curious a pair at the
+Transcendental community in Roxbury.”
+
+We next examined a collection of swords and other weapons, belonging to
+different epochs, but thrown together without much attempt at
+arrangement. Here Was Arthur’s sword Excalibar, and that of the Cid
+Campeader, and the sword of Brutus rusted with Caesar’s blood and his
+own, and the sword of Joan of Arc, and that of Horatius, and that with
+which Virginius slew his daughter, and the one which Dionysius
+suspended over the head of Damocles. Here also was Arria’s sword, which
+she plunged into her own breast, in order to taste of death before her
+husband. The crooked blade of Saladin’s cimeter next attracted my
+notice. I know not by what chance, but so it happened, that the sword
+of one of our own militia generals was suspended between Don Quixote’s
+lance and the brown blade of Hudibras. My heart throbbed high at the
+sight of the helmet of Miltiades and the spear that was broken in the
+breast of Epaminondas. I recognized the shield of Achilles by its
+resemblance to the admirable cast in the possession of Professor
+Felton. Nothing in this apartment interested me more than Major
+Pitcairn’s pistol, the discharge of which, at Lexington, began the war
+of the Revolution, and was reverberated in thunder around the land for
+seven long years. The bow of Ulysses, though unstrung for ages, was
+placed against the wall, together with a sheaf of Robin Hood’s arrows
+and the rifle of Daniel Boone.
+
+“Enough of weapons,” said I, at length; “although I would gladly have
+seen the sacred shield which fell from heaven in the time of Numa. And
+surely you should obtain the sword which Washington unsheathed at
+Cambridge. But the collection does you much credit. Let us pass on.”
+
+In the next alcove we saw the golden thigh of Pythagoras, which had so
+divine a meaning; and, by one of the queer analogies to which the
+virtuoso seemed to be addicted, this ancient emblem lay on the same
+shelf with Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg, that was fabled to be of
+silver. Here was a remnant of the Golden Fleece, and a sprig of yellow
+leaves that resembled the foliage of a frost-bitten elm, but was duly
+authenticated as a portion of the golden branch by which AEneas gained
+admittance to the realm of Pluto. Atalanta’s golden apple and one of
+the apples of discord were wrapped in the napkin of gold which
+Rampsinitus brought from Hades; and the whole were deposited in the
+golden vase of Bias, with its inscription: “TO THE WISEST.”
+
+“And how did you obtain this vase?” said I to the virtuoso.
+
+“It was given me long ago,” replied he, with a scornful expression in
+his eye, “because I had learned to despise all things.”
+
+It had not escaped me that, though the virtuoso was evidently a man of
+high cultivation, yet he seemed to lack sympathy with the spiritual,
+the sublime, and the tender. Apart from the whim that had led him to
+devote so much time, pains, and expense to the collection of this
+museum, he impressed me as one of the hardest and coldest men of the
+world whom I had ever met.
+
+“To despise all things!” repeated I. “This, at best, is the wisdom of
+the understanding. It is the creed of a man whose soul, whose better
+and diviner part, has never been awakened, or has died out of him.”
+
+“I did not think that you were still so young,” said the virtuoso.
+“Should you live to my years, you will acknowledge that the vase of
+Bias was not ill bestowed.”
+
+Without further discussion of the point, he directed my attention to
+other curiosities. I examined Cinderella’s little glass slipper, and
+compared it with one of Diana’s sandals, and with Fanny Elssler’s shoe,
+which bore testimony to the muscular character of her illustrious foot.
+On the same shelf were Thomas the Rhymer’s green velvet shoes, and the
+brazen shoe of Empedocles which was thrown out of Mount AEtna.
+Anacreon’s drinking-cup was placed in apt juxtaposition with one of Tom
+Moore’s wine-glasses and Circe’s magic bowl. These were symbols of
+luxury and riot; but near them stood the cup whence Socrates drank his
+hemlock, and that which Sir Philip Sidney put from his death-parched
+lips to bestow the draught upon a dying soldier. Next appeared a
+cluster of tobacco-pipes, consisting of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, the
+earliest on record, Dr. Parr’s, Charles Lamb’s, and the first calumet
+of peace which was ever smoked between a European and an Indian. Among
+other musical instruments, I noticed the lyre of Orpheus and those of
+Homer and Sappho, Dr. Franklin’s famous whistle, the trumpet of Anthony
+Van Corlear, and the flute which Goldsmith played upon in his rambles
+through the French provinces. The staff of Peter the Hermit stood in a
+corner with that of good old Bishop Jewel, and one of ivory, which had
+belonged to Papirius, the Roman senator. The ponderous club of Hercules
+was close at hand. The virtuoso showed me the chisel of Phidias,
+Claude’s palette, and the brush of Apelles, observing that he intended
+to bestow the former either on Greenough, Crawford, or Powers, and the
+two latter upon Washington Allston. There was a small vase of oracular
+gas from Delphos, which I trust will be submitted to the scientific
+analysis of Professor Silliman. I was deeply moved on beholding a vial
+of the tears into which Niobe was dissolved; nor less so on learning
+that a shapeless fragment of salt was a relic of that victim of
+despondency and sinful regrets,—Lot’s wife. My companion appeared to
+set great value upon some Egyptian darkness in a blacking-jug. Several
+of the shelves were covered by a collection of coins, among which,
+however, I remember none but the Splendid Shilling, celebrated by
+Phillips, and a dollar’s worth of the iron money of Lycurgus, weighing
+about fifty pounds.
+
+Walking carelessly onward, I had nearly fallen over a huge bundle, like
+a peddler’s pack, done up in sackcloth, and very securely strapped and
+corded.
+
+“It is Christian’s burden of sin,” said the virtuoso.
+
+“O, pray let us open it!” cried I. “For many a year I have longed to
+know its contents.”
+
+“Look into your own consciousness and memory,” replied the virtuoso.
+“You will there find a list of whatever it contains.”
+
+As this was all undeniable truth, I threw a melancholy look at the
+burden and passed on. A collection of old garments, banging on pegs,
+was worthy of some attention, especially the shirt of Nessus, Caesar’s
+mantle, Joseph’s coat of many colors, the Vicar of Bray’s cassock,
+Goldsmith’s peach-bloom suit, a pair of President Jefferson’s scarlet
+breeches, John Randolph’s red baize hunting-shirt, the drab
+small-clothes of the Stout Gentleman, and the rags of the “man all
+tattered and torn.” George Fox’s hat impressed me with deep reverence
+as a relic of perhaps the truest apostle that has appeared on earth for
+these eighteen hundred years. My eye was next attracted by an old pair
+of shears, which I should have taken for a memorial of some famous
+tailor, only that the virtuoso pledged his veracity that they were the
+identical scissors of Atropos. He also showed me a broken hourglass
+which had been thrown aside by Father Time, together with the old
+gentleman’s gray forelock, tastefully braided into a brooch. In the
+hour-glass was the handful of sand, the grains of which had numbered
+the years of the Cumeean sibyl. I think it was in this alcove that I
+saw the inkstand which Luther threw at the Devil, and the ring which
+Essex, while under sentence of death, sent to Queen Elizabeth. And here
+was the blood-incrusted pen of steel with which Faust signed away his
+salvation.
+
+The virtuoso now opened the door of a closet and showed me a lamp
+burning, while three others stood unlighted by its side. One of the
+three was the lamp of Diogenes, another that of Guy Fawkes, and the
+third that which Hero set forth to the midnight breeze in the high
+tower of Ahydos.
+
+“See!” said the virtuoso, blowing with all his force at the lighted
+lamp.
+
+The flame quivered and shrank away from his breath, but clung to the
+wick, and resumed its brilliancy as soon as the blast was exhausted.
+
+“It is an undying lamp from the tomb of Charlemagne,” observed my
+guide. “That flame was kindled a thousand years ago.”
+
+“How ridiculous to kindle an unnatural light in tombs!” exclaimed I.
+“We should seek to behold the dead in the light of heaven. But what is
+the meaning of this chafing-dish of glowing coals?”
+
+“That,” answered the virtuoso, “is the original fire which Prometheus
+stole from heaven. Look steadfastly into it, and you will discern
+another curiosity.”
+
+I gazed into that fire,—which, symbolically, was the origin of all that
+was bright and glorious in the soul of man,—and in the midst of it,
+behold a little reptile, sporting with evident enjoyment of the fervid
+heat! It was a salamander.
+
+“What a sacrilege!” cried I, with inexpressible disgust. “Can you find
+no better use for this ethereal fire than to cherish a loathsome
+reptile in it? Yet there are men who abuse the sacred fire of their own
+souls to as foul and guilty a purpose.”
+
+The virtuoso made no answer except by a dry laugh and an assurance that
+the salamander was the very same which Benvenuto Cellini had seen in
+his father’s household fire. He then proceeded to show me other
+rarities; for this closet appeared to be the receptacle of what he
+considered most valuable in his collection.
+
+“There,” said he, “is the Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains.”
+
+I gazed with no little interest at this mighty gem, which it had been
+one of the wild projects of my youth to discover. Possibly it might
+have looked brighter to me in those days than now; at all events, it
+had not such brilliancy as to detain me long from the other articles of
+the museum. The virtuoso pointed out to me a crystalline stone which
+hung by a gold chain against the wall.
+
+“That is the philosopher’s stone,” said he.
+
+“And have you the elixir vita which generally accompanies it?” inquired
+I.
+
+“Even so; this urn is filled with it,” he replied. “A draught would
+refresh you. Here is Hebe’s cup; will you quaff a health from it?”
+
+My heart thrilled within me at the idea of such a reviving draught; for
+methought I had great need of it after travelling so far on the dusty
+road of life. But I know not whether it were a peculiar glance in the
+virtuoso’s eye, or the circumstance that this most precious liquid was
+contained in an antique sepulchral urn, that made me pause. Then came
+many a thought with which, in the calmer and better hours of life, I
+had strengthened myself to feel that Death is the very friend whom, in
+his due season, even the happiest mortal should be willing to embrace.
+
+“No; I desire not an earthly immortality,” said I.
+
+“Were man to live longer on the earth, the spiritual would die out of
+him. The spark of ethereal fire would be choked by the material, the
+sensual. There is a celestial something within us that requires, after
+a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it from decay and
+ruin. I will have none of this liquid. You do well to keep it in a
+sepulchral urn; for it would produce death while bestowing the shadow
+of life.”
+
+“All this is unintelligible to me,” responded my guide, with
+indifference. “Life—earthly life—is the only good. But you refuse the
+draught? Well, it is not likely to be offered twice within one man’s
+experience. Probably you have griefs which you seek to forget in death.
+I can enable you to forget them in life. Will you take a draught of
+Lethe?”
+
+As he spoke, the virtuoso took from the shelf a crystal vase containing
+a sable liquor, which caught no reflected image from the objects
+around.
+
+“Not for the world!” exclaimed I, shrinking back. “I can spare none of
+my recollections, not even those of error or sorrow. They are all alike
+the food of my spirit. As well never to have lived as to lose them
+now.”
+
+Without further parley we passed to the next alcove, the shelves of
+which were burdened with ancient volumes and with those rolls of
+papyrus in which was treasured up the eldest wisdom of the earth.
+Perhaps the most valuable work in the collection, to a bibliomaniac,
+was the Book of Hermes. For my part, however, I would have given a
+higher price for those six of the Sibyl’s books which Tarquin refused
+to purchase, and which the virtuoso informed me he had himself found in
+the cave of Trophonius. Doubtless these old volumes contain prophecies
+of the fate of Rome, both as respects the decline and fall of her
+temporal empire and the rise of her spiritual one. Not without value,
+likewise, was the work of Anaxagoras on Nature, hitherto supposed to be
+irrecoverably lost, and the missing treatises of Longinus, by which
+modern criticism might profit, and those books of Livy for which the
+classic student has so long sorrowed without hope. Among these precious
+tomes I observed the original manuscript of the Koran, and also that of
+the Mormon Bible in Joe Smith’s authentic autograph. Alexander’s copy
+of the Iliad was also there, enclosed in the jewelled casket of Darius,
+still fragrant of the perfumes which the Persian kept in it.
+
+Opening an iron-clasped volume, bound in black leather, I discovered it
+to be Cornelius Agrippa’s book of magic; and it was rendered still more
+interesting by the fact that many flowers, ancient and modern, were
+pressed between its leaves. Here was a rose from Eve’s bridal bower,
+and all those red and white roses which were plucked in the garden of
+the Temple by the partisans of York and Lancaster. Here was Halleck’s
+Wild Rose of Alloway. Cowper had contributed a Sensitive Plant, and
+Wordsworth an Eglantine, and Burns a Mountain Daisy, and Kirke White a
+Star of Bethlehem, and Longfellow a Sprig of Fennel, with its yellow
+flowers. James Russell Lowell had given a Pressed Flower, but fragrant
+still, which had been shadowed in the Rhine. There was also a sprig
+from Southey’s Holly Tree. One of the most beautiful specimens was a
+Fringed Gentian, which had been plucked and preserved for immortality
+by Bryant. From Jones Very, a poet whose voice is scarcely heard among
+us by reason of its depth, there was a Wind Flower and a Columbine.
+
+As I closed Cornelius Agrippa’s magic volume, an old, mildewed letter
+fell upon the floor. It proved to be an autograph from the Flying
+Dutchman to his wife. I could linger no longer among books; for the
+afternoon was waning, and there was yet much to see. The bare mention
+of a few more curiosities must suffice. The immense skull of Polyphemus
+was recognizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the forehead
+where once had blazed the giant’s single eye. The tub of Diogenes,
+Medea’s caldron, and Psyche’s vase of beauty were placed one within
+another. Pandora’s box, without the lid, stood next, containing nothing
+but the girdle of Venus, which had been carelessly flung into it. A
+bundle of birch-rods which had been used by Shenstone’s schoolmistress
+were tied up with the Countess of Salisbury’s garter. I know not which
+to value most, a roc’s egg as big as an ordinary hogshead, or the shell
+of the egg which Columbus set upon its end. Perhaps the most delicate
+article in the whole museum was Queen Mab’s chariot, which, to guard it
+from the touch of meddlesome fingers, was placed under a glass tumbler.
+
+Several of the shelves were occupied by specimens of entomology.
+Feeling but little interest in the science, I noticed only Anacreon’s
+grasshopper, and a bumblebee which had been presented to the virtuoso
+by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
+
+In the part of the hall which we had now reached I observed a curtain,
+that descended from the ceiling to the floor in voluminous folds, of a
+depth, richness, and magnificence which I had never seen equalled. It
+was not to be doubted that this splendid though dark and solemn veil
+concealed a portion of the museum even richer in wonders than that
+through which I had already passed; but, on my attempting to grasp the
+edge of the curtain and draw it aside, it proved to be an illusive
+picture.
+
+“You need not blush,” remarked the virtuoso; “for that same curtain
+deceived Zeuxis. It is the celebrated painting of Parrhasius.”
+
+In a range with the curtain there were a number of other choice
+pictures by artists of ancient days. Here was the famous cluster of
+grapes by Zeuxis, so admirably depicted that it seemed as if the ripe
+juice were bursting forth. As to the picture of the old woman by the
+same illustrious painter, and which was so ludicrous that he himself
+died with laughing at it, I cannot say that it particularly moved my
+risibility. Ancient humor seems to have little power over modern
+muscles. Here, also, was the horse painted by Apelles which living
+horses neighed at; his first portrait of Alexander the Great, and his
+last unfinished picture of Venus asleep. Each of these works of art,
+together with others by Parrhasius, Timanthes, Polygnotus, Apollodorus,
+Pausias, and Pamplulus, required more time and study than I could
+bestow for the adequate perception of their merits. I shall therefore
+leave them undescribed and uncriticised, nor attempt to settle the
+question of superiority between ancient and modern art.
+
+For the same reason I shall pass lightly over the specimens of antique
+sculpture which this indefatigable and fortunate virtuoso had dug out
+of the dust of fallen empires. Here was AEtion’s cedar statue of
+AEsculapius, much decayed, and Alcon’s iron statue of Hercules,
+lamentably rusted. Here was the statue of Victory, six feet high, which
+the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias had held in his hand. Here was a
+forefinger of the Colossus of Rhodes, seven feet in length. Here was
+the Venus Urania of Phidias, and other images of male and female beauty
+or grandeur, wrought by sculptors who appeared never to have debased
+their souls by the sight of any meaner forms than those of gods or
+godlike mortals. But the deep simplicity of these great works was not
+to be comprehended by a mind excited and disturbed, as mine was, by the
+various objects that had recently been presented to it. I therefore
+turned away with merely a passing glance, resolving on some future
+occasion to brood over each individual statue and picture until my
+inmost spirit should feel their excellence. In this department, again,
+I noticed the tendency to whimsical combinations and ludicrous
+analogies which seemed to influence many of the arrangements of the
+museum. The wooden statue so well known as the Palladium of Troy was
+placed in close apposition with the wooden head of General Jackson,
+which was stolen a few years since from the bows of the frigate
+Constitution.
+
+We had now completed the circuit of the spacious hall, and found
+ourselves again near the door. Feeling somewhat wearied with the survey
+of so many novelties and antiquities, I sat down upon Cowper’s sofa,
+while the virtuoso threw himself carelessly into Rabelais’s easychair.
+Casting my eyes upon the opposite wall, I was surprised to perceive the
+shadow of a man flickering unsteadily across the wainscot, and looking
+as if it were stirred by some breath of air that found its way through
+the door or windows. No substantial figure was visible from which this
+shadow might be thrown; nor, had there been such, was there any
+sunshine that would have caused it to darken upon the wall.
+
+“It is Peter Schlemihl’s shadow,” observed the virtuoso, “and one of
+the most valuable articles in my collection.”
+
+“Methinks a shadow would have made a fitting doorkeeper to such a
+museum,” said I; “although, indeed, yonder figure has something strange
+and fantastic about him, which suits well enough with many of the
+impressions which I have received here. Pray, who is he?”
+
+While speaking, I gazed more scrutinizingly than before at the
+antiquated presence of the person who had admitted me, and who still
+sat on his bench with the same restless aspect, and dim, confused,
+questioning anxiety that I had noticed on my first entrance. At this
+moment he looked eagerly towards us, and, half starting from his seat,
+addressed me.
+
+“I beseech you, kind sir,” said he, in a cracked, melancholy tone,
+“have pity on the most unfortunate man in the world. For Heaven’s sake,
+answer me a single question! Is this the town of Boston?”
+
+“You have recognized him now,” said the virtuoso. “It is Peter Rugg,
+the missing man. I chanced to meet him the other day still in search of
+Boston, and conducted him hither; and, as he could not succeed in
+finding his friends, I have taken him into my service as doorkeeper. He
+is somewhat too apt to ramble, but otherwise a man of trust and
+integrity.”
+
+“And might I venture to ask,” continued I, “to whom am I indebted for
+this afternoon’s gratification?”
+
+The virtuoso, before replying, laid his hand upon an antique dart, or
+javelin, the rusty steel head of winch seemed to have been blunted, as
+if it had encountered the resistance of a tempered shield, or
+breastplate.
+
+“My name has not been without its distinction in the world for a longer
+period than that of any other man alive,” answered he. “Yet many doubt
+of my existence; perhaps you will do so to-morrow. This dart which I
+hold in my hand was once grim Death’s own weapon. It served him well
+for the space of four thousand years; but it fell blunted, as you see,
+when he directed it against my breast.”
+
+These words were spoken with the calm and cold courtesy of manner that
+had characterized this singular personage throughout our interview. I
+fancied, it is true, that there was a bitterness indefinably mingled
+with his tone, as of one cut off from natural sympathies and blasted
+with a doom that had been inflicted on no other human being, and by the
+results of which he had ceased to be human. Yet, withal, it seemed one
+of the most terrible consequences of that doom that the victim no
+longer regarded it as a calamity, but had finally accepted it as the
+greatest good that could have befallen him.
+
+“You are the Wandering Jew!” exclaimed I.
+
+The virtuoso bowed without emotion of any kind; for, by centuries of
+custom, he had almost lost the sense of strangeness in his fate, and
+was but imperfectly conscious of the astonishment and awe with which it
+affected such as are capable of death.
+
+“Your doom is indeed a fearful one!” said I, with irrepressible feeling
+and a frankness that afterwards startled me; “yet perhaps the ethereal
+spirit is not entirely extinct under all this corrupted or frozen mass
+of earthly life. Perhaps the immortal spark may yet be rekindled by a
+breath of heaven. Perhaps you may yet be permitted to die before it is
+too late to live eternally. You have my prayers for such a
+consummation. Farewell.”
+
+“Your prayers will be in vain,” replied he, with a smile of cold
+triumph. “My destiny is linked with the realities of earth. You are
+welcome to your visions and shadows of a future state; but give me what
+I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask no more.”
+
+“It is indeed too late,” thought I. “The soul is dead within him.”
+
+Struggling between pity and horror, I extended my hand, to which the
+virtuoso gave his own, still with the habitual courtesy of a man of the
+world, but without a single heart-throb of human brotherhood. The touch
+seemed like ice, yet I know not whether morally or physically. As I
+departed, he bade me observe that the inner door of the hall was
+constructed with the ivory leaves of the gateway through which Aeneas
+and the Sibyl had been dismissed from Hades.
+
+
+
+
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