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Title: The Entire Gutenberg Files of Holmes

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Release Date: June, 2002  [Etext #3252]
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        THE ENTIRE GUTENBERG FILES OF OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.


CONTENTS:
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table
The Professor at the Breakfast-table
The Poet at the Breakfast Table
Over the Teacups
Elsie Venner
The Guardian Angel
A Mortal Antipathy
Pages from an Old Volume of Life
     Bread and the Newspaper
     My Hunt after "The Captain"
     The Inevitable Trial
     Cinders from Ashes
     The Pulpit and the Pew
Medical Essays
     Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions
     The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
     Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science
     Border Lines of Knowledge in Some Provinces of Medical Science
     Scholastic and Bedside Teaching
     The Medical Profession in Massachusetts
     The Young Practitioner
     Medical Libraries
     Some of My Early Teachers


                         



Scanned and proofed by David Price <ccx074@coventry.ac.uk>


                  THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE
                        by Oliver Wendell Holmes



THE AUTOCRAT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.


THE interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of
these papers was just a quarter of a century in duration.

Two articles entitled "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" will be
found in the "New England Magazine," formerly published in Boston
by J. T. and E. Buckingham.  The date of the first of these
articles is November 1831, and that of the second February 1832.
When "The Atlantic Monthly" was begun, twenty-five years
afterwards, and the author was asked to write for it, the
recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary
boyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curious experiment
to shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were
better or worse than the early windfalls.

So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those
earlier attempts to my own notice and that of some few friends who
were idle enough to read them at the time of their publication.
The man is father to the boy that was, and I am my own son, as it
seems to me, in those papers of the New England Magazine.  If I
find it hard to pardon the boy's faults, others would find it
harder.  They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I
hope, anywhere.

But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and
with these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still
breathes, will be contented.


- "It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you
find yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation." -

- "When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary.
The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences.
The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and
luftre have been given by the attrition of ages.  Bring me the
fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I
will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more
accurate, and a more eloquent analogy." -

- "Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people in
the world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon.  So
the projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years.  Some
thousand fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the
selectmen and other great folks of all the different nations.  For
a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful
noise that was to be made on the great occafion.  When the time
came, everybody had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal
ejaculation of BOO, - the word agreed upon, - that nobody spoke
except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in
Pekin, so that the world was never so ftill fince the creation." -


There was nothing better than these things and there was not a
little that was much worse.  A young fellow of two or three and
twenty has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in
learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his
hat-full of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an
ELEGANT like Brummel to point to an armful of failures in the
attempt to achieve a perfect tie.  This son of mine, whom I have
not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a
self-willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised
fancies.  He, like too many American young people, got the spur
when he should have had the rein.  He therefore helped to fill the
market with that unripe fruit which his father says in one of these
papers abounds in the marts of his native country.  All these by-
gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did he not feel sure
that very few of his readers know anything about them.  In taking
the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had
uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that
his unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years
have doubled, he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should
live to double them again and become his own grandfather.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
BOSTON.  NOV. 1ST 1858.



CHAPTER I



I WAS JUST going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the
many ways of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical
and algebraical intellects.  All economical and practical wisdom is
an extension or variation of the following arithmetical formula:
2+2=4.  Every philosophical proposition has the more general
character of the expression A+B=C.  We are mere operatives,
empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead
of figures.

They all stared.  There is a divinity student lately come among us
to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to
take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or
pertinent questions are involved.  He abused his liberty on this
occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same
observation. - No, sir, I replied, he has not.  But he said a
mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it,
and you found it, NOT IN THE ORIGINAL, but quoted by Dr. Thomas
Reid.  I will tell the company what he did say, one of these days.

- If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration? - I blush to say
that I do not at this present moment.  I once did, however.  It was
the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a
body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired
their teacher, and to some extent each other.  Many of them
deserved it; they have become famous since.  It amuses me to hear
the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray -


"Letters four do form his name" -


about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage
of civilization.  All generous companies of artists, authors,
philanthropists, men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of
Mutual Admiration.  A man of genius, or any kind of superiority, is
not debarred from admiring the same quality in another, nor the
other from returning his admiration.  They may even associate
together and continue to think highly of each other.  And so of a
dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so
many.  The being referred to above assumes several false premises.
First, that men of talent necessarily hate each other.  Secondly,
that intimate knowledge or habitual association destroys our
admiration of persons whom we esteemed highly at a distance.
Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows, who meet together to dine
and have a good time, have signed a constitutional compact to
glorify themselves and to put down him and the fraction of the
human race not belonging to their number.  Fourthly, that it is an
outrage that he is not asked to join them.

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who
sits opposite said, "That's it! that's it!"

I continued, for I was in the talking vein.  As to clever people's
hating each other, I think a LITTLE extra talent does sometimes
make people jealous.  They become irritated by perpetual attempts
and failures, and it hurts their tempers and dispositions.
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak
flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable.  It
spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the
rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water.
No wonder the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this
class of slightly flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by
the strange sight of a dozen men of capacity working and playing
together in harmony.  He and his fellows are always fighting.  With
them familiarity naturally breeds contempt.  If they ever praise
each other's bad drawings, or broken-winded novels, or spavined
verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it was simply
a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.

If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that
alters the question.  But if they are men with noble powers and
qualities, let me tell you, that, next to youthful love and family
affections, there is no human sentiment better than that which
unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration.  And what would
literature or art be without such associations?  Who can tell what
we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare, and
Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members?  Or to that of
which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the
Spectator?  Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and
Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all
admirers, met together?  Was there any great harm in the fact that
the Irvings and Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable
cabal in the literary union of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and
as many more as they chose to associate with them?

The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he
abuses this noblest of institutions.  Let him inspect its mysteries
through the knot-hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a
medium for his popgun.  Such a society is the crown of a literary
metropolis; if a town has not material for it, and spirit and good
feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere caravansary, fit for a
man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in.  Foolish people hate
and dread and envy such an association of men of varied powers and
influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the
necessity of the case, exclusive.  Wise ones are prouder of the
title M. S. M. A. than of all their other honors put together.

- All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called
"facts."  They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact
or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many
bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or
convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy?  I allow no "facts"
at this table.  What!  Because bread is good and wholesome and
necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe
while I am talking?  Do not these muscles of mine represent a
hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten
thousand of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my
speech?

[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar
mind.  The reader will of course understand the precise amount of
seasoning which must be added to it before he adopts it as one of
the axioms of his life.  The speaker disclaims all responsibility
for its abuse in incompetent hands.]

This business of conversation is a very serious matter.  There are
men that it weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day's
fasting would do.  Mark this that I am going to say, for it is as
good as a working professional man's advice, and costs you nothing:
It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have a
nerve tapped.  Nobody measures your nervous force as it runs away,
nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.

There are men of ESPRIT who are excessively exhausting to some
people.  They are the talkers who have what may be called JERKY
minds.  Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence.
They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags
rack you to death.  After a jolting half-hour with one of these
jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief.
It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a squirrel.

What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times!
A ground-glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to
our dazzled eyes than such a one to our minds.

"Do not dull people bore you?" said one of the lady-boarders, - the
same that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a
few original stanzas, not remembering that "The Pactolian" pays me
five dollars a line for every thing I write in its columns.

"Madam," said I, (she and the century were in their teens
together,) "all men are bores, except when we want them.  There
never was but one man whom I would trust with my latch-key."

"Who might that favored person be?"

"Zimmermann."

- The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the
cobra-di-capello.  You remember what they tell of William Pinkney,
the great pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his
neck would swell and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he
seemed on the verge of apoplexy.  The hydraulic arrangements for
supplying the brain with blood are only second in importance to its
own organization.  The bulbous-headed fellows that steam well when
they are at work are the men that draw big audiences and give us
marrowy books and pictures.  It is a good sign to have one's feet
grow cold when he is writing.  A great writer and speaker once told
me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this,
ALL his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury
sometimes withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.

- You don't suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so
many postage-stamps, do you, - each to be only once uttered?  If
you do, you are mistaken.  He must be a poor creature that does not
often repeat himself.  Imagine the author of the excellent piece of
advice, "Know thyself," never alluding to that sentiment again
during the course of a protracted existence!  Why, the truths a man
carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter
is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board
with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail?
I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often.  I shall
use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same
stereotypes.  A thought is often original, though you have uttered
it a hundred times.  It has come to you over a new route, by a new
and express train of associations.

Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech
twice over, and yet be held blameless.  Thus, a certain lecturer,
after performing in an inland city, where dwells a LITTERATRICE of
note, was invited to meet her and others over the social teacup.
She pleasantly referred to his many wanderings in his new
occupation.  "Yes," he replied, "I am like the Huma, the bird that
never lights, being always in the cars, as he is always on the
wing." - Years elapsed.  The lecturer visited the same place once
more for the same purpose.  Another social cup after the lecture,
and a second meeting with the distinguished lady.  "You are
constantly going from place to place," she said. - "Yes," he
answered, "I am like the Huma," - and finished the sentence as
before.


What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine
speech, word for word, twice over!  Yet it was not true, as the
lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he had embellished
his conversation with the Huma daily during that whole interval of
years.  On the contrary, he had never once thought of the odious
fowl until the recurrence of precisely the same circumstances
brought up precisely the same idea.  He ought to have been proud of
the accuracy of his mental adjustments.  Given certain factors, and
a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the
certainty of Babbage's calculating machine.

- What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere
mathematician!  A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and
without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results
like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it
grind a thousand bushels of them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents PLUS "the
mathematics."  But the calculating power alone should seem to be
the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of
reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three
or four calculators, and better than any one of them.  Sometimes I
have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension
of the relations of numbers.  But the triumph of the ciphering
hand-organ has consoled me.  I always fancy I can hear the wheels
clicking in a calculator's brain.  The power of dealing with
numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put
into a mighty poor watch - I suppose it is about as common as the
power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare
endowment.

- Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about.
Nature is very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many
small talents and little accomplishments would be neglected!  Talk
about conceit as much as you like, it is to human character what
salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet, and renders it endurable.
Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-fowl's
plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and
the wave in which he dips.  When one has had ALL his conceit taken
out of him, when he has lost ALL his illusions, his feathers will
soon soak through, and he will fly no more.

"So you admire conceited people, do you?" said the young lady who
has come to the city to be finished off for - the duties of life.

I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear.  It
does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a
salt-water plunge at Nahant.  I say that conceit is just as natural
a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle.  But little-
minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five
minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine
their whole curve.  An arc in the movement of a large intellect
does not sensibly differ from a straight line.  Even if it have the
third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it.  The highest
thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not
obviously imply any individual centre.

Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing.
What resplendent beauty that must have been which could have
authorized Phryne to "peel" in the way she did!  What fine speeches
are those two:  "NON OMNIS MORTAR," and "I have taken all knowledge
to be my province"!  Even in common people, conceit has the virtue
of making them cheerful; the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his
house, his horse, his dog, and himself severally unequalled, is
almost sure to be a good-humored person, though liable to be
tedious at times.

- What are the great faults of conversation?  Want of ideas, want
of words, want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you
think.  I don't doubt it, but I will tell you what I have found
spoil more good talks than anything else; - long arguments on
special points between people who differ on the fundamental
principles upon which these points depend.  No men can have
satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on
certain ULTIMATA of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary
conversation, and unless they have sense enough to trace the
secondary questions depending upon these ultimate beliefs to their
source.  In short, just as a written constitution is essential to
the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary
condition of profitable talk between two persons.  Talking is like
playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the
strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out
their music.

- Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in
your minds?  Let me lay down the law upon the subject.  Life and
language are alike sacred.  Homicide and VERBICIDE - that is,
violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate
meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.  Manslaughter,
which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter,
which is the end of the other.  A pun is PRIMA FACIE an insult to
the person you are talking with.  It implies utter indifference to
or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious.  I
speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the
subject is deep raving.  I have committed my self-respect by
talking with such a person.  I should like to commit him, but
cannot, because he is a nuisance.  Or I speak of geological
convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark;
also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern
inundation.

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return.  But if a blow
were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be
judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter
were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable
homicide.  Thus, in a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe
presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of
suffering humanity.  Roe replied by asking, When charity was like a
top?  It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence.
Roe then said, "When it begins to hum."  Doe then - and not till
then - struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of
the Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification
ensued, with a fatal result.  The chief laid down his notions of
the law to his brother justices, who unanimously replied, "Jest
so."  The chief rejoined, that no man should jest so without being
punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was acquitted,
and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff.  The bound volume
was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.

People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the
railroad tracks.  They amuse themselves and other children, but
their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for
the sake of a battered witticism.

I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will
mark the places on this slip of paper.  (While he is gone, I may
say that this boy, our land-lady's youngest, is called BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name.  A highly
merited compliment.)

I wished to refer to two eminent authorities.  Now be so good as to
listen.  The great moralist says:  "To trifle with the vocabulary
which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the
currency of human intelligence.  He who would violate the
sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the
paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of Saturn
without an indigestion."

And, once more, listen to the historian.  "The Puritans hated puns.
The Bishops were notoriously addicted to them.  The Lords Temporal
carried them to the verge of license.  Majesty itself must have its
Royal quibble.  'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said Queen
Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord
of Leicester.'  The gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent
their sanction to the practice.  Lord Bacon playfully declared
himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan.  Sir Philip
Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought
him water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man.  A courtier,
who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the
blackamoor was a brute, and not a man.  'Thou hast reason,' replied
a great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two-
legged animal WITH feathers.'  The fatal habit became universal.
The language was corrupted.  The infection spread to the national
conscience.  Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal
double meanings.  The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation.  What was
levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in
the age of the Stuarts."

Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the
Macaulay-flowers of literature? - There was a dead silence. - I
said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any interruption by a pun
as a hint to change my boarding-house.  Do not plead my example.
If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would
show up a drunken helot.  We have done with them.

- If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic? - I
should say that its most frequent work was to build a PONS ASINORUM
over chasms which shrewd people can bestride without such a
structure.  You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove
anything that you want to prove.  You can buy treatises to show
that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle of Bunker-hill was
ever fought.  The great minds are those with a wide span, which
couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other.
Logicians carry the surveyor's chain over the track of which these
are the true explorers.  I value a man mainly for his primary
relations with truth, as I understand truth, - not for any
secondary artifice in handling his ideas.  Some of the sharpest men
in argument are notoriously unsound in judgment.  I should not
trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that of a good
chess-player.  Either may of course advise wisely, but not
necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.

The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer
lifts his forefoot, at the expression, "his relations with truth,
as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and
said I talked like a transcendentalist.  For his part, common sense
was good enough for him.

Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, AS YOU
UNDERSTAND IT.  We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our
own minds, either of things or persons.  A man who is willing to
take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice
of whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of
things for one's self.  On the whole, I had rather judge men's
minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of
thoughts by knowing who utter them.  I must do one or the other.
It does not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another
man's thoughts as broader and deeper than my own; but that does not
necessarily change my opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy
of every superior mind that held a different one.  How many of our
most cherished beliefs are like those drinking-glasses of the
ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we keep them in our
hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down!  I have
sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of MORA, in
which one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and
the other gives the number if he can.  I show my thought, another
his; if they agree, well; if they differ, we find the largest
common factor, if we can, but at any rate avoid disputing about
remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what tuning an
instrument is to playing on it.

- What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a
copy of verses, with critical remarks by the author?  Any of the
company can retire that like.


ALBUM VERSES.


When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another

To cheat the cunning tempter's art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.

A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.

On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.

Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.

But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor's smile, the murderer's frown,
The lips of lying lovers,

They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavour
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.


What do YOU think of these verses my friends? - Is that piece an
impromptu? said my landlady's daughter.  (Aet. 19 +.  Tender-eyed
blonde.  Long ringlets.  Cameo pin.  Gold pencil-case on a chain.
Locket.  Bracelet.  Album.  Autograph book.  Accordeon.  Reads
Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb, junior, while her mother makes
the puddings.  Says "Yes?" when you tell her anything.) - OUI ET
NON, MA PETITE, - Yes and no, my child.  Five of the seven verses
were written off-hand; the other two took a week, - that is, were
hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as
long as that.  All poets will tell you just such stories.  C'EST LE
DERNIER PAS QUI COUTE.  Don't you know how hard it is for some
people to get out of a room after their visit is really over?  They
want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don't know
how to manage it.  One would think they had been built in your
parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched.  I have
contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors,
which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them
down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their "native
element," the great ocean of out-doors.  Well, now, there are poems
as hard to get rid of as these rural visitors.  They come in
glibly, use up all the serviceable rhymes, DAY, RAY, BEAUTY, DUTY,
SKIES, EYES, OTHER, BROTHER, MOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, and the like; and
so they go on until you think it is time for the wind-up, and the
wind-up won't come on any terms.  So they lie about until you get
sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of
a final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors.  I
suspect a good many "impromptus" could tell just such a story as
the above. - Here turning to our landlady, I used an illustration
which pleased the company much at the time, and has since been
highly commanded.  "Madam," I said, "you can pour three gills and
three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is full, in less
than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last quarter
of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the
vessel upside down for a thousand years.

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in
that copy of verses, - which I don't mean to abuse, or to praise
either.  I always feel as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-
leathers to an old pair of boot-soles and bodies, when I am fitting
sentiments to these venerable jingles.

     .    .    .    .    youth
.    .    .    .    .    morning
.    .    .    .    .    truth
.    .    .    .    .    warning

Nine tenths of the "Juvenile Poems" written spring out of the above
musical and suggestive coincidences.

"Yes?" said our landlady's daughter.

I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from
her limited range of reading, she will never see it; I said it
softly to my next neighbour.

When a young female wears a flat circular side - curl, gummed on
each temple, - when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his
arm against the back of hers, - and when she says "Yes?" with the
note of interrogation, you are generally safe in asking her what
wages she gets, and who the "feller" was you saw her with.

"What were you whispering?" said the daughter of the house,
moistening her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.

"I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis."

"Yes?"

- It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
implements and modes of expression in all times and places.  The
young ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook's Voyages, had a
sort of crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest
spread of our own lady-baskets.  When I fling a Bay-State shawl
over my shoulders, I am only taking a lesson from the climate that
the Indian had learned before me.  A BLANKET-shawl we call it, and
not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines, and not like the
Highlanders.

- We are the Romans of the modern world, - the great assimilating
people.  Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents
with us, as with our prototypes.  And so we come to their style of
weapon.  Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed GLADIUS of the
Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to
meet the daily wants of civil society.  I announce at this table an
axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the journals of Congress:-


The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.


COROLLARY.  It was the Polish LANCE that left Poland at last with
nothing of her own to bound.


"Dropped from her nerveless grasp the SHATTERED SPEAR!"


What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a
fifteen-foot pole between her and the breasts of her enemies?  If
she had but clutched the old Roman and young American weapon, and
come to close quarters, there might have been a chance for her; but
it would have spoiled the best passage in "The Pleasures of Hope."

- Self-made men? - Well, yes.  Of course everybody likes and
respects self-made men.  It is a great deal better to be made in
that way than not to be made at all.  Are any of you younger people
old enough to remember that Irishman's house on the marsh at
Cambridgeport, which house he built from drain to chimney-top with
his own hands?  It took him a good many years to build it, and one
could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a little wavy in
outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect.  A
regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was
a very good house for a "self-made" carpenter's house, and people
praised it, and said how remarkably well the Irishman had
succeeded.  They never thought of praising the fine blocks of
houses a little farther on.

Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife,
deserves more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-
turned article, shaped by the most approved pattern, and French-
polished by society and travel.  But as to saying that one is every
way the equal of the other, that is another matter.  The right of
strict social discrimination of all things and persons, according
to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious
republican privileges.  I take the liberty to exercise it, when I
say, that, OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, in most relations of life I
prefer a man of family.

What do I mean by a man of family? - O, I'll give you a general
idea of what I mean.  Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it
costs us nothing.

Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a
member of his Majesty's Council for the Province, a Governor or so,
one or two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later
than the time of top-boots with tassels.

Family portraits.  The member of the Council, by Smibert.  The
great merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-
chair, in a velvet cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to
show the range of his commercial transactions, and letters with
large red seals lying round, one directed conspicuously to The
Honourable etc. etc.  Great-grandmother, by the same artist; brown
satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old lady, stiffish,
but imposing.  Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular, hanging
sleeves; parrot on fist.  A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1.  A superb
full-blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory blood in
his veins, tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother,
and warmed up with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one
flame of ruddy sunshine; his ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom
with an impetuous generosity, as if it would drag his heart after
it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand dollars to the
Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and dependants.
2.  Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of
Empire; bust A LA JOSEPHINE; wisps of curls, like celery-tips, at
sides of forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial.
As for the miniatures by Malbone, we don't count them in the
gallery.

Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them, -
family names; - you will find them at the head of their respective
classes in the days when students took rank on the catalogue from
their parents' condition.  Elzevirs, with the Latinized
appellations of youthful progenitors, and HIC LIBER EST MEUS on the
title-page.  A set of Hogarth's original plates.  Pope, original
edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717.  Barrow on the lower shelves, in
folio.  Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-
decimos.

Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms
of the family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden
aunt.

If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in,
furnished with claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, and
tall bevel-edged mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit
is complete.

No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man
who inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at
least four or five generations.  Above all things, as a child, he
should have tumbled about in a library.  All men are afraid of
books, who have not handled them from infancy.  Do you suppose our
dear DIDASCALOS over there ever read POLI SYNOPSIS, or consulted
CASTELLI LEXICON, while he was growing up to their stature?  Not
he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and
leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs
sweated through the bat's handle in the Arabian story.  I tell you
he is at home wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of
Russia leather.  No self-made man feels so.  One may, it is true,
have all the antecedents I have spoken of, and yet be a boor or a
shabby fellow.  One may have none of them, and yet be fit for
councils and courts.  Then let them change places.  Our social
arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and
down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by
layers of prescription.  But I still insist on my democratic
liberty of choice, and I go for the man with the gallery of family
portraits against the one with the twenty-five-cent daguerreotype,
unless I find out that the last is the better of the two.

- I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had
thought the world was ripe.  But it is very green yet, if I am not
mistaken; and besides, there is a great deal of coal to use up,
which I cannot bring myself to think was made for nothing.  If
certain things, which seem to me essential to a millennium, had
come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they haven't.
Perhaps you would like to hear my


LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.


When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle - rasp - and straw -
Grow bigger DOWNWARDS through the box, -

When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right, -
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light, -

When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean, -
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean, -

When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take, -
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience' sake, -

When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof, -

When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair, -

When Cuba's weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harber not
Such dimples as would hold your fist, -

When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before, -
When the first locomotive's wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel's bore; -

TILL then let Cumming a blaze away,
And Miller's saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
THEN order your ascension robe!


The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read
others occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them.  Of course
they would not expect it every morning.  Neither must the reader
suppose that all these things I have reported were said at any one
breakfast-time.  I have not taken the trouble to date them, as
Raspail, PERE, used to date every proof he sent to the printer; but
they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have said a good
many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some time
or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.

I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor,
of whom you may perhaps hear more by and by.  The Professor read
them, he told me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our
great Historians met a few of his many friends at their invitation.


YES, we knew we must lose him, - though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
'Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.

As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel, -
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel, -
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.

What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!

In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!

Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed
From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!

* * * * *

The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
On pampas, on prairie, o'er mountain and lake,
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.

So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
When the dead summer's jewels were trampled and crushed:
THE TRUE KNIGHT OF LEARNING, - the world holds him dear, -
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!



CHAPTER II.



I REALLY believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being
too precious for conversation.  What do you think an admiring
friend said the other day to one that was talking good things, -
good enough to print?   "Why," said he, "you are wasting
mechantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I
can tell, of fifty dollars an hour."  The talker took him to the

window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.

"Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a
sprinkling-machine through it."

"Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water?  What would
be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our
THOUGHT-SPRINKLERS through them with the valves open, sometimes?

"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you
forget.  It shapes our thoughts for us; - the waves of conversation
roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore.  Let me
modify the image a little.  I rough out my thoughts in talk as an
artist models in clay.  Spoken language is so plastic, - you can
pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill up, and
stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is
nothing like it for modelling.  Out of it come the shapes which you
turn into marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to
write such.  Or, to use another illustration, writing or printing
is like shooting with a rifle; you may hit your reader's mind, or
miss it; - but talking is like playing at a mark with the pipe of
an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time enough, you
can't help hitting it."

The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior
excellence, or, in the phrase used by them, "Fust-rate."  I
acknowledged the compliment, but gently rebuked the expression.
"Fust-rate," "prime," "a prime article," "a superior piece of
goods," "a handsome garment," "a gent in a flowered vest," - all
such expressions are final.  They blast the lineage of him or her
who utters them, for generations up and down.  There is one other
phrase which will soon come to be decisive of a man's social
STATUS, if it is not already:   "That tells the whole story."  It
is an expression which vulgar and conceited people particularly
affect, and which well-meaning ones, who know better, catch from
them.  It is intended to stop all debate, like the previous
question in the General Court.  Only it doesn't; simply because
"that" does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole
story.

- It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a
professional education.  To become a doctor a man must study some
three years and hear a thousand lectures, more or less.  Just how
much study it takes to make a lawyer I cannot say, but probably not
more than this.  Now most decent people hear one hundred lectures
or sermons (discourses) on theology every year, - and this, twenty,
thirty, fifty years together.  They read a great many religious
books besides.  The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons except
what they preach themselves.  A dull preacher might be conceived,
therefore, to lapse into a state of QUASI heathenism, simply for
want of religious instruction.  And on the other hand, an attentive
and intelligent hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers,
might become actually better educated in theology than any one of
them.  We are all theological students, and more of us qualified as
doctors of divinity than have received degrees at any of the
universities.

It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often
find it difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed
upon a sermon treating feebly a subject which they have thought
vigorously about for years, and heard able men discuss scores of
times.  I have often noticed, however, that a hopelessly dull
discourse acts INDUCTIVELY, as electricians would say, in
developing strong mental currents.  I am ashamed to think with what
accompaniments and variations and FIORITURE I have sometimes
followed the droning of a heavy speaker, - not willingly, - for my
habit is reverential, - but as a necessary result of a slight
continuous impression on the senses and the mind, which kept both
in action without furnishing the food they required to work upon.
If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird after him, you will get an
image of a dull speaker and a lively listener.  The bird in sable
plumage flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while the
other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back
again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never
losing sight of him, and finally reaches the crow's perch at the
same time the crow does, having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops
and knots and spirals while the slow fowl was painfully working
from one end of his straight line to the other.

[I think these remarks were received rather coolly.  A temporary
boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than
middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little
"frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold
beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in
basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have
been very virulent about what I said.  So I went to my good old
minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember
them, to him.  He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
considerable truth in them.  He thought he could tell when people's
minds were wandering, by their looks.  In the earlier years of his
ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching; -
very little of late years.  Sometimes, when his colleague was
preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it
was not so very unnatural.  I will say, by the way, that it is a
rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my
minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]

- I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody
has made before me.  You know very well that I write verses
sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table.  (The
company assented, - two or three of them in a resigned sort of way,
as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and
was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.) - I
continued.  Of course I write some lines or passages which are
better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be
called relatively excellent.  It is in the nature of things that I
should consider these relatively excellent lines or passages as
absolutely good.  So much must be pardoned to humanity.  Now I
never wrote a "good" line in my life, but the moment after it was
written it seemed a hundred years old.  Very commonly I had a
sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere.  Possibly I may
have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that
I ever once detected any historical truth in these sudden
convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase.  I have
learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me
out of a thought or line.

This is the philosophy of it.  (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.)  Any new formula which suddenly
emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of
thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance
among the recognized growths of our intellect.  Any crystalline
group of musical words has had a long and still period to form in.
Here is one theory.

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts.
It is this.  The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories
is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance.  Their
apparent age runs up miraculously, like the value of diamonds, as
they increase in magnitude.  A great calamity, for instance, is as
old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.  It stains
backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of
life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we
are turning.  For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed
in dreams that we leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the
"dissolving views" of dark day-visions; all omens pointed to it;
all paths led to it.  After the tossing half-forgetfulness of the
first sleep that follows such an event, it comes upon us afresh, as
a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again, - old as
eternity.

[I wish I had not said all this then and there.  I might have known
better.  The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was
looking at me, as I noticed, with a wild sort of expression.  All
at once the blood dropped out of her cheeks as the mercury drops
from a broken barometer-tube, and she melted away from her seat
like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not have brought her down
better.  God forgive me!

After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained
balancing teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or
tilting upon the hind legs of their chairs until their heads
reached the wall, where they left gratuitous advertisements of
various popular cosmetics.]

When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of
trial, he finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for
it.  He has committed a great crime, for instance, and is sent to
the State Prison.  The traditions, prescriptions, limitations,
privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life, stamp
themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax; - a
single pressure is enough.  Let me strengthen the image a little.
Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed
steam-engine at the Mint?  The smooth piston slides backward and
forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a
ring.  The engine lays one of ITS fingers calmly, but firmly, upon
a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and
tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over
with twenty centuries.  So it is that a great silent-moving misery
puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment, - as sharp an
impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.

It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional
dealers in misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a
moment, and you pass out of the individual life you were living
into the rhythmical movements of their horrible machinery.  Do the
worst thing you can, or suffer the worst that can be thought of,
you find yourself in a category of humanity that stretches back as
far as Cain, and with an expert at your elbow who has studied your
case all out beforehand, and is waiting for you with his implements
of hemp or mahogany.  I believe, if a man were to be burned in any
of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would be found a master of
ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were necessary, and the
best way of arranging the whole matter.

- So we have not won the Goodwood cup; AU CONTRAIRE, we were a "bad
fifth," if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third
time, has not yet bettered the matter.  Now I am as patriotic as
any of my fellow-citizens, - too patriotic in fact, for I have got
into hot water by loving too much of my country; in short, if any
man, whose fighting weight is not more than eight stone four
pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss the point with him.  I
should have gloried to see the stars and stripes in front at the
finish.  I love my country, and I love horses.  Stubbs's old
mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and Herring's portrait of
Plenipotentiary, - whom I saw run at Epsom, - over my fireplace.
Did I not elope from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and
Little John, and Peacemaker run over the race-course where now yon
suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen hundred and ever-
so-few?  Though I never owned a horse, have I not been the
proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest
little "Morgin" that ever stepped?  Listen, then, to an opinion I
have often expressed long before this venture of ours in England.
Horse-RACING is not a republican institution; horse-TROTTING is.
Only very rich persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows
they are kept mainly as gambling implements.  All that matter about
blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all that; useful,
very, - OF course, - great obligations to the Godolphin "Arabian,"
and the rest.  I say racing horses are essentially gambling
implements, as much as roulette tables.  Now I am not preaching at
this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning;
but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not
republican.  It belongs to two phases of society, - a cankered
over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the
reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism
of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements.  Real
Republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of
government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows
out of it.  This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice
or stocks, but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively
quiet.  But horse-racing is the most public way of gambling, and
with all its immense attractions to the sense and the feelings, -
to which I plead very susceptible, - the disguise is too thin that
covers it, and everybody knows what it means.  Its supporters are
the Southern gentry, - fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans
exactly, as we understand the term, - a few Northern millionnaires
more or less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real
people, and the mob of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly
idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a
crowd, or to meet in a dark alley.  In England, on the other hand,
with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth
enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes,
from the Queen to the costermonger.  London is like a shelled corn-
cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the
money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down
on his office-stool the next day without wincing.

Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment.  The
racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet
upon, as much as the thimble-rigger's "little joker."  The trotter
is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for
sporting men.

What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most
cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that
the trotting horses of America beat the world?  And why should we
have expected that the pick - if it was the pick - of our few and
far-between racing stables should beat the pick of England and
France?  Throw over the fallacious time-test, and there was nothing
to show for it but a natural kind of patriotic feeling, which we
all have, with a thoroughly provincial conceit, which some of us
must plead guilty to.

We may beat yet.  As an American, I hope we shall.  As a moralist
and occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it.  Wherever
the trotting horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses,
lively bakers' carts, and therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher's
wagon, the cheerful gig, the wholesome afternoon drive with wife
and child, - all the forms of moral excellence, except truth, which
does not agree with any kind of horse-flesh.  The racer brings with
him gambling, cursing, swearing, drinking, the eating of oysters,
and a distaste for mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues.

And by the way, let me beg you not to call a TROTTING MATCH a RACE,
and not to speak of a "thoroughbred" as a "BLOODED" horse, unless
he has been recently phlebotomized.  I consent to your saying
"blood horse," if you like.  Also, if, next year, we send out
Posterior and Posterioress, the winners of the great national four-
mile race in 7 18.5, and they happen to get beaten, pay your bets,
and behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know how.

[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper
condensed in the above paragraph.  To brag little, - to show well,
- to crow gently, if in luck, - to pay up, to own up, and to shut
up, if beaten, are the virtues of a sporting man, and I can't say
that I think we have shown them in any great perfection of late.]

- Apropos of horses.  Do you know how important good jockeying is
to authors?  Judicious management; letting the public see your
animal just enough, and not too much; holding him up hard when the
market is too full of him; letting him out at just the right buying
intervals; always gently feeling his mouth; never slacking and
never jerking the rein; - this is what I mean by jockeying.

- When an author has a number of books out a cunning hand will keep
them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching
each one up, as it begins to "wabble," by an advertisement, a puff,
or a quotation.

- Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast
in the papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new
edition coming.  The extracts are GROUND-BAIT.

- Literary life is fun of curious phenomena.  I don't know that
there is anything more noticeable than what we may call
CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS.  There is a tacit understanding in every
community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular
fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity.  There
are various reasons for this forbearance:  one is old; one is rich;
one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it
would not be safe to hiss him from the manager's box.  The
venerable augurs of the literary or scientific temple may smile
faintly when one of the tribe is mentioned; but the farce is in
general kept up as well as the Chinese comic scene of entreating
and imploring a man to stay with you with the implied compact
between you that he shall by no means think of doing it.  A poor
wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these
bandbox reputations.  A Prince-Rupert's-drop, which is a tear of
unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling
hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves itself
into powder.  These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's-
drops of the learned and polite world.  See how the papers treat
them!  What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which can
be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service!
How kind the "Critical Notices" - where small authorship comes to
pick up chips of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy - always are
to them!  Well, life would be nothing without paper-credit and
other fictions; so let them pass current.  Don't steal their chips;
don't puncture their swimming-bladders; don't come down on their
pasteboard boxes; don't break the ends of their brittle and
unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your names
will be household words a thousand years from now.

"A thousand years is a good while," said the old gentleman who sits
opposite, thoughtfully.

- Where have I been for the last three or four days?  Down at the
Island, deer-shooting. - How many did I bag?  I brought home one
buck shot. - The Island is where?  No matter.  It is the most
splendid domain that any man looks upon in these latitudes.  Blue
sea around it, and running up into its heart, so that the little
boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall ships are
stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-
sails banging and flying in ribbons.  Trees, in stretches of miles;
beeches, oaks, most numerous; - many of them hung with moss,
looking like bearded Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge,
dark-stemmed grape-vines.  Open patches where the sun gets in and
goes to sleep, and the winds come so finely sifted that they are as
soft as swan's down.  Rocks scattered about, - Stonehenge-like
monoliths.  Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary's lake, crystal-
clear, full of flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like
tigers in the jungle.  Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for
breakfast.  EGO FECIT.

The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my
Latin.  No, sir, I said, - you need not trouble yourself.  There is
a higher law in grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and
Stoddard.  Then I went on.

Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the
like of in these our New England sovereignties.  There is nothing
in the shape of kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful,
which has not found its home in that ocean-principality.  It has
welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman
who came to breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine,
to the great statesman who turned his back on the affairs of
empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white
teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the
keenest and his story the best.

[I don't believe any man ever talked like that in this world.  I
don't believe I talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one's
conversation, one cannot help BLAIR-ing it up more or less, ironing
out crumpled paragraphs, starching limp ones, and crimping and
plaiting a little sometimes; it is as natural as prinking at the
looking-glass.]

- How can a man help writing poetry in such a place?  Everybody
does write poetry that goes there.  In the state archives, kept in
the library of the Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of
unpublished verse, - some by well-known hands, and others quite as
good, by the last people you would think of as versifiers, - men
who could pension off all the genuine poets in the country, and buy
ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what they had
left.  Of course I had to write my little copy of verses with the
rest; here it is, if you will hear me read it.  When the sun is in
the west, vessels sailing in an easterly direction look bright or
dark to one who observes them from the north or south, according to
the tack they are sailing upon.  Watching them from one of the
windows of the great mansion, I saw these perpetual changes, and
moralized thus:-


SUN AND SHADOW.


As I look from the isle, o'er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, -
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him that gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O'er the gulfs of the desolate sea.

Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We'll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!


- Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.  Good
mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if
anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or
reverse their motion.  A weak mind does not accumulate force enough
to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.  We
frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in
consequence of what are called RELIGIOUS mental disturbances.  I
confess that I think better of them than of many who hold the same
notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life very well,
outside of the asylums.  Any decent person ought to go mad, if he
really holds such or such opinions.  It is very much to his
discredit in every point of view, if he does not.  What is the use
of my saying what some of these opinions are?  Perhaps more than
one of you hold such as I should think ought to send you straight
over to Somerville, if you have any logic in your heads or any
human feeling in your hearts.  Anything that is brutal, cruel,
heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and
perhaps for entire races, - anything that assumes the necessity of
the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated, -
no matter by what name you call it, - no matter whether a fakir, or
a monk, or a deacon believes it, - if received, ought to produce
insanity in every well-regulated mind.  That condition becomes a
normal one, under the circumstances.  I am very much ashamed of
some people for retaining their reason, when they know perfectly
well that if they were not the most stupid or the most selfish of
human beings, they would become NON-COMPOTES at once.

[Nobody understood this but the theological student and the
schoolmistress.  They looked intelligently at each other; but
whether they were thinking about my paradox or not, I am not clear.
- It would be natural enough.  Stranger things have happened.  Love
and Death enter boarding-houses without asking the price of board,
or whether there is room for them.  Alas, these young people are
poor and pallid!  Love SHOULD be both rich and rosy, but MUST be
either rich or rosy.  Talk about military duty!  What is that to
the warfare of a married maid-of-all-work, with the title of
mistress, and an American female constitution, which collapses just
in the middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized India-rubber,
if it happen to live through the period when health and strength
are most wanted?]

- Have I ever acted in private theatricals?  Often.  I have played
the part of the "Poor Gentleman," before a great many audiences, -
more, I trust, than I shall ever face again.  I did not wear a
stage-costume, nor a wig, nor moustaches of burnt cork; but I was
placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper
hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my
countenance, and made my bow and acted my part.  I have seen my
name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself
in the place by daylight.  I have gone to a town with a sober
literary essay in my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced
as the most desperate of BUFFOS, - one who was obliged to restrain
himself in the full exercise of his powers, from prudential
considerations.  I have been through as many hardships as Ulysses,
in the pursuit of my histrionic vocation.  I have travelled in cars
until the conductors all knew me like a brother.  I have run off
the rails, and stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind
females that would have the window open when one could not wink
without his eyelids freezing together.  Perhaps I shall give you
some of my experiences one of these days; - I will not now, for I
have something else for you.

Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country lyceum-
halls, are one thing, - and private theatricals, as they may be
seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are
another.  Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who
do not think it necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most
of our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters which show off
their graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged,
unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with a lithe figure, and a
pleasant voice, acting in those love-dramas which make us young
again to look upon, when real youth and beauty will play them for
us.

- Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write.  I did not
see the play, though.  I knew there was a young lady in it, and
that somebody was in love with her, and she was in love with him,
and somebody (an old tutor, I believe) wanted to interfere, and,
very naturally, the young lady was too sharp for him.  The play of
course ends charmingly; there is a general reconciliation, and all
concerned form a line and take each others' hands, as people always
do after they have made up their quarrels, - and then the curtain
falls, - if it does not stick, as it commonly does at private
theatrical exhibitions, in which case a boy is detailed to pull it
down, which he does, blushing violently.

Now, then, for my prologue.  I am not going to change my caesuras
and cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or
iambic trimeter brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear
it


THIS IS IT.

A Prologue?  Well, of course the ladies know; -
I have my doubts.  No matter, - here we go!
What is a Prologue?  Let our Tutor teach:
PRO means beforehand; LOGOS stands for speech.
'Tis like the harper's prelude on the strings,
The prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; -
Prologues in metre are to other PROS
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.

"The world's a stage," as Shakspeare said, one day;
The stage a world - was what he meant to say.
The outside world's a blunder, that is clear;
The real world that Nature meant is here.
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid,
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
One after one the troubles all are past
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all,
Join hands, SO happy at the curtain's fall.
- Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
- When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
Cries, "Help, kyind Heaven!" and drops upon her knees
On the green - baize, - beneath the (canvas) trees,-
See to her side avenging Valor fly:-
"Ha! Villain!  Draw!  Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!"
- When the poor hero flounders in despair,
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire, -
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
Sobs on his neck, "MY BOY!  MY BOY!!  MY BOY!!!"

Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
Of love that conquers in disaster's spite.
Ladies, attend!  While woful cares and doubt
Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain:  Love will triumph here!

Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule, -
The world's great masters, when you're out of school, -
Learn the brief moral of our evening's play:
Man has his will, - but woman has her way!
While man's dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
Woman's swift instinct threads the electric wire, -
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
But that one rebel, - woman's wilful heart.
All foes you master; but a woman's wit
Lets daylight through you ere you know you're hit.
So, just to picture what her art can do,
Hear an old story made as good as new.

Rudolph, professor of the headsman's trade,
Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
Knelt at the block to test the artist's skill.
Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed,
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
As the pike's armor flashes in the stream.
He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go;
The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
"Why strikest not?  Perform thy murderous act,"
The prisoner said.  (Hs voice was slightly cracked.)
"Friend I HAVE struck," the artist straight replied;
"Wait but one moment, and yourself decide."

He held his snuff-box, - "Now then, if you please!"
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze,
Off his head tumbled, - bowled along the floor, -
Bounced down the steps; - the prisoner said no more!

Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye;
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die!
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
We die with love, and never dream we're dead!


The prologue went off very well, as I hear.  No alterations were
suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know.
Sometimes people criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest
all sorts of improvements.  Who was that silly body that wanted
Burns to alter "Scots wha hae," so as to lengthen the last line,
thus


"EDWARD!" Chains and slavery!


Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee for
a certain celebration.  I understood that it was to be a festive
and convivial occasion, and ordered myself accordingly.  It seems
the president of the day was what is called a "teetotaller."  I
received a note from him in the following words, containing the
copy subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it.

"Dear Sir, - your poem gives good satisfaction to the committee.
The sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are not, however,
those generally entertained by this community.  I have therefore
consulted the clergyman of this place, who has made come slight
changes, which he thinks will remove all objections, and keep the
valuable portions of the poem.  Please to inform me of your charge
for said poem.  Our means are limited, etc., etc., etc.

Yours with respect,"


HERE IT IS - WITH THE SLIGHT ALTERATIONS!

Come! fill a fresh bumper, - for why should we go
While the [nectar] [logwood] still reddens our cups as they flow?
Pour out the [rich juices] [decoction] still bright with the sun,
Till o'er the brimmed crystal the [rubies] [dye-stuff] shall run.

The [purple glebed clusters] [half-ripened apples] their life-dews
have bled;
How sweet is the [breath] [taste] of the [fragrance they shed]
[sugar of lead]!
For summer's [last roses] [rank poisons] lie hid in the [wines]
[WINES!!!]
That were garnered by [maidens who laughed through the vines.]
[stable-boys smoking long-nines.]

Then a [smile] [scowl], and a [glass] [howl], and a [toast]
[scoff], and a [cheer] [sneer],
For all [the good wine, and we've some of it here] [strychnine and
whiskey, and ratsbane and beer]
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
[Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all!] [Down, down,
with the tyrant that masters us all!]


The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised me to
charge the committee double, - which I did.  But as I never got my
pay, I don't know that it made much difference.  I am a very
particular person about having all I write printed as I write it.
I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-
revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions,
especially verse.  A misprint kills a sensitive author.  An
intentional change of his text murders him.  No wonder so many
poets die young!

I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces of
advice I gave to the young women at table.  One relates to a
vulgarism of language, which I grieve to say is sometimes heard
even from female lips.  The other is of more serious purport, and
applies to such as contemplate a change of condition, - matrimony,
in fact.

- The woman who "calculates" is lost.

- Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.



CHAPTER III



[THE "Atlantic" obeys the moon, and its LUNIVERSARY has come round
again.  I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks made
since the last high tides, which I respectfully submit.  Please to
remember this is TALK; just as easy and just as formal as I choose
to make it.]

- I never saw an author in my life - saving, perhaps, one - that
did not purr as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (FELIS CATUS,
LINN.,) on having his fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful
hand.

But let me give you a caution.  Be very careful how you tell an
author he is DROLL.  Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does,
be sure he can do you a mischief, and very probably will.  Say you
CRIED over his romance or his verses, and he will love you and send
you a copy.  You can laugh over that as much as you like - in
private.

- Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny? - Why,
there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones.  The clown
knows very well that the women are not in love with him, but with
Hamlet, the fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat.  Passion
never laughs.  The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a
procession.

If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to
tell it.  There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit -
using that term in its general sense - that its essence consists in
a partial and incomplete view of whatever it touches.  It throws a
single ray, separated from the rest, - red, yellow, blue, or any
intermediate shade, - upon an object; never white light; that is
the province of wisdom.  We get beautiful effects from wit, - all
the prismatic colors, - but never the object as it is in fair
daylight.  A pun, which is a kind if wit, is a different and much
shallower trick in mental optics throwing the SHADOWS of two
objects so that one overlies the other.  Poetry uses the rainbow
tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in
the purest white light of truth. - Will you allow me to pursue this
subject a little further?

[They didn't allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape
the floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all
must have noticed, has the instantaneous effect that the cutting of
the yellow hair by Iris had upon infelix Dido.  It broke the charm,
and that breakfast was over.]

- Don't flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say
disagreeable things to your intimates.  On the contrary, the nearer
you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact
and courtesy become.  Except in cases of necessity, which are rare,
leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they
are ready enough to tell them.  Good-breeding NEVER forgets that
AMOUR-PROPRE is universal.  When you read the story of the
Archbishop and Gil Blas, you may laugh, if you will, at the poor
old man's delusion; but don't forget that the youth was the greater
fool of the two, and that his master served such a booby rightly in
turning him out of doors.

- You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find
everything in my sayings is not exactly new.  You can't possibly
mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket.  I
once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for
its latitude.  On examination, I found all its erudition was taken
ready-made from D'Israeli.  If I had been ill-natured, I should
have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in
his feeble way.  But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves
easily enough, and they are not worth the trouble of putting them
in the pillory.  I doubt the entire novelty of my remarks just made
on telling unpleasant truths, yet I am not conscious of any
larceny.

Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements.  Some
persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly
stated propositions, is all that conversation admits.  This is
precisely as if a musician should insist on having nothing but
perfect chords and simple melodies, - no diminished fifths, no flat
sevenths, no flourishes, on any account.  Now it is fair to say,
that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must have
its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths.
It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal
element as much as pictures or statues.  One man who is a little
too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of
ESPRIT. - "Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's
nonsense?  Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!" -
Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox, - if he is flighty and
empty, - if, instead of striking those fifths and sevenths, those
harmonious discords, often so much better than the twinned octaves,
in the music of thought, - if, instead of striking these, he
jangles the chords, stick a fact into him like a stiletto.  But
remember that talking is one of the fine arts, - the noblest, the
most important, and the most difficult, - and that its fluent
harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note.
Therefore conversation which is suggestive rather than
argumentative, which lets out the most of each talker's results of
thought, is commonly the pleasantest and the most profitable.  It
is not easy, at the best, for two persons talking together to make
the most of each other's thoughts, there are so many of them.

[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]

When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is
natural enough that among the six there should be more or less
confusion and misapprehension.

[Our landlady turned pale; - no doubt she thought there was a screw
loose in my intellects, - and that involved the probable loss of a
boarder.  A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a
sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I
understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring
theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down
of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping VOCE DI PETTO, to
Falstaff's nine men in buckram.  Everybody looked up.  I believe
the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-
knife; at any rate, he slid it to one side, as it were carelessly.]

I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here,
that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be
recognized as taking part in that dialogue between John and Thomas.

Three Johns.

1.  The real John; known only to his Maker.
2.  John's ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike
him.
3.  Thomas's ideal John; never the real John, nor John's John, but
often very unlike either.

Three Thomas.

1.  The real Thomas.
2.  Thomas's ideal Thomas.
3.  John's ideal Thomas.


Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
conversation.  Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and
ill-looking.  But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men
the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly
conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks
from the point of view of this ideal.  Thomas, again, believes him
to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as
Thomas's attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful
rogue, though really simple and stupid.  The same conditions apply
to the three Thomases.  It follows, that, until a man can be found
who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as
others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every
dialogue between two.  Of these, the least important,
philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real
person.  No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are
six of them talking and listening all at the same time.

[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made
by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me
at table.  A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little
known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me VIA this unlettered
Johannes.  He appropriated the three that remained in the basket,
remarking that there was just one apiece for him.  I convinced him
that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the
mean time he had eaten the peaches.]

- The opinions of relatives as to a man's powers are very commonly
of little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their
own flesh and blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are
quite as likely to underrate those whom they have grown into the
habit of considering like themselves.  The advent of genius is like
what florists style the BREAKING of a seedling tulip into what we
may call high-caste colors, - ten thousand dingy flowers, then one
with the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the coming up in
old Jacob's garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the
seckel pear, which I have sometimes seen in shop-windows.  It is a
surprise, - there is nothing to account for it.  All at once we
find that twice two make FIVE.  Nature is fond of what are called
"gift-enterprises."  This little book of life which she has given
into the hands of its joint possessors is commonly one of the old
story-books bound over again.  Only once in a great while there is
a stately poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the
glories of art, or they enfold a draft for untold values signed by
the million-fold millionnaire old mother herself.  But strangers
are commonly the first to find the "gift" that came with the little
book.

It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own
flavor.  Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still
more eloquently silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of
any personal peculiarity, may well be doubted.  No man knows his
own voice; many men do not know their own profiles.  Every one
remembers Carlyle's famous "Characteristics" article; allow for
exaggerations, and there is a great deal in his doctrine of the
self-unconsciousness of genius.  It comes under the great law just
stated.  This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often found
in the family as well as in the individual.  So never mind what
your cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say
about that fine poem you have written, but send it (postage-paid)
to the editors, if there are any, of the "Atlantic," - which, by
the way, is not so called because it is A NOTION, as some dull wits
wish they had said, but are too late.

- Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has
mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence.  Absolute,
peremptory facts are bullies, and those who keep company with them
are apt to get a bullying habit of mind; - not of manners, perhaps;
they may be soft and smooth, but the smile they carry has a quiet
assertion in it, such as the Champion of the Heavy Weights,
commonly the best-natured, but not the most diffident of men, wears
upon what he very inelegantly calls his "mug."  Take the man, for
instance, who deals in the mathematical sciences.  There is no
elasticity in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it
never yields a hair's breadth; everything must go to pieces that
comes in collision with it.  What the mathematician knows being
absolute, unconditional, incapable of suffering question, it should
tend, in the nature of things, to breed a despotic way of thinking.
So of those who deal with the palpable and often unmistakable facts
of external nature; only in a less degree.  Every probability - and
most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities - is provided
with BUFFERS at both ends, which break the force of opposite
opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has no
spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of yielding.  All this
must react on the minds which handle these forms of truth.

- Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most
gracious, unassuming people in the world, and yet preeminent in the
ranges of science I am referring to.  I know that as well as you.
But mark this which I am going to say once for all:  If I had not
force enough to project a principle full in the face of the half
dozen most obvious facts which seem to contradict it, I would think
only in single file from this day forward.  A rash man, once
visiting a certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to
express the sentiment, that man is a rational being.  An old woman
who was an attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the
statement, and appealed to the facts before the speaker to disprove
it.  The rash man stuck to his hasty generalization,
notwithstanding.

[ - It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated
in my daily relations.  I not unfrequently practise the divine art
of music in company with our landlady's daughter, who, as I
mentioned before, is the owner of an accordion.  Having myself a
well-marked barytone voice of more than half an octave in compass,
I sometimes add my vocal powers to her execution of


"Thou, thou reign'st in this bosom."


not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is
present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark.  I have also taken
a good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to,
sometimes called B. F., or more frequently Frank, in imitation of
that felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience,
adopted by some of his betters.  My acquaintance with the French
language is very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but
in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F. devotes himself to it with the
peculiar advantage of an Alsacian teacher.  The boy, I think, is
doing well, between us, notwithstanding.  The following is an
UNCORRECTED French exercise, written by this young gentleman.  His
mother thinks it very creditable to his abilities; though, being
unacquainted with the French language, her judgment cannot be
considered final.


LE RAT DIES SALONS A LECTURE.


CE rat ci est un animal fort singulier.  Il a deux pattes de
derriere sur lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il
fait usage pour tenir les journaux.  Cet animal a la peau noire
pour le plupart, et porte un cerele blanchatre autour de son cou.
On le trouve tous les jours aux dits salons, on il demeure, digere,
s'il y a do quoi dans son interieur, respire, tousse, eternue,
dort, et renfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le semblant de lire.
On ne sait pas s'il a une autre gite que cela.  Il a l'air d'une
bete tres stupide, mais il est d'une sagacite et d'une vitesse
extraordinaire quand il s'agit de saisir un journal nouveau.  On ne
sait pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ'il ne parait pas avoir des idees.
Il vocalise rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux
divers.  Il porte un crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec
lequel il fait des marques sur les bords des journaux et des
livres, semblable aux suivans:  !!! - Bah!  Pooh!  Il ne faut pas
cependant les prendre pour des signes d'intelligence.  Il ne vole
pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement meme des echanges de
parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son chapeau a toujours un
caractere specifique.  On ne sait pas au juste ce dont il se
nourrit.  Feu Cuvier etait d'avis que c'etait de l'odeur du cuir
des reliures; ce qu'on dit d'etre une nourriture animale fort
saine, et peu chere.  Il vit bien longtems.  Enfin il meure, en
laissant a ses heritiers une carte du Salon a Lecture on il avait
existe pendant sa vie.  On pretend qu'il revient toutes les nuits,
apres la mort, visiter le Salon.  On peut le voir, dit on, a
minuit, dans sa place habituelle, tenant le journal du soir, et
ayant a sa main un crayon de charbon.  Le lendemain on trouve des
caracteres inconnus sur les bords du journal.  Ce qui prouve que le
spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les Professeurs de
Cambridge sont des imbeciles qui ne savent rien du tout, du tout.


I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be
touched in any way, is not discreditable to B. F.  You observe that
he is acquiring a knowledge of zoology at the same time that he is
learning French.  Fathers of families in moderate circumstances
will find it profitable to their children, and an economical mode
of instruction, to set them to revising and amending this boy's
exercise.  The passage was originally taken from the "Histoire
Naturelle des Betes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipedes et Autres,"
lately published in Paris.  This was translated into English and
published in London.  It was republished at Great Pedlington, with
notes and additions by the American editor.  The notes consist of
an interrogation-mark on page 53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to
another book "edited" by the same hand.  The additions consist of
the editor's name on the title-page and back, with a complete and
authentic list of said editor's honorary titles in the first of
these localities.  Our boy translated the translation back into
French.  This may be compared with the original, to be found on
Shelf 13, Division X, of the Public Library of this metropolis.]

- Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don't write a
story, or a novel, or something of that kind.  Instead of answering
each one of you separately, I will thank you to step up into the
wholesale department for a few moments, where I deal in answers by
the piece and by the bale.

That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for
ONE novel in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a
cherished belief.  It has been maintained, on the other hand, that
many persons cannot write more than one novel, - that all after
that are likely to be failures. - Life is so much more tremendous a
thing in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be,
that all records of human experience are as so many bound HERBARIA
to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing,
fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling
leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies.  All we can do
with books of human experience is to make them alive again with
something borrowed from our own lives.  We can make a book alive
for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form
to our own experience.  Now an author's first novel is naturally
drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is,
is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises.  But
the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the
creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in
order to tell a living story; and this is rare.

Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall
clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts.  Most lives,
though their stream is loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial
waste, drop a few golden grains of wisdom as they flow along.
Oftentimes a single CRADLING gets them all, and after that the poor
man's labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles.  All which
proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write
one novel or story at any rate, if I would.

- Why don't I, then? - Well, there are several reasons against it.
In the first place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain
that verse is the proper medium for such revelations.  Rhythm and
rhyme and the harmonies of musical language, the play of fancy, the
fire of imagination, the flashes of passion, so hide the nakedness
of a heart laid open, that hardly any confession, transfigured in
the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as self-exposure.  A
beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by the
glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms
and shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain
calico, she would be unendurable - in the opinion of the ladies.

Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends.  I
should like to know if all story-tellers do not do this?  Now I am
afraid all my friends would not bear showing up very well; for they
have an average share of the common weakness of humanity, which I
am pretty certain would come out.  Of all that have told stories
among us there is hardly one I can recall who has not drawn too
faithfully some living portrait that might better have been spared.

Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull
to write such a story as I should wish to write.

And finally, I think it very likely I SHALL write a story one of
these days.  Don't be surprised at any time, if you see me coming
out with "The Schoolmistress," or "The Old Gentleman Opposite."
[OUR schoolmistress and OUR old gentleman that sits opposite had
left the table before I said this.]  I want my glory for writing
the same discounted now, on the spot, if you please.  I will write
when I get ready.  How many people live on the reputation of the
reputation they might have made!

- I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being
too dull to write a good story.  I don't pretend to know what you
meant by it, but I take occasion to make a remark which may
hereafter prove of value to some among you. - When one of us who
has been led by native vanity or senseless flattery to think
himself or herself possessed of talent arrives at the full and
final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the
most tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a
mortal's mind.  All our failures, our shortcomings, our strange
disappointments in the effect of our efforts are lifted from our
bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian's pack, at the feet of
that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the pleasant gift of
high intelligence, - with which one look may overflow us in some
wider sphere of being.

- How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, "I hate
books!"  A gentleman, - singularly free from affectations, - not
learned, of course, but of perfect breeding, which is often so much
better than learning, - by no means dull, in the sense of knowledge
of the world and society, but certainly not clever either in the
arts or sciences, - his company is pleasing to all who know him.  I
did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste half so
distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless
acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship.  In fact, I think
there are a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark
to keep their place, that really "hate books," but never had the
wit to find it out, or the manliness to own it.  [ENTRE NOUS, I
always read with a mark.]

We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an "intellectual
man" was, as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or
thereabouts, of book-learning, and one-tenth himself.  But even if
he is actually so compounded, he need not read much.  Society is a
strong solution of books.  It draws the virtue out of what is best
worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of tea-leaves.  If I
were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in
which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well.
The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre.  You
understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be
to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to.  I
know the man I would have:  a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive
fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books
about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts
and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and
the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in
new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet
and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for
the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big
wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and
unbandaging of all literary mummies.  Yet he is as tender and
reverential to all that bears the mark of genius, - that is, of a
new influx of truth or beauty, - as a nun over her missal.  In
short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to
make a living.  Him would I keep on the square next my own royal
compartment on life's chessboard.  To him I would push up another
pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would
of course take - to wife.  For all contingencies I would liberally
provide.  In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive
phrase, "put him through" all the material part of life; see him
sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be
able to lay on his talk when I liked, - with the privilege of
shutting it off at will.

A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with
about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord
of the macrocosm.  They do well to dine together once in a while.
A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of
civilization over barbarism.  Nature and art combine to charm the
senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by well-
studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into their
natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a
short jacket.

The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take
for granted.  Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out;
nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies
their dull apprehensions.  But look at two masters of that noble
game!  White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red
says, Mate in six moves; - White looks, - nods; - the game is over.
Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are
good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table.  That
blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them, -
that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the
reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to
get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a
festive garland and the vacant place on the MEDIUS LECTUS, - that
carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms
bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional
mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored
fire, and the mischief-making rain of BON-BONS pelting everybody
that shows himself, - the picture of a truly intellectual banquet
is one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to
reproduce in their -

- "Oh, oh, oh!" cried the young fellow whom they call John, - "that
is from one of your lectures!"

I know it, I replied, - I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.


"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"


All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and
grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually
sliding.  Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still
June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum
of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere
beyond?  Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back
Bay, - where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating
the "Metropolitan" boat-clubs, - find yourself in a tepid streak, a
narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little
underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to
bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature?  Just
so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one
not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the
conversation.  The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street door-
plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings
itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and
bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes,
like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of
early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, -
you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you! - Nothing
but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture. - As when, at some
unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the
air before the astonished passer-by, - silver-footed, diamond-
crowned, rainbow-scarfed, - from the bosom of that fair sheet,
sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams
of a less amiable and less elevated order of REPTILIA in other
latitudes.

- Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying
that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with
the higher?  No matter who he was.  Now look at what is going on in
India, - a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-
skinned, inferior, but still "Caucasian" race, - and where are
English and American sympathies?  We can't stop to settle all the
doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure
to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general
law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as
it does the same nature in the inferior animals, - tame it or crush
it.  The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged
and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-
killers.  England takes down the Map of the World, which she has
girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus:  [DELPHI] DELE.
The civilized world says, Amen.

- Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly,
that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them
and dilute it down to an essay.  Borrow some of my old college
themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric
heroes did with their MELAS OINOS, - that black sweet, syrupy wine
(?) which they used to alloy with three parts or more of the
flowing stream.  [Could it have been MELASSES, as Webster and his
provincials spell it, - or MOLOSSA'S, as dear old smattering,
chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in
the "Magnalia"?  Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make
barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries!" - ye
Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too,
ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars! - ye
Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of
native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest
fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made
a Golgotha" of your pages! - ponder thereon!]

- Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses.
You will understand by the title that they are written in an
imaginary character.  I don't doubt they will fit some family-man
well enough.  I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on A
PRIORI grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody.  There is
no loftier illustration of faith than this.  It believes that a
soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and
nurtured it; that its mysterious COMPAGES or frame-work has
survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity;
that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to
the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial
clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select
the very locality where this audacious generalization has been
acted upon.  It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and
trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it.  There is
a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.
- Now hear the verses.


THE OLD MAN DREAMS.


O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I'd rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!

Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning's crown!
Tear out life's wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!

One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood's fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!

- My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
"If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.

"But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?"

- Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I'll take - my - precious wife!

- The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
"The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!"

-  "And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years!"

Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all;
I'll take - my - girl - and - boys!

The smiling angel dropped his pen, -
"Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!"

And so I laughed, - my laughter woke
The household with its noise, -
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.



CHAPTER IV.



[I AM so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to
remain there, perhaps for years.  Of course I shall have a great
many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of
different tone and on different subjects.  The talks are like the
breakfasts, - sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry.  You must
take them as they come.  How can I do what all these letters ask me
to?  No. 1. want serious and earnest thought.  No. 2. (letter
smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a
"good storey" which he has copied out for me.  (I suppose two
letters before the word "good" refer to some Doctor of Divinity who
told the story.)  No. 3. (in female hand) - more poetry.  No. 4.
wants something that would be of use to a practical man.
(PRAHCTICAL MAHN he probably pronounces it.)  No. 5. (gilt-edged,
sweet-scented) - "more sentiment," - " heart's outpourings." -

My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such
remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table.  Their
character will depend on many accidents, - a good deal on the
particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed.  It
so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the
divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I
need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in
the conversation.  This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of
course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect
all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of
what was said.  Still, I think there may be a few that will rather
like this vein, - possibly prefer it to a livelier one, - serious
young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis
from - years of age to - inclusive.

Another privilege of talking is to misquote. - Of course it wasn't
Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair, - but IRIS.  (As I
have since told you) it was the former lady's regular business, but
Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on
the point of etiquette.  So the bathycolpian Here - Juno, in Latin
- sent down Iris instead.  But I was mightily pleased to see that
one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated
"Oceanic Miscellany" misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse.
"Waft us HOME the MESSAGE" of course it ought to be.  Will he be
duly grateful for the correction?]

- The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to
be governed, not by, but ACCORDING TO laws, such as we observe in
the larger universe. - You think you know all about WALKING, -
don't you, now?  Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held
to your body?  They are sucked up by two cupping vessels,
("cotyloid" - cup-like - cavities,) and held there as long as you
live, and longer.  At any rate, you think you move them backward
and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you? - On
the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a
fixed rate, determined by their length.  You can alter this by
muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and
make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by
the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.

[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to
certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the
facts, which, however, he said he had often verified.  I
appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this,
when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?

The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership.  Some one was saying that it had cost
nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had
got it already. - Why, - said the Professor, - they might have
hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]

Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the
bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its
regular cycles.  Such or such a thought comes round periodically,
in its turn.  Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere
with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond
our power of recognition.  Take all this for what it is worth, but
at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular
thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that
a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through
your mind.  Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way.
Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of
assent in the listener or listeners.  Yes, indeed; they have often
been struck by it.

ALL AT ONCE A CONVICTION FLASHES THROUGH US THAT WE HAVE BEEN IN
THE SAME PRECISE CIRCUMSTANCES AS AT THE PRESENT INSTANT, ONCE OR
MANY TIMES BEFORE.

O, dear, yes! - said one of the company, - everybody has had that
feeling.

The landlady didn't know anything about such notions; it was an
idee in folks' heads, she expected.

The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew
the feeling well, and didn't like to experience it; it made her
think she was a ghost, sometimes.

The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he
had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous
conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that
same thing ever so many times before.  I looked severely at him,
and his countenance immediately fell - ON THE SIDE TOWARD ME; I
cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either
half of his face without the other half's knowing it.

- I have noticed - I went on to say - the following circumstances
connected with these sudden impressions.  First, that the condition
which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very
trivial, - one that might have presented itself a hundred times.
Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is
rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after
any time has elapsed.  Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to
record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce
the state of mind in words.  Fourthly, I have often felt that the
duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it
was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual.  Lastly, I have had the
same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it? - Why, there are several ways that I can
mention, and you may take your choice.  The first is that which the
young lady hinted at; - that these flashes are sudden recollections
of a previous existence.  I don't believe that; for I remember a
poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one
day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever
lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr. Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double
organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts
for it.  One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the
small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the
sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the
second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.
But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see
no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the
time, nor any analogy that bears it out.  It seems to me most
likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but
that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we
occasionally do resemblances of persons.  A momentary posture of
circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it
as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally,
mistaking him for a friend.  The apparent similarity may be owing
perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the
outward circumstances.

- Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks.  I have
said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with
something like it in books, - somewhere in Bulwer's novels, I
think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE
READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER
CHANNEL.

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's
susceptibilities differ. - O, yes!  I will tell you some of mine.
The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them.  During a year or two of
adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as
about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like
another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:
orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and
transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; - EHEU!


"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"


but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of
eighteen hundred and - spare them!  But, as I was saying,
phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its
luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance;
it comes to me in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory."  Only
the confounded Vienna matches, OHNE PHOSPHOR-GERUCH, have worn my
sensibilities a little.

Then there is the MARIGOLD.  When I was of smallest dimensions, and
wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we
would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop
opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage.  Out of it would
come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself,
shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would
gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy.  Sally lies
in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-
crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years.  Cottage,
garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, -
stateliest of vegetables, - all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant IMMORTELLE of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming.  I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions
that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling
flowers.  A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had
been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain
on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh.  Something, too, of immortality
in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless
petals.  Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border
the River of Life.

- I should not have talked so much about these personal
susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I
believe is a new one.  It is this.  There may be a physical reason
for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.
The olfactory nerve - so my friend, the Professor, tells me - is
the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain,
the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the
intellectual processes are performed.  To speak more truly the
olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the
brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes.  Whether
this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have
mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth
remembering.  Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of
suggestive impressions, with that of smell.  Now the Professor
assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate
connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of
the spinal cord.

[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to
this hypothesis of mine.  But while I was speaking about the sense
of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in
getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief.  Then he lurched a
little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last
extricated an ample round snuff-box.  I looked as he opened it and
felt for the wonted pugil.  Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying
therein.  I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use
the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the
long unused stimulus - O boys, - that were, - actual papas and
possible grandpapas, - some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,
- some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled, - do
you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the
Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the
dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria?  Then
it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering
in its straw cradle.  And one among you, - do you remember how he
would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was
hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-
breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture,
in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]

Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through
my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I
was born!  On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and
pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were
stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period
there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate;
there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had
lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in
their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels.  The
odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim
recesses.

- Do I remember Byron's line about "striking the electric chain"? -
To be sure I do.  I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs
the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves
us.  What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the
folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and
finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up
in them perhaps a hundred years ago?  And, lo! as one looks on
these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in
the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and
the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the
Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic
the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at
Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust
so long - even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry - are
alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils,
and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of
heaven!  And all this for a bit of pie-crust!

- I will thank you for that pie, - said the provoking young fellow
whom I have named repeatedly.  He looked at it for a moment, and
put his hands to his eyes as if moved. - I was thinking, - he said
indistinctly -

- How?  What is't? - said our landlady.

- I was thinking - said he - who was king of England when this old
pie was baked, - and it made me feel bad to think how long he must
have been dead.

[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; CELA
VA SANS DIRE.  She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of
corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize
itself by a special narrative.  There was the wooing and the
wedding, - the start in life, - the disappointments, - the children
she had buried, - the struggle against fate, - the dismantling of
life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts, - the
broken spirits, - the altered character of the one on whom she
leaned, - and at last the death that came and drew the black
curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but
I often cried, - not those pattering tears that run off the eaves
upon our neighbors' grounds, the STILLICIDIUM of self-conscious
sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits
until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those
tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features; - such I did

shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno
tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]

Young man, - I said, - the pasty you speak lightly of is not old,
but courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are
of the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining.  May
I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you
are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet - if you are
handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice.  I take
it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain
pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand;
Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you:  "QUOIQU'ELLE SOIT
TRES SOLIDEMENT MONTEE, IL FAUT NE PAS BRUTALISER LA MACHINE." - I
will thank you for the pie, if you please.

[I took more of it than was good for me - as much as 85 degrees, I
should think, - and had an indigestion in consequence.  While I was
suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a
theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation.
When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by
as scarecrows and solemn warnings.  I have a number of books on my
shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as
they have great names on their title-pages, - Doctors of Divinity,
some of them, - it wouldn't do.]

- My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or
twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some
of the journals of his calling.  I told him that I didn't doubt he
deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse
occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody
could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without
being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have
their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing
something of the kind. - The Professor smiled. - Now, said I, hear
what I am going to say.  It will not take many years to bring you
to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing
and talking men, do nothing but praise.  Men, like peaches and
pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.  I
don't know what it is, - whether a spontaneous change, mental or
bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness
of critical honesty, - but it is a fact, that most writers, except
sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the
time when they are beginning to grow old.  As a general thing, I
would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he
is himself an author, over fifty years of age.  At thirty we are
all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this
tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up
our jack-knives.  Then we are ready to help others, and care less
to hinder any, because nobody's elbows are in our way.  So I am
glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in
a few years.

- Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me
very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere.  I just
now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo.  Do you
know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the
harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are
gentle and placid as young children?  I have heard it said, but I
cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain,
Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age.  An
old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to
him.  One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years
describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor.  I
remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became
remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of
his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their
way of coming to maturity.  Some are ripe at twenty, like human
Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon
over.  Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn
kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit.  And some, that,
like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the
rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after
the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards.  Beware
of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath
the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls.  Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
Early-Catherine.  Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were
swelling when he ripened.

- There is no power I envy so much - said the divinity-student - as
that of seeing analogies and making comparisons.  I don't
understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling
thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you
wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins.  It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and
training.  I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs, -
give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to
speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
contains lifeless albumen.]

You call it MIRACULOUS, - I replied, - tossing the expression with
my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear. - Two men are walking
by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup
with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and
the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at
all, - and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession!  It is the
ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle!  Nothing is clearer
than that all things are in all things, and that just according to
the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the
many in the one and the one in the many.  Did Sir Isaac think what
he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean, - the child
and the pebbles, you know?  Did he mean to speak slightingly of a
pebble?  Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its
compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had
grown solid, and has watched it until now!  A body which knows all
the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by
invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion!  A
body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the
entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries!  A throne
of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the
rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

So, - to return to OUR walk by the ocean, - if all that poetry has
dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics
have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed
in the fancies of women, - if the dreams of colleges and convents
and boarding-schools, - if every human feeling that sighs, or
smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their
innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat, -
the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and
analogies that rolls through the universe.

[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he
received this.  He did not swallow it at once, neither did he
reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried
it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at
his leisure.]

- Here is another remark made for his especial benefit. - There is
a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together
in TRIADS, as I have heard them called, - thus:  He was honorable,
courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.
Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you
could separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays.
Many of our writers show the same tendency, - my friend, the
Professor, especially.  Some think it is in humble imitation of
Johnson, - some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.
I don't think they get to the bottom of it.  It is, I suspect, an
instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought
or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid, - an
unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and
thickness.  It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,
and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it.  But
mind this:  the more we observe and study, the wider we find the
range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind,
and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining
conscious movement.

- I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such
strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted
to laugh at them.  "Where did our friends pick up all these fine
ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself.  Then I would remember My
Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how
affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own.
But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at
my window.  By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe
his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and
waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing
side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at.  And now I should
like to ask, WHO taught him all this? - and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side
and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was
passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made
of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its
shoulders?

- Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable
restrictions?  A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may
see such a one in any mineralogical collection.  One little fluid
particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!

- Weaken moral obligations? - No, not weaken, but define them.
When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to
lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-
books.

I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary.  You
saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in
which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very
apt to be fools and cowards.  But a great many of the clergyman's
patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.

[Immense sensation at the table. - Sudden retirement of the angular
female in oxydated bombazine.  Movement of adhesion - as they say
in the Chamber of Deputies - on the part of the young fellow they
call John.  Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw -
(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.)  Our landlady
to Benjamin Franklin, briskly, - Go to school right off, there's a
good boy!  Schoolmistress curious, - takes a quick glance at
divinity-student.  Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his
shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood - or truth - had hit
him in the forehead.  Myself calm.]

- I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having
pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit
should be disputed.  Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin,
(for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a
small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?

[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,
vellum-papered 32mo.  "DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA.  Amstelodami.
Typis Ludovici Elzevirii.  1650."  Various names written on title-
page.  Most conspicuous this:  Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim.
1725.  Oxon.

- O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, - then writing
as I now write, - now in the dust, where I shall lie, - is this
line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance?  Thy name is
at least once more spoken by living men; - is it a pleasure to
thee?  Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, -
its week, its month, its year, - whatever it may be, - and then we
will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion's
Uncatalogued Library!]

- If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to
read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty
scholar, - the great Erasmus, - who "laid the egg of the
Reformation which Luther hatched."  Oh, you never read his
NAUFRAGIUM, or "Shipwreck," did you?  Of course not; for, if you
had, I don't think you would have given me credit - or discredit -
for entire originality in that speech of mine.  That men are
cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the
extraordinary antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they
are fools, by their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits
of wood from the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense;
that they are fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story:
I will put it into rough English for you. - "I couldn't help
laughing to hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure
to be heard, a promise to Saint Christopher of Paris - the
monstrous statue in the great church there - that he would give him
a wax taper as big as himself.  'Mind what you promise!' said an
acquaintance that stood near him, poking him with his elbow; 'you
couldn't pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.'
'Hold your tongue, you donkey!' said the fellow, - but softly, so
that Saint Christopher should not hear him, - 'do you think I'm in
earnest?  If I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him
so much as a tallow candle!'"

Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in
their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have
not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the
contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the
qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many
doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call
foolish, cowardly, and false.

- So you would abuse other people's beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell
us your own creed! - said the divinity-student, coloring up with a
spirit for which I liked him all the better.

- I have a creed, - I replied; - none better, and none shorter.  It
is told in two words, - the two first of the Paternoster.  And when
I say these words I mean them.  And when I compared the human will
to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral
obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to
express:  that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings
is a very strictly limited agency in the universe.  The chief
planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization,
education, condition.  Organization may reduce the power of the
will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale
mounts upwards by slight gradations.  Education is only second to
nature.  Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and
Timbuctoo to change places!  Condition does less, but "Give me
neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good
reason.  If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in
getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these
every-day working forces into account.  The great theological
question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is
this:-

No, I wont talk about these things now.  My remarks might be
repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what
personal incivilities I should be visited.  Besides, what business
has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast-
table?  Let him make puns.  To be sure, he was brought up among the
Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto
"Concilium Tridentinum."  He has also heard many thousand
theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not
at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this
time to express an opinion on theological matters.

I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal
rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of
thought.  Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two
letters a week, requesting him to. . . . , - on the strength of
some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the
intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a
harlequin?

- Well, I can't be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like
to make you laugh, well enough, when I can.  But then observe this:
if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible
nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he
had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head
of his profession.  Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels
of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the
other water-power; that is all.  I have often heard the Professor
talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest illustration of
the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts
are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children;
and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the
transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake
play JESSE RURAL.

It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love
for the ridiculous.  People laugh WITH him just so long as he
amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have
their laugh, and so they laugh AT him.  There is in addition,
however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear.  Do
you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you
laugh, whether by making faces or verses?  Are you aware that you
have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so
far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your
royal delight?  Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a
dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is
exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right! - first-rate
performance! - and all the rest of the fine phrases.  But if all at
once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and,
stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him, - ah, that
wasn't in the programme!

I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith - who, as
everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman,
every inch of him - ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of
Royalty.  The "Quarterly," "so savage and tartarly," came down upon
him in the most contemptuous style, as "a joker of jokes," a
"diner-out of the first water," in one of his own phrases; sneering
at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking
behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a
man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even. - If
I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three
facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit
in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more
solid qualities.  And so to an actor:  HAMLET first, and BOB LOGIC
afterwards, if you like; but don't think, as they say poor Liston
used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do
anything great with MACBETH'S dagger after flourishing about with
PAUL PRY'S umbrella.  Do you know, too, that the majority of men
look upon all who challenge their attention, - for a while, at
least, - as beggars, and nuisances?  They always try to get off as
cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a
literary man - pardon the forlorn pleasantry! - is the FUNNY-bone.
That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and
makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.

- Oh, indeed, no! - I am not ashamed to make you laugh,
occasionally.  I think I could read you something I have in my desk
which would probably make you smile.  Perhaps I will read it one of
these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and
reflective; not just now.  The ludicrous has its place in the
universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas,
illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long
before Aristophanes or Shakspeare.  How curious it is that we
always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and
encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of
those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call
BLESSED!  There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be
preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look
forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all
joyousness from their countenances.  I meet one such in the street
not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who
gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look
of recognition, - something as if he were one of Heaven's
assessors, come down to "doom" every acquaintance he met, - that I
have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a
violent cold, dating from that instant.  I don't doubt he would cut
his kitten's tail off, if he caught her playing with it.  Please
tell me, who taught her to play with it?

No, no! - give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and
you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about
entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my
serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies.  I know nothing in
English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment
of Sir Thomas Browne "EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS
NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF."

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand,
as in what direction we are moving:  To reach the port of heaven,
we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, -
but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.  There is one
very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really
moving onward.  It is this:  that one cannot help using his early
friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.  Every
now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a
string of thought tied to him, and look - I am afraid with a kind
of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion - to see the rate at
which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and
down, poor fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and
bright sparkle at our bows; - the ruffled bosom of prosperity and
progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it!  But this is only
the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow
all that we love.

Don't misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you.
It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring
our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the
habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary,
we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy.  We see
just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the
balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now.
No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken.  If we change our last
simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the
harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get
what we want out of it.  There is one of our companions; - her
streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea,
then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another,
the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a
seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas.  But lo! at
dawn she is still in sight, - it may be in advance of us.  Some
deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent, -
yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they
are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim.  And when at last
the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the
mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes
off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all
wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride,
may never come.

So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships,
because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present
and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but
are not what we are.  Nothing strikes one more, in the race of
life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the
course.  "Commencement day" always reminds me of the start for the
"Derby," when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season
are brought up for trial.  That day is the start, and life is the
race.  Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just "graduating."
Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit;
step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:-


"HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
SOCII MOERENTES."


But this is the start, and here they are, - coats bright as silk,
and manes as smooth as EAU LUSTRALE can make them.  Some of the
best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show
their paces.  What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old
lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their
eyes for?  Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on
the stage.  Do they really think those little thin legs can do
anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these
next forty years?  Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that
comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered
rings of the ARCUS SENILIS!

TEN YEARS GONE.  First turn in the race.  A few broken down; two or
three bolted.  Several show in advance of the ruck.  CASSOCK, a
black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts
commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first
quarter.  METEOR has pulled up.

TWENTY YEARS.  Second corner turned.  CASSOCK has dropped from the
front, and JUDEX, an iron-gray, has the lead.  But look! how they
have thinned out!  Down flat, - five, - six, - how many?  They lie
still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very
sure!  And the rest of them, what a "tailing off"!  Anybody can see
who is going to win, - perhaps.

THIRTY YEARS.  Third corner turned.  DIVES, bright sorrel, ridden
by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is
getting to be the favourite with many.  But who is that other one
that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows
close up to the front?  Don't you remember the quiet brown colt
ASTEROID, with the star in his forehead?  That is he; he is one of
the sort that lasts; look out for him!  The black "colt," as we
used to call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a
gentle trot.  There is one they used to call THE FILLY, on account
of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is
not to be despised my boy!

FORTY YEARS.  More dropping off, - but places much as before.

FIFTY YEARS.  Race over.  All that are on the course are coming in
at a walk; no more running.  Who is ahead?  Ahead?  What! and the
winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that
turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory!
Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure
that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they
knew how!

- Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in
an ocean of similitudes and analogies?  I will not quote Cowley, or
Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were
suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower
or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object,
suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells
to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus.  We need not trouble
ourselves about the distinction between this and the Paper
Nautilus, the ARGONAUTA of the ancients.  The name applied to both
shows that each has long been compared to a ship, as you may see
more fully in Webster's Dictionary, or the "Encyclopedia," to which
he refers.  If you will look into Roget's Bridgewater Treatise, you
will find a figure of one of these shells, and a section of it.
The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments
successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which
is built in a widening spiral.  Can you find no lesson in this?


THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main, -
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every clambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed, -
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!



CHAPTER V.



A LYRIC conception - my friend, the Poet, said - hits me like a
bullet in the forehead.  I have often had the blood drop from my
cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death.
Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, -
then a gasp and a great jump of the heart, - then a sudden flush
and a beating in the vessels of the head, - then a long sigh, - and
the poem is written.

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly, -
I replied.

No, - said he, - far from it.  I said written, but I did not say
COPIED.  Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body
of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for.  The soul
of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul.  It comes to him a
thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words, - words that
have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have
never been wedded until now.  Whether it will ever fully embody
itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain;
but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale
with it.  It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot
thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those
parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging
along in their regular sequences of association.  No wonder the
ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external.  [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced]  Goddess, - Muse, - divine afflatus, -
something outside always.  I never wrote any verses worth reading.
I can't.  I am too stupid.  If I ever copied any that were worth
reading, I was only a medium.

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand, -
telling them what this poet told me.  The company listened rather
attentively, I thought, considering the literary character of the
remarks.]

The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read
anything better than Pope's "Essay on Man"?  Had I ever perused
McFingal?  He was fond of poetry when he was a boy, - his mother
taught him to say many little pieces, - he remembered one beautiful
hymn; - and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud voice, for
his years, -


"The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens," -


He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up
beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek.  As I looked
round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum, - the
Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it.  The old man's sudden
breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each
kept his posture as if changed to stone.  Our Celtic Bridget, or
Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a
sentiment.  She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-
shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are
known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop
forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk, - the
waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy
footfall.  Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was
about to deposit a plate heaped with something upon the table, when
I saw the coarse arm stretched by my shoulder arrested, -
motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn't set
the plate down while the old gentleman was speaking!

He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on
his cheek.  Don't ever think the poetry is dead in an old man
because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him
when his hand trembles!  If they ever WERE there, they ARE there
still!

By and by we got talking again. - Does a poet love the verses
written through him, do you think, Sir? - said the divinity-
student.

So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal
heat about them, I KNOW he loves them, - I answered.  When they
have had time to cool, he is more indifferent.

A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes, - said the young fellow
whom they call John.

The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized
female in black bombazine . - Buckwheat is skerce and high, - she
remarked.  [Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady, -
pays nothing, - so she must stand by the guns and be ready to repel
boarders.]

I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things
I wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again. - I
don't think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly
appreciated, given to you as they are in the green state.

- You don't know what I mean by the GREEN STATE?  Well, then, I
will tell you.  Certain things are good for nothing until they have
been kept a long while; and some are good for nothing until they
have been long kept and USED.  Of the first, wine is the
illustrious and immortal example.  Of those which must be kept and
used I will name three, - meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems.
The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand
offerings to the cloud-compelling deities.  It comes to us without
complexion or flavor, - born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but
colorless as PALLIDA MORS herself.  The fire is lighted in its
central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of
the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a
drachm are diffused through its thirsting pores.  First a
discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing, umber
tint spreading over the whole surface.  Nature true to her old
brown autumnal hue, you see, - as true in the fire of the
meerschaum as in the sunshine of October!  And then the cumulative
wealth of its fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors
takes a thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it
without awakening the old joys that hang around it as the smell of
flowers clings to the dresses of the daughters of the house of
Farina!

[Don't think I use a meerschaum myself, for I DO NOT, though I have
owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the
Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and
beaded knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his
right check.  On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-
mounted tobacco-stopper you ever saw.  It is a little box-wood
Triton, carved with charming liveliness and truth; I have often
compared it to a figure in Raphael's "Triumph of Galatea."  It came
to me in an ancient shagreen case, - how old it is I do not know, -
but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh's time.  If you
are curious, you shall see it any day.  Neither will I pretend that
I am so unused to the more perishable smoking contrivance that a
few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the
Bay of Biscay.  I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-
wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the
CIGAR, so called, of the shops, - which to "draw" asks the suction-
power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery
palate of an old Silenus.  I do not advise you, young man, even if
my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your
life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the
stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you
think for.  I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown
before its time under such Nicotian regimen, and thought the
umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain
enfeebled and a will enslaved.]

Violins, too, - the sweet old Amati! - the divine Stradivarius!
Played on by ancient MAESTROS until the bow-hand lost its power and
the flying fingers stiffened.  Bequeathed to the passionate, young
enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his
inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his
monotonous despair.  Passed from his dying hand to the cold
VIRTUOSO, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till,
when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the
stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of
their lord and leader.  Into lonely prisons with improvident
artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy
hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies
in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were
shut up in it; then again to the gentle DILETTANTE who calmed it
down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days
of the old MAESTROS.  And so given into our hands, its pores all
full of music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through,
with the concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which
have kindled and faded on its strings.

Now I tell you a poem must be kept AND USED, like a meerschaum, or
a violin.  A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum; - the more
porous it is, the better.  I mean to say that a genuine poem is
capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own
humanity, - its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its
aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine
secondary color derived from ourselves.  So you see it must take
time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature,
by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can
penetrate.

Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from
the maker's hands?  Now you know very well that there are no less
than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin.  These pieces are
strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to
make them thoroughly acquainted.  At last they learn to vibrate in
harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were
a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona,
or elsewhere.  Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty
years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets
tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.

Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem?  Counting
each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of
verses than in a violin.  The poet has forced all these words
together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first.
But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's
muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit
together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a
syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for
meddling with the harmonious fabric.  Observe, too, how the drying
process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a
violin.  Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its
hundredth birthday, - (Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,) - the
sap is pretty well out of it.  And here is the song of an old poet
whom Neaera cheated. -


"Nox erat, et coelo fulgebat Luna sereno
Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen laesura deorum
In verba jurabas mea."


Don't you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin
phrases?  Now I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary
brings with it a certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the
sheets of the "Pactolian," in which, as I told you, I sometimes
print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those
words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, that, while the
sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can't
fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true
stuff, they will ring better after a while.

[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate
exposition of these self-evident analogies.  Presently A PERSON
turned towards me - I do not choose to designate the individual -
and said that he rather expected my pieces had given pretty good
"sahtisfahction." - I had, up to this moment, considered this
complimentary phrase as sacred to the use of secretaries of
lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by a small
pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this
moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm.  But
as a reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a
little below that blood-heat standard which a man's breath ought to
have, whether silent, or vocal and articulate.  I waited for a
favorable opportunity, however, before making the remarks which
follow.]

- There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that
fix a man's position for you before you have done shaking hands
with him.  Allow me to expand a little.  There are several things,
very slight in themselves, yet implying other things not so
unimportant.  Thus, your French servant has DEVALISE your premises
and got caught.  EXCUSEZ, says the SERGENT-DE-VILLE, as he politely
relieves him of his upper garments and displays his bust in the
full daylight.  Good shoulders enough, - a little marked, - traces
of smallpox, perhaps, - but white. . . . . CRAC! from the SERGENT-
DE-VILLE'S broad palm on the white shoulder!  Now look!  VOGUE LA
GALERE!  Out comes the big red V - mark of the hot iron; - he had
blistered it out pretty nearly, - hadn't he? - the old rascal
VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Marseilles!  [Don't!  What if he
has got something like this? - nobody supposes I INVENTED such a
story.]

My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females
which I told you I had owned, - for, look you, my friends, simple
though I stand here, I am one that has been driven in his
"kerridge," - not using that term, as liberal shepherds do, for any
battered old shabby-genteel go-cart which has more than one wheel,
but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle WITH A POLE, - my man
John, I say, was a retired soldier.  He retired unostentatiously,
as many of Her Majesty's modest servants have done before and
since.  John told me, that when an officer thinks he recognizes one
of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really been in
the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful
country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, "Strap!"
If he has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the
reprimand for its ill adjustment.  The old word of command flashes
through his muscles, and his hand goes up in an instant to the
place where the strap used to be.

[I was all the time preparing for my grand COUP, you understand;
but I saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued, -
always in illustration of the general principle I had laid down.]

Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of.  There was
a legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the
English coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape
of Saxons, who would not let them go, - on the contrary, insisted
on their staying, and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo
treated Marsyas, or an Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in
his title-page, and, having divested them of the one essential and
perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in the mildest climates,
nailed the same on the church-door as we do the banns of marriage,
IN TERROREM.

[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I
looked at our landlady, I saw that "the water stood in her eyes,"
as it did in Christiana's when the interpreter asked her about the
spider, and I fancied, but wasn't quite sure that the
schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy did in the same conversation, as
you remember.]

That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story, - said the young fellow
whom they call John.  I abstained from making Hamlet's remark to
Horatio, and continued.

Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying
an old Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other
things thought the doors should be attended to.  One of them
particularly, the front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it
were, and as if it would be all the better for scraping.  There
happened to be a microscopist in the village who had heard the old
pirate story, and he took it into his head to examine the crust on
this door.  There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine
historical document, of the Ziska drum-head pattern, - a real CUTIS
HUMANA, stripped from some old Scandinavian filibuster, and the
legend was true.

My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and
financial question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute
fragment of a similar document.  Behind the pane of plate-glass
which bore his name and title burned a modest lamp, signifying to
the passers-by that at all hours of the night the slightest favors
(or fevers) were welcome.  A youth who had freely partaken of the
cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, following a moth-like
impulse very natural under the circumstances, dashed his fist at
the light and quenched the meek luminary, - breaking through the
plate-glass, of course, to reach it.  Now I don't want to go into
MINUTIAE at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go
through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle,
to say the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a
sausage-machine without looking the worse for it.  The Professor
gathered up the fragments of glass, and with them certain very
minute but entirely satisfactory documents which would have
identified and hanged any rogue in Christendom who had parted with
them. - The historical question, WHO DID IT? and the financial
question, WHO PAID FOR IT? were both settled before the new lamp
was lighted the next evening.

You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
insignificant premises.  This is eminently true of manners and
forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you
want to know about a person.  Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly
pronounced HAALTH) - instead of, How do you do? or, How are you?
Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety
one-horse wagon a "kerridge."  Or telling a person who has been
trying to please you that he has given you pretty good
"sahtisfahction."  Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing,
or that you have been "stoppin"' at Deacon Somebody's, - and other
such expressions.  One of my friends had a little marble statuette
of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house, - bow, arrows, wings,
and all complete.  A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking
pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a
statoo of her deceased infant?"  What a delicious, though somewhat
voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that
brief question!

[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in
the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my
fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual
at whose door it lay.]

That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, EX PEDE
HERCULEM.  He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you
may judge of the barrel."  EX PEDE, to be sure!  Read, instead, EX
UNGUE MINIMI DIGITI PEDIS, HERCULEM, EJUSQUE PATREM, MATREM, AVOS
ET PROAVOS, FILIOS, NEPOTES ET PRONEPOTES!  Talk to me about your
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]!  Tell me about Cuvier's
getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a
portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale!  As the "O"
revealed Giotto, - as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford
atte-Bowe-taught Anglais, - so all a man's antecedents and
possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at
once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.

Possibilities, Sir? - said the divinity-student; can't a man who
says HAOW? arrive at distinction?

Sir, - I replied, - in a republic all things are possible.  But the
man WITH A FUTURE has almost of necessity sense enough to see that
any odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of.  Doesn't
Sydney Smith say that a public man in England never gets over a
false quantity uttered in early life?  OUR public men are in little
danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in the habit of
introducing Latin into their speeches, - for good and sufficient
reasons.  But they are bound to speak decent English, - unless,
indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or
General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian's head are
pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a
constituency of thirty empires is not at all particular, provided
they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.

However, it is not for me to talk.  I have made mistakes enough in
conversation and print.  I never find them out until they are
stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me.  I have no
doubt I shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is
over, and remember them all before another.  How one does tremble
with rage at his own intense momentary stupidity about things he
knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays himself open to the
impertinences of the CAPTATORES VERBORUM, those useful but humble
scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what
might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as
they go!  I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal
critics; - how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and
vulgarisms of speech?  Only there is a difference between those
clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better,
and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is
unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or
broadcloth.

[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making
this record of the date that nobody may think it was written in
wrath, on account of any particular grievance suffered from the
invasion of any individual SCARABAEUS GRAMMATICUS.]

- I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this
table when it is repeated?  I hope they do, I am sure.  I should be
very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they
did not.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat
stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found
it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round
it, close to its edges, - and have you not, in obedience to a kind
of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough,
insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge
and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to
herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"?  What an odd
revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a
small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected,
until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced
by your turning the old stone over!  Blades of grass flattened
down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and
ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
horny-shelled, - turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them
softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine
watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a
joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-
pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets,
with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse
stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae,
perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the
infernal wriggle of maturity!  But no sooner is the stone turned
and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded
community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the
luxury of legs - and some of them have a good many - rush round
wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in
a general stampede for underground retreats from the region
poisoned by sunshine.  NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing
tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest
where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are
growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut
over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful
consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

- The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very
familiar way, - at which I do not choose to take offence, but which
I sometimes think it necessary to repress, - that I was coming it
rather strong on the butterflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, - the
butterfly as well as the others.  The stone is ancient error.  The
grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by
it.  The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that
thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it.
He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to
the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious
face or a laughing one.  The next year stands for the coming time.
Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in
its full stature and native hues in the sunshine.  Then shall God's
minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.
Then shall beauty - Divinity taking outlines and color - light upon
the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit
rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub,
which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a
terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population
that dwells under it.

- Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of
somebody or other.  As soon as his breath comes back, he very
probably begins to expend it in hard words.  These are the best
evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to
say.  Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his
pamphlets.  "I think I have not been attacked enough for it," he
said; - "attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard
unless it rebounds."

- If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply?  Not I.
Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long
ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY?

Don't know what that means? - Well, I will tell you.  You know,
that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a
pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would
stand at the same height in one as in the other.  Controversy
equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, - AND THE FOOLS KNOW
IT.

- No, but I often read what they say about other people.  There are
about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like
the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the
bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows.
If you get one, you get the whole lot.

What are they? - Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and
longitude.  Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately.
Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial,
witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished,
celebrated, illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first
writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow,
ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and disgrace
to civilization.

What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets? - Well, I
should say a set of influences something like these:  - 1st.
Relationships, political, religious, social, domestic.  2d.
Oyster, in the form of suppers given to gentlemen connected with
criticism.  I believe in the school, the college, and the clergy;
but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion - which means
commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry - is
the following MAJOR PROPOSITION.  Oysters AU NATUREL.  MINOR
PROPOSITION.  The same "scalloped."  CONCLUSION.  That - (here
insert entertainer's name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant, - and
the rest.

- No, it isn't exactly bribery.  One man has oysters, and another
epithets.  It is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a "spread"
on linen, and the other on paper, - that is all.  Don't you think
you and I should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical
line?  I am sure I couldn't resist the softening influences of
hospitality.  I don't like to dine out, you know, - I dine so well
at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is
so pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the
boarders]; but if I did partake of a man's salt, with such
additions as that article of food requires to make it palatable, I
could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I suppose I
should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string of
sleigh-bells.  Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of
us, - not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that
its sharp corners get terribly rounded.  I love truth as chiefest
among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never
be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it.  I might
write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that is
another matter.

- Listen, Benjamin Franklin!  This is for you, and such others of
tender age as you may tell it to.

When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those
two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to
us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and
in his left spheres like marbles.  The cubes are of stainless
ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold - TRUTH.  The
spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark
crimson flush above, where the light falls on them, and in a
certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three
letters L, I, E.  The child to whom they are offered very probably
clutches at both.  The spheres are the most convenient things in
the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the
child would have them.  The cubes will not roll at all; they have a
great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up.
But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so
easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out
of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to
find the others, which stay where they are left.  Thus he learns -
thus we learn - to drop the streaked and speckled globes of
falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth.  But
then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all
Polite-behavior, all insisting that truth must ROLL, or nobody can
do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the
second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve,
do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of
truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes
hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.

The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased
with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next
day.  But she should tell the children, she said, that there were
better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of
its convenience and the inconvenience of lying.

Yes, - I said, - but education always begins through the senses,
and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong.  The first
thing the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is
unprofitable, - afterwards, that it is against the peace and
dignity of the universe.

- Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in
newspapers, under the title, "From our Foreign Correspondent," does
any harm? - Why, no, - I don't know that it does.  I suppose it
doesn't really deceive people any more than the "Arabian Nights" or
"Gulliver's Travels" do.  Sometimes the writers compile TOO
carelessly, though, and mix up facts out of geographies, and
stories out of the penny papers, so as to mislead those who are
desirous of information.  I cut a piece out of one of the papers,
the other day, which contains a number of improbabilities, and, I
suspect, misstatements.  I will send up and get it for you, if you
would like to hear it. - Ah, this is it; it is headed


"OUR SUMATRA CORRESPONDENCE.

"This island is now the property of the Stamford family, - having
been won, it is said, in a raffle, by Sir - Stamford, during the
stock-gambling mania of the South-Sea Scheme.  The history of this
gentleman may be found in an interesting series of questions
(unfortunately not yet answered) contained in the 'Notes and
Queries.'  This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which
here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallizing in
cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its
surface, during calm weather, the rainbow tints of the celebrated
South-Sea bubbles.  The summers are oppressively hot, and the
winters very probably cold; but this fact cannot be ascertained
precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the mercury in these
latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, and thus the
thermometer is rendered useless in winter.

The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper
tree and the bread-fruit tree.  Pepper being very abundantly
produced, a benevolent society was organized in London during the
last century for supplying the natives with vinegar and oysters, as
an addition to that delightful condiment.  [Note received from Dr.
D. P.]  It is said, however, that, as the oysters were of the kind

called NATIVES in England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience to
a natural instinct, refused to touch them, and confined themselves
entirely to the crew of the vessel in which they were brought over.
This information was received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a
native himself, and exceedingly fond of missionaries.  He is said
also to be very skilful in the CUISINE peculiar to the island.

"During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons employed
are subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent
and long-continued sternutation, or sneezing.  Such is the
vehemence of these attacks, that the unfortunate subjects of them
are often driven backwards for great distances at immense speed, on
the well-known principle of the aeolipile.  Not being able to see
where they are going, these poor creatures dash themselves to
pieces against the rocks or are precipitated over the cliffs and
thus many valuable lives are lost annually.  As, during the whole
pepper-harvest, they feed exclusively on this stimulant, they
become exceedingly irritable.  The smallest injury is resented with
ungovernable rage.  A young man suffering from the PEPPER-FEVER as
it is called, cudgelled another most severely for appropriating a
superannuated relative of trifling value, and was only pacified by
having a present made him of a pig of that peculiar species of
swine called the PECCAVI by the Catholic Jews, who, it is well
known, abstain from swine's flesh in imitation of the Mahometan
Buddhists.

"The bread-tree grows abundantly.  Its branches are well known to
Europe and America under the familiar name of MACCARONI.  The
smaller twigs are called VERMICELLI.  They have a decided animal
flavor, as may be observed in the soups containing them.
Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very
dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being
boiled.  The government of the island, therefore, never allows a
stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston
with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out.
These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives
among us.  It therefore always contains many of these insects,
which, however, generally die of old age in the shops, so that
accidents from this source are comparatively rare.

"The fruit of the bread-tree consists principally of hot rolls.
The buttered-muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the
cocoa-nut palm, the cream found on the milk of the cocoa-nut
exuding from the hybrid in the shape of butter, just as the ripe
fruit is splitting, so as to fit it for the tea-table, where it is
commonly served up with cold" -

- There, - I don't want to read any more of it.  You see that many
of these statements are highly improbable. - No, I shall not
mention the paper. - No, neither of them wrote it, though it
reminds me of the style of these popular writers.  I think the
fellow who wrote it must have been reading some of their stories,
and got them mixed up with his history and geography.  I don't
suppose HE lies; - he sells it to the editor, who knows how many
squares off "Sumatra" is.  The editor, who sells it to the public -
By the way, the papers have been very civil haven't they? - to the
- the what d'ye call it? - "Northern Magazine," - isn't it? - got
up by some of those Come-outers, down East, as an organ for their
local peculiarities.

- The Professor has been to see me.  Came in, glorious, at about
twelve o'clock, last night.  Said he had been with "the boys."  On
inquiry, found that "the boys," were certain baldish and grayish
old gentlemen that one sees or hears of in various important
stations of society.  The Professor is one of the same set, but he
always talks as if he had been out of college about ten years,
whereas. . .  [Each of these dots was a little nod, which the
company understood, as the reader will, no doubt.]  He calls them
sometimes "the boys," and sometimes "the old fellows."  Call him by
the latter title, and see how he likes it. - Well, he came in last
night glorious, as I was saying.  Of course I don't mean vinously
exalted; he drinks little wine on such occasions, and is well known
to all the Peters and Patricks as the gentleman who always has
indefinite quantities of black tea to kill any extra glass of red
claret he may have swallowed.  But the Professor says he always
gets tipsy on old memories at these gatherings.  He was, I forget
how many years old when he went to the meeting; just turned of
twenty now, - he said.  He made various youthful proposals to me,
including a duet under the landlady's daughter's window.  He had
just learned a trick, he said, of one of "the boys," of getting a
splendid bass out of a door-panel by rubbing it with the palm of
his hand.  Offered to sing "The sky is bright," accompanying
himself on the front-door, if I would go down and help in the
chorus.  Said there never was such a set of fellows as the old boys
of the set he has been with.  Judges, mayors, Congress-men, Mr.
Speakers, leaders in science, clergymen better than famous, and
famous too, poets by the half-dozen, singers with voices like
angels, financiers, wits, three of the best laughers in the
Commonwealth, engineers, agriculturists, - all forms of talent and
knowledge he pretended were represented in that meeting.  Then he
began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he
could "furnish out creation" in all its details from that set of
his.  He would like to have the whole boodle of them, (I
remonstrated against this word, but the Professor said it was a
diabolish good word, and he would have no other,) with their wives
and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see how
splendidly they would reorganize society.  They could build a city,
- they have done it; make constitutions and laws; establish
churches and lyceums; teach and practise the healing art; instruct
in every department; found observatories; create commerce and
manufactures; write songs and hymns, and sing 'em, and make
instruments to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a journal
almost as good as the "Northern Magazine," edited by the Come-
outers.  There was nothing they were not up to, from a christening
to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never be called for,
unless some stranger got in among them.

- I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn't make much
difference to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of
pale Sherry and similar elements.  All at once he jumped up and
said, -

Don't you want to hear what I just read to the boys?

I have had questions of a similar character asked me before,
occasionally.  A man of iron mould might perhaps say, No!  I am not
a man of iron mould, and said that I should be delighted.

The Professor then read - with that slightly sing-song cadence
which is observed to be common in poets reading their own verses -
the following stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about
two feet and a half, with an occasional movement back or forward
for better adjustment, the appearance of which has been likened by
some impertinent young folks to that of the act of playing on the
trombone.  His eyesight was never better; I have his word for it.


MARE RUBRUM.


FLASH out a stream of blood-red wine! -
For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine,
Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade;
But every ghost of boyhood's dream
By Nature's magic power is laid
To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.

It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer's cloudless day
Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
It pictures still the bacchant shapes
That saw their hoarded sunlight shed, -
The maidens dancing on the grapes, -
Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.

Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
Those flitting shapes that never die,
The swift-winged visions of the past.
Kiss but the crystal's mystic rim,
Each shadow rends its flowery chain,
Springs in a bubble from its brim
And walks the chambers of the brain.

Poor Beauty! time and fortune's wrong
No form nor feature may withstand, -
Thy wrecks are scattered all along,
Like emptied sea-shells on the sand; -
Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,
The dust restores each blooming girl,
As if the sea-shells moved again
Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.

Here lies the home of school-boy life,
With creaking stair and wind-swept hall,
And, scarred by many a truant knife,
Our old initials on the wall;
Here rest - their keen vibrations mute -
The shout of voices known so well,
The ringing laugh, the wailing flute,
The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.

Here, clad in burning robes, are laid
Life's blossomed joys, untimely shed;
And here those cherished forms have strayed
We miss awhile, and call them dead.
What wizard fills the maddening glass
What soil the enchanted clusters grew?
That buried passions wake and pass
In beaded drops of fiery dew?

Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine, -
Our hearts can boast a warmer grow,
Filled from a vantage more divine, -
Calmed, but not chilled by winter's snow!
To-night the palest wave we sip
Rich as the priceless draught shall be
That wet the bride of Cana's lip, -
The wedding wine of Galilee!



CHAPTER VI.



SIN has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

- I think, Sir, - said the divinity-student, - you must intend that
for one of the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were
speaking of the other day.

I thank you, my young friend, - was my reply, - but I must say
something better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the
number.

- The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there
were on record, and what, and by whom said.

- Why, let us see, - there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, "the
great Bostonian," after whom this lad was named.  To be sure, he
said a great many wise things, - and I don't feel sure he didn't
borrow this, - he speaks as if it were old.  But then he applied it
so neatly! -

"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another than he whom you yourself have obliged."

Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my
friend, the Historian, in one of his flashing moments:-

"Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries."

To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the
wittiest of men:-

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." -

The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.

The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn't think the wit
meant any irreverence.  It was only another way of saying, Paris is
a heavenly place after New York or Boston.

A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they
call John, - evidently a stranger, - said there was one more wise
man's saying that he had heard; it was about our place, but he
didn't know who said it. - A civil curiosity was manifested by the
company to hear the fourth wise saying.  I heard him distinctly
whispering to the young fellow who brought him to dinner, SHALL I
TELL IT?  To which the answer was, GO AHEAD! - Well, - he said, -
this was what I heard:-

"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system.  You couldn't
pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation
straightened out for a crowbar."

Sir, - said I, - I am gratified with your remark.  It expresses
with pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered
with malignant dulness.  The satire of the remark is essentially
true of Boston, - and of all other considerable - and
inconsiderable - places with which I have had the privilege of
being acquainted.  Cockneys think London is the only place in the
world.  Frenchmen - you remember the line about Paris, the Court,
the World, etc. -  I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that
city which ran thus:  "Hotel l'Univers et des Etats Unis"; and as
Paris IS the universe to a Frenchman, of course the United States
are outside of it. - "See Naples and then die." - It is quite as
bad with smaller places.  I have been about, lecturing, you know,
and have found the following propositions to hold true of all of
them.

1.  The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of
each and every town or city.

2.  If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it
is affectionately styled by the inhabitants the "GOOD OLD town of"
- (whatever its name may happen to be.)

3.  Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to
listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a "remarkably
intelligent audience."

4.  The climate of the place is particularly favorable to
longevity.

5.  It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the
world.  (One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember,
sent short pieces to the "Pactolian" some time since, which were
"respectfully declined.")

Boston is just like other places of its size; - only perhaps,
considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department,
superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the
English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of
cities.  I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the
real offence of Boston.  It drains a large water-shed of its
intellect, and will not itself be drained.  If it would only send
away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no
offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always
proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which
the gentleman has quoted.  There can never be a real metropolis in
this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of
their talent and wealth. - I have observed, by the way, that the
people who really live in two great cities are by no means so
jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated
within the intellectual basin, or SUCTION-RANGE, of one large one,
of the pretensions of any other.  Don't you see why?  Because their
promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have
been drained off to the neighboring big city, - their prettiest
girl has been exported to the same market; all their ambition
points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there.
I hate little toad-eating cities.

- Would I be so good as to specify any particular example? - Oh, -
an example?  Did you ever see a bear-trap?  Never?  Well, shouldn't
you like to see me put my foot into one?  With sentiments of the
highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.

Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming.  If they have an
old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here
and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for
the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door
with their tomahawks,) - if they have, scattered about, those
mighty square houses built something more than half a century ago,
and standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former
diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its
monument, - if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push
their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on
the side-walk, - if they have a little grass in the side-streets,
enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay, - I think I
could go to pieces, after my life's work were done, in one of those
tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be
rocked to sleep in.  I visit such spots always with infinite
delight.  My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are
most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties.  Let
a man live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine
of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy
streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun
through it by day and the stars by night.

- Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns? - I don't believe there is much difference.  You know how
they read Pope's line in the smallest town in our State of
Massachusetts? - Well, they read it


"All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!"


- Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by
which they may be entered.  The front-door is on the street.  Some
keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some,
bolted, - with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in;
and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold.  This
front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and
this into the inferior apartments.  The side-door opens at once
into the sacred chambers.

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door.  This is
carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom.  Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it.  The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas,
if none is given with it!

If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly
pronounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim, -
THE LORD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL!  You will probably go mad within
a reasonable time, - or, if you are a man, run off and die with
your head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San Francisco, - or, if
you are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn into a pale,
jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play
some real life-tragedy or other.

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-
door.  The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear
to you very terrible at times.  You can keep the world out from
your front-door, or receive visitors only when you are ready for
them; but those of your own flesh and blood, or of certain grades
of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they will, at any
hour and in any mood.  Some of them have a scale of your whole
nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in
semitones, - touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes
the keys of his instrument.  I am satisfied that there are as great
masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their
lines of performance.  Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found.  A delicate
woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of
sensibilities!  From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on
the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of
taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other
instrument possesses.  A few exercises on it daily at home fit a
man wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely
as he returns from them.  No stranger can get a great many notes of
torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well, -
parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.  Be very careful to whom
you give a side-door key; too many have them already.

- You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed
a frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became
thawed?  If we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better
that it should sting us and we should die than that its chill
should slowly steal into our hearts; warm it we never can!  I have
seen faces of women that were fair to look upon, yet one could see
that the icicles were forming round these women's hearts.  I knew
what freezing image lay on the white breasts beneath the laces!

A very simple INTELLECTUAL mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life.  If a
watch tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry
it about with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and
is not a repeater, nor a musical watch, - though it is not
enamelled nor jewelled, - in short, though it has little beyond the
wheels required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good face
and a pair of useful hands.  The more wheels there are in a watch
or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of.  The
movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by
their very nature.  A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms
and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely
perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship. -
Observe, I am talking about MINDS.  I won't say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to
the understanding and reason; - but, on the other hand, that the
brain often runs away with the heart's best blood, which gives the
world a few pages of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of
making one other heart happy, I have no question.

If one's intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share
all one's intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books.
After all, if we think of it, most of the world's loves and
friendships have been between people that could not read nor spell.

But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs
all that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of
smiles or the pressure of hand or lip, - this is the great
martyrdom of sensitive beings, - most of all in that perpetual AUTO
DA FE where young womanhood is the sacrifice.

- You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and
friendships of illiterate persons, - that is, of the human race,
with a few exceptions here and there.  I like books, - I was born
and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into
their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses.  I don't think
I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors.  But I
can't help remembering that the world's great men have not commonly
been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.  The Hebrew
patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent
to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think,
if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next
Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.

What I wanted to say about books is this:  that there are times in
which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

- I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir, - said
the divinity-student, - who should feel himself above Shakspeare at
any time.

My young friend, - I replied, - the man who is never conscious of a
state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond
expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of
language.  I can hardly believe there are any such men.  Why, think
for a moment of the power of music.  The nerves that make us alive
to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the most sensitive
region of the marrow just where it is widening to run upwards into
the hemispheres.  It has its seat in the region of sense rather
than of thought.  Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were,
logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how
different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the
reach of symbols! - Think of human passions as compared with all
phrases!  Did you ever hear of a man's growing lean by the reading
of "Romeo and Juliet," or blowing his brains out because Desdemona
was maligned?  There are a good many symbols, even, that are more
expressive than words.  I remember a young wife who had to part
with her husband for a time.  She did not write a mournful poem;
indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word
about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with
jaundice.  A great many people in this world have but one form of
rhetoric for their profoundest experiences, - namely, to waste away
and die.  When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.
When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold. - You talk
about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the
highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be
so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text
which lies before him.  But think a moment.  A child's reading of
Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of
him is another.  The saturation-point of each mind differs from
that of every other.  But I think it is as true for the small mind
which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up
much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always
to rise above - not the author, but the reader's mental version of
the author, whoever he may be.

I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown
into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music.  Then
they may drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought
without words.  We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and
probably are, unless there is some particular reason to suppose the
contrary.  But we get glimpses now and then of a sphere of
spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now, may sail in
vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.

- I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago, - I hate the very sight of a book.  Sometimes
it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the
mind, before putting anything else into it.  It is very bad to have
thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, STRIKE
IN, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books.  I suppose every
day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more
of births, - with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats,
its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the
books that were ever written, put together.  I believe the flowers
growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was
ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

- Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
elsewhere? - No, that is the last thing I would do.  I will tell
you my rule.  Talk about those subjects you have had long in your
mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied
but recently.  Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till
they are seasoned.

-  Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned
a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the
mind.  Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an
hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.
When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when
acquired.  It has domiciliated itself, so to speak, - become at
home, - entered into relations with your other thoughts, and
integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind. - Or take a
simple and familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it.  You
forget a name, in conversation, - go on talking, without making any
effort to recall it, - and presently the mind evolves it by its own
involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another
train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

- I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
something of his progress in the French language.  I rather liked
that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I
should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a
remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their
portraits.

- Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies.  I don't know whether
the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as
Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his
description.  At any rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to
turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would
sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was
meant to have some local bearing or other, - which the author, of
course, didn't mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with
anything on this side of the water.

 [The above remarks were addressed to the school-mistress, to whom
I handed the paper after looking it over.  The divinity-student
came and read over her shoulder, - very curious, apparently, but
his eyes wandered, I thought.  Fancying that her breathing was
somewhat hurried and high, or THORACIC, as my friend, the
Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more closely. - It is
none of my business. - After all, it is the imponderables that move
the world, - heat, electricity, love.  HABET?]

This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school
French, such as you see here; don't expect too much; - the mistakes
give a relish to it, I think.


LES SOCIETES POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.

CES Societes la sont une Institution pour suppleer aux besoins
d'esprit et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survecu a leurs
emotions a l'egard du beau sexe, et qui n'ont pas la distraction de
l'habitude de boire.

Pour devenir membre d'une de ces Societes, on doit avoir le moins
de cheveux possible.  S'il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux
depilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques
connaissances, n'importe dans quel genre.  Des le moment qu'on
ouvre la porte de la Societe, on a un grand interet dans toutes les
choses dont on ne sait rien.  Ainsi, un microscopiste demontre un
nouveau FLEXOR du TARSE d'un MELOLONTHA VULGARIS.  Douze savans
improvises, portans des besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des
insectes, si ce n'est les morsures du CULEX, se precipitent sur
l'instrument, et voient - une grande bulle d'air, dont ils
s'emerveillent avec effusion.  Ce qui est un spectacle plein
d'instruction - pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite Societe.  Tous
les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec un air
d'intelligence parfaite pendant qu'ils prouvent dans un discours
d'une demiheure que O6 N3 H5 C6 etc. font quelque chose qui n'est
bonne a rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur tres desagreable,
selon l'habitude des produits chimiques.  Apres cela vient un
mathematicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin
un x+y, dont vous n'avex pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos
relations avec la vie.  Un naturaliste vous parle des formations
speciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n'avez
jamais soupconne l'existence.  Ainsi il vous decrit les FOLLICULES
de L'APPENDIX VERMIFORMIS d'un DZIGGUETAI.  Vous ne savez pas ce
que c'est qu'un FOLLICULE.  Vous ne savez pas ce que c'est qu'un
APPENDIX UERMIFORMIS.  Vous n'avez jamais entendu parler du
DZIGGUETAI.  Ainsi vous gagnez toutes ces connaisances a la fois,
qui s'attachent a votre esprit comme l'eau adhere aux plumes d'un
canard.  On connait toutes les langues EX OFFICIO en devenant
membre d'une de ces Societes.  Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai
sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on comprend tout cela de suite, et
s'instruit enormement.

Il y a deux especes d'individus qu'on trouve toujours a ces
Societes:  1 (degree) Le membre a questions; 2 (degree) Le membre a
"Bylaws."

La QUESTION est une specialite.  Celui qui en fait metier ne fait
jamais des reponses.  La question est une maniere tres commode de
dire les choses suivantes:  "Me voila!  Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,
- je respire encore!  J'ai des idees, - voyez mon intelligence!
Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de
cela!  Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacite, voyez vous!  Nous ne
sommes nullement la bete qu'on pense!" - LE FAISEUR DE QUESTIONS
DONNE PEU D'ATTENTION AUX REPONSES QU'ON FAIT; CE N'EST PAS LA DANS
SA SPECIALITE.

Le membre a "Bylaws" est le bouchon de toutes les emotions
mousseuses et genereuses qui se montrent dans la Societe.  C'est un
empereur manque, - un tyran a la troiseme trituration.  C'est un
esprit dur, borne, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les
grandeurs, selon le mot du grand Jefferson.  On ne l'aime pas dans
la Societe, mais on le respecte et on le craint.  Il n'y a qu'un
mot pour ce membre audessus de "Bylaws."  Ce mot est pour lui ce
que l'Om est aux Hundous.  C'est sa religion; il n'y a rien audela.
Ce mot la c'est la CONSTITUTION!

Lesdites Societes publient des feuilletons de tems en tems.  On les
trouve abandonnes a sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunes,
faute de membrane cutanee, ou meme papyracee.  Si on aime la
botanique, on y trouve une memoire sur les coquilles; si on fait
des etudes zoologiques, on square trouve un grand tas de q' [square
root of minus one], ce qui doit etre infiniment plus commode que
les encyclopedies.  Ainsi il est clair comme la metaphysique qu'on
doit devenir membre d'une Societe telle que nous decrivons.

RECETTE POUR LE DEPILATOIRE PHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUE
Chaux vive lb. ss.  Eau bouillante Oj.
Depilez avec.  Polissez ensuite.


I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to
him; and some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the
piece that made me smile, I turned it into English for them, as
well as I could, on the spot.

The landlady's daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that a
depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific
accomplishments; she wanted me to print the piece, so that she
might send a copy of it to her cousin in Mizzourah; she didn't
think he'd have to do anything to the outside of his head to get
into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig once, when he
played a part in a tabullo.

No, - said I, - I shouldn't think of printing that in English.
I'll tell you why.  As soon as you get a few thousand people
together in a town, there is somebody that every sharp thing you
say is sure to hit.  What if a thing was written in Paris or in
Pekin? - that makes no difference.  Everybody in those cities, or
almost everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all large
places. - You never studied AVERAGES as I have had occasion to.

I'll tell you how I came to know so much about averages.  There was
one season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the
week, through most of the lecturing period.  I soon found, as most
speakers do, that it was pleasanter to work one lecture than to
keep several in hand.

- Don't you get sick to death of one lecture? - said the landlady's
daughter, - who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for
conversation.

I was going to talk about averages, - I said, - but I have no
objection to telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
delivery.  One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his
mind.  After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then
disgusted with its repetition.  Go on delivering it, and the
disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a
hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or
hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience.  But this is
on one condition, - that he never lays the lecture down and lets it
cool.  If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is
intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad
as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool.  We use it for a
while with pleasure.  Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to
touch it.  By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no
longer any sensitiveness about it.  But if we give it up, the
calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the
novelty and get the blisters. - The story is often quoted of
Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had
been preached forty times.  A lecture doesn't begin to be old until
it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have
doubled, if not quadrupled, that number.  These old lectures are a
man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also, - like the pipes,
fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day.  One learns to make
the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones, -
to take out the really good things which don't tell on the
audience, and put in cheaper things that do.  All this degrades
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.
A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

- No, indeed, - I should be very sorry to say anything
disrespectful of audiences.  I have been kindly treated by a great
many, and may occasionally face one hereafter.  But I tell you the
AVERAGE intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is
not very high.  It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it
is not very rapid or profound.  A lecture ought to be something
which all can understand, about something which interests
everybody.  I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a
different account from this, it will probably be one of those
eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of
their manner, whatever they talk about, - even when they don't talk
very well.

But an AVERAGE, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of
the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study.  It is
awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action.  Two
communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions,
so far as we can see.  Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each,
are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in
many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place
and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent
audience" of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England
town of similar size.  Of course, if any principle of selection has
come in, as in those special associations of young men which are
common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage.
But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows
pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes
in.  Front seats:  a few old folk, - shiny-headed, - slant up best
ear towards the speaker, - drop off asleep after a while, when the
air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid.  Bright
women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but
toward the front - (pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.)
Here and there a countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen
pretty female ones sprinkled about.  An indefinite number of pairs
of young people, - happy, but not always very attentive.  Boys, in
the background, more or less quiet.  Dull faces here, there, - in
how many places!  I don't say dull PEOPLE, but faces without a ray
of sympathy or a movement of expression.  They are what kill the
lecturer.  These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony
lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him; - that is the
chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.
They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our
minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on
our hearts.

Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated, - a
great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen
as any two mammals of the same species are like each other.  Each
audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your
lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all.  Even
those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes
cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his
ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture
always.  I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture
in the convent, - that he sometimes thought the living tenants were
the shadows, and the painted figures the realities, - I have
sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, and this great
unchanging multivertebrate which I faced night after night was one
ever-listening animal, which writhed along after me wherever I
fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me the
same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last
drowsy incantation!

- Oh, yes!  A thousand kindly and courteous acts, - a thousand
faces that melted individually out of my recollection as the April
snow melts, but only to steal away and find the beds of flowers
whose roots are memory, but which blossom in poetry and dreams.  I
am not ungrateful, nor unconscious of all the good feeling and
intelligence everywhere to be met with through the vast parish to
which the lecturer ministers.  But when I set forth, leading a
string of my mind's daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch
in their strings of horses - Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow
who sneered at the sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if,
because he was decently paid for his services, he had therefore
sold his sensibilities. - Family men get dreadfully homesick.  In
the remote and bleak village the heart returns to the red blaze of
the logs in one's fireplace at home.


"There are his young barbarians all at play," -


if he owns any youthful savages. - No, the world has a million
roosts for a man, but only one nest.

- It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always
made in all discussions.  The men of facts wait their turn in grim
silence, with that slight tension about the nostrils which the
consciousness of carrying a "settler" in the form of a fact or a
revolver gives the individual thus armed.  When a person is really
full of information, and does not abuse it to crush conversation,
his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.

- What do I mean by the real talkers? - Why, the people with fresh
ideas, of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in.
Facts always yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts
about facts; but if a false note is uttered, down comes the finger
on the key and the man of facts asserts his true dignity.  I have
known three of these men of facts, at least, who were always
formidable, - and one of them was tyrannical.

- Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes. - He?  VENEERS in first-rate style.  The
mahogany scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the
cheap light stuff - I found - very fine in conversational
information, the other day when we were in company.  The talk ran
upon mountains.  He was wonderfully well acquainted with the
leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the Appalachians;
he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis, and
various other mountains that were mentioned.  By and by some
Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity
with the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to
Major Andre.  A point of Natural History being suggested, he gave
an excellent account of the air-bladder of fishes.  He was very
full upon the subject of agriculture, but retired from the
conversation when horticulture was introduced in the discussion.
So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite, but
did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal.  There was
something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge,
that I suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and
waited till I got an opportunity. - Have you seen the "New American
Cyclopaedia?" said I. - I have, he replied; I received an early
copy. - How far does it go? - He turned red, and answered, - To
Araguay. - Oh, said I to myself, - not quite so far as Ararat; -
that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must have read
all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in
this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will
know more than I ever thought he would.

Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related
a similar story.  I didn't borrow it, for all that. - I made a
comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted
and received many compliments.  It was that of the mind of a bigot
to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it
contracts.  The simile is a very obvious, and, I suppose I may now
say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it occurs in a
Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore's published long
before my remark was repeated.  When a person of fair character for
literary honesty uses an image, such as another has employed before
him, the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently,
or unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.

It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a
comparison which suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a
recollection.  I told you the other day that I never wrote a line
of verse that seemed to me comparatively good, but it appeared old
at once, and often as if it had been borrowed.  But I confess I
never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from the
fact of its obviousness.  It is proper, however, that I proceed by
a formal instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an
idea given to the world at about the time when I had just joined
the class in which Master Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced
scholar.

I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing
the liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for
that reason feeling uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing
it, do hereby renounce all claim to being considered the FIRST
person who gave utterance to a certain simile or comparison
referred to in the accompanying documents, and relating to the
pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on the
other.  I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially
all claims to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my
supposed property in the above comparison, - knowing well, that,
according to the laws of literature, they who speak first hold the
fee of the thing said.  I do also agree that all Editors of
Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers of
Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at
liberty to retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the
supposition that I was the sole and undisputed author of the above
comparison.  But, inasmuch as I do affirm that the comparison
aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief that it was new and
wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that I had never
seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well
known that different persons may independently utter the same idea,
- as is evinced by that familiar line from Donatus, -


"Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt," -


now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-
disposed persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am
open to any accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison,
and, if they have so asserted or implied, that they will have the
manliness forthwith to retract the same assertion or insinuation.


I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than
myself.  If I had even suspected that the idea in question was
borrowed, I should have disclaimed originality, or mentioned the
coincidence, as I once did in a case where I had happened to hit on
an idea of Swift's. - But what shall I do about these verses I was
going to read you?  I am afraid that half mankind would accuse me
of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them.  I am convinced that
several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life,
will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through
your consciousness at some time.  I can't help it, - it is too late
now.  The verses are written, and you must have them.  Listen,
then, and you shall hear


WHAT WE ALL THINK.

THAT age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.

That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those "good old days,"
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.

That - mother, sister, wife, or child -
The "best of women" each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown,

That BUT FOR THIS our souls were free,
And BUT FOR THAT our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.

Whene'er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race, -
Though doctors think the matter plain, -
That ours is "a peculiar case."

That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.

That when we sob o'er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.

That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
"Ah, had I but ONE THOUSAND MORE!"

That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe'er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.

Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O'erhanging truth's eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with WHAT WE THINK,
Their echoes dumb to WHAT WE KNOW;

That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it:  GOD IS LOVE!



CHAPTER VII.



[THIS particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a
paper by my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or
intercalated.  I would suggest to young persons that they should
pass over it for the present, and read, instead of it, that story
about the young man who was in love with the young lady, and in
great trouble for something like nine pages, but happily married on
the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I take it for granted, will
be contained in the periodical where this is found, unless it
differ from all other publications of the kind.  Perhaps, if such
young people will lay the number aside, and take it up ten years,
or a little more, from the present time, they may find something in
it for their advantage.  They can't possibly understand it all
now.]

My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary
sort of way.  I couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while,
but at last it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old
man. - He didn't mind his students calling him THE old man, he
said.  That was a technical expression, and he thought that he
remembered hearing it applied to himself when he was about twenty-
five.  It may be considered as a familiar and sometimes endearing
appellation.  An Irishwoman calls her husband "the old man," and he
returns the caressing expression by speaking of her as "the old
woman."  But now, said he, just suppose a case like one of these.
A young stranger is overheard talking of you as a very nice old
gentleman.  A friendly and genial critic speaks of your green old
age as illustrating the truth of some axiom you had uttered with
reference to that period of life.  What I call an old man is a
person with a smooth, shining crown and a fringe of scattered white
hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days, stooping as he walks,
bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling old stories,
smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits;
one that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps
a little night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the
lamp is not upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it
to prevent the puffs of wind from blowing the flame out.  That's
what I call an old man.

Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to tell me that I have got
to that yet?  Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time
when - [I knew what was coming, and could hardly keep from
laughing; twenty years ago he used to quote it as one of those
absurd speeches men of genius will make, and now he is going to
argue from it] - several years short of the time when Balzac says
that men are - most - you know - dangerous to - the hearts of - in
short, most to be dreaded by duennas that have charge of
susceptible females. - What age is that? said I, statistically. -
Fifty-two years, answered the Professor. - Balzac ought to know,
said I, if it is true that Goethe said of him that each of his
stories must have been dug out of a woman's heart.  But fifty-two
is a high figure.

Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.  - The
Professor took up the desired position. - You have white hairs, I
said. - Had 'em any time these twenty years, said the Professor. -
And the crow's-foot, - PES ANSERINUS, rather. - The Professor
smiled, as I wanted him to, and the folds radiated like the ridges
of a half-opened fan, from the outer corner of the eyes to the
temples. - And the calipers said I. - What are the CALIPERS? he
asked, curiously. - Why, the parenthesis, said I. - PARENTHESIS?
said the Professor; what's that? - Why, look in the glass when you
are disposed to laugh, and see if your mouth isn't framed in a
couple of crescent lines, - so, my boy ( ). - It's all nonsense,
said the Professor; just look at my BICEPS; - and he began pulling
off his coat to show me his arm.  Be careful, said I; you can't
bear exposure to the air, at your time of life, as you could once.
- I will box with you, said the Professor, row with you, walk with
you, ride with you, swim with you, or sit at table with you, for
fifty dollars a side. - Pluck survives stamina, I answered.

The Professor went off a little out of humor.  A few weeks
afterwards he came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a
paper, which I have here, and from which I shall read you some
portions, if you don't object.  He had been thinking the matter
over, he said, - had read Cicero "De Senectute," and made up his
mind to meet old age half way.  These were some of his reflections
that he had written down; so here you have.


THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.


THERE is no doubt when old age begins.  The human body is a furnace
which keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less.  It
burns about three hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other
fuel,) when in fair working order, according to a great chemist's
estimate.  When the fire slackens, life declines; when it goes out,
we are dead.

It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the
amount of combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year,
remains stationary to about forty-five, and then diminishes.  This
last is the point where old age starts from.  The great fact of
physical life is the perpetual commerce with the elements, and the
fire is the measure of it.

About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live, - for
that, you know, regulates matrimony, - you may be expecting to find
yourself a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic
felicity that gives one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as
among the not remotely possible events.

I don't mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale,
telling her about life's declining from THIRTY-FIVE; the furnace is
in full blast for ten years longer, as I have said.  The Romans
came very near the mark; their age of enlistment reached from
seventeen to forty-six years.

What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or
the movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of
life that flows through us?  We are old fellows from the moment the
fire begins to go out.  Let us always behave like gentlemen when we
are introduced to new acquaintance.


INCIPIT ALLEGORIA SENECTUTIS.


Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.

OLD AGE. - Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well.  I have known you
for some time, though I think you did not know me.  Shall we walk
down the street together?

PROFESSOR (drawing back a little). - We can talk more quietly,
perhaps, in my study.  Will you tell me how it is you seem to be
acquainted with everybody you are introduced to, though he
evidently considers you an entire stranger?

OLD AGE. - I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person's
recognition until I have known him at least FIVE YEARS.

PROFESSOR. - Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as
that?

OLD AGE.  I do.  I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I
am afraid you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.

PROFESSOR. - Where?

OLD AGE. - There, between your eyebrows, - three straight lines
running up and down; all the probate courts know that token, - "Old
Age, his mark."  Put your forefinger on the inner end of one
eyebrow, and your middle finger on the inner end of the other
eyebrow; now separate the fingers, and you will smooth out my sign-
manual; that's the way you used to look before I left my card on
you.

PROFESSOR. - What message do people generally send back when you
first call on them?

OLD AGE. - Not at home.  Then I leave a card and go.  Next year I
call; get the same answer; leave another card.  So for five or six,
- sometimes ten years or more.  At last, if they don't let me in, I
break in through the front door or the windows.

We talked together in this way some time.  Then Old Age said again,
- Come, let us walk down the street together, - and offered me a
cane, an eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes. - No, much
obliged to you, said I.  I don't want those things, and I had a
little rather talk with you here, privately, in my study.  So I
dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked out alone; - got a
fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had time to
think over this whole matter.


EXPLICIT ALLEGORIA SENECTUTIS.


We have settled when old age begins.  Like all Nature's processes,
it is gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions,
and all its little griefs soothed by natural sedatives.  But the
iron hand is not less irresistible because it wears the velvet
glove.  The button-wood throws off its bark in large flakes, which
one may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at last pushed off,
by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to be
seen, but too powerful to be arrested.  One finds them always, but
one rarely sees them fall.  So it is our youth drops from us, -
scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and
immature fresh growth of old age.  Looked at collectively, the
changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and
indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne
has called "the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature."


My lady's cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide -


No, no, - this will never do.  Talk about men, if you will, but
spare the poor women.

We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably
good observer.  It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it,
yet I have been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural
analysis into no less than fifteen distinct periods.  Taking the
five primary divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old
age, each of these has its own three periods of immaturity,
complete development, and decline.  I recognize on OLD baby at
once, - with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a
porringer,) - so does everybody; and an old child shedding its
milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his
permanent ones.  Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it
were, of old age; the graybeard youngster must be weaned from his
late suppers now.  So you will see that you have to make fifteen
stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make twenty-
five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as
the first stage of the earlier periods of life shows.  The great
delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and
exceptional which is universal and according to law.  A person is
always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man
for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
board of vessels, - in a state of intoxication.  We are hustled
into maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we
have drifted far away from port before we awake out of our
illusions.  But to carry us out of maturity into old age, without
our knowing where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates,
and so we stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until
snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains
out of their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the
physical ones; - I mean the formation of HABITS.  An old man who
shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as
much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were
governed by clock-work.  The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists
call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of
deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them,
to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement.  Every
man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)
has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose
BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their
brains, have a SYSTOLE and DIASTOLE as regular as that of the heart
itself.  Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the
organic.  It is a confession of failure in the highest function of
being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view
of all existing circumstances.  But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives.  It is substituting a VIS
A TERGO for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a
year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he
must economize force somewhere.  Now habit is a labor-saving
invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel, - that
is all; for fuel is force, you know, just as much in the page I am
writing for you as in the locomotive or the legs that carry it to
you.  Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it wood, or coal,
or bread and cheese.  A reverend gentleman demurred to this
statement, - as if, because combustion is asserted to be the SINE
QUA NON of thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely
chemical process.  Facts of chemistry are one thing, I told him,
and facts of consciousness another.  It can be proved to him, by a
very simple analysis of some of his spare elements, that every
Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up more
phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days.  But
then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it,
and save his phosphorus and other combustibles.

It follows from all this that THE FORMATION OF HABITS ought
naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age.  As
for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the
time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the
experience of the ring.  A man is "stale," I think, in their
language, soon after thirty, - often, no doubt, much earlier, as
gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep
their vital fire burning WITH THE BLOWER UP.

- So far without Tully.  But in the mean time I have been reading
the treatise, "De Senectute."  It is not long, but a leisurely
performance.  The old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when
he addressed it to his friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person
of distinction, some two or three years older.  We read it when we
are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty years, and then take
it up again by a natural instinct, - provided always that we read
Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us
who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.

Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue.  A good deal of it is
what would be called in vulgar phrase "slow."  It unpacks and
unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look
at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole.  I think ancient
classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind
of expansion.

An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans.  As the
patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull
work to sit with his hands in his lap.  Reading, the ingenious
inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.
He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various
works that might amuse the weary hour.  I remember only three, -
Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and WATTS ON THE MIND.

It is not generally understood that Cicero's essay was delivered as
a lyceum lecture, (CONCIO POPULARIS,) at the Temple of Mercury.
The journals (PAPYRI) of the day ("Tempora Quotidiana," -
"Tribuinus Quirinalis," - "Praeco Romanus," and the rest) gave
abstracts of it, one of which I have translated and modernized, as
being a substitute for the analysis I intended to make.

IV.  Kal.  Mart. . . . .

The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well
attended by the ELITE of our great city.  Two hundred thousand
sestertia were thought to have been represented in the house.  The
doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (ILLOTUM VULGUS,)
who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat
roughly handled (GLADIO JUGULATI).  The speaker was the well-known
Mark Tully, Eq., - the subject Old Age.  Mr. T. has a lean and
scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal
feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by
some to be derived.  As a lecturer is public property, we may
remark, that his outer garment (TOGA) was of cheap stuff and
somewhat worn, and that his general style and appearance of dress
and manner (HABITUS, VESTITUSQUE) were somewhat provincial.

The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and
Laelius.  We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a
few moments for refreshment (POCULA QUAEDAM VINI). - All want to
reach old age, says Cato, and grumble when they get it; therefore
they are donkeys. - The lecturer will allow us to say that he is
the donkey; we know we shall grumble at old age, but we want to
live through youth and manhood, IN SPITE of the troubles we shall
groan over. - There was considerable prosing as to what old age can
do and can't. - True, but not new.  Certainly, old folks can't
jump, - break the necks of their thigh-bones, (FEMORUM CERVICES,)
if they do; can't crack nuts with their teeth; can't climb a
greased pole (MALUM INUNCTUM SCANDERE NON POSSUNT); but they can
tell old stories and give you good advice; if they know what you
have made up your mind to do when you ask them. - All this is well
enough, but won't set the Tiber on fire (TIBERIM ACCENDERE
NEQUAQUAM POTEST.)

There were some clever things enough, (DICTA HAND INEPTA,) a few of
which are worth reporting. - Old people are accused of being
forgetful; but they never forget where they have put their money. -
Nobody is so old he doesn't think he can live a year. - The
lecturer quoted an ancient maxim, - Grow old early, if you would be
old long, - but disputed it. - Authority, he thought, was the chief
privilege of age. - It is not great to have money, but fine to
govern those that have it. - Old age begins at FORTY-SIX years,
according to the common opinion. - It is not every kind of old age
or of wine that grows sour with time. - Some excellent remarks were
made on immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited to
Plato. - Several pleasing anecdotes were told. - Old Milo, champion
of the heavy weights in his day, looked at his arms and whimpered,
"They are dead."  Not so dead as you, you old fool, - says Cato; -
you never were good for anything but for your shoulders and flanks.
- Pisistratus asked Solon what made him dare to be so obstinate.
Old age, said Solon.

The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our
culture and civilization. - The reporter goes on to state that
there will be no lecture next week, on account of the expected
combat between the bear and the barbarian.  Betting (SPONSIO) two
to one (DUO AD UNUM) on the bear.


- After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise,
"De Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new
occupations when growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in
the extreme period of life.  Cato learned Greek when he was old,
and speaks of wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such instrument,
(FIDIBUS,) after the example of Socrates.  Solon learned something
new, every day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim.  Cyrus
pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he had planted with
his own hand.  [I remember a pillar on the Duke of Northumberland's
estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words, if not the
same.  That, like other country pleasures, never wears out.  None
is too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy
it.]  There is a New England story I have heard more to the point,
however, than any of Cicero's.  A young farmer was urged to set out
some apple-trees. - No, said he, they are too long growing, and I
don't want to plant for other people.  The young farmer's father
was spoken to about it, but he, with better reason, alleged that
apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting.  At last some one
mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer.  He had
nothing else to do, - so he stuck in some trees.  He lived long
enough to drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on
those trees.

As for myself, after visiting a friend lately, - [Do remember all
the time that this is the Professor's paper.] - I satisfied myself
that I had better concede the fact that - my contemporaries are not
so young as they have been, - and that, - awkward as it is, -
science and history agree in telling me that I can claim the
immunities and must own the humiliations of the early stage of
senility.  Ah! but we have all gone down the hill together.  The
dandies of my time have split their waistbands and taken to high-
low shoes.  The beauties of my recollections - where are they?
They have run the gantlet of the years as well as I.  First the
years pelted them with red roses till their cheeks were all on
fire.  By and by they began throwing white roses, and that morning
flush passed away.  At last one of the years threw a snow-ball, and
after that no year let the poor girls pass without throwing snow-
balls.  And then came rougher missiles, - ice and stones; and from
time to time an arrow whistled, and down went one of the poor
girls.  So there are but few left; and we don't call those few
GIRLS, but -

Ah, me!  Here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed AI, AI!
and the old Roman, EHEU!  I have no doubt we should die of shame
and grief at the indignities offered us by age, if it were not that
we see so many others as badly or worse off than ourselves.  We
always compare ourselves with our contemporaries.

[I was interrupted in my reading just here.  Before I began at the
next breakfast, I read them these verses; - I hope you will like
them, and get a useful lesson from them.]


THE LAST BLOSSOM.


Though young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty's dear deluding wiles;
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood's lingering miles.

Who knows a woman's wild caprice?
It played with Goethe's silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father's "niece"
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.

When sixty bids us sigh in vain
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.

We see the Patriarch's wintry face,
The maid of Egypt's dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.

Tranced in her Lord's Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies, -
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.

Might we but share one wild caress
Ere life's autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth's brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all!

My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.

Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O'er sense and spirit, heart and brain.

Thou com'st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that would seek the poet's cage
Lured by the magic breath of song!

She blushes!  Ah, reluctant maid,
Love's DRAPEAU ROUGE the truth has told!
O'er girlhood's yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller's crimson fold!

Come to my arms! - love heeds not years
No frost the bud of passion knows. -
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered, - Rose!

Sweet was her smile, - but not for me;
Alas, when woman looks TOO kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see, -
Some youth is walking close behind!


As to GIVING UP because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that
it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such
thing.  I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago.  I
see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit,
effete, LA LEVRE INFERIEURE DEJA PENDANTE, with what little life
they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium.  But as
the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and
everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to
say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the
malady in my own case.

First.  As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less
time for it than when I was younger, I find that I give my
attention more thoroughly, and use my time more economically than
ever before; so that I can learn anything twice as easily as in my
earlier days.  I am not, therefore, afraid to attack a new study.
I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with good
success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.

Secondly.  I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected
privileges and pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a
little courage to enjoy them.  You may well suppose it pleased me
to find that old Cato was thinking of learning to play the fiddle,
when I had deliberately taken it up in my old age, and satisfied
myself that I could get much comfort, if not much music, out of it.

Thirdly.  I have found that some of those active exercises, which
are commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed
at a much later period.

A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of
the journals, entitled, "Saints and their Bodies."  Approving of
his general doctrines, and grateful for his records of personal
experience, I cannot refuse to add my own experimental confirmation
of his eulogy of one particular form of active exercise and
amusement, namely, BOATING.  For the past nine years, I have rowed
about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water.
My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three row-boats.
1. A small flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept
mainly to lend to boys.  2. A fancy "dory" for two pairs of sculls,
in which I sometimes go out with my young folks.  3. My own
particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat, twenty-
two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-
foot sculls, - alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him
out, if he doesn't mind what he is about.  In this I glide around
the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and
Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of
steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon;
I linger under the bridges, - those "caterpillar bridges," as my
brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black
sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern
of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the
sentinel warns me off from the Ohio, - just as if I should hurt her
by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the
water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean, - till all at
once I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall
drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-
house, - plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no
chair drawn up at the table, - all the dear people waiting,
waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into
the great desert, where there is no tree and no fountain.  As I
don't want my wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in
company with devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and
bleached crab-shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings
for home.  When the tide is running out swiftly, I have a splendid
fight to get through the bridges, but always make it a rule to
beat, - though I have been jammed up into pretty tight places at
times, and was caught once between a vessel swinging round and the
pier, until our bones (the boat's, that is) cracked as if we had
been in the jaws of Behemoth.  Then back to my moorings at the foot
of the Common, off with the rowing-dress, dash under the green
translucent wave, return to the garb of civilization, walk through
my Garden, take a look at my elms on the Common, and, reaching my
habitat, in consideration of my advanced period of life, indulge in
the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.

When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-
calluses on my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my
fifteen miles at a stretch without coming to grief in any way, when
I can perform my mile in eight minutes or a little less, then I
feel as if I had old Time's head in chancery, and could give it to
him at my leisure.

I do not deny the attraction of walking.  I have bored this ancient
city through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an
old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese.  Why, it was I who,
in the course of these rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue
called MYRTLE STREET, stretching in one long line from east of the
Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved cliff which looks down
on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the far hills; a
promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with
glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with
its iron river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding
back and forward over it, - so delightfully closing at its western
extremity in sunny courts and passages where I know peace, and
beauty, and virtue, and serene old age must be perpetual tenants, -
so alluring to all who desire to take their daily stroll, in the
words of Dr. Watts, -

"Alike unknowing and unknown," -

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal
the secret of its existence.  I concede, therefore, that walking is
an immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly
to avail itself.

Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather.
The principal objection to it is of a financial character.  But you
may be sure that Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for
nothing.  One's HEPAR, or, in vulgar language, liver, - a ponderous
organ, weighing some three or four pounds, - goes up and down like
the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements,
at every step of a trotting horse.  The brains also are shaken up
like coppers in a money-box.  Riding is good, for those that are
born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as
much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they
hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with
calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which
it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day
and night.

Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this
empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of
them in a more scientific form.

The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical
impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action.  The first
source of pleasure varies of course with our condition and the
state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount
and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action.  In all forms
of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in action,
- the will, the muscles, and the intellect.  Each of these
predominates in different kinds of exercise.  In walking, the will
and muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their
task with so little expenditure of force, that the intellect is
left comparatively free.  The mental pleasure in walking, as such,
is in the sense of power over all our moving machinery.  But in
riding, I have the additional pleasure of governing another will,
and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal's ears and to his
four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet.  Now in this
extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal,
my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at
once gratified.  When the horse ceases to have a will of his own
and his muscles require no special attention on your part, then you
may live on horseback as Wesley did, and write sermons or take
naps, as you like.  But you will observe, that, in riding on
horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after all, it is not
you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the
satisfaction from being complete.

Now let us look at the conditions of rowing.  I won't suppose you
to be disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging
in which is to rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to
bestriding an Arab.  You know the Esquimaux KAYAK, (if that is the
name of it,) don't you?  Look at that model of one over my door.
Sharp, rather? - On the contrary, it is a lubber to the one you and
I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted with what I
will tell you about. - Our boat, then, is something of the shape of
a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the
sunshine just where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the
lily-pads.  It is a kind of a giant POD, as one may say, - tight
everywhere, except in a little place in the middle, where you sit.
Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is only from
sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand
why you want those "outriggers," or projecting iron frames with the
rowlocks in which the oars play.  My rowlocks are five feet apart;
double the greatest width of the boat.

Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with
arms, or wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more
than twenty feet from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending
as perfectly into them as if your spinal cord ran down the centre
strip of your boat, and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as
the broad blades of your oars, - oars of spruce, balanced,
leathered, and ringed under your own special direction.  This, in
sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever
made or perhaps ever will make.  As the hawk sails without flapping
his pinions, so you drift with the tide when you will, in the most
luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit.  But
if your blood wants rousing, turn round that stake in the river,
which you see a mile from here; and when you come in in sixteen
minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys, and not champion
scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little
warmed up or not!  You can row easily and gently all day, and you
can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just
as you like.  It has been long agreed that there is no way in which
a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing.
It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of
his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of
them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he
shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks
he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well
as in his easy-chair.

I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that
intoxicate me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay
are smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping
it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the rent closing after
me like those wounds of angels which Milton tells of, but the seam
still shining for many a long rood behind me.  To lie still over
the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling
and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat, - to
rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil
creek, - to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the
thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades,
crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles,
and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and
thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing
to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, - lying there
moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor
in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, - the cool
breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-
sunken pillars, - why should I tell of these things, that I should
live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with
boats as with a swarm of water-beetles?  What a city of idiots we
must be not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and
wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with
skaters!

I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed,
soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our
Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon
lineage.  Of the females that are the mates of these males I do not
here speak.  I preached my sermon from the lay-pulpit on this
matter a good while ago.  Of course, if you heard it, you know my
belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a
number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an
improvement on the old model.  Clipper-built, sharp in the bows,
long in the spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship,
which is the great organ of our national life of relation, is but a
reproduction of the typical form which the elements impress upon
its builder.  All this we cannot help; but we can make the best of
these influences, such as they are.  We have a few good boatmen, -
no good horsemen that I hear of, - I cannot speak for cricketing, -
but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in
these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the
Common in five minutes.  Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick
players, and boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of.  Boxing is
rough play, but not too rough for a hearty young fellow.  Anything
is better than this white-blooded degeneration to which we all
tend.

I dropped into a gentlemen's sparring exhibition only last evening.
It did my heart good to see that there were a few young and
youngish youths left who could take care of their own heads in case
of emergency.  It is a fine sight, that of a gentleman resolving
himself into the primitive constituents of his humanity.  Here is a
delicate young man now, with an intellectual countenance, a slight
figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming deportment, a
mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from between
the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease.
Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles!  Ah, he is
divesting himself of his cravat!  Why, he is stripping off his
coat!  Well, here he is, sure enough, in a tight silk shirt, and
with two things that look like batter puddings in the place of his
fists.  Now see that other fellow with another pair of batter
puddings, - the big one with the broad shoulders; he will certainly
knock the little man's head off, if he strikes him.  Feinting,
dodging, stopping, hitting, countering, - little man's head not off
yet.  You might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit
the little man's intellectual features.  He needn't have taken off
the gold-bowed spectacles at all.  Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble,
cool, he catches all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach,
till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter
puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into
the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping,
collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous
bundle. - If my young friend, whose excellent article I have
referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence
among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should have better sermons
and an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant.  A bout with
the gloves would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion,
which, united, have embroiled their subject in a bitter
controversy.  We should then often hear that a point of difference
between an infallible and a heretic, instead of being vehemently
discussed in a series of newspaper articles, had been settled by a
friendly contest in several rounds, at the close of which the
parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled,

But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid.  I was for a
moment tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last
evening, to try the gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a
friend to the noble art; but remembering that he had twice my
weight and half my age, besides the advantage of his training, I
sat still and said nothing.

There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference
to old age.  I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the
diminished refracting power of the humors of the eye, - in other
words, spectacles.  I don't use them.  All I ask is a large, fair
type, a strong daylight or gas-light, and one yard of focal
distance, and my eyes are as good as ever.  But if YOUR eyes fail,
I can tell you something encouraging.  There is now living in New
York State an old gentleman who, perceiving his sight to fail,
immediately took to exercising it on the finest print, and in this
way fairly bullied Nature out of her foolish habit of taking
liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout.  And now this old
gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his pen,
showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes.  I should be
afraid to say to you how much he writes in the compass of a half-
dime, - whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms AND the
Gospels, I won't be positive.

But now let rue tell you this.  If the time comes when you must lay
down the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff,
and drop the ten-foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and,
after dallying awhile with eye-glasses, come at last to the
undisguised reality of spectacles, - if the time comes when that
fire of life we spoke of has burned so low that where its flames
reverberated there is only the sombre stain of regret, and where
its coals glowed, only the white ashes that cover the embers of
memory, - don't let your heart grow cold, and you may carry
cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your second
century, if you can last so long.  As our friend, the Poet, once
said, in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his which he keeps
for his private reading, -

Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o'er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel's song, the poet's lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden's smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart, -
Turn to the record where his years are told, -
Count his gray hairs, - they cannot make him old!

END OF THE PROFESSOR'S PAPER.


[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several
instalments, and accompanied by various comments from different
persons at the table.  The company were in the main attentive, with
the exception of a little somnolence on the part of the old
gentleman opposite at times, and a few sly, malicious questions
about the "old boys" on the part of that forward young fellow who
has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, in these
reports.

On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of,
I have always tried to give a more appropriate character to our
conversation.  I have never read them my sermon yet, and I don't
know that I shall, as some of them might take my convictions as a
personal indignity to themselves.  But having read our company so
much of the Professor's talk about age and other subjects connected
with physical life, I took the next Sunday morning to repeat to
them the following poem of his, which I have had by me some time.
He calls it - I suppose, for his professional friends - THE
ANATOMIST'S HYMN, but I shall name it - ]


THE LIVING TEMPLE.

Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker's glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame, -
Eternal wisdom still the same!

The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay
The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature's flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.

No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o'er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.

But warmed with that uchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason's guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master's own.

See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.

Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thought in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation's faintest thrill
And flashes forth the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells!
The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads!

O Father! grant thy love divine
To make these mystic temples thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms!



CHAPTER VIII.



[SPRING has come.  You will find some verses to that effect at the
end of these notes.  If you are an impatient reader, skip to them
at once.  In reading aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and
seventh verses.  These are parenthetical and digressive, and,
unless your audience is of superior intelligence, will confuse
them.  Many people can ride on horseback who find it hard to get on
and to get off without assistance.  One has to dismount from an
idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.]

- The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had
fairly come, mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the
street.  It seems to have been a premature or otherwise
exceptionable exhibition, not unlike that commemorated by the late
Mr. Bayly.  When the old gentleman came home, he looked very red in
the face, and complained that he had been "made sport of."  By
sympathizing questions, I learned from him that a boy had called
him "old daddy," and asked him when he had his hat whitewashed.

This incident led me to make some observations at table the next
morning, which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this
record.

- The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument.  I
learned this in early boyhood.  I was once equipped in a hat of
Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were
usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native
town which lies nearest to this metropolis.  On my way I was met by
a "Port-chuck," as we used to call the young gentlemen of that
locality, and the following dialogue ensued.

THE PORT-CHUCK.  Hullo, You-sir, joo know th' wuz gon-to be a race
to-morrah?

MYSELF.  No.  Who's gon-to run, 'n' wher's't gon-to be?

THE PORT-CHUCK.  Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o'
your hat.

These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at
that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question,
the Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his
cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has
been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article of
dress ever since.  Here is an axiom or two relating to it.

A hat which has been POPPED, or exploded by being sat down upon, is
never itself again afterwards.

It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the
contrary.

Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat.  There
is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome
gloss, suggestive of a wet brush.

The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its
dilapidated castor.  The hat is the ULTIMUM MORIENS of
"respectability."

- The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very
pleasantly, saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his
French except the word for potatoes, - PUMMIES DE TARE. -  ULTIMUM
MORIENS, I told him, is old Italian, and signifies LAST THING TO
DIE.  With this explanation he was well contented, and looked quite
calm when I saw him afterwards in the entry with a black hat on his
head and the white one in his hand.


- I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for
my intimates.  We are so much together, that we no doubt think and
talk a good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects
individual and peculiar.  You know me well enough by this time.  I
have not talked with you so long for nothing and therefore I don't
think it necessary to draw my own portrait.  But let me say a word
or two about my friends.

The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful
and worthy kind of drudge.  I think he has a pride in his small
technicalities.  I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and
though I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand
airs "Science" puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting
on, while the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating, - yet
I am sure he has a liking for his specially, and a respect for its
cultivators.

But I'll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other
day. - My boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you,
because I keep all my goods in the lower story.  You have to hoist
yours into the upper chambers of the brain, and let them down again
to your customers.  I take mine in at the level of the ground, and
send them off from my doorstep almost without lifting.  I tell you,
the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he
works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle.
Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary
man to have a profession.

- Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the
other.  After a while I get tired of both.  When a fit of
intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have
found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other
amusements which I have spoken of, - that is, working at my
carpenter's-bench.  Some mechanical employment is the greatest
possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to
tire.  When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work
immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick,
and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I
"regained my freedom with a sigh," because my toy was unfinished.

There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and
others when I give myself wholly up to the Poet.  Now that my
winter's work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn
to the Poet's company.  I don't know anybody more alive to life
than he is.  The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he
says, - yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he
can sing least.

Then a fit of despondency comes over him. - I feel ashamed,
sometimes, - said he, the other day, - to think how far my worst
songs fall below my best.  It sometimes seems to me, as I know it
does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be ALL BEST,
- if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive.  I am
grateful - he continued - for all such criticisms.  A man is always
pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the highest
aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.

Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must
change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or
losing their voices.  You know, I suppose, - he said, - what is
meant by complementary colors?  You know the effect, too, which the
prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina.  If you
close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, you see a
GREEN image.

It is so with many minds, - I will not say with all.  After looking
at one aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or
truth, when they turn away, the COMPLEMENTARY aspect of the same
object stamps itself irresistibly and automatically upon the mind.
Shall they give expression to this secondary mental state, or not?

When I contemplate - said my friend, the Poet - the infinite
largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence,
how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and
ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to
change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest
condition, - never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon
what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a
chance to air and exercise themselves.  After the first and second
floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their
splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their
holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry -
simple adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them
- show themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they
ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and
perishable?

- I don't know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or
other, and let him speak for himself.  Still I think I can tell you
what he says quite as well as he could do it. - Oh, - he said to
me, one day, - I am but a hand-organ man, - say rather, a hand-
organ.  Life turns the winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the
stops.  I come under your windows, some fine spring morning, and
play you one of my ADAGIO movements, and some of you say, - This is
good, - play us so always.  But, dear friends, if I did not change
the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust
in another.  How easily this or that tune flows! - you say, - there
must be no end of just such melodies in him. - I will open the poor
machine for you one moment, and you shall look. - Ah!  Every note
marks where a spur of steel has been driven in.  It is easy to
grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make
it was the painful task of time.

I don't like to say it, - he continued, - but poets commonly have
no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them
piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect.
The more stops, the better.  Do let them all be pulled out in their
turn!

So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest
songs, and after it a gay CHANSON, and then a string of epigrams.
All true, - he said, - all flowers of his soul; only one with the
corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the
third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two
showing its tip through the calyx.  The water-lily is the type of
the poet's soul, - he told me.

- What do you think, Sir, - said the divinity-student, - opens the
souls of poets most fully?

Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus.
Neither is enough by itself.  A rose will not flower in the dark,
and a fern will not flower anywhere.

What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's corolla?
- I don't like to say.  They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at
least they shine on a good many that never come to anything.

Who are THEY? - said the schoolmistress.

Women.  Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his
best reward.

The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased. - Did I
really think so? - I do think so; I never feel safe until I have
pleased them; I don't think they are the first to see one's
defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of
a true poem.  Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-
string, - to a woman and it is a harp-string.  She is vibratile and
resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of
the air about her. - Ah, me! - said my friend, the Poet, to me, the
other day, - what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and
what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's
praises!  I should have grown like Marvell's fawn, -

"Lilies without; roses within!"

But then, - he added, - we all think, IF so and so, we should have
been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those
rhymes of yours.

- I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but
of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in
soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and
sorrows, every literature is full.  Nature carves with her own
hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts
the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.

There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of
blondes.  [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table. -
Please to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.]
Why, there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of
coloring matter, - NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature
on the way to become albinesses.  There are others that are shot
through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various
degree, - POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams,
and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is
unlike a snowball.  The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil
and a sensitive retina.  The other, or the leonine blonde, has an
opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match
with her quick glittering glances.

Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations,
and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature.  Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive
to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at
all.  Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with
melancholy.  There is no more beautiful illustration of the
principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than
the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest
songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for
the rougher duties of life.  When one reads the life of Cowper, or
of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, - of so many
gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before
their time, - one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
singing, like the swan in the old story.  The French poet, Gilbert,
who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine, - (killed by
a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in
consequence of a fall,) - this poor fellow was a very good example
of the poet by excess of sensibility.  I found, the other day, that
some of my literary friends had never heard of him, though I
suppose few educated Frenchmen do not know the lines which he
wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed in the great
hospital of Paris.


"Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive,
J'apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."

At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
No friend shall come to shed a tear.


You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke
White's poems.  It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all
these sweet albino-poets.  "I shall die and be forgotten, and the
world will go on just as if I had never been; - and yet how I have
loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!"  And so singing,
their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner
and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and,
still singing, they drop it and pass onward.


- Our brains are seventy-year clocks.  The Angel of Life winds them
up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the
hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop
them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness
only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case,
and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart,
silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have
carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.

If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count
the dead beats of thought after thought and image after image
jarring through the overtired organ!  Will nobody block those
wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those
weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder?  What a
passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest! - that this
dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but
one brief holiday!  Who can wonder that men swing themselves off
from beams in hempen lassos? - that they jump off from parapets
into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? - that they take
counsel of the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory
monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is
dashed upon a marble floor?  Under that building which we pass
every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar,
nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may
be shattered, shall by any chance be seen.  There is nothing for
it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but
to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash.
Ah, they remembered that, - the kind city fathers, - and the walls
are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes
without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable
upholstery.  If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever
that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton
and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world
give for the discovery?

- From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place
and the quality of the liquor, - said the young fellow whom they
call John.

You speak trivially, but not unwisely, - I said.  Unless the will
maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot
stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to
get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other.
They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the
maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors.  It
is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement
directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice,
by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of
going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.

Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work
independently of the will, - poets and artists, for instance, who
follow their imagination in their creative moments, instead of
keeping it in hand as your logicians and practical men do with
their reasoning faculty, - such men are too apt to call in the
mechanical appliances to help them govern their intellects.

- He means they get drunk, - said the young fellow already alluded
to by name.

Do you think men of true genius are apt to indulge in the use of
inebriating fluids? said the divinity-student.

If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,
- I replied, - I will talk to you about this.  But mind, now, these
are the things that some foolish people call DANGEROUS subjects, -
as if these vices which burrow into people's souls, as the Guinea-
worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would be
more mischievous when seen than out of sight.  Now the true way to
deal with those obstinate animals, which are a dozen feet long,
some of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a piece of
silk round their HEADS, and pull them out very cautiously.  If you
only break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill
the person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them.  Whence it
is plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head
lies.

Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of
intemperance.  What is the head of it, and where does it lie?  For
you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has
not a head of its own, - an intelligence, - a meaning, - a certain
virtue, I was going to say, - but that might, perhaps, sound
paradoxical.  I have heard an immense number of moral physicians
lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority
of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all,
but was all body and tail.  So I have found a very common result of
their method to be that the string slipped, or that a piece only of
the creature was broken off, and the worm soon grew again, as bad
as ever.  The truth is, if the Devil could only appear in church by
attorney, and make the best statement that the facts would bear him
out in doing on behalf of his special virtues, (what we commonly
call vices,) the influence of good teachers would be much greater
than it is.  For the arguments by which the Devil prevails are
precisely the ones that the Devil-queller most rarely answers.  The
way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it, - to say
that it has no attractions, when everybody knows that it has, - but
rather to let it make out its case just as it certainly will in the
moment of temptation, and then meet it with the weapons furnished
by the Divine armory.  Ithuriel did not spit the toad on his spear,
you remember, but touched him with it, and the blasted angel took
the sad glories of his true shape.  If he had shown fight then, the
fair spirits would have known how to deal with him.

That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil is not perfectly
clear.  Men get fairly intoxicated with music, with poetry, with
religious excitement, oftenest with love.  Ninon de l'Enclos said
she was so easily excited that her soup intoxicated her, and
convalescents have been made tipsy by a beef-steak.

There are forms and stages of alcoholic exaltation which, in
themselves, and without regard to their consequences, might be
considered as positive improvements of the persons affected.  When
the sluggish intellect is roused, the slow speech quickened, the
cold nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, the flagging
spirit kindled, - before the trains of thought become confused or
the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed, - just at the moment
when the whole human zoophyte flowers out like a full-blown rose,
and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution-box, -
it would be hard to say that a man was, at that very time, worse,
or less to be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his
meaner wits about him.  The difficulty is, that the alcoholic
virtues don't wash; but until the water takes their colors out, the
tints are very much like those of the true celestial stuff.

[Here I was interrupted by a question which I am very unwilling to
report, but have confidence enough in those friends who examine
these records to commit to their candor.

A PERSON at table asked me whether I "went in for rum as a steady
drink?" - His manner made the question highly offensive, but I
restrained myself, and answered thus:-]

Rum I take to be the name which unwashed moralists apply alike to
the product distilled from molasses and the noblest juices of the
vineyard.  Burgundy "in all its sunset glow" is rum.  Champagne,
"the foaming wine of Eastern France," in rum.  Hock, which our
friend, the Poet, speaks of as


"The Rhine's breastmilk, gushing cold and bright,
Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light,"


is rum.  Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to
the first miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion!  I
address myself to the company. - I believe in temperance, nay,
almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people.  I trust that I
practice both.  But let me tell you, there are companies of men of
genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect
and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I
thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.

Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by
drinking.  My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined
before they became drunkards.  The habit of drinking is often a
vice, no doubt, - sometimes a misfortune, - as when an almost
irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it, - but
oftenest of all a PUNISHMENT.

Empty heads, - heads without ideas in wholesome variety and
sufficient number to furnish food for the mental clockwork, - ill-
regulated heads, where the faculties are not under the control of
the will, - these are the ones that hold the brains which their
owners are so apt to tamper with, by introducing the appliances we
have been talking about.  Now, when a gentleman's brain is empty or
ill-regulated, it is, to a great extent, his own fault; and so it
is simple retribution, that, while he lies slothfully sleeping or
aimlessly dreaming, the fatal habit settles on him like a vampyre,
and sucks his blood, fanning him all the while with its hot wings
into deeper slumber or idler dreams!  I am not such a hard-souled
being as to apply this to the neglected poor, who have had no
chance to fill their heads with wholesome ideas, and to be taught
the lesson of self-government.  I trust the tariff of Heaven has an
AD VALOREM scale for them - and all of us.

But to come back to poets and artists; - if they really are more
prone to the abuse of stimulants, - and I fear that this is true, -
the reason of it is only too clear.  A man abandons himself to a
fine frenzy, and the power which flows through him, as I once
explained to you, makes him the medium of a great poem or a great
picture.  The creative action is not voluntary at all, but
automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and
wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it.
Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to REVERIE, or
dreaming.  If mind and body were both healthy and had food enough
and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than
the imaginative classes.  But body and mind often flag, - perhaps
they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas,
overworked, or abused in some way.  The automatic action, by which
genius wrought its wonders, fails.  There is only one thing which
can rouse the machine; not will, - that cannot reach it; nothing
but a ruinous agent, which hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats
out the heart of the mechanism.  The dreaming faculties are always
the dangerous ones, because their mode of action can be imitated by
artificial excitement; the reasoning ones are safe, because they
imply continued voluntary effort.

I think you will find it true, that, before any vice can fasten on
a man, body, mind, or moral nature must be debilitated.  The mosses
and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious
parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is
already enfeebled.  Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that
he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to
stick to it, and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face
which was of necessity always clean.  I don't know how much fancy
there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the
lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative
natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds
untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the
germination of the seeds of intemperance.

Whenever the wandering demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift, -
no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its
course, - he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight
for the maelstrom.


- I wonder if you know the TERRIBLE SMILE?  [The young fellow whom
they call John winked very hard, and made a jocular remark, the
sense of which seemed to depend on some double meaning of the word
SMILE.  The company was curious to know what I meant.]

There are persons - I said - who no sooner come within sight of you
than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth,
which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and
thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about
themselves, - and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-
consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which
are betrayed by the cowardly behaviour of the eye and the tell-tale
weakness of the lips that characterize these unfortunate beings.

- Why do you call them unfortunate, Sir? - asked the divinity-
student.

Because it is evident that the consciousness of some imbecility or
other is at the bottom of this extraordinary expression.  I don't
think, however, that these persons are commonly fools.  I have
known a number, and all of them were intelligent.  I think nothing
conveys the idea of UNDERBREEDING more than this self-betraying
smile.  Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of
MEANINGLESS BLUSHING may be fallen into by very good people who met
often, or sit opposite each other at table.  A true gentleman's
face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness, - calm-eyed,
firm-mouthed.  I think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as
well as anybody that ever lived.  The portrait of a young man
holding a glove in his hand, in the Gallery of the Louvre, if any
of you have seen that collection, will remind you of what I mean.

- Do I think these people know the peculiar look they have? - I
cannot say; I hope not; I am afraid they would never forgive me, if
they did.  The worst of it is, the trick is catching; when one
meets one of these fellows, he feels a tendency to the same
manifestation.  The Professor tells me there is a muscular slip, a
dependence of the PLATYSMA MYOIDES, which is called the RISORIUS
SANTORINI.

- Say that once more, - exclaimed the young fellow mentioned above.

The Professor says there is a little fleshy slip called Santorini's
laughing muscle.  I would have it cut out of my face, if I were
born with one of those constitutional grins upon it.  Perhaps I am
uncharitable in my judgment of those sour-looking people I told you
of the other day, and of these smiling folks.  It may be that they
are born with these looks, as other people are with more generally
recognized deformities.  Both are bad enough, but I had rather meet
three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.

- There is another unfortunate way of looking, which is peculiar to
that amiable sex we do not like to find fault with.  There are some
very pretty, but, unhappily, very ill-bred women, who don't
understand the law of the road with regard to handsome faces.
Nature and custom would, no doubt, agree in conceding to all males
the right of at least two distinct looks at every comely female
countenance, without any infraction of the rules of courtesy or the
sentiment of respect.  The first look is necessary to define the
person of the individual one meets so as to avoid it in passing.
Any unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient
apology for a second, - not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but
an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may
inoffensively yield to a passing image.  It is astonishing how
morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to the slightest
demonstration of this kind.  When a lady walks the streets, she
leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well
enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces
framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a
right to see them.

- When we observe how the same features and style of person and
character descend from generation to generation, we can believe
that some inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities.
Little snapping-turtles snap - so the great naturalist tells us -
before they are out of the egg-shell.  I am satisfied, that, much
higher up in the scale of life, character is distinctly shown at
the age of -2 or -3 months.

- My friend, the Professor, has been full of eggs lately.  [This
remark excited a burst of hilarity which I did not allow to
interrupt the course of my observations.]  He has been reading the
great book where he found the fact about the little snapping-
turtles mentioned above.  Some of the things he has told me have
suggested several odd analogies enough.

There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the
OVARIAN EGGS of the next generation's or century's civilization.
These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet;
some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk.  But
as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and
these are what must form the future.  A man's general notions are
not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual
ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the
minds of others.  One must be in the HABIT of talking with such
persons to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their
development is necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new
patterns, which must be long and closely studied.  But these are
the men to talk with.  No fresh truth ever gets into a book.

- A good many fresh lies get in, anyhow, - said one of the company.

I proceeded in spite of the interruption. - All uttered thought, my
friend, the Professor, says, is of the nature of an excretion.  Its
materials have been taken in, and have acted upon the system, and
been reacted on by it; it has circulated and done its office in one
mind before it is given out for the benefit of others.  It may be
milk or venom to other minds; but, in either case, it is something
which the producer has had the use of and can part with.  A man
instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in
print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it
lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his
intellect.

- Where are the brains that are fullest of these ovarian eggs of
thought? - I decline mentioning individuals.  The producers of
thought, who are few, the "jobbers" of thought, who are many, and
the retailers of thought, who are numberless, are so mixed up in
the popular apprehension, that it would be hopeless to try to
separate them before opinion has had time to settle.  Follow the
course of opinion on the great subjects of human interest for a few
generations or centuries, get its parallax, map out a small arc of
its movement, see where it tends, and then see who is in advance of
it or even with it; the world calls him hard names, probably; but
if you would find the OVA of the future, you must look into the
folds of his cerebral convolutions.

[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled at this suggestion,
as if he did not see exactly where he was to come out, if he
computed his arc too nicely.  I think it possible it might cut off
a few corners of his present belief, as it has cut off martyr-
burning and witch-hanging; - but time will show, - time will show,
as the old gentleman opposite says.]

- Oh, - here is that copy of verses I told you about.


SPRING HAS COME.

INTRA MUROS.

The sunbeams, lost for half a year,
Slant through my pane their morning rays
For dry Northwesters cold and clear,
The East blows in its thin blue haze.

And first the snowdrop's bells are seen,
Then close against the sheltering wall
The tulip's horn of dusky green,
The peony's dark unfolding ball.

The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
The long narcissus-blades appear;
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.

The willow's whistling lashes, wrung
By the wild winds of gusty March,
With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
Are swaying by the tufted larch.

The elms have robed their slender spray
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
Wide o'er the clasping arch of day
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.

- [See the proud tulip's flaunting cup,
That flames in glory for an hour, -
Behold it withering, - then look up, -
How meek the forest-monarch's flower! -

When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
"Bud, little roses!  Spring is here!"]

The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink as Aurora's finger-tips.

Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty's changed corolla-shades, -
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.

The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.

Here comes the dealer's awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot, -
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.

- Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!

I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.

Oh for one spot of living green, -
One little spot where leaves can grow, -
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below!



CHAPTER IX.



[AQUI ESTA ENCERRADA EL ALMA DEL LICENCIADO PEDRO GARCIAS.

If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I
hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the
above sentence for a motto on the title-page.  But I want it now,
and must use it.  I need not say to you that the words are Spanish,
nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to "Gil
Blas," nor that they mean, "Here lies buried the soul of the
licentiate Pedro Garcias."

I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes
referring to old age.  I must be equally fair with old people now.
They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons
from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which
latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one
youthful reader.  You know well enough what I mean by youth and
age; - something in the soul, which has no more to do with the
color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with
the grass a thousand feet above it.

I am growing bolder as I write.  I think it requires not only
youth, but genius, to read this paper.  I don't mean to imply that
it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.
It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the
English tongue as is given by a common school education.  So much I
do claim.  But here I have related, at length, a string of
trivialities.  You must have the imagination of a poet to
transfigure them.  These little colored patches are stains upon the
windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull
and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.

My hand trembles when I offer you this.  Many times I have come
bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this
poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless.  And
yet - and yet - it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-
CAPSULE.  Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of
his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very
probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
not for individual experiences which differ from those of others
only in details seemingly trifling.  All of us have been thirsty
thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best
of things.  I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which
the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a
red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a
fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-
"studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled
over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have
known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.

Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that
white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and
just so of my special relationships with other things and with my
rice.  One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere
fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having
thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than
single waves in the ocean; - but the accidents or trivial marks
which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory
our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.

Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause
at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself
seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to
follow.  For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals
such as poets offer you, - nothing but a dry shell, containing, if
you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems.  You
may laugh at them, if you like.  I shall never tell you what I
think of you for so doing.  But if you can read into the heart of
these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and
can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
life, - which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.

May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your
own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance, - may I beg
of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
enclose certain paragraphs?  I want my "asides," you see, to
whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page
or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our
boarders.  You will find a very long "aside" to you almost as soon
as you begin to read.  And so, dear young friend, fall to at once,
taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn
them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet,
why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the
Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and
count her ocean-pulses.]

I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating
especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear
them.

[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her
face directed partly towards me. - Half-mourning now; - purple
ribbon.  That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her
mother's, no doubt; - I remember our landlady's daughter telling
me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she
had lately "buried a payrent."  That's what made her look so pale,
- kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood.  Ah! long
illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after
one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young
creature at one's bedside!  Well, souls grow white, as well as
cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out
an angel. - God bless all good women! - to their soft hands and
pitying hearts we must all come at last! - The schoolmistress has a
better color than when she came. - Too late!  "It might have been."
- Amen! - How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!
There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company,
but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just
given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the
crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the
creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and
left in its blind rage.

I don't deny that there was a pang in it, - yes, a stab; but there
was a prayer, too, - the "Amen" belonged to that. - Also, a vision
of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, - I actually saw
many specific articles, - curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and
could draw the patterns of them at this moment, - a brick house, I
say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and
busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the
window, looking on the water, two of us. - "Male and female created
He them." - These two were standing at the window, when a smaller
shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look
that I - - poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then
continued.]

I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people
commonly never tell, about my early recollections.  Should you like
to hear them?

Should we LIKE to hear them? - said the schoolmistress; - no, but
we should love to.

[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very
pleasant in its tone, just then. - The four-story brick house,
which had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is
quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts,
flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete, - and the figures as
before.]

We are waiting with eagerness, Sir, - said the divinity-student.

[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had
struck it.]

If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing - I said - is to
know whether I can trust you with them.  It is only fair to say
that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such
things.  I think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree
with me.

Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable
of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or
sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:
that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable
spiritual cowards - that is, if they have any imagination - that
they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal
more which they teach themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books
and those who knew what was in books.  I was carefully instructed
in things temporal and spiritual.  But up to a considerable
maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have
been superhuman beings.  The central doctrine of the prevalent
religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized
in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual
life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper. - Why did I not ask?
you will say. - You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive
children.  The first instinctive movement of the little creatures
is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes,
and terrors.  I am uncovering one of these CACHES.  Do you think I
was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?

I was afraid of ships.  Why, I could never tell.  The masts looked
frightfully tall, - but they were not so tall as the steeple of our
old yellow meeting-house.  At any rate I used to hide my eyes from
the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the
bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted
very long. - One other source of alarm had a still more fearful
significance.  There was a great wooden HAND, - a glove-maker's
sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a
pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.
Oh, the dreadful hand!  Always hanging there ready to catch up a
little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,
- whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his
half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to
think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but
I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the
same experiences.  No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of
OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood.  That
trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue
to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more
biographies, I well remember.  Stepping on or over certain
particular things or spots - Dr. Johnson's especial weakness I got
the habit of at a very early age. - I won't swear that I have not
some tendency to these not wise practices even at this present
date.  [How many of you that read these notes can say the same
thing!]

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I
would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to
put a momentary trust in them.  Here is one which I cannot help
telling you.

The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at
the place where I was born and lived.  "There is a ship of war come
in," they used to say, when they heard them.  Of course, I supposed
that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of
absence, - suddenly as falling stones; and that the great guns
roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old
war-ship splitting the bay with her cutwater.  Now, the sloop-of-
war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the
Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean,
and was supposed to be lost.  But there was no proof of it, and, of
course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard
from.  Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I
pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste
of waters she was still floating, and there were YEARS during which
I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the
Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost
thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water
before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and
threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.
This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told.  Let me
make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have
outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood,
when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have
started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight,
and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the
mind's dumb whisper, THE WASP HAS COME!

- Yes, children believe plenty of queer things.  I suppose all of
you have had the pocket-book fever when you were little? - What do
I mean?  Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that
bank-bills to an immense amount were hidden in them. - So, too, you
must all remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or
other, which fed you with hopes perhaps for years, and which left a
blank in your life which nothing has ever filled up. - O. T.
quitted our household carrying with him the passionate regrets of
the more youthful members.  He was an ingenious youngster; wrote
wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given above with
great skill on all available surfaces.  I thought, by the way, they
were all gone; but the other day I found them on a certain door
which I will show you some time.  How it surprised me to find them
so near the ground!  I had thought the boy of no trivial
dimensions.  Well, O. T., when he went, made a solemn promise to
two of us.  I was to have a ship, and the other a marTIN-house
(last syllable pronounced as in the word TIN).  Neither ever came;
but, oh, how many and many a time I have stolen to the corner, -
the cars pass close by it at this time, - and looked up that long
avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure, as I
turned to look northward, that there he would be, trudging toward
me, the ship in one hand and the marTIN-house in the other!

[You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I
have said, was told to the whole company.  The young fellow whom
they call John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a
cheroot, the fumes of which came in, not ungrateful, through the
open window.  The divinity-student disappeared in the midst of our
talk.  The poor relation in black bombazine, who looked and moved
as if all her articulations were elbow-joints, had gone off to her
chamber, after waiting with a look of soul-subduing decorum at the
foot of the stairs until one of the male sort had passed her and
ascended into the upper regions.  This is a famous point of
etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between ourselves, they
make such an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had a great deal
rather have them simple enough not to think of such matters at all.
Our landlady's daughter said, the other evening, that she was going
to "retire"; whereupon the young fellow called John took up a lamp
and insisted on lighting her to the foot of the staircase.  Nothing
would induce her to pass by him, until the schoolmistress, saying
in good plain English that it was her bed-time, walked straight by
them both, not seeming to trouble herself about either of them.

I have been led away from what I meant the portion included in
these brackets to inform my readers about.  I say, then, most of
the boarders had left the table about the time when I began telling
some of these secrets of mine, - all of them, in fact, but the old
gentleman opposite and the schoolmistress.  I understand why a
young woman should like to hear these simple but genuine
experiences of early life, which are, as I have said, the little
brown seeds of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves of azure
and gold; but when the old gentleman pushed up his chair nearer to
me, and slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking
of some trifling, tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with
such a tremor in it that a little more and it would have been a
sob, why, then I felt there must be something of nature in them
which redeemed their seeming insignificance.  Tell me, man or woman
with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of
recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the
dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of
fast-returning winters, - a few such recollections, which, if you
should write them all out, would be swept into some careless
editor's drawer, and might cost a scanty half-hour's lazy reading
to his subscribers, - and yet, if Death should cheat you of them,
you would not know yourself in eternity?]

- I made three acquaintances at a very early period of life, my
introduction to whom was never forgotten.  The first unequivocal
act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this:
refusing a small favor asked of me, - nothing more than telling
what had happened at school one morning.  No matter who asked it;
but there were circumstances which saddened and awed me.  I had no
heart to speak; - I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant
excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost.  What
remorse followed I need not tell.  Then and there, to the best of
my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned
my back on Duty.  Time has led me to look upon my offence more
leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is
infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite.  Yet, oh
if I had but won that battle!

The great Destroyer, whose awful shadow it was that had silenced
me, came near me, - but never, so as to be distinctly seen and
remembered, during my tender years.  There flits dimly before me
the image of a little girl, whose name even I have forgotten, a
schoolmate, whom we missed one day, and were told that she had
died.  But what death was I never had any very distinct idea, until
one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground and
mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long,
narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown
loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was
an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man
seen through an opening at one end of it.  When the lid was closed,
and the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in
black, who was crying and wringing her hands, went off with the
other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death,
and should never forget him.

One other acquaintance I made at an earlier period of life than the
habit of romancers authorizes. - Love, of course. - She was a
famous beauty afterwards. - I am satisfied that many children
rehearse their parts in the drama of life before they have shed all
their milk-teeth. - I think I won't tell the story of the golden
blonde. - I suppose everybody has had his childish fancies; but
sometimes they are passionate impulses, which anticipate all the
tremulous emotions belonging to a later period.  Most children
remember seeing and adoring an angel before they were a dozen years
old.

[The old gentleman had left his chair opposite and taken a seat by
the schoolmistress and myself, a little way from the table. - It's
true, it's true, - said the old gentleman. - He took hold of a
steel watch-chain, which carried a large, square gold key at one
end and was supposed to have some kind of time-keeper at the other.
With some trouble he dragged up an ancient-looking, thick, silver,
bull's-eye watch.  He looked at it for a moment, - hesitated, -
touched the inner corner of his right eye with the pulp of his
middle finger, - looked at the face of the watch, - said it was
getting into the forenoon, - then opened the watch and handed me
the loose outside case without a word. - The watch-paper had been
pink once, and had a faint tinge still, as if all its tender life
had not yet quite faded out.  Two little birds, a flower, and, in
small school-girl letters, a date, - 17 . . - no matter. - Before I
was thirteen years old, - said the old gentleman. - I don't know
what was in that young schoolmistress's head, nor why she should
have done it; but she took out the watch-paper and put it softly to
her lips, as if she were kissing the poor thing that made it so
long ago.  The old gentleman took the watch-paper carefully from
her, replaced it, turned away and walked out, holding the watch in
his hand.  I saw him pass the window a moment after with that
foolish white hat on his head; he couldn't have been thinking what
he was about when he put it on.  So the schoolmistress and I were
left alone.  I drew my chair a shade nearer to her, and continued.]

And since I am talking of early recollections, I don't know why I
shouldn't mention some others that still cling to me, - not that
you will attach any very particular meaning to these same images so
full of significance to me, but that you will find something
parallel to them in your own memory.  You remember, perhaps, what I
said one day about smells.  There were certain SOUNDS also which
had a mysterious suggestiveness to me, - not so intense, perhaps,
as that connected with the other sense, but yet peculiar, and never
to be forgotten.

The first was the creaking of the wood-sleds, bringing their loads
of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen
trailed them along over the complaining snow, in the cold, brown
light of early morning.  Lying in bed and listening to their dreary
music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that
which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by
one "who hath no friend, no brother there."

There was another sound, in itself so sweet, and so connected with
one of those simple and curious superstitions of childhood of which
I have spoken, that I can never cease to cherish a sad sort of love
for it. - Let me tell the superstitious fancy first.  The Puritan
"Sabbath," as everybody knows, began at "sundown" on Saturday
evening.  To such observance of it I was born and bred.  As the
large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a
somewhat melancholy hush came over us all.  It was time for work to
cease, and for playthings to be put away.  The world of active life
passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun
should sink again beneath the horizon.

It was in this stillness of the world without and of the soul
within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to
make itself most distinctly heard, - so that I well remember I used
to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled
with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamp, WAS PECULIAR
TO SATURDAY EVENINGS.  I don't know that anything could give a
clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit
of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange,
childish fancy.

Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn
cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood.  It was
heard only at times, - a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell,
not loud, but vast, - a whistling boy would have drowned it for his
next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a
hundred square miles.  I used to wonder what this might be.  Could
it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand
footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring
city?  That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and
fell in regular rhythm.  I remember being told, and I suppose this
to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves,
after a high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant.
I should really like to know whether any observing people living
ten miles, more or less, inland from long beaches, - in such a
town, for instance, as Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the
Territory of the Massachusetts, - have ever observed any such
sound, and whether it was rightly accounted for as above.

Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of
memory, are the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare
intervals.  I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have not
generally agreeable voices.  The marrowy organisms, with skins that
shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly
padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not
so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular
outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous
covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color,
and voices at once thin and strenuous, - acidulous enough to
produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing
duets with the katydids.  I think our conversational soprano, as
sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young
persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great
industrial centres, for instance, - young persons of the female
sex, we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud
strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two
or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat
apples and hand round daguerreotypes, - I say, I think the
conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not
be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition,
were he getting up a new temptation of St. Anthony.

There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not
musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet
sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some
warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful
harmonies we hope to enjoy. - But why should I tell lies?  If my
friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth.  I never
heard but two voices in my life that frightened me by their
sweetness.

- Frightened you? - said the schoolmistress. - Yes, frightened me.
They made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with
such a chord in her voice to some string in another's soul, that,
if she but spoke, he would leave all and follow her, though it were
into the jaws of Erebus.  Our only chance to keep our wits is, that
there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this
string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred
a little by and by come into harmony with it. - But I tell you this
is no fiction.  You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a
fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who
followed him?

- Whose were those two voices that bewitches me so? - They both
belonged to German women.  One was a chambermaid, not otherwise
fascinating.  The key of my room at a certain great hotel was
missing, and this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information
respecting it.  The simple soul was evidently not long from her
mother-land, and spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect.  But to
hear her wonder and lament and suggest, with soft, liquid
inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full of serious
tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child
that had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her
features and figure been as delicious as her accents, - if she had
looked like the marble Clytie, for instance, - why, all can say is
-

[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]

I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself.  For
Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept
asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a
MESALLIANCE, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes
along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of
boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were
only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through
the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you
have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la
Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said
"Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a
single moment.

The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have
said, that of another German woman. - I suppose I shall ruin myself
by saying that such a voice could not have come from any
Americanized human being.

- What was there in it? - said the schoolmistress, - and, upon my
word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had
said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic
remark above reported. - Oh, I said, it had so much WOMAN in it, -
MULIEBRITY, as well as FEMINEITY; - no self-assertion, such as free
suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous
nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but
subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture
of fifty generations.  Sharp business habits, a lean soil,
independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things
for the larynx.  Still, you hear noble voices among us, - I have
known families famous for them, - but ask the first person you meet
a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic,
matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that
produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people
connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with
such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire
at once from the precincts.

- Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard
in a French hospital.  Between two and three years old.  Fell out
of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones.  Lying in bed, patient,
gentle.  Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking
fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still.  I
spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a
voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it
which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at
this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards. -
C'EST TOUT COMME UN SERIN, said the French student at my side.

These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as
to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall
enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl.  There must be
other things besides aerolites that wander from their own spheres
to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may
be nearer the literal truth than we dream.  If mankind generally
are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set
adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more
trial to reach the shore, - as some grave theologians have
maintained, - if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead
devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from
Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts
three or four score summers, - why, there must have been a few good
spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak
of must belong to them.

- I wish you could once hear my sister's voice, - said the
schoolmistress.

If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one, - said I.

I never thought mine was anything, - said the schoolmistress.

How should you know? - said I. - People never hear their own
voices, - any more than they see their own faces.  There is not
even a looking-glass for the voice.  Of course, there is something
audible to us when we speak; but that something is not our own
voice as it is known to all our acquaintances.  I think, if an
image spoke to us in our own tones, we should not know them in the
least. - How pleasant it would be, if in another state of being we
could have shapes like our former selves for playthings, - we
standing outside or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to
us just what we used to be to others!

- I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call "play," after
our earthly toys are broken, - said the schoolmistress.

Hush, - said I, - what will the divinity-student say?

[I thought she was hit, that time; - but the shot must have gone
over her, or on one side of her; she did not flinch.]

Oh, - said the schoolmistress, - he must look out for my sister's
heresies; I am afraid he will be too busy with them to take care of
mine.

Do you mean to say, - said I, - that it is YOUR SISTER whom that
student -

[The young fellow commonly known as John, who had been sitting on
the barrel, smoking, jumped off just then, kicked over the barrel,
gave it a push with his foot that set it rolling, and stuck his
saucy-looking face in at the window so as to cut my question off in
the middle; and the schoolmistress leaving the room a few minutes
afterwards, I did not have a chance to finish it.

The young fellow came in and sat down in a chair, putting his heels
on the top of another.

Pooty girl, - said he.

A fine young lady, - I replied.

Keeps a first-rate school, according to accounts, - said he, -
teaches all sorts of things, - Latin and Italian and music.  Folks
rich once, - smashed up.  She went right ahead as smart as if she'd
been born to work.  That's the kind o' girl I go for.  I'd marry
her, only two or three other girls would drown themselves, if I
did.

I think the above is the longest speech of this young fellow's
which I have put on record.  I do not like to change his peculiar
expressions, for this is one of those cases in which the style is
the man, as M. de Buffon says.  The fact is, the young fellow is a
good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of his jokes, - and if
it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of his face,
I should not mind his fun much.]


[Some days after this, when the company were together again, I
talked a little.]

- I don't think I have a genuine hatred for anybody.  I am well
aware that I differ herein from the sturdy English moralist and the
stout American tragedian.  I don't deny that I hate THE SIGHT of
certain people; but the qualities which make me tend to hate the
man himself are such as I am so much disposed to pity, that, except
under immediate aggravation, I feel kindly enough to the worst of
them.  It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow, so much
worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I
sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may
use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not
waste on noble natures.  One who is born with such congenital
incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled,
not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy.  But as we
cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of
physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from our society,
- we love them, but open the window and let them go.  By the time
decent people reach middle age they have weeded their circle pretty
well of these unfortunates, unless they have a taste for such
animals; in which case, no matter what their position may be, there
is something, you may be sure, in their natures akin to that of
their wretched parasites.

- The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities,
as well as of antipathies; did I believe in love at first sight?

Sir, - said I, - all men love all women.  That is the PRIMA-FACIE
aspect of the case.  The Court of Nature assumes the law to be,
that all men do so; and the individual man is bound to show cause
why he does not love any particular woman.  A man, says one of my
old black-letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, as thus:
He hath not seen the person named in the indictment; she is of
tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain personal
disqualifications, - as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath
an ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being
limited, his affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so
of other conditions.  Not the less is it true that he is bound by
duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman.
Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show
cause why he doth not love her.  This is not by written document,
or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk,
gold, and other materials, which say to all men, - Look on me and
love, as in duty bound.  Then the man pleadeth his special
incapacity, whatsoever that may be, - as, for instance,
impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many wives in his household,
or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity; of which reasons
it may be noted, that the first is, according to late decisions, of
chiefest authority. - So far the old law-book.  But there is a note
from an older authority, saying that every woman doth also love
each and every man, except there be some good reason to the
contrary; and a very observing friend of mine, a young unmarried
clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experience goes, he has
reason to think the ancient author had fact to justify his
statement.

I'll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love
with at first sight.

- We a'n't talking about pictures, - said the landlady's daughter,
- we're talking about women.

I understood that we were speaking of love at sight, - I remarked,
mildly. - Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is
just what a picture as big as a copper, or a "nickel," rather, at
the bottom of his eye can teach him, I think I am right in saying
we are talking about the pictures of women. - Well, now, the reason
why a man is not desperately in love with ten thousand women at
once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly
seen upon that wall.  They all ARE painted there by reflection from
our faces, but because ALL of them are painted on each spot, and
each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time,
no one is seen as a picture.  But darken a chamber and let a single
pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on
the wall.  We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from
women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and
then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the
image in our mental camera-obscura.

- My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
anniversaries come round.

What's the difficulty? - Why, they all want him to get up and make
speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he
doesn't want to do.  He is an old story, he says, and hates to show
on these occasions.  But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do
without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get
their fingers on the FONTANELLE, (the Professor will tell you what
this means, - he says the one at the top of the head always remains
open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating
spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.

There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before
going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and
clutch up a handful of what grows there, - weeds and violets
together, - not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots
with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them.  That's his
idea of a post-prandial performance.  Look here, now.  These verses
I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots
just in that way, the other day. - Beautiful entertainment, - names
there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry
and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted,
modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his
countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the
better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will
turn into the prose of common life.  My friend, the Poet, says you
must not read such a string of verses too literally.  If he trimmed
it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he likes
to keep them, and a little of the soil clinging to them.

This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our
friend, the Poet:-


A GOOD TIME GOING!

BRAVE singer of the coming time,
Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant,
Good-bye!  Good-bye! - Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
Cry, God be with him, till he stands
His feet among the English daisies!

'Tis here we part; - for other eyes
The busy deck, the flattering streamer,
The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
The cloudy pillar gliding o'er him,
The deep blue desert, lone and drear,
With heaven above and home before him!

His home! - the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it; -
This little speck the British Isles?
'Tis but a freckle, - never mind it! -
He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
And ridges stretched from pole to pole
Heave till they crack their iron knuckles!

But memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant:-
"An islet is a world," she said,
"When glory with its dust has blended,
And Britain kept her noble dead
Till earth and seas and skies are rended!"

Beneath each swinging forest-bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes, -
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valor's life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
One-half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!

Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp,
From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together; -
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between, -
Our little mother isle, God bless her!

In earth's broad temple where we stand,
Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
We hold the missal in our hand,
Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
Where'er its blazoned page betrays
The glistening links of gilded fetters,
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
Her rubric stained in crimson letters!

Enough!  To speed a parting friend
'Tis vain alike to speak and listen; -
Yet stay, - these feeble accents blend
With rays of light from eyes that glisten.
Good-bye! once more, - and kindly tell
In words of peace the young world's story, -
And say, besides, - we love too well
Our mother's soil, our father's glory!

When my friend, the Professor, found that my friend, the Poet, had
been coming out in this full-blown style, he got a little excited,
as you may have seen a canary, sometimes, when another strikes up.
The Professor says he knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write
verses.  At any rate, he has often tried, and now he was determined
to try again.  So when some professional friends of his called him
up, one day, after a feast of reason and a regular "freshet" of
soul which had lasted two or three hours, he read them these
verses.  He introduced them with a few remarks, he told me, of
which the only one he remembered was this:  that he had rather
write a single line which one among them should think worth
remembering than set them all laughing with a string of epigrams.
It was all right, I don't doubt; at any rate, that was his fancy
then, and perhaps another time he may be obstinately hilarious;
however, it may be that he is growing graver, for time is a fact so
long as clocks and watches continue to go, and a cat can't be a
kitten always, as the old gentleman opposite said the other day.

You must listen to this seriously, for I think the Professor was
very much in earnest when he wrote it.


THE TWO ARMIES.

As Life's unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen,-
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.

One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
The wide-mouthed clarion's bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
"Our glory is to slay."

One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet's gleam
That walks the clouded skies.

Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave;
Its banner bears the single line,
"Our duty is to save."

For those no death-bed's lingering shade;
At Honor's trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory's arms they fall.

For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night, -
Each answers, "Here am I!"

For those the sculptor's laurelled bust,
The builder's marble piles,
The anthems pealing o'er their dust
Through long cathedral aisles.

For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
In flowery-foaming waves.

Two paths lead upward from below,
And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop's flow,
Each falling tear of Love.

Though from the Hero's bleeding breast
Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
Sprang from that scarlet dew, -

While Valor's haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
To sit beside the Throne!



CHAPTER X.



[THE schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair, - a fresh
June rose.  She has been walking early; she has brought back two
others, - one on each cheek.

I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the
occasion.  Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a
couple of damasks.  I suppose all this went through my mind, for
this was what I went on to say:-]

I love the damask rose best of all.  The flowers our mothers and
sisters used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our
eaves and by our doorstep, are the ones we always love best.  If
the Houyhnhnms should ever catch me, and, finding me particularly
vicious and unmanageable, send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I'll tell
you what drugs he would have to take and how he would have to use
them.  Imagine yourself reading a number of the Houyhnhnm Gazette,
giving an account of such an experiment.

"MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.

"THE soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
assembly.  The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely
confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of
shoulder-hitting and foot-striking.  His countenance expressed the
utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.

"The operator took a handful of BUDDING LILAC-LEAVES, and crushing
them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
towards the creature.  Its expression changed in an instant, - it
drew in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with
its soft split hoofs.  Having thus quieted his suspicious subject,
the operator proceeded to tie a BLUE HYACINTH to the end of the
pole and held it out towards the wild animal.  The effect was
magical.  Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips
trembled as it pressed them to the flower.  After this it was
perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer,
without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet or
hit from the shoulder."


That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette. - Do you ever wonder why
poets talk so much about flowers?  Did you ever hear of a poet who
did not talk about them?  Don't you think a poem, which, for the
sake of being original, should leave them out, would be like those
verses where the letter A or E or some other is omitted?  No, -
they will bloom over and over again in poems as in the summer
fields, to the end of time, always old and always new.  Why should
we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired of
blossoms or the night of stars?  Look at Nature.  She never wearies
of saying over her floral pater-noster.  In the crevices of
Cyclopean walls, - in the dust where men lie, dust also, - on the
mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-
heap, - still that same sweet prayer and benediction.  The Amen! of
Nature is always a flower.

Are you tired of my trivial personalities, - those splashes and
streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which
you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a
tulip?  Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot
whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being.  It
is because you are just like me that I talk and know that you will
listen.  We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments, - not
with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but
by the same hand and from the same palette.

I don't believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for
the blue hyacinth which I have, - very certainly not for the
crushed lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they
are.  You love the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves,
I don't doubt; but I hardly think that the last bewitches you with
young memories as it does me.  For the same reason I come back to
damask roses, after having raised a good many of the rarer
varieties.  I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are
queer little old homely sounds that are better than music to me.
However, I suppose it's foolish to tell such things.

- It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time, - said the
divinity-student; - saying it, however, in one of the dead
languages, which I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and
therefore do not bear quotation as such.

Well, now, - said I, - suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking
countryman's cart stops opposite my door. - Do I want any
huckleberries? - If I do not, there are those that do.  Thereupon
my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the
wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad
hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries,
and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they
tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the
resounding metal beneath. - I won't say that this rushing
huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me than the "Anvil
Chorus."

- I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.

- Where are your great trees, Sir? - said the divinity-student.

Oh, all round about New England.  I call all trees mine that I have
put my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham
Young has human ones.

- One set's as green as the other, - exclaimed a boarder, who has
never been identified.

They're all Bloomers, - said the young fellow called John.

[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our
landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by
putting my wedding-ring on a tree.]

Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear, - said I, - I
have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New
England elms and other big trees. - Don't you want to hear me talk
trees a little now?  That is one of my specialities.

[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about
trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most
intense, passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had
several romantic attachments to certain trees in particular.  Now,
if you expect me to hold forth in a "scientific" way about my tree-
loves, - to talk, for instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and
describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that, - you are
an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who
will discourse to you of such matters.  What should you think of a
lover who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of
science, thus:  Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo;
Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula

 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3
i---c---p---m---
 2-2 1-1 2-2 3-3'

and so on?

No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them,
adore them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green
sun-shades over our heads, talking to us with their hundred
thousand whispering tongues, looking down on us with that sweet
meekness which belongs to huge, but limited organisms, - which one
sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in the patient posture,
the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of these vast
beings endowed with life, but not with soul, - which outgrow us and
outlive us, but stand helpless, - poor things! - while Nature
dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-
witted children.

Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin?  Slowest of men, even of
English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a
sleepy eye in woman.  I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to
make fun of him.  I have a whole set of his works, and am very
proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and
orange-juice landscapes.  The PERE Gilpin had the kind of science I
like in the study of Nature, - a little less observation than White
of Selborne, but a little more poetry. - Just think of applying the
Linnaean system to an elm!  Who cares how many stamens or pistils
that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have
to classify it by?  What we want is the meaning, the character, the
expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.

There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if
well marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language.
Take the oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a
type of strength and endurance.  I wonder if you ever thought of
the single mark of supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all
our other forest-trees?  All the rest of them shirk the work of
resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it.  It chooses the
horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may
tell, - and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that
the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting.  You will
find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the
branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of
those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle.  At 90
degrees the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would
mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of
organization.  The American elm betrays something of both; yet
sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain resemblance to its
sturdier neighbor.

It won't do to be exclusive in our taste about trees.  There is
hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting
place for it.  I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions
and aspect, a vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of
a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country round.  A native of
that region saw fit to build his house very near it, and, having a
fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and exterminate
himself and any incidental relatives who might be "stopping" or
"tarrying" with him, - also laboring under the delusion that human
life is under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable
existence, - had the great poplar cut down.  It is so easy to say,
"It is only a poplar!" and so much harder to replace its living
cone than to build a granite obelisk!

I must tell you about some of my tree-wives.  I was at one period
of my life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode
Island, a small, but delightful State in the neighborhood of
Pawtucket.  The number of inhabitants being not very large, I had
leisure, during my visits to the Providence Plantations, to inspect
the face of the country in the intervals of more fascinating
studies of physiognomy.  I heard some talk of a great elm a short
distance from the locality just mentioned.  "Let us see the great
elm," - I said, and proceeded to find it, - knowing that it was on
a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly.
I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great
Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the
first time.  Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or
vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when
it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for
Nature's best.  I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and
that a sort of shiver came over it as over a betrothed maiden when
she first stands before the unknown to whom she has been plighted.
Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all quails and
shrinks into itself.  All those stories of four or five men
stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's
fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many
hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful
ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.

As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object
of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time
at the road-side.  Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the
rest, I asked myself, - "Is this it?"  But as I drew nearer, they
grew smaller, - or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line
had looked like one, and so deceived me.  At last, all at once,
when I was not thinking of it, - I declare to you it makes my flesh
creep when I think of it now, - all at once I saw a great, green
cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such
Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-
growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a
hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me,
without need of uttering the words, - "This is it!"

You will find this tree described, with many others, in the
excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts.  The
author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his
measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully.  It is a
grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular
development, - one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
class of New England elms.

The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the
ground is in the great elm lying a stone's throw or two north of
the main road (if my points of compass are right) in Springfield.
But this has much the appearance of having been formed by the union
of two trunks growing side by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong
also to the first class of trees.

There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to
spread its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or
more before they covered the foot of its bole up with earth.  This
is the American elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.

The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of
form.  I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County,
and few to compare with it anywhere.  I am not sure that I remember
any other first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.

- What makes a first-class elm? - Why, size, in the first place,
and chiefly.  Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet
above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet
across, may claim that title, according to my scale.  All of them,
with the questionable exception of the Springfield tree above
referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at about twenty-
two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of
spread.

Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to
eighteen feet, are comparatively common.  The queen of them all is
that glorious tree near one of the churches in Springfield.
Beautiful and stately she is beyond all praise.  The "great tree"
on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as does the one at
Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head as
round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of
others which might be mentioned.  These last two have perhaps been
over-celebrated.  Both, however, are pleasing vegetables.  The poor
old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation.  A wig of false
leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.

[I don't doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating
green, but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which
only wants a sacred singer to make it celebrated.  Send us your
measurements, - (certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible
imposition,) - circumference five feet from soil, length of line
from bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for
you.]

- I wish somebody would get us up the following work:-


SYLVA NOVANGLICA.

Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the
Same Scale of Magnitude.  With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a
Distinguished Literary Gentleman.  Boston & Co. 185..


The same camera should be used, - so far as possible, - at a fixed
distance.  Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures
in his "Trees of America," must not think this Prospectus invades
his province; a dozen portraits, with lively descriptions, would be
a pretty complement to his large work, which, so far as published,
I find excellent.  If my plan were carried out, and another series
of a dozen English trees photographed on the same scale the
comparison would be charming.

It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the
Old and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of
their various types of organization.  We should begin with man, of
course; institute a large and exact comparison between the
development of LA PIANTA UMANA, as Alfieri called it, in different
sections of each country, in the different callings, at different
ages, estimating height, weigh, force by the dynamometer and the
spirometer, and finishing off with a series of typical photographs,
giving the principal national physiognomies.  Mr. Hutchinson has
given us some excellent English data to begin with.

Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel
forms of life in the two continents.  Our naturalists have often
referred to this incidentally or expressly; but the ANIMUS of
Nature in the two half globes of the planet is so momentous a point
of interest to our race, that it should be made a subject of
express and elaborate study.  Go out with me into that walk which
we call THE MALL, and look at the English and American elms.  The
American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if
from languor.  The English elm is compact, robust, holds its
branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own
native tree.

Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the
ocean, or not?  Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole
realm of life can answer this question.

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable
life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in
an extraordinary manner.  Just as we have two trees alike in many
ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just
so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the
same ideal, embody it with various modifications.  Inventive power
is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be
economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the
divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind
which exercises it.  As the same patterns have very commonly been
followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and
determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the
movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality.  We
should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove
that Anglo-Saxons can't live here, but die out, if not kept up by
fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons
have maintained.  It may turn out the other way, as I have heard
one of our literary celebrities argue, - and though I took the
other side, I liked his best, - that the American is the Englishman
reinforced.

- Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?
- I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed, -
as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of
gallantry as that was for our boarding-house.  On the contrary, she
turned a little pale, - but smiled brightly and said, - Yes, with
pleasure, but she must walk towards her school. - She went for her
bonnet. - The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes,
and said he wished he was a young fellow.  Presently she came down,
looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a
school-book in her hand.]


MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.


This is the shortest way, - she said, as we came to a corner. -
Then we won't take it, - said I. - The schoolmistress laughed a
little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock's row of English elms.  The gray
squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them
came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was
close to the rail of the burial-ground.  He was on a grave with a
broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it.  The
stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an
Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more. -
Oh, yes, DIED, - with a small triangular mark in one breast, and
another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man's
rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on
the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-
dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.

Let us have one look at poor Benjamin's grave, - said I. - His
bones lie where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone
says they lie, - which is more than can be said of most of the
tenants of this and several other burial-grounds.

[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my
knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at
least of our city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the
city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of
the perpetrators.  Many years ago, when this disgraceful process
was going on under my eyes, I addressed an indignant remonstrance
to a leading journal.  I suppose it was deficient in literary
elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of
it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face
of daylight.  I have never got over it.  The bones of my own
ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the
upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing
short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any
of those records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as
sacred to some cherished memory.  Shame! shame! shame! - that is
all I can say.  It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of
authority, that this infamy was enacted.  The red Indians would
have known better; the selectmen of an African kraal-village would
have had more respect for their ancestors.  I should like to see
the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed, and the
ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never
famous for truth, but the old reproach of "Here LIES" never had
such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places,
where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman's sigh over poor
Benjamin's dust.  Love killed him, I think.  Twenty years old, and
out there fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool
of that old July evening; - yes, there must have been love at the
bottom of it.

The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through
the rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge.  That was all her
comment upon what I told her. - How women love Love! said I; - but
she did not speak.

We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from
the main street. - Look down there, - I said, - My friend the
Professor lived in that house at the left hand, next the further
corner, for years and years.  He died out of it, the other day. -
Died? - said the schoolmistress. - Certainly, - said I. - We die
out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies.  A commercial
smash kills a hundred men's houses for them, as a railroad crash
kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants.  Men
sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves
its body when it is tired of its infirmities.  The body has been
called "the house we live in"; the house is quite as much the body
we live in.  Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the
other day? - Do! - said the schoolmistress.

A man's body, - said the Professor, - is whatever is occupied by
his will and his sensibility.  The small room down there, where I
wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a portion of
my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm or leg is
of his.

The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it,
like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes.
First, he has his natural garment of flesh and blood.  Then, his
artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their
cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously-tinted pigments.
Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion.
And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as
in a loose outside wrapper.

You shall observe, - the Professor said, - for, like Mr. John
Hunter and other great men, he brings in that SHALL with great
effect sometimes, - you shall observe that a man's clothing or
series of envelopes does after a certain time mould itself upon his
individual nature.  We know this of our hats, and are always
reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong side foremost.
We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull, with
all its irregular bumps and depressions.  Just so all that clothes
a man, even to the blue sky which caps his head, - a little
loosely, - shapes itself to fit each particular being beneath it.
Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned criminals,
all find it different, according to the eyes with which they
severally look.

But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer
natures.  See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it.
There is a shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells
into the walls of its own.  A house is never a home until we have
crusted it with the spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our
own past.  See what these are and you can tell what the occupant
is.

I had no idea, - said the Professor, - until I pulled up my
domestic establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of
roots I had been making during the years I was planted there.  Why,
there wasn't a nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its
way into; and when I gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to
shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold and came away.

There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably,
and which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable
aspect and in all dimensions.  The infinite galleries of the Past
await but one brief process and all their pictures will be called
out and fixed forever.  We had a curious illustration of the great
fact on a very humble scale.  When a certain bookcase, long
standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed, there
was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its
portions.  But in the midst of this picture was another, - the
precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall before the
bookcase was built.  We had all forgotten everything about the map
until we saw its photograph on the wall.  Then we remembered it, as
some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over
and covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before
the wall of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time, - not twenty years,
but pretty near it.  When he entered that door, two shadows glided
over the threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed
through it for the last time, - and one of the shadows was claimed
by its owner to be longer than his own.  What changes he saw in
that quiet place!  Death rained through every roof but his;
children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away,
threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that
stock-company's theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his,
and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling.
Peace be to those walls, forever, - the Professor said, - for the
many pleasant years he has passed within them!

The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in
imagination with tender interest wherever he goes. - In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long, -

- in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes
loitering down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord,
swallowing up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it
goes, until it gets proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious
oxbows about the fair Northampton meadows, and at last overflows
the oldest inhabitant's memory in profligate freshets at Hartford
and all along its lower shores, - up in that caravansary on the
banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the
jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions, -
where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the
hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the
opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the
Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old
"Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not within range of
sight, - sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks which
carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village
lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses,
to the terminus of their harmless stroll, - the patulous fage, in
the Professor's classic dialect, - the spreading beech, in more
familiar phrase, - [stop and breathe here a moment, for the
sentence is not done yet, and we have another long journey before
us,] -

- and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic, - dark stream, but clear, like the lucid
orbs that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes, - in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the
tracks of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the
winter snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North,
the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy
region, - suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried
Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden
away beneath the leaves of the forest, - in that home where seven
blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven
golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer, -

- in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious,
yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany, - full of
great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom, - in all
these summer or winter nests he was always at home and always
welcome.

This long articulated sigh of reminiscences, - this calenture which
shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-
circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling
their way along the wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as
blind men's busy fingers, - is for that friend of mine who looks
into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the same
visions which paint themselves for me in the green depths of the
Charles.

- Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress? - Why, no, - of
course not.  I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last
ten minutes.  You don't think I should expect any woman to listen
to such a sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to
put in a word?

- What did I say to the schoolmistress? - Permit me one moment.  I
don't doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular
case, as I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very
interesting young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the
classic version of a familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin
Franklin, it is NULLUM TUI NEGOTII.

When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the
damask roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by
exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a
stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her
to let me join her again.


EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.
(TO BE BURNED UNREAD.)


I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself
to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age
which invites confidence and expansive utterance.  I have been low-
spirited and listless, lately, - it is coffee, I think, - (I
observe that which is bought READY-GROUND never affects the head,)
- and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am
downhearted.

There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton
Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.

There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest
ocean-buried inscription!

- Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no! - Yet what is this which
has been shaping itself in my soul? - Is it a thought? - is it a
dream? - is it a PASSION? - Then I know what comes next.

- The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed
corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather.  But there are
iron bars to all the windows.  When it is fair, some of us can
stroll outside that very high fence.  But I never see much life in
those groups I sometimes meet; - and then the careful man watches
them so closely!  How I remember that sad company I used to pass on
fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy! - B., with his arms full of
yellow weeds, - ore from the gold mines which he discovered long
before we heard of California, - Y., born to millions, crazed by
too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive, - made a
Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a
stick, - (the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to
buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I
don't doubt the good people made him easy for life,) - how I
remember them all!

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in
"Vathek," and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its
breast, showed its heart, - a burning coal.  The real Hall of Eblis
stands on yonder summit.  Go there on the next visiting-day, and
ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like those
Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture,
to lift its hand, - look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but
ashes. - No, I must not think of such an ending!  Dying would be a
much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty.  Make a will
and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other little
financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping
school. - I wonder what nice young man's feet would be in my French
slippers before six months were over!  Well, what then?  If a man
really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry her for the
world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best person she
could by any possibility marry.

- It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing. - It
is the merest fancy that ever was in the world.  I shall never be
married.  She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so
far, I will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her
and her husband, sometimes.  No coffee, I hope, though, - it
depresses me sadly.  I feel very miserably; - they must have been
grinding it at home. - Another morning walk will be good for me,
and I don't doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh
air before school.


- The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been
coming over me from time to time of late.  Did you ever see that
electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through
letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or
legend springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?

There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if
the flash might pass through them, - but the fire must come down
from heaven.  Ah! but what if the stormy NIMBUS of youthful passion
has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged CIRRUS of
dissolving aspirations, or the silvered CUMULUS of sluggish
satiety?  I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom
living ones no longer worship, - the immortal maid, who, name her
what you will, - Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty, - sits by the
pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead
until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his
dreams.


MUSA.

O MY lost Beauty! - hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
To chill our fiery dreams,
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?

Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
Whose flowers are silvered hair! -
Have I not loved thee long,
Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
Ah, wilt thou yet return,
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?

Come to me! - I will flood thy silent shine
With my soul's sacred wine,
And heap thy marble floors
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
In leafy islands walled with madrepores
And lapped in Orient seas,
When all their feathery palm toss, plume-like, in the breeze.

Come to me! - thou shalt feed on honied words,
Sweeter than song of birds; -
No wailing bulbul's throat,
No melting dulcimer's melodious note,
When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
Thy ravished sense might soothe
With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.

Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
Sought in those bowers of green
Where loop the clustered vines
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines, -
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
And Summer's fruited gems,
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.

Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves, -
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns,
Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones
Still slumbering where they lay
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.

Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!
Still let me dream and sing, -
Dream of that winding shore
Where scarlet cardinals bloom, - for me no more, -
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!

Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed! -
Come while the rose is red, -
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
On the green ripples round you sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!

Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild sweet pain! -
On life's autumnal blast,
Like shrivelled leaves, youth's, passion-flowers are cast, -
Once loving thee, we love thee to the last! -
Behold thy new-decked shrine,
And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"



CHAPTER XI.



[THE company looked a little flustered one morning when I came in,
- so much so, that I inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-
student,) what had been going on.  It appears that the young fellow
whom they call John had taken advantage of my being a little late
(I having been rather longer than usual dressing that morning) to
circulate several questions involving a quibble or play upon words,
- in short, containing that indignity to the human understanding,
condemned in the passages from the distinguished moralist of the
last century and the illustrious historian of the present, which I
cited on a former occasion, and known as a PUN.  After breakfast,
one of the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some
of the questions and their answers.  I subjoin two or three of
them, to show what a tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless
talk in young persons of a certain sort, when not restrained by the
presence of more reflective natures. - It was asked, "Why tertian
and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects."  Some
interesting physiological relation would be naturally suggested.
The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry
equivocation, that they SKIP a day or two. - "Why an Englishman
must go to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch."  The answer
proves to have no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as
no better reason is given than that island- (or, as it is absurdly
written, ILE AND) water won't mix. - But when I came to the next
question and its answer, I felt that patience ceased to be a
virtue.  "Why an onion is like a piano" is a query that a person of
sensibility would be slow to propose; but that in an educated
community an individual could be found to answer it in these words,
- "Because it smell odious," QUASI, it's melodious, - is not
credible, but too true.  I can show you the paper.

Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things.  I know
most conversations reported in books are altogether above such
trivial details, but folly will come up at every table as surely as
purslain and chickweed and sorrel will come up in gardens.  This
young fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know perfectly
well; but he didn't, - he made jokes.]

I am willing, - I said, - to exercise your ingenuity in a rational
and contemplative manner. - No, I do not proscribe certain forms of
philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd
or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio
of the Reverend Father Thomas Sanchez, in his famous Disputations,
"De Sancto Matrimonio."  I will therefore turn this levity of yours
to profit by reading you a rhymed problem, wrought out by my friend
the Professor.


THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE:
OR THE WONDERFUL "ONE-HOSS-SHAY."
A LOGICAL STORY.

HAVE you heard of the wonderful one-shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it - ah, but stay,
I'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, -
Have you ever heard of that, I say?

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
GEORGIUS SECUNDUS was then alive, -
Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock's army was done so brown,
Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.

Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
There is always SOMEWHERE a weakest spot, -
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, - lurking still
Find it somewhere you must and will, -
Above or below, or within or without, -
And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise BREASTS DOWN, but doesn't WEAR OUT.

But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an "I dew vum," or an "I tell YEOU,")
He would build one shay to beat the taown
'n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun';
It should be so built that it COULDN' break daown -
- "Fur," said the Deacon, "'t's mighty plain
Thut the weakes' place mus' stan the strain;
'n' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain,
Is only jest
T' make that place uz strong uz the rest."

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke, -
That was for spokes and floor and sills;
He sent for lancewood to make the thills;
The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
But lasts like iron for things like these;
The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum," -
Last of its timber, - they couldn't sell 'em,
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died.
That was the way he "put her through." -
"There!" said the Deacon, "naow she'll dew."

Do!  I tell you, I father guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less!
Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grand-children - where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; - it came and found
The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten; -
"Hahnsum kerridge" they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came; -
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.

Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it. - You're welcome. - No extra charge.)

FIRST OF NOVEMBER, - the Earthquake-day. -
There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay.
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn't be, - for the Deacon's art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn't a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
And the panels just as strong as the floor,
And the whippletree neither less nor more,
And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub ENCORE.
And yet, AS A WHOLE, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be WORN OUT!

First of November, 'Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay,
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
"Huddup!" said the parson. - Off went they.

The parson was working his Sunday's text, -
Had got to FIFTHLY, and stopped perplexed
At what the - Moses - was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n-house on the hill.
- First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, -
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n-house clock, -
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
- What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, -
All at once, and nothing first, -
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic.  That's all I say.


- I think there is one habit, - I said to our company a day or two
afterwards - worse than that of punning.  It is the gradual
substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly
characterize their objects.  I have known several very genteel
idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen
expressions.  All things fell into one of two great categories, -
FAST or SLOW.  Man's chief end was to be a BRICK.  When the great
calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken
of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP.  Nine-tenths of human existence
were summed up in the single word, BORE.  These expressions come to
be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or
indolent to discriminate.  They are the blank checks of
intellectual bankruptcy; - you may fill them up with what idea you
like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the
treasury upon which they are drawn.  Colleges and good-for-nothing
smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi
spring up most luxuriantly.  Don't think I undervalue the proper
use and application of a cant word or phrase.  It adds piquancy to
conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce.  But it is no better
than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the
intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and
youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does.  As we hear flash
phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of
English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a three-
volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured
urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial
climate.

- The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was
"rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang
line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.

- I replied with my usual forbearance. - Certainly, to give up the
algebraic symbol, because A or B is often a cover for ideal
nihility, would be unwise.  I have heard a child laboring to
express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed
sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been
sufficiently explained by the participle - BORED.  I have seen a
country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse
vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely,
in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which
would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped
sophomore in the one word - SLOW.  Let us discriminate, and be shy
of absolute proscription.  I am omniverbivorous by nature and
training.  Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow
most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.

Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something.
They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank
checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists
may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them.  They
are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but
for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would
have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art.  Yes, I
like dandies well enough, - on one condition.

- What is that, Sir? - said the divinity-student.

- That they have pluck.  I find that lies at the bottom of all true
dandyism.  A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger
in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him,
looks very silly.  But if he turns red in the face and knotty in
the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants,
throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if
necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery
takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened
Astyanax.  You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were
his best officers.  The "Sunday blood," the super-superb sartorial
equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous.
But such fellows as Brummel and D'Orsay and Byron are not to be
snubbed quite so easily.  Look out for "la main de fer sous le gant
de velours," (which I printed in English the other day without
quotation-marks, thinking whether any SCARABAEUS CRITICUS would add
this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers, -
which he didn't do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London
language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the
same.)  A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a
decided dash of dandyism about them.  There was Alcibiades, the
"curled son of Clinias," an accomplished young man, but what would
be called a "swell" in these days.  There was Aristoteles, a very
distinguished writer, of whom you have heard, - a philosopher, in
short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and
is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again.
Regular dandy, he was.  So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost
his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn't his dandyism that
spoiled his chance.  Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar
or a poet, but he was one of the same sort.  So was Sir Humphrey
Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful.
Yes, - a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I
was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle, - aye,
and left it swinging to this day. - Still, if I were you, I
wouldn't go to the tailor's, on the strength of these remarks, and
run up a long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your
next suit.  ELEGANS "NASCITUR, NON FIT."  A man is born a dandy, as
he is born a poet.  There are heads that can't wear hats; there are
necks that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can't fill out
collars - (Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier
ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are TOURNURES nothing can
humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity
or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different
styles of dandyism.

We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,
- not a GRATIA-DEI, nor a JUREDIVINO one, - but a DE-FACTO upper
stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life
like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water
about our wharves, - very splendid, though its origin may have been
tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities.  I say,
then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its
individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a
whole.  Of course, money is its corner-stone.  But now observe
this.  Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race, -
I don't mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood
and bone.  Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up
more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys
country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good
nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton.
When the spring-chickens come to market - I beg your pardon, - that
is not what I was going to speak of.  As the young females of each
successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other
things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the
expensive luxury of beauty.  The physical character of the next
generation rises in consequence.  It is plain that certain families
have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and
that in a small circle of city-connections one may sometimes find
models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would find it
hard to match from all its townships put together.  Because there
is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life,
among the richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious
fact I have just spoken of, - which in one or two generations more
will be, I think, much more patent than just now.

The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded
to in connection with cheap dandyism.  Its thorough manhood, its
high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its
windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-
panels.  It is very curious to observe of how small account
military folks are held among our Northern people.  Our young men
must gild their spurs, but they need not win them.  The equal
division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above
the necessity of military service.  Thus the army loses an element
of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to
count heroism among its virtues.  Still I don't believe in any
aristocracy without pluck as its backbone.  Ours may show it when
the time comes, if it ever does come.

-  These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual
GREEN FRUIT of all the places in the world.  I think so, at any
rate.  The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the
market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like
unripe gooseberries, - get plucked to make a fool of.  Think of a
country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial
Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been
buying twelve thousand!  How can one let his fruit hang in the sun
until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such
hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?
Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins
and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among
its fruits.  There are literary green-groceries at every corner,
which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.  It
takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
writing.  The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
people.  Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. -
we won't say who, - editor of the - we won't say what, offered me
the sum of fifty cents PER double-columned quarto page for shaking
my young boughs over his foolscap apron?  Was it not an
intoxicating vision of gold and glory?  I should doubtless have
revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the
FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by
no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.

-  Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
virtues.  It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from
all that is sinful or hurtful.  But making a business of it leads
to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the
more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

-  I don't believe one word of what you are saying, - spoke up the
angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, - I said, and added softly to
my next neighbor, - but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
said, in an undertone, - OPTIME DICTUM.

Your talking Latin, - said I, - reminds me of an odd trick of one

of my old tutors.  He read so much of that language, that his
English half turned into it.  He got caught in town, one hot
summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a
series of city pastorals.  Eclogues he called them, and meant to
have published them by subscription.  I remember some of his
verses, if you want to hear them. - You, Sir, (addressing myself to
the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college,
or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will
understand them without a dictionary.  The old man had a great deal
to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one
might say, to HIBERNATION.  Intramural aestivation, or town-life in
summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or
semi-asphyxia.  One wakes up from it about the beginning of the
last week in September.  This is what I remember of his poem:-


AESTIVATION.

AN UNPUBLISHED POEM, BY MY LATE LATIN TUTOR

IN candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.

How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!

To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, -
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!

Me wretched!  Let me curr to quercine shades
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, -
Depart, - be off, - excede, - evade, - erump!


- I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains. - No, I am
not going to say which is best.  The one where your place is is the
best for you.  But this difference there is:  you can domesticate
mountains, but the sea is FERAE NATURAE.  You may have a hut, or
know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half-
way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and
you might share it.  You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you
know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in
October, when the maples and beeches have faded.  All its reliefs
and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that
hang round the walls of your memory's chamber. - The sea remembers
nothing.  It is feline.  It licks your feet, - its huge flanks purr
very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you,
for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if
nothing had happened.  The mountains give their lost children
berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die.
The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea
has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence.  The mountains lie
about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon,
but safe to handle.  The sea smooths its silver scales until you
cannot see their joints, - but their shining is that of a snake's
belly, after all. - In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a
difference.  The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the
procession of its long generations.  The sea drowns out humanity
and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to
eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and
ever.

Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore.  I should
love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of
my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see
it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its
smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show
its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its
mad, but, to me, harmless fury. - And then, - to look at it with
that inward eye, - who does not love to shuffle off time and its
concerns, at intervals, - to forget who is President and who is
Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which
golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system
is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats
its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of
human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human
chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?

-  What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence? -
Constitution, first of all.  How much snow could you melt in an
hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it?  Comfort is
essential to enjoyment.  All sensitive people should remember that
persons in easy circumstances suffer much more cold in summer -
that is, the warm half of the year - than in winter, or the other
half.  You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as
your clothing to your shape.  After this, consult your taste and
convenient.  But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry
mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must
have an ocean in your soul.  Nature plays at dominos with you; you
must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.

- The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she
was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they
took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.

Have you ever read the little book called "The Stars and the
Earth?" - said I. - Have you seen the Declaration of Independence
photographed in a surface that a fly's foot would cover?  The forms
or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing
in themselves, - only our way of looking at things.  You are right,
I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being
quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world.  Every man of
reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle
which is drawn about his intellect.  He has a perfectly clear sense
that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of
many other minds of which he is cognizant.  He often recognizes
these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius.
On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside
of our own, we say it INTERSECTS ours, but are very slow to confess
or to see that it CIRCUMSCRIBES it.  Every now and then a man's
mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks
back to its former dimensions.  After looking at the Alps, I felt
that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its
elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I
had to spread these to fit it.

-  If I thought I should ever see the Alps! - said the
schoolmistress.

Perhaps you will, some time or other, - I said.

It is not very likely, - she answered. - I have had one or two
opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a
rich family.

[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman!  Well, I can't say I
like you any the worse for it.  How long will school-keeping take
to kill you?  Is it possible the poor thing works with her needle,
too?  I don't like those marks on the side of her forefinger.

TABLEAU.  Chamouni.  Mont Blanc in full view.  Figures in the
foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of
- oh, - ah, - yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on
his shoulder. - The ingenuous reader will understand that this was
an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one
instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished
into black nonentity by the first question which recalled me to
actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which
I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some
poor but honest shop-boy's head, just taken off by its sudden and
unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come
down in front of it "by the run."]

- Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to
at last?  I used to be very ambitious, - wasteful, extravagant, and
luxurious in all my fancies.  Read too much in the "Arabian
Nights."  Must have the lamp, - couldn't do without the ring.
Exercise every morning on the brazen horse.  Plump down into
castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of
young sparrows.  All love me dearly at once. - Charming idea of
life, but too high-colored for the reality.  I have outgrown all
this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive, - almost,
perhaps, ascetic.  We carry happiness into our condition, but must
not hope to find it there.  I think you will be willing to hear
some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of my
maturity.


CONTENTMENT.

"Man wants but little here below."

LITTLE I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A VERY PLAIN brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own; -
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.

Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten; -
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank heaven for three.  Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice; -
My CHOICE would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land; -
Give me a mortgage here and there, -
Some good bank-stock, - some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share; -
I only ask that Fortune send
A LITTLE more than I shall spend.

Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names; -
I would, PERHAPS, be Plenipo, -
But only near St. James; -
I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.

Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things; -
One good-sized diamond in a pin, -
Some, NOT SO LARGE, in rings, -
A ruby and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me; - I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;) -
I own perhaps I MIGHT desire
Some shawls of true cashmere, -
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare
An easy gait - two, forty-five -
Suits me; I do not care; -
Perhaps, for just a SINGLE SPURT,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four, -
I love so much their style and tone, -
One Turner, and no more, -
(A landscape, - foreground golden dirt
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)

Of books but few, - some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor; -
Some LITTLE luxury THERE
Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems, - such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride; -
ONE Stradivarius, I confess,
TWO Meerschaums, I would fain possess.

Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; -
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But ALL must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share, -
I ask but ONE recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them MUCH, -
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!


MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
(A PARENTHESIS.)

I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together before
this one.  I found the effect of going out every morning was
decidedly favorable on her health.  Two pleasing dimples, the
places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy,
in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to
me from the school-house-steps.

I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking.  At any rate, if
I should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen
walks we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint
from my friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own
risk and expense, would be the proper method of bringing them
before the public.

- I would have a woman as true as Death.  At the first real lie
which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly
chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a
governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over
again, even to her bones and marrow. - Whether gifted with the
accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the
rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving
mortal of her.  Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I
think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it
belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them. - Proud
she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the
sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the
two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy. - She who nips off the end
of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to
bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize,
proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of
bad blood.  Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people
gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with
her real equals, she has something about herself or her family she
is ashamed of, or ought to be.  Middle, and more than middle-aged
people, who know family histories, generally see through it.  An
official of standing was rude to me once.  Oh, that is the maternal
grandfather, - said a wise old friend to me, - he was a boor. -
Better too few words, from the woman we love, than too many:  while
she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is
working for herself. - Love is sparingly soluble in the words of
men; therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's
speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.

-  Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress,
or not, - whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon, - whether I
cribbed them from Balzac, - whether I dipped them from the ocean of
Tupperian wisdom, - or whether I have just found them in my head,
laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my
observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I
cannot say.  Wise men have said more foolish things, - and foolish
men, I don't doubt, have said as wise things.  Anyhow, the
schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of
which I do not feel bound to report.

- You are a stranger to me, Ma'am. - I don't doubt you would like
to know all I said to the schoolmistress. - I sha'n't do it; - I
had rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested
in this.  Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it.  I shall
tell only what I like of what I remember.

-  My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque
spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes.  I
know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company
with my young friend.  There were the shrubs and flowers in the
Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his
granite foot upon them.  Then there are certain small seraglio-
gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high
fences, - one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it, - here and there
one at the North and South Ends.  Then the great elms in Essex
Street.  Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in
Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head,
(as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were
whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!" - and the
rest of that benediction.  Nay, there are certain patches of
ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always
has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has
covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with
each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and
you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have
disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece.  The
Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street,
which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation,
beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as
ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-
and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at
their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and
puts everything in high colors relating to it.  That is his way
about everything.  I hold any man cheap, - he said, - of whom
nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.
- How is that, Professor? - said I; - I should have set you down
for one of that sort. - Sir, - said he, - I am proud to say, that
Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck
without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the
garden of the Luxembourg.  And the Professor showed the whites of
his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many
courses.

I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities.  You heap
up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
which was green once.  The trees look down from the hill-sides and
ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, - "What are these people
about?"  And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper
back, - "We will go and see."  So the small herbs pack themselves
up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
them at night and whispers, "Come with me."  Then they go softly
with it into the great city, - one to a cleft in the pavement, one
to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
nothing but a man is buried, - and there they grow, looking down on
the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
railings.  Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other, - "Wait
awhile!"  The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
other, - "Wait awhile!"  By-and-by the flow of life in the streets
ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants - the smaller tribes always in
front - saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to
be picked out of the granite to find them food.  At last the trees
take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have
encamped in the market-place.  Wait long enough and you will find
an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow
underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House.  Oh,
so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

- Let us cry! -

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
schoolmistress.  I did not say that I would not tell you something
about them.  Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I
ought to, probably.  We never tell our secrets to people that pump
for them.

Books we talked about, and education.  It was her duty to know
something of these, and of course she did.  Perhaps I was somewhat
more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her
reading and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a
library.  The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman
goes to work softly with a cloth.  She does not raise half the
dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it, - but she goes into
all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers. -
Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive
the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest
lines are reproduced.  A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after
a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her
gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together.
I thought I knew something about that, - that I could speak or
write about it somewhat to the purpose.

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
water, - to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills
its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit, - to have winnowed every
wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through
the flume upon its float-boards, - to have curled up in the keenest
spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-
sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or
four score years, - to have fought all the devils and clasped all
the angels of its delirium, - and then, just at the point when the
white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our
experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or
other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of
spring and temper in it.  All this I thought my power and province.

The schoolmistress had tried life, too.  Once in a while one meets
with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes
before it.  As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken
eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a
balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which
this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble in the
palm of their slender hands.  This was one of them.  Fortune had
left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the
loneliness of almost friendless city-life were before her.  Yet, as
I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness
which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various
matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and
lip and every shifting lineament were made for love, - unconscious
of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty
with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing
less than the Great Passion.

- I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the
course of these pleasant walks.  It seemed to me that we talked of
everything but love on that particular morning.  There was,
perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I
have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house.  In
fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but,
somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual.
The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer
which was to leave at noon, - with the condition, however, of being
released in case circumstances occurred to detain me.  The
schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.

It was on the Common that we were walking.  The MALL, or boulevard
of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
different directions.  One of these runs down from opposite Joy
Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston
Street.  We called it the long path, and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we
came opposite the head of this path on that morning.  I think I
tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible.  At
last I got out the question, - Will you take the long path with me?
- Certainly, - said the schoolmistress, - with much pleasure. -
Think, - I said, - before you answer; if you take the long path
with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more! -
The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an
arrow had struck her.

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by, - the one
you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. - Pray, sit down, - I
said. - No, no, she answered, softly, - I will walk the LONG PATH
with you!

- The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm,
about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly, -
"Good morning, my dears!"



CHAPTER XII.



[I DID not think it probable that I should have a great many more
talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much
as I could into every conversation.  That is the reason why you
will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to
tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them
habitually at our breakfast-table. - We're very free and easy, you
know; we don't read what we don't like.  Our parish is so large,
one can't pretend to preach to all the pews at once.  One can't be
all the time trying to do the best of one's best if a company works
a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn't be straining themselves
all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff.  Let them wash
some of those lower-story windows a little.  Besides, there is no
use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get
through this paper.]

- Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond
to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels.  I am
thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially
in Italy.  Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes
it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it
without sticking.  I can prove some facts about travelling by a
story or two.  There are certain principles to be assumed, - such
as these:- He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues. - To-
day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's
revolution.  A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of
Dr. Gould's private planets. - Every traveller is a self-taught
entomologist. - Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an
old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home, -
which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather
than increased vitality.  There was a story about "strahps to your
pahnts," which was vastly funny to us fellows - on the road from
Milan to Venice. - CAELUM, NON ANIMUM, - travellers change their
guineas, but not their characters.  The bore is the same, eating
dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans
in Beacon Street. - Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct
for "establishing raws" upon each other. - A man shall sit down
with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take
up the question they had been talking about under "the great elm,"
and forget all about Egypt.  When I was crossing the Po, we were
all fighting about the propriety of one fellow's telling another
that his argument was ABSURD; one maintaining it to be a perfectly
admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase "reductio ad
absurdum;" the rest badgering him as a conversational bully.
Mighty little we troubled ourselves for PADUS, the Po, "a river
broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal
led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their
trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat
was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

- Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or
annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but
obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often
affects us more than one in full costume.


"Is this the mighty ocean? - is this all?"


says the Princess in Gebir.  The rush that should have flooded my
soul in the Coliseum did not come.  But walking one day in the
fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken
masonry, and lo! the World's Mistress in her stone girdle - ALTA
MAENIA ROMAE - rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale
shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning's work at one
of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old
church of St. Etienne du Mont.  The tomb of St. Genevieve,
surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the
mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a
noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken
shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous
staircase like a coil of lace.  These things I mention from memory,
but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription
on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls.  It told how
this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year
16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls
of the parish (FILLES DE LA PAROISSE) fell from the gallery,
carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but
by a miracle escaped uninjured.  Two young girls, nameless, but
real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came
fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the
sharpest treble in the Te Deum.  (Look at Carlyle's article on
Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson
talked with in the streets one evening.)  All the crowd gone but
these two "filles de la paroisse," - gone as utterly as the dresses
they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and
meat that were in the market on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that
call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or
struggle, reach us most nearly.  I remember the platform at Berne,
over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse
sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in
the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild
youth, but God's servant from that day forward.  I have forgotten
the famous bears, and all else. - I remember the Percy lion on the
bridge over the little river at Alnwick, - the leaden lion with his
tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle, - and why?  Because
of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden
tail, standing out over the water, - which breaking, he dropped
into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest
of his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-
axe must have a slanting edge.  Something intensely human, narrow,
and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily
than huge occurrences and catastrophes.  A nail will pick a lock
that defies hatchet and hammer.  "The Royal George" went down with
all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it;
but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the
lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the
same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is
still young.  You remember the monument in Devizes market to the
woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth.  I never saw that, but
it is in the books.  Here is one I never heard mentioned; - if any
of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.
Where is this monument?  I was riding on an English stage-coach

when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of
considerable size and pretensions. - What is that? - I said. -
That, - answered the coachman, - is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR.  Then he
told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal
sheep.  He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over
his head, and started for home.  In climbing a fence, the rope
slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him.  Next morning
he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on
the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this
monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better
than virtue.  I will send a copy of this record to him or her who
shall first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something
which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons.  I
once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the
highest, I think, in Europe.  It is a shaft of stone filigree-work,
frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to
keep you from falling.  To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
twenty digits.  While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense
inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire
was rocking.  It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a
cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it.  I mentioned it
to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
forward, - I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will
intersect it.  Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of
Dumeril's in an old journal, - the "Magazin Encyclopedique" for
L'AN TROISIEME, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the
vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral.  A man can shake it
so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly
seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like
that of an earthquake.  I have seen one of those wretched wooden
spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone
churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell
the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a
wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing's happening in a
stone spire.  Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like
a blade of grass?  I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way; - perhaps we
will have some philosophy by and by; - let me work out this thin
mechanical vein. - I have something more to say about trees.  I
have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you.  Tree blew
down in my woods (that were) in 1852.  Twelve feet and a half
round, fair girth; - nine feet, where I got my section, higher up.
This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a
slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family.  Length,
about eighteen inches.  I have studied the growth of this tree by
its rings, and it is curious.  Three hundred and forty-two rings.
Started, therefore, about 1510.  The thickness of the rings tells
the rate at which it grew.  For five or six years the rate was
slow, - then rapid for twenty years.  A little before the year 1550
it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy
years.  In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then
for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew
pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when
it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here.  Here are some human lives laid down against the periods
of its growth, to which they corresponded.  This is Shakspeare's.
The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches
when he died.  A little less than ten inches when Milton was born;
seventeen when he died.  Then comes a long interval, and this
thread marks out Johnson's life, during which the tree increased
from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter.  Here is the
span of Napoleon's career; - the tree doesn't seem to have minded
it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this
section.  I have seen many wooden preachers, - never one like this.
How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings
of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on
earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the
stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history
as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!

I have something more to say about elms.  A relative tells me there
is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford.  I have some
recollections of the former place, pleasant and other.  [I wonder
if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to.  My
room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling
deaths, and people's ages, as they do in the country.  He swore -
(ministers' sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt
to handle them carelessly) - that the children were dying by the
dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in
recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the
clock got through striking.]  At the foot of "the hill," down in
town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been
hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (CREDAT
HAHNEMANNUS,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in
its wood.  Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut,
telling me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town.
One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end!
What do you say to that?  And gentle ladies beneath it, that love
it and celebrate its praises!  And that in a town of such supreme,
audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich! - Only the dear people
there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere
accident of spelling.

NorWICH.
PorCHmouth.
CincinnatAH.

What a sad picture of our civilization!

I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the
Colman farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for
many years, and did not like to trust my recollection.  But I had
it in memory, and even noted down, as one of the finest trees in
symmetry and beauty I had ever seen.  I have received a document,
signed by two citizens of a neighboring town, certified by the
postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated,
reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college-
class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to
belong, who, though he has FORMERLY been a member of Congress, is,
I believe, fully worthy of confidence.  The tree "girts" eighteen
and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real beauty.
I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don't have
"youth at the prow," we will have "pleasure at the 'elm."


And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows
in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for
anything but thanks.

[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these
notes.  The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and
brief poem, from New Orleans.  I could not make any of them public,
though sometimes requested to do so.  Some of them have given me
great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose
faces I had never seen.  If you are pleased with anything a writer
says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a
pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring
you, and so becomes tired himself.  I purr very loud over a good,
honest letter that says pretty things to me.]

- Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to
have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public,
and of themselves.  Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young
folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send.  It is not
fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are
hundreds that are in need of it.


DEAR SIR, - You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser
than I was at your age.  I don't wish to be understood as saying
too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on
my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of
development.

You long to "leap at a single bound into celebrity."  Nothing is so
common-place as to wish to be remarkable.  Fame usually comes to
those who are thinking about something else, - very rarely to those
who say to themselves, "Go to, now, let us be a celebrated
individual!"  The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in
notoriety; - that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to the
pillory which is crowded with fools who could not hold their
tongues and rogues who could not hide their tricks.

If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it.
The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true
originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and
newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the
ripe apples and pears are.  Produce anything really good, and an
intelligent editor will jump at it.  Don't flatter yourself that
any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame.
Nothing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having
from a new hand.  There is always a dearth of really fine articles
for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety
are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head;
some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full
reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb.

You may have genius.  The contrary is of course probable, but it is
not demonstrated.  If you have, the world wants you more than you
want it.  It has not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark
of genius that shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in
our national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one,
among his friends, and no takers, that he is the real, genuine, no-
mistake Osiris.

QU'EST CE QU'IL A FAIT?  What has he done?  That was Napoleon's
test.  What have you done?  Turn up the faces of your picture-
cards, my boy!  You need not make mouths at the public because it
has not accepted you at your own fancy-valuation.  Do the prettiest
thing you can and wait your time.

For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I
dare not affirm that they show promise.  I am not an editor, but I
know the standard of some editors.  You must not expect to "leap
with a single bound" into the society of those whom it is not
flattery to call your betters.  When "The Pactolian" has paid you
for a copy of verses, - (I can furnish you a list of alliterative
signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe
Zenith,) - when "The Rag-bag" has stolen your piece, after
carefully scratching your name out, - when "The Nut-cracker" has
thought you worth shelling, and strung the kernel of your cleverest
poem, - then, and not till then, you may consider the presumption
against you, from the fact of your rhyming tendency, as called in
question, and let our friends hear from you, if you think it worth
while.  You may possibly think me too candid, and even accuse me of
incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half so plain-
spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time.  If you prefer the long
jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try it
like a man.  Only remember this, - that, if a bushel of potatoes is
shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes
always get to the bottom.  Believe me, etc., etc.


I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these
are by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless,
querulous, unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with.
Is a young man in the habit of writing verses?  Then the
presumption is that he is an inferior person.  For, look you, there
are at least nine chances in ten that he writes POOR verses.  Now
the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them
is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of
feebleness and a debilitating agent.  A young man can get rid of
the presumption against him afforded by his writing verses only by
convincing us that they are verses worth writing.

All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed
to any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of
these pages.  I would always treat any given young person passing
through the meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of
adolescence with great tenderness.  God forgive us if we ever speak
harshly to young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths,
and so sooner or later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on
the lips who might have sung the world into sweet trances, had we
not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings!  Just as
my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for the
ungifted who are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-
estimate.  I have always tried to be gentle with the most hopeless
cases.  My experience, however, has not been encouraging.

- X. Y., aet. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and
broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls
in his village, and "got the mitten" (pronounced mittIn) two or
three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and
truthing, in the newspapers.  Sends me some strings of verses,
candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I
learn for the millionth time one of the following facts:  either
that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about
time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with
time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with
time or with a chime.  Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice
as to his future course.

What shall I do about it?  Tell him the whole truth, and send him a
ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded
Youth?  One doesn't like to be cruel, - and yet one hates to lie.
Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism, -
recommends study of good models, - that writing verse should be an
incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the
needle, the lapstone, or the ledger, - and, above all that there
should be no hurry in printing what is written.  Not the least use
in all this.  The poetaster who has tasted type is done for.  He is
like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency.  He
feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very
bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy.  One of these
young brains is like a bunch of India crackers; once touch fire to
it and it is best to keep hands off until it has done popping, - if
it ever stops.  I have two letters on file; one is a pattern of
adulation, the other of impertinence.  My reply to the first,
containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous
language, had brought out the second.  There was some sport in
this, but Dulness is not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after
he is struck.  You may set it down as a truth which admits of few
exceptions, that those who ask your OPINION really want your
PRAISE, and will be contented with nothing less.

There is another kind of application to which editors, or those
supposed to have access to them, are liable, and which often proves
trying and painful.  One is appealed to in behalf of some person in
needy circumstances who wishes to make a living by the pen.  A
manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication.  It
is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient.  If
Rachel's saying is true, that "fortune is the measure of
intelligence," then poverty is evidence of limited capacity which
it too frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception
here and there.  Now an editor is a person under a contract with
the public to furnish them with the best things he can afford for
his money.  Charity shown by the publication of an inferior article
would be like the generosity of Claude Duval and the other
gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much they robbed the
rich to have the means of relieving them.

Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the
trials to which they are submitted.  They have nothing to do but to
develope enormous calluses at every point of contact with
authorship.  Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of
intellect.  They must reject the unfit productions of those whom
they long to befriend, because it would be a profligate charity to
accept them.  One cannot burn his house down to warm the hands even
of the fatherless and the widow.


THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.

- You haven't heard about my friend the Professor's first
experiment in the use of anaesthetics, have you?

He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his
about the chaise.  He spoke to me once or twice about another poem
of similar character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would
listen to and criticize.

One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking
very red in the cheeks and heavy about the eyes. - Hy'r'ye? - he
said, and made for an arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat
and then his person, going smack through the crown of the former as
neatly as they do the trick at the circus.  The Professor jumped at
the explosion as if he had sat down on one of those small CALTHROPS
our grandfathers used to sow round in the grass when there were
Indians about, - iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a
half long, - stick through moccasins into feet, - cripple 'em on
the spot, and give 'em lockjaw in a day or two.

At the same time he let off one of those big words which lie at the
bottom of the best man's vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in
his life, - just as every man's hair MAY stand on end, but in most
men it never does.

After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript,
together with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just
been writing an introduction or prelude to the main performance.  A
certain suspicion had come into my mind that the Professor was not
quite right, which was confirmed by the way he talked; but I let
him begin.  This is the way he read it:-

PRELUDE.

I'M the fellah that tole one day
The tale of the won'erful one-hoss-shay.
Wan' to hear another?  Say.
- Funny, wasn'it?  Made ME laugh, -
I'm too modest, I am, by half, -
Made me laugh'S THOUGH I SH'D SPLIT, -
Cahn' a fellah like fellah's own wit? -
- Fellahs keep sayin', - "Well, now that's nice;
Did it once, but cahn' do it twice." -
Don' you b'lieve the'z no more fat;
Lots in the kitch'n 'z good 'z that.
Fus'-rate throw, 'n' no mistake, -
Han' us the props for another shake; -
Know I'll try, 'n' guess I'll win;
Here sh' goes for hit 'm ag'in!

Here I thought it necessary to interpose. - Professor, - I said, -
you are inebriated.  The style of what you call your "Prelude"
shows that it was written under cerebral excitement.  Your
articulation is confused.  You have told me three times in
succession, in exactly the same words, that I was the only true
friend you had in the world that you would unbutton your heart to.
You smell distinctly and decidedly of spirits. - I spoke, and
paused; tender, but firm.

Two large tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor's lids, - in
obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that
delicious bit of bladdery bathos, "The very law that moulds a
tear," with which the "Edinburgh Review" attempted to put down
Master George Gordon when that young man was foolishly trying to
make himself conspicuous.

One of these tears peeped over the edge of the lid until it lost
its balance, - slid an inch and waited for reinforcements, -
swelled again, - rolled down a little further, - stopped, - moved
on, - and at last fell on the back of the Professor's hand.  He
held it up for me to look at, and lifted his eyes, brimful, till
they met mine.

I couldn't stand it, - I always break down when folks cry in my
face, - so I hugged him, and said he was a dear old boy, and asked
him kindly what was the matter with him, and what made him smell so
dreadfully strong of spirits.

Upset his alcohol lamp, - he said, - and spilt the alcohol on his
legs.  That was it. - But what had he been doing to get his head
into such a state? - had he really committed an excess?  What was
the matter? - Then it came out that he had been taking chloroform
to have a tooth out, which had left him in a very queer state, in
which he had written the "Prelude" given above, and under the
influence of which he evidently was still.

I took the manuscript from his hands and read the following
continuation of the lines he had begun to read me, while he made up
for two or three nights' lost sleep as he best might.


PARSON TURELL'S LEGACY:
OR THE PRESIDENT'S OLD ARM-CHAIR.
A MATHEMATICAL STORY.

FACTS respecting an old arm-chair.
At Cambridge.  Is kept in the College there.
Seems but little the worse for wear.
That's remarkable when I say
It was old in President Holyoke's day.
(One of his boys, perhaps you know,
Died, AT ONE HUNDRED, years ago.)
HE took lodging for rain or shine
Under green bed-clothes in '69.

Know old Cambridge?  Hope you do. -
Born there?  Don't say so!  I was, too.
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, -
Standing still, if you must have proof. -
"Gambrel? - Gambrel?" - Let me beg
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg, -
First great angle above the hoof, -
That's the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.)
- Nicest place that ever was seen, -
Colleges red and Common green,
Sidewalks brownish with trees between.
Sweetest spot beneath the skies
When the canker-worms don't rise, -
When the dust, that sometimes flies
Into your mouth and ears and eyes.
In a quiet slumber lies,
NOT in the shape of unbaked pies
Such as barefoot children prize.

A kind of harber it seems to be,
Facing the flow of a boundless sea.
Rows of gray old Tutors stand
Ranged like rocks above the sand;
Rolling beneath them, soft and green,
Breaks the tide of bright sixteen, -
One wave, two waves, three waves, four,
Sliding up the sparkling floor;
Then it ebbs to flow no more,
Wandering off from shore to shore
With its freight of golden ore!
- Pleasant place for boys to play; -
Better keep your girls away;
Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
Which countless fingering waves pursue,
And every classic beach is strown
With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.

But this is neither here nor there; -
I'm talking about an old arm-chair.
You've heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELL?
Over at Medford he used to dwell;
Married one of the Mathers' folk;
Got with his wife a chair of oak, -
Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge, -
One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings, -
But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand, -
Fit for the worthies of the land, -
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in,
Or Cotton Mather to sit - and lie - in.
- Parson Turell bequeathed the same
To a certain student, - SMITH by name;
These were the terms, as we are told:
"Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde;
When he doth graduate, then to passe
To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe.
On Payment of" -(naming a certain sum) -
"By him to whom ye Chaire shall come;
He to ye oldest Senior next,
And soe forever," - (thus runs the text,) -
"But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime,
That being his Debte for use of same."

SMITH transferred it to one of the BROWNS,
And took his money, - five silver crowns.
BROWN delivered it up to MOORE,
Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four.
MOORE made over the chair to LEE,
Who gave him crowns of silver three.
LEE conveyed it unto DREW,
And now the payment, of course, was two.
DREW gave up the chair to DUNN, -
All he got, as you see, was one.
DUNN released the chair to HALL,
And got by the bargain no crown at all.
- And now it passed to a second BROWN,
Who took it, and likewise CLAIMED A CROWN.
When BROWN conveyed it unto WARE,
Having had one crown, to make it fair,
He paid him two crowns to take the chair;
And WARE, being honest, (as all Wares be,)
He paid one POTTER, who took it, three.
Four got ROBINSON; five got DIX;
JOHNSON PRIMUS demanded six;
And so the sum kept gathering still
Till after the battle of Bunker's Hill
- When paper money became so cheap,
Folks wouldn't count it, but said "a heap,"

A certain RICHARDS, the books declare,
(A. M. in '90?  I've looked with care
Through the Triennial, - NAME NOT THERE.)
This person, Richards, was offered then
Eight score pounds, but would have ten;
Nine, I think, was the sum he took, -
Not quite certain, - but see the book.
- By and by the wars were still,
But nothing had altered the Parson's will.
The old arm-chair was solid yet,
But saddled with such a monstrous debt!
Things grew quite too bad to bear,
Paying such sums to get rid of the chair!
But dead men's fingers hold awful tight,
And there was the will in black and white,
Plain enough for a child to spell.
What should be done no man could tell,
For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse,
And every season but made it worse.

As a last resort, to clear the doubt,
They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out.
The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop
And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop;
Halberds glittered and colors flew,
French horns whinnied and trumpets blew,
The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth
And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath;
So he rode with all his band,
Till the President met him, cap in hand.
- The Governor "hefted" the crowns, and said, -
"A will is a will, and the Parson's dead."
The Governor hefted the crowns.  Said he, -
"There is your p'int.  And here's my fee.
These are the terms you must fulfil, -
On such conditions I BREAK THE WILL!"
The Governor mentioned what these should be.
(Just wait a minute and then you'll see.)
The President prayed.  Then all was still,
And the Governor rose and BROKE THE WILL!
- "About those conditions?"  Well, now you go
And do as I tell you, and then you'll know.
Once a year, on Commencement-day,
If you'll only take the pains to stay,
You'll see the President in the CHAIR,
Likewise the Governor sitting there.
The President rises; both old and young
May hear his speech in a foreign tongue,
The meaning whereof, as lawyers swear,
Is this:  Can I keep this old arm-chair?
And then his Excellency bows,
As much as to say that he allows.
The Vice-Gub. next is called by name;
He bows like t'other, which means the same.
And all the officers round 'em bow,
As much as to say that THEY allow.
And a lot of parchments about the chair
Are handed to witnesses then and there,
And then the lawyers hold it clear
That the chair is safe for another year.

God bless you, Gentlemen!  Learn to give
Money to colleges while you live.
Don't be silly and think you'll try
To bother the colleges, when you die,
With codicil this, and codicil that,
That Knowledge may starve while Law grows fat;
For there never was pitcher that wouldn't spill,
And there's always a flaw in a donkey's will!


- Hospitality is a good deal a matter of latitude, I suspect.  The
shade of a palm-tree serves an African for a hut; his dwelling is
all door and no walls; everybody can come in.  To make a morning
call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long
tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an
apple with a worm-hole has.  One might, very probably, trace a
regular gradation between these two extremes.  In cities where the
evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors,
where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the
interchange of civilities.  A good deal, which in colder regions is
ascribed to mean dispositions, belongs really to mean temperature.

Once in a while, even in our Northern cities, at noon, in a very
hot summer's day, one may realize, by a sudden extension in his
sphere of consciousness, how closely he is shut up for the most
part. - Do you not remember something like this?  July, between 1
and 2, P. M., Fahrenheit 96 degrees, or thereabout.  Windows all
gaping, like the mouths of panting dogs.  Long, stinging cry of a
locust comes in from a tree, half a mile off; had forgotten there
was such a tree.  Baby's screams from a house several blocks
distant; - never knew there were any babies in the neighborhood
before.  Tinman pounding something that clatters dreadfully, - very
distinct, but don't remember any tinman's shop near by.  Horses
stamping on pavement to get off flies.  When you hear these four
sounds, you may set it down as a warm day.  Then it is that one
would like to imitate the mode of life of the native at Sierra
Leone, as somebody has described it:  stroll into the market in
natural costume, - buy a water-melon for a halfpenny, - split it,
and scoop out the middle, - sit down in one half of the empty rind,
clap the other on one's head, and feast upon the pulp.

- I see some of the London journals have been attacking some of
their literary people for lecturing, on the ground of its being a
public exhibition of themselves for money.  A popular author can
print his lecture; if he deliver it, it is a case of QUAESTUM
CORPORE, or making profit of his person.  None but "snobs" do that.
ERGO, etc.  To this I reply, - NEGATUR MINOR.  Her Most Gracious
Majesty, the Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part of the
service for which she is paid.  We do not consider it low-bred in
her to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it so to hearing
it from any other person, or reading it.  His Grace and his
Lordship exhibit themselves very often for popularity, and their
houses every day for money. - No, if a man shows himself other than
he is, if he belittles himself before an audience for hire, then he
acts unworthily.  But a true word, fresh from the lips of a true
man, is worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, or
even of fifty dollars a lecture.  The taunt must be an outbreak of
jealousy against the renowned authors who have the audacity to be
also orators.  The sub-lieutenants (of the press) stick a too
popular writer and speaker with an epithet in England, instead of
with a rapier, as in France. - Poh!  All England is one great
menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded
cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the
talking-bird's and the nightingale's being willing to become a part
of the exhibition!


THE LONG PATH.
(LAST OF THE PARENTHESES.)


Yes, that was my last walk with the SCHOOLMISTRESS.  It happened to
be the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young
woman, who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor,
and she was provided for elsewhere.  So it was no longer the
schoolmistress that I walked with, but - Let us not be in unseemly
haste.  I shall call her the schoolmistress still; some of you love
her under that name.

When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side,
there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation.  I confess I
pitied our landlady.  It took her all of a suddin, - she said.  Had
not known that we was keepin company, and never mistrusted anything
particular.  Ma'am was right to better herself.  Didn't look very
rugged to take care of a femily, but could get hired haalp, she
calc'lated. - The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her
soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her
daughter.

- No, poor, dear woman, - that could not have been.  But I am
dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile
on my face all the time.

The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out
of flowering instincts.  Life is maintained by the respiration of
oxygen and of sentiments.  In the long catalogue of scientific
cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as
that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump
and exhausting the air from it.  [I never saw the accursed trick
performed.  LAUS DEO!]  There comes a time when the souls of human
beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the
atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe.  Then it is
that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman
who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments.  The
element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her
crystalline prison.  Watch her through its transparent walls; - her
bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum.  Death is no riddle,
compared to this.  I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of
Martyrs."  The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that
frightened her most.  How many have withered and wasted under as
slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we
call Civilization!

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain,
overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young
person, whoever you may be, now reading this, - little thinking you
are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are
destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such
multitudes worthier than yourself.  But it is only my surface-
thought which laughs.  For that great procession of the UNLOVED,
who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the
locks of brown or gray, - under the snowy cap, under the chilling
turban, - hide it even from themselves, - perhaps never know they
wear it, though it kills them, - there is no depth of tenderness in
my nature that Pity has not sounded.  Somewhere, - somewhere, -
love is in store for them, - the universe must not be allowed to
fool them so cruelly.  What infinite pathos in the small, half-
unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to
recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear
sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God-
given instincts!

Read what the singing-women - one to ten thousand of the suffering
women - tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken!  Nature
is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough
lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue slate-
stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true that
"all sounds of life assumed one tone of love," as for Letitia
Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give
words to her grief, and they could not. - Will you hear a few
stanzas of mine?


THE VOICELESS.

WE count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, -
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them; -
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their hearts' sad story, -
Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death pours out his cordial wine
Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses, -
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!


I hope that our landlady's daughter is not so badly off, after all.
That young man from another city who made the remark which you
remember about Boston State-house and Boston folks, has appeared at
our table repeatedly of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive
to this young lady.  Only last evening I saw him leaning over her
while she was playing the accordion, - indeed, I undertook to join
them in a song, and got as far as "Come rest in this boo-oo," when,
my voice getting tremulous, I turned off, as one steps out of a
procession, and left the basso and soprano to finish it.  I see no
reason why this young woman should not be a very proper match for a
man that laughs about Boston State-house.  He can't be very
particular.

The young fellow whom I have so often mentioned was a little free
in his remarks, but very good-natured. - Sorry to have you go, - he
said. - School-ma'am made a mistake not to wait for me.  Haven't
taken anything but mournin' fruit at breakfast since I heard of it.
- MOURNING fruit, - said I, - what's that? - Huckleberries and
blackberries, - said he; - couldn't eat in colors, raspberries,
currants, and such, after a solemn thing like this happening. - The
conceit seemed to please the young fellow.  If you will believe it,
when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it
out as follows.  You know those odious little "saas-plates" that
figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns,
into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre
of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel
homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery
tea-spoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub, -
(not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are
of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean
bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or "lucent syrups tinct with
cinnamon," and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the Tower-
stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy, - as people in the green
stage of millionism will have them, - I can dally with their amber
semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,) - you know these
small, deep dishes, I say.  When we came down the next morning,
each of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf.
On lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black
huckleberries.  But one of those plates held red currants, and was
covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was
covered with a white rose.  There was a laugh at this at first, and
then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the
old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna
handkerchief

- "What was the use in waiting?  We should be too late for
Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer." - The hand I
held trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed
herself before the feet of Ahasuerus. - She had been reading that
chapter, for she looked up, - if there was a film of moisture over
her eyes there was also the faintest shadow of a distant smile
skirting her lips, but not enough to accent the dimples, - and
said, in her pretty, still way, - "If it please the king, and if I
have found favor in his sight, and the thing seem right before the
king, and I be pleasing in his eyes" -

I don't remember what King Ahasuerus did or said when Esther got
just to that point of her soft, humble words, - but I know what I
did.  That quotation from Scripture was cut short, anyhow.  We came
to a compromise on the great question, and the time was settled for
the last day of summer.

In the mean time, I talked on with our boarders, much as usual, as
you may see by what I have reported.  I must say, I was pleased
with a certain tenderness they all showed toward us, after the
first excitement of the news was over.  It came out in trivial
matters, - but each one, in his or her way, manifested kindness.
Our landlady, for instance, when we had chickens, sent the LIVER
instead of the GIZZARD, with the wing, for the schoolmistress.
This was not an accident; the two are never mistaken, though some
landladies APPEAR as if they did not know the difference.  The
whole of the company were even more respectfully attentive to my
remarks than usual.  There was no idle punning, and very little
winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the
reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question
or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant, - except when
the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the
landlady's daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until
she would ask what he was pokin' his fun at her for, and if he
wasn't ashamed of himself.  In fact, they all behaved very
handsomely, so that I really felt sorry at the thought of leaving
my boarding-house.

I suppose you think, that, because I lived at a plain widow-woman's
plain table, I was of course more or less infirm in point of
worldly fortune.  You may not be sorry to learn, that, though not
what GREAT MERCHANTS call very rich, I was comfortable, -
comfortable, - so that most of those moderate luxuries I described
in my verses on CONTENTMENT - MOST of them, I say - were within our
reach, if we chose to have them.  But I found out that the
schoolmistress had a vein of charity about her, which had hitherto
been worked on a small silver and copper basis, which made her
think less, perhaps, of luxuries than even I did, - modestly as I
have expressed my wishes.

It is a rather pleasant thing to tell a poor young woman, whom one
has contrived to win without showing his rent-roll, that she has
found what the world values so highly, in following the lead of her
affections.  That was an enjoyment I was now ready for.

I began abruptly:- Do you know that you are a rich young person?

I know that I am very rich, - she said. - Heaven has given me more
than I ever asked; for I had not thought love was ever meant for
me.

It was a woman's confession, and her voice fell to a whisper as it
threaded the last words.

I don't mean that, - I said, - you blessed little saint and seraph!
- if there's an angel missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her
at this boarding house! - I don't mean that!  I mean that I - that
is, you - am - are - confound it! - I mean that you'll be what most
people call a lady of fortune.  And I looked full in her eyes for
the effect of the announcement.

There wasn't any.  She said she was thankful that I had what would
save me from drudgery, and that some other time I should tell her
about it. - I never made a greater failure in an attempt to produce
a sensation.

So the last day of summer came.  It was our choice to go to the
church, but we had a kind of reception at the boarding-house.  The
presents were all arranged, and among them none gave more pleasure
than the modest tributes of our fellow-boarders, - for there was
not one, I believe, who did not send something.  The landlady would
insist on making an elegant bride-cake, with her own hands; to
which Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add certain embellishments
out of his private funds, - namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done
in white sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars and stripes,
which had a very pleasing effect, I assure you.  The landlady's
daughter sent a richly bound copy of Tupper's Poems.  On a blank
leaf was the following, written in a very delicate and careful
hand:-


Presented to . . . by . . .
On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony.
May sunshine ever beam o'er her!


Even the poor relative thought she must do something, and sent a
copy of "The Whole Duty of Man," bound in very attractive
variegated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled.  From the divinity-
student came the loveliest English edition of "Keble's Christian
Year."  I opened it, when it came, to the FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT,
and read that angelic poem, sweeter than anything I can remember
since Xavier's "My God, I love thee." - I am not a Churchman, - I
don't believe in planting oaks in flower-pots, - but such a poem as
"The Rosebud" makes one's heart a proselyte to the culture it grows
from.  Talk about it as much as you like, - one's breeding shows
itself nowhere more than in his religion.  A man should be a
gentleman in his hymns and prayers; the fondness for "scenes,"
among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that -


"God only and good angels look
Behind the blissful scene,"-


and that other, -


"He could not trust his melting soul
But in his Maker's sight," -


that I hope some of them will see this, and read the poem, and
profit by it.

My laughing and winking young friend undertook to procure and
arrange the flowers for the table, and did it with immense zeal.  I
never saw him look happier than when he came in, his hat saucily on
one side, and a cheroot in his mouth, with a huge bunch of tea-
roses, which he said were for "Madam."

One of the last things that came was an old square box, smelling of
camphor, tied and sealed.  It bore, in faded ink, the marks,
"Calcutta, 1805."  On opening it, we found a white Cashmere shawl
with a very brief note from the dear old gentleman opposite, saying
that he had kept this some years, thinking he might want it, and
many more, not knowing what to do with it, - that he had never seen
it unfolded since he was a young supercargo, - and now, if she
would spread it on her shoulders, it would make him feel young to
look at it.

Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid of all work!  What must
she do but buy a small copper breast-pin and put it under
"Schoolma'am's" plate that morning, at breakfast?  And Schoolma'am
would wear it, - though I made her cover it, as well as I could,
with a tea-rose.

It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and I could not leave them
in utter silence.

Good-by, - I said, - my dear friends, one and all of you!  I have
been long with you, and I find it hard parting.  I have to thank
you for a thousand courtesies, and above all for the patience and
indulgence with which you have listened to me when I have tried to
instruct or amuse you.  My friend the Professor (who, as well as my
friend the Poet, is unavoidably absent on this interesting
occasion) has given me reason to suppose that he would occupy my
empty chair about the first of January next.  If he comes among
you, be kind to him, as you have been to me.  May the Lord bless
you all! - And we shook hands all round the table.

Half an hour afterwards the breakfast things and the cloth were
gone.  I looked up and down the length of the bare boards over
which I had so often uttered my sentiments and experiences - and -
Yes, I am a man, like another.

All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of these old friends of
mine, whom you know, and others a little more up in the world,
perhaps, to whom I have not introduced you, I took the
schoolmistress before the altar from the hands of the old gentleman
who used to sit opposite, and who would insist on giving her away.

And now we two are walking the long path in peace together.  The
"schoolmistress" finds her skill in teaching called for again,
without going abroad to seek little scholars.  Those visions of
mine have all come true.

I hope you all love me none the less for anything I have told you.
Farewell!




End of the  Project Gutenberg Etext of The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table








Etext prepared for Gutenberg by David Widger,  widger@cecomet.net


                  THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
                        by Oliver Wendell Holmes



PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
quarter of a century since these papers were written.  Statements
which were true then are not necessarily true now.  Thus, the speed
of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
49 of the "Autocrat."  No doubt many other statements and opinions
might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
than a score of years younger.

These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat."  They
had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
selfsame flight."

There is good reason why it should be so.  The first juice that runs
of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
the flow betrays the flavor of the skin.  If there is any freshness
in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
second series of papers to the first.  The new papers were more
aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
in others.  It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
called forth.  Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary.  It required
the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant!  One day, in the time
when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
Jones," and glance at the title-page.  There was one of those little
engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
patiently."  How many times, when, after rough usage from
ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
effervescence!  There is very little in them and very little of them;
and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
catastrophe.  The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.

But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
denunciation.

November, 1882.






PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
years.  The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.  If
the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is
natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception
of his more or less aggressive ideas.  He wishes to convince, not to
offend,--to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry
opposition in those who do not accept it.  There is commonly an
anxious look about a first Preface.  The author thinks he shall be
misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant
expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he
looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the
conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
radicals.  The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest
part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.

After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still
read, and that he must write a new Preface.  He comes smiling to his
task.  How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty
or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those
almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his
readers,--for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he
may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and
his sword in his left hand.

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic
Monthly" and introduced itself without any formal Preface.  A quarter
of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had
laid before him, was written.  There is no mark of worry, I think, in
that.  Old opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author
they had attacked or denounced.  Newspapers which had warned their
subscribers against him were glad to get him as a contributor to
their columns.  A great change had come over the community with
reference to their beliefs.  Christian believers were united as never
before in the feeling that, after all, their common object was to
elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity.  But within the
special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner.
As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown
themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the
Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the
transplanted Anglican church of this country.  Recent circumstances
have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic
communities which has been going on silently but surely.  The
licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one
department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-
tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.

The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
religious organizations.  We may demand the credentials of every
creed and catechise all the catechisms.  So we may discuss the
gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our
evening tea-cups.  There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives
up his legendary anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.

It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
controversy.  The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed
beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip
the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency.
"Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being
meddled with.  It means, of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in
the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a
religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that
we can bring to convince a jury of our fellow beings.  Its roots are
thus inextricably entangled with those of self-love and bleed as
mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.  Some persons may
even at this late day take offence at a few opinions expressed in the
following pages, but most of these passages will be read without loss
of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they may be
found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they are
still read by any.

BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.

O.  W.  H.






                        THE PROFESSOR

                           AT THE
                       BREAKFAST-TABLE.


          What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.




I

I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
It would have had a grand effect.  For this purpose I fixed my eyes
on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
being. --I will thank you for the sugar,--I said. --Man is a
dependent creature.

It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
the sugar to me.

--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.

The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
of the sugar question.

You smile,--I said. --Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
great things?

The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches. --Life is a great
bundle of great things,--he said.

(NOW, THEN!)  The great end of being, after all, is....

Hold on! --said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.

Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
the bait and hook intended for flounders.  On being drawn from the
water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
broad black feet.

When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
round the table with curiosity to see what it meant.  At the further
end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
fair level enough for him to get at his food.  His whole appearance
was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
spectacle.  I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
heard began so:

--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
pails to get water to make egg-pop with.  Born in Boston; went to
school in Boston as long as the boys would let me. --The little man
groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on. --Ran away from
school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
logger-head.  That was in flip days, when there were always two three
loggerheads in the fire.  I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em.  Yes,--up
on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
it looked, I tell you!  There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite!  You
can't make me ashamed of the old place!  Full crooked little
streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--

--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
thinking in a half-whisper, evidently. --I should think so; and got
kinked up, turnin' so many corners. --The little man did not hear
what was said, but went on,--

--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
steeples!

--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
amounting to a suspicion.  For this is a gentleman from a great city,
and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
him, and is the object of his especial attention.

How high?--said the little man. --As high as the first step of the
stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem.  Is n't that high enough?

It is,--I said. --The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
be so still.  But who shall tune the pitch-pipe?  Quis cus-(On the
whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
thought I would not finish it.)

--Go to the Bible! --said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
itself as a bit of economy.

You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
commentary on what you say.  "He who would bring back the wealth of
the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."  What you bring
away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]

--Here it is.  "Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, ,etc., etc.  By J.
J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858."

Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what
are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and
he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
humanity in particular.  It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I
hope you accept his conclusions.

The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.

But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her
argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.
--I don't like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have
pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well
mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
secret he wished to be relieved of.

--I continued. --If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
chance to become a convert to a better religion.

The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
the mind by changing the word which stands for it.

--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
divinity-student.

I will tell you,--I said. ---When a given symbol which represents a
thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and
consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.

The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these
from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
should say it aloud.  What do you care for O'm?  If you wanted to get
the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new
translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid
to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly
dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.

I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.

A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view.  If you wish to get
the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
and midwinter, for instance.  To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
as of the clergy.  Teachers and students of theology get a certain
look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
externals.  They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.  Of course they have their
false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
do. --The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
civilization.  They have never suffered it to stop.  They have often
carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
momentum stored in their vast body.  Sometimes, too, they have kept
it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
yields the bread of life.  But the mainspring of the world's onward
religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
tell you.  It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
that makes the people.  Of course, the profession reacts on its
source with variable energy. --But there never was a guild of dealers
or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.

Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
Harvard College yard.

--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man. --The bonfire when Robert
Calef's book was burned?

The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel.  You remember
the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
a set of fools and worse than fools they were-

Remember it?--said the little man. --I don't think I shall forget it,
as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
it wears.  There was a ring on it.

May I look at it?--I said.

Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.

He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
only a little above the level of the table, as he stood.  With pain
and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
varus, or inverted club-foot.

Stop!  stop! --I said,--let me come to you.

The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long
ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those
funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round
fit of glass was a death's head.  Engraved on one side of this, "L.
B.  AEt.  22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692

My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man. --Hanged for a
witch.  It does n't seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother,
and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
-That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert
Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-

Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.

This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.

--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
Divinity."

I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a
civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
as fires come, from a spark.

Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.

--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
country-practitioner?  Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
and that is not my fault.  But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!  I
did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession
and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark
how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
in what form it fell.

A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very
fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
phrases.

All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
(theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their

drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of
themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.

--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some
are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n't
be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
ministers' studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of
cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly
of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out
of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool's
judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.

--Amen! --said the young fellow called John-- Ten minutes by the
watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
their left foot!

I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often
noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I
think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I
noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
to be satirical on his part.

--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
Professor, a conservative.  For I don't know any fruit that clings to
its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can't shake
him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by
a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
generally.

But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
are in it.

You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.

By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
them--like Aaron's calf

[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
through the box."   D.W.]

If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.

--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
and excited.

I was not,--I replied.

It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
be born in.  But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis,
the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from
Newport, and stayed here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
ground!  I've stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,--meant
well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
the wheel of that side was down.  T' other fellow's at work now, but
he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his
side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
it which may get hurt.  Hope not,--hope not.  But this is the great
Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.

Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.

The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
it went by cogwheels. --Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
foreign vermin included,--said the little man.

This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed.  The little man uttered it with
the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard.  The party supposed
to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
interfered with the reply he would have made.

--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders.  I think
our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
magisterially.  I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
justified.  But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
listener.  If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.  If, when I
am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
of the "Old Sailor" says.  I had rather hear one of those grand
elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
chance find myself capable of saying.  Of course, if I come across a
real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.

Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
sometimes.  Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
thought.  I can't answer for what will turn up.  If I could, it would
n't be talking, but "speaking my piece."  Better, I think, the hearty
abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
never saying a foolish thing.

--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
do,--and that is to let him talk when he will.  The day of the
"Autocrat's" monologues is over.

--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
person who sits at the other end of the table?

What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.

The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.

Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.

It is,--said I. --But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
know anything about this deformed person?

About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.

My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
Nature to be spared by his fellows.  Even in speaking of him to
others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
contempt for what should inspire only pity.

A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
John.

Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak.  It's all
right.  The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
individual.  Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail! --I
understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
-it is a conservative principle in creation.

The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
eyes.  He had not taken my meaning.

Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
as he answered,--Jest so.  All right.  A 1.  Put her through.  That's
the way to talk.  Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
you Chrononhotonthologos? "

I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
generations.  This is the final cause of the underlying brute
instinct which we have in common with the herds.


--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
thought I must try again. --It's a pity that families are kept up,
where there are such hereditary infirmities.  Still, let us treat
this poor man fairly, and not call him names.  Do you know what his
name is?

I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow. --They
call him Little Boston.  There's no harm in that, is there?

It is an honorable term,--I replied. --But why Little Boston, in a
place where most are Bostonians?

Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
young fellow.

"L. B.  Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
The ring he wears labels him well enough.  There is stuff in the
little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
crotchety old town.  Give him a chance. --You will drop the Sculpin,
won't you?--I said to the young fellow.

Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.

No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term.  Don't call him so any more,
if you please.  Call him Little Boston, if you like.

All right,--said the young fellow. --I would n't be hard on the poor
little-

The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
grammar.  It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
given to rural pursuits.  It is classed by custom among the profane
words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.

I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
fish to the little man from that day forward.

--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house.  First, myself, the
Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit.  At the further end
sits the Landlady.  At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
noor, or the gentleman with the diamond.  Opposite me is a Venerable
Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken.  The Landlady's
Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said.  The Poor Relation near
the Landlady.  At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing.  Next the
further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
deformed person.  The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
empty.  I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
mother.  We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
attractions.  I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.  She
wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
than I care to see on a person in her position.  Her voice is
strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
of more pretensions.  I can't help hoping we shall put something into
that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
harp.  I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected.  Something in the
schoolgirl way, I believe.  We shall see.

--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
of all concerned.

Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into
a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
FUNDS.  My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.

Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of
paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
your metallic basis.

There is something in that,--said I. --Only I rather think life can
coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What
if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be
no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,--many drops,
large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
absterged!

Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!

A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
receptacle. --I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like "fits of easy
and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often
intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
by its constantly recurring obscuration.

An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his
most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could
not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal

equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
fitting him with a new garment.  "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
himself, before he left-the store."  A passing throb, only,--but it
deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.

We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man's
mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I
look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.

When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and
hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!

I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
when I have used up my affinities.  What a blessed thing it is, that
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!  Painful
as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
undertaken.  Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
imbecility.  Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
fulfil-

--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.

--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
great department of Ocean-Cable literature.  As all the poets of this
country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
and dear.  Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.




                  DE SAUTY

         AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.

         Professor.       Blue-Nose.


PROFESSOR.

Tell me, O Provincial!  speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
Holding talk with nations ?

Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
Three times daily patent ?

Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
Romulus and Remus?

Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
Or a living product of galvanic action,
Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!



BLUE-NOSE.

Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
Thou shalt hear them answered.

When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
At the polar focus of the wire electric
Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
Called himself "DE SAUTY."

As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
Sucking in the current.

When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
Said, "All right!  DE SAUTY."

>From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
Of "All right! DE SAUTY."

When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
Of disintegration.

Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
There was no De Sauty.

Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
Such as man is made of.

Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
Cry, "All right!  DE SAUTY."




II

Back again! --A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it.  So the
boys say.

It is a libel on the turtle.  He grows to his shell, and his shell is
in his body as much as his body is in his shell. --I don't think
there is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am.  Nothing
but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the
turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace;
and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand
sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns
all America,--

          "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"

his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
resume his skeleton.

Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral
of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves!  Welcome, ye triumphs of
pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me
from the walls of my sacred cell!  Vesalius, as Titian drew him,
high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems
a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a
scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old
man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and
two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on
one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in
shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir
Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of
lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull
of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome
once more to my eyes!  The old books look out from the shelves, and I
seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,--a kind of
solemn greeting.  The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.  The
arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it
were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches
itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
stretches in after-dinner laughter.

The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back.
One of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I
believed what I said. --This was apparently considered something
unusual, by its being mentioned.

One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of
bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and
actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger,
is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that
belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short,
and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is,
who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two
Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a
word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is
occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese
talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.
Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
and never a calm ; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so
gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find
faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is
something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.

You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine
was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well,
you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if
the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have
suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if
you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.
Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their
minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that
we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables
just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their
pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just
as it does that of music into notes. --Well, they govern the world
for all that, these sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index
of a larger fact than wisdom.

--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.

Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is
the promise of the future.

--All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I,
suppose, seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an
intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other's faces,--we exchange
a dozen words.  One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each
other,--to be perfectly courteous,--more than courteous; for we are
the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood
reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for
it.

I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
strong drink before they begin jabberin'.

The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words
had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead. --The boys of my
time used to call a hit like this a "side-winder."

--I must finish this woman.--

Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking
as he sat at meat.  Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
place, you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a
very miscellaneous company.  Probably there was a great deal of loose
talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may
believe.

Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--
and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water,
and, I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its
being the grand specific against dull dinners.  A score of people
come together in all moods of mind and body.  The problem is, in the
space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same
condition of slightly exalted life.  Food alone is enough for one
person, perhaps,--talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer
and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum
radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now
just where it was when

          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,

--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine.  I
once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that
I was afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it
was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing
domestic influences.

--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous. --Can
you tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration
once, of which the following is a verse?

     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!

I did,--I answered. --What are you going to do about it?--I will tell
you another line I wrote long ago:--

     Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.

The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with
many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about
them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to
grind us down to a single flat surface.  It is hard work to resist
this grinding-down action. --Now give me a chance.  Better eternal
and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made
wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they
should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches!
Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon
all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and
social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the
closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public
dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be
true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
to be "consistent."  But a great many things we say can be made to
appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a
truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face
and its profile often do.

Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend
the "Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by
omitting the very word which gives it its significance,--the word
fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds
it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining
principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now
I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all
attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems,
printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman
where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the
independent will of the "subcreative centre," as my heretical friend
has elsewhere called man.

     --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
     --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
     --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!

If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and
the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly
consistent!

Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few
light ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend,
De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current;
trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-
paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging
the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find
out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to
drop the deep-sea line;--in short, seeing what we have to deal with.
If the Englishman gets his H's pretty well placed, he comes from one
of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find
him a good companion.

But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two
different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us,
we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall
to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior
fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I
would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World
folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are
playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.

--------
FOOTNOTE:

The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me
the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a
special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.  But
no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may
come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows
nothing at all.  He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-
determining.  The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
moving.  'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
--------

That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet
and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with,
we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and
constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and
masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases,
which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used
in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don't think we on our part ever
understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized
reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring
some little difficulties about race and complexion which the
Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it
is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;
but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you
often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty
individuality.

This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to
me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans
swim into each other's laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to
let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming
to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so
much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the
Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the
cosmopolite Englishman loses.

How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his
opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!

---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I
follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current
of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness
belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two
others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.

A. ---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman
talking.

B. --Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.

C. --Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-
repeating idea.

A. --White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-
blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-

B. --Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter!  (Look
out of window just here. --Two pages and a half of description, if it
were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family
nose!  Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
Why don't they wear a ring in it?

C. --You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-

I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--
Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought
which had been working through comes up to the surface clear,
definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or
an unpleasant recollection.

The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between
consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that
in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms
of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded
all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed
into regular polyhedra.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and
no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by
him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the
layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among
thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great
troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more
or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another
way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once,
but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take
his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of
another.

--What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course. --Twenty
years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to
you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and
round all that time without a rider.

The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving
thought upon that of another.

--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are
in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
something?

--I thought it best not to hear this question.

--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--
as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an
Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a
master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way
in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the
truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines
begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he
has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it
as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the
streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the
truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is
not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people
like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!

Dear!  dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see
how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade
are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.  How they
spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!

--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
fighting attitude. --Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the
concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball. --You
small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"

The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three
words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the
first was an emphatic monosyllable. --Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot
myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have
any.  I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I
put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the
wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from
the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don't want
a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can
take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the
great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait
till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that
thing, Sir!

--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
--remarked the Koh-i-noor.

I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman. --If importing most dry goods
made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for
'em. --Mr. Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at
any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the
owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language
which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language! --the
blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which
they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam
Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there,
with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of
his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out
of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't
in the Colonial dictionaries !  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
tance, Resistance!  That was in '43, and it was a good many years
before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but
when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden
women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes,
yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in
Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have
made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould
of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God's permission,
we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or
two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--
this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little
spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new
world's destiny!

He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his
high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.

Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
call John.

The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said
he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.
Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and
remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking
down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a
great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.

Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
--I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his
stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the
'lection dinner.

Salem!  Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.

But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.

The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.  He stabbed
a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it
as if it ought to shriek.  It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.

--Language is a solemn thing,--I said. --It grows out of life,--out
of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.  Every
language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
enshrined.  Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp
angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?
Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care
of themselves. --A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was
a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like
an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you
hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your
hand as naked as a peeled apple.  Well, he began with taking off the
case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly
open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--
crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.  All right except one
thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
balance-wheel.  So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and
caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without
touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ!  and the watch had done
up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time! --The English
language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-
spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as
so many other dialects have done before it.  I can't stand this
meddling any better than you, Sir.  But we have a great deal to be
proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we
must n't be ungrateful.  Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--
the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities,
colleges, and especially of publishers.  After all, it is likely that
the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and
dictionary-making.  You may spade up the ocean as much as you like,
and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead
the tides, and the winds will form their surface.

--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
divinity-student.

Haow?--said the divinity-student. --He colored, as he noticed on my
face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from
making a little movement on its own account.

It was too late. --A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps,
better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his
earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue
half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their
dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large
libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes
let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken
since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.  That is
one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or
celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly
those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled
them with.

--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
sitting at the right upper corner of the table.

I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of
character. --I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in
the matter of voice. --Hear this.

Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She
overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken
with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must
have that little girl come and live in her father's house.  So the
child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she
remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children
became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy
years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing,
one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with
her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
her peaceful days. --Three generations linked together by so light a
breath of accident!

I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had
something better than ,the bloom and freshness which had first
attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of
wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:
hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly
planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen's
families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly
with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as
they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,--to draw nails
with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and bowl
his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb," or any forty-port-
holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
compliments. --I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his
plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in
Boston.

When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him,
the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at
him.

Good for the Boston boy! --he said.

I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.

I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--
said the little gentleman.  Pray, what part of Maryland did you come
from, and how shall I call you?

The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-
hand corner.  His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,
telling who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right
to ask any questions he wanted to.

Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman,
pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.

You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-
morrow,--said the landlady to him.

He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color.  It can't
be that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young
lady!  It can't be that he has had experiences which make him
sensitive!  Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart
throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs!  There is no use in
wasting notes of admiration.  I must ask the landlady about him.

These are some of the facts she furnished. --Has not been long with
her.  Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it
upstairs.  Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies.  The
Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to
enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression
that he was indifferent to ladies' society.  Paid his bill the other
day without saying a word about it.  Paid it in gold,--had a great
heap of twenty-dollar pieces.  Hires her best room.  Thinks he is a
very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber.
Wants the care of some capable nuss.  Never pitied anybody more in
her life--never see a more interestin' person.

--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
boarders.  So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited
about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be
disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an
account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him.  It so
happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of
observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity.
That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little
body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps
mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.

One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without
drawing an absolute inference.  Being at the studio of a sculptor
with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of
a left arm.  On my asking where the model came from, he said it was
taken direct from the arm of a deformed person, who had employed one
of the Italian moulders to make the cast.  It was a curious case, it
should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly
imperfect--I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of
his left arm.  Can he have furnished the model I saw at the
sculptor's?

--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow.  I hope there will be
something pretty and pleasing about her.  A woman with a creamy
voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than
our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of
whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.  I don't mean
that these are our only female companions; but the rest being
conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in
their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither
away from the table like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have
not yet referred to them as individuals.

I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
to-morrow!

--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
It was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.



                    THE BOYS.

Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!

We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!--
"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes!  white, if we please;
Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!

Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
And these are white roses in place of the red!

We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
That boy we call Doctor," (1) and this we call Judge (2)--
It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.

That fellow's the Speaker,"(3)--the one on the right;
Mr. Mayor,"(4) my young one, how are you to-night?
That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
There's the "Reverend"(6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!

That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.

There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
That could harness a team with a logical chain:
When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)

And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
--Just read on his medal,--My country,--of thee! "

You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)

Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,--
And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?

Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!


1 Francis Thomas.
2 George Tyler Bigelow.
3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
4 G. W. Richardson.
5 George Thomas Davis.
6 James Freeman Clarke.
7 Benjamin Peirce.




III

[The Professor talks with the Reader.  He tells a
Young Girl's Story.]

When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
balance of creation was disturbed.  The materials that go to the
making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate
nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.  These combined
to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the
previous creation of our common father.  All this, mythically,
illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.

The man implies the woman, you will understand.  The excellent
gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling
matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of
miracles at the present day.  So do I.  I believe, if you could find
an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome
young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched
there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-
trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.

Where would she come from?

Oh, that 's the miracle!

--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear
some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a
clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.

--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
the sun to ripen well. --How some of us fellows remember Joe and
Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples,
and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the
whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the
chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling
banquets in those gay ,times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of
the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-
jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-
natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the
crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and
the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge
butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--
steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the
Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place
thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank
like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves
down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so
that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a
general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different
from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an
English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and
the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting
parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition,
and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.

I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day,
though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of
us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to
men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--
so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first
heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from
an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the
writer's invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am
talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little
fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise,
traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-
skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come
from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-
common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals
who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire
groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw himself into
an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language,
expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his
attentions.  I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so
much more of than Americans, for the most part.  However, one of the
Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there,
sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow,
as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and
senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.  This
ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is
not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English
pugilistic science.  These are old recollections, with not much to
recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a
little something.

The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.  He
recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you
of.  Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red-
flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,
--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some
white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers,
flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer
is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!

I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.

There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as
accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she
ought, of course, to be sitting.  One of the "positive" blondes, as
my friend, you may remember, used to call them.  Tawny-haired,
amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.  Looks
dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her
neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not
do.  So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an
artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the
finishing touch to a picture.  I can't help being struck with her,
for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as
blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled
with.  It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that
our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.

Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have
the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as
nice as a three-volume novel.

The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by
his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if
he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might
happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life
looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which
struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational
openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even
went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as
we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less
ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.  The little
man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young
lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our
Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
reddened a little,--so I thought.  I don't think it right to watch
persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.

I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-
mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--
pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--
features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye
on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her
My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I
have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young
lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine
for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very
curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have
heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck
with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly
striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of
miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the
ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name
of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely
pillow,--a widow.

Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed
for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only
things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these
surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not
recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention,
I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the
Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
children.  For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or
come across some idea.  Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact
or idea strikes you from another quarter.  It seems as if it had
passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank
wall that shuts in the world of thought.  Yet no possible connection
exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact
arrived.  Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.

One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table
boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard
of.  Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short,
in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of
the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the
cavity of a geode.

               Aphorism by the Professor.

In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat
anything at any hour of the day or night.  If old, it observes stated
periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of
highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
The crucial experiment is this.  Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.  If this is
eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.  If
the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
maturity is no less clear.


--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table. --Young
fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre
fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to
impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the
fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-
time.  The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found
out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--
they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place. --Now the
odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this
college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the
same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and to every person,
often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts
or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a
furrow of subsoil in it. --The explanation is, of course, that in a
great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these
instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the
least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through
our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic
record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body
than you think for.  Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of
mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed,
rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part
and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose
are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which
warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist
spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow
streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.  The
counting by the micrometer took him a week. --You have, my full-grown
friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery,
running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,

sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
Errors excepted. --Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am
the Professor.  I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will
blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know
what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.

Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads,
and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies
illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
unconscious subject of my brief delineation.



IRIS.

You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd
poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I
love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living
dictionary for him at the word , filia, a daughter.  The poor man was
greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.  Lucretia and Virginia
were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured
stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying,
though he had read them a hundred times.

--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her
wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of
herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  "Her husband and her
father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.

-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged
to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy
to her,--must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the
arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things. --All
right.   There are two sides to everything.  Audi alteram partem.
The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
--A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the
Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly. --Father
thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter,
if the young lady and her maid will step this way.  That is the
explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall,
meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia

The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at
the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.
When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she
was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless
shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women
followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were
coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--
he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and,
through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never
look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.

Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the
founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the
greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius
Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his
memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-
leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the
loves and mishaps of Dido.  It would n't do.  A lady who had not
learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook
his head, as he sadly repeated,

    "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"

but when he came to the lines,

    "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"

he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.

"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.  So her name was Iris.

--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only
a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in
brick or stone and iron.  I don't mean that you will see in the
registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-
marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases,
be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very
well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is
only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade
and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia,
consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and
keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have
passed through the successive stages of inanition.

In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
process in question.  You see they do get food and clothes and fuel,
in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice
rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look
as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water
of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The
tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk
watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and
elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;
his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes,
rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too
thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty
hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and
gradual starvation.

--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name,
which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain
old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as
recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well
from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter
backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the
chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little
white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares
nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and
swept her from the larger board of life.

The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
companion, with her name and age and Eheu!  upon it,--a smaller one
at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have
cherished tenderly.

About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved
into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black
trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-
ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts
of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his
walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going
up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward
trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as
peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the
doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story
that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went
out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.
A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by."  So the
doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before
it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will
see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he
would look in occasionally.  After this, the Latin tutor began the
usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a
muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the
purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----
might be able--to--attend------to his class again. --But he was
recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and
occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.  The unmarried
sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old
enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in
the chamber, or played, about.

Things could not go on so forever, of course.  One morning his face
was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.  He was "better," he
whispered, but sadly and faintly.  After a while he grew restless and
seemed a little wandering.  His mind ran on his classics, and fell
back on the Latin grammar.

"Iris!  " he said,--",filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my
dear little daughter as well as if it had been English. --"Rainbow!
"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and
his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!" --The
child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could
not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender
frame.  But there she sat, looking steadily at him.  Presently he
opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus."  She did not
know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and
sad.  So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that
seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the
Latin version, called the Vulgate.  "Open it," he said,--"I will
read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!  hoeret
lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord
take care of my child!  Domine, audi-- vel audito!" His face whitened
suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.  He had taken
his last degree.

--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.  A limited
wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good
books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of
the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--
these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange
doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are
the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she
inherited. --No,--I forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of
us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early
winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time
when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and
running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he
used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring
clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face,
with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which
has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest
moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old
age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance
in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old
man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had
meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its
destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate,
strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities
of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their
children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence
and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of
sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as
compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine
race.

But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.  An air-
plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests
that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from
the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but
a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that
holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears
its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the
tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.

Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the
shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
that,--this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled
them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge,
such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had
attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to
"raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--
thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.

A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two
years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the
doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged
himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not
belong.  What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it
was a wonder the child made out to live through it.  It saddened her
early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts
which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as
instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a
healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out
of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its
downward path.

The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with
the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the
curious students of science.

Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late
Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the
future mother of his child.  The deceased tutoress was a tranquil,
smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which
is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the
daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through
childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite
of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.

--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
descent of qualities.  Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five.
It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at
another blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is
represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than
either original line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a
loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward
impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.

So it was with this child.  She had glanced off from her parental
probabilities at an unexpected angle.  Instead of taking to classical
learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties
like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the
direction of Art.  As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to
sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit.
Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could
move.  Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush.
Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital
connection with their most improbable bodies.  By-and-by the doctor,
on his beast,--an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded
it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor
pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances.
A dreadful old man!  Be sure she did not forget those saddle-bags
that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those
loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
in strawberries and peaches, are-- Well, I suppose I had better stop.
Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming.
On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and
white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
stories concerning the death of various little children about her
age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting
Admiral Byng.   Then she would take her pencil, and with a few
scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might
notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots
darted at the paper looked like real eyes.

By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
heads thrown back in ecstasy.  This was at about twelve years old, as
the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years
before she came among us.  Soon after this time, the ideal figures
began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new
feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of
verse and short poems.


It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an
old spinster and go to a village school.  Her books bore testimony to
this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a
sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of
blessedness or other, which began to be painful.  She might have gone
through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided
into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly
assistance and counsel.

In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition,
somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of
cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character,
and of more than common accomplishments.  The gentleman in black
broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about
her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof,
an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was.
unaccustomed to, "The Model of all the Virtues."

She deserved this title as well as almost any woman.  She did really
bristle with moral excellences.  Mention any good thing she had not
done; I should like to see you try!  There was no handle of weakness
to take hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her
totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial
table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue
of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and "caromed" from
one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of
temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the
Enemy's corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her
conduct, as there was no chance for their master.

What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a
slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius
running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her
virgin nature!  One of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was
calmness.  She was resolute and strenuous, but still.  You could
depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel.  She was
kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life.  She had
more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more
goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
together.

Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
himself to her in marriage.  It was a great wonder.  I am very
anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of
Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.

You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of
presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.  There
are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing
effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the
virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing
organs.  When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as
if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery,
carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.

"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear
as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.
Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-
smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the
riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.  She
carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious,
steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not
spill.  Then she was an admirable judge of character.  Her mind was a
perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into
breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts
were recorded on litmus-paper.  I think there has rarely been a more
admirable woman.  Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately
attached to her. --Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--
grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch
of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.

We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
much.  People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
subjects for biographies.  But we don't always care most for those
flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.

This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two?
Is n't there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome
aureole of saintly perfection?  Does n't she carry a lump of opium in
her pocket?  Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its
legitimate use would require?  It would be such a comfort!

Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such
words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind.  Whether at
the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her.  Iris sits
between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as
the black-coated personage called her. --I will watch them all.

--Here I stop for the present.  What the Professor said has had to
make way this time for what he saw and heard.

-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle
souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with
something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where
these musical friends had gathered.  Whether they were written with
smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.


               THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.

In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.

Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!

Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."

For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.

So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."

--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
(Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.

Just as the "Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies,
--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
(For she thought't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"




IV

I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is
out of fashion among them.  This could never be, if they were in the
habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other.  That is the kind of
underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and
genuine hatreds.  On the other hand, I should like to know if we are
not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest
things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his
thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday.

We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions.  No
"surprise" parties!  You understand these, of course.  In the rural
districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in
the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-
handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of
real life.  Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially the
latter, are the main dependence; but babies, brides, and deceased
citizens cannot be had at a day's notice.  Now, then, for a surprise-
party!

A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a
basket of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of
lemonade, a purse stuffed with bills of the more modest
denominations, may, perhaps, do well enough for the properties in one
of these private theatrical exhibitions.  The minister of the parish,
a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man, living on a small salary,
with many children, sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them,
praying fervently every day to be blest in his "basket and store,"
but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small returns,
has the first role,--not, however, by his own choice, but forced upon
him.  The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first
lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family.  If they only
had a playbill, it would run thus:


                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
                    WILL BE PRESENTED
                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
                         CALLED

                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY

                           OR

                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;


WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.

The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
interesting children.
Peggy, by the female help.

The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
relief.  He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
chokes,--and bursts into tears.  That is the great effect of the
evening.  The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and
counts the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the
other.  The children stand ready for a spring at the apples.  The
female help weeps after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.

Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
remember they get their money's worth.  If you pay a quarter for dry
crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for
real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not
acting, but sobbing in earnest?

All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-
party where I read these few lines that follow:

We will not speak of years to-night;
For what have years to bring,
But larger floods of love and light
And sweeter songs to sing?

We will not drown in wordy praise
The kindly thoughts that rise;
If friendship owns one tender phrase,
He reads it in our eyes.

We need not waste our schoolboy art
To gild this notch of time;
Forgive me, if my wayward heart
Has throbbed in artless rhyme.

Enough for him the silent grasp
That knits us hand in hand,
And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
That locks our circling band.

Strength to his hours of manly toil!
Peace to his starlit dreams!
Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
The music-haunted streams!

Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
The sunshine on his lips,
And faith, that sees the ring of light
Round Nature's last eclipse!


--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
am almost afraid to report it.  However, as he seems to be really
honest and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't
believe anybody will be very angry with him.

It is here, Sir!  right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--
in this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and
was fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are
dead and gone,--please God!  The battle goes on everywhere throughout
civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying
which proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next
to that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each
individual immortal soul!  The three-hilled city against the seven-
hilled city!  That is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you
know what that means, I don't think you'll ask for anything more.  I
swear to you, Sir, I believe that these two centres of civilization
are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery
of our planetary intelligence!  And I believe there are spiritual
eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the
systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that
faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we
call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what organs I know
not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the
accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
city!

--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch.  Let him blow
her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.

The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and
a charge of cavalry.

But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if
to speak.

Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name.  And
then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am
Allen!

But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen
against it.  He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he
would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker.  The young
Marylander fixed his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on
his arm, carelessly almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that
he could not move it.  It was of no use.  The youth was his master in
muscle, and in that deadly Indian hug in which men wrestle with their
eyes;--over in five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and
is good for threescore years and ten;--one trial enough,--settles the
whole matter,--just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard,
game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other,
and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous,
Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all
the rest of his days.

I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath.  For
though a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom
reference was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly
asserted in respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see
no reason why he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he
was indebted to it or its authoress.

I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to
which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural.  Nature is
fertile in variety.  I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence,
(including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked
as if she had been boiled in milk.  A young Hottentot of my
acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of
marrow-fat peas.  One of my own classmates has undergone a singular
change of late years,--his hair losing its original tint, and getting
a remarkable discolored look; and another has ceased to cultivate any
hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.  So I am perfectly
willing to believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's
moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.  But I
can't think why he got so angry.

The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it
was all over by the time the other end of the table found out there
was a disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be
seen resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he
struck.  So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was
not, interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto
remarks of mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.

He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started
again.  The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself
more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he
were talking with some imaginary opponent.

--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is full-
grown!

He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
little figure to the view of the boarders.

It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was
so strange an illustration of the text!  I thought it was time to put
in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
cosmopolitan.

I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have
in England,---I said. --An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr.
Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.

Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and
where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and
steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking
them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under
protest; he lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a
welcome fact.  Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England?  The
same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and
still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to
whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except
as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like
the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very
different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs,
but he is always wanting to be on all fours.  Nothing that can be
taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with
the milk of the breast at which he hangs.

--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
commonly belongs to a female Paddy.

I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked,
as if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did
when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If
he winked, however, he did not dodge.

A lively comment!--he said. --But Rome, in her great founder, sucked
the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian
wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American
infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making
man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don't think what we are
doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are
bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got
the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there
ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?

--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
smiled.

Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
but I know 'em best here.  Anyhow, the American skies are different
from anything they see in the Old World.  Yes, and the rocks are
different, and the soil is different, and everything that comes out
of the soil, from grass up to Indians, is different.  And now that
the provisional races are dying out-

--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the divinity-
student, interrupting him.

Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
manhood were ready.

I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.

Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.
--Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.
When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can
make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race,
Sir,--nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation,
kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping
and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away,
according to the programme.

Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate

himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-
and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
'em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has
been any time these hundred years!  That's all I claim for Boston,--
that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the
planet.

--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
little mischievously.

Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I
'm past that!  There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in
Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical
lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't
thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the
entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into
colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of
thinking come over it. --No, Sir,--show me any other place that is,
or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social
influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the
progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other
drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and
mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the "dry
pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!

--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said
the young Marylander, good-naturedly. --But I suppose you can't
forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
numbers,--tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?

Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis
of the Union.  Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
Washington column?  Why don't you get that lady off from Battle
Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for
other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,--you live too well
to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the
salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but
you--if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat
oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and
silences all your aspirations.

And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.

Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;-
-Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological
section of social strata, go to The Club. --Good place to live in,
--first-rate market,--tip-top peaches. --What do we know about
Philadelphia, except that the engine-companies are always shooting
each other?

And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.

A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
splendid city.  A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
permanence for much that is respectable.  A great money-centre.  San
Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
sidewalks.  I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
in all our cities.  It makes 'em all look paltry and petty.  Has many
elements of civilization.  May stop where Venice did, though, for
aught we know. --The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture.  Printing, as a
mechanical art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were
scholars too, made Venice renowned for it.  Journalism, which is the
accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great
colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,-
-but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask
out of whose loins Dante sprung!

Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden
Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but
all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.

I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--
something in the councils of the nation.  Plenty of Art, I grant you,
Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population
is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people
provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of
Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!

--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
expense of every other place.  I have my doubts if he had been in
either of the cities he had been talking about.  I was just going to
say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young
Marylander spoke up.

Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons?  Did n't I
hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
all America?  If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
scribbling fools?  If I like Broadway better than Washington Street,
what then?  I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an
American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes
overhead, that is home to me!

He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
over him in the breeze.  We all looked up involuntarily, as if we
should see the national flag by so doing.  The sight of the dingy
ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the
illusion.

Bravo!  bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
table. --Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a
copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
Why don't they now?  Why don't they now?  I saw enough of hating each
other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--
let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't
any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.

It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--

The color burst up into my cheeks.  What was I saying,--I, who would
not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
allusion?

I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
himself down from his high chair.

No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice
next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.

Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with
very little flavor of grace.

She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that
lasted some seconds.  For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown
womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature
covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's
eyes.

Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his
life.  Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that
reached into her soul as these did.  It was not that they were in
themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them
that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman
without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.  To him it seemed as if
those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a
mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin
wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all
its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.

That is my image, of course,--not his.  It was not a simile that was
in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.

A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
slaves of us all. --And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor
ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his
sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts
that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common
Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly
well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common
Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague,
half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his
inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John
Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-
hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in
any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a
winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when
it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club,
subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of
it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by
our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the
exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the
fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to
hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to
leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or
drop it with a loud or silent cry!

--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and
to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured
themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the
table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean
not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get
any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your
own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is
always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains
to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are
very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical
province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an
angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
another;--and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man's
ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth
half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive
him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.

What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all
your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of
acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you
most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for
a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between
the pages. --Oh, that is it!

What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
bills!

At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of
those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were
not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held
the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after
generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered,
shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that
played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,
to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent
after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left
the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.

A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being
a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for
by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.
Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a
spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-
place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany
shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,--
and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.

Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which
no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.
What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of
the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears,
until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our
consciousness,--as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of
dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?

Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women
walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts,
which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they
were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.

What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.

There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could
only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor
of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any
cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not
mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.

Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class
of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of
men as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or
the newspapers commonly called "religious."  Now, although it would
be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-
made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional
kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy
to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must
have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the
only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at
least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can't
afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.

I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on
the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish,
which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and
dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.
I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish
still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if
he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the
idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but
with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of
nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,
simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I
have not found, however, that people mind them much.

The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every
questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared
for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other
day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-
reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is
not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a
book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book,
and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should
drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a
lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp
faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon
the paper the name "Hiram." --Love! love! love!--everywhere!
everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids' "jewelry,"--lifting the
marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine! --No,
no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the
poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be
in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!

Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-
out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked
decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that
underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a
stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the
nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a
wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for
the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature, which I venture to say would
leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A
heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been
fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has
tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day, which
could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings
against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a
little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind
the wires or his keeper's handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but
half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded
bombazine.

Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not
touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do
just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself
imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that,
go before him, limping.

I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I
use rarely in my common talk.

I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing
instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a
Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I
was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact
like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film
of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of
thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to
soak through and mingle with the other.

We were talking about names, one day. --Was there ever anything,--I
said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time
of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of
another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is
common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was
christened Lord Pitt,--and called for convenience, as above.  I have
heard a charming little girl, belonging to an intelligent family in
the country, called Anges invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes.
Names are cheap.  How can a man name an innocent new-born child, that
never did him any harm, Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she
is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I was stupid, and went on. --
To think of a man going through life saddled with such an abominable
name as that! --The poor relation grew very uneasy. --I continued;
for I never thought of all this till afterwards. --I knew one young
fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of Hiram--  What's got
into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look so?--There! you 've
upset your teacup!

It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
"hysteric ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous
women often complain of.  What business had I to be trying
experiments on this forlorn old soul?  I had a great deal better be
watching that young girl.

Ah, the young girl!  I am sure that she can hide nothing from me.
Her skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats
by the flushes they send into her cheeks.  She does not seem to be
shy, either.  I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid.
She seems to me like one of those birds that travellers tell of,
found in remote, uninhabited islands, who, having never received any
wrong at the hand of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular
consciousness of his presence.

The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed
gentleman get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side
by side.  The next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the
"Model" and so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her.  The
intention of that estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and
leave her.  I suppose there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this
young lady knows how to take care of herself, but I do not like to
see young girls turned loose in boarding-houses.  Look here now!
There is that jewel of his race, whom I have called for convenience
the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite out of the question for
me to use the family names of our boarders, unless I want to get into
trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the diamond is looking very
often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the farther
corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.  The
landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as
I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person.  The
landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the
arrival of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my
remembrance.

He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be
kinder hankerin' round after that young woman.  It had hurt her
daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents
to them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he
as good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable
a young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever
they might be.

Tickets!  presents!--said I. --What tickets, what presents has he had
the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?

Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady.  There is them that's glad
enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of
'em ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must
be offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she
is, that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth.  But it
a'n't her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of
hers, or whatever she is, served him right enough.

Why, what did she do?

Do?  Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.

Dropped?  dropped what?--I said.

Why, the soap,--said the landlady.

It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a
delicate expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that,
after having met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was
picked up by Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it,
rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions
in consequence, so that his hands were a frequent subject of maternal
congratulation, and he smelt like a civet-cat for weeks after his
great acquisition.

After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the
young lady.  She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being
interested in.  If he was her crippled child, instead of being more
than old enough to be her father, she could not treat him more
kindly.  The landlady's daughter said, the other day, she believed
that girl was settin' her cap for the Little Gentleman.

Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there
is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
enough.  I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's
kinder childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls
to play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook
to see to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.

I could not help overhearing this conversation.  "Board her and
clothe her!"--speaking of such a young creature!  Oh, dear!--Yes,--
she must be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
establishment.  Somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has a right to
watch her and see how much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her,
if she has too good an appetite.  Somebody has a right to keep an eye
on her and take care that she does not dress too prettily.  No mother
to see her own youth over again in these fresh features and rising
reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness,
forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases
that hold her own ornaments to find for her a necklace or a bracelet
or a pair of ear-rings,--those golden lamps that light up the deep,
shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties,--swinging in a semi-
barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens
and musky Odalisques!  I don't believe any woman has utterly given up
the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as she wears ear-rings.

I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk.  She smiles
sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him.  When
he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him.  This
may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth
noticing.  I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public
audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common:
the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them.
I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive
neighbor while he is speaking.

He is evidently pleased with it.  For a day or two after she came, he
was silent and seemed nervous and excited.  Now he is fond of getting
the talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has
at least one interested listener.  Once or twice I have seen marks of
special attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one
day, and a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's,
but more lustrous.  I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his
right hand.  I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or
carbuncle or something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the
other day.  It is a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the
cast mentioned was taken from his arm.  After all, this is just what
I should expect.  It is not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or
one of them, running away with the whole strength, and, therefore,
with the whole beauty, which we should never have noticed, if it had
been divided equally between all four extremities.  If it is so, of
course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm; that is human
nature.  I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his favoritism, as
people who have any one showy point are apt to do,--especially
dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last
molars.

Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their
relations to each other.

That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat
alone at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I
hate her.

Of course, I begged an explanation.

An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks
like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty
with all her might.  I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to
cry.  Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted
to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't
love to be looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate
her,--her eyes kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be
looked at so,--the sooner she goes home, the better.  I don't want a
woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of
work.  The judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir.  A
woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by
what she sees.  Love prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't
think much of, nor care much for, a woman outside of his household,
unless he can couple the idea of love, past, present, or future, with
her.  I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the
services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that
are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.
--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and give her a
chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.

He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
red stone ring upon it. --Is he going to fall in love with Iris?

Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--

      THE CROOKED FOOTPATH

Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
That marks the old remembered spot,--
The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,--
The crooked path across the lot.

It left the road by school and church,
A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
That parted from the silver birch
And ended at the farmhouse door.

No line or compass traced its plan;
With frequent bends to left or right,
In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
But always kept the door in sight.

The gabled porch, with woodbine green,--
The broken millstone at the sill,--
Though many a rood might stretch between,
The truant child could see them still.

No rocks, across the pathway lie,--
No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,--
And yet it winds, we know not why,
And turns as if for tree or stone.

Perhaps some lover trod the way
With shaking knees and leaping heart,--
And so it often runs astray
With sinuous sweep or sudden start.

Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
>From some unholy banquet reeled,--
And since, our devious steps maintain
His track across the trodden field.

Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
Could ever trace a faultless line;
Our truest steps are human still,--
To walk unswerving were divine!

Truants from love, we dream of wrath;--
Oh, rather let us trust the more!
Through all the wanderings of the path,
We still can see our Father's door!




V

The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.

I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading
to some of my young and vivacious friends.  I don't know, however,
that any of them have entered into a contract to read all that I
write, or that I have promised always to write to please them.  What
if I should sometimes write to please myself?

Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest
me, to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be
totally indifferent.  I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts,
affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--
virtu in all its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter
volumes and yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains
not yet imbedded in the snows of age.  I love the generous impulses
of the reformer; but not less does my imagination feed itself upon
the old litanies, so often warmed by the human breath upon which they
were wafted to Heaven that they glow through our frames like our own
heart's blood.  I hope I love good men and women; I know that they
never speak a word to me, even if it be of question or blame, that I
do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with a reasonable amount
of human kindness.

I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
representatives.  It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted
fear.  Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no
heart so insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no

intellect so virile that it does not own a certain deference to the
claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when
they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad
daylight which they see in mystic shadow.  How grateful would it be
to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings!  Sleep,
sleep, sleep!  says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her
dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her
foes,--its large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of
her convert's rosary!  Silence! the pride of reason! cries another,
whose whole life is spent in reasoning down reason.

I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own.  And
most assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me
into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent
class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their
duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury
rather than them.  Go and talk with any professional man holding any
of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the
mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent,
and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his
presence!  It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a
large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
believing.  But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as
he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?

The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
of quasi-barbarism.  None of them like too well to be told of it, but
it must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs.  When a
man has taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place
him between two persons who shall make him walk up and down
incessantly; and if he still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they
say that a lash or two over his back is of great assistance.

So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not
yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown
by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of
silver, which turns epileptics into Ethiopians.  If that is not
enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task
and get good fees for it.  A few score years ago, sick people were
made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed
juice of wood-lice.  The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed
abominations not to be named.  Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or
Ashantee.  Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly
improved medical science of our century.  So while the solemn farce
of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-
science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
somersets, and begins laying about him.

In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous,
clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied
the appellant to lift the other which he threw down.  It was not
until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft
were repealed.  As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that
its antiquated abuses form one of the staples of common proverbs and
popular literature.  So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched
perpetually by public opinion as much as the doctors do.

I don't think the other profession is an exception.  When the
Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished
scientific brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it
rather slow and painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of
religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of
Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than
those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not
consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female
relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I
care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any
other barbarian.

Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the
ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of
Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial
duelling, and murder for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can
trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves
the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.
--What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?


[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-
barbarism": invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather
than prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith
in minute differences between control and treated groups; statistical
manipulation to prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to
answer for!  D.W.]


Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.
--I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the
two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of
people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The
earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its
axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same
number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a
population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred
times as many, earth-born intelligences.  Life, as we call it, is

nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it
comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to
talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the
innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who
are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we
all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in
some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the
minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many
results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I
cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my
friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for
the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know
the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
woman-strangling dogmatists. --However, I fought this matter with one
of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the
conversation.

The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more
serious than usual.  He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered
after the others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table,
found myself alone with him.

When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine,
and began.

I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
most important class of subjects.  Is there not danger in introducing
discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
discourse?

Danger to what?--I asked.

Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.

I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said. --How long is it
since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a
gentleman in a black coat on the box?  Let me tell you a story,
adapted to young persons, but which won't hurt older ones.

--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string
to keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own
account.  This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one
day,--Brother, pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and
take hold of it.  Then the little boy pulled it down.  Now the
naughty brother had a sharp pin in his hand, and he thrust it into
the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so that there was nothing
left but a shrivelled skin.

One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see
the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--
Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my
naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we
shall not see it any more.

Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we
could do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get
too thick on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we
could not pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.
--Mind you this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is
seen from a good many parlor-windows.

--Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round
and full at evening.  Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well
if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if
she scratches her finger?  [Would that this was so:--error,
superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a
tenacity that survives inexplicably.  D.W.]  I never heard that a
mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated
proposition.  I think, generally, that fear of open discussion
implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to
the expression of individual opinion is a mark of weakness.

--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as
for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed
to judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.

Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from
the society of people who come together habitually?

I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-
student.

Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of
doctrines these people do not approve.  Some of your friends stop
little children in the street, and give them books, which their
parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give
them what they consider proper religious instruction, do not think
fit for them.  One would say it was fair enough to talk about matters
thus forced upon people's attention.

The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be
called opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.

But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
on such subjects.  Suppose a minister were to undertake to express
opinions on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he
was going beyond his province?

I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and
supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled
with medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general
rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose
way of admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.

I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
thinking of their certificates to patent medicines.  Let us look at
this matter.

If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for
thirty or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a
year,--if he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
approved text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually
practised according to different methods, daily, for the same length
of time,--I should think, that if a person of average understanding,
he was entitled to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or
else that his instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent
charlatans.

If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in
a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I
should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same,
and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.

Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us
an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in
a certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the
first:

I.  All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or
caries, and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is
extracted and a new set is inserted according to the principles of
dentistry adopted by this Society.

I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true.  There are a good
many bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones.  You
must n't trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the
people who have bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache.
The idea that you must pull out every one of every nice young man and
young woman's natural teeth!  Poh, poh!  Nobody believes that.  This
tooth must be straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this
other perhaps extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are
all so bad as to require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the
poor soul for it!  Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that
everybody not only always has every tooth in his head good for
nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a punishment
for that misfortune!  No, I can't sign Number One.  Give us Number
Two.

II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our
views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of
it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.

To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
the two following:

III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of
disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is
simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia,
and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with
Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet,
to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible
diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and
he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared
calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.

IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does
not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named
and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his
mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry,
to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set
inserted according to our regulations.

Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any
rhubarb, if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing
them, we express doubts (in public, about any of them, they will cut
us off from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to
discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call
boiling it down a little too strong!

If we understand them, why can't we discuss them?  If we can't
understand them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the
Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?

Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its
members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen
have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for
instance,--in other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion;
for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the
antagonist of school-divinity.

Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-
third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of
Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-
eight years B. C.  Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the
elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the
other.

Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral
surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools,
reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for
imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set
right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.

The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.  The
commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan
Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned
him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he
should never preach for them again.  A man's logical and analytical
adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary
relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find
it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.

In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were
unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to
supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still
lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-
hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will
see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like
intermeddling with his business very well.

"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he
says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up
against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds
among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in
Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from
his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a
Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.  This
Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit
of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the
Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his
Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his
Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets,
and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was
thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible
Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd
with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:
He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and
the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the " Abominable
Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.

This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young
friend!  We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a
coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a
seat in the first-class cars behind him.

--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;-
-and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
doctrines of religion should not be introduced.  You would not attack
a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for
instance?

Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered. --But,
mind you, at this table I think it is very different.  I shall
express my ideas on any subject I like.  The laws of the lecture-
room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold
here.  I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I
trust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such
natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow
upon me.

A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
arguments.  These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case
with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--
brain, heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has
shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.

--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly.
May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?

Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
questions.  I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to
go and lay it.  But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of
Scripture depolarized in and out of the pulpit.  I heard the Rev.
Mr. F. once depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street
Church.  Many years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a
similar depolarized version in Rome, New York.  I heard an admirable
depolarization of the story of the young man who "had great
possessions" from the Rev.  Mr. H.  in another pulpit, and felt that
I had never half understood it before.  All paraphrases are more or
less perfect depolarizations.  But I tell you this: the faith of our
Christian community is not robust enough to bear the turning of our
most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.  You have only
to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
satisfy yourself on this point.  Time, time only, can gradually wean
us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas
of the thing signified.  Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by
nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all
his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the
golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones.  Rough
work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth.  It is, indeed,
as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath
it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation;
veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he
that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram
nobas."

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may
think what we like and say what we think.

--Think what we like! --said the divinity-student;--think what we
like!  What! against all human and divine authority?

Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our
own peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk
of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on
green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far,
that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among
us.

And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a
great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop
talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an
Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!

That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.

You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all
quarters.

If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it! --I said.
--I can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.

Right, Sir!  right!--said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know
the fellows.  They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes,
but they must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the
way, till it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the
water out of the fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but
when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's
mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the
authors of them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand
know what their right hand doeth!

I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along
with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto
thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his
hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little
Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on
the ring-finger,)--and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach!
Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by
persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.
Let 'em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath
contempt.

I hope so,--I said. --I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs
flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former
years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance
of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing
which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though
nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the
sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe,
have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women
stir among the ruins. --What would you do, if the folks without names
kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that
would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give
a kick now and then?

Let 'em bite! --said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite!  It makes
'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks
without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the
quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a
pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board
gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the
bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  "Ananias,"
for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper
taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and
negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so
particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you
lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going
to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies.
Now you think you 've got him!  Not so fast.  "Ananias " keeps still
and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--
keep your temper. --So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left
fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or
somebody a most pernicious punch with it.

Good!--said I. --Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at,
after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.

--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to
deal and to live with.

--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
the men, in every denomination.

--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:

1.  The comfortably rich.
2.  The decently comfortable.
3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.

--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
clinch.

--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.

--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.

--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
belief of a large one.

The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth
while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.

I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don't see that you are any better
than a heathen.

I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.
--Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than
scolding for it; and the history of heathen races is full of
instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their
kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's
sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such
beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian
commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of
larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?

I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.

It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that.  In
another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
sometimes hear them now.

Pectus est quod facit theologum.  The heart makes the theologian.
Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its
own or a new interpretation of an old one.  Democratic America, has a
different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new
divinity.  See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our
faiths.  The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so
still in the hands of some of the vulgar.  The Puritans went to the
Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their
patriarchal institution.  Every generation dissolves something new
and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.

You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
their organizations.  So true is this, that I have doubts whether a
large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than
offended, if they could have overheard our, talk.  For, look you, I
think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private
conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may
frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of
secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which
sometimes get a hearing.

I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his
own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he
muddles his brains.  But as for the good and true and intelligent men
whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful,
helpful,--men who know that the active mind of the century is tending
more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church
or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our
masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way
between these two points, he must look one way or the other,--I don't
believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our
late conversation.

But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look
over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not
agree with most of these things that were said amongst us.  If he
agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does
not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious.
I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these
topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on
this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I
please,---unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied
contract to keep clear of doubtful matters.  You did n't think a man
could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every
morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two
thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state
during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.  Of course, the
one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to
become of them and of him.  And the plain truth is, that a good many
people are saying one thing about it and believing another.

--How do I know that?  Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
remember.  Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women
much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key
of our souls in their bosoms.  It is in their hearts that the
"sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its
source.  The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the
sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as
having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the
power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the
other,--these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless
systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle
the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the
miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and
withered in their delusion.

I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose
creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond
all praise.  When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken
against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which
excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and
an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the
honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant,
pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one
who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall
the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but
their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their
fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus,"
to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!

--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that
one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our
moments of trial.  But we are false to our new conditions of life, if
we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political
freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies.  Certain men
will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views:
first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and,
secondly, that we are not so good as they are.  They have a polarized
phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that.
To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good
authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something;
and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from
our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have
found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that
would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
to make a bonfire for all the heretics.

As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of
managing it, if you like.  I don't believe it will hurt you or
anybody.  Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with
pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will
only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of
attacks from Messrs.  Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.

[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the
hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for
the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women,
to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and
tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]



          A MOTHER'S SECRET.

How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
In my slight verse such holy things are named--
Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!

The choral host had closed the angel's strain
Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
And some remembered how the holy scribe,
Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
So fared they on to seek the promised sign
That marked the anointed heir of David's line.

At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
No pomp was there, no glory shone around
On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!

The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
"Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"

They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
But kept their words to ponder in her heart.

Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
No voice had reached the Galilean vale
Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
In the meek, studious child they only saw
The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.

So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
When at the holy place the tribes appear.
Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.

Then Joseph spake : "Thy boy hath largely grown;
Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"

And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
>From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!

They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
All day the dusky caravan has flowed
In devious trails along the winding road,
(For many a step their homeward path attends,
And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"

O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!

Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.

At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
They found him seated with the ancient men,
The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.

And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!
"Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
To all their mild commands obedient still.

The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
It passed around among the listening friends,
With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.

But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother's secret hope outlives them all.




VI

You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
Bloated some, I expect.

This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which
the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.

Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part
to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and
particularly unpleasant world.  This is so much a matter of course,
that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.  He
took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting
forward over the chapped sideboard.  The image it returned to him had
the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.  The scenery of a
long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-
train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of
disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over
their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive,
but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so
that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so
longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as
they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a
duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks
for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on
the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or
beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and
the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal
body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you
are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an
upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size,
so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about
and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned
solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having
neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting
posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the
formless and position to the placeless.  Neither did his thoughts
spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.
They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--
sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes
connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.

They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I
have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass
turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to
him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut
not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground
archives.  He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the
direction in which his downward path was tending.  It was an honest
little cough enough, so far as appearances went.  But coughs are
ungrateful things.  You find one out in the cold, take it up and
nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your
bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.  And by-and-by its little
bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing! --you find it
is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the
breast where he has been nestling so long. --The Poor Relation said
that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
bad way. --The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-
pictorial.

Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John. --Make it into punch,
cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.  I'll come up 'n' show you
how to mix it.  Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man
exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?

Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place
where the fat man was exhibitin'.  Tried to get in at half-price, but
the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten
year old.

It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.  Whiskey--that's what did
it,--real Burbon's the stuff.  Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
wear on the sides of their foreheads.

But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
fellow had just drawn.

He took up his hat and went out.

I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.
--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too
much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for
he looks as if his mind were made up to something.

I followed him at a reasonable distance.  He walked doggedly along,
looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.  Luckily, the doctor
was there and overhauled him on the spot.  There was nothing the
matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a
sound one.  He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.

This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
well-bred and ill-bred people.

I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone,
expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the
reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than
others.

--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
Tutor's daughter.

I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the
quality.

Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like
ours?

I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The
great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters
and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a
republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-
presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how
seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I
believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except
such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has
crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of
equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more
curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.

Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this
of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of
all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is
still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies
arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but
superior as a body to all else.

Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely

hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.

--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
who are the electors?--said the Model.

Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal
vote.  The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well
what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the
chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a
staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred
tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and
cheap training.  As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of
two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood
doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those
old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great
people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small
artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held "base" fluid
enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!

Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.

Almost.  And with good reason.  For though there are numerous
exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most
agreeable companions.  The influence of a fine house, graceful
furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and,
above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it,
gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we
feel, if we cannot explain their charm.  Yet we can get at the reason
of it by thinking a little.

All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial
influences.  In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow
delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil
and incased in soft gloves.  The whole nature becomes subdued into
suavity.  I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common
kind even of literary ones.  They have n't read the last book,
perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them.
If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance.
Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in
diamonds than in dogmas.  I don't know where you will find a sweeter
portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King
Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
her lord.  I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable
person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of
Sisera.  The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something
that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality.  The
highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the
truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in
all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so
that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a
fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and
pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a
dahlia.  As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is
much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.  Don't you see
why?  Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
all the compliments paid you.  This is one reason.

--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
Model.

[My reflection.  Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married.  Served
you right.]  My remark.  Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery
telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that,
which they are not.  But a woman who does not carry about with her
wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make
everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of
at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom
she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the
comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than
otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she
may do well enough to hold discussions with.

--I don't think the Model exactly liked this.  She said,--a little
spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little
praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
habit of getting much.

Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco.  It is
notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.

--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my
cigars and burnt 'em all up.

I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were
all disposed of in the same way.

So do I,--said the young fellow John.

Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those
odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have
consumed your own?

I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.

It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American
woman would be grateful to you.  Let us burn them all in a heap out
in the yard.

That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.

--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior
apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he
has dropped into a well.  But before it had fairly reached the
water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain
interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to
fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh,
that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated
soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it.  It was plain that
some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she
was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been
cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it.
So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model--who, if she
had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted
that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--
had not the tact to join.  She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
the young fellow John said.  In fact, I was afraid the joke would
have cost us both our new lady-boarders.  It had no effect, however,
except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two,
who could, on the whole, be spared.

--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
axioms on the matter of breeding.  But it so happened, that, exactly
at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom
several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt
many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of
manners.  Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to
coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to
express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for
what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was
delivered.  But what shall I do now?  He told us it was childish to
lay down rules for deportment,--but he could not help laying down a
few.

Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry.  True, but hard of
application.  People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization:
quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought,
excitable temper.  Stillness of person and steadiness of features
are signal marks of good-breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still,
or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.

Talking of one's own ails and grievances. --Bad enough, but not so
bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-
looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.

Apologizing. --A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  Nine times out of ten, the
first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his
apology.  It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your
small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk
about them.

Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait,
and eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in
certain intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation,
to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without
them,--to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to
have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot
afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the
harmonies, throughout your person and--dwelling: I should say that
this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.

Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
generic humanity.  It is just here that the very highest society
asserts its superior breeding.  Among truly elegant people of the
highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse
than in a country village.  As nuns drop their birth-names and
become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop
their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of
conversational charity.  Nor are fashionable people without their
heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-
devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as
ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There
are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold
back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed,
gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the
green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary
apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-
room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that
a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be
presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,--he had
on black gloves,--and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!
Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your
paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is
that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the
social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have
wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness
and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.

I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always
been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if
at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on
whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be
bestowed?  This may happen,--how soon the future only knows.  Think
of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,--an
unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the
flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the
public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the
forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political
oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good
society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in
fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!
No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield
the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.
I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he
would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,--
or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating
his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into
her bosom, like Lucretia!  I can see her studying in his provincial
dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that
think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson
and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think
they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know,
comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
the same thing.

If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to
foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not
grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice,
or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then
convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation
addressed the divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like.
I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don't for mercy's sake think I
hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No
matter where you find such people; they are clowns.

The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when
she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good
manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood
of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned
by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit,
tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth
from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them
into a kind of human vegetable.

I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to
make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this
particular record, which some young people who are going to choose
professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If
you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if
possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is
not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of
death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the
Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by
word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some
extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence
which one human being can offer to another.  "You have killed me,"
said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in
six' weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought
to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of
hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long
as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of
heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the
bearer is ready to let fall.

Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The
chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a
certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse
people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at
length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and
sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried
on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.

And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer
the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you
can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces
that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your
children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones
cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.

After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably
select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then
all will be right.

This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which
could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are
made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a
marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been
at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.?  and, Do you
take this woman?  how do you think the officiating clergyman put the
questions?  It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any
English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought,
if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom
anything but plain woman and man at such a time?

I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt,
that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed
what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the
pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain
social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the
holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the
good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that
superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please
could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify
than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.

MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes
before that.

         "When Adam delved and Eve span,
          Who was then the gentleman?"

The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from
the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat
is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and
all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the
surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as
we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more
tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud
of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.

--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all
the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is
the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good
persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her. --Only we
don't.

This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the
principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit
and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably
immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had
occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as
I have done for the Model.  "Pious and painefull."  Why has that
excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good
painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the
long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of
it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.

--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.

Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?

Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
petticoats.

--Now that means something,--said I to myself. --These rough young
rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without
knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their
intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can't help
it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.
Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to
her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not
to show itself too staringly on the outside. ---You don't know,
perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the
internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the
brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes
from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up
one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives
no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.

Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did
anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and
intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of
society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion?  Because of
the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.  The red
heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed,
chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly
what we do not want of woman as woman.  The current should run the
other-way.  The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes
itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always
travel to the lips via the heart.  It does so in those women whom
all love and admire.  It travels the wrong way in the Model.  That
is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
her."  That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.
That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces
with scalpel and forceps.  That is the reason why the young girl
whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which
lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.  I can see her,
as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man
on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she
speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain
in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.

Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and
high culture.  It is not

    "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
     Zephyr with Aurora playing,"

when the two meet

    "---on beds of violets blue,
     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"

that claim such women as their offspring.  It is rather the east
wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a
clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England
ice-quarry. --Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this
were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of
our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.  The brain-women never
interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.
But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as
well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of
summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;
and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and
heaven in their souls.  Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no
more.  Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those
babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know
enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only
as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological
cabinets.

Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little
clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.
Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable,
talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of
an achromatic understanding.  Goodbye!  Where is my Beranger?  I
must read a verse or two of "Fretillon."

Fair play for all.  But don't claim incompatible qualities for
anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.
Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's
digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one
homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are
all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics
and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed
them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a
suggestion of their old pungency and power.

Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession,
by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not
the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice,
which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed,
is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute
wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn't a man always strike
out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of
injustice?

So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the
world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of
richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to
ask it.

Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way
one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all
things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept
under by the laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant
life, opulent and showy organizations,--the spherical rather than
the plane trigonometry of female architecture,--plenty of red blood,
flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of
dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you
will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,--women whom
dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,--
talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,--and around
whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty
next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too
perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the
yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.

There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion
or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and
loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden
slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of
accumulation.

But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms
and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing
about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk
about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a
card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of
their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it
was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?

Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged
uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men
were all the time fighting and robbing each other,--in those
tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a
man's cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and
rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings
to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with
common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is
nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man's
learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance,
but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live
and keep his memory green.

I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving
utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by
conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary
to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the
breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and
fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances
which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades
the other.

A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is
not generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of
common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends
should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and "all-
rounds," or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything
I have said, I will give them references to some of the class
referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary
diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old
woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.

I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean
to flatter them.  I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness.
But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which,
of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people
into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real
respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them
stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it
a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can't somebody give us a
list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another
list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?

Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
following lesson for the day.

     THE TWO STREAMS.

Behold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!

Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.

So from the heights of Will
Life's parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends,

>From the same cradle's side,
>From the same mother's knee,--
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!




VII

Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
gentility.  She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is
known by all to be a mark of high breeding.  She wears her trains
very long, as the great ladies do in Europe.  To be sure, their
dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux
and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go
draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must
ride in coaches when they are in full dress.  It is true, that,
considering various habits of the American people, also the little
accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one
would care to be her neighbor.  But then there is no need of being
so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our
little deformed gentleman was the other day.

--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said.
Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir!  They had
grand women in old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children
as never the world saw before.  And so it was here, Sir.  I tell
you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's
milk before it ran in man's blood, Sir!

But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
streets! --where do they come from?  Not out of Boston parlors, I
trust.  Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail
through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses.
Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a
maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a
nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying
about with her pah! --that's what I call getting vulgarity into your
bones and marrow.  Making believe be what you are not is the essence
of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.
If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes
up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David
served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his skirts, Sir!
cut off his skirts!

I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended
in the way he condemned.

Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman. --Don't
tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all
about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I
won't believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion
has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If
a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money,
which she wants and means to spend, but doesn't know how, let her
buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out
to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;--there
may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an
insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house
for her to deal with.  I don't like the Bloomers any too well,--in
fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob of boys
after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
a-----

The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked
round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of
any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye
wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one
other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on
Iris,--his next neighbor, you remember.

--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
person's eyes have been fixed on us.

Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the
person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice,
of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix
Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting
evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous
stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A
young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on.
the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it
with their pencils of blue or brown light.

A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also
observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her
who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins
yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if
we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we
naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.
If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and
features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see
twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There
is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization;
every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.
If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to
it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and
wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a
common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often
fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of
its handle.

All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention
that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him
with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after
wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say;
but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked
calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that
wore the red jewel.

--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures!
Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?
Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd,
fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above
and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he
is--out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man,
distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman
could not shape a husband out of.

--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do
you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the
angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he
shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a
brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to
which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.

But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I
suppose.  They say that leads to love.

--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I
can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent
feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very
hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine,
knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly
down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will
take care of itself.

One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a
house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the
building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive,
crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is
tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating
about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-
acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.  Let us get up and
see what is going on. --Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold
of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red
eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his
thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping
the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber
sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your
life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing
but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!

If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say
was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know
that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among
them.  I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these
two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that
there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their
commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to
understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid
her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked
the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-
tamer's secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster
that he makes a baby of.

One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love,
on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who
they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love
like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth
and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the
parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of
human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this
fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the
flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in
the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a
kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her
burning image?

--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.  I should think the
chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her
than she to marry him.

There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he
awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in
it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say
age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of
wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not
touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling
current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them
balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn
so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents
are like those of the earth our mother.

Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud,
mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him

               "with quivering peals,
     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
     Redoubled and redoubled."

When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far
distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint
itself with new force upon his perceptions. --Read the sonnet, if
you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn
in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-
physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild
term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.
All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of
the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will
come in next.

--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in
the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but
there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin
of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run
riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to
read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at
it honorably.

I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only
guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in
the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on
the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not
over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from
which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging
of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,-
-it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now
and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether
of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it
may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition
I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and
moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have
heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have
covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my
dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-
called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
neck-lace, but a dull-stain.

Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions
about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take
all that nonsense out of any man's head!  It is not our beliefs that
frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes,
but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but
it does n't worry him much.  On the other hand, carry that man
across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and
show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many
years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old
man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the
country-people have called it "the haunted house,"--the owners
have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account
of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows
on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned
black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and
the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,--
take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
alone,--how do you think he will like it?  He doesn't believe one
word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or
sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with
ghostly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that
frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that
reaches a good way if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if
these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber
sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not
because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.
The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that
was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold; it
was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious
and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a
woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for,
in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly,
he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what
they call the vox humana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get
away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very
frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits
explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that,
I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first
a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in
the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
"Lamia."

There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any
time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a
dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises
you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the
dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of
drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There's a
door ajar; you know you shut them all.

Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it
softly?  or, worse than any body, is----?  (Cold shiver.) Then a
sudden gust that jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does
not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops,
you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps
outside,--a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,--but a gentle
moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle
or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the
rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so
that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of
your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
over, very likely---- Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are
damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so
that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!

No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.
Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it,
of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and
owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on
moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the
eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our
old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when
she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops;
but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black
velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of
her lips is full of mystery and fear.

You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that
has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I
suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work
so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so
easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons

which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather
pleased to get "the Professor" under their ceilings.

The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and
try some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1.  On asking him what
was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven,
sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go
ahead to show me the way.  I followed him to his habitat, being very
willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I
might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my
curiosity.

Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a
bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and
"vests,"--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and
pantaloons or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out
of them.  Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that
grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to
Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew
the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and
especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,"
and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith."  "Best three in five.
Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."

That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is,
as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living
mechanism.  I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26.  Flora Temple
has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less.
Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember
in public as low down as 2.20.  From five to ten seconds, then, in
about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the
present race of trotting horses.  The same thing is seen in the
running of men.  Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one
comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about

4.30 the maximum is reached.  Averages of masses have been studied
more than averages of maxima and minima.  We know from the
Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot
water out of spouts of teakettles.  We know, that, among suicides,
women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms.  A
woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or
a gun.  Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?

I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
to the sporting men more than to the philosophers.  The lesson their
experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
saltum.  The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best.  Just look at
the chess-players.  Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers.  Such a person is a
"knight-player,"--he must have that piece given him.  Another must
have two pawns.  Another, "pawn and two," or one pawn and two moves.
Then we find one who claims "pawn and move," holding himself, with
this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure
to beat him playing even. --So much are minds alike; and you and I
think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after
shaping our cerebral convolutions.  So I reflected, standing and
looking at the picture.

--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11
stay jest as well, if you'll only set down.  I've had 'em this year,
and they haven't stirred. --He spoke, and handed the chair towards
me,--seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.

You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
interrogation at the end of the statement.

Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question
by another.

No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the
bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board."

[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement.  This
impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment
and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a
couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table.  One of
them was of the class of people who grumble if they don't get
canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week.  The
other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he
ought to have been asleep in his bed.  In this state he walked into
several of the boarders' chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual
with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to
know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for
the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem.  Among them was a
repeater, belonging to our young Marylander.  He happened to wake up
while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his
infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after
which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when
he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases
of somnambulism.]

If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this
parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has
interrupted.

It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's
looks when a fellah lays it in too strong.  The feed's well enough.
After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's
got old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin'
tall 'n' slim 'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are
gettin' so big 'n' hard they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of
a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season.  But
it's too much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's
substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah 's
as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 'n'
not enough for two.  I can't help lookin' at the old woman.  Corned-
beef-days she's tolerable calm.  Roastin'-days she worries some, 'n'
keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves.  But when there's
anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to
see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces,
that there's no comfort in eatin'.  When I cut up an old fowl and
help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you
have a slice of widdah?--instead of chicken.

The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in
his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston
folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as
being A 1.

Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
communicative.

It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who
had excited my curiosity.

What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.

Fust-rate little filly;-he said. --Pootiest and nicest little chap
I've seen since the schoolma'am left.  Schoolma'am was a brown-
haired one,--eyes coffee-color.  This one has got wine-colored
eyes,--'n' that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.

This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette.
Which style do you like best?

Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young
man John.  Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
goodness.  I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away.
Used to like to look at her.  I never said anything particular to
her, that I remember, but---

I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the
young fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing
that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.

I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--
but I come pretty near tryin'.  If she had said, Yes, though, I
shouldn't have known what to have done with her.  Can't marry a
woman now-a-days till you're so deaf you have to cock your head like
a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can't see
what she looks like nearer than arm's-length.

Here is another chance for you,--I said. --What do you want nicer
than such a young lady as Iris?

It's no use,--he answered. --I look at them girls and feel as the
fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout. --'To'od 'a' cost more
butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah. --Takes a whole
piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days.  I'd as lief undertake
to keep a span of elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as
to marry one of 'em.  What's the use?  Clerks and counter-jumpers
ain't anything.  Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,--not
while they're young and tender.  Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--
except once a year, on Fast-day.  And marryin' a'n't for them.
Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young
woman, to tell her how lonely he feels.  And sometimes a fellah,--
here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as
if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah would like
to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and push
about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little
articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything,
and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything.  It makes
nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt!  And it's pleasant to see
fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods,
waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men
lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
customers, but have n't the money!

Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I
said.

What!  Little Boston ask that girl to marry him!  Well, now, that's
cumin' of it a little too strong.  Yes, I guess she will marry him
and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he
said, mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman
comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'.
I should like to know what he's about in that den of his.  He lays
low 'n' keeps dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the
boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to
want 'em.  Biddy could tell somethin' about what she's seen when she
's been to put his room to rights.  She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but
she knows enough to keep her tongue still.  All I know is, I saw her
crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room.  She looked
pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
Blessed Virgin.  If it had n't been for the double doors to that
chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but,
somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both open at
once.

What do you think he employs himself about?  said I.

The young man John winked.

I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the
blossom, to come to fruit in words.

I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.

Nor I.

We were both silent for a few minutes.


--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said,
presently.

All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show
it.  Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking
of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into
it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  "If you please," says
she,--'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl
up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n't,
and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-
lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to
somebody.

--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to
live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so
long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing.
book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a
look into the Little Gentleman's room.

I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble
myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason,
that all I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some
outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural
sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the
pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I'll
tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the
strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread
her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries
that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon
him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the
first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I
would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.

Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he
is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery
about him.

The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
many more reflections.  It was about two o'clock in the morning,--
bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the
heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over
the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when
I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the
clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was
not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's
voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of
rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and
sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away
at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low,
monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the closing of a
door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and
all was still for the night.

By George!  this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for
a change of night-clothes.

I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
it at our celebration.  So I read it to the boarders instead, and
print it to finish off this record with.


          ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.

He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
His wandering flock had gone before,
But he, the shepherd, might not share
Their sorrows on the wintry shore.

Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
The pastor spake, and thus he said:--

"Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
God calls you hence from over sea;
Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.

"Ye go to bear the saving word
To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
Heed well the lessons ye have heard
>From those old teachers taught of God.

"Yet think not unto them was lent
All light for all the coming days,
And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
In making straight the ancient ways.

"The living fountain overflows
For every flock, for every lamb,
Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."

He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
With tears of love and partings fond,
They floated down the creeping Maas,
Along the isle of Ysselmond.

They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
And grated soon with lifting keel
The sullen shores of Fatherland.

No home for these! --too well they knew
The mitred king behind the throne;
The sails were set, the pennons flew,
And westward ho!  for worlds unknown.

--And these were they who gave us birth,
The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
Who won for us this virgin earth,
And freedom with the soil they gave.

The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,--
In alien earth the exiles lie,--
Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
His words our noblest battle-cry!

Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!




VIII

There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
going on.  There is no particular change that I can think of in the
aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
catastrophes.  I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
little to tell as yet.  You may laugh at me, and very likely think
me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
middling-class household like ours.  Do as you like.  But here is
that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
loose among live men.

-Terrible fact?

Very terrible.  Nothing more so.  Do you forget the angels who lost
heaven for the daughters of men?  Do you forget Helen, and the fair
women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
born?  If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
lovely young woman. --I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
father used sometimes to call her, of ours.  Handsome creature that
she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
that holds my eyes upon her.  Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
me.

It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
years.  These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.  I have
many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.  Of
course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
and to their First Great Cause.  This secret seems to be broken up,
as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.  I
do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.  Persons,
however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
could not tell in our human words.

Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
mystery.  There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
women to be worshipped.

But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But
this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?

Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
have tired of, and through--Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud
is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.

You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a
rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow
under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in
the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
out, obsolete and useless.

So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the
deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.

I wish the girl would go.  I don't like to look at her so much, and
yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that
I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
give you which settle all that matter.  I don't wonder, however,
that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.

I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic
implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No,
women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love,
though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,--
Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have
known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them
drunkards.

I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
young girl's face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a
friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,--only into
feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
or on the very threshold of the next.

You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
girl's face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which
we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of
clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I
could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything
intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with
whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people
to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
understood;--

          That moment that his face I see,
          I know the man that must hear me
          To him my tale I teach.

--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
for this August number, so that they will never see it.

--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
refunded, if you will make the change.

This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then
there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
direction in which their occupants love to look.

That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some
mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She
gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.

--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
his button-hole. --After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
Very fine performances,--very fine! --truly elegant productions,
truly elegant! --Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some
lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,

          Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
          With me but roughly since I heard thee last."

And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The
dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a
waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till
manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
but, as it were, his child.

If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
thought.

--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
that you don't want to see. --The old gentleman put his hand to his
forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim
photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.

How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
take lessons? --This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
large size she had covered with drawings.

I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies,
principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a
superb drawing of an arm!  I don't remember it among the figures
from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
>From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature. --Oh!

--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said. --I should like
to see her style of working on a small scale. --There was nothing in
it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of
dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of
them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand
second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her
what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
has, at any rate. --I saw a book she had, which must have come from
the divinity-student.  It had a dreary title-page, which she had
enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
"good men," and that heaven is full of such. --The gentleman with
the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.  He pulls
his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
sees him, as it should seem.  The young Marylander, who I thought
would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
one.  But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
locked drawing-book.

Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.  For
this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
followed him as he toiled back to his room.  He rested on the
landing and faced round toward me.  There was something in his eye
which said, Stop there!  So we finished our conversation on the
landing.  The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
door, having a pretext ready. --No answer. --Knock again.  A door,
as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.  He
pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
stood.  He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
and a quaint-looking key in his hand.  Our conversation was short,
but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.

I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.  I mean to give
up such nonsense and mind my own business. --Hark!  What the deuse
is that odd noise in his chamber?

--I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when
I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a
series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps."  These were patches
of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in
one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
named after a Colonial Governor.  I do not think many persons are
aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the northwest corner,
and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken.  A
considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
visible.  The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
which she was thought to know something. --I tell you it was not so
pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
his ascetic sanctity.

There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark
storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady's
portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room
downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
liable to superstitious fancies.

Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the
world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
chamber after midnight.

But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my
thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
means of so doing.

Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body
in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
obtain in addition to his purchase.

The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well.  But
there is this difference between its view and that of a person
looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
from without, and see us as living statues.  To be sure, by the aid
of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
from within outward which none but ourselves can take.  A portrait
is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us.  The artist looks only
from without.  He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
we are never likely to see.  No genuine expression can be studied by
the subject of it in the looking-glass.

More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
acquaintances never see us.  Without wearing any mask we are
conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  For, in the
first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
record, if you happened to read that document.  And secondly, each
of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
looks for.  Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
any one of these special views.  Suppose he should copy you as you
appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation.  The
artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
two, or something different from either.  What the daguerreotype and
photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.  Out of
all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
exact look at any one time or to any particular person.  Such a
portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
as life."  Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
in resemblance by many persons.

There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
shapes your features from his outline.  It is that you resemble so
many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
likeness in your countenance.

He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
thus:

There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
never thought I had a sign of it.  The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
blue eye, those I knew I had.  But there is a something which
recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
years ago!  I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
better for having a trace of it.

Are we not young?  Are we not fresh and blooming?  Wait, a bit.  The
artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.  Five years. --The
artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
perpendicularly between the eyebrows.  Ten years. --The artist
breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
or other change of feature. --Hold on!  Stop that!  Give a young
fellow a chance!  Are we not whole years short of that interesting
period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?

There now!  That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.  Is he not a POET
that painted us?

          "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
                                        COWPER.

--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral
elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.

--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child "feels
its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very
interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
painful admiration.  It will be found that most of these children
are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
most frequent of which I need not mention.  They are like the
beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
because its core is gnawed out.  They have their meaning,--they do
not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.  I am convinced that many
healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
exercises.  Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
behind " anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an

engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
this world out?  Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents?  The time
comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
premature decay.  I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
piety.  I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.  I
know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
fools to pick a quarrel with me.  In the sensibility and the
sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.

--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite
note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We
repaired to that scientific Golgotha.

Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular
speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder
if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No.
9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
"organs."  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
stripped twig of willow.

The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
antechamber.

Tape round the head,--22 inches.  (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
think you are the better man!)

Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No.  5 or 6, or
something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
other number equally significant.

Mild champooing of head now commences.  'Extraordinary revelations!
Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!
Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!
Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a
linguist. --Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and
dictionaries immediately. --I have nothing against the grand total
of my phrenological endowments.

I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
Much obliged to them for their politeness.  They have been useful in
their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)


A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
Breakfast-Table.

I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
against it, is excluded.  It is invariably connected with some
lucrative practical application.  Its professors and practitioners
are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.  The believing
multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
a member of the detective police. --I do not say that Phrenology was
one of the Pseudo-sciences.

A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies.  It
may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.  The rottenest bank
starts with a little specie.  It puts out a thousand promises to pay
on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
a good one.  The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
out of our own imagination.  (How many persons can read Judges xv.
16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
this. --I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.

I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
something in Phrenology.  A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature.  I have
as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
the bumps.  It is observed, however, that persons with what the
Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
plenary belief in the doctrine.

It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
I might be puzzled.  But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
our satellite, before I purchase.

It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
statement.  It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.  The walls
of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
the smallest and most closely crowded "organs."  Can you tell how
much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
kneading its knobs with your fingers?  So when a man fumbles about
my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.  Perhaps there is;
only he does n't know anything about at.  But this is a point that
I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
better than you do.  The next argument you will all appreciate.

I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
An example will show it most conveniently.

A. is a notorious thief.  Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness.  Positive fact for
Phrenology.  Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
does not lose in the act of copying. --I did not say it gained. --
What do you look so for?  (to the boarders.)

Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A.  But B. has no bump at
all over Acquisitiveness.  Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
--Not a bit of it.  Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
That's the reason B. stole.

And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
way of committing petty larceny.  Unfortunately, C.  has a hollow,
instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness.  Ah, but just look and see
what a bump of Alimentiveness!  Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
when a boy, with the money he stole?  Of course you see why he is a
thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.

At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
Byron, for instance.  Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
Phrenologist.  "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
organ, which determines its degree of power."

Oh! oh!  I see. --The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose."  Well, that's
convenient.

It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
the Pseudo-sciences.  I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.

I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls.  Of
course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
cranial inspections and manipulations. --What are you laughing at?
(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece.  Let us see how well
he could get along without the "organs."

I will suppose myself to set up such a shop.  I would invest one
hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
and other matters that would make the most show for the money.  That
would do to begin with.  I would then advertise myself as the
celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
wait for my first customer.  My first customer is a middle-aged man.
I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.

LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
      CUSTOMER.
                             Each to be accompanied with a wink.

Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
                    men love to be told they do.

Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
                 lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey

Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.

Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
                       effect of that plus sign.

Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.

Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.

Conscientiousness 8�   That fraction looks first-rate.

Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.

Ideality 9             That sounds well.

Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that
Color, Locality,       cannot be guessed.
Eventuality, etc. etc.


                And so of the other faculties.


Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do.  They
go only by the bumps. --What do you keep laughing so for?  (to the
boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
"Phrenology" for a living.

                    End of my Lecture.


--The Reformers have good heads, generally.  Their faces are
commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
even though their voices may be like

         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,

when heard from the platform.  Their greatest spiritual danger is
from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
These lines are meant to caution them.


     SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.

          HIS TEMPTATION.

No fear lest praise should make us proud!
We know how cheaply that is won;
The idle homage of the crowd
Is proof of tasks as idly done.

A surface-smile may pay the toil
That follows still the conquering Right,
With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.

Sing the sweet song of other days,
Serenely placid, safely true,
And o'er the present's parching ways
Thy verse distils like evening dew.

But speak in words of living power,--
They fall like drops of scalding rain
That plashed before the burning shower
Swept o'er the cities of the plain!

Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
And, smitten through their leprous mail,
Strike right and left in hope to sting.

If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--

Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
Too firm for clamor to dismay,
When Faith forbids thee to believe,
And Meekness calls to disobey, --

Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
The smiling pride that calmly scorns
Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
In laboring on thy crown of thorns!




IX

One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent
in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of
them are, I felt bound to answer.

1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
single page?

To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had
but half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send
through the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper
(crosswise, lengthwise, and diagonally).

2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?

To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
questioners.

a.  Not trying to be a gentleman.

b.  Self-respect underlying courtesy.

c.  Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
intercourse.

d.  f. s. d.  (as many suppose.)

3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?

Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:

     Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
     It is her figure pleases me."
     "What may her figure be?" I cried.
     "One hundred thousand!" he replied.

When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he
should like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the
girl was one of the right sort.

The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
blessin' of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had
it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and
knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins
merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he
lived ten year longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody
to take care of him.  There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick
folks and them that couldn't take care of themselves.

The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed
to think this speech was intended.

If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was.
Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the
conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially
interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast,
sometimes almost savagely,--and, I have noticed once or twice,
presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something
that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.

While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is
interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his
face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes
with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind
of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our
table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us
all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From
the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they
have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in
thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for "free trade
and no right of search" on the high seas of religious controversy,
and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In
her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly
disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say
or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
of hers.

The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little
Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.
She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she
had the toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter
the wind blows from, she will catch her "death o' cold."

The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
tried to persuade him to hold his tongue. --The boarders was gettin'
uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to
settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all
her livin' depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't
any of 'em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them
that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.

The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her
mate by these and other bird-like graces. --My dear Madam,--he
said,--I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to
which I am totally indifferent. --I don't doubt he meant this; but a
day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice
uttering itself aloud, thus:

-It must be done, Sir! --he was saying,--it must be done!  Our
religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when
it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in
politics;--it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a
man,--and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's
interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his
lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other
candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right, Sir.  Just so a
man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn't do,
Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and "heretic" and
those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have
left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!

As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or
pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron
through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board
at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the
fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led
to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had
better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee
advertisement like this! --(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as
he uttered the words,--)

--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.

--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!

--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves
unsatisfactory.

I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what's
the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves
and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the
things themselves, Sir?  What's the use of painting the fire round a
poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as
they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?

--What story is that?--I said.

Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the
statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n't
quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a
hogshead painted all over with flames!

No, Sir!  when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-
box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is
your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born,
Sir!  It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as
we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends
into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much
of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"! --None of my
words, Sir!  none of my words!

--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
like when one sees it?  She follows him with her eyes, she leans
over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of
his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with
Christabel,--

          That all her features were resigned
          To this sole image in her mind.

But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when
he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.

Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might
be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex
hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.  But in all common
aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion
from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all,
from their pure affections.

Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her
childhood.  Especially she had been told that she hated all good
things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true
of a great many children, to say the least.  I have sometimes
questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a
natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was
enforced for so long a period.

The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle
of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all
she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or
else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or
"wrong"?  No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child
with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery
and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out
of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not
assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its
parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image. --
How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that
is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and
adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a
part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato,
you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of
the world's teachers. --Old books, as you well know, are books of
the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of
all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The
gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of
the dross with which it was mingled.

And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only
fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give
themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer,
who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself,
in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first
article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of
this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order
of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the
fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.

The child must have some place of worship.  What would a young girl
be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose
all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free
to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry
her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were
hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was
a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in
doctrine as could well be divided her affections.

The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to
the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but
there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and
there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other
elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in
choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with
very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a
bag, such as Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried
round to receive contributions.  Everything was done not only
"decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a certain
air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
clergymen, often two or three in number.  The music and the free
welcome were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the
door of the chapel.  For this was a church with open doors, with
seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous
worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and
women, one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor,
and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their
own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors.  In its
mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
refinement, which the educated require just as much in their
churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp,
which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its
effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
value.  Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
cheerful religious spirit.  The artistic sense, which betrayed
itself in the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with
her taste.  The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those
rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every
tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as
"Good Lord, deliver us!  "--the sweet alternation of the two choirs,
as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices
rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to
another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
Polycarp?

The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship,
had introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for
such of our boarders as were not otherwise provided for.  I saw them
looking over the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help
thinking that two such young and handsome persons could hardly
worship together in safety for a great while.  But they seemed to
mind nothing but their prayer-book.  By-and-by the silken bag was
handed round. --I don't believe she will; so awkward, you know;-
besides, she only came by invitation.  There she is, with her hand
in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of silver
tinkled as it struck the coin beneath.  God bless her! she has n't
much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is
all Heaven asks. --That was the first time I noticed these young
people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young
gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the
corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far
removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat
is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a
romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could
it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon.  (To my
lady-reader.)

I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going
to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is
not with the throng of men and women and staring children.

I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I
should go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy
enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes,
whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship
comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was
that I carried our young girl.

The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in
outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that,
it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down
a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden
tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the
high, sharp roofs--traces, both, of that upward movement of
ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires,
shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the
cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of
medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell
might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of
outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very
little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side,
and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it
was a church reduced to its simplest expression:

Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne,
in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of

the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple
chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in
their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due
succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher's
desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin
white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses
of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of
autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of
glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year
told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple
desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
homily.  There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when
all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.

Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same
gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit,
the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all
else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical
costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A
liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from
the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to
change its expressions to its own liking.

Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they
are apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper
before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that
old Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the
first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.
The truth is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family
does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least,
considering it on the whole quite a delightful matter to come
together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise
lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very
precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging  criticisms on the
literary character of the sermon they  may hear.  There is no
restlessness and no restraint  among these quiet, cheerful
worshippers.  One thing  that keeps them calm and happy during the
season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join
very generally in the singing.  In this way they  get rid of that
accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety
movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still
reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which
another boy is working,--this spirting impatience of the people is
so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the
grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to
the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with
immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating
youngster.

How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one
common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and
now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in
advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and
place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the
last semi-breve upon his private responsibility; but how much more
of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly
trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers
who take our musical worship out of our hands!

I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is
not laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint
Polycarp.  Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of
those churches had met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature,
or for the promotion of any charitable object, they would have found
they had more in common than all the special beliefs or want of
beliefs that separated them would amount to.  There are always many
who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a better test of its
condition than a statement of the composts with which it is dressed,
though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.

Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her
affections.  But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either
with more devotion than she does to her little neighbor when he
talks of these matters.

What does he believe?  In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very
bitter against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private
judgment.  Over this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity
in general, bred out of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply
streaked with fiery lines of wrath at various individual acts of
wrong, especially if they come in an ecclesiastical shape, and
recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was
strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her
halter.  With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of
this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the
free thought of its northeastern metropolis.

--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of
Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all
the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the
world!  No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer
Light and the sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains!  Yes,
Sir,--and there are great truths that are higher than mountains and
broader than seas, that people are looking for from the tops of
these hills of ours;--such as the world never saw, though it might
have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open! --Where do
they have most crazy people?  Tell me that, Sir!

I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England
than in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.

Very good, Sir,--he answered. --When have there been most people
killed and wounded in the course of this century?

During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.

That's it! that's it! --said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle
of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
We're battling for a faith here, Sir.

The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the
world's history for men to be looking out for a new faith.

I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours
from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and
that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and
makes the fat of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes
the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It is n't where a
pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the
game round it is when it is on this or that square.

Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now
doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition
of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which
the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No,
Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--
call it an ark, rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold
all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves
of life,--and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one
end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as
to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and
throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about
the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting afloat
with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters
sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say
now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water,
shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten
cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where
it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
lying!"

It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan
was n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the
Rhone was n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and
perhaps the Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of
that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks
of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good
Samaritan.  I don't know, Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--
I do believe she slides;--and when I think of what a work that is
for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would
not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for
my birthright in the soil of little Boston!

--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.

And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure
which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets
excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and
especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing,
his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to
which he looks forward.

Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.

You are not well,--she said.

I am never well,--he answered. --His eyes fell mechanically on the
death's-head ring he wore on his right hand.  She took his hand as
if it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it
should be out of sight.  One slight, sad, slow movement of the head
seemed to say, "The death-symbol is still there!"

A very odd personage, to be sure!  Seems to know what is going on,--
reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him,
they tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday
affairs of the world, too.  Whether he hears everything that is said
with preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend
visits him in a quiet way, is more than I can tell.  I can make
nothing more of the noises I hear in his room than my old
conjectures.  The movements I mention are less frequent, but I often
hear the plaintive cry,--I observe that it is rarely laughing of
late;--I never have detected one articulate word, but I never heard
such tones from anything but a human voice.

There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned.  This
is doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have
saddened his look of late.  Either some passion is gnawing at him
inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon him.

--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to
me one day. --There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he
looks peakeder than ever.  The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
wants a puss to take care of him.  Them pusses that take care of old
rich folks marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a
great while after that.  No, Sir!  I don't see what he wants to die
for, after he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor
accommodations as that crooked body of his.  I should like to know
how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's goin' to get out.  What
business has he to die, I should like to know?  Let Ma'am Allen (the
gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be (this is a
family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.  Not by a
great sight.  Can't do without him anyhow.  A'n't it fun to hear him
blow off his steam?

I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if
the Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table
for a better world.

--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I
have found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well
acquainted with Miss Iris.  There is a certain frankness and
directness about her that perhaps belong to her artist nature.  For,
you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear
perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect
mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures
and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A
true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-
defined mental physiognomy.  Besides this, many young girls have a
strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in
physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will
find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who
do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One
of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to
the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly
height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young
fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees
for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can
"shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-
water mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first
time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or
two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after
she had some girls of her own to look out for.

Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
through them, are often full of character.  They come, probably
enough, from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed
in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose
tints have faded out as their line of descent has become
impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often
become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the
eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.

I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility
which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to
accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call
genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but
there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it
were of upward aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--
a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of
the Gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is
not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and
sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can come only from the
inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough, reminding me of those
long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird
harmonies.

I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl.  Alone,
unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-
houses, the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table,
watched with jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that
poor relation of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women
that like to catch others in mischief when they themselves are too
mature for indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-
catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of
wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great
little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-
life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she
borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and
herds of indifferent animals.

These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as
they will.  The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally.  The
sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who
wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said,
Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the
word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or
any other subject that may prove interesting.  Many charming
conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of
the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in the shadow of
porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which some of
our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles
are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
mention it.

On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris.  We
were on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,-
-my left arm, of course.  That leaves one's right arm free to defend
the lovely creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish
her from your side.  Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a
little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you
will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble, a
circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young
fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to yourselves.

We had it to ourselves that evening.  The Koh-inoor, as we called
him, was in a corner with our landlady's daughter.  The young fellow
John was smoking out in the yard.  The gendarme was afraid of the
evening air, and kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door,
looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his
forehead and stalked off.  I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the
arm I held, and saw the girl's head turn over her shoulder for a
second.  What a kind creature this is!  She has no special interest
in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off
because he feels as if he were not wanted.

She had her locked drawing-book under her arm. --Let me take it,--I
said.

She gave it to me to carry.

This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.

She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.

I was there, of course?

Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.

Then she would let me see the inside of it?

She would think of it.

Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed
it to me.  This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see
it.  I am not afraid of you.

I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me.  At any
rate, I took the book and hurried with it to my room.  I opened it,
and saw, in a few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.

--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
suggested by the season.


          MIDSUMMER.

Here!  sweep these foolish leaves away,
I will not crush my brains to-day!
Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
Fetch me a fan, and so begone!

Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
Brought from a parching coral-reef!
Its breath is heated;--I would swing
The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.

I hate these roses' feverish blood!
Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
Cold as a coiling water-snake.

Rain me sweet odors on the air,
And wheel me up my Indian chair,
And spread some book not overwise
Flat out before my sleepy eyes.

--Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
The pulse that flutters faint and low
When Summer's seething breezes blow?

O Nature!  bare thy loving breast
And give thy child one hour of rest,
One little hour to lie unseen
Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!

So, curtained by a singing pine,
Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
In sweeter music dies away.




X

          IRIS, HER BOOK

I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!

For Iris had no mother to infold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.

She had not learned the mystery of awaking
Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.

Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?

She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.

Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.

Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.

And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
Save me!  oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?

And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!

If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
No second self to say her evening prayer for?

She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.

Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
What if a lonely and unsistered creature
Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,

Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?

--This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.

In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.

Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.

Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.


These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.
As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair
to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the
unsunned depths of a young girl's nature, which I can look through,
as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets
through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail
over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the
child trusted me with such artless confessions,--self-revelations,
which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of
twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the
light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?

To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was
too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair
shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal
loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she
said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with
her,--nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,--all
the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of
a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.
It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a
child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-
house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense
that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through
natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with
its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its
face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.

I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little
creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The
heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The
central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other
little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only
their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black,
beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the
model of them all.

However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like
this of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so
transparent that the heart itself could be seen beating through it.
I should say there never could have been such a book, but for one
recollection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a
certain number of my former townsmen.  If you think I over-color
this matter of the young girl's book, hear this, which there are
others, as I just said, besides myself, will tell you is strictly
true.


THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.

In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a
house inhabited by three maidens.  They left no near kinsfolk, I
believe; whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them;
for they lived and died in all good report and maidenly credit.  The
house they lived in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage
pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but after the size of
the dwellings of handicraftsmen.  The lower story was fitted up as a
shop.  Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so
rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old
folk are to coats.  They speak of limited commerce united with a
social or observing disposition--on the part of the shopkeeper,--
allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as
have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.  On the
door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has
hanging among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some
pairs of thick woollen stockings.  More articles, but not very many,
were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's
books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented
with handsome cuts.  This was the only purchase I ever knew to be
made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is
probable there were others.  So long as I remember the shop, the
same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings hung on the door-
posts. --You think I am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers
would not keep the same article exposed for years.  Come to me, the
Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it
of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass
alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner
of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]

The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had
claims to be considered a Beauty.  When I saw them in the old
meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in
silks and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them,
I thought of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King
Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must
have taken the hint of it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la
Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in the collection of French
songs before me).  There was some story of an old romance in which
the Beauty had played her part.  Perhaps they all had had lovers;
for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
berry at the time of my first recollections.

One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost
nothing, and nobody to inherit it.  Not absolutely nothing, of
course.  There must have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits
of furniture, a Bible, and the spectacles the good old souls read it
through, and little keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when
we find them in old drawers;--such relics there must have been.  But
there was more.  There was a manuscript of some hundred pages,
closely written, in which the poor things had chronicled for many
years the incidents of their daily life.  After their death it was
passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands.  How I have
cried and laughed and colored over it!  There was nothing in it to
be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such
a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do
believe was never drawn before.  And there were all the smallest
incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which
die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their
temples standing.  I know, for instance, that on a given day of a
certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust,
not without special mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I
read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent
a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden Sisters, who,
I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description, were
fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time.  I know
who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one
of them compared to those huge barges to which we give the
ungracious name of mudscows.  But why should I illustrate further
what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of?  Some kind
friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious
strangers into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it,
and I was glad that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes.
I learned from it that every good and, alas! every evil act we do
may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record.  I got a new
lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
learn.  The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate
her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens.
I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and
I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere.  I know there are
prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went
upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good
women cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay
dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed
around her.

--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.  You will believe me more
readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
that lay open before me.  Sometimes it was a poem that held it,
sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere
hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.  A rag of cloud
on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of
it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China
bowl.  On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, I
suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the
leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a
letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
blurred.  Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic
traceries.  It was strange to me at first to see how often she
introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none
too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her
artist eye and pencil.  By the side of the garden-flowers,--of
Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to
sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay,
oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush
that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling
themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each
of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.

Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we
see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens
the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems
fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round
with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale
blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are
kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of
dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the
broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the
Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping
plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly
that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings
to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she
wove into her fanciful garlands and borders. --On one of the pages
were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano
belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that
I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard
the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my
neighbor's chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the
page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed
to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-
hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an
expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of
black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.
The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--
one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his
wings spread over some unseen object. --And on the very next page a
procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty
every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and
one other.

I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him. --There is
a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
Gladiator,"the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the
broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless.  [The separate
casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the
limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that
miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old
Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd,
to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What
could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She
has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy
grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing
up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the
desert."  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the
forehand, light in the hind-quarter.  [The buffalo is the lion of
the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering
curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under
their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on
one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
stare of monumental effigies. --A very odd page indeed!  Not a
creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a
mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am
fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we
vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light
of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like
the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this
paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head
connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.
--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I
believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,
--if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did
you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,--transient
loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position
in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had

been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders
moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her
cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I
went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating
naturally enough,--but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was
as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it. --This
will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her
forehead.  She started and looked round. --I have been in a dream,--
she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me
your hand! --She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft
and white enough, but--Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my
bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she
who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris
turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given
pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the
poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the
spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.

To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each
other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.
On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked
with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged
creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of
those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.
I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of
which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another
as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden
things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among
mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the
single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and
whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.

I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.  As I turned over
the last leaves I could not help starting.  There were all sorts of
faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders
that ran round the pages.  They had mostly the outline of childish
or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.
But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look
not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem
new. --Can it be so?  Was there ever such innocence in a creature so
full of life?  She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old
child betrays itself without need of being questioned!  This was no
common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-
factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.  I began to
understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.

Poets are never young, in one sense.  Their delicate ear hears the
far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel
towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by
them.  A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  I
have frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and
exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.  Too
often one meets such in our charitable institutions.  Their faces
are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore
years and ten.

And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.  The profound
melancholy of those lines of Shelley,

     "I could lie down like a tired child
      And weep away the life of care
      Which I have borne and yet must bear "

came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.

I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this
gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as
well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of
feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.  And then besides,
and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy
confidence in me.  Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter!  How one
must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!

--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.  The world is
always ready to receive talent with open arms.  Very often it does
not know what to do with genius.  Talent is a docile creature.  It
bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.  It
backs into the shafts like a lamb.  It draws its load cheerfully,
and is patient of the bit and of the whip.  But genius is always
impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.

Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely,
that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
therefore more distinctly human in its character.  Genius, on the
other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the
admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to
have something of the lower or animal character.  A goose flies by a
chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  A poet,
like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored
regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.
The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to
his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.

And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest
instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the
suggestion of reason?  What is a bee's architecture but an
unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule
but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect
copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established,
transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?

Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
but rarely a whole brood of either.  Talent is often to be envied,
and genius very commonly to be pitied.  It stands twice the chance
of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass
against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm,
or intangible private truth.

--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making
their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius,
and very likely do not want to know any more.  For a divine
instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet
heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for
many whom it possesses.  It must have been a terrible thing to have
a friend like Chatterton or Burns.  And here is a being who
certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency,
if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on
womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see
a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace
with its evolution.

I think now you know something of this young person.  She wants
nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.  Now and then one meets with
a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously
utterly incompetent.  It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by
accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow
into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that
surround it.  There is no question that certain persons who are born
among us find themselves many degrees too far north.  Tropical by
organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into
which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles
and oranges.  Strange effects are produced by suffering any living
thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
intended for it.  A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
water in the dark.  Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they
did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth,
and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or
embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-
nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the
aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven
into the lungs made to receive it.  Of course we never try to keep
young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or
two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been
bred and fed!  Never!  Never.  Never?

Now to go back to our plant.  You may know, that, for the earlier
stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air,
water, light, and warmth.  But by-and-by, if it is to have special
complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be
supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the
tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to
come into flower and to set its fruit.  Then it is that many young
natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it
contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and
uncolored, unless they are transplanted.

Pray for these dear young souls!  This is the second natural birth;-
for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which
form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness
of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal
relation.  The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of
its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in
purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember
those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.

I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.  She
should ripen under an Italian sun.  She should walk under the
frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of
Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with
the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.  Has she
not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature
requires?

I do not know.  The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on
Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.  I was riding once
along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we
passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and
filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.  I could not
believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary
season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and
huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and
unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the
colored fringe worn from all its border.

If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a
poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well?  Yes,
but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak
of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders,
is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of
imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread
its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone
of humanity?

Take the poet.  On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
poetical faculty finds material everywhere.  The grandest objects of
sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations.  The
sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope
and vision of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in
poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished
life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one.  Which our
common New England life might be considered, I will not decide.  But
there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden.
I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view
as they come before us in so many other aspects.

There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which
we grow.  At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked
up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow.  At Canoe Meadow, in the
Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads.  So everywhere
Indian arrowheads.  Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who
knows? who cares?  There is no history to the red race,--there is
hardly an individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a
tomahawk--there is the Indian of all time.  The story of one red ant
is the story of all red ants.  So, the poet, in trying to wing his
way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along
our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown
generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; he meets

    "A vast vacuity!  all unawares,
     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
     Ten thousand fathom deep."

But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
ancient civilization!  The stakes of the Britons' stockades are
still standing in the bed of the Thames.  The ploughman turns up an
old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the
time of the Caesars.  In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to
be of yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding
newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls
of Fiesole or Volterra.  It makes a man human to live on these old
humanized soils.  He cannot help marching in step with his kind in
the rear of such a procession.  They say a dead man's hand cures
swellings, if laid on them.  There is nothing like the dead cold
hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
solemn flow of the life of our race.  Rousseau came out of one of
his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.

I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving
railroad village.  The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses,
the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of
youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating.  They speak of
progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor
the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural
growths.  Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids.  They seem to me
crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the
steeple of the new meeting-house.  I may be wrong, but the Tiber has
a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Alius, even
more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the
piles of West Boston Bridge.

Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
migratory race.  A poet wants a home.  He can dispense with an
apple-parer and a reaping-machine.  I feel this more for others than
for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet
exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around
it.

--Pardon me a short digression.  To what small things our memory and
our affections attach themselves!  I remember, when I was a child,
that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the
southwest gorner of our front-yard.  Well, I left the paternal roof
and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of
strange people.  But after many years, as I looked on the little
front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Star-
of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.  The grass was tall there,
and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
glossier.  Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he
hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
monumental memorial-flower.  Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly
in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they
are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by
the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.

Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial

as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,
you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone
with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured
in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the
very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the
soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in
the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.

But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the
dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet
honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few
months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of
peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in
just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of
buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has
come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years
than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our
nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate
neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower
poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
transplanted.

Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a
young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  "I
am
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